“In Westminster not long ago / There lived a ratcatcher’s daughter. / She was not born at Westminster / But on t’other side of the water. / Her father killed rats and she sold sprats / All round, and over the water / And the gentlefolks, they all bought sprats / Of the pretty ratcatcher’s daughter.…”
He remained in a crouch as two figures rounded the bend, one of them holding a staff from which dangled an oil lamp, flooding the tunnel with welcome light. They were both dressed in leather waders that came up to their chests, one tall and thin, the other portly and no taller than the other’s shoulder. The taller man had added height thanks to a battered felt top hat; the shorter wore a derby as round as his belly. Both had skin as white as paper, hair the color of snow. The hems of their thick coats dragged in the black water they strode through, pots and cutlery festooning the heavy backpacks each wore and clanking in rhythm with their stride.
“She wore no hat upon her head / Nor cap, nor dandy bonnet / Her hair of her head it hung down her neck / Like a bunch of carrots … oh!” The singing of the shorter man tailed off and they both stopped in the flowing filth as they sighted him.
“Well,” said the taller. “What have we here?”
“Mud lark. Shit-hawk. Waif. Stray,” said the other, counting off on fat, dirty digits that poked through frayed woolen fingerless gloves.
The taller man raised the oil lamp higher, squinting through the shadows. “Does he know we’re armed?” he wondered. “We’ll stick him like a pig if he tries anything.”
“He does now.” The fatter man nodded with satisfaction. He raised his voice. “Who are you? And what’s your business here? This is our patch, don’t you know?”
He straightened up, holding out his hands to show he had no weapon. “I don’t mean you any harm. I fell down … I need to get out.”
“Fell like manna from heaven,” said the tall man. They resumed their sloshing walk toward him. “Wants to get out. What do you make of that?”
“I say it’s a good job we found him.” The short man nodded. “What do they call you, then?”
The thin one clambered up onto the ledge, holding out a long arm to haul his companion up with him.
His name? He recalled the sign on the hardware shop above, which had plucked at something in his dim mind, like idle fingers at a loose thread.
“Smith,” he said, rolling the word around his mouth. “My name is Smith.”
The shorter man screwed up an eye. “Christian name or surname?”
“Not both, I hope,” said the other. “Can’t abide men who have names that are either-or. Remember Walter Edward? Hated him.”
The short man smiled. “I found him quite palatable company.”
“And Peter John. Ridiculous.”
“Smith,” said Smith. “It’s just Smith. And you are…?”
The tall man removed his top hat and bowed low. “We forget our manners. I am Mr. Tait.”
The other gave a curt nod. “And I am Mr. Lyall.”
“Tait and Lyall?” said Smith dubiously.
“Tait with an ‘i’,” said Tait, standing up straight.
“And Lyall with an ‘a’. Though a man who calls himself Smith, just Smith, ought not to be casting nasturtiums on the appellations of gentlemen he’s just met.”
“It’s aspersions,” said Tait, replacing his hat. “Not nasturtiums. Those are flowers.”
Lyall broke into song again, his deep voice echoing off the brick walls. “A flower gal by profession, I earns my smokes and drinks, I does just wot I likes, and sez just wot I finks!”
“But what are you doing down here in this dreadful place?” said Smith.
Tait looked at him aghast. “Dreadful place? My dear Smith, you are standing in one of the great engineering marvels of the modern age! Sir Joseph William Bazalgette’s sewer system! The large intestine of London!”
Smith wrinkled his nose. Lyall nudged Tait in the ribs. “I bet he doesn’t remember the Great Stink.”
Tait nodded. “Too young, by half. The Great Stink, Smith. Summer of ’fifty-eight. London was awash with … well, we’re all men here, aren’t we? Shit, Smith. Shit. London was drowning in it.”
“Dropping like flies, they were. The cholera, don’t you know. That’s why Sir Joseph—”
“God bless him!” shouted Lyall.
“Indeed. That’s why he created the sewer system. Bloody genius.”
“But what are you doing here?” asked Smith again.
“Doing here? This is where we earn our living, isn’t that right, Mr. Lyall?”
Lyall nodded. “Correct, Mr. Tait. We’re toshers, Smith, that’s what we are. Toshers.”
* * *
“Toshers,” said Lyall as they walked down the tunnel, Smith on the ledge and the two men splashing through the filth, “provide an invaluable service to the City of London.”
“It’s an honorable trade,” said Tait. “A profession.”
“But what do you do?” asked Smith.
Tait swung his lantern wide, and a pair of rats splashed out of their way, nosing ahead of them in the water. He said, “We find that which is lost.”
“Down here?”
Lyall nodded. “You wouldn’t believe what ends up in the sewers. Money. Jewelry. Scrap iron. Why, once we found a whole steam-cab.” He shook his head. “Heaven knows how that got down here.”
“And you … salvage these lost items? Sell them?”
“That we do,” said Tait. “There’s a handsome living to be made as a tosher, which is why we’re very particular about who we find on our patch.”
“I’m not after your business,” said Smith. “I just want to get out of here. Did you say there’ll be another ladder…?”
“Soon,” said Lyall. “And yes, we sell what we find. Thing is, we tend to spend more time down here than up there, these days. Sometime we even sleep down here, me and Mr. Tait, bundled up in our blankets, under our bivouac.”
“But the smell…,” said Smith.
Tait smiled. “I don’t mind. You get used to Mr. Lyall after a spell.”
“Cheeky blighter,” said Lyall with good humor.
“What of the rats?”
“Quite tasty, sometimes,” said Tait.
Smith gaped at him. “You eat them?”
“They have a taste of chicken.” Lyall nodded. “That’s not all we eat. There’s hogs over in Hampstead, you know. In the sewers. They can be vicious buggers, but get one of ’em on their own … why, we can eat for a week. Not to mention the cats and dogs that find their way down here.”
Smith felt his bile rise. “But you said you sell the things you find … don’t you make enough money to buy food?”
They paused at a fork in the tunnels. Lyall pulled a rolled paper from his coat pocket and unfurled it; Smith glanced at what appeared to be a map of this strange subterranean world. “Left,” said Lyall, then as they moved on said, “Fact is, we tend to keep more than we sell, these days. Inveterate collectors, Mr. Tait and I. Can’t bear to part with some of our finds.”
The tunnel they had taken widened, and the ledge grew progressively wider, for which Smith was thankful. Tait removed a pocket watch from his waistcoat and inspected it. “Lunchtime, Mr. Lyall.”
“Can’t that wait until we get out of here?” said Smith.
“Oh, don’t be in a rush to get up top, Smith,” said Tait. “It was snowing something vicious, last time I looked. No snow down here, no rain neither.”
Both men climbed up onto the ledge, slipping the packs from their shoulders. As Lyall began to unpack pans and a small oilstove from his, Tait held up his lamp and squinted down the tunnel. “That’s most curious, Mr. Lyall. What do you make of it?”
Smith followed the tall man’s pointing finger. There was what seemed to be a doorway in the opposite ledge some distance along the tunnel, but the closer he looked the more he realized the brickwork had been smashed through to create an opening. Lyall left his stove to consult the map in the l
ight from the oil lamp.
“Curious indeed, Mr. Tait. It seems to be a proper tunnel, but bricked up at some point. It isn’t on the map. Perhaps a service tunnel, or a sewer that wasn’t needed.”
“I’m sure I didn’t see it last time we passed this way. What was it, a week ago, perhaps?”
“Yes, a week ago. If it’s Monday we’re here, Tuesday over Holborn, Wednesday under Tottenham Court Road, Thursday up at Highgate … regular as clockwork, ain’t we, Mr. Tait?”
“You have to follow a routine, Mr. Lyall. A schedule. Country’d be off to hell in a handbasket if people didn’t have routines and schedules. Yes, regular as clockwork, we are.”
Lyall turned his attention to lighting the small stove. Smith caught Tait glancing at him with interest. The tall man said, “How did you come to be climbing down here, Smith?”
“I was … escaping.”
“Escaping? Escaping what? Or whom?”
“A mob,” said Smith. “The police.”
“Ah,” said Lyall, looking up. “A wrong ’un!”
Tait caught Smith’s perturbed look and said, “Don’t fret, Smith, we’re not about to hand you in to the authorities, whatever you’ve done. What happens on the surface stays on the surface. We’re not interested.”
“Just like what happens down here stays down here,” said Lyall, eventually lighting the oilstove with his matches. “Ah. Lovely.”
“What are you eating?” asked Smith. His stomach ached with hunger, but the thought of eating one of those rats, whether it tasted of chicken or not, forced his appetite to flee.
“You’ll have a sweetheart who’ll be missing you, a fine, strong, handsome lad like you,” said Tait.
An image of that prostitute’s face—Lottie’s face—flitted through his mind. There was something about that girl, something he couldn’t let go of … but it was ridiculous. Men didn’t fall in love with prostitutes, not at first glance.
“No,” he said, though not sounding convinced even to himself. “No sweetheart.”
“Family?”
There was an aching hole inside him at the thought of family. “No, no family.”
There was a moment’s silence in the sewer, save for the distant splashing of rats and the sluggish flow of the river of muck. Smith glanced from Tait to Lyall. Both were looking at him most curiously.
“No sweetheart,” said Lyall.
“No family,” said Tait.
“A wrong ’un running from the police.”
Lyall reached into his bag and withdrew something that glinted in the lamplight, a long-bladed butcher’s knife.
“No one to miss him at all,” said Tait. “We’d be doing society a favor, Mr. Lyall. A valuable service we perform.”
Lyall grinned unpleasantly and hefted the knife as Tait suddenly grabbed Smith by the scruff of the neck, the tall man’s thin fingers exerting an unexpectedly ironlike grip.
“Lunchtime,” said Lyall, his eyes shining, and licked his lips.
Then a deafening roar rent the thick air in the tunnel.
* * *
“Now what do you suppose that was, Mr. Tait?” said Lyall, his eyes narrowed, the carving knife poised in the air. “Have you ever heard the like?”
Tait looked over his shoulder, behind him down the sewer tunnel. “Can’t say as I have, Mr. Lyall.”
“Allegations in the sewers, do you think?”
Tait gave a thin chuckle. “I think you mean alligators, Mr. Lyall. And you know as well as I do that those are just stories. Rats, cats, dogs, and snakes. Pigs. A horse, once. But never alligators.”
Another roar echoed around the brick tunnel, and Smith took the opportunity to wriggle free from Tait’s slackening grip, throwing himself back against the curved wall. He rubbed his neck and said, “You were going to eat me?”
“We weren’t going to eat you,” corrected Lyall, raising the knife again. “We are going to eat you.”
Tait still looked pensive. “That noise, though, Mr. Lyall.…”
Smith aimed a boot at the short man’s arm, and the knife went flying over his shoulder, skittering away into the darkness. He pushed with both hands at the surprised Tait, causing the tall man to splash backward into the effluent, the oil lamp spinning out of his hand.
They were going to eat him.
In the dancing rays of the catapulting lamp, he set off into the darkness, down the tunnel that lay in front of them. Behind him, he heard curses from the two men.
“He’s making a break for it, Mr. Lyall!”
“Then I propose we pursue him, Mr. Tait! We can’t let him get to the surface.… He could bring all manner of problems down on us.”
The light was fading behind him, but he heard Tait and Lyall splashing through the muck. They knew the tunnels well, while he was foundering in the dark. Even if he could outpace them, hungry and weak as he was, would he be able to make it to a ladder and force a manhole aside in time?
In the last of the gray gloom from the lamplight, Smith noticed a quick and sudden movement off to his right. He was passing the broken wall the two men had pointed out earlier, and a tiny shape bobbed up and down. A rat?
No, the monkey.
It chattered at him excitedly, waving its arms.
Was it telling him to follow?
He risked a glance back. Tait and Lyall were dim shapes in the corona of the recovered oil lamp, lurching closer. If he could get across before they fully rounded the bend …
Smith jumped down into the cold, thick stream, grimacing as his foot slipped on something slimy. He waded swiftly across to the other ledge and hauled himself up. The monkey jumped up and down then disappeared into the darkness, reappearing a moment later to ensure he was following.
“Stop, Smith, stop!” called a voice behind.
Without a backward glance he clambered through the damaged brickwork into blackness. A tunnel—thankfully dry—led in a gentle downward slope. He felt the sudden weight of the bricks and darkness, suffocatingly thick, but pushed the fear away.
Your fear is a lie, said the voice from the past again.
Feeling his way along the narrow walls, he followed the chattering of the unseen monkey. A distant voice called, “Smith? You down there?”
Tait and Lyall. He hadn’t fooled them at all. But then another roar—closer, reverberating around his head—sounded from ahead of him. The monkey jumped up and down; he could see it now, in a dim light emanating not from the pursuing toshers but from ahead, where the tunnel was curving to the left. Smith paused, looking back. Was it better to take his chances with Tait and Lyall or face what lay ahead? But then the decision was made for him. Strong hands grabbed him, and he found himself surrounded by three or four figures melting out of the shadows who held him fast and hauled him off his feet and around the corner, into a wide brick-walled room lit by a burning brazier. A man stood with his fists on his hips in the dancing shadows, regarding him with a frown, but Smith barely gave him a glance.
His attention was somewhat diverted by the young tyrannosaur that strained at a thick chain driven into the wall and fixed him with its piercing yellow eyes, opening its vast mouth to display teeth like knives and roaring with uncontained fury.
11
REGINA V FANSHAWE
The crowd on the pavement outside the arched doors of the Central Criminal Court was so big that it was already spilling out into the Strand, much to the annoyance of the steam-omnibus and carriage drivers who were trying to negotiate the busy, slush-filled thoroughfare. Word got out, then, thought Aloysius Bent. He had hoped to get to the Old Bailey early and secure a seat, but so had the massed ranks of his former colleagues on a dozen London newspapers, not to mention the aficionados of the adventures in World Marvels & Wonders and assorted ghouls, tourists, and tricoteuses. Bent checked his pocket watch; it was a shade after nine. Proceedings would get underway in an hour; it was to be hoped that Siddell had been inside for some time, interviewing Rowena. If the lawyer had spent another nigh
t on the tiles and awoken late, then it would not only be the Belle of the Airways who would be up on a murder charge today.
“As I live and breathe, Aloysius Bent!” called one of the press men who were jostling behind a wooden barrier, waiting for the ushers to open up and let them into the fine gray stone Gothic building, its spires scraping the underside of a sky that hung low like paving slabs, threatening yet more snow.
“Herbert.” Bent nodded, pushing through the throng until he got to the journalists. As a friend of Rowena he wasn’t guaranteed a seat in court number one any more than the casual observers, but he was still a bona fide member of Her Majesty’s Press, and he was going to pull every string he could.
“How’s life on the penny bloods?” asked another man in a battered derby and flapping collars.
“Tolerable.” Bent nodded.
“Heard you was keeping right highfalutin company these days,” sniffed Herbert, who’d worked for the Gazette longer than anyone—much less Herbert himself—cared to remember. “Heroes and the like. Come to slum it with your old chums?”
A man who was even fatter than Bent stuck a pockmarked nose into the conversation. “Nah, he’s thick with the defendant, he is. Rowena Fanshawe. She’s one of his mob.”
Herbert looked at him with interest. “Oh, yes, that’s right. You a witness for the defense, Bent?”
“Witless for the defense, more like.” The fat man chuckled. Bent aimed a half-hearted cuff toward his beacon of a nose.
“Eff off out of it, Gargrave, or I’ll have cause to tell your missus just where you spends your time on all those nights you claims to be working late. Unless you’ve already passed her a dose of the clap, and she knows full well.”
Gargrave made a face at him, but he shut up. Bent felt a surge of something he’d almost forgotten, the banter and feeling of belonging that he’d always had with the press pack. He’d spent more days waiting to go into the Old Bailey with this mob than he’d had hot dinners, but not more than he’d had glasses of gin with them afterward. By God, he’d missed it. He asked, “Who’s the judge?”
Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper Page 12
