Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

The pale student paled some more. ‘My fingers, sir. It seemed easier than poking blindly with forceps.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘No metallic instruments at all?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good boy.’ Mr G snapped his fingers and a sixpenny piece appeared between them. ‘Here.’ He spun it high in the air. ‘Use that to induce a barber to relocate the untethered ends of your oleaginous hairs closer to your scalp.’

  ‘I do not know why you are interested in Wallace.’ Duffy was clearly discomfited at he and his students being belittled. ‘You already know how he died.’

  ‘Oh, Professor.’ My godfather went down on his haunches to scrutinize a tattered lung that had been deposited in an enamelled bowl on the floor. ‘One of the few things we have in common,’ he parted two spongy lobes with a steel spatula, ‘is that our interest in people is only increased by their demises.’ Mr G poked the instrument into the opening of a large bronchus and scooped around it. ‘The man who once possessed this cadaver came recently from a rural area. He had a chronic inflammatory pulmonary condition which I have oft observed afflicts those who deal with hay.’

  ‘We called it farmers’ chest in Lancashire,’ I recalled.

  ‘I suspect it is a reaction to the dust created in the production of fodder. His lungs are choked with it.’ Sidney Grice held out the spatula coated in phlegm speckled with off-yellow particles.

  An alternative to his theory sprang to mind but I refrained from voicing it amongst such would-be superior beings. Professor Duffy had no such qualms, however.

  ‘Tens of thousands of people in London deal with hay every day,’ he objected. ‘Ostlers, carters, stable lads and grooms, for example.’

  ‘And inhale the soot-laden air with every breath,’ my guardian reminded him. ‘You have performed enough autopsies to have observed that their alveoli are clogged with carboniferous deposits. Scalpel, Miss Middleton.’

  I passed one handle first – as often I had placed one into my father’s hand before the world made me old whilst I was still young – and Mr G sliced deep into the tissue.

  ‘Quite pink,’ I vouched. ‘So probably not a smoker either.’

  ‘Come, Miss Middleton.’ Sidney Grice rose and made for the exit. ‘Oh, and that right middle finger does not belong to the same man. It is too short and smells of tobacco tar.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Professor Duffy asked tersely.

  ‘I think that will do for today,’ my guardian assured him, lifting the corner of a sheet idly to inspect a partly dissected foot.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to give our man a name,’ the professor suggested sarcastically.

  ‘Simon,’ I said, and he gaped at me. ‘It is a nice name,’ I continued, ‘but not necessarily his.’

  ‘Goodbye, Professor.’ Sidney Grice tipped his hat as he ushered me out. ‘I cannot agree.’ His lips were as immobile as a very good ventriloquist’s. ‘With your inflated puffery for that appellation. It tastes of pork. Acwellen is a far superior name. It is Anglo-Saxon and means—’ we passed back out on to Gower Street—‘Kill.’

  20

  The Street of Seven Dreams

  THE LIMEHOUSE BASIN was crowded as always and a great steamship was being unloaded, stevedores lowering long full sacks into barges for transfer along the Regent’s Canal, thence to be transported throughout the country. Lascars in pantaloons and baggy jackets, heads covered in flat cylindrical skullcaps, dragged a rope as thick as their arms, working it into a giant coil. A gang of perhaps twenty black longshoremen, stripped to the waist, torsos glistening in the blaze of the sun, hauled the Alice Rose, a four-mast windjammer, back to the pier that she had overshot. Land and river swarmed with activity, and countless voices in dozens of different languages and accents competed to be heard above each other and the crash of cargo being dumped on the quayside.

  ‘Is it not inspiring,’ Sidney Grice shouted above the hubbub, ‘to think how many of these creatures could die without anyone caring.’

  He threw our fare up to the driver, who put it in a cloth bag under his straw hat.

  ‘They could have someone who loves them,’ I argued, taking his arm to clamber on to the cobbles.

  There was a strong stale smell coming from the river and I dreaded to think what it must have been like in the days of the Great Stink when the Thames was an open sewer, before Joseph Bazalgette built his drains and pumping stations.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Mr G tidied his coat. ‘Who, for example, could care about this loathsome specimen?’ He poked a ragged but otherwise presentable youth in the chest with his cane.

  ‘Oy!’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘I doubt he ever had one.’ Sidney Grice led me up a narrow street into a short alley with a strong smell of rancid butter, and then into a long one stinking of cats, then a series of passageways, each narrower and less salubrious than the previous, the doors either side of us going from painted to patchily painted to unpainted to broken, to being replaced with sacking hooked over rusty nails. And then we were in a court, deserted except for five women squatting in the corner some forty feet away, shelling peas from a sack into a bucket and dropping the pods into their grubby aprons.

  ‘Never mind ’er, darlin’,’ one called out. ‘I can give you a better time.’

  ‘The only thing you could give him would be infectious,’ I called back and my guardian paused to consider my comment.

  ‘Pulmonary tuberculosis and scabies being the least troubling of her afflictions,’ he pondered.

  ‘Who you calling scabby?’ the woman spluttered chestily, while her companions clucked in sympathy.

  ‘I am unfamiliar with her cognomen and have no desire to familiarize myself with it.’ Mr G raised his stick in salutation. ‘Goodbye, repellant and plebian females. May your lives be abbreviated.’

  He took my arm and we turned left down a winding lane.

  ‘A proper gent,’ I heard the woman say as I dodged a piglet scampering straight towards me.

  ‘Gawd, which rag-and-bone man did ’e pick ’er up from?’ one of her companions croaked to more cackling than any joke ever told before could possibly have merited.

  ‘There you go, causing trouble again,’ my godfather scolded as we turned down yet another alley, this one hung with lanterns and the first property bearing a sign with red Chinese symbols arranged round the words Golden Dragon, also in red.

  The front door was painted red too and I was beginning to think the theme somewhat overdone before the door was opened – in response to Sidney Grice’s complicated rhythm of knocks – by a Chinaman, very tall compared to those I had seen slaving on the docks, and clad in a red kimono. He bowed and admitted us into a waiting room – the walls, floor and ceiling, the bench and the two armchairs all coloured deep and dark vermilion. Had there been any windows in this lamplit room, I had no doubt what colour the drapes would have been.

  ‘Mr Glice.’ the Chinaman put his hands together, hardly visible amongst the voluminous sleeves of his robe.

  ‘And Miss Middleton,’ I added, in the unlikely instance of anyone being interested, and the Chinaman bowed so low that I could see the long pigtail braided down his back.

  ‘An honour.’ He came up gently. ‘What bringee you to my humble home?’

  ‘Save the theatricals for your customers, Jones,’ Mr G told him sharply. ‘Your humble abode is a thirty-four room mansion in Primrose Hill, and even Miss Middleton would not be taken in by your counterfeit orientalism.’

  I had more pride than to admit that I had been.

  The apparently fake Chinaman smiled serenely, his moustaches hanging like bootlaces almost to his chest.

  ‘Pleasee, Mr Glice. In Plimlose Hill I may be who I choose. In the Street of Seven Dreams I am Chang Foo.’

  ‘This is Grey Dog Lane,’ my guardian pointed out

  ‘To you pah-haps,’ Jones/Chang conceded.

  ‘But your eyes,’ I looked into them and
they returned my gaze placidly. ‘They look oriental.’

  ‘I was born with droopy eyes.’ Jones gave up his pretence.

  ‘Ocular ptosis,’ I realized.

  ‘Is that what it is?’ Our host smiled ruefully. ‘The other children used to call me names.’ His mouth tensed as he remembered. ‘There was nothing I could do so I decided to put it to my own advantage. I’ve always been interested in opium since my grandmother introduced me to the habit, but nobody buys from an Englishman.’

  ‘You are very well spoken,’ I observed.

  ‘Another fraudulent device,’ Sidney Grice told me. ‘Jones was born and raised not thirty yards from here.’

  ‘We are none of us who we pretend to be,’ Jones said.

  ‘I think I am,’ I objected.

  ‘You probably are,’ my guardian conceded. ‘Whereas I do not pretend to be anyone.’ His cane shot up under Jones’s chin. ‘Miss Bocking.’

  Jones jumped but instantly readopted his inscrutable image. ‘I don’t know nuffink abart that.’ He reverted to his native Cockney.

  ‘You must know something,’ I reasoned, ‘or you would have asked who Mr Grice meant.’

  ‘A rational remark,’ my godfather approved.

  ‘Well, I know she came with ’er friend and left with ’er friend, but they nevva said nuffink to me.’ Jones flapped his wing-like sleeves and Mr G blanched but held his ground. ‘’Er friend wore a veil but lots of women don’t want to be recognized.’ He sniggered breathily. ‘Once ’ad a muvvah sittin’ next to ’er daugh’a and neevah nevvah knew it.’

  ‘And you did not notice anything unusual on the night Miss Bocking came?’

  ‘Did he not?’ Mr G wandered to a red-lacquered table in the corner and tried the drawer.

  ‘That was a question.’

  ‘Then be so charitable as to phrase it as one.’ Sidney Grice pulled off his gloves, drawing his breath in sharply as if the process were distressing.

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual?’ I tried again.

  ‘Nuffink,’ Jones folded his arms inside his sleeves, ‘is unusual round ’ere.’

  ‘What about the men who were with her?’ I persisted.

  ‘I didn’t notice them,’ Jones assured me placidly, and glanced over his shoulder. ‘That drawer is locked.’

  ‘I have ascertained that already.’ Mr G wheeled round. ‘We shall look downstairs now and you shall remain, seated.’ He rattled the back spokes of an upright wooden chair. ‘Here.’

  ‘’Ere ’oo said yer could poke around my place?’ Jones objected indignantly.

  My guardian licked his finger and held it up as if checking the direction of the wind.

  ‘I was not aware that anybody had,’ he answered. ‘And I certainly did not ask anyone to do so.’ He swept off his hat and dropped his gloves one by one into the upturned crown.

  I scrutinized a red tassel which dangled from an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and sniffed it in an attempt to look as if I was doing something, but neither man was paying me any attention. It smelled, as the rest of the room did, of a sickly perfume.

  ‘How many police officers would you like to visit you tonight, Dr Jones?’ Sidney Grice stood on tiptoe to look him in the eye.

  ‘Dr?’ I repeated incredulously and, now that I had their attention, examined the tassel again.

  Jones shifted his feet. ‘This is an easier and more lucrative living,’ he admitted bashfully before stiffening his sinews.

  ‘He is not qualified other than in the art of cheap swindling.’

  ‘Cheap?’ Jones ruffled his robes. ‘That certificate cost me a fortune.’ He tightened the wide silk belt around his waist. ‘Look, Mr Grice, I pay to be left alone.’

  ‘But you do not and never shall pay me to do so,’ my guardian reminded him.

  Jones swished his pigtail crossly. ‘Oh, very well.’ He flapped a wide sleeve. ‘Behind the head.’

  A golden dragon smiled toothily all along that bamboo-lined wall, carrying the world in its claws in a pose more reminiscent of an underarm bowler approaching the crease. I slid the end screen aside to reveal a door and Dr Jones turned sulkily away. ‘The honourable gentleman will not find anything of intelest,’ he prophesied in his best cod Mandarin.

  ‘I have only ever been to nineteen places where I found absolutely nothing of interest.’ Sidney Grice took a hair off the fabric. ‘And in every instance bar one I was asleep.’ He compared the hair to mine, put it on his palm and blew it away. ‘The last, of course, was Paris.’

  I opened the door, to my guardian’s unconcealed chagrin. He had a fondness for doing so in theatrical manners, but I had endured more than enough of his public displays recently. A steep narrow staircase, with solid walls to either side, led down away from us.

  ‘You will not lock us in,’ I said. ‘And that was not a question.’

  ‘Never entered my ’ead.’ Jones jerked his neck forward like a strutting chicken.

  ‘Then present me with the key,’ my guardian said firmly.

  Jones seemed about to protest but, realizing there was no point, brought a hand out of his voluminous sleeve and handed it over.

  ‘One word of warning.’ Mr G paused with his foot on the top step. ‘If anything unpleasant should befall myself and my assistant down there, it will be very much the worse for us.’

  And, with that encouraging thought, I followed him down.

  21

  Into the Dragon’s Lair

  THE STAIRS WERE unlit as was the room into which we descended, but Sidney Grice soon had three oil lamps lit and the more my eyes became accustomed to their glare, the more dingy our surroundings looked. True, it was decorated, as my guardian had predicted, in supposedly erotic murals, but they were clumsily drawn and peeling in the damp that infests all London cellars. The four sofas were upholstered in balding velvet with the grease marks of a thousand heads on their backs and arms and peppered with countless burns. Each sofa had a long low table in front of it, the red paint marked and blistered by the heat of innumerable pipes. The furniture stood on a large square rug – red, of course – which looked fairly new but could not disguise the hardness of the stone floor beneath it.

  Mr G pulled back another drape in the far left-hand corner to reveal a plain plank door, locked, with the key removed. He pressed his ear to the woodwork and rapped once with his knuckles.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ I asked, hoping he would not say something as vague as clues.

  My guardian glanced at the ceiling, stained with smoke and dotted with hundreds of ochre splots that were probably meant to be suns.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ He reached into his inner pocket. ‘Do I have to write you a list?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, taken aback by his sharpness, but apparently he felt he did, for he was scribbling away industriously in his notebook and cringing at the desecration as he tore out another page.

  ‘Take this.’ He pressed the folded the paper into my hands. ‘And go and read it under that oil lamp.’

  He pointed to the one at the foot of the stairs, and I was about to insist that I could read it just as well where I was when I felt his toe tap mine.

  ‘Very well.’ I went over and unfolded his missive.

  1 Do not say anything.

  2 When I say the word ‘fascinating’ you are to re-enter the reception area as quietly as your ungainly construction permits – remembering as you should have observed during our descent that the ninth tread on your ascent crepitates – so as to present yourself unexpectedly to Mr Thomas David Jones.

  3 Pay particular attention to what he is doing. He will be doing something. The Welsh are always doing something.

  4 Exercise one of your few skills by devising a convincing untruth for your unexpected appearance.

  Mr G dropped on to his haunches and tipped his head like a blackbird listening for worms.

  ‘This is not fascinating,’ he said.

  I clamped my jaw tight just in time to cho
ke back my instinctive reply and set my foot upon the first step. The stairwell was so narrow that my dresses rustled noisily against the wall.

  ‘The police will not be intrigued by what I have found,’ my guardian declaimed, never quite able to bring himself to tell a lie.

  I was on the third step as he boomed out, ‘For I shall not, having no motive to do so, grant them such information.’

  Another step, holding my skirts in as best I could.

  ‘I have not not seen the like of this unenchanting... thing in nineteen years,’ came after me, by which time I had reached step six of about fourteen.

  ‘Blimmit,’ I cursed quietly as my hem snagged on a splinter.

  ‘Language,’ my godfather responded automatically, but it was all I could do to restrain my tongue as the lining ripped when I pulled it free.

  It was a light blue dress and not new, but it had given me good service and had a useful secret pocket just large enough for my spare cigarette case.

  ‘My word, this is not markedly different from the last one I came across.’ Mr G struggled to continue as the stair squealed under me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I hissed. I had thought I was on the eighth step.

  ‘Oh, just get a move on,’ he rapped, and I galloped up the remaining five steps like a herd of Mollies in full stampede, almost wrenching the screen off its runners as I stumbled through the opening at the top.

  Thomas Jones was intent upon his inkwell as I burst into view. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘You are supposed to be in that chair.’

  He snapped the lid back down. ‘Nobody tells me what to do in my own establishment.’ His face was flushed and looking less oriental now.

  ‘Mr Grice does,’ I assured him.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Jones hastened back to his chair. ‘You won’t say anything?’ he pleaded, now a naughty child trying to do a deal with nanny.

  ‘I always say something,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, be a sport.’ Jones hitched up his robes, showing off a rather flashy pair of embroidered pink slippers that I would not have minded for myself.