Beneath London (38 page)

He listened to footfalls on the floor above – Beaumont returning to his own room – and then the sound of his door closing and the dwarf’s footfalls again on the planks.
Good
, he thought. At least he would know whether Beaumont was in his room or had gone out. But it dawned on him that someone in a room below might know the same of him, and so he removed his shoes and laid them out of sight under the far side of the bed, which was high enough off the floor for him to slide beneath if he heard someone approach. They would see him as soon as they looked beneath, but perhaps they wouldn’t look. He put his jacket underneath with his shoes, made sure that there was space for him along with the rest, and then sat at the desk to wait, setting his creel down in front of him, his mind turning.

He wondered what Beaumont had meant by saying that they would “go underground” to Margate and the Vortigern Caves. The phrase conveyed no meaning to his mind, although he had seen the caves once, five years or so back. Margate was known for amusements, and Duffy’s Circus had set up near what was called Dreamland, a manufactured, fabulous, mechanical world. There was little of a dream in it, however – a salt marsh, really, that was recently drained and on a hot day still stank of dead things in the mud. There were small boats fastened atop rails that one could sit in and be tossed about against the backdrop of a painted, stormy sea. People enjoyed them well enough, or at least pretended to after paying tuppence for the pleasure, but Finn preferred real boats, which he’d learned to sail when he had fished for oysters with Square Davey, a long time ago now…

He stood up, too restless to sit. If Beaumont knew a way to escape underground to Margate, then Finn was game. He heartily wished that he could get a message to the Professor and Alice at the Half Toad, if only to tell them where he and Beaumont and Clara were bound, once they escaped. When the time came to run it would be too late. He opened a tall casement window and looked down to the ground – a sheer drop of thirty feet.

The street was busy with people now, the day well underway, the wind blowing up leaves and bits of paper, white clouds moving swiftly in the sky. The tobacco shop sat cater-corner across the street, and the chemist’s next to that. A man came out of the tobacconist’s now and stood on the pavement loading a pipe. An old shawly woman issued from the chemist’s, walking with a stick, and the man with the pipe bowed to her and lifted his hat as she moved slowly along, looking up toward the window where Finn stood. After a long moment she looked down again, her face half hidden by a large bonnet.

Finn was strongly reminded of Mother Laswell, this woman being much the same age and size, it seemed to him, although stooped and slow. He watched, however, as she stepped off the pavement at the corner of the building and moved into the shadows cast by an overhanging tree that grew in a bit of garden. She looked up at him again, standing up to reveal her full height this time and removing her bonnet, from which fell a voluminous quantity of red hair. It
was
Mother Laswell, sure enough, and the sight of her stopped his breath for a moment. A tide of relief flowed through him as he waved at her and quickly turned back to the desk. He opened his creel, which smelled of trout and waterweeds, and took out the two Christmas puddings that he’d stowed there earlier. He removed his notebook and pencil and began to write.

* * *

M
other Laswell had only the faintest sense of Clara’s presence. She was gone from the house, no doubt. Seeing Finn, however, gave her hope that Clara would return. She stood along the wall of a tobacco shop in the shadow of the building and half hidden by a stand of shrubbery. Finn had just turned back into the room, in haste, it seemed to her. She held her bonnet against the very persuasive wind, listening to a bell toll the hour. She had already missed the first meeting at the Temple Church with Bill and Alice, but she would at least bear some variety of news when she found them again.

A curtain was pulled back from an open window some distance down the wall from Finn’s window, but apparently on the same floor. Mother Laswell watched as a woman looked out of it. She was dressed in a peignoir, and Mother Laswell, utterly surprised, recognized her from earlier that morning at the Half Toad – the woman with the crow affixed to her hat. A man appeared beside her, looking briefly down at the street before raising his palm as if to slap her, while forcibly turning her away from the window. There was a shout, the woman’s voice – angry, it seemed, from this distance, but unintelligible. The man looked out through the window again before pulling it shut.

Finn reappeared at his window, waved once again, stepped back a pace, and flung out a missile of some sort. It flew toward Mother Laswell with great speed and accuracy, and she ducked away just as it hit the wall and exploded, spraying her and the pavement with what turned out to be Christmas pudding, chunks of it glued to the paper wrapper that had enclosed it. A lump with a slip of paper thrust into it lay on the ground, and Mother picked it up, extricated the note, and read it: “Beaumont the Dwarf means for us to run underground to Margate, to the Vortigern caves
if we must.
The Professor knows Beaumont. Tell him it’s the dwarf who played the organ in the Cathedral. Beaumont is a good friend, who has saved me twice, and together we are going to save Clara, who is held prisoner in this room. The three of us mean to run at the first chance, through the tunnel behind Narbondo’s old house near the river.
Soon
. Finn Conrad.” The “if we must” and the “soon” were heavily underlined.

“The
three
of us,” she muttered, studying the note. So Clara was safe, at least for the moment.

Finn still stood at the window watching her, and Mother Laswell nodded and held up the note to show him that she had it. A richly attired carriage, its gold paint aglow, passed close by just then, cutting off her view, and she stepped back two paces to be less conspicuous. The driver took no notice of Mother Laswell. There was another man inside the coach, however, who took particular notice – the villain Shadwell, whose mouth was agape as he apparently grappled with the strange business of seeing her there on the pavement.

Clara Wright sat across from him, and Mother Laswell was certain that she swiveled her head to look in her direction through the dark lenses of her spectacles when Shadwell’s head was turned. Her elbow was raised in front of her. The girl looked forward again immediately, and it came to Mother Laswell joyfully that they were still convinced that she was utterly blind. Abruptly she realized that her bonnet was in her hand and that she was making no effort to disguise herself.

The coach was past now, slowing down and stopping before the broad gates of the house. It wasn’t going in apparently, although the gate was swinging open. Mother Laswell turned and walked back past the tobacco shop and the chemist’s. At the end of the block she looked back to see that Shadwell was handing Clara down from the coach, the driver holding the gate open just far enough for Clara and Shadwell to step through.

In that moment a boy dressed as if for the office dashed past Mother Laswell along the middle of the street, running like a deer. He gave a shrill whistle, and Shadwell looked back, waiting as the boy ran up alongside, disappearing from Mother Laswell’s view. In the next moment she saw Shadwell climb onto the driver’s seat, setting out toward the distant corner at a good clip. The driver led Clara out of sight, and the boy slouched back along the pavement, in no hurry now.

THIRTY

T
he Savoy Chapel, adjacent to Waterloo Bridge, was no great distance from the Board of Works. As Alice and Kraken made their way toward it along the Strand, Alice considered the curious Mr. Lewis. Her brazen threat to set Bill Kraken upon him had drained the blood from his face. The depth of her anger had surprised her as well, even as it was coming out of her mouth, although in some sense she meant just what she’d said. If Lewis had played them false, she would pin his ears back for him.

She wondered at his “apology,” such as it was, on behalf of himself and of the Board of Works. Had he meant to curry favor with her? To what end? Surely not to persuade her to take a more favorable attitude toward the Board, which scarcely required Mr. Lewis’s good word. His insistence that he was tying his shoe rather than lighting a fuse sounded like a lie to her, but in a court of law it would sound perfectly sensible. Alice was no threat to the Board of Works or to Mr. Lewis. And of course if he
had
been tying his shoe, then she had condemned him unfairly, which was regrettable.

“It’s nigh onto the top of the hour,” Kraken said, holding out his pocket watch. “We’d best look in on Temple Church, ma’am. We missed our tide the first time, but if we hurry we can be in port for the second meeting.”

“It’s not far, I believe,” Alice said.

“No ma’am, though we’ll have to hurry.”

“You run on ahead, Bill, and bring Mother back with you. I might spend a moment alone in the chapel. I’ll wait for you there and we all can walk back to the Half Toad together.”

Kraken nodded. Spending a moment alone in the chapel was apparently something he understood. “You won’t take no chances, ma’am? Same as you told me at Bow Street, I ain’t got the fortitude to stand it if you come to harm. I couldn’t face the Professor and tell him of it, not after all he’s done for me.”

“There’s nothing to it, Bill. If they brought Harrow’s body here, so be it. If they did not, they did not.”

“Then I’m off,” he said, and without another word he loped away up the Strand in the direction of Fleet Street and Temple Church.

Ahead of Alice lay the new Savoy Hotel, an immense structure, although only partly built, on the site where the old Savoy Hospital used to stand before it was demolished. The area had suffered great indignity in the years between, but the new hotel with its advertised electric lights and lifts and water closets in every room seemed gaudy to Alice, of little benefit, certainly, to the poor people who lived in the area, except that it might employ a few of them to wait on the well-to-do.

The Savoy Chapel, a remnant of an older London that was quickly becoming a ghost, was very humble indeed, dwarfed as it was by the structures that were rising around it. She saw the wide, cobbled path around the side of the chapel, leading to the churchyard behind, and she followed it along the edge of the building. She would look into the chapel when she had completed her work.

At the rear of the chapel sat the old cemetery, a hummocky collection of graves with tilting headstones, the enriched grass high and green from recent rains. A long, narrow out-building stood at the far side of the cemetery, affixed to a high wall.

A horse and empty wagon stood beside it, the horse cropping grass. And beside that stood a gold-painted coach, very elegant. The door to the shed was open, and a man, vigorously smoking a pipe, lounged in the doorway, no doubt preferring the reek of tobacco smoke to the smell of the charnel house. He nodded at her, and then came out to meet her when he saw that she took no interest in the graves. Despite the breeze, the air was rank with the stink of decaying corpses.

“Good day to you, sir,” she said, and he nodded noncommittally and continued to smoke. “I was sent here by the Metropolitan Board of Works, in order to look into the death of a Mr. James Harrow. I’m told that his body was conveyed here after his unfortunate accident the night before last. It might not have been identified, however.”

“It’s just as you say, ma’am,” the man said to her. “The police brought it. I’m the watchman, and I was here when he came in, dead as a stone. Kicked in the forehead by his horse, he was, his head stove right in, and soaking wet into the bargain. He’d got into the river when the horse did for him, and if there was any life left in him, the river took it. They fished him out and brought him here. He’ll go out to Necropolis Cemetery at Brookwood tomorrow morning if there’s naught else to do with him.”

“So his body is here now?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, knocking his pipe out against the sole of his shoe and then slipping it into a pocket of his vest, which was threadbare and stained. “Do you want to have a look at him? He ain’t pretty, mind you.”