Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

‘Right then, let’s give it a knock and see if we can’t get to the bo’om o’ this then.’

  The policemen stepped up to the door, trying to peer through the cracks where the wood was warped and rotten. The window itself was boarded up, and nothing was discernible inside the room in the feeble half-light of the breaking dawn. The alley outside was awash with myriad foul scents; raw sewage, spoiled fish and other decaying meat, along with rancid vegetables and the putrid stench of rotting mounds of general garbage, and topping this off was the overpoweringly rank stink of human waste, and the fetid odour of too many unwashed bodies crammed into too small a space. To top off this olfactory foulness, everything was seasoned liberally with the inescapable acridity of the coal-fires of industry. Near this particular door, however, a more powerful and unsettling stink cut through the stew of odours, causing the closest constable to wrinkle his nose in revulsion.

  ‘Blimey. Smells like some’fing isn’t right in this ‘ere rookery,’ he remarked gruffly before rapping on the door. There was no reply but silence, so he knocked again and waited. ‘Love, if you’re in there you’d best open this ‘ere door or I’ll be wont to batter it down, and I’m sure neither of us would be too ‘appy about that!’ Silence. ‘Right then Constable Escombe, give this rickety old bastard a good sound heave with the shoulder. On three. One, two … three!’

  The brawny men hurled their combined weight against the door, which burst inward in a shower of splinters. The lead constable immediately swore, coughing and retching violently as the stench from within the room was released.

  ‘Jesus bleedin’ Christ!’ he cursed as he lit his small lantern. ‘Escombe, take this lamp and poke around in there. There’s a croaker in the room for sure.’

  ‘Oh blimey, me poor Judy!’ the prostitute wailed.

  Escombe pulled out a handkerchief, covering his nose and mouth before gingerly entering the dwelling, brandishing the glowing lantern like a sword against the darkness before him. The room was a mess of ragged clothes, broken crockery and scattered items of half-eaten food, and in the corner sat a chamber pot overflowing with human waste.

  ‘My God,’ he muttered under his breath, trying to hold back the bitter bile that was creeping up the back of his throat.

  It didn’t take long to figure out where the awful stench was coming from: there, half-naked and sprawled across the bed, was the decaying corpse of Judy. Her cold skin was a blueish-grey tone, a sure sign that she had fallen victim to cholera.

  ‘That’s that then,’ Escombe sighed, his shoulders slumping, ‘this ‘ere dirty puzzle won’t be servicing no more blokes from the look of ‘er. Another victim of the epidemic. We’d best get the coroner over ‘ere.’ As he was about to turn and leave the room, however, something stirred under the bedclothes, causing him to spring back with sudden fright. ‘Bloody ‘ell!’ he roared. ‘There’s a, a, cat or some’fing in ‘ere! It just bloody moved, gave me the fright of me bleedin’ life, it did!’

  ‘Just give it a sound clobberin’ wiff the ol’ billy then, put the poor ‘fing ou’ of its misery.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll do that,’ Escombe growled, raising his truncheon above his head, ready to strike as he pulled back the stained bed covers with cautious fingers.

  ‘Crikey!’ he exclaimed, dropping his truncheon. ‘It’s no bleedin’ cat, it’s a little lad!’

  ‘Step back Escombe!’ the other constable yelled. ‘He might be infected!’

  Big grey eyes, set beneath attractively angular eyebrows, shone out from under a greasy, tangled mop of blonde hair, the bright orbs regarding the officer with an unsettling mix of terror and curiosity. The boy was thin almost to the point of malnourishment, and seemed small for his age. His face would have been cute if it had not been so wan, and his cheeks not been so sunken. Although the child remained motionless as he clung to his mother’s lifeless arm, it was clear that, as weak as he was, the light of life burned with resilient strength in his eyes.

  ‘I ‘fink he’d be dead by now if he were infected,’ Escombe muttered. ‘He looks right as rain, though, he does.’ Escombe’s eyes softened at the sight of the tiny child, and he offered him a hand. ‘Come ‘ere lad,’ he said gently. ‘We’re not going to ‘urt you. Are you feelin’ poorly?’

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘Just very ‘ungry an’ thirsty, sir,’ he answered in a croaky, barely audible voice. ‘And I’m very sad that me mum doesn’t want to wake up.’

  Escombe shook his head sadly.

  ‘I’m sorry lad, but your mum, well, she’s not going to wake up. You’ll ‘ave to come with us to the parish ‘ouse, see? Some good folk will look after you there. What’s your name then, and ‘ow old are you?’

  ‘My name’s William Gisborne, sir. I just turned four years old, I did.’

  ***

  March 1839

  ‘Get your lazy arses out of bed, you filthy little scoundrels!’ the raspy voice boomed, reverberating its wrath against the damp stone walls of the pitch-black cellar. ‘I don’t employ you whoresons to be layin’ about in ‘ere, gobblin’ up my food an’ pissin’ in my pans! Now ‘urry up an’ get your worthless arses movin’!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ grumbled Michael, who at the age of eight was the oldest of the chimney sweeps. Not only was he older than the others, he was also of a more robust build and taller stature than the rest of them, his size artificially broadening the gulf of years that separated him from the other boys. He scratched vigorously at his nit-riddled scalp through his shock of bright red hair, and then rubbed at his small, green eyes before muttering a complaint. ‘It’s only bleedin’ four in the morning, it is.’

  ‘Who was that?!’ the voice bellowed, raised now by an octave or two and smouldering with volatile rage. ‘Which one of you lil’ gutter rats dared talk back to me?! I’ll bleedin’ skin you alive, I will! Now ‘urry up an’ get moving! Wake up now, bloody well wake up I say!’ shouted Mr Goode, a chubby, boxy-figured man, in whose thick-jowled face bulgy green eyes gleamed malevolently, set in fleshy lids beneath caterpillar brows. Above these sat a tangle of greasy, thinning auburn hair, the bald spot in the middle of which was routinely concealed with a tatty bowler hat. He shuffled around the room, grunting with pain from his gouty foot, kicking the little forms in their blackened soot sacks to rouse them from their slumber.

  ‘Up, up, all of you filthy rats! Up, move! Get on with it!’

  William was still adrift in the liminal zone between dreams and consciousness when a punt from Mr Goode’s steel-capped boot caught him in the ribs. The sharp, jarring pain quickly ripped him from the warm cotton of the semi-dream, dumping him into the damp frigidity of reality. He coughed weakly and wiggled himself out of the coal sack that served as his bed.

  He had put on some weight over the last two years, but was still thin and shorter than his peers. His face, however, was no longer as haggard as it had once been, and now he sported a set of chubby, peachy cheeks, and he would have been a handsome little fellow if he had had the chance to scrub the soot from his face, and wash and cut his unruly tangle of dirty blonde hair.

  After a protracted yawn he began rubbing the sleep-grit out of his eyes, and then reached over to his friend David, who at four years old was even smaller and younger than himself. David, a tiny mite of a child, was still curled up in oblivious slumber inside the dusty sack, so William grabbed his arm and shook him with forceful urgency, trying to rouse him before the violence of Mr Goode’s boot did.

  ‘Davy, wake up, quickly! Wake up Davy, hurry, wake up,’ William hissed, fully awake now, his eyes glinting in the flickering orange glow of Mr Goode’s swinging lamp.

  ‘Who’s talking there?’ Mr Goode snarled, his wrath adding a terrifying rasp to his voice. ‘Who?! I’ll bring my cane in here right now, by Jove! I swear I’ll give each one of you rats the soundest thrashing of your worthless little lives!’

  An hour later, just after a chilly dawn had broken over the smog-breathing city, Mr Goode and his five chimne
y sweeps were gathered outside a large and imposing townhouse. They had just received their instructions on who had been detailed to which flue, and how long their jobs were supposed to take.

  ‘Cor blimey,’ exclaimed the usually reticent Andrew, who was a year older than William. ‘This ‘ouse is a good five storeys tall, it is. It’ll be quite the climb to sweep out these stacks, lads!’

  ‘Crikey, look at the size o’ that main stack,’ remarked Paul, Andrew’s identical twin, who shared his brother’s almost bovine chestnut eyes, but who had a decidedly different nature to his sibling. While Andrew was a quiet and reserved introvert, Paul was loud and boisterous, and revelled in attention from others. Physically, though, both boys seemed to have been cast from the same mould; each had the same narrow shoulders, thin arms and slim torso, with muscular legs that were strangely disproportionate to the upper halves of their bodies. Their sharp-chinned, almost triangular faces, with their pinched features and almost too-large eyes, were nearly indistinguishable from one another, except to those who knew them very well. Each boy sported the same thick mop of chestnut hair, but while Paul’s was as messy as any sparrow’s nest, Andrew would run his long, slender fingers through his hair with almost compulsive regularity, ensuring that his hair was always kept in as neat a side parting as he could manage.

  ‘That’s the one I’m going up,’ William said, his soft voice barely louder than a whisper.

  ‘Aye, an’ Goody-Goode says he’ll light a brimstone candle under you if don’t shimmy up there fast enough like,’ Paul added with a grimace. ‘And you know he’ll do it, that old git doesn’t never ‘and out empty threats.’

  ‘Aye, aye. He’s done it to me before, he ‘as,’ William murmured with a sad sigh, his words bolstered by a pathos that belied his years. ‘As well as sendin’ that scoundrel Pip up after me to prick needles into my toes when he thought I was draggin’ me feet.’

  ‘Poor ol’ Pip,’ Michael sighed. ‘He wasn’t the nicest lad, an’ he did enjoy prickin’ them needles into our feet sometimes, but it was right ‘orrible to see him just getting’ worse an’ worse with that sooty cancer, as they calls it.’

  ‘What’s a cancer?’ David asked in his squeak of a voice.

  ‘It’s a terrible blight,’ Michael answered. ‘You get real sick like, an’ no doctors can ‘elp you or nuffin’. Pip’s cancer, that’s somefing that ‘appened before you came along. You were Pip’s replacement, see? After he died from the sooty cancer, ol’ Goody Goode went an’ bought you from the parish ‘ouse.’

  ‘He didn’t buy me from no parish ‘ouse, I ain’t never been in no parish ‘ouse,’ David said indignantly. ‘Me mum gave me to Mr Goode, she got a whole guinea for me, she did! I do miss her though, even with all the wallopings she used to give me.’

  ‘My mum died,’ William interjected, speaking in a plain matter-of-fact manner, his words untainted by self-pity. ‘She ‘ad the plague, she did. She was lovely though, she didn’t never wallop me, although some of the uncles that visited our room, they sometimes gave me a good thrashin’, oft times for no reason … I didn’t like them uncles, not one bit, but most of ‘em I only saw once or twice, an’ they never came back.’

  Before William could continue, Mr Goode waddled over to the boys. Sweat glistened on his pockmarked forehead, and his mouth was twisted into a dirty scowl. He grabbed the youngest two boys, William and David, and dragged them by their soot-blackened shirts along the path to the front door, while cursing and shouting at the others to follow after him. He rapped on the door, and a few moments later a meticulously dressed butler opened it a crack.

  ‘Ah, you’ve brought the climbing boys, I see,’ remarked the butler, a tall, thin man with a narrow head crowned with wispy white hair.

  ‘I certainly ‘ave, guv’nor,’ Mr Goode replied, his greedy eyes gleaming with keenness as he rubbed his thick hands together. ‘And they’re ready to scrub every last ounce o’ soot out o’ this lovely mansion’s chimneys.’

  The butler raised a condescending eyebrow and peered down his Roman nose at Mr Goode.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured coolly. ‘Well I’m afraid that we don’t admit the likes of you and these young rascals through the front entrance. Please make your way around to the back of the mansion, and you may enter via the kitchen.’

  ‘Whatever you say ‘guv, whatever you say,’ Mr Goode said, beaming out a greasy, gap-toothed grin. As soon as the butler shut the door, though, the smile vanished from Mr Goode’s pockmarked face. ‘Right you little rats,’ he growled, ‘let’s get to work! And I’m warnin’ you, the slowest lad’ll be strung up from the beam in the cellar and flogged senseless, and you blasted lil’ rascals know that that’s no idle threat!’

  ***

  William’s knees and elbows were raw and oozing blood by the time he was twelve feet up the narrow flue, but the injuries, to which he had become well-accustomed, did not cause him nearly as much anxiety as the thought of having the raw wounds scrubbed with brine afterward. The darkness and heat of the chimney, as well as the rough sackcloth climbing cap that was pulled over his face, all contributed to omnipresent feelings of terror, panic and claustrophobia against which he had to struggle with all his might. Doing his best to fight the fear, he wedged his knees in tighter against the jagged, nodular bricks of the flue and scrubbed his soot brush harder above his head, his arms burning from exertion.

  It was as he finished this particular section that he heard the cry: a bloodcurdling scream of sheer terror. He recognized the voice immediately: David.

  ‘Oh blimey,’ he gasped, a sudden wash of icy fright flooding through him. ‘Poor Davy, I ‘ope he’s not stuck!’

  Mr Goode’s booming voice echoed up the chimney. ‘Ignore that! You keep working you little rat, or there’ll be some brimstone flame an’ smoke coming up after you! I’ll go see what that rascal David is playing at. You finish your bleedin’ job, William, an’ then you come down an’ wait for me!’

  ‘Yes sir,’ William shouted into the darkness, the shrillness of his voice in the tiny space buzzing in his ear drums.

  William continued scraping and scrubbing with a frantic haste. Chunks of soot fell around him like black hail, and David’s screams and yells did not abate; indeed, they became even more panicked and hysterical, reverberating through the house in a nightmarish racket, broken here and there by the gravelly cursing of Mr Goode. William knew that something was dreadfully wrong, and he redoubled his efforts to finish his job in case he was needed to help free his trapped friend.

  After a few more minutes he was done, so he shimmied down the flue with anxious haste, emerging from the opening of the fireplace in a billowing cloud of soot and dust. Pulling off his climbing cap, he was met by Michael, whose usual tone of calm indifference had been raised in pitch to a tremulous note of panic.

  ‘Will,’ Michael blurted out as he grabbed his friend’s arm, ‘come quickly! Davy’s stuck an’ you’re the only lad small enough to go up after ‘im! Come ‘ere, climb on my back, I’ll piggyback you there. Come on, we ‘ave to hurry!’

  The ocean-swaying world began to materialize through the light-blind haze as Michael piggy-backed William through the corridors of the townhouse, passing by sombre portraits and imposing sculptures, the echoes of Michael’s footsteps bouncing off the impossibly high ceilings as they ran.

  ‘Mikey,’ William gasped, struggling to get his dark-accustomed eyes used to the light, ‘what if, what if I don’t get up there in time?’

  ‘Just don’t think o’ that, Will, don’t think o’ that, all right? You’re going to pull Davy out, an’ he’ll be just fine, he will,’ Michael panted as he sprinted.

  With William clinging desperately to his back, Michael raced up a grandiose flight of stairs, breathing hard, before emerging into a dimly lit corridor with plush carpeting underfoot and grim portraits of past lords and ladies, all long-dead, lining the walls. The screams echoed loudly through this passage and lent an eerie vestige of ghostly life to
the glaring, oil-painted eyes that watched the two soot-blackened figures running by.

  With every step Michael took along the corridor, the screams were amplified in both volume and intensity. Michael, breathing hard and sweating profusely, entered a cavernous room and skidded to a halt on a polished marble floor, where Mr Goode was pacing back and forth in front of the ornate fireplace, cursing and muttering under his breath. The lady of the house stood by, surrounded by a gaggle of her servants, all wringing their hands and chattering in panicked voices.

  Despite the grave severity of the situation, William could not help but be stunned by the lady’s striking beauty. Dressed in a long, flowing gown that shimmered in the light of the dawn sunlight that was streaming through the expansive lead-lined windows, she seemed as ethereal as any fairy tale princess. Her hair was a shining hue of russet, and a golden aura shimmered around it against the backlight of the window. Her alabaster skin was as unblemished as the first snows of winter, and her ocean-green eyes sat nestled beneath delicately plucked brows. Her face was drawn with consternation and distress, and this somehow gave her even more of a sylphlike air.

  ‘I must be looking at an angel,’ William murmured to himself.

  Before he could stare for too long, however, he was jerked out of this momentary trance by a bloodcurdling scream that emanated from the statue-lined fireplace.

  ‘He’s up there!’ Michael yelled, setting William down in front of the fireplace, his voice cracking with urgency.

  ‘Bleedin’ right that little devil’s up there!’ Mr Goode bellowed, ‘an’ when he gets down, I’ll give ‘im the clobberin’ of his measly little life, I will!’

  A crystalline voice slashed through the combined noise of Mr Goode’s raging and the child’s screaming.

  ‘Sir, you most certainly will not lay a hand upon that poor boy! Not in this house!’

  William turned around, quite unaware that his jaw had dropped in disbelief; it was the lady of the house who was admonishing Mr Goode. Mr Goode scrambled with fumbling awkwardness to put back on his mask of magnanimity.