by Ed Hillyer
The air grew thick with fumes. Sugar refineries, prevalent hereabouts, generated an atmosphere most unnerving. Gratings, set in the pavement, revealed lurid aspects of a hell, sufficient almost to make Sarah turn tail and run. Handkerchief pressed across her nose and mouth, she maintained her course.
The Ratcliff-highway – a coagulate of older, lesser roads – ran across the top of Wapping Island, from Little Tower-hill in the west almost to the Regent’s Canal in the east. Running parallel with the river and hard by the docks, it was of a piece with London’s port and its commerce – so utterly notorious, following a series of murders early in the century, that it had since been renamed. St George-street only existed on maps, however; everyone still referred to it as of old.
Sarah’s ideas concerning ‘the Highway’ persisted from her childhood picture-books, as a broad avenue of elms: the area had not been built as a slum, as could be said of Shoreditch, or Bermondsey in the south, but a slum had been made of it. The houses collapsed together in a cheery yet filthy disorder, each drunkenly supporting its neighbour. The populace, clinging to their porches, eyed her suspiciously as she passed.
As she approached the corner of one tumbledown street, a group of sturdy women-folk all but filled the pavement. Dark shawls gathered up over their heads, they resembled mourners, and stood with their faces pressed to the dark surface of a window-glass. The white lettering above their heads read ‘CREAM GIN’. One turned aside to sit on the kerb dejected. She cradled a tiny infant.
Chancing the gutter, Sarah passed by.
The streets being unpaved and with no guttering to speak of, heavy raindrops fell splashing in filth and puddle alike. Sarah regarded a strand of grimy rabbit-skins. Her boot heels skidded in the nightmare sludge. Even in decline, Bloomsbury was a paradise by comparison. She had often overheard other Londoners speak of going ‘up West’ and ‘down East’, without ever really understanding why, not having seen the imbalance for herself.
Thinking on her mission, Sarah redoubled her courage. She marked the multiplicity of churches by their visible signs. A spire here, a bell-tower there, they sprang up in swift succession – Mission, Episcopal, Swedish Protestant – the notoriety of the former Ratcliff-highway was such that it required the services of every single denomination. Any one of these eruptions might be the St Paul’s Church: she really should have referred to a Kelly’s Directory before venturing forth, only she had not expected the road to be so very long…
Adjacent to the bustle of a cab stand was a turning into Ratcliff-street. Sarah stood at the gate to a graveyard. The grind of wheels at her back reduced to a dull murmur, a spooky hush settled over the place. Mighty St George in the East reared to her left. Pale sunlight, playing on the stained glass of its rear window, threw patterns across the acreage of cold stone. Abutting to the northeast, through the shade of a grove of trees, she glimpsed a second church, a Wesleyan or Methodist chapel. Other potential candidates clustered close by. Tucked away down side streets, they were perhaps more immediately accessible, but only by cutting across this burial ground.
Sarah shivered, turned, and made her way back to the main road.
The next turning, about a hundred yards on, was nothing more than a dark alleyway, enclosed on all sides by high brick wall. She could see that it opened out after a short interval by the way that it grew lighter ahead. Not entirely insensible of the dangers, but inclined to recklessness, Sarah gathered her skirts from where they trailed in the muck and ducked in.
A gutter ran down the centre, where a lean young pig stood sniffing at a mouldering stump of turnip. Someone from an upper window gathered spit. Thuggish-looking women, mottled arms as thick as hams, crouched beneath the windowsills, knees up to their flabby chins. Naked babies wallowed at their feet, pink, puny and underfed, like worms.
In this jungle of the senses the stink of humanity was almost metallic.
Sarah hesitated at a junction within the network of small passageways. By the stark blackletter of signs screwed to the walls she at least knew their names: Palmers-folly lay behind, Perseverance-place ahead.
First bypassing a Rehoboth chapel, Sarah briefly contemplated sanctuary inside tiny Ebenezer Church.
She crossed into Angel-gardens, a squalid slum terrace of back-to-backs accessed by a blind alley. This led to and from an inner courtyard, enclosed on all sides by high brick wall: the Chancery. A suffocating pocket universe that had surely never known light, or air, its brickwork was black, as if shadows of night clung there. The walls pressed in so close that the sun, when it shone, might only blanch their very tops.
Sarah was instantly struck by the absolute silence: to not hear the sound of anything in London was exceptional. At first she assumed her ears had popped, as with altitude gained, instead of her having sunken to these great depths. Among such ghostly haunts, she could not be certain she was not herself the ghost. The stench was truly overpowering. Enervated, becoming faint, she felt she might fade entirely away.
This must be Shadwell – Dreuse’s London, barely altered since the day he was born.
The enclosed courts slid invisibly one inside another like a succession of trick Chinese boxes. Figures filled the doorways, faces leering; it was enough to see their lips working to know that they traded in slander and gossip. The risk was great in pressing on; greater still in staying put. Sarah’s pulse, already racing, set to a mad gallop. Gathering all her strength, she advanced into an even darker passageway, no bigger than her coal-cellar, to emerge within a bare yard, long, and thin, and ruined.
Altogether down and out, the poorest of the poor, the residents swarmed like lice in crumbling wood. The staggered outlines of an agglomeration of hovels, close-packed, begged for a conflagration to wipe them out. No gardens here, and no angels; these were the precincts of the damned: bodies that suffered, spirits that fell, souls that were lost. Sarah could scarcely believe whole families made their homes in this way – not living, mere existence.
She looked out at scenes as if steering a tiny craft that merely sailed through them. Danger, perhaps even tragedy, hovered in the wings. One or two of the stunted creatures were stirring. Listless blanks before, the masks of their faces began to twist and take on new shapes. Broken-veined and empurpled, they exhibited blunt interest, even the stirrings of anger. From out of the generalised grumbles sprang an occasional loud oath.
Sarah wanted to bring out her purse, slip the few coins into an open hand, if only for the sake of a child – but feared such an action might bring the rest down on her head like a pack of hungry wolves. She was no ghost, but flesh and blood: if she did not pull herself together, she risked being torn apart.
She turned and fled.
A dark figure pulled away from the shadows in her wake, moving almost as swiftly in pursuit.
Popped like a thorn squeezed from a wound, Sarah rejoined the main Highway. Crossing the busy road to the south side, she passed by entrances to the docks. Over the tops of shorter buildings the tall spars of a great many ships were visible at anchor, and she could almost smell the salt sea on the air.
Van horses toiled the length of New Gravel-lane. A roughneck crew of sailors swaggered past, doing the rope-walk. Dark-skinned, they wore red shirts with broad sashes tied around their waists. They seemed hopelessly exotic, like foreign pirates, the air boiling in their wake redolent of rum.
Sarah examined the shops, marine-store dealers. They were bright with brass fittings: quadrants and sextants, chronometers, all sorts of other navigational paraphernalia. A mariner’s compasses nestled among ocean-going charts. A sudden gleam in the window-glass caused her to spin about. The light reflected off the polished buttons on the jacket of a custom-house officer. Standing tall by her side, he nodded politely. Sarah hurried on.
Crude hand-written notices read, ‘LODGINGS FOR SAILORS – OWN BUNKS’, ‘LETTERS WRITTEN AND SENT’, or, ‘MONEY AND BILLS EXCHANGED’. Sitting at the threshold to a ship’s chandler, one fellow in particular caught her eye. H
ands dyed a deep orange colour from the handling of rope and tar-bucket, he wore a bright satin waistcoat, and pulled at the most enormous pair of boots. His face glowed red, but not, thought Sarah, through strain: his tanned muscles worked comfortably. Twisted around his head, worn as a sort of turban, was a cotton kerchief. Dark hair, extruding beneath, was artfully curled into ringlets, and flattened with grease. He was, every inch, a model sailor: Bruce, as first pictured in her imagination.
‘Not everyone is what they seem, down the Highway.’
The voice of a stranger at her shoulder made Sarah jump. A dark figure peeled away from the shadow of the lobby and advanced to stand beside her. His face was full – if not as florid as the other man’s – and his gingery beard was flecked with white.
‘’Tis a fiddler’s green, miss, beyond compare,’ he said. ‘Oh, some may look the part, dressed in their Guernseys ’n’ blue jackets, but in a mess of y’ars they’ll’ve sailed no further than the alehouse on the corner. Turnpike sailors they are, and that’s all. Lurchers, idlers, beggars and thieves, the Sons of Abraham!’
The man barked out loud, as if for the benefit of all. Sarah looked around, embarrassed, and saw that ‘Bruce’ had gone, leaving behind only an empty stool.
‘They sell a little fish fried in oil, or else keeps a lodgin’-house, but they’re no more sailors than you or oi, moi dear. They only mime the maritime.’
At that the man bunched his fists and performed a little jig, the hornpipe, stopped short as suddenly as begun. He leant in closer, as if to confide – she saw the freckles of his cheeks – but then his voice rang out loud as before, causing her to flinch.
‘One such beggar I knew with only the one arm,’ he said. ‘Every day he stood at the gates down in West Garden, the London Dock gates as you’ll understand me, and took up enough to live like a lord! The great idle selfish brute.’
He would not stop talking. Backed into a corner, Sarah felt a trifle alarmed.
‘Had a parrot, so he did, to sit on his one arm, and even then it had to do his begging for him! Language, warse than his own. Ev’ry sart a blasphemy an’ obscenity, the Twelve Unprintable Monosyllables!’
His pale, bushy eyebrows worked up and down like two birds in a mating dance. Seeing that he had her full attention, he settled his face almost at once into a more serious expression, the tone of his voice modulated to match.
‘Sargint Padraig Tubridy, ma’am,’ he said. ‘A water-rat operating out of Leman-street Police Station. An’ it’ll not be me you must be wary of.’
His fingers tapped the rim of his helmet. He turned to indicate their surroundings.
‘This here’s Tiger Bay, and here be tygers all right. No sart a place for the likes of you.’
He saw that she took offence.
‘Oh, no, milady,’ he said. ‘The fault lies with the place, not with your good self.’ Tubridy sniffed and wrinkled his nose, in what seemed a friendly fashion. ‘I dare say you’ll have noted the pertic’lar…atmosphere. T’ings go on here in Sailortown, such t’ings I scarcely durst mention. A reservoir of dirt, drunks and drabs, Mr Dickens has called it, and that should tell you sufficient. A respectable lady…a lady, that is, such as yourself…should not be out walking on her own.’
Sarah misunderstood. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I should.’ She decided to ask for directions. ‘I have business here,’ she said. ‘I am in search of a particular house of worship, only, I didn’t expect to see so very many – ’
‘Yus, ma’am,’ he cut her off, ‘one at ev’ry corner…’
She was smiling, nodding in agreement.
‘The Bridge of Sighs,’ he said, ‘Ward’s Hoop and Grapes, the Albion, the Prince Regent, the Effingham Saloon…’ He pointed just behind them, and then just ahead of them. ‘There’s the Duke O’Yark’s.’ He smiled. ‘And there, the White Hart.’
Sarah glared at him.
‘You may think the Highway bad,’ said Tubridy, ‘but the neighbourhood’s warse. Angel-gardins, Chancery-lane, Albert-square…’ The police sergeant gently let her know he had been following her progress for some time. ‘The genuwine sorry face of London’s East End,’ he said. ‘Streets filled wit’ houses of the vilest description, an’ frequented by those who call demselves the Farty Teevs, alley-barbers who’ll slit yer throat soon as look at you.’
‘The Forty Thieves’ – Sarah wondered if they bore relation to the child Bruce’s gang.
‘Lucky for you that you run into me,’ declared Tubridy, ‘before someone undesirable has done the same for you.’
She did not care for his familiar tone. Sarah thought to walk on.
‘You may count on being the innocent bystander,’ he was saying, ‘but they are as much at risk should a fight break out and the sea-knives flash. These forin sailors are a danger, a-stabbing with their Bowie. A gin-mad Malay goes running amok, a-waving of his glittery creese, bot a tiny Greek stiletto is all it takes, for eyes that were of a colour, ta turn one red, while de udder one stays blue.
‘Anyone,’ he said, ‘wishing to visit the Highway, or any other part of the environmint, is, for their ain safety, recommendit to gain permission from the authorities at Scotland Yard. Then they shall have an officer or inspector provided for their escort. Even a Metropolitain perliceman would be unwise t’ walk these by-ways alone. An’ here’s me, a sargint without ma carp’rill. I shall have to ask that you accompany me, miss, ta prevent me from comin’ ta harm…’
He touched his helmet again, in deference, and flashed a wicked smile.
‘Or ma’am.’
Sarah smiled but shook her head, and began to pick up the pace in order to put some distance between them. ‘I do thank you for your concern, sergeant,’ she said in parting, ‘but I think I shall be all right.’
‘As you like,’ he said. Following on at a discreet distance of about twenty paces, he called out after her. ‘Oi’ll feel safer, all th’ same, if I might keep you in sight. We are but travellers on the same road, after all.’
Pointedly, Sarah crossed onto the north side of the street.
Barely a block further on, with each swing of its doors, the Albion public house belched forth more of its clientele, swelling a sizeable crowd. Forced back out into the road, Sarah slowed. At the centre of the disturbance she spied a woman, spectacularly fat, and dressed in pantomime costume. The buttercup-yellow finery, filthy and torn, suggested Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard, or some equally likely hero-villain. The vision sat astride a wooden hobbyhorse, and performed a halting gallop in tiny steps.
Sarah walked on past. A general hiss issued from among the spectators.
‘Cool ’im,’ she heard someone say, in their peculiar backwards slang. ‘Cool the esclop.’
Turning around, she was not the only one surprised to see the policeman walk by the crowd as if nothing were happening. He continued to dog her steps, at a distance no longer discreet. Her cheeks burned.
In this fashion the two of them continued on down the Highway.
Around King David-lane the street became yet more riotous. Whereas before she had been glad of Tubridy’s silence, Sarah soon found herself grateful of his company. First the Admiralty clerk, then young Jeffery, and now, further, this policeman – all positively falling over themselves to assist her. She had never known herself the object of so much male attention. It was a flattering sort of novelty, to be sure, a situation so absurd she didn’t know what to make of it.
Thus beguiled, yet innocent of vanity, Sarah discovered herself precisely where she wished to be.
Across the street lay the rectory and Vestry Hall; up ahead, rising over the tops of the surrounding trees, the piercing black spire of St Paul’s Shadwell.
Sarah turned to address her acolyte.
‘Much obliged, sergeant,’ she said. ‘I have arrived at my destination.’
‘Ma’am.’
Tubridy looked up at the tall spire; the monster Union Jack, flying atop.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ he said, ‘
out here.’
‘Really,’ she assured him, ‘there’s no need.’
‘Along here?’ he said. ‘Believe me, there is need.’
The church itself was a very plain structure, a box of brick in the classical eighteenth-century style: large slates on its roof, tower and plaster-rendered steeple at the west front, but otherwise unadorned.
Sarah opened the gates and walked through, past a wooden board that read ‘St Paul’s Shadwell, The Church of the Sea Captains’. The screams of small children rent the air: the adjoining Vestry Hall doubled as both school and orphanage. Sarah checked that she had closed the gate properly behind her. In the midst of a clutch of the smallest foundlings stood a friendly-looking figure, dressed all in black. She could not get closer than a few feet, so they were obliged to shout their introductions over the nursery din.
Augustin Mellish, the vestry clerk, indicated another fellow a little farther on. He crouched beneath a rosebush – in the very middle of the graveyard. Steeling herself, Sarah picked her way in between the crowding stones. The rector wore a sun-hat. Pruning his roses, he remained unaware of her approach, even when she stood right beside him. The sharp beak of his shears worked nimbly. She cleared her throat.
‘Reverend… Reverend Kingsford?’
Perspiring slightly, he stood and removed his hat, revealing a shock of grey hair. He was a tall, thin man, with kind eyes.
‘Brenchley Kingsford,’ he said, ‘ye-e-es?’
The last vowel, elongated, sounded out a note of enquiry.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Sarah Larkin, daughter of the Reverend Lambert Blackwold Larkin.’
‘Oh, yes?’ he said. ‘And how may I be of assistance?’
Sarah said, ‘I should very much like to consult the church’s Baptismal Register, if I may. I have travelled some way in the hope that I might.’
Less than four miles distant from New Oxford-street, she had travelled to the ends of the earth.
