Lungdon

by Edward Carey

  ‘What on earth was that?’ cried Eleanor.

  ‘I do believe it’s Binadit,’ I said. ‘He’s sleeping. I do think that’s very sensible of him, perhaps we should all do likewise. It must be very late by now.’

  ‘The clock downstairs says it’s half past one in the morning.’

  ‘Please,’ said Eleanor, ‘will you sleep by me?’

  ‘I think that’s quite enough!’ put in Pinalippy. ‘He’s mine, we’re to be married.’

  ‘Why don’t we all find a spot in the same room,’ I suggested. ‘Why don’t we go and join Irene, she’s probably just as confused as you are, Eleanor.’

  ‘If she’s going then I’m coming along too,’ said Pinalippy.

  ‘By all means come, Penelope,’ said Eleanor, ‘and don’t scowl so.’

  ‘My name is Pinalippy! Please to call me so!’

  ‘Very well then … Pinalippy.’

  ‘And he’s my fiancé, just remember that!’

  We went to the drawing room. I couldn’t see Irene at first, there was so much clutter. Indeed I do not think I had ever seen such a room for bits and pieces, for collections, for keepsakes, for mementoes, for gilt mirrors, for rocking horses, for globes, for trainsets, for wooden blocks, for elaborate birdcages with model birds inside them, for dolls – most of all for dolls, large and small, all seated here and there and all about, some even set around a green-topped table as if they were playing at cards.

  ‘I’ve never seen such an amassing before.’

  ‘My aunt is, was, a great collector.’

  ‘My grandmother had a great room of artefacts,’ I said, ‘but this is different. So many things here are from childhoods.’

  ‘She liked to play, you see; even though she was old, she still liked to play.’

  ‘Well and why shouldn’t she,’ I said.

  ‘What childishness,’ said Pinalippy. ‘What silliness.’

  Irene Tintype was sitting just as still as all the other dolls; the only difference was the faint clouds of black smoke coming out of her mouth.

  ‘Hullo, Irene Tintype,’ I said, ‘how are you?’

  ‘Oh hullo!’ she said, sitting up, jerking back into life.

  ‘We’ve come to rest in here with you if we may?’

  ‘Come along, come along!’ she trilled.

  ‘How are you feeling, Irene?’

  ‘If you want to know, I’m feeling very angry.’

  ‘Are you, Irene, why is that?’

  ‘These people,’ she whispered to me, indicating the dolls, ‘they’re snobs!’

  ‘Oh I shouldn’t worry too much over them.’

  ‘No, you’re right I declare! They’re not worth the effort! I’ve introduced myself to them a hundred times and not one of them has once bothered to speak to me.’

  ‘Oh I see, Irene!’ I said. ‘The thing about these people …’

  ‘Such pretty dresses! I should like to have one of those!’

  ‘… the thing about them is, they’re dolls, Irene, they’re not real.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re toys, they’re playthings, they’re imitation humans, they’re not real, they’re made to look like people but they’re just, well, stuff. That’s all.’

  ‘You mean they’re dead!’

  ‘They never were living, Irene.’

  ‘Why would anyone ever do that? Put bits together to look alive, to come so close to life but not to have it. What cruelty!’

  ‘I doubt very much their maker thought that, I think he must have thought they would be nice companions for a child, something to play with.’

  ‘To play with a dead thing!’ said Irene, disgusted.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘perhaps they were very well loved.’

  ‘What use is that to them?’

  ‘Not much, dear Irene, probably not much, but now I think we should get a little rest, and tomorrow we shall see how we fare.’

  So we sat in armchairs or lay on the sofa and tried to sleep a little in that room thick with human shapes. Here I was with a girl of London, with a girl stitched from bits, with a girl who was supposed to marry me. Whatever has happened to the world to make such companions?

  Pinalippy was the first to find sleep, and then Eleanor followed. Irene took the longest, indeed I’m not sure if she could ever sleep or if she only imitated it. She woke me up as I dozed, and she was in tears, muttering, over and over, ‘The poor things!’

  Whatever shall the morrow bring?

  A Candle Factory, Bishopsgate

  18

  THE FACTORY OF LIGHT

  Continuing the narrative of Lucy Pennant

  I haven’t travelled much. I haven’t stepped in very many wheres, but I have heard about them. I know there are big sandy patches, I know there are some locations that are very hot. I gather there are mountains too, that in some places it snows all the year round. I know there’s a sea somewhere, several of them, supposed to be, seven they say, I know that. In theory. I’ve never seen it. The only ocean I ever knew was one of garbage that was wont to drown a fellow if you didn’t take good care. I know (or I’ve been told, or heard about it from books) there are places where people can sit in the sun and the sun feels hot on your skin and the air is clear and the birds sing and don’t snatch your food away from you when you have it out in the open. I’ve heard there are places that are even green in colour. Well, I take that all on trust, don’t I, and hope one day to become an experienced journeyer in my way and to walk in fields and even one day, one day who knows, dip my toe into the ocean and see what the ocean thinks of it.

  One day.

  Can’t say which.

  But now I come to the bit when we arrive in a new place, into and along the home of our guide and saviour, Georgie-no-smell, odd fish, our one person in all London, and there was he down a narrow court and pulling us along. Then Georgie stops at a dark door, says, ‘Home! Here we are.’

  And he knocked heavily on the door, it opened and a grim looking man poked his head out.

  ‘Open up,’ said Georgie.

  The man put his hand out, and Georgie dropped some coins into it.

  The door was opened to us.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Georgie, meaning the porter I supposed. ‘He’s tame enough, so long as he’s paid he lets us in and out. Come along then, get in.’

  Down a dark passageway and there we were.

  The mansion of Georgie.

  Georgiepalace.

  Castle Georgie.

  Let me describe it, tourist that I was to such hallowed regions.

  It was a squalid room about twenty feet square, a general filth all around. Many things hung from the ceiling by chains, they were candles, I began to understand, that had been dipped in great basins of candle wax and left to dry upside down. The whole place was like being in some cavern and all about were stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and they dripped too of course, down onto the floor and the floor was thick with the splattings and drippings, the droppings of wax.

  About all these candles, all these great thick sinews of tallows waiting to be embraced by wax, about all the great steaming basins and the hot air and the flames beneath the basins to keep the wax liquid, about all the little basin moulds and night-light moulds and calipers and handsaws and measures, were the lesser things: the odd looking filthy creatures that made the pure white candles. These animals were not white at all, they were threadbare and their hair was burnt in places and so too their arms and much of their skins, all their fingers were red-burnt from their employ and many of them shook terribly. These were the candlemakers in this sweating shop of candle grease, in this misery of light making. Children, girls mostly, burnt and filthy and shining with candlegrease, like their own skins were made of that same wax stuff and like their hair was wick waiting for a flame, and they’d burn up, in no time probably, and their light, I supposed, should soon enough sputter out.

  ‘Here we are then,’ said Georgie, ‘here’s home.’<
br />
  ‘Thank you, Georgie,’ I said. ‘What a place.’

  The workers all around barely looked up from their labours as we came in, but kept their eyes upon their candlemaking like it was all they could see of the world.

  ‘How do?’ called Georgie, and some of them grunted back. ‘Don’t mind them, they’re hard at it and will be at it for a good hour or more yet.’

  ‘Making all the candles?’

  ‘That’s it. We do make them, that’s our business, but not just any candles, no, not at all,’ he said with genuine pride, ‘for we are chandlers to the Church of England, that’s us. Several concerns like ours, but this is the one where we shift. Me and the boys you met, we go out in our break and (not to tell anyone) we borrow some lights from here (please, please don’t let on), and we tip the porter according to our arrangement, you see, and we go link around Mill Bank to get us more wealth, because if we linked here in the City, in Bishopsgate, they’d have us for theft no time and then, well then, we’d lose our jobs – we have an arrangement with some gangs from Mill Bank. And where should we be with no job? Quite in the dark.’

  I looked inside one of the huge vats of wax.

  ‘What a business,’ I said. ‘Has anyone ever fallen in?’

  ‘Well, we most of us have, to be honest, at one time or other. We call it our baptism … we do make the odd church reference you see, seeing as we help to light all the great Godhouses of London from Saint Paul’s to Westminster Abbey and any other chapel in between … yes we fall in, of a time, we get tired, see, the hours can be long and if we have to be up on the benches just by the edge here, to lay the tallows right before they’re dipped, where it’s terrible slippery, well then if we drift off, then we fall.’

  ‘And get burnt?’

  ‘Oh yes, can be bad sometimes, very bad. Can scald you terrible.’

  ‘Can kill, the candle basins can,’ said one bespotted worker.

  ‘Let’s not harp on that,’ snapped Georgie. ‘Well then, what do you think?’

  We all looked around, still taking the place in.

  ‘Like it?’

  We didn’t specify.

  ‘You’d better like it, because here’s your working now. Cos if you’re to stay the night, if you’re to take the bread and the mug of tea that I’m about to offer you, if you accept the bed which I shall be introducing to you soon enough then you’re in on it, signed and stamped! That’s it: you work here. In the candlemass, making the great white pillars for the Churches of England, it’s a privileged position right here alongside the rest of us, don’t you see? Starting at seven in the morning, finish around seven. You may earn as much as eleven shillings a week, minus four shillings a week for the bed and the victuals. What do you say, shake on it?’

  I looked around at all the miserable workforce. This is no better than Foulsham, I thought, this is the very same, only here they work for the Church and over there they worked for the Iremongers.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we are grateful.’

  ‘And there we are then! The rector will sign you in in the morning, and then you’re proper lodged. He comes from St Helen’s close by the leather market, he’s a rector he is, and he keeps us here employed and out of the streets. So long as we do our hours straight, otherwise we are out again, double quick. And no begging shall get you readmitted. Well then here you are and may have some bread, if you’re of a hunger.’

  We fell on the dry bread he gave us.

  ‘It is, this place, on the whole,’ he said as we ate, ‘a rather sticky sort of environment. On account of all the candle slop, you see. Which I don’t smell, but am told does have a certain nose to it, very like the insides of a church, the breath of God, you might call it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jen, ‘perhaps it does.’

  At that Georgie Clark seemed very happy indeed. ‘Yes! Ha! Well, thank you! Thank you! Thank you for noticing!’

  ‘It is, also, Georgie,’ Colin Shanks ventured, ‘uncommonly warm inside.’

  ‘Again! What joy! I don’t love you! But I don’t hate you! There then, I’ll meet you in the middle.’

  ‘Georgie,’ I said, looking at him clearly in the candlelight. His face itself seemed like a very antique fish, very thin and very pale and somewhat off balance, like he was a direct descendant of a flounder. ‘How long have you been here, working like this?’

  ‘Since I misplaced my parents,’ he admitted.

  ‘What happened to them?’ Jen asked.

  He was quiet then a moment, before he opened his mouth at last, huge and big like a great codfish, and he said, ‘Truth be told, I dunno. They gone. Mysterious, it was. There’s been a lot of it around.’

  ‘A lot of what, Georgie?’

  ‘Oh, a good deal of parent-losing I should say, on the whole. A lot of parents, a whole deal of adults, gone missing. It happened to all of us here, and the Rector, he found us scavenging about and brought us in for to make candles for God.’

  ‘What happened, Georgie?’ I asked. ‘Will you tell us?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s no secret. Three weeks about. I was at home, at Limehouse, in our lodgings. My ma asked me if I’d seen my pa and I said well yes, he’s over there, but he wasn’t, though he had been a few minutes previous, now all there was, well, was this.’

  He took out a pair of old spectacles.

  ‘Now where did they come from, I ask you? Who could’ve left them there? Whoever could afford such things?’

  ‘Were they warm, Georgie,’ I asked, ‘when you found them?’

  ‘That they were! Piping!’

  ‘And when your mother went missing, did you find anything?’

  ‘That I did,’ he cried. ‘This here!’ He held up a tin baby’s rattle.

  ‘Oh, Georgie, you must hold on to those.’

  ‘I mean to, don’t know how they came here, but I never go out without them. I know my people’ll show up again some time, they just haven’t yet. And the Rector says he’ll keep an eye out on all the ones of ours that have gone.’

  ‘Oh, Georgie,’ I said, ‘I have heard of this before. My parents, they suddenly went too.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘I lost a brother very suddenly, and, same day, gained a stepladder.’

  ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘Yes and my aunt went and we got a carpet beater, though we had no carpets to speak of, so what was the use on it, I say.’

  ‘Our uncle got lost and we had a clothes horse.’

  ‘Heavens,’ said Georgie, ‘over there, over in your Foulsham?’

  ‘Yes, yes, at our old home.’

  ‘Same thing’s happening here, in a general way; there’s a shortage of grown-ups. All the while there’s less and less of us. Hit the adults most especial, but some kids too, though fewer.’

  ‘It’s happened before, in Foulsham. There’ll be more of it, for certain, before it is over again.’

  ‘Well it’s here now. And don’t you mention Foulsham to the Rector, he shan’t take you on if you own up to that place, isn’t Godly I shouldn’t think.’

  The door was slid back and some other of the link boys came in, Tommy leading the way.

  ‘Got them all stowed, Georgie?’

  ‘All in, Tommy, all fed.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tommy, ‘you’ve made some enemies, oh you’ve made some enemies all right.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Only that they’re all out looking for you, all over town probably, and they mean to get you. You’re sought for, highly sought after.’

  ‘Did you find out anything,’ asked Colin, ‘about the ones in prison?’

  ‘No, nothing on that. But if they’re in Mill Bank, we’ll maybe learn more. Horace’s dad’s in there, it’s his current abode if you catch my meaning, he may have heard, we’ll ask about.’

  ‘What are we to do?’ I wondered.

  ‘Ke
ep here,’ said Tommy. ‘Out of the light, making light. You’ll be safe enough here. But must pay for it. When you’re paid at the end of the week, we’ll take your earnings, and we shan’t rag on you.’

  ‘What a deal you’ve made,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t like it?’ said Tommy. ‘Sling your hook.’

  But there was nowhere else for us to go.

  ‘Thought so,’ said Tommy. ‘Well then, sleep might be in order, you look half dead.’

  There was a grim black room they called the dormitory, blankets coated in splatters of candlewax, two to a bed, but it was rest, rest after so long. We had found shelter. We were still living.

  Tomorrow, I thought, as I lay down with Esther Nelson beside me, tomorrow I’ll strike out, into London. I don’t care about this rector fellow and I’ll see what else I can see. I shan’t linger long enough for my skin to look like wax.

  Tommy blew out the small candle in the dormitory and the darkness came back in ever such a hurry.

  Part Four

  Outside In

  19

  JOHN SMITH UN-IREMONGER

  Report from Inspector Frederick Harbin

  7th February 1876

  3–5 a.m.

  John Smith Un-Iremonger came to us this morning with all his many instruments. I confess the man fills me with a certain dread and at the moment of his arriving a cold sweat came over me and I felt a panic in my chest. I know that I am not the only one to suffer so. I have seen Sergeant Metcalfe weeping behind his desk, huge burly man that Metcalfe is, I have known him these five years since, and never before was he wont to cry. It is the Smith that does it.

  So very little is known about the Smith. He was used five years ago when certain bailiffs from London were discovered to be in Iremonger hands. On that occasion he stepped forward and, with his particular methods, had all the bailiffs disposed of. Brutally so if I am not mistaken. And then afterwards he disappeared again, as if he came from nowhere and went back there once more.

  I have been told to let him do his work as he sees fit, never to question him. Indeed we shall leave him alone, readily. There’s something so unpleasant about his person. I cannot quite explain it. I am a very rational man, I have no true belief in God, save for how religion might help us to be better persons. But I think that – it suffers me so to write it and yet I must – I think that he is not quite natural. I think there is something very other about him.