The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  P.S. DIS IS TES MISTER LYLE IS DOIN HIS NUT COS DER IS DIS GIRL WAT I NOS AN IF SHE DIES HE WILL GO UP LIK A FIRWORK. SO SHIFT YUR BOTOM. TESS.

  Lord Elwick, if he had read such a note, would probably have passed straight through scarlet fury and out the other side into snow-white convulsions. Thomas, however, was a younger man, from a newer time, and merely turned pink from the ends of his toes to the tips of his ears, folded the letter, and said, ‘Father, may I be excused from the table?’

  For a moment, his father considered saying no.

  The moment passed, almost as quickly as Thomas left the room, the family mansion, Hammersmith, and everything else besides, behind him.

  Approximately five hours before Thomas Edward Elwick ran out into the morning light to find a boatman to carry him up the river to see his friend, colleague and unofficial mentor, Horatio Lyle, the following conversation could be heard issuing from the halls of Lyle’s house in Blackfriars:

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘You went an’ swore, Mister Lyle! You ain’t ’posed to swear!’

  ‘Tess get water now!’

  ‘Wha’s the matter? Oh. I see!’

  ‘I opened the door and she just fell inside. She’s unconscious. Pale skin, clammy, pupils don’t change size when the light moves, bleeding feet, smell of ethyl . . . methyl . . . no, ethyl alcohol on her breath, sluggish pulse. I just opened my door and she just . . . Tess? What’s the matter? Tess?’

  ‘Mister Lyle?’

  The voice of Teresa Hatch was faint and lonely in the gloom of the candlelight.

  ‘Tess?’

  ‘I knows her. I know that girl.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Her name’s Sissy. She’s called Sissy Smith.’

  . . . and perhaps here, perhaps after all, is where it really all began . . .

  Time flowed through Lyle’s fingertips like water, running away too fast to count the drops.

  He remembered carrying Sissy Smith upstairs.

  He remembered writing a note to Thomas.

  He remembered trying every remedy he knew, and then some he didn’t, to try and rouse the girl. He even drew a sample of her blood, stared at it under the microscope in the naive hope that somewhere in it would be a big black sign saying ‘Poison - come get me if you can’.

  And at about 4 a.m., as the clocks began to strike their off-key, out-of-tune, out-of-time dirges across the city rooftops, he sent Tess to find a doctor for Sissy Smith, who wouldn’t wake up.

  His name was Risdon Barnaby, physician at the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children. He didn’t usually approve of making house calls at early hours of the morning. He held that daily concentration was assisted by a smooth awakening, rather than by, for example, having a little girl break in through his prised-open bedroom window and start shouting, ‘Oi, where’s this quack bloke?’ Such things were not conducive to vascular well-being.

  The house to which he was dragged by the said girl, was owned by one Mister Lyle - very much a Mister, he felt, though he couldn’t say exactly why. This Mister Lyle had put the patient in a bed on the second floor and clearly, in his own amateurish way, had attempted some sort of deductive reasoning with regard to the child’s condition. Bottles, tubs of water, hot and cold, clean linen and soft towels had all been brought into the room and, at some part of the night, applied to the child in question, who lay like no more than white paper dragged over a few pencil bones, as close a picture of starving death as the doctor had ever seen. As she slept, her eyes, sunk deep into her skull beneath her lowered eyelids, turned constantly.

  Mister Lyle, standing in the door said, ‘Her name is Sissy Smith.’

  Behind him, the other child, the reprobate child who had so impolitely summoned Dr Barnaby a few hours before dawn, peeked round her master’s side and said, ‘She come from the workhouse. I know her, see?’

  Both Mister Lyle and the creature who, with a shudder of familial distaste, Dr Barnaby could only assume to be his savage daughter, looked tired, skin pale and eyes bruised, from their night of watching the child called Sissy Smith. ‘She come lookin’ for me,’ added the girl, ‘she come lookin’ for this house, see, an’ I know her. You a good quack?’

  For a moment, there was something in the girl’s voice, older, much, much older, than her little face and pouting lower lip suggested. Something that had grown old without bothering to ask why.

  Mister Lyle coughed, cleared his throat and said, ‘I think the girl - I think she’s been poisoned. It’s not really my field, but when we found her she had an increased pulse, and she convulsed in the night. It looked like actaea alba, but her pupils were small, and she’s been asleep, unable to wake, for over ten hours, which led me to think maybe papaver somniferum or a derivative . . . I need to talk to her, Doctor.’

  Dr Barnaby scratched his long ginger-grey whiskers, and said, ‘Yes . . . well, actaea alba . . . yes . . .’

  ‘We gave her milk,’ added Lyle, ‘in case it was arsenic, and we managed to induce some vomiting.’

  ‘You did what?!’

  ‘To help remove whatever it was from her—’

  ‘You made this child—’

  ‘. . . so that the poison wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Are you a qualified physician, Mister Lyle? Are you even a surgeon?’

  Behind Lyle, Tess muttered something in a low voice, ‘. . . blockhead.’

  Lyle smiled a knife-thin smile, and Dr Barnaby realised that the blade in question might spend its time cutting warm butter, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t slice through other things.

  ‘Dr Barnaby,’ said Lyle, laying a kindly hand on one arm and turning the doctor away from the glaring child by the door, ‘I am not a physician, nor a surgeon. I do not believe, for example, that opium is necessarily the wisest choice of drug with which to calm a child; that amputation is the best solution to a nasty cut; nor that slicing a hole in a man’s skull to relieve the pressure of humours on the brain will necessarily improve his ability to speak. You may at this point choose to say, “What do you know? All you can possibly have done is read a book,” and I would say, yes, I have read books. Just like you, Dr Barnaby. And I am a great believer in the power of books to enlighten as well as entertain. So I must ask you again: what can you do for Sissy Smith that we have not already tried?’

  Dr Barnaby looked at Mister Lyle and his strange . . . child, that resembled Lyle in no physical way except, perhaps, a certain shrewdness round the eyes. He said, ‘The girl is in a catatonic slumber. I’ve seen such things before, occasionally, in the victims of the opium dens, but never in anyone so young. I see no symptoms of addiction to any narcotic substances, no aging of the skin around the nose or mouth, no discoloration of her veins; but it is hard to tell. She is underfed, and clearly came a long way to find you, Mister Lyle. And as you are candid with me, let me be candid with you. I do not think there is anything you, nor I, can do to relieve her condition.’

  There was silence. Two - no, three onlookers, including a small dog at the door, with great sad brown eyes - stared at him. The child, hiding behind Lyle, looked as if she was going to explode in a jungle fury - whether from sadness or rage, he couldn’t tell and didn’t want to guess. The dog looked equally unimpressed. Lyle just looked down and thought for a long, clock-tock moment, then said, ‘All right, Dr Barnaby, thank you for your time.’

  He saw the doctor to the door and there, as he found was so often the way, Dr Barnaby did have one, final thought. He turned and, in a low voice not meant to be heard by dog or child, murmured to Lyle, ‘There is a place . . . a kind place, where they tend to those who cannot tend for themselves. It is in Marylebone, a hospital. I do not think you can cure this child, Mister Lyle. I do not think you want to watch her die.’

  Lyle just smiled and nodded, so distant that for a moment, Dr Barnaby wondered if he’d heard a word that had been spoken.

  When Lyle returned upstairs, Tess was sitting by Sissy Smith in her thick-blanketed bed, watching the
slumbering child. Lyle said, ‘The physician’s gone.’

  Tess just grunted in reply. ‘Quack.’ In silence she ran a finger down the thin, yellow-white tangle of Sissy Smith’s hair. ‘She come ’ere, Mister Lyle,’ she said at last. ‘She come lookin’ for me.’

  Lyle sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘We was at the workhouse together. St Bartholomew’s Workhouse, N. District, Farringdon,’ she intoned, like an ancient mantra. ‘Her mam popped it when she were born, an’ my mam left me by the gate, so we was kept together, right? Sorta friends. There ain’t no real friends in the workhouse, ’cos you ain’t s’posed to talk, most of the time. But if there was friends, she was mine.’

  ‘Did she leave the workhouse when you did? When you ran away?’

  ‘Nah. She were scared.’

  ‘Of leaving?’

  ‘ ’Course. We were in the house since we was born. You leave everythin’ you ever known. You gotta be real smart or real scared to do that.’

  ‘Which were you?’ asked Lyle gently, perching beside Sissy’s white-bandaged feet.

  ‘Smart, ’course!’ exclaimed Tess. ‘I ain’t never not been smart, Mister Lyle. But Sissy, she didn’t wanna go. So I went anyway. Wanted to see what was outside, what made so much noise in the night. Sissy were scared of the sounds. There were a great fat steel mill up the street; she said it sounded like they were grinding up dead bones every day, every night. She said they’d get us. They’d bring us back, lock us up in the dark.’

  ‘But she got out,’ said Lyle. ‘I mean, she came looking for you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yep.’ Tess sighed. ‘I s’pose.’

  There was silence, then Lyle said, ‘Thomas should be here within the hour.’

  Tess just shrugged.

  ‘Even if we can’t - I mean, there are still things we can do. There are questions we can ask.’

  This time, Tess didn’t even shrug.

  ‘Teresa? Tess?’ Lyle edged closer to her, uncertain, then reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘Hey, lass? You all right?’

  Tess seemed to sigh, her whole body curling in on itself and her eyes wandering down towards her hands. ‘Yep,’ she said, in a little, old tired voice. ‘Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me, Mister Lyle.’

  He smiled, turning her gently away from the bed. ‘Let’s have some breakfast? Then maybe we can see what can be done.’

  She nodded and, without a word, walked away from the sleeping little shape of Sissy Smith.

  CHAPTER 3

  Workhouse

  Thomas Edward Elwick was a bigwig.

  It was a word he was getting used to with some difficulty. He’d never heard it before until Tess, in a moment of her usual . . . refreshing honesty, had exclaimed, ‘You think the bigwig knows?’ It had taken him a while to work out that ‘bigwig’ referred to him, and exhaustive researches before he’d concluded that ‘bigwig’ in Tess’s own special vernacular, was a way of saying ‘gentleman’.

  And in that single moment of typical Tess-based revelation, the guilt had set in, and Thomas Edward Elwick had thought about all that money, all that great, ill-earned fortune spent on houses and hunting and drink and food and dresses and shoes and big hats and bigger hair, and for just a moment he’d begun to think, What a waste. All that history and wealth, spent on buying a really . . . really . . . big wig.

  Approximately two and a half seconds later, he had decided what to do with his life. He was going to prove himself worthy of his wealth.

  That said, he hadn’t entirely anticipated that the vehicles for his worthiness, the people through whom his good deeds were to be done, would take the unlikely shape of an eccentric inventor with an interest in crime, an East End guttersnipe, and their pet dog. But, he decided, the unlikely and occasionally trying nature of his allies just made his worthiness all the more worthy.

  So it was, that Thomas, beaming with righteousness and ready to Do What Had To Be Done, got out of a hansom cab in front of Lyle’s house in Blackfriars, marched up the steps to the front door, hammered with the dirty knocker and unconsciously wiped his fingers on a clean white linen handkerchief from his trouser pocket. A few moments later, a loud barking announced that his arrival had been noticed and, a moment after that, the door opened. Horatio Lyle stood there with a frying pan full of sizzling bacon and a slightly bewildered expression. A hairy thing of white and brown, composed mostly of ear, waddled - Tate never ran - past Lyle’s feet and started dribbling contentedly on Thomas’s polished leather shoes. And at the end of the corridor. . .

  . . . Thomas felt his ears turn pink . . .

  . . . Tess said, ‘Oi, breakfast!’

  Lyle seemed to notice the frying pan in his hand for the first time. ‘Oh, yes,’ he muttered, and just managed to stop short of saying, ‘How did that get there?’ It could be hard, when most of your time was dedicated to thinking about the nature of mass in general and matter incidentally, to remember basic details like shoelaces and food. This, at least, was what Lyle told himself.

  ‘Hello, bigwig!’ Tess called out down the hallway.

  Thomas carefully averted his eyes. Lyle, seeing this, frowned and said, ‘You all right, lad?’

  ‘Erm . . . yes.’

  Lyle looked round him, up, down, and finally behind, and seeing no reason why Thomas’s face should suddenly be turning into a baked pumpkin, said, ‘Eat something dodgy?’

  ‘No. It’s just . . .’

  Thomas flapped a hand in the direction of Tess. Lyle turned and carefully looked her up and down. Aware that their attention was on her, Tess looked herself over as well, tugging at her nightdress and finally proclaiming, ‘If there’s a hole in a silly place, then I don’t wanna know.’

  Realisation dawned in Lyle’s eye as he looked back at Thomas. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a lady in a nightdress? ’

  Tess giggled.

  ‘Well, it’s not—’

  ‘Hear that, bigwig?’ asked Tess. ‘I’m a lady. Now shift yourself, before breakfast goes an’ gets cold.’

  Thomas watched Tess eat.

  It was always a sight that surprised him: not just the sheer quantity of food her little frame seemed capable of consuming and holding, but the speed and ferocity with which even the most boring of meals was consumed - and food, with Lyle, was never anything extraordinary. As a cook, he seemed to understand the need for things to be eaten on a regular basis, and if they happened to be interesting, so much the better. Nonetheless, to Lyle any meal was just fuel, and the idea of eating for pleasure, when you could be, say, in a lab, just baffled him.

  Only once had Thomas dared to ask Tess why she ate so . . .

  ‘. . . so much, right? If Mister Lyle was to drop dead right now, see, or get possessessed by an evil faerie or shot by nasty bigwigs or all burnt up in a chemical flame or blown to squishy bits by a nasty big reaction or electrocuted, see, by electric voltage, then who do you know what would make me more grub?’

  Thomas was obliged to concede that she had a point. He couldn’t cook.

  So Tess ate, and as she ate she waved a fork heavy with the next mouthful and proclaimed, ‘Mmmhwwwnnh!’ at Lyle as they all sat round the kitchen table.

  ‘Well,’ responded Lyle, ‘it’s like this.’ He went on to describe his discovery of Sissy Smith, and her present mysterious state. ‘So, all we know for certain is that she has been poisoned. Malnourished in the long term, and recently poisoned, most likely by an oral application. I smelt some sort of drink on her breath, something strong, maybe ethyl derived—’

  ‘Mmmnhh!’ exclaimed Tess, her mouth still full.

  ‘Alcohol derived—’ corrected Lyle.

  ‘Mmmn!’

  ‘Booze.’ He went on without hesitating, ‘And her symptoms suggest an opiate derivate with maybe a hint of an organic toxin somehow joined.’

  Thomas raised a hand. ‘Yes?’ asked Lyle with the look of a man expecting the worst.

  ‘Mister Lyle, what do
you mean, “somehow joined”?’

  Lyle looked shifty. ‘Well, while naturally I enjoy organic chemistry as much as the next man, and indeed find it fascinating how nature can so readily mimic mathematics - or mathematics mimic nature, depending on your point of view - in the link between the theoretical and the practical—’

  Tess swallowed enough of a mouthful of food to say, ‘You don’t know nothin’ ’bout poisons.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ blurted Lyle. ‘I could poison the Prince of Wales and make it look like a bad oyster without breaking a sweat!’

  Two pairs of disbelieving eyes locked on Lyle’s face. He shifted in his seat, and reached uneasily for the comfort of the teapot. ‘Can we please stick to the matter at hand? The fact that I don’t currently know the nature of the organic compound which has, regrettably, reduced Sissy Smith to a state where she is barely able to drink, let alone talk, is an interesting fact in itself, since it implies a mind of superhuman scientific intelligence and extraordinary learning to have devised a concoction of which I, in my remarkably vast knowledge, am not aware.