Onyx City (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles Book 3)

by P J Thorndyke

  The factories at Homerton were eerily silent since the desertion of their workers. Their gates hung open onto empty yards, where goods and tools lay abandoned. They crossed the fields and descended into the Lea Valley, following the tow path north. Once they were above Hackney Marsh, they felt well out of the city and for the time being, out of trouble.

  It was pitch black. The moonlight shone through the trees on their left, screening off the hell that had consumed London. The peace was enjoyable but it was not to last. They approached a public house in Tottenham which had been visited by the rioters. The door had been kicked in and its yard was in a shambles.

  “Probably looking for drink to spur them on,” said Lazarus.

  “There’s a light burning inside,” said Mr. Clumps.

  “Let’s move on,” said Mary. “No point hanging around here.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Lazarus asked her.

  “They won’t be open at this time.”

  “Open? The place barely has a door.”

  “So you intend to steal from the proprietor like common looters?”

  “Let’s just see if anybody’s about.” He drew his pistol but let Mr. Clumps go in first. The sight of him alone should terrify any lingering looters into submission.

  It was dim inside, but the light came from behind the door of a back room. Mr. Clumps slowly opened it and found himself staring down the barrel of a Martini-Henry rifle. It was held by a member of the Royal Horse Artillery.

  “Bloody hell!” the soldier said at the sight of the mechanical’s face. “Now I know I’ve gone mad!”

  “At ease, soldier,” Lazarus said, slowly holstering his pistol. “Don’t be alarmed by my friend here. He’s quite harmless. I understand your shock but he’s something of a new science project the government is working on.”

  “Government fellows, are you?” the soldier asked. “What are you doing here, then?”

  “We saw the door broken in and a light burning. Just thought we’d take a look.”

  “Why are you abroad at this time of night?”

  “Escaping the madness in the city. We’re headed for Edmonton. What happened here?”

  “A bloody massacre, that’s what happened. They came on this place like a swarm of Zulus, not like Englishmen at all. They were looking for drink.”

  “Where’s the proprietor?”

  “Dead. They knocked his head in before we got here.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Tommy, here.” He indicated a wounded man who was stretched out in the corner of the room, almost hidden by the shadows. Blood soaked through the bed sheets that had been used to cover him. He was watching them through half-closed eyes.

  “What are you fellows doing so far out if it?” Lazarus asked, conscious that he may be dealing with deserters.

  “We’re all that’s left! They tore us apart! You can drop us in it for deserting if you will but I’ll not regret our actions. It was flee or be butchered. We’re not trained for this!”

  “What happened?”

  “They’ve been storming the prisons and arming the convicts. We were sent down to Newgate to disperse the mob at its gates. It was a proper siege! They had men in uniform standing on overturned carriages giving speeches about overthrowing the old system and starting from scratch, new laws, new philosophies and that meant that all incarcerated under the old system had to be freed! We fired grapeshot and canister into the crowd and that pushed them back a bit, but they came at us with bloody war machines! Like the ones they have in America you see illustrated in the papers.”

  “Not quite like them,” said Lazarus. “These revolutionists have no access to mechanite, thank God.”

  “Say what you like, mister, it made little difference to us. Those things are impenetrable! We fired everything we had at them and they kept on coming. Then they opened fire and decimated our guns and there wasn’t a bleeding thing we could do about it! We fell back. It was chaos. I saw good mates of mine blown apart before my very eyes. Tommy here took a piece of shrapnel in the arm.”

  “Let me take a look at him,” said Mary, kneeling down at Tommy’s side.

  “We headed north,” continued the soldier. “The fires and the looting had spread ahead of us. Well to-do houses were being ransacked right in front of us and their occupants dragged out into the street. I just kept pushing on with Tommy over my shoulder, resting whenever there was a safe spot and moving on when it got too hot. We were ravenous and needed clean water, not to mention somewhere to get a bit of kip. We came upon this place just as the looters were moving on.”

  All throughout the soldier’s story his eyes had been flitting to the half-face of Mr. Clumps. “I never seen anything like this fellow,” he mumbled. “Are you all from the government?”

  “I and my friend are, but Mary here is just somebody we picked up. A friend.”

  “Got any water?” Mary asked. “His wound wants washing.”

  “Got some here,” the soldier said, handing her his canteen. “I was gonna get around to doing it myself but I heard you lot approaching. Besides, he’s the better for a woman’s touch. You a nurse?”

  “Do I look like one?” she replied. “But I’ve patched up enough cuts and scrapes in my time. He’ll need a doctor’s attention, but I think I can fix him up enough so’s he’s likely to survive the night.”

  “Much obliged, miss,” the soldier said.

  “Got any gin?”

  Lazarus fetched her half a bottle from the next room that had survived the mob and handed it to her. “I thought you were against the idea of looting.”

  “It’s for disinfecting the wound,” she said, giving him a withering look. She uncorked it with her teeth and took a long swig. “Anyway, the proprietor is dead so it’s not really thieving.”

  Lazarus sent Mr. Clumps to scavenge what he could from the larder while he helped himself to some weak ale in the bar. The mob had left little, but there was some dried sausage to be had, some cheese and a few old biscuits. They shared their feast with the soldiers and enjoyed the brief respite.

  “What’s the plan, then?” Mary asked Lazarus. “Stop the night here? There’s food and drink and an extra man to stand watch.”

  “No,” Lazarus replied. “We’ve come this far. I want to go on. Edmonton isn’t far now.”

  “I’m sure your old man can wait for the morning.”

  “I’m not so sure. He’s not well, you see, and I have been lax in my duties as a son of late. With the city going up in smoke and brother turning on brother, it’s got me thinking of him and I can’t stop now. Not when we’re so close. I need to see that he’s all right.”

  Mary accepted this and, loath to be up on their feet again and leaving the safety of the public house, they said their farewells to the soldiers and wished them all the luck that was to be had in a world turned upside-down.

  “Thank you for understanding,” Lazarus told Mary after they had walked the first mile in silence.

  “Don’t mention it,” she replied. “I never really saw eye to eye with me own da. But I was sorry when he died. It happened a few years ago. I was in London and hadn’t paid him a thought for many months. When I heard that he was dead I wished I had. He was all right, really. Not a drunk or a beater and he kept us fed. I suppose that’s about as much as anyone can ask for.”

  “Yes,” said Lazarus. “I suppose it is.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  In which a second night is had at the theatre

  When they got to Edmonton the sky in the east was a purplish blue, dawning on a changed England. The fires of London underlit the thick fug of acrid smoke that hung over the city like a pall. Whatever this new day would bring, Lazarus thought, it had to be an improvement on the previous one.

  Alfred’s condition was worse than he expected. He was wracked with coughs and his blanket was smeared with blood. It didn’t look like he had been up and about anytime recently.

  “Hasn’t the doctor come by?” Lazarus
asked him.

  “Fat chance,” he replied. “From what you’ve been telling me the whole city has gone to pot. Maybe the whole country, too.”

  “I’m sure the military will have things sorted out in a day or two.”

  Alfred sneered and coughed some more. Mary heated up water for him on the stove, while Mr. Clumps sat by the window peering out at the gradually lightening street, still on guard as if he could never be anything but on duty.

  They made some tea and Lazarus fed Alfred some. Mary took a liking to the old man and pandered to him, cleaning his face with a warm cloth and fetching fresh sheets from a cupboard on the landing.

  “Nice girl, you’ve found there,” Alfred told Lazarus when she was gone. “Think you might let her make an honest man of you?”

  “Mary? Oh, we’re not... it’s not... I just met her while on the job. She’s only tagging along because I didn’t want her wandering around London with all this rioting.”

  “You seem rather concerned for her safety if she’s just someone you met ‘on the job’.”

  “Just trying to be a gentleman.”

  “You know you’re not all that bad,” Albert said with a smile that bordered on sympathy. “She might be very grateful for your chivalry. Women have married men for less...”

  “Marriage? You don’t understand. She’s... well... she’s a...”

  “I’m well aware of what she is, son. I’m old and dying but I’m not blind. I’m a man of the world. You might make honest people of each other.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m not going to be one of those interfering old people and say that you can’t stay a bachelor forever. I’m the living proof that one can. I just don’t want you to end up like me. I want you to have what I never had. A wife and children of your own. That would be just the thing to pull you out of this business with the government. It would be a chance for a normal life.”

  “What’s a normal life these days when London itself is going up in smoke?” Lazarus asked.

  Alfred was quiet at this. Then he said; “You wouldn’t even have to stay in England. She might be persuaded to go abroad with you.”

  “I thought you said you wanted me out of the government’s employ.”

  “You’ll find your own way, as I did. You never know what employment you might find in the big wide world, or whom you might pick up on the way.”

  “A scruffy little pickpocket to call my own?”

  Alfred managed a weak cackle which nearly set him off on one of his coughing fits. “Have you given any thought to finding out what happened to your real father?” he wheezed.

  “Not really.”

  “There may be a fortune awaiting you. Constantine Westcott seems to think so. It might be worth pursuing. Besides, you don’t know that your father is even dead. He could still be there, living like a prince in clothes of silk and gold.”

  “If he is, then he’s a cad of the highest order,” said Lazarus with a touch of poison in his voice. “He left my mother and I in Bangkok and never returned for us. I just hope he is dead so that I may think something of him, at least. Besides, he is not my true father.”

  Albert’s eyes studied him intently, wetness showing at the corners. Lazarus patted his hand. “My true father is right here in London.”

  They slept until ten o’clock; until the low autumn sunlight shone in between the curtains and woke them. When they rose, they found that Albert Longman had died in the night.

  “Lazarus, I’m so sorry,” Mary said, touching his shoulder.

  Lazarus was sorry too. Sorry that he hadn’t been able to get Albert into a good hospital. Sorry that he hadn’t been able to spend more time with him in his last days. Sorry that he had not been the son he should have been.

  “Let’s head back towards the city,” he said. “I’ll make funeral arrangements as soon as I am able. Things might have quietened down a bit.”

  “What if they haven’t?” Mary said. “What if Pedachenko is in control of the city and England is lost?”

  “Then we’ll have to build new lives somewhere else,” he said. “All three of us.”

  As it turned out, the world hadn’t ended. As they entered the city they saw signs of people trying to piece together their lives. Many walked about in a daze as if the events of the previous night were some sort of horrible dream. But the wreckage that lay all about was proof that it wasn’t. Shopkeepers prized off the wooden boards from their windows and tried to reorganize what was left of their stock. Corpses were cleared from the streets and piled up in neat rows, as if they were rubble.

  By questioning a series of people they encountered, they received a fragmentary account of what had happened. After the defeat of the 11th Horse Artillery outside Newgate Prison, a general retreat had been called. Marshalling their forces west of Regent Street, the military had awaited reinforcements in the form of the 3rd Durham Volunteer Artillery. Once they had arrived, they had been able to smash the revolution’s armored vehicles with a combination of Howitzers and Maxim Guns. Large areas of Soho and Covent Garden were rubble now, but they had hammered the mobs into submission.

  Then came the dangerous task of ridding the underground of the remnants of Pedachenko’s army. Infantry regiments marched down the tracks at Maze Hill, Blackfriars and the old Whitechapel station. Reports came to the surface that little resistance was met, nearly all of the revolution’s soldiers having been killed in the battle above. The majority of the wretches down there were worn out workers who wanted nothing more than to see daylight again.

  It was over and, while reeling from the blow that it had been struck, London would stagger to its feet and carry on as it had always done throughout history.

  “Looks like we can finally go home,” said Mary as they approached the East End.

  “Can we walk you to Miller’s Court?” Lazarus asked her. “I’d feel a lot better if you’d let us.”

  She smiled. “All right. But then I’d best be seeing about getting back to work tonight. I imagine most men in Whitechapel are in need of a good fuck to take their mind off things. Unwind a little. I might make a fortune!”

  Lazarus did not laugh. He was still thinking about his father’s parting words to him. Could he make it work with a girl like Mary? Could he make an honest woman out of her? Or her a decent man out of him?

  “No sign of this Pedachenko fellow,” said Morton when Lazarus—bathed, trimmed and in a new suit—sat before his desk that afternoon. “Seems to have given us the slip, although we have all ports on alert for a man fitting his description. He’ll be trying to make his way back to Russia.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Lazarus asked.

  “I’ve had our agents over there do some digging. Alexander Pedackenko is something of a chameleon. He sometimes goes by the name of Count Luiskovo.”

  “Count? That doesn’t sound like much of an anarchist.”

  “Well no, that’s the interesting bit. All our sources seem to suggest that he is not an enemy of the Tsarist regime at all. There was nothing that forced him to leave Russia and seek amnesty on our shores. Unless, of course, it was his orders from the Okhrana.”

  “The Okhrana?” exclaimed Lazarus, astonished.

  “Looks like our revolutionary leader was nothing more than an agent provocateur sent by the Russian secret police to stir up trouble here in London. I’d say he went above and beyond in the call of duty.”

  “The whole thing was a sham? But the violence.... the lives lost...”

  “Such are the morals of our opponents in this tournament of shadows we play,” Morton replied with a grim smile. “The lives of pawns cost little and there are so very many of them.”

  “But the revolution very nearly succeeded. Would Russia really have wanted an anarchist state setting the example for the rest of Europe?”

  “I imagine they were as surprised by the level of Pedachenko’s success as we were. I think their aim was to cause as much havoc in London as possible and
, should the unthinkable happen—the downfall of the British Empire—whatever rose from its ashes would be green and young and easily crushed under their boot.”

  Lazarus was silent. He was shocked at how casually the great powers in the world threw away human lives as if people were mere logs to be cast on the furnace of a steam engine, driving it ever onwards.

  “Well, despite half the city being in ruins,” Morton went on, “I think we can say that your mission was a resounding success. Well done, old chap. I knew you could pull it off. And just in time, too. I would hate to think what would have happened had all this revolution malarkey gone off when Bismarck was in the thick of London society.”

  Lazarus blinked. He had forgotten about Bismarck’s impending visit.

  “I imagine Pedachenko would not have let a chance to pick off his master’s great enemy slip by. That would have been catastrophic for our relations with Prussia.”

  “When is Bismarck getting here?” Lazarus asked.

  “Arriving in three days. The Prussian officials tried to call off the visit when they heard what was happening in London, but their chancellor convinced them to postpone it for only a few days. That old warhorse won’t let a petty revolution stand in the way of his plans for Europe. I’m to be part of the host delegation, unfortunately. I loathe social functions. We’re going to the theatre of all things to see that blasted Jekyll and Hyde play. I’m dreading it.”

  “Jekyll and Hyde...” mumbled Lazarus, not sure if he had heard him correctly.

  “Yes, apparently the PM thinks it’s important to give our Prussian friend the full English experience. Although what a play written by a Scotsman and acted out by Americans says about English culture, I daren’t say.”

  As the patrons filed in from the lobby to find their seats, Lazarus felt as if he had stepped back in time, as if the past few months had only been a dream. Part of him wanted to enjoy the illusion. He forced himself to remember all that had happened, and that he was here to convince his friend to stop performing and seek the help he needed.