by Edward Carey
I have thick red hair that shall not be tamed and a long face and a nose that points upwards. My eyes are green with flecks in them, but that’s not the only place I’m dotted. There’s punctuation all over me. I’m freckled and spotted and moled and bruised and I have scabs all over my face and hands. My teeth are not white at all. One tooth is lost. I’m being honest. I shall finish up everything exactly how it is and not tell lies but stay with the actual always. As much as ever I can. I’m doing my best. My name is Lucy Pennant, this was my story, and it was others’ too.
I live in London these days, I may walk about where I like, there’s no one that pulls me down any more, nor tells me I cannot go here nor either there. If there are walls then I may step around them, or go through the gate same as anyone. The sun comes up these days, not very confident, it is true, but there is a marked difference between morning and night.
I live with Iremongers and Foulshammers, all those that are left of us. We have a dwelling here that is our own, hard by Kings Cross it is, no palace, for certain. Our home is in an old schoolhouse and church that stands within Saint Giles Cemetery, a closed cemetery it was, by which they mean a full one, but they opened it up a little for us, it is just by the Royal Veterinary College and the St Pancras Workhouse. It is fitting enough that Giles is the saint we’ve been grouped with, he is the patron saint of cripples, you see, and of convulsions and of childhood terrors. There’s quite a number of us that live here, we residents, we have made it our mission not to have servants but that each takes his turn and is as important as any other. It is a social experiment, I dare say. Blood is all mixed up here and we don’t much talk about it. We have a shop here at Saint Giles and it is open five days a week, ten a.m. until three p.m., you may visit us here if you like.
We do a brisk business, there’s never an end of it really, queues down the Pancras Road some mornings, slackened off a bit lately, but we ebb and flow in popularity, sometimes we have very smart ladies and gentlemen, very posh, others it’s ragpickers, all may come in, we’re not particular.
It is a noisy house, be warned of that if you intend to come to us, for though we all live together and do get along mostly, still there are those of us that arrived very young from the Gathering in Parliament. There is our youngest, Jack Pike, who once was a cuspidor, was kept living in that great breathing of objects, even after his own master was crushed. He is a fat little babe who was born with twelve teeth already in his gob and he does bite and chew at anything and will not be stopped. There’s Gloria Emma Utting, who was once a doily and is a trouble to us, no doubting, such a forceful little girl with great buck teeth who thinks she knows the world, she is being looked after by the care of Eleanor Cranwell. It is Eleanor indeed who assists in our school room, she and a former music stand called Janey Cunliffe, the best of friends. They are the only ones of us that are not from Foulsham but are counted as part of the family nonetheless. There’s one other teacher, but I shall come to her in a little moment.
Some of the old family are still alive. There are some of the cousins, Ormily, Ugh and Flip and Neg, who were Tummis’s siblings. Aliver Iremonger is the oldest of us that is left, and he looks after our health and is very solicitous to his new friend Percy Hotchkiss, who was a pair of forceps before now. They are often out, those two, gone to watch a dissection or some such at Guy’s Hospital. When Aliver isn’t off with Percy he is generally beside Ada Cruickshanks, whom I know well enough now. We did fight each other so, she and I, we both wanted some life. She has a certain fear of flames, which is hardly to be wondered over, and I light all her candles for her and put a frosted glass shield over them. She is very frail but is still with us; though Pinalippy struck all the matches, still the box was left over. Much of her body is calcified and it is the very devil to move some of her limbs, as if they had decided not to be living any more, but inside that hard exterior is some life and living. Ada is journeyed around in a wheelchair and from that mobile seat she does help instruct the classroom. We do look at each other so, Ada and I, and do hold hands and marvel that we are both here at once. I sometimes help her in the schoolroom. What students there are! Dear Alice Higgs is a very smart child though one may call her skittish; she was once Rosamud Iremonger’s doorhandle, she fears to open doors now and they must be opened for her. And then there is James Henry Hayward with all his plugs; he has a great collection of them, it seems to help him, this gathering up of plugs, as if each of them were members of his own lost family that never made it out of Foulsham, the poor Hayward family of ratcatchers. It is a hard business stopping him from trapping the rats outside in the old cemetery. For there are many of them, and they do come to visit.
We feed them, our rats. I shall not be cruel to them. There may be no doubt that many of them that come are of the old family, and could not get back into human shape. It is very hard for them. There’s one with very ground teeth that I am almost certain is Claar Piggott the old housekeeper. How that rat hissed and bit at me at first but I fed it and it kept coming back and now it sits in my lap and weeps a little there.
I think we do look after things in a different way from other households, here in Saint Giles. We do take care with what we handle; true, there are times when one of us has a panic and fury, and in those moments must smash a deal of china because they are so sad and confused. We cannot perhaps be blamed. We have lost so many things, you see, so many things and people. There has been a search around Parliament for a letter opener knife that was a young hero man called Alexander Erkmann who was known as the Tailor in Foulsham, but he has not been found. There were some link boys who swore they saw the strangest fight of their lives, on the day of the Opening of Parliament. There was, they do swear it, a battle between a very short squat man and a very tall long one and these two did fight each other so mercilessly for so long that they did thoroughly murder each other. It’s such a sadness really, when you think of it, when a person and his object cannot get along.
Then just the other day we heard this noise coming from the nursery:
‘Rippit! Rippit!’
We rushed in, fearing the worst, fearing that our youngest must be in danger. But it was only Perdita Braithwaite – that was once Ormily’s watering can – playing with a toy frog. You pull a cord out of the tin frog and it makes this sound:
‘Rippit, Rippit.’
Gave us all quite a scare.
Parliament was in ruins. Curious thing is, they’re saying somehow that it had come away from its foundations, that the whole building had shunted several feet. Nothing to explain it, they say. One scientist called John Tyndall reported that all the north bank of London has been tugged towards the Thames, several miles along it. Like the city was moving, living, shifting. Or like Clod had grabbed it and tugged it all by himself. They’re building the Houses back now, it shall be up again in time for the Opening of Parliament next year. We have been pardoned. There shall be no prosecution against us, they are saying it never happened, all the Gathering and stuff, nonsense, tricks, but they let us live now and that I suppose is the miracle. They call it a terrible storm, an awful freak storm. And so they have pardoned us. But what I wonder at is, have we pardoned them? We shan’t be invited to the Opening of the new Parliament. Can’t say I’m surprised really, we are rather a dirty lot after all, can’t seem to help it. It’s in our blood I suspect. Still, without rubbish we’d all die, everyone knows that. There’s a heap we’ve been given too, a small enough one, butts onto the Great National Railway’s coal depot. That’s where Ben lives now.
He has a little cottage there but prefers to sleep in the open or beneath his heap; he is pining for Irene Tintype. We have never been able to find her, we have looked and shall continue to. There are many leathers still living about London, hundreds I should think. Whenever we come upon one, we leave them alone. The old family lied to Clod about how the leathers came to be, they took the years from children of Foulsham, and in London they took the breath from their own servants to make them.
I shouldn’t think they thought twice about doing it.
Some of the house that Clod and Ben and Eleanor hid up in has been moved to Ben’s heap. It all came down, great big bang it made when it fell over. Ben likes to be amongst the place where last he was with the leather Irene Tintype. Sometimes we bring him into Saint Giles with us and we tug some of the things from him and give him a good clean up.
For my own part, for my own terror, my clothes now are fastened by clasps, I do not have truck with buttons now if I may help it, they give me a nasty turn.
I do take lessons too. Of a kind. It’s Otta Iremonger that gives them to me. We sit at the kitchen table, there’s a teacup there. It is the only thing on the table and, with encouragement from Otta, I ask the teacup to move. For many weeks we have sat here like this, Otta and I, and I have whispered, shouted, cried at the teacup to move a little on its own. And it was so stubborn, the cup was. But Otta keeps me at it. And just last Thursday I moved it! It turned around so that the handle, which was initially turned away from me, journeyed about until it was pointing at me! I had such a feeling then!
‘I did that!’ I cried.
‘No,’ says Otta, ‘the cup did it; you just asked it right.’
It is not, I do learn, it is not blood, it is concentration that may move a cup.
She’s all right, is Otta, she comes and goes. She likes to be this and that and here and there, a seagull one day, a fox another. But mostly she looks after her brother Unry who would like to fit in, but he never knows what nose or ears to wear, he doesn’t really understand who he is. We encourage him to leave his snouts and lugs behind and walk about us as he truly is, snoutless and lugless, but he is too shy to do it.
Rowland Cullis was to be hanged. He had been seen shooting a man, and that, they said, was called plain murder and that they could not pardon. So just as we were so happy to see our ones from Foulsham freed from the Mill Bank Penitentiary and back amongst us, we were miserable to see Rowland going in. I told the police that he was trying to do good but they wouldn’t hear of it. I wrote to the Queen, who was only happy enough to support us on other issues, but this time she said it was beyond her control, she has no power. I wrote to Mr Disraeli and he wrote back that it was a matter of law, and so Rowland must to the hangman. But what about all the people of Foulsham that died, who is to hang for that? And Mr Disraeli – being one of the ones that signed for Foulsham’s destruction – he wrote that that was not the same thing at all. They make no sense, these people.
In the end Otta went to Mill Bank, the night before Rowland was to be hanged. She went in as a mouse and no one did notice. She told him he must be a toastrack again. He said he was Rowland. And that he was proud to be Rowland and would never be a toastrack again, even if he should swing for it.
‘Very well then,’ said Otta, ‘do swing for it then. For as a toastrack I may carry you safe out of here, but as a Rowland I may never get you through the bars.’
‘I shall not do it!’ he cried.
‘You shall, and I’ll help you.’
‘I am Rowland Cullis!’
He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give up his name. He was Rowland Cullis and he said he’d never be anything else again. They hanged him next morning.
The link boys have been made part of the police force under Inspector Harbin, who is promoted Superintendent now. He told me he tried to kill me in Parliament. Let’s not make it personal, I told him. Rotten shot. Who was it that shot little Molly Porter, I asked him. He tells me he does not know. I want her revenged, I say. Policemen, he says, have died too.
* * *
Augusta Ingrid Ernesta Hoffmann, quite the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, left us to go back to Germany where she was born before she came over to London and was taken by the Iremonger family when still a girl and made the old woman’s birth object. She was the only one of us who chose to go and we were all sorry for it. Though, the wonderful news is, that she is coming back and soon. She could find none of her relatives, they had all died and faded during the years she was a marble mantelpiece. And when she comes back we shall travel a little, she has promised. Augusta has such a yearning to see the world. We shall go down to Brighton and shall inspect the sea.
There you are, you see, a happy family.
There I was forgetting our shop.
People do come to us with their particular pieces and we do help them out if we can. I have seen a duchess holding up a very dirty flannel with all the care she might take hold of a baby, I have seen a laundry woman holding aloft a coronet with wonder and shock.
‘I always knew she was special, no one else could see it.’
There have been so many people bringing their particular things to us. The disease, it spread all over London, it came inside poor hovels and great palaces, it entered drawing rooms and doss houses, it sat with equal leisure in Turkish baths as outhouses. It could arrive all of a sudden in a prison cell or in a judge’s seat, it would strike whole houses or factories, or visit a school and take down only one single child. It did seem to stop after the business at Parliament, then there were fewer cases, less and less, and so then seemed to cease all together, and so there are fewer visitors to our particular shop.
Should you have lost someone, should a person have gone of a sudden, and should you have picked up some unfamiliar item in any of the rooms of your lives, then you may bring it to us. Do not be afraid to, you shall not be laughed at here. I have seen people lugging great sculptures, I have seen people with mops and chamber pots and enema tubes. I have seen it all. We never do judge what you bring to us, but take all very carefully and do what we may for it. We have all, after all, lost so much.
Sometimes though we know various objects are people turned, then the bringer will only wish for confirmation and will not want to have the person restored to them.
‘Not yet,’ one bruised woman told us – the dog collar she brought was her husband – ‘not just yet, maybe another day.’
There were one hundred and four convicts that caught the disease, that is the number we were given, we suspect there were more, and ‘the Crown’, they say, does not permit us to visit those objects, which are still kept under lock and key.
To begin with there were so many that we were able to help, so many could be brought back, but now it seems people have stopped coming to us, and do worry about us, and think we might be evil, though all we ever do is help. There are gates around the old cemetery to keep us from harm; at times I fear we are being locked up again. We do not steal the things brought to us, we wish to make that very clear.
Sometimes people come to us – oftener with nicer things – and they say to us, of a certainty, or in shaking, hopeful voices,
‘I think this is Willy, it is Willy is it not?’
But it is not Willy at all, it is only a jug.
‘This is Henrietta Carberry, my niece, aged twelve, it is, you know.’
But it is not Henrietta, it is only a bicycle saddle.
On those occasions he says to them very gently, ‘I am sorry, I am so sorry.’
Oh then, didn’t I say? Have I not mentioned? It is Clod that does it. Clod himself.
He does it very gentle. I’m really very proud of him. He gets stronger by the day and does even walk a little now and he eats some more, and likes to wander around London through maps and guidebooks. Nearly died on me. All the Queen’s horses and all her men came to sew him up or so it seemed to me. They wouldn’t let me see him, not at first, until he set the hospital upside down and so then they let me. He shall always walk with a cane. It is a nice cane, with a good silver handle, made of malacca wood.
‘What is your walking stick’s name, Clod?’
‘Walking stick,’ he tells me gently.
Now I may kiss him whenever I please, and I do, I do very often. I’ll never let him go again; to see him each time is the miracle. We have grown up taller after all our troubles and shall probably not grow any more. Sometimes we go out on a little w
ander around the cemetery and are seen together there, a golden half-sovereign and a clay button.
If you have something, some thing you’re unsure about, some object you have, bring it by, why don’t you?
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the incredible team at Hot Key, for all their work to make the Iremonger series possible. I am extremely fortunate to have had the help of Sara O’Connor who started the whole thing off, Jan Bielecki for making these books look so smart, and for the sharp eyes and great wisdom of Jenny Jacoby. Tracy Carns has championed the Iremongers in the US for Overlook Press and she’s been very wonderful, as has Hadley Dyer for HarperCollins in Canada. I cannot thank Grasset and Pierre Demarty enough for welcoming Les Ferrailleurs to France, and Elisabetta Sgarbi at Bompiani in Italy has kept faith in me over so many years that I owe her a very great debt. These brilliant people have been essential in getting this trilogy out in the world: Louise Brice, Alba Donati, Midori Furuya, Allyssa Kasoff, Emma Matthewson, Olivia Mead, Sergio Claudio Perroni, Jet Purdie, Alice Seelow, Michael Taeckens, Josie Urwin and Tom Witcomb.
I am very indebted to the early readers of this book: Jenny and Emma, the extraordinary Margo Rabb who read it with such brilliance and at no notice whatsoever, and Isobel Dixon – who has been with me from the start of my writing career, is an amazing agent, a dear friend, and is the reader every writer would dream of. Last of all, and most of all, I would like to thank my wife Elizabeth and my children, Gus and Matilda, who keep me going and who are very marvellous.
† The fact that the upper gallery of the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral possessed whispering gallery waves – where a person whispering in the gallery may be heard at some distance by another person in said gallery – was not actually discovered until two years later by John William Strutt 3rd Baron Rayleigh, some time in 1878, but that did not stop Rowland from hearing every word.
