The Poisoned Island (11 page)

An oceangoing ship is, Horton knows, a crucible of murderous intent. Violent men spend months and months huddled together, and gossip and envy and deceit are distilled over the long ocean nights into something potent. Disagreements can turn into feuds, vengeful thoughts become vendettas. It is a great deal more likely that whatever killed Sam Ransome came back on the ship with him, and did not wait for his return.

Up and down. Up and down.

*  *  *

Her husband, notes Abigail, is prowling again. The sun is high and a warm breeze blows down Lower Gun Alley, and Abigail can look out into the street to see Charles marching up and down, up and down, as if wearing in a new pair of boots on the dirty, foul-smelling cobbles of the little street. Her window is open, and the noises and smells of Wapping fill the small first-floor apartment in which they live, fill it with such intensity that the tidy room she stands in actually seems to be getting dirtier before her eyes. She watches her husband for a while, smiling a smile which covers an enduring inner concern. Charles Horton is on the trail of another mystery, and she’ll not get the benefit of those calm dark eyes again until the mystery is solved. She thinks back to her pleasant night at the Royal Institution, which ended so suddenly with the discovery of a dead body. The memory of this still makes her shudder, though not with the fear that her husband imagines. It is the memory of Horton’s own body, broken and almost dead when it was brought into the hospital, that first time she’d laid eyes on him, which causes her discomfort.

She is dressed simply in a white muslin dress which is,
despite its plainness, in the latest Empire style. She wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in it. The air is warm. She has nothing else to do today. Well then.

A few minutes later, she appears in the street behind her husband, a shawl over her shoulders, a bonnet covering her blond hair, an old but perfectly serviceable parasol over her arm. When her husband reaches the end of his little march and turns, she is waiting for him, and even with his mind whirring on yesterday’s scraps he stops short. Abigail realizes she may have been mistaken in her previous thoughts, for those cool, dark eyes do rest on her for some moments. They have a warm disbelief in them, as if she were something of another world.

“So, husband. You are exercised by Rotherhithe matters.”

He smiles and nods.

“And I neglect you,” he says.

“Aye, you do. And I crave some attention. So it occurs to me, I have heard much about the new constructions which are appearing on the other shore of our river. I have never seen them. Perhaps a walk in the sun on the Surrey shore would be a sweet way to spend our Saturday?”

Charles Horton’s smile is broad now, and its appearance causes Abigail’s heart to skip, for such a smile is a rare thing indeed on such a man, carrying as he does curses and guilts which she can barely fathom.

“To Rotherhithe you would go, madam?”

“Aye, sir. To Rotherhithe I would go.”

*  *  *

They take a wherry from the stairs beside the Police Office: an official boat, piloted by a waterman-constable named
Peach, who says nothing during the crossing, only glares at Charles in a way which Abigail finds alarming and amusing in equal measure. When they reach the Rotherhithe stairs at the end of Love Lane, they turn to watch the angry Peach turn the wherry around and begin to make his way back to Wapping, through the crowd of ships and lighters.

“Your friend Mr. Peach must be unwell today. He seemed rather quiet.”

Charles looks sad, and she wishes for a moment she had said nothing.

“Aye, he is not alone in disliking me. The other constables resent my position with the magistrate. They see nothing of my work, and imagine I am a kept man with little to occupy my time. It is the price I pay for the work I do.”

He says nothing more, and they begin to walk along Rotherhithe Street, the thin strip of houses, wharves, and warehouses which follows the course of the river. The houses are small and poor and, in places along the river, old and alarmingly ramshackle, stretching out over stairs and wharves and, in some cases, over the water and foreshore itself. The place has something of Wapping’s sense of overwhelming narrowness and complexity, although it feels more open to the sky at those points where development is only just beginning.

They pass a timber yard, and then St. Mary’s Church, which faces almost directly onto the foreshore. The street skirts round the church, but the two of them walk through the churchyard itself, staying as close to the river as possible. They walk past the old alehouse the Spread Eagle and Crown, and after another few minutes they come to the first evidence on the Surrey shore of the mercantile classes’ new passion: the building of docks.

A great lock has been built at the river’s edge, and behind it lies a body of water which is part canal, part dock. This is the new Surrey Canal, Charles explains to Abigail, which reaches only to Camberwell to date, but is still the subject of great schemes for development. Abigail surprises Charles by making reference to the great canal of Canute, which cut through Rotherhithe and allowed the old Dane to take London from the rear, as it were, by skirting round London Bridge. Charles decides his wife needs no instruction on dock building. His wife smiles and turns her face to the sun. It really is a beautiful morning.

On the downstream side of the Surrey Canal lock are more shipyards and timber yards, and more riverside tenements and warehouses. Behind Rotherhithe Street have long been marshes and meadows, rope walks and tenter grounds, which are now being covered, yard by yard and year by year, with boardinghouses and shops and storehouses and manufactories and brothels, the inevitable handmaidens of the docks.

As they head round the great bend in the river, which turns south here, the dwellings disappear on the right-hand side of the road and give way to open meadow and swampy-looking ground. Some hundreds of yards away the basin of the canal can be seen, and the north edge of the newly extended Commercial Dock, the renamed and improved old Howland Wet Dock, where whales were once boiled down and men could be seen walking through the cavernous bones of leviathans. The old whale graveyard is now the oldest part of the emerging Surrey dock system, with its new canal and basin and its mass of warehouses and locks and wharves, paid for by entrepreneurs with their eyes on the same lucrative prizes already seized by the City merchants who’d subscribed to the new London, East India, and West India docks. Abigail
remarks how very different to Wapping the dock-building scheme is here, how few dwellings there are to be cleared, how flat and empty the land is. She asks the question which has been asked by hundreds of others before her: why did the dock get built in Wapping? Why force out so many thousands amidst such a wave of demolition and clearance, when all this land was available just across the river? Charles is pondering this question when, up ahead and clearly visible above the sketchy crowds which are making their way up and down Rotherhithe Street, he sees a familiar figure emerge from a wherry tied up at a wharf.

It is the strange dark-suited gentleman from the
Solander
. Looking out to the river Charles notices that they are almost alongside Sir Joseph Banks’s ship, which is moored just off Rotherhithe. She is quiet, her sails now completely stowed, only three or four figures visible up on deck.

The man from the
Solander
is looking up and down the street, his eyes gliding over Charles and Abigail without recognition. He is wearing the same dark suit Charles saw on ship, the clerical appearance at odds with his tanned face and its broad, almost Asiatic features.

“What is it, Charles?”

Abigail’s hand is on his arm, but she is not looking at him—she has instinctively turned to look in the same direction as him. He keeps his eye on the dark-suited man while replying.

“Well, my darling, it is an interesting young man from the
Solander
. See, the fellow in the dark suit heading away from us.”

“He looks like a vicar.”

“Indeed. A vicar with a mission, it would appear. Abigail, I would very much like to see where that man is going. Could I call you a boat from the stairs beyond this yard?”

His wife is studiously ignoring him.

“Your young man is disappearing fast, though he sticks out somewhat like a horse amongst sheep. We will lose him. Hurry, husband. We will lose sight of him in moments.”

Her parasol over her arm and her shawl flowing behind her, Abigail follows the priestly figure along the riverbank, pursued by her husband.

They walk for perhaps ten minutes, and soon the newly minted Commercial Dock is to their right, clearly visible as, unlike the Wapping Dock, it is not yet surrounded by warehouses and walls. There are more houses here, some of them built quite recently in anticipation of an influx of money from the new dock.

The man from the
Solander
walks with his hands behind his back, stooped slightly, and the image of a country vicar strolling around his parish is overwhelming, though this vicar looks to have seen exotic shores and his parish is crowded, smelly, and loud. Near the Commercial Dock he stops walking suddenly, before one of the newer-looking buildings, which seems to be part storehouse, part wharf, part tavern, part lodging, its hasty, tentative balcony almost poking over the foreshore. Charles and Abigail stop perhaps fifty yards away, stepping into a gap between two buildings (Abigail gasping, even giggling). The man eyes the building for a while, looking along the windows and running a hand through his dark, oiled hair as if steadying himself for an unpleasant task. After a minute, he steps into the building.

“Now what, husband?” whispers Abigail, and Charles, despite himself, smiles.

“I think you need not whisper, dear wife.”

She smacks his arm at that. He keeps an eye on the building.

“I think we should wait for a while. If he doesn’t come out soon, I will make a note of the address and take the information back to the Police Office.”

“What has that young man done?”

“Nothing, that I know of. But I was struck by him when I visited the
Solander
about the . . . incident we came across the other day.”

“Ah.” Abigail goes quiet at that. The mention of the dead body drops like a shadow between them, and their little game of chase takes on a more melancholy character. Then the priestlike man reappears, darting back into the street, his eyes looking into the house he has just departed before glancing around like a squirrel surrounded by dogs.

After a final glance into the house, the man turns and walks towards them, much quicker than before, closing the ground in seconds. Charles steps out from around the corner of the building where they have hidden themselves, holds out a hand and brings the man up short. The man looks brutally alarmed, though whether this is because of the appearance of Charles from around a corner or because of what he saw in that house Abigail cannot say.

“You . . . you were
following
me?” he says. Charles has a hold of one of his arms, and does not answer, but thinks:
He recognizes me. Is that not odd?

“You appear to be in a fearful hurry.” Abigail notes the hint of tenderness in Charles’s voice, and notices for the first time how awfully young this priestly man is. She sees his face preparing to lie, the eyes starting to hood themselves.

“Oh, there’s a woman in that house,” he says, and his attempted hail-fellow-well-met nonchalance would be funny were it not acutely embarrassing. “
You
know, Constable.”

He knows I am a constable, thinks Horton. A most informed
young man. Abigail, meanwhile, finds it hard not to smirk at the uncomfortable fellow’s attempt to lie. A romantic liaison for a diffident cleric? How fantastical.

“Well then, let’s go and see this woman,” says Charles. He starts to pull the arm he is holding back towards the boardinghouse.

“Oh, no, I don’t think we should at all . . .”

“Come on.”

Charles has to virtually drag the jittery man back to the boardinghouse. Abigail follows. Several people had come out of the house when the young man made his escape, including an older man wearing only a cotton vest and a disgusting pair of trousers who is giving vent to a stream of riverside obscenities which Abigail attempts to ignore. There is a great confusion in the doorway of the boardinghouse, as if a wild animal had torn through the interior and out into the street. Charles pulls the captured young man back into the house, and Abigail follows them inside, where there are more people shouting, mainly women, most of them barely dressed, some of them with men (or
customers
, thinks Abigail) or small children, and miscellaneous dogs and cats running round at their feet. There is barking and screaming and mewing and cursing.

Charles ignores the melee, and shoves the man before him through the hallway and towards the back of the house, where another door gives out onto a wharf and several more rooms give out onto the hall. Charles is being rather rough, Abigail thinks, not liking what she is seeing in her husband, whose face looks grim and angry and determined and cold all at the same time. Charles surely cannot know where to go in this strange Bedlam. The dark-suited young man stops before one of the open doors, Charles behind him, and the younger man
screams a girl-like scream, so horror-stricken that it silences everyone in the crowded little hallway. He screams again, and again, and again, and Charles shoves him aside, leaving the young man to fall back against the opposite wall and slide down it onto his haunches, weeping now like a woman in the terrible throes of childbirth. Abigail approaches the door, and catches sight of something red around the corner of it before her husband grabs her and holds her head against his shoulder while he turns away, and all she can hear is the terrible moaning of the young man behind her, who through his sobs is saying “it cannot be . . . it cannot be . . . it cannot be” over and over and over again.