The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  Thomas said, ‘Your father had no other child?’

  Miss Chaste looked surprised, then said, ‘Why do you ask, sir?’

  ‘You said, no child should see the loss of a father.’

  ‘I give them peace,’ she hissed in reply.

  He smiled, nodded and said, ‘I am sure you do, in your way. The others, they are poorer than you and I. They do not understand the guilt, one might say, that can sometimes accompany wealth. They do not understand the responsibility, the difficulty of having to decide what is for the greater good. When my father dies, I will be in charge of over eight hundred people: tenants, servants, maids, stewards. I will even inherit an MP or two from boroughs where my patronage will decide the direction of government. I can’t wait. It will be the most important duty of my life.’

  ‘My father wanted a son,’ said Miss Chaste sadly. ‘A son could have continued the honour, the name, could have inherited, could have . . . And I could have had a son, too. Perhaps that would have saved the name but I didn’t. And now it’s too . . . People of our status don’t discuss such things,’ she concluded.

  ‘No,’ agreed Thomas, every bit his father in pomp and steel. ‘But you see, Miss Chaste, if you don’t tell me where Greybags is, if we don’t find him, if we don’t make things right, then Mister Lyle will be dead for nothing, and Miss Teresa will be alone with even less. So you are going to tell me where Greybags is, because, if you don’t, I will buy this hospital ward. I will buy it and I will declare the children insane, and I will buy every newspaper in town and have them preach about how pointless it is to help people who can’t even help themselves.

  ‘And I’ll open workhouses.’ Thomas’s eyes gleamed with simulated malice. ‘I’ll open workhouses and skim three shillings off every four that the parish gives me to run them, and I’ll teach the children to pick oakum and nothing more. You see, these are things that money lets me do. Don’t think, because I’m young, I don’t know this. I have already seen remarkable things. And when I am older, I, in my turn, will do things that make the deeds of now seem . . . child’s play.

  ‘So, Miss Chaste, tell me - where is Greybags?’

  Lyle.

  Mister Lyle?

  Horatio Lyle!

  A glass bottle in one hand. A needle in another.

  Overhead, the cracked tumbler of some liquid stuff, has been knocked from the table top. Across the floor, herbs, vials, jars, jugs, boxes of powdered stuff, scattered and spilt in every direction.

  Someone has been busy.

  Someone took belladonna to stay that way.

  You don’t have to put your ear to the chest to hear the heartbeat.

  A shadow in the darkness. Tate shuffles across the floor, picking his way around the more dangerous chemical substances that a pair of blindly scrambling hands have knocked out of their way. He puts his nose into Lyle’s ear and very loudly, very deliberately, sneezes.

  Mister Lyle?

  Nothing.

  Tate whimpers and whines, chews on the end of Lyle’s sleeve, slobbers on the side of his face, paws at his head, and finally, with nothing else to do, sniffs the empty glass vial in Lyle’s hand. It smells of a whole host of things, thrown together in a terrible hurry and not properly integrated into one whole packet. The remnants of the smell are also on Lyle’s lips.

  Interesting.

  Tate settles down by Lyle’s side, and listens to the rushed beating of his master’s heart.

  Nothing else stirs.

  Not a sound.

  Tate imagines, for a moment, he can smell mince pies.

  Curious.

  And not entirely unwelcome.

  But you shouldn’t have fallen asleep, Mister Lyle.

  It’s not like you hadn’t been warned.

  The rising fog billowed through the hospital yard in Marylebone, greenish-yellow through the haze of the gas light and stench of coal dust floating in the air. The hansom cabby Lin had flagged down on Fleet Street sat with his feet up on his stand mentally ticking off the minutes that went by, adding an outrageous number of farthings for every moment he reckoned had passed in the dead night. Lin and Tess waited, leaning against the side of the cab, which creaked unevenly at even this lightest of weights. A door opened somewhere in the gloom; there was a momentary dull spill of orangish light, half obscured by a shadow. Footsteps on the cobbles, getting nearer approached the little red glass shades hanging over the cabby’s driving lamps. Thomas appeared in the fog, his face sombre.

  Tess nearly shrieked with impatience. ‘Did you find ’im? Did you, did you, did you?!’

  Thomas’s face was grim. ‘Miss Chaste was cooperative.’

  ‘An’ an’ an’ an’ an’? Oh, come on, bigwig. We ain’t got all night.’

  ‘He’s going to run,’ replied Thomas. ‘He’s like a child. He’s scared - he’s going to run away.’

  ‘It took me four months to find him!’ exclaimed Lin angrily. ‘If he runs, I’ll have to start all over again! We have to stop him leaving the city!’

  Thomas nodded. ‘Miss Chaste has arranged tickets for him on the last train from Paddington Station. Tonight.’

  It was, the cabby reflected as they spun away again into the night, turning into one of his more interesting fares.

  CHAPTER 20

  Paddington

  Miss Chaste had said: Greybags will run.

  He’s scared of them.

  Miss Chaste didn’t know who they were. But when she had looked into Lin’s eyes, and seen an endless emerald forest stretching away behind that ageless, laughing gaze, she had perhaps started to guess.

  Greybags was scared of them.

  He was going to run, because he wasn’t clever enough for anything else; run to find more children and another place and start again. And perhaps, yes, he might have to get old while doing it. His hair might thin and his skin might sag, his knees might creak and his back might bend; within days, just a few Paddington days without feeding, he would be an old man. But that didn’t matter. He’d find a way to feed. All he had to do was get out of the city.

  She’d said: ‘He likes Paddington Station.’

  So to Paddington Lyl - no, wait, not Lyle, not tonight - Lin, Thomas and Tess now go. Because tonight, if nothing else, justice is walking hand in hand with vengeance.

  Hyde Park: neat grass melting into neglected grass where lovers go in secret moonlight; young plane trees growing up between the old elms where the gallows used to stand and heretics suffered and where, now, bright electric lights are displayed among the branches to the amazement of all. Heading north, past high railings and grand terraces, proud in their white facades still fading to smudged coal-blackness. Even on the new, wide thoroughfares of Queensway and Bayswater there is no escaping the smoke of the city. Factories cluster to the north to be close to the goods trains into Paddington Station and its gleaming line into the west, an artery fed by the coal of Wales and the wealth of colonial ships coming into Bristol. Here, the bobbies are out tonight, swinging their rattles and challenging every loitering shadow on every half-finished building site, turning their eyes one way and their palms another for a few pieces of silver taken from the local area-sneak to look the other way, to ignore any shouts from number fifteen, where the maid was foolish enough to leave the silver visible in the kitchen window.

  But tonight, none of this matters.

  Now run!

  Horatio Lyle dreams.

  This is what:

  Once upon a time . . .

  (Deep breath, it could be important.)

  Once upon a time there lived a young boy called . . . called . . . look, I’ll get back to you on this point, and he had a mother called . . . and a father and they lived in the city of London. It was a big city, it was growing every day, black and beautiful and terrifying, a place of endless alleys and fog, of thick smoke and the smell of dung and hay and cheap gin. And this boy was lonely, but he never said so because it wasn’t done, you didn’t say such things in polite society. Boys
were not supposed to say these things, because boys are boys and have to be Strong, just like Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice said, have to be strong like . . .

  Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice?

  Pay attention! Once upon a time in the city of London a child decided he never wanted to grow up . . .

  Hold on a moment, hold on . . .

  . . . never ever ever. He was going to play with his friends and never be lonely an—

  Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice?

  Listen! You have to listen to the story! Horatio, you have to pay attention to the story! One day a circus came to the town and . . .

  Mrs Bontoft doesn’t approve of the circus.

  Forget Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice, you don’t need her, she’s boring, a boring adult who does boring things and has forgotten how to play, and what it was to be young and alone.

  Stuff that, every damn child thinks it’s alone. ‘No one understands me’, that’s what they say, what would Mrs Bontoft do if—

  Shut up shut up shut up!! Once upon a time . . .

  Poisoned.

  Don’t you want to be a child for ever?!

  Paddington

  And it seemed to Lyle, as he slept and dreamed, that this question being asked by - by what? By an uncomfortable taste on the lips? By a voice nudged in at the back of the head?

  Once upon a time . . .

  Hold on just a minute!

  (Poisoned?)

  Once upon a time there was a child who never wanted to grow up . . .

  . . . who ran away to the circus . . .

  . . . who laughed and played . . .

  . . . who got poisoned and seriously messed around by a villain.

  No, no, not right! Children don’t get poisoned! Children don’t suffer, they don’t hurt, they mustn’t. It’s the rules! Adults can get hurt, adults can feel grief, but if you’re a child you’re not allowed! Not allowed, dammit!

  (Not that it works like that. Only in stories do the children not get hurt. Only when you begin it, once upon a . . .)

  Oh, shut up!

  Well then, whispered a voice, a different voice, an older voice in the back of Lyle’s wandering head, isn’t this a pickle?

  Yet for all this, through the haze of pain and sleep, he thought he could hear footsteps on dirty pantry stones.

  There it is!

  A great metal arch over the sky, against smoking chimneys, filthy canals, iron bridges, crumbling tenements, houses pressed right up to the railway line. Smoke, so much smoke, and steam, shooting upwards every time a railway locomotive passes under the end of the arch where the metal tracks wind towards the west.

  Though it is late, the crowds in Paddington Station still pitch and heave within this town within a city. A thousand gaslit faces pursuing the night’s last train. Engines belch great long burps of chuff chuff chuff groan, brakes squeak in metallic irritation at some fresh command, whistles scream, hiiii-eeeeyyyy!, while the stationmaster wonders if he should learn to wind his fob watch faster. The coal-stained engineers scurry to couple the carriages, the oil-soaked drivers rub their blackened hands across their overalls to make their fingers stick a little better to the valves and the levers and the pumps. Pressure gauges climb into the red, steam vents itself, scalding hot, seemingly from beneath and around every part of the train as if to say: ‘Approach ye who dare.’ The poor go to the third class, pressed in ten to every four seats, wooden seats, hard benches beneath scrawny knees. Or perhaps you are the clerk travelling into the city, top hat resting on your knees, little paper stub for second class handed to the guard in his black peaked hat. Only the few may sit in the plumplush fat chairs of first class. Learn to knock with respect should you come here! Doors clatter in every carriage, be careful of your hat, don’t lose your luggage, strap it to the roofs, shove it in the racks, last call, last call for the train to Bristol, mind your skirts as you climb the steps, welcome to Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s marvellous railway, the only way to travel, all the time, any time, anywhere! Calling, some of them, at all the stations down the line, starting with deepest elm-fringed Middlesex: the village of Ealing, not so humble since it’s become the night-time destination of commuters, whatever they are; through the quiet countryside round the great house and parkland of Osterley; past the empty fields of Heathrow, the rural slum-row of cottages on the heath, where nothing stirs but rabbits and scrawny Paddington goats; and on to the once unimaginably distant market town of Reading, forty miles from London, and now little more than an hour away by express - and then on! At Bristol itself you need not stop, but can take ship to other continents.

  Paddington Station: next stop, anywhere.

  And here is the call for what may well be the last train, the guard standing astride the gap between the train and the platform, shrilling on his whistle and calling, ‘Take her away!’

  Footsteps on stone.

  Thick swathes of fabric moving in the dark.

  Smell of mince pies.

  The sound of someone . . .

  . . . tutting?

  A voice.

  Human.

  Female.

  Warm.

  ‘Well,’ it says, ‘what a fine pickle this is.’

  And it dawns on Tate, being the only conscious and arguably the most intelligent witness of the events that are occurring in Lyle’s pantry, that something rather wonderful is about to happen.

  In the crowded night-time streets between Marylebone and Paddington, three voices are raised over the sound of iron-shod hooves clanging on wet cobbles, of loud-mouthed drivers, of creaky old wagons with no way through and, over everything, the muffling of any sound from an almighty, fog-bound London traffic jam.

  ‘Why ain’t it movin’? Why ain’t it bloody movin’!’ demands Tess. Her frustration boiling over, she leans out of the cab window and shouts down the street, ‘Oi! You up there! You move your great fat lazy arses!’

  Only Lin is free from haste and frustration. Unlatching the cab door, she asks the others, ‘Do you really plan to sit there like a pair of herons by a pond? To use a most excellent phrase - move your bottoms!’

  So Thomas, Tess and Lin get out of the carriage, turn towards Paddington Station, and run.

  They are not the only people running in London tonight.

  In Wapping, a pickpocket caught by a crowd while lifting a bookseller’s handkerchief flees through blackened alleys and broken riverside stairs, hearing behind him the hue and cry of the angry mob, half of whom don’t know what it is they’re running after, but run just for the sake of the chase.

  In Westminster, a messenger boy runs the full length of the Colonial Office to deliver a warning fresh from India of more trouble brewing; nothing as bad as in ’57, sir, not yet, sir, but johnny native is bound to kick up a ruckus if you let him.

  In Drury Lane, the clown whose act went down like a Frog frigate at Trafalgar flees from the stage to the pelting of rotting cabbage, sold three a farthin’ special by the enterprising young woman outside. In King’s Cross, the Scotsman runs for the last train back to his civilised native land, where they damn well don’t water down the drink and people will at least look you in the eye before they knife you.

  And somewhere in the middle of London, between the black slums of Soho and the genteel manors of Mayfair, someone else Paddington is running. And as this shadow runs through the streets, this sound can be heard rising up between the tumbled-down chimney pots and twisted old washing lines. ‘Buggery buggery buggery. Nitro-glycerin, check. Magnesium, check. Phosphorus, check. Capacitor - not bloody charged. Damn!’

  There is the clattering of some piece of equipment being thrown aside, rolling limp and abandoned into the gutter with the thick black rats who cluster in the comfort of the darkening night, while its some-time owner, a long-eared dog at his side, runs on into the night.

  Someone watches them go.

  ‘Oh! Are we there?’

  Tess had stopped so hard that Thomas nearly ran into her. Through the
smoke and gouts of steam within the vast walls Thomas could see top hats bobbing, feet dawdling or running, trunks half upright on the porters’ barrows, swerving through the crowd. He hastened into the station. Sweat prickling on his skin at the heat from the great smoke-blackened locomotives, each chugging sulkily in their lair between the long platforms.