The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  ‘I love it when people go “but” in telling a story,’ exclaimed Lin brightly, ‘please tell me that the next few sentences you are going to utter involve white floppy shirts and fencing.’

  ‘Fencing? As in the enclosure of sheep or the . . .?’

  ‘Swords, of course!’ Lin flapped with the quavering excitement of a woman who’d read about the adventures of men with white floppy shirts and quick flashing blades, and had been disappointed to find, upon her arrival in Western Europe, a definite lack of all of the above.

  ‘Alas, no swords,’ chided Mrs Hobbs. ‘Indeed, it took a great deal of fiscal adventure, including some extremely complicated yet highly interesting workings involving the subclauses of the legal framework for the actuarial examination of the—’

  ‘Yes yes yes yes yes,’ interrupted Lin. ‘I know all this, and then the potassium reacted with the air and something exothermic happened to the bullion being transferred between the vaults and inflation was blown up and all that. I’ve heard it from Lyle. What did you actually discover?’

  Mrs Hobbs managed to look only a little disconcerted at having her adventures so sharply curtailed. ‘I discovered,’ she said primly, ‘the names and occupations of the commissioning members of the charity that has been paying the workhouses to send their children to the circus. I have traced the doctor who has been signing the death certificates of dozens of children, who have, in fact, not died; who declared this girl Sissy Smith to be dead when she was, in fact, alive, and who has been signing those same certificates across dozens of workhouses throughout London for children who may not, in fact, be dead, but whose official death on paper permits them to vanish, to what could be a far worse fate.’

  ‘And?’ demanded Lin. ‘Come on, chop chop, time flies.’

  ‘The doctor is highly respected in London circles; a dogooder of charitable bent. His signature on every death certificate has been Mr Preston, but it is my belief, having followed the money trail between the charity and his private funds, that Mr Preston is in fact a doctor by the name of Dr Risdon Barnaby.’

  Lin sucked in breath between her teeth, scratched her chin, rubbed the back of her head, examined the ends of her fingertips, then said, ‘No, never heard of him. Anyone else?’

  Mrs Hobbs sighed. ‘There is also a gentlewoman who is widely regarded for her charitable work in London; a compassionate lady, a liberal giver of family money to worthy causes. She serves as secretary to the charity and has authorised every single payment made to every workhouse, hospice and asylum from which children have then vanished. I’ve met her myself, and though I find her conversation highly tedious, I would never have considered her the . . .’ she hesitated for a deep long breath ‘. . . I would never have considered her truly intelligent enough to practise such malignancy.’

  ‘A name, already, a name!’ Lin was nearly glowing with frustration.

  ‘Her name,’ replied Mrs Hobbs firmly, ‘is Miss Mercy Chaste.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Charity

  This is the place where the children sleep.

  This is the dreamless sleep in which they spend their hours drifting through empty nothingness.

  Except, perhaps, scrambling away at the very edges of their minds, a whisper of . . .

  my name is . . .

  . . . my name is . . .

  . . . once upon a time . . .

  . . . ran away to the circus . . .

  Effy Hall slumbers in the bed next to sleeping Sissy Smith, who was told by teacher that it was all right to eat the cake, and who woke and ran, as sometimes, very rarely, a child will do, and who now dreams of . . .

  Once upon a time, there was a child called . . .

  . . . called . . .

  A shadow falls across the head of her bed.

  A hand reaches out and smoothes back the hair that has fallen across Sissy’s face. A voice, somewhere on the edge of a high-pitched scream that has not yet found the strength to be anything more than a sigh, whispers, ‘Sleep well, children. Sleep well.’

  And alone in the night, Mercy Chaste walks the ward of the empty sleeping children to keep them safe in their sleep. Because that is what a mother must do.

  Lyle lay on the floor of his own smelly, stained old parlour and thought about chemistry. Very, very deliberately thought about chemistry. Because the second he didn’t then in crept . . .

  Once upon a time . . .

  . . . all the children . . .

  . . . I wanna my mama! . . .

  . . . in a land far far away . . .

  He tried to blink. Couldn’t. Every bone seemed to have been replaced with a dead weight that pressed him to the floor. Even breathing was an effort; but if that hurt, if every nerve throughout the rest of him throbbed with pain and sickness, it was nothing to the unnatural agony of his eyes.

  Lin had said, ‘You will not close your eyes.’ It hadn’t just been the command of a friend, it had been a Tseiqin, a creature whose voice was authority and whose eyes . . . don’t look at the eyes. And he hadn’t closed his eyes. His eyeballs were two sand-dry bubbles of blurred sense; they felt three times too large for the skull that held them.

  He heard a footstep on the stair, half turned his head, smelt for a moment a hint of autumnal leaves. Lin sat down on the floor next to him, pulling her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms round her legs, head on one side. ‘Hello, Mister Lyle,’ she said finally.

  ‘Hello, Miss Lin.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Poisoned.’

  ‘And what may we do to cure you? Thomas seemed quite involved with his medical undertakings.’

  Lyle half shook his head. ‘Treating symptoms. Not cure. Poison to cure the poison. Raw coffee beans to make the heart beat faster, belladonna to make it beat even faster still, to dilate the eyes, to . . .’

  ‘Belladonna, in my experience, kills people,’ said Lin gently.

  ‘Not much belladonna.’

  ‘And causes hallucinations.’

  ‘Right now, I wouldn’t know. Valium in case everything gets too fast and to prevent me injuring myself from spasms, salt water to induce vomiting to remove any undigested poison from my stomach, charcoal to hinder any interactions.’

  ‘Symptoms, not a cure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can still talk. You sound like an adult.’

  ‘I haven’t slept. When I sleep . . .’

  ‘You will dream of beautiful stories, of amazing adventures, of castles and princesses and childish things.’ Lin sighed. ‘Yes, I know. And when you wake . . . you won’t ever really wake. My people aren’t entirely irresponsible. We did try to remove Greybags long before you stumbled in. He ran from us. A Tseiqin but not a Tseiqin. We were protecting you, little homo sapiens with your monkey brains, we were protecting you from him.’

  ‘Why were you at the circus?’ asked Lyle softly.

  ‘To find him.’

  ‘He wasn’t hard to find.’

  ‘He knows how to hide from my people. And I had to find out who was helping him.’

  ‘Helping?’

  Lin sighed again, hugged her knees a little tighter, looked, for a moment, small and frail. ‘Greybags is old; much older than he pretends. He chooses to be a child because, in his adult life, all he ever experienced was rejection and contempt. That is our fault, I admit it. As a child, you need never know these things. You are forgiven, you are loved, your food is brought to you on a plate. He was one of us, once. A Tseiqin, but not one of us: born differently. My people do not treat those who are different with much kindness. As a child, he wasn’t aware of this. As an adult, he was. As an adult, he was shunned, hurt, discarded by my people. And more. Worse. He could not accept what we had done to him. His mind was not strong enough, his . . . his soul, if you’ll pardon the theologically unsound sentiment, wasn’t strong enough. He swore to become a child again, to be as innocent and free as a child. It is a result of his unusual heritage that he can do so. He lulls the children to sleep
and steals their dreams, feeds on them, sucks them dry. He has no interest in the dreams of adults - too slow, too dull - but the same poison turns the adults to puppets in his fantasy, to childish mockeries of what they should be, the circus master with his moustache, the organ grinder for ever grinding, the clown eternally laughing, the . . .’

  Lin saw Lyle’s face and stopped. Smiled. Shrugged. ‘But on the bright side, you are going to be dramatically and implausibly rescued, Mister Lyle! What a happy thought!’

  Lyle managed a thin whimper of a smile, and winced, as if the movement of his face was too much for his nerves to take. ‘You’re sweetness and light underneath, aren’t you, Lin Zi?’

  ‘Greybags is not capable of organising all this by himself - of having children smuggled to his tent, of buying poisons, of mixing drugs, of arranging secret movements of money, of stealing beggars and mudlarks from the gutters of the streets; he just doesn’t have the intellectual maturity to get all this done. He had to have help.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your Mrs Hobbs, curiously enough, provided the answer. Money! Your culture does so prize its money!’

  ‘Miss Lin, since I may not be conscious for much longer, save me the graces and tell me!’

  ‘I am sorry, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Do you know a vicar’s daughter by the name of Miss Mercy Chaste?’

  ‘I . . . she runs a hospital.’

  ‘For all the children who have lost their dreams. Greybags sucks them dry, eats up everything they are, all their hopes and innocence, and then they go to sleep and never wake again. And all, strangely, seem to find their way to a ward in Marylebone. Do you believe this to be . . . good charity?’

  ‘Mercy Chaste doesn’t have a malicious bone in her body.’

  ‘Does she have kind bones?’

  ‘Yes! Extremely kind bones, very, very kind, so kind that . . .’ Lyle’s voice trailed off.

  ‘Yes, I thought that might be the case.’

  Silence. Then Lyle said, ‘I can’t believe that she . . . that she would . . .’

  ‘I think, Mr Lyle, that you can.’

  ‘If there’s no cure . . .’

  ‘There’ll be a cure,’ Lin assured him patiently. ‘Miss Chaste is assisted by a medical man, a doctor who signs fake death certificates - a Dr Barnaby.’

  ‘I know him!’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘We had him examine Sissy Smith. He said there was . . . he . . .’ Lyle squeezed his eyes tight shut. ‘Damn,’ he whispered. ‘Damn damn damn wanna my mama! If there isn’t any cure then . . .’

  ‘I’ll make sure no one laughs at you when you start picking your nose in the street,’ said Lin kindly.

  ‘Keep them safe,’ he whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The bloody children!’

  ‘Oh, them, yes, of course. Sorry, I thought you were about to impart some excitingly romantic secret. But, yes, of course, the children, how silly of me.’

  ‘Miss Lin?’ he wheezed.

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Why do you seem to be so . . . childish all the time? So ignorant? You are much more than you pretend.’

  She thought about this for a long time. ‘I think you just asked me a foolish question. I shall attribute it merely to the heightened emotional and decreased intellectual capacity brought upon you by your present state. But, since you ask, I suppose if I have learnt one thing from my considerably elongated existence, it is that there is nothing more joyous than a childish joy. Which is, given our current circumstances, a little ironic.’

  ‘Miss Lin—’

  ‘Mister Lyle,’ she interrupted briskly ‘I would guess that at this moment you are filled with an overwhelming desire to kiss me. And may I say, while completely willing to experiment with an explosion of passionate longing on your part, the fact that you have vomited quite recently leads me to suggest we put the encounter off until a later time.’

  There was a long, stunned silence.

  Lyle said, ‘Uh . . .’

  ‘You were about to kiss me, weren’t you?’ demanded Lin in a tone which suggested there was only one correct answer.

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘Excellent! Well then,’ Lin declared, standing up quickly, her cheeks turning a faint shade of pink despite her stern gaze, ‘that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it? Just as soon as you’re cured we can even discuss whether or not you get to see my ankles before committing to a legally satisfactory mutual relationship. ’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘This is a stressful time for you,’ she added helpfully. ‘I entirely understand.’

  ‘Stop Greybags. Children—’

  ‘It is something I was planning on, you know,’ she chided him. ‘Except this tedious human I occasionally run into decided to allow himself to be poisoned while pursuing a line of enquiry with good manners instead of, as was far more sensible, mystic powers and a very sharp knife.’

  ‘I remember a nitro-glycerin derivative going off somewhere near my left ear,’ mumbled Lyle.

  ‘But a sharp knife and an offensive word could easily have achieved the same effect!’

  ‘Find Greybags. Make him stop.’

  ‘I’m not going to leave you, Mister Lyle. Good grief, you know I’ve had tea with dowager empresses, and look at me now? Staying by the side of a human in the face of serious danger. What would Marie Antoinette say?’

  ‘Lin,’ said Lyle firmly, ‘do you understand advanced organic chemistry?’

  ‘I can’t say it’s one of my main interests.’

  ‘How about medical science?’

  ‘I have an excellent grasp of anatomy.’

  ‘Can you cure me by sitting here?’

  Silence.

  Then, ‘You know, Mister Lyle, you are dashing any romantic overtones in our relationship before we really get a chance to explore them.’

  ‘Madam,’ he replied, dry lips shaking with the effort of coherent speech, ‘while the legal system frowns on it, I promise you, nothing right now would be as romantic as you, personally, hunting down Greybags and passing him to the relevant authorities. For me.’

  ‘He’ll have fled the circus.’

  ‘But he’ll need help.’

  Lin sighed, stood, stretched, tucking a rogue strand of hair back behind a little ear. ‘Busy busy busy. Very well. Evolutionary alternatives!’ She clapped her hands together in firm summoning at the empty air. ‘Thomas, Tess, little dog thing.’ She looked Lyle in the eye, and smiled, and, for a minute, there was something old and wise and true in her face. ‘Let’s finish this messy affair.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Mercy

  Time passed.

  Not much time at all.

  And here they are, two children, a demon-lady and a dog, in a hansom cab, racing through the streets of London. Or at least, attempting to race, if the milkman’s empty cart will move, if the sheep going to Smithfield will clear the way for the iceman driving to Billingsgate, if the sweeper can move aside from his crossing, if the hay wagons will shift their loads, if the old donkey will just do its business, if the omnibus can make the corner and if the damned costermongers, hawkers and pedestrians will just get out of the damn way!

  Things, Thomas reflected grimly, always seemed easier in stories.

  The bells are ringing out the hour, proclaiming that all good children should have gone to bed, thumping out ancient copper notes from high in the dome of St Paul’s cathedral to St James’s tucked away by Piccadilly, from St Giles’ where the beggars sleep in the crypt to St Andrew’s-in-the-Wardrobe which houses St Anne, however she came to be there. They strike ponderous echoes in the ancient red-brick church of the Middle Temple, resound across the creaking ships all moored up against each other in the crowded Thames, call out above the engine whistles from St Pancras station and the proud bonging of Big Ben. Ten of the clock, little children, and all’s not well, go to bed, little children, go to bed, what
dreams you shall dream tonight.

  And here’s Billy the Button shut up in Mrs Lyle’s privy. He’s dreaming of: children children children make them laugh make them laugh make them laugh all the laughing children! And he cackles in the night, though he doesn’t understand what is quite so funny.

  And here’s Lyle.

  Nowhere left to run. You can out-run knives and fists and mobs and, if you’re lucky, bullets and rapid uncontained exothermic, high-energy combustion but not this. Strange, that it took so long, so many years, so much time, to realise that sometimes there are some things you really can’t out-run.