by Tim Powers
It seemed certain that Romanelli would pitch into the tub, so Doyle whirled, crouching, drew the makeshift dagger from his pant leg and sprang in a wild lunge toward the upside-down ka. It hooted in alarm and let go of the shoe buckles, but before it could float upward Doyle’s wooden knife punched into its frail chest.
A blast of chilly and foul-smelling air hit Doyle in the face, and the ka flew backward off the end of the dagger and, visibly shrivelling as all the noxious air whooshed out of it, sailed across the room, rebounded from the wall, started to fly straight up toward the ceiling, then lost speed and stalled.
Romanelli was rolling in agony on the floor beyond the tub, having done an impromptu leap and roll over it without touching it. “Get him,” he managed to croak.
The doorkeeper stood between Doyle and the hall door, and Doyle ran straight at him, brandishing the dagger and roaring as loud as he could.
The man leaped out of the way, but not quickly enough; Doyle clubbed him with the butt end of the weapon and he tumbled to the floor unconscious as Doyle’s racing footsteps receded down the hall.
Romanelli was still struggling to get his protective shoes between himself and the torturing floor as, with a sound as soft as the fall of a dead leaf onto a pond, the empty skin and clothes of Doctor Romany settled onto it and didn’t move.
* * *
The beggars in Thames Street didn’t approach the little man who came striding along in the cool twilight, for his ill-fitting clothes, pale, grinning face and wild mop of graying hair all indicated that he’d have no pence to spare, and might well even be mad; though one legless beggar on a wheeled cart did a double take, pushed himself along after the man for a few paces, then coasted to a stop, shook his head uncertainly and then wheeled around to return to his post.
Walking across the open pavement of Billingsgate, the man skirted the little Punch and Judy stage, and he heard the piping voice of Punch exclaim, “Ah, one of the Dolorous Brethren, I do b—” The voice choked off, and the man glanced at the puppet.
He halted and grinned. “Somethin’ I can do for you, Punch?” he asked.
The puppet stared at him for several seconds. “Uh, no,” it said. “I thought for a moment I—no.”
The man shrugged and walked on toward the vacant dock. Soon his worn boot heels were knocking on the weathered wooden decking, and he paused only when he stood right on the splintery lip of the dock.
He stared out across the broad, darkening face of the great river at the first few lights on the Surrey-side, then he laughed quietly and whispered, “Let’s just test your… stamina, Chinnie.” He crouched, leaned forward and, arms over his head, kicked off in a long and fairly shallow dive. There was a splash and spatter, but it was not loud and there was no one nearby.
The ripples were just beginning to subside when his head broke the surface twenty feet farther out. He shook the wet hair out of his face and then trod water for a few moments, breathing in fast, whispered hoots. “Cold as the water through the seventh hour,” he muttered. “Ah well—sherry and dry clothes in Just a few minutes now.” He did a leisurely crawl, punctuated by rest stops during which he floated on his back and stared at the stars, until he was far out in the center of the river, nowhere near any of the few boats and barges that were on the water that evening.
Then he expelled all the air from his lungs in a slow hiss that quickly became bubbles as his head disappeared under the surface.
For nearly a full minute bubbles continued to float up and pop in the lonely center of the river. Then there weren’t any more, and the river resumed its featureless smoothness.
* * *
It had been a close bout all along, but at last, from his vantage point by the window, old Harry Angelo saw his premier pupil setting up his opponent for the thrust Angelo had recommended for use against a left-handed fencer.
The bout had been going on for more than five minutes without either fencer receiving a touch, and Richard Sheridan, who had strolled over, brandy glass in hand, to join the cluster of spectators, had remarked quietly to the pugilist “Gentleman” Jackson that it was the best display of swordplay he’d seen since Angelo had had his salle in the Opera House in Haymarket.
Angelo’s pupil, the prize fighter known as the Admirable Chinnie, had repeatedly disengaged from a feint toward the outside line of sixte into a thrust in the quarte line, on the other side of his opponent’s blade, and his opponent had each time parried it easily, though never managing to land a riposte on Chinnie.
At the age of fifty-four, Harry Angelo had been the unquestioned master of fencing instruction in England ever since his legendary father’s retirement a quarter of a century ago, and now he could read his pupil’s intention as clearly as if Chinnie had spoken it: another sixte feint and then the by now expected disengage—but this time not all the way around the opposing bell guard to the quarte line, but instead up under the opponent’s guard into the unprotected low flank.
Angelo smiled as the sixte feint was thrust out—then frowned, for the tipped point just wavered there. The opponent started to make the conditioned quarte parry, then noticed that Chinnie’s blade was motionless, and so picked it up in a lightning bind that sent his own point corkscrewing in to thud and flex against Chinnie’s canvas-jacketed stomach.
Angelo expelled his held breath in a whispered oath; then the Admirable Chinnie staggered back and almost fell over, and several of the spectators rushed to him to hold him up. Chinnie’s opponent yanked off his mask and dropped it and his foil on the hardwood floor and exclaimed, “My God, did I hurt you, Chinnie?”
The prize fighter took off his own mask, straightened and shook his head as if to clear it. “No no,” he said hoarsely. “Just a bit of trouble catching my breath just now. Right in a sec. Strain of the peculiar posture.”
Angelo raised his gray eyebrows. In three years of concentrated instruction this was the first time he’d ever heard the Admirable Chinnie describe the en guard position as peculiar.
“Well, we certainly shan’t count a point that was made when you were off guard,” declared Chinnie’s opponent. “Whenever you’re ready we’ll resume the bout at zero and zero.”
Though smiling cheerfully, Chinnie shook his head. “No,” he said. “Later. Right now—fresh air.”
Old Richard Sheridan helped him to the door, with Angelo striding along beside them, as the rest of the company shrugged and picked up their foils and masks as two couples squared off on opposite sides of the pistes painted on the floor. “I trust he’s all right,” someone muttered.
Out in the hall Chinnie waved the other two men away as the clang and rasp resumed in the salle. “I’ll be back in after a moment,” he said. But when they’d reluctantly gone in, Chinnie hurried down the stairs to the street door, flung it open and sprinted away down the Bond Street pavement.
When he reached Piccadilly he slowed to a walk, taking deep lungfuls of the chilly autumn air, and at the Strand he glanced to his right, toward the river, and whispered, “How ye doin’, Chinnie me lad? Cold, ain’t it?” Another man on the sidewalk had started toward him as if he recognized him, but drew back, disconcerted, when Chinnie burst into maniacal giggling and did a fast, if inexpert, dance step on the pavement.
He continued muttering to himself all the way down Fleet Street to Cheapside. “Hah!” he exclaimed at one point, bounding into the air. “Good as Benner’s, this is. Better! Don’t know why it never occurred to me before to grab the West End sort of merchandise.”
* * *
The first part of the dream was devoid of horror, and Darrow never remembered until he woke up that he’d been through it many times before.
The fog was so thick that he could see no more than a few yards ahead, and the damp black brick walls on either side were visible only because they were so claustrophobically close. The alley was silent except for an irregular knocking somewhere in the fog overhead, as though an unfastened shutter was swinging in a breeze.
He’d been taking a
short cut that should have wound up at Leadenhall Street, but he’d been lost for what seemed like hours in this maze of courts and alleys and zigzagging lanes. He hadn’t met a soul yet, but he’d stopped now because he’d heard a low cough from the dimness ahead.
“Hello,” he said, and was instantly ashamed of the timidity in his voice. “Hello there!” he went on more strongly. “Perhaps you can help me find my way.”
He heard the shuffle of slow steps, and saw a dark form begin to emerge from the wall of mist; then the figure was close enough for him to see the face—and it was Brendan Doyle.
A hand seized Darrow’s shoulder and the next thing he knew he was sitting bolt upright in his own bed, clenching his teeth against the despairing cry that in the dream had burst from his lips and resounded flatly in the fog-deadened air:
“I’m sorry, Doyle! God, I’m sorry!”
“Jeez, chief,” said the young man who’d awakened him, “didn’t mean to startle you. But you said to roust you out at six-thirty.”
“Right, Pete,” Darrow croaked, swinging his legs to the floor and rubbing his eyes. “I’ll be in the office. When the fellow I described gets here, send him in, will you?”
“Aye aye.”
Darrow stood up, ran his hands through his white hair and then walked down the hall to the office. The first thing he did was pour himself a glass of brandy and drain it in one long swallow. He set the glass down, lowered himself into the chair behind the desk and waited for the liquor to sluice the images of his dream out of his head.
“May the damned dreams go with the body,” he whispered, fumbling a cigarette out of a box and lighting it in the lamp flame. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, leaned back and blew it toward the ranked ledgers on the shelf next to the desk. He considered, then discarded, the idea of doing some more work on his already complicated network of investments. He was getting rich again rapidly, and it was irritating to have to work without computers and calculators.
Soon two sets of boots could be heard ascending the stairs, and in a moment there was a knock on the office door.
“Come in,” said Darrow, forcing his voice to sound easy and confident.
The door opened and a tall young man strode in, a smirking grin on his handsome, clean-shaven face. “Here it is, yer Honor,” he said, doing a satirical pirouette in the middle of the room. “Okay, hold still. The doc will go over you in a few minutes, but I wanted to eyeball it myself first. How’s it feel walking?”
“Springy as new French steel. You know what surprised me? All the smells on the way over here! And I don’t think I ever was able to see this well.”
“Well, we’ll get you a good one too. No headache, stomachache? He’s been making a living for years as a prize fighter.”
“None atall.” The young man poured a brandy for himself, bolted it and refilled the glass.
“Easy on the sauce,” said Darrow.
“The wha’?”
“The sauce, the booze—the brandy. Want me to get an ulcer?” With an injured expression the young man set the glass down. His hand went to his mouth.
“And don’t bite the nails, please,” Darrow added. “Say, do you … ever catch any of the old tenant’s thoughts, left behind in the, like, cupboards of his head after his eviction? Uh, do things like dreams ever stay with the old body?”
“Avo—I mean, yes, yer Honor—I believe so. It’s not the sort of thing I pay attention to, but sometimes I find myself dreaming of places I’ve never seen, and I believe it’s bits from the lives of the lads I’ve passed through. No way of knowin’ for sure. And,” he paused, and his eyebrows drew together, “and sometimes when I’m just driftin’ over the line from awake to asleep, I hear… well, picture standin’ on the forecastle of an emigrant ship, you know, in the middle of the night with all them bunks like bookshelves all over the walls?… And imagine that each of those men is talking in his sleep… “
Darrow reached across the desk, took the filled glass and drained it. “This stomach doesn’t matter,” he said, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Come on, let’s go see the doc.”
* * *
Young Fennery Clare, his bare feet still tingling from having stood for a while in the warm pool below the sheet metal manufactory by Execution Dock, waded out from the docks, skirting the Limehouse Hole, and tried to line up the landmarks he’d memorized this morning. It was getting darker by the minute, though, and the two chimneys across the river were completely invisible, while the crane on the third pier downstream of him seemed to have been moved since he saw it last. And though the tide was on its way out again, he was already in up to his waist, and like most Mud Larks he couldn’t swim.
Damn that bunch of Irish kids, he thought. If they hadn’t been hanging about the Hole here this morning, I could have just picked the sack up and carried it out, for I can thrash any of the local kids. Them Micks would have taken it from me for sure, though, and a stroke of luck like this might come only once in a lifetime: a cloth bag, evidently dropped by one of the workmen who were re-sheathing that big ship here last week, absolutely filled with copper nails!
The very thought of the money he’d get from the rag shop for the haul—eight pence at least, more likely a shilling and some—made the boy’s mouth water, and he resolved that if he found it and couldn’t work it back up the slope with his feet, he’d risk being swept away and just bend down and pick it up. It would be well worth the risk, for he could live high for several lazy days on a shilling, at the end of which time he’d be ready to do his usual early winter trick of getting caught stealing coal from one of the barges up at Wapping so as to be sent off to the House of Correction, where he’d have a coat and shoes and stockings and regular meals for several months, and not have to wade half-clad out into the cold mud in the winter dawns.
He tensed and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, for the toes of his left foot had plunged through the top layer of silt and found cloth. He turned, trying to get his other foot onto it without losing his balance.
“Can,” croaked a voice from a few yards out in the water, “can someone… help me?”
The boy recovered his balance after starting in surprise, and belatedly realized that some of the river sounds that he’d been too absorbed to pay attention to had been the ripple and swish of weak swimming.
There was the spatter of a wet head being shaken. “Hey… boy! Is that a boy there? Help me!”
“I can’t swim,” said Fennery.
“You’re standing there, aren’t you? The shore’s so close?”
“Aye, just behind me.”
“Then I can… make it myself. Where am I?”
“I’ll tell you if you come pick up this sack of nails for me.” The swimmer had been angling toward the boy, and was now close enough to stand on the underwater mud slope. For a few minutes he just stood there as his frame was racked with gasping and choking and retching. Fennery was glad he was upstream of the man.
“God,” the man gasped finally. He rinsed his mouth and spat. “I must have… swallowed half the Thames. Did you hear an explosion earlier?”
“No, sir,” said Fennery. “What blew up?”
“I think a block in Bond Street did. One moment I was—” He gagged and threw up another cupful of river water. “Pah. Lord preserve me. I was fencing at Angelo’s, and an instant later I was at the bottom of the Thames with empty lungs. I think it took me five minutes to fight my way to the surface—I don’t think anybody who wasn’t a trained athlete could have done it—and in spite of clenched teeth and a… firm resolve, I tried to breathe the river on the way up. I don’t even recall breaking the surface—I think I had fainted, and the cold air revived me.”
The boy nodded. “Could you reach down and get me my bag?”
Dazedly obedient, the man bent over, ducked his head under, groped for and found the neck of the bag and yanked it up out of the mud.
“Here you go, lad,” he said when he’d straigh
tened up. “Lord, I’m weak! Scarce could lift it. And I think I’ve damaged my ears—voice sounds odd. Where is this?”
“Limehouse, sir,” said Fennery gleefully, wading back toward the stairs.
“Limehouse? Then I’ve been swept much further than I’d thought.”
The water was only at Fennery’s knees now, and he was able both to hang onto the bag and support the bedraggled swimmer, who was reeling dizzily. “You’re an athlete, sir?” the boy asked dubiously, for the shoulder he was supporting felt bony and thin.
“Aye. I’m Adelbert Chinnie.”
“What? Not the Admirable Chinnie, the singlestick champion?”
“That’s me.”
“Why, I saw you in Covent Garden once, fighting Torres the Terrible.” They had reached the stairs, and started haltingly up them.
“Summer before last, that was. Yes, he nearly beat me, too.”
When they had laboriously gotten up to street level they walked along a cinder path in the shadow of a brick wall for a dozen paces, then rounded the end of it and started across a littered, industrial-looking yard that was lit by a couple of lanterns hung on the wall of a warehouse.
Fennery was glad to be so impressively escorted in this neighborhood, which was one of the most perilous in London. He glanced up at his companion—and halted.
“You stinking liar!” he hissed, all at once fearful of making any noise.
The man seemed to be having difficulty walking. “What?” he asked distractedly.
“You’re not the Admirable Chinnie!”
“Of course I am. What the devil do you suppose is wrong with me, though? My whole body feels strange, as though—”
“Chinnie’s taller than you, and younger, and muscular. You’re some sort of derelict.”
The man chuckled weakly. “You young wretch. If there was ever an occasion I’d every right to look like a derelict, this is it. How do you suppose you’d look after swimming up, breathless, from the floor of the river? And I am taller—when shod.”
