By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  I’ve come quite alone, sir, Foole murmured. I assure you.

  Pinkerton seemed to glower down with a swift and mercurial fury and then this too was gone. He said nothing until he had searched him. Ran his hands along Foole’s arms, under his armpits, he kneeled and felt firmly the length of his trouser legs. He got to his feet and unbuttoned Foole’s topcoat and ran a hand smoothly over the inner lining and he withdrew from a waistcoat pocket a pocket watch and then replaced it without giving it a glance. He plucked the silk hat from Foole’s head and the cold air squeezed suddenly at his pate and Pinkerton reached into the hat and ran his fingers over the brim slowly and methodically and then he handed it back and nodded.

  I was surprised by your message, Foole said quietly. But pleased that you would take up my offer.

  Don’t be pleased yet. Pinkerton inspected the walking stick.

  I carry no weapons, sir. I have always felt it takes a kind of courage to refuse a fight.

  Pinkerton grimaced. There was a menace in the man he had not felt upon that first meeting. I never met a man who ran from a fight out of courage, he said. You’re an American?

  Foole buttoned up his overcoat. He took the walking stick back and weighed it in his hands then looked up at the bigger man. I was raised there.

  Raised where?

  Ah. Not in Chicago, sir. Foole smiled a cautious smile to see the stillness creep across the man’s features. Come now, he said. You’re a public figure. You must expect me to know some few things about you.

  While I know nothing of you.

  That, Foole said, I find difficult to believe.

  Pinkerton lifted his face and Foole stood in silence and after a moment he heard the quiet slow footsteps of a constable walking his beat. When he was gone Pinkerton said, You aren’t American by birth.

  Foole said nothing. He was reminding himself with impatience that this man could prove both his accomplice and his undoing. Dangerous, fiery, ill-tempered, violent.

  And you do not come from wealth, Pinkerton continued. He had removed his gloves to search Foole and had held them in his teeth as he did so and now he pulled them back tightly over his wrists and flexed his fingers as he spoke. He said, You’re too careful in your dress and your manners. You’re too aware.

  Ah.

  There’s no shame in being a self-made man.

  Foole had so often stated the same that he wondered a moment just how thorough the detective’s research might have been. He said, Once, when I was a boy in the school-house, I traded my only two pennies for a single brand-new penny. When I brought it home my father beat me for my stupidity. Foole tugged at his whiskers. Everyone’s attracted to the shinier thing. Especially if they don’t know its real worth. When I grew older I determined to make of myself a brighter and more attractive spectacle. Foole glanced at the sky as if to determine the hour. It was black and starless. He said, He was a cobbler. Respectable, until debts got the better of him and drink did the rest. He studied Pinkerton to gauge the effect of his lie. What’s any father like, really? You love them and you resist them and you want something from them that in the end they fail to give. Foole started to turn away but then paused. He met the detective’s eye. I was sorry to hear about yours, he said.

  There was a tension in the detective’s shoulders, a ferocity in his stillness.

  He said nothing.

  In the Civil War Foole had stood once beside Allan Pinkerton in a crowded army mess tent while a hot rain gattled the tarps and chewed up the mud outside and he had slid one shifty eye to gauge the man drenched and snorting beside him. He was not tall but there was a solidity to him that reminded Foole of the men who had once been engaged to saw down and drag clear a stand of timber from the Shade estates. His wrists were strong, hairy. He flared his nostrils and spat and ran an open hand over his beard to crush the rain from it. His blues were steaming and hung heavily on him, like a horse blanket. Drowns everything but the damned blackfiies, he grinned at the cook ladling out their mess, and his voice sounded like the soft burred voice of a shopkeeper. Friendly, brisk, freighted in its friendliness with its own wants. All this Foole had observed with the quick eye of a boy from the streets but when Allan Pinkerton turned his broad face and stared down at Foole the man’s eyes terrified him, deep, lightless, the eyes of a dead man who did not yet know he was dead.

  What he saw now when he looked at the son was a distortion of that father, a marred reflection, a twisting and warping of a great man gone wrong.

  The detective led him north out of the square up Regent Street then turned east on Coventry keeping to the crowds until they had reached the green of Leicester Square. Two rent boys strolled arm in arm towards them in magenta neckties and green and cream overcoats but upon seeing Pinkerton’s face the young men ceased their whistling and veered to the left and kept on. There were other men lounging under the solitary gas lamps waiting for some encounter and the detective led him past to a small round building at the limits of a far hedge. It was fitted with a low child-sized door and he glanced around him then withdrew a bent wire and picked the lock. A rancid air rushed past. He was standing just behind the detective’s shoulder and he could feel the man’s physical power but he did not flinch. Inside he glimpsed stairs, descending into shadow.

  We’re not entering by the river?

  Pinkerton was silent a long moment and then he said, Charlotte didn’t die in the river.

  On a hook to the left of the door Pinkerton found a lantern and on a plaster shelf above it the sparking flint and these he took down. They were covered in a grime of dust. He turned his back and unhooked the glass door to check the tallow candle within. Then he crouched and held the bell of the fiint-work over the wick and scraped twice and watched the wick catch and waver and lean violently to one side and then burn tall.

  You have a map, I presume? Foole said. You must have instructions?

  Pinkerton gave him a long slow searching look, the lantern casting his features in eerie relief. I met with an old friend of yours the other day, he said. Martin Reckitt.

  Foole paused. About Charlotte?

  Among other matters. He said you and I had much to talk about.

  Foole could feel a hardness in his throat. Mr. Reckitt was always a capable man, he said with forced calm. Perhaps not the most reliable. I have found it best to take his accounts on caution.

  Yes.

  We were never friends.

  The detective inclined his head. Associates, then.

  Foole wondered just what Martin Reckitt might have said to the man. He did not believe Reckitt knew his most damaging secrets but then the aging thief was nothing if not resourceful. He said, You have two fists, Mr. Pinkerton, like any peeler. But connecting them is a skull with a brain in it. That is more rare. I’d suggest you exercise that intelligence carefully when dealing with a man like Martin Reckitt. The Yard never managed to.

  You don’t have much faith in the Yard.

  I prefer American defectives.

  Pinkerton lifted the lantern and the light caught the craggy planes of his face distorted and grey-skinned and stern. Beneath his dour moustache he was smiling.

  My brother insists there’s no such thing as bad press.

  Only bad printing.

  Pinkerton grunted, his smile fading. Come, he said. He doffed his hat to clear the lintel and stepped with a shiver through. Let us go find your mudlark, Mr. Foole.

  The stairs were dry. He paused on the third step and took the lantern from Pinkerton that he might shoulder the door more firmly shut and it screeled to with a clatter that echoed deep below them. Then the American took the lantern back and continued on past. They wound their way down into darkness. A weak corona of light cast over the stone walls, the spidering cracks lit in the ancient bricks, their wet footprints trailing behind them like some doomed path the sightless might once have walked. The air tasted of dust and iron.

  The stairs ended in a worm-eaten wood door and Foole reached out and tried the han
dle and his hand came away wet. The door did not give. Pinkerton pressed past. Set his shoulder to. The door punched wide with a loud shriek and he staggered through.

  It was a long arched corridor and Pinkerton paused only a moment then turned right and walked quickly over the ill-fitted stones. Water in the cracks, water shimmering like mercury at the edges of the light-fall. There were streaks of black moss growing on the walls where moisture trickled. At every twenty yards or so an alcove opened to their right and each alcove was barred by an iron gate and he could see Pinkerton eyeing each but neither man spoke and they went on. The corridor curved, branched, curved again and Pinkerton kept to the left until it began very gradually to slope downward. At last they came to a three-way fork and the American paused and walked back some ten feet until he reached the nearest alcove and when he set his hand on the gate there it opened with a rattle and he hoisted the lantern and peered in. Foole followed. Within he could see another set of stairs.

  We’re not there yet, Pinkerton murmured.

  They went in. Foole could hear the slow roar of running water as they descended. The smell thickened, the air went tarry and rank. This second stairwell was steep, and slick, and Foole set a hand on the slimed wall as he went holding his walking stick in his fist for balance. He knew men had been lost in the lines, knew to avoid the smaller branches where the air was bad and chokedamp could strike. The night before, the gunsmith’s apprentice had stood in the Emporium office anxiously turning his hat in his bitten fingers as he delivered the detective’s message. Fludd had listened glowering. He had stormed out in disgust and then come right back in and the two of them had talked through it. Foole said he would be careful. Fludd warned him the tide would rise five hours after midnight and careful was not enough and that he would need to be above it by then. Foole said Pinkerton could have no reason to let him come to harm. Fludd said Pinkerton was a bastard and a man of violence and harm was like breathing to him. An if you get yourself lost, his friend growled, don’t stop to think about it. Follow the waters out. Down there rats been known to eat a man to the bone an him still alive. An rats ain’t the worst of what’s down there.

  All this Foole was thinking as he followed the huge shadowy figure of the detective. They came out, at last, upon the wide parapet of the London sewers.

  Pinkerton lifted the lantern high. Coins of light on the dark waters before them. A vast arched ceiling vanishing into blackness. In one hand he had withdrawn a map and unfolded it deftly with his thumb and two fingers and he held it up in the light. He looked left, looked right, studied the map again.

  Foole watched him. Lost already?

  Pinkerton smiled grimly. Not just yet, he said.

  They tied handkerchiefs at their noses and mouths like bandits and went on in silence under a penumbra of light and as they walked Foole felt a kind of dread coming up in him. He strained over the rush of the waters to hear any cry or rustle of men with murder in their hearts. He knew if the berserkers came upon them it would be sudden and swift and brutal.

  The parapet was wide enough to walk abreast and Foole moved with hands at his sides and his walking stick gripped fast and he could hear the big American breathing fiercely through his nostrils alongside him.

  After a distance Pinkerton slowed, held a hand out to stop. He shuttered the lantern to a slit and they stood, listening. The low rumble of the waters. Foole’s blood loud in his ears. He could hear nothing else.

  What is it? he whispered, his handkerchief shirring.

  Pinkerton unshuttered the lantern, their shadows sliding up the curved wall.

  But then it came again: a weird distant hooting, like the call of a night creature. The cry filled the tunnel elongating and distorting as it sounded and Foole shivered to hear it. He could not tell from which direction it came, ahead or behind.

  What the hell is it? Pinkerton whispered through his handkerchief.

  Foole listened. It did not sound human.

  Pinkerton walked to the wall, made a deliberate mark in chalk. Let’s keep moving, he said.

  It was a wide tunnel high and well ventilated and the waters moved at a steady drift, muscling past, scraping the filth and detritus of a world city against its bed. The corpses of dogs, cats, rats washed down from the slaughterhouses, even the coiled tumbling entrails of horses turning end over end in its current. The cavern veered left and then left again and then a smaller branch sewer opened on the far side but Pinkerton kept on. The chamber widened until it seemed a kind of reservoir of muck and the stink deepened into something older, thicker, a stench they had to wade through as they went. Punctured here and there high up in the walls were the narrow clotted outfalls of old sewer lines, a steady trickle of crud leaking from their openings into the reservoir. When Pinkerton lifted the lantern Foole could see suspended from the ceiling long spindled stalactites of putrid matter hanging over the waters and he glanced at Pinkerton and the skin around the man’s eyes was drawn and pinched in the strange light but he kept slowly on.

  After a time there was a sound from the far side of the chamber and then a light appeared, a luminescence hovering, moving bumpily forward in the darkness. Pinkerton stiffened, shuttering his lantern too late. Foole heard the click of his revolver.

  A second light appeared, more distant, a third. And then Foole saw the dim outline of a man take form. He had tied to his front a small bull’s-eye lantern and the half-shuttered light crossed and crossed again in the gloom as he went, wraithlike, about his business. The man was back-bent and his arms were long and he did not look their way though Foole knew they must be visible. Instead he passed silently on in a long greasy velveteen coat, pockets weighed heavily down, a sack clinking over his shoulder. Then a second man appeared wearing a canvas apron stained with what looked like blood and this man carried a long staff with some sort of flattened blade at its end like a monstrous hoe and he walked with his bald head bare and his grey skin gleaming in the weak light. There were three of them in all moving single file in some strange procession and as the third passed he raised a forlorn hand as if in warning or entreaty and his face was cadaverous and terrible. Then he too was lost to view in a gloom beyond which it was not possible to go and the two of them stood again alone.

  Tunnel men, Foole breathed in relief. Salvagers.

  Pinkerton looked at him gravely.

  They went on. After a short length they heard a steady scraping and then saw tied to the parapet on the far side a skeletal hull rising and falling in the waters. It was an old peter boat fitted out for dredging at one time but now pitched and paired for nothing beyond shore work. It had no stern, no aft, but a sharp cutwater at either end, the bow scarred from grapples hooked there years past. It rode shallow in the current. All this they saw at a glance and Foole knew it would belong to the salvagers they had just seen.

  Pinkerton studied it uneasily from the edge of the walkway, the foul waters between. His handkerchief sucking in around his mouth at each breath, sucking then billowing back out.

  Careful, Foole murmured. That’s more than deep enough to drown in.

  Pinkerton regarded him with unreadable eyes then consulted the map and made his mark in chalk. It was then they heard that eerie cry come again, closer this time, distinctly anguished. Foole stared in alarm at the big American and neither spoke as the cry swelled past them and dissipated. Then came a second cry, a response.

  This sounded higher, nearer, and Foole could make out the long slow bending of the vowels as it replied.

  Did it just say clear? Pinkerton hissed.

  No, Foole whispered. It said here.

  The cry came again, louder. Pinkerton raised his face to the darkness behind them and then Foole too heard it: footsteps, clattering towards them. It sounded like a great horde of men running.

  Foole twisted in alarm. This way, he said.

  But Pinkerton was already running. Foole could hear the low hooting cry pass them and the clatter and chink of what sounded like chains and he too was ru
nning fast, his walking stick low at his side, Pinkerton just ahead with the lantern swaying wildly and casting the tunnel and the rushing waters into bizarre spirals of shadow, spirals of light. His hat flew from his head, spun out across the gap and landed upright and adrift in the black currents and was gone. He did not slow.

  That chamber came to an end at three wide sewers, each line opening at an angle, and Pinkerton paused, breathing heavily. He set down the lantern and unfolded his map. Foole could hear the clatter of feet behind them.

  Pick one, he snapped.

  Pinkerton squinted at the map.

  An ancient brick walkway had been erected across to the centre line, overspilling now with sewage. It reached a span of nine feet at least, the wash of foul matter making the crossing treacherous. Foole stared, gauging it. Then he picked up the lantern and looked at Pinkerton and turned and ran nimbly across. The going was slick and dangerous and when he was in the clear he turned and set the lantern down at his feet and held out a hand to Pinkerton.

  The detective glanced uneasily behind him. Foole saw he had his revolver low at his thigh.

  Don’t think about it. Just come.

  Foole could see for a moment his companion plunging into the murk and being dragged under and then he put it from his mind. It was not what he wanted. The detective had pulled the handkerchief down from his face and was glaring at the narrow brick walkway.

  Goddamnit, he muttered.

  Then he turned and strode back into the darkness and disappeared. Foole called out to him in a loud whisper but there was no answer.

  He heard quick footsteps and all at once the detective emerged from the shadows hurtling towards him at speed and then he was leaping with his arms outstretched and legs wide. He seemed to hang an impossible long moment in the air before his right foot came down, hard, on the edge of the old brick crossing, and the bricks crumbled and gave way. Then Pinkerton was rolling like a fallen horse into Foole and the two men crashed against the wall at their backs. There was an eerie sucking sound from beside them and then a strong current of filth poured through the breach in the bricks into the tunnel below. Foole could hear men shouting behind them. And then he was scrambling to his knees and Pinkerton was shuttering the lantern and they both were crawling blind around the corner into the line and they lay with legs outstretched trying not to breathe and listening as the figures rushed past.