The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  ‘Added to this valuable information is the fact that Sissy Smith does not appear to have taken enough of the dosage to kill her, merely to render her currently incapacitated. Or it may be that the poison in question was never intended to kill, but merely to induce an altered state of consciousness. Either way, this information helps us.’

  ‘Helps us do what?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Find out who poisoned her, ’course.’ Tess sighed. ‘Cos I ain’t goin’ to do nothin’ while some tuppenny parish prig hurts Sissy!’

  ‘You mean, it’s our Duty . . .?’ began Thomas, brightening at the prospect.

  ‘I mean that if you don’t do right by the snipes what yor banged up with,’ snapped Tess, ‘then that’s the end of the what-sit thing right there!’

  ‘Social order?’ hazarded Lyle.

  ‘Like I said!’

  ‘We could inform the police?’ suggested Thomas.

  ‘An’ they’d just bang her back up in workhouse!’ wailed Tess. ‘Bloody bobbies!’

  ‘I’m a bloody bobby,’ pointed out Lyle mildly, ‘on occasion. And since I do sometimes consult for Scotland Yard, let us assume that by telling me, you’ll ensure that the police, in their roundabout way, will know. What’s more, they will be thrilled to avoid spending their limited resources on this case when I can in fact be solving it for them. Besides, Tess has a point. Children go missing all the time from the city streets; you can pay to get rid of them. There’s no reason they should care for Sissy Smith. And Tess does care. And for the sake of a peaceful life, that means I care too. Oh, yes’ - he glanced at Thomas and managed not to smile, ‘and it is very much our civic Duty.’

  Thomas let out a sigh of relief. So long as that was established, he wasn’t about to complain.

  ‘Right!’ exclaimed Lyle, clapping his hands together to proclaim both the conclusion of breakfast, and the hopeful expectation that afterwards he wouldn’t be finding bits of fried egg in Tess’s pocket. ‘Tess, this workhouse where you were with Sissy Smith - where is it, exactly?’

  Tess’s face turned green, bacon dangling halfway to her lips. ‘Oh nononono,’ she said. ‘Ain’t nothin’ as you can say or do what’ll make me go back there.’

  Time passed.

  Tess sat in the back of a hansom cab, squashed between Thomas and Lyle, with Tate on her lap. Eyes fixed on the coffin-tight wall in front of her, she said, ‘I hate you. Yor goin’ to feel sooooo bad when this is all over.’

  ‘What you mean,’ intoned Lyle, ‘is, “I hate you, Mister Lyle, sir. You are going to feel extremely put out when this affair is concluded.” Decorum and grammar, Tess. Like a gentlewoman should. Unless you meant you hated Thomas?’

  Tess glanced over at Thomas, who wisely studied the streets going by outside the glassless window. Her scowl deepened. ‘Why we goin’ to the workhouse anyway?’ she wailed. ‘We don’t know as how Sissy might never have come from there!’

  ‘Well,’ said Lyle, drawing himself up in the manner of a man delivering a prepared speech, ‘we could conclude that she had come from the workhouse by her clothes, which were a cheap-looking uniform grey, made from poor fabric, very much like most orphans are expected to wear in such places. Or, we could hypothesise from her poor diet yet recent haircut, from her bad teeth yet well-worked fingers, or maybe even from the hints of tar under her nails that this was a child used to regular work and regular living but for a very low reward indeed. Naturally, all this is speculation. But I think it’s safer than saying she ran away from the circus, don’t you?’

  There was silence. It was a thick, volcanic seethe, in which Tess’s lower lip sank ever deeper.

  Lyle attempted to stretch, and found he had no room. ‘Her feet are a mystery. Blisters and blood and mud - and something stranger than mud. There was grass between her toes, and thin cuts from long grass up the sides of her legs - hardly common in this city.’

  Thomas thought of the open fields of Hammersmith, but decided to say nothing in case he was accounted either a bigwig or a fool.

  ‘The extent of recent bruising and blistering to the soles of her feet suggested she had come, without shoes, a reasonably long way to reach us, run the distance most likely, a remarkable feat considering the toxins inside her. She must have known that she had been poisoned, and the only safe place she could think to go was -’ Lyle glanced sideways at Tess, and a little frown deepened between his eyes - ‘to you, Teresa. How did she know where you were, I wonder?’

  Tess shrugged. ‘I used to run with some good area sneaks. Ain’t nothin’ what they couldn’t know - an’ all without bein’ seen.’

  ‘But you’d have seen them, wouldn’t you, Teresa? Being, as you are, such an excellent professional.’

  The scowl slightened on Tess’s face. ‘Well, yes . . .’

  ‘So you can see,’ Lyle said, his voice slipping into a kindlier tone, ‘why we have to go back to the workhouse. Since even I can’t just extrapolate a cure for whatever has poisoned Sissy without first seeing the poison, we need to find out what happened to her, and that’s the place to start. She was looking for you, Teresa. It’s not fair, and it’s not nice, but that makes her your responsibility.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because . . . because of ethics and . . . and duty and—’

  ‘Because you’ve got the means to make it right.’

  To everyone’s surprise, most of all his, it was Thomas who had spoken. Three pairs of eyes turned to look at him. Tate put his head on one side. Tess stared up at him as though trying to see if a pencil was lodged up his nose. And even Lyle, usually unflappable in the face of many nasty and frequently explosive things, looked startled. ‘Er, yes,’ Lyle managed to say at last. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

  Even to Tess, it made a certain sense.

  The St Bartholomew’s Workhouse was in what the Metropolitan Police District had classified as N. Division. The ‘N’ made the wardens who maintained it feel especially good about their noble deeds. Not only was there the reward of Christian service and charitable works, but there was the extra benefit of feeling part of a system: ordered, efficient, authorised and generally a place where all the ink would be blotted at the bottom of the page. No one knew what the ‘N’ stood for, but that just added to its mystique.

  The workhouse lurked by one of the railway lines that had entered the city, joining up with the new-fangled Underground line worming its way from King’s Cross to Baker Street. Its brick walls, when new, had been yellowish-grey, but just a few years of looking down on the crooked rooftops and lop-sided chimney stacks of Clerkenwell, had served to turn them black. The dirt-stained windows, when rubbed clean, revealed their own greyness etched into the glass by the biting London rain. The gate had been made of black-painted ironwork, but rust had started to eat into it, so that now the letters up above the entrance proclaimed:

  FAR IN DO DIST IC WO HO SE

  The courtyard beyond the gate was full of tossed-out remains from the kitchen: thin, soapy water dribbled between the stones; the grey remains of vegetable peelings and tea leaves boiled their regulation half-dozen times; and a black and crusty end of a great loaf of bread, at which the rats patiently gnawed, ignoring all human traffic that didn’t run at them with a carving knife. Steam rolled over the wall of the yard, tumbling out of a laundry containing huge soapy vats in which women trod, knee-deep, on the clothes floating within. From another direction came the piping of a factory whistle, and the grinding of machinery that could, in a single afternoon, produce any bolt of any number you cared to name, good sir, miracle of technology, yours for an unbeatable price.

  But from the walls of the workhouse, there came almost nothing. Not a squeak, not an echo, only the tap-tap-tap of a pair of nailed soles walking down a stone corridor somewhere behind the barred windows.

  The four unlikely explorers stood in front of the high walls and considered the workhouse. Tate growled at the rats, who gave him one look and went right on at their w
ork. Lyle rubbed his chin thoughtfully, where a more respectable man might have possessed a beard and where he possessed a mixture of badly shaven skin and chemical stains. Thomas shuffled uneasily from foot to foot. Tess said, ‘It seemed bigger when I was ’ere.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve grown, Teresa.’

  ‘ ’Pose.’

  The four considered in silence a while longer. ‘Well,’ said Lyle finally, ‘there’s no point in just looking. We need to find out about Sissy. Now, I propose that you’ - he pointed at Thomas - ‘are the, shall we say, bad bobbie in the pack, and I’ll be the sympathetic good copper, and you two’ - he turned to Teresa and Tate, who looked at him with matching bewildered expressions - ‘try not to steal or eat anything.’

  ‘Like there’s summat worth pinching,’ muttered Tess, as the four of them trudged towards the main gate.

  The gate had a warden.

  His name was Willocks. He looked like an origami puppet of a man, made of bent white angles and crisp thin paper dipped in glue and coated in iron filings. He had a top hat turned almost yellow by time and decay, and when he stroked his chin, his bony fingers across the grey stubble of a once-been beard crackled like a midget’s firework.

  He said, ‘Who are you?’ in a voice that was all dribble and no teeth.

  Tess looked at Lyle. Lyle looked at Thomas. Thomas looked at Tess, who shrugged, so Thomas looked down at Tate, who wagged his tail half-heartedly. Having sought enlightenment and found none, Thomas fell back to his default position; he turned to Willocks, pulled himself up to his not particularly impressive full height and announced, ‘I am Master Thomas Edward Elwick Esq.’

  Willocks said, ‘Uh?’

  ‘I am Thomas Edward Elwick, Knight of the Yellow Daffodil, Keeper of the Royal Hounds, Squire of the Crossbows and . . . and Master of the Suspicious Precipitates!’ he repeated, in the indignant voice of a man who couldn’t quite believe that this ignorant baboon hadn’t already wet itself in awe. ‘This is St Bartholomew’s Workhouse for the wretched, is it not?’

  ‘Uh,’ was the reply.

  ‘Well, then - let me in!’

  Willocks looked Thomas up and down, taking note of the waistcoat designed to hold a paunch that wasn’t yet there, the black frock coat with the silk lining, the long trousers, the shiny shoes from the best bootmaker in town, the top hat almost twice the height of Thomas’s head and finally, the boy’s face. He said, ‘You wantin’ relief?’

  ‘Of course I’m not wanting relief. Do I look like a common wretch?’ demanded Thomas. ‘I am Thomas Edward—’

  ‘Ain’t nothin’ for them ’ere as don’t want relief.’

  Lyle coughed politely, leant forward and opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘You wantin’ relief? You looks like it,’ added Willocks.

  Lyle’s eyes widened, and he seemed to half choke on the words trying to form themselves. ‘Uh, no. No relief today, thank you. I was merely going to suggest that, with your permission, my lord,’ the words tumbled like gold coins, that clanged and bounced their way over the pavement, ‘my Lord Elwick,’ added Lyle for good measure, ‘that you might mention to the gentleman here the charitable purpose of your visit.’

  At which point, Thomas, who had after all been bred for this exact purpose, excelled himself. He threw one weary hand into the air and pinched the bridge of his nose, turning his head aside from the workhouse gate as if pained to be in proximity with anything so low, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, how tiresome! When one is in a position such as mine, it is almost base to consider the mere details of money.’

  Willocks’ shadow had a hard time keeping up with its master, he was so quick to unlock the black padlock on the black gate and usher them inside.

  Horatio Lyle thought about workhouses.

  He had visited a few in his time as a special constable, and like all good citizens of Her Majesty’s Dominions, he feared them. He feared the queues of starving men and women trailing round the high walls, bony flesh sticking through the tears in their filthy clothes; he feared the men with truncheons who stood at the gates and inspected every pair of hands that came inside to see whether you were someone who could work, who did work, who had worked, because work made you worthy of care. He feared the cripples too hideous even to beg, locked away in the darkest wing of the workhouse, who would never get out, for what could they do? He feared the anonymous cemeteries of turned grey earth, the carts that arrived weekly carrying nothing but old potatoes and leaving with bodies that were little more; feared the silence and the uniform clothes and the stubbly haircuts. It was the place for the debtors, orphans, scavengers, beggars and widows, those who couldn’t look after themselves and so had to be told what to do.

  Be grateful, the workhouse walls said, that society has deigned in its infinite mercy to give you a wall to hide behind. Be grateful for the gruel and grateful for the cot in the dormitory that sleeps two hundred, be grateful for the silence and the toil, because by being grateful for these things, you might, just might come a little bit closer to paying back the debt you owe to all these charitable, rich, superior strangers. The parish wardens deigned to let their local skeletons two breaths short of the grave live. And to Lyle’s mind, there was no greater disdain upon the earth than casually permitting another member of the human race to survive.

  So, like all good citizens of his generation, Horatio Lyle felt fear as they made their way into the workhouse, and prayed to all the theological uncertainties he was sure did not exist, to keep him from more than a passing visit inside those walls.

  Teresa Hatch, like her sometimes employer/companion/friend/ fath—grown-up bloke what did the cookin’, thought about workhouses too.

  She thought, Too quiet too quiet too quiet too quiet too quiet don’t wanna see ’ere again don’t wanna too quiet . . .

  They walked through functional corridors made of functional brick and stone, with little square functional windows set above big black functional doors whose very express function was to stop them, the unclean, the unwanted ones on the other side, getting out here to where the good charitable citizens might be muddied by contact with those they were here to save. Certainly, once the orphans, the beggars and the thieves within the workhouse walls had been purified by good toil and a brisk education, both in the letters of the alphabet and how to sensibly apply them for six shillings a week, then the charitable philanthropists and parish masters whose good works and kindly deeds kept the doors of the workhouse open, would be only too gratified to meet the reformed creations from within these looming walls. Until that moment, though, it was considered unhealthy for these two parts of society to mingle freely, at least without a guard for company. No one blamed the inmates of the workhouse, not at all! It was just . . . maybe if they’d tried harder?

  Up a dull flight of stairs the sunlight seemed too shy to approach, to a dull black door, at which Willocks knocked twice with his fat protruding knuckles. A voice from the other side grunted, ‘Enter!’

  Behind a desk on which lay far too few papers to be taken seriously, a man sat smoking a black pipe nearly the size of the hand that held it. His feet, in hobnailed boots, rested on the desk. His face was three parts black whisker to one part red nose and blinking little eyes; his lips were lost somewhere within the fuzz of his beard; his ears, if he possessed any, had long since been consumed by an exploding mass of hair. Bits of pastry, old meats and thin ales had tangled and spilt themselves in his beard and made it their home, and when he grinned, as he did often, Lyle could see the remnants of that morning’s pie lodged between his uneven front teeth. A bright blue waistcoat shimmered beneath a more respectable black jacket; a top hat sat proudly on his head, despite him being indoors. At the end of the desk was a walking cane, dented and scarred from halfway down.

  Tess recognised him.

  He did not recognise her.

  His gaze took in the motley strangers standing in his office and at once fixed on Thomas. Thomas smiled his most condescending smile, trusting to th
e whiteness of his teeth and silkiness of his clothes to dazzle any onlookers so they wouldn’t notice his far more scruffy companions. He barked, ‘And who would you be?’ and before the man had a chance to answer, had taken the only other chair, a thin wicker thing from which the cushion had long since been sold, and sat down in it as proud as a peacock on a tiger’s throne.

  The man behind the desk grunted. ‘I am the master of this establishment; my name is Mullett. And who might you be, sir?’