Corpse Thief

by Michael Arnold

  The crowd clamoured about him like hounds, calling each other on, encouraging further bloodshed. The man renewed his pleas for them to relent, and they laughed as one, like the onlookers at a baiting, though their numbers comprised women and children as well as men, from successful-looking gentle types to the lowest of the low, unified by nothing except a shared antipathy for the man on the floor.

  Hawke reached the mob’s periphery to see that the object of their wrath had mournful brown eyes and a dark complexion that he guessed might hail from the Ottoman lands or the Barbary Coast. He was murmuring something in a foreign tongue. Someone spat at him, earning an ominous cheer of approval.

  “What is happening?” Hawke asked a thickset man in a woollen cap who was carrying a stack of pamphlets in the crook of his arm. “What is his offence?”

  “Murderer,” the man answered gruffly, not taking his gaze from the foreigner.

  “Killed a wee bairn!” a woman squawked at Hawke’s flank, spittle flecking the corners of her mouth. “Just a wee bairn!”

  “Warlock!” another screeched.

  “Devil-monger!”

  “Kill him!”

  The crowd cheered again. Missiles were lobbed. The well-dressed man wailed at the sky. Hawke was vaguely aware of the whinny of a horse somewhere over his left shoulder.

  “There’ll be no killing today!”

  The impromptu assembly turned with one mind to see the rider rein in. He wore a long blue greatcoat above a waistcoat of rich scarlet, and in his hand he gripped a long, solid-looking staff. The people grudgingly parted as he dismounted. One anonymous voice yelled, “Piss off, Robin Redbreast! Leave him to us!”

  Grumbles of agreement erupted in pockets, but the officer of the Bow Street Horse Patrol appeared unmoved as he strode to the felled man.

  “She was from the people!” an unseen voice shrieked. “Tis the people what must avenge her!”

  The Robin Redbreast, a Runner’s mounted cousin, seemed to sigh as if dealing with a schoolroom full of errant children, though he held tight to the staff as he stood protectively over his new charge.

  Hawke said to the thickset man, “Avenge what, exactly?”

  “This.” The man turned now to face him, plucking one of the pamphlets from his bunch and handing it to Hawke. “Did you not see?”

  Hawke took the paper, scanning it quickly. The case of Betsy Milne, recounted - and tastelessly embellished - through several pages of lurid text, accompanied by graphic pictures of corpses, black-clad evil-doers and horned beasts. Clearly the cheaply-produced penny bloods, as Ruthven had warned, were leading the way in whipping the masses to frenzy, reaching London’s streets in a way the broadsides and high-brow newspapers could not. He gave the publication back, nodding towards the man who still cowered behind the staff-wielding officer. “And what proves this man’s guilt?”

  The pamphlet seller scowled at the crowd’s target. “They say the killer is of foreign stock. Brings witching from his heathen hole.” He spat. “This man is from Syria, so they say. He sells childish dolls to the chil’ens of the rich and mighty.”

  “Dolls?” Hawke almost laughed, though he thought better of it and bit his tongue.

  “Dolls what are used in witchcraft. He fashions them in place of your enemy, see, if you pays him enough. Chants spells over them, and sticks them with pins. They say he is oft witnessed talking to young girls.”

  “Perhaps they like the dolls.”

  The pamphlet seller’s jowls reddened. “He’s a murderer, friend, and he’ll hang.”

  “Disperse, I tell you!” the Robin Redbreast was commanding, emboldened now that two more horsemen had arrived. “We shall deal with the matter.”

  “String him up!” someone protested.

  The officer raised the stick high. “If that is what the law demands, then so be it!” he called. “But you are not the law! He will see the inside of a cell, and nothing more, until his fate is decided!”

  The Syrian was helped to his feet by the Bow Street men, thanking them profusely in a stream of words in his native language. Hawke glanced again at the penny bloods that were being passed about the disgruntled onlookers. With a creeping sense of trepidation, he slipped away.

  Θ

  The wind became bitter as Hawke reached Drury Lane. It numbed his face and stung his eyes and lips, and he was forced to clamp a hand upon the rim of his topper to keep it from whirling away with the last of the leaves. He stared hard at the ground, placing each foot carefully as he stepped, for his head still swam precariously. A coach rounded the junction with High Holborn, fifty yards up ahead, and thundered towards him. He was forced to scuttle to the opposite side of the road lest he be crushed beneath wheels and hooves. As the whip-wielding driver bellowed obscenities at him for good measure, he found himself skirting the frontage of a row of businesses. A cobbler first, a bonnet maker and a tailor. Then came the inevitable gin palace. An oasis. Hawke’s mouth filled with saliva and his skin pulsed hot in spite of the prevailing chill. He plunged a hand into his pocket, groping for the hard metal of Ruthven’s coins as he peered through the small window. As he laid fingertips on the money, he found himself staring into the reflective glass, at the gaunt, pathetic face gawping back at him. He felt more sick than ever.

  A figure, pale and diminutive, flashed in the reflection above his shoulder. He turned on his heels. Studied the far side of the road. Examined each doorway and the openings of every narrow alley that cut between shops and homes. Had he been followed? He could see nothing out of the ordinary, but something in the way the fleeting figure had moved - and how quickly it had vanished - seemed furtive, and made him uneasy. He rubbed his eyes. They ached, the pain lancing right out to his temples, and he supposed his stewed mind must be playing tricks. He walked twenty paces up the street, then, as another carriage rolled past, shrank under the porch of a tenement block. He waited and watched. Nothing moved.

  Hawke cursed again, upbraiding his own senses for the deceit. The spell of the gin palace had broken, however, and he resolved to press on with his unwanted duties. He moved more swiftly now, hugging his coat tight as he came to the tavern at High Holborn that was his true destination. He went inside, stepping into a high-ceilinged foyer of dark-painted wood, and was immediately hit by the warmth from the main taproom’s raging hearth. It was a welcome sensation, but he veered instead towards a wide staircase that led to the upper floor lodgings.

  Hawke made hard work of it, scaling the worn steps as if they were the sheer face of a jagged cliff. He paused in the stairwell at the first-floor landing, gathering himself, clutching the alarmingly loose handrail as a wave of nausea surged through his stomach. There was a small window, unglazed, at his eye-line, and he peered through. The parish of St Giles spread out far below. The wind had swept away the morning mist, but the tenements and streets were yet wreathed in a thin skein of dirty smoke. The Lord’s day of rest appeared to be scarcely adhered to here, the bustle of people and animals and vehicles as frenetic as ever. He wondered absently if somewhere down there, hidden in plain sight amongst all that life, there stalked the depraved killer of Betsy Milne. And how many more?

  Pressing on, head pounding, he rasped musty air into his lungs no less desperately than had he been treading water in a storm. He had removed his topper to cool himself, but still sweat dripped freely from his bald pate, tumbling into his eyes and off the end of his nose. He rounded the summit of the final flight, feeling like he owed himself a triumphal jig if only he had the breath left to perform it. On the landing he encountered a group of children, all facing inwards around something unseen, clustered like so many flies at a carcass. They were jeering, shrill and cruel. They turned, almost as one, upon his approach.

  Through the rabble, Hawke could not identify the object of their attention, but the scene brought the plight of the hapless Syrian doll-maker into sharp relief, and he called a challenge without thinking. His warning was dry and feeble, more croak than roar, but it did the tr
ick all the same, and they scattered in all directions, vanishing into a nearby corridor or skirting him to flee down the staircase.

  There was a girl left alone as the swarm departed. She was stooping forwards, arms clutched defensively about her head, but still she stood, defiant to the last. A curtain of straight hair, the colour of rich copper, had fallen across her face. Hawke replaced his hat and stretched out a hand. “How fare you, lass?”

  She stood tall, sweeping the hair clear with a lily-white hand. “I’m well, mister. Ain’t afeared o’ them.”

  Hawke smiled. “Good.” He found himself looking into a face he recognised. It was the girl who had hurt her knee when first he had visited the lodgings-cum-apothecary. “Your father home?”

  Θ

  “I am indebted to you, Mister Hawke,” Ansell Brommett said as he settled into a seat beside the fire, “for seeing her home safe. Especially on the Sabbath.” He looked up into his guest’s face, one eyebrow slightly raised. “I would have expected you to be at worship.”

  Hawke was standing on a threadbare rug that was pock-marked with tiny black cinder-scars, hands clasped tight at his front to keep them from trembling. “A rare week off.”

  Brommett lifted a hand to smooth down his beard, but his thin, pale fingers failed to conceal the trace of a smirk. “Quite so.” He canted his head, like a hound sniffing the wind. “You are an intriguing fellow, Mister Hawke. Forgive me...”

  “Forgive you?”

  “That is to say, you are of the streets, yet there is a certain nobility about you. A soul fallen from grace, perhaps.”

  “Is that a question or a statement?” Hawke countered icily.

  “Whichever you’d prefer.”

  “I would suggest that falls from grace were your area of expertise, Mister Brommett.”

  “Touché!” Brommett barked. “Now that they are!” He glanced at the brick hearth, beside which stood a buxom lady with florid face and keen blue eyes. “Kitty, dearest, would you hand me that vial?”

  Kitty Brommett stepped away from the black pot that she had been stirring, and picked a small glass container from the mantelpiece just below her eye-line. She passed it to her husband, though her gaze remained firmly on their visitor. “You shiver, Mister Hawke. Are you cold?”

  Brommett opened the vial and held it up for Hawke to take. “He will be positively glacial to the touch, my dear, but he sweats as though he arrived in this room by way of the chimney.”

  Hawke regarded the transparent tube, smelled the dark liquid within, identifying it instantly. A solution of alcohol, infused with the juice of the poppy. His breath became ragged, though he tried to hide it. “I have an ague, sir. Do not concern yourself.”

  “An ague,” Brommett scoffed. “You come here for my assistance, my intellect, yet you treat me like a child. Take some and be done with it.”

  “I do not...” Hawke resisted weakly.

  “You most certainly do,” Brommett cut him off. “Your body suffers, not because of the laudanum, but because you are overdue the next dose. Take a drop. Just one, mind. It will put you at ease.”

  Hawke did as he was told, lifting the vial to his lips. His fingers fluttered as they fought for grip. They were already beginning to steady by the time he gave it back. The sense of slackening, of well-being, bubbled through him and he had to part his stance a touch to keep from keeling over entirely. He blinked slowly, thanked Brommett for the act of kindness, and heard Kitty demand a chair be brought for him. It appeared, by magic to Hawke, and he poured himself into it with a guttural groan, hanging his head, breathing deep, revelling in the warmth that rose through his chest and neck and face.

  When he sat up, rubbing his eyes, he had no idea of the time. Hours might have slipped by. Panicking, he made to stand, but Ansell Brommett, still seated on the chair opposite, waved him back down. “Calm, Mister Hawke,” he said, seeing Hawke’s evident distress. “Minutes only, be assured.” He fiddled again with his beard. “And now we can speak with candour and clarity, yes?”

  Hawke stared dumbly about the chamber. He remembered the encounter with the red-headed girl out on the landing. Recalled her showing him in. This room, the family’s living quarters, was adjacent to her father’s workshop. It was humble, as one would expect from lodgings above a tavern of the rougher kind, but, even with a pair of beds taking up one end, spacious enough to be acceptable. He pressed the heels of his palms into sore eyes, kneading them like fresh dough. The pungent tang of laudanum still tainted his mouth. He thought, but what a miraculous potion it was. He noticed the young girl now, as she came to perch on the end of one of the beds, muttering to the trio of smaller children who had gathered at her feet in the throes of some game that seemed empty of rules and full of laughter.

  “Forgive me,” Hawke said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. “I am ashamed. They should not see such things.”

  Brommett had lit a pipe and spoke while managing to keep it clamped in the corner of his mouth. “I administer my tinctures and poultices to the folk of this great parish. They have witnessed plenty.”

  Hawke’s stomach griped, the smell of the broth forcing its way through now that the haze of addiction was thinning. He glanced again at the girl, dropping his voice. “They were taunting her outside.”

  Kitty grunted angrily as she stirred the bubbling pot. “The boys around the way. Despicable creatures, all.”

  Hawke remembered how, upon his first encounter with the Brommetts, it had been claimed the girl had hurt her knee roughhousing with her siblings. He saw again the look of dignified stubbornness she gave him when the mocking children had scattered. “She has a courageous heart.”

  Brommett said, “Oftentimes too courageous.” He stared sadly into the roiling smoke cloud. “It is my doing, this trouble. My fault.”

  His wife adjusted the woollen shawl about her shoulders. “Of course it is your fault.” As Brommett pulled a hurt expression, she let her thin lips ease back in the beginnings of a fond smile that he immediately returned.

  Brommett placed a hand over his chest. “Dearest Kitty, you are the mistress of my heart.”

  “Go on with you,” Kitty Brommett snapped, though her smile broadened. She looked at Hawke with an expression full of interest but, he was pleased to see, not hostility. “You’re from the north west, sir?”

  “Droylsden,” he said, feeling stronger and sharper with every passing moment. “And you, perchance, would be a Yorkshire lass?”

  She beamed, revealing neat white teeth. “Skipton and proud, sir! ‘Course, I departed those green dales many moons ago. Exotic promises of far-away lands got the better of me, I confess.” She lifted the ladle to slurp noisily at the stew, then plunged it home as her free hand rummaged in a wicker basket for whatever spice she deemed required.

  Hawke remembered what the apothecary had said during their first meeting, of how he had taken the King’s shilling after his ignominious departure from Oxford. “You went on campaign, madam?”

  She nodded. “I was following my first husband’s regiment. Dear Frederick. He bought it at Rolica, God rest his soul. Pistol ball in the ear.” She spoke distantly, stared hard into the bubbling pot. “I was left with nothing.” She half turned, lifting her gaze to regard Hawke. “You know what a woman must do to survive, sir, in a place like that?”

  Brommett clapped his hands, tearing the cloak of melancholy that seemed to have settled across his wife. “But we found one another, Mister Hawke, and God be praised for it! Married before Vimiero. Together we did battle the tyrant Napoleon and all his minions, did we not, my love?”

  “That we did, husband,” Kitty declared, chasing away the old grief and turning to Hawke. “Made a life for ourselves here after the war, as so many wandering souls have sought to do. London is the kind of place where everyone is from somewhere else, do you not think?”

  “I do, Mrs Brommett.”

  “But our children will put down roots here.” She gave a wry smile. “Perhaps not
within earshot of the bells of St Giles, God willing.”

  Ansell Brommett chuckled bleakly. “The Holy Land is not wholly conducive to the raising of civilised young people.” He pushed up from the chair, wincing at the effort, and walked in his lop-sided manner to the bed, playfully prodding the four children until they rolled away laughing, before stooping to fetch an object from the floor beneath.

  As he sidled back to the fire, Hawke asked him, “Why do they taunt your daughter so?”

  “They say I am a warlock.” Brommett tossed the object to his guest, who caught it despite obvious surprise, then took up the seat again, glancing at ceiling beams that, like those of his workshop, were adorned with various dried plants and other curiosities. “A difficult accusation to refute.”

  “Particularly in a parish such as this,” Hawke said, “where folk are like to blame sickly babes and balding heads upon the local crone, should she own a black cat.” As he spoke, he inspected what he now realised was an artificial hand. It was large, made for a man, and fashioned from small steel plates, riveted together like polished dragon scales. The knuckles were articulated to give them movement. He waved it, the fingers jangling as they flapped. “And this kind of thing cannot help matters.”

  Kitty guffawed at that. “You are quite right, Mister Hawke, and I have told him so, time and again!”

  “This kind of thing,” Brommett, undeterred, echoed Hawke’s words in a poor parody of his accent, “is what will get us out of St Giles.” He took a long drag on the pipe. “What think you to that, sir? A fine piece, is it not?”

  Hawke turned the prosthesis slowly, admiring the detail and workmanship. Fingernails had even been added, the work of one with keen powers of observation and a steady hand. “Fine indeed, Mister Brommett.” He looked up. “You must have seen a great many in need of such adornments.”

  Brommett nodded. “In the Peninsula, hundreds. But here in London you cannot cross the street without laying eyes on a poor wretch in need of a foot or an arm. I will provide them. Better, more practicable pieces than those doled out by the hospitals. A hand like that,” he jabbed the pipe at the metallic creation, “will not only replace the missing part, but allow the wearer to conduct his daily affairs with little or no limitation. It has become my life’s work.” He sat back, returning to the pipe fog. “Strange, I know.”