Beneath London (5 page)

T
he yellow glow of the gas lamps hissing along Peach Alley was obscured by fog, the narrow alley angling down toward the river from Lower Thames Street, very near Billingsgate Market and to the west of the Custom House. The alley resided in nearly perpetual shadow, light falling directly upon it for an hour before and after noon or on cloudless nights when the moon hovered for a brief period right above the looming buildings. Even in high summer there wasn’t enough sun to dry up the damp filth that stood in runnels between the cobbles. The air was heavy with the constant reek of fish from the market and, at low tide, of river muck from the Thames, which flowed some sixty feet beyond the dead end of the alley. The tops of ghostly masts moving along the river were just visible beyond the roof of the Goat and Cabbage Public House.

Beaumont the Dwarf stood outside a pawnbroker’s shop near the mouth of the alley. He carried four pocket watches in his leather purse, three of which he had liberated from their owners, most recently from Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who was unlikely to miss it, now that he dwelt among the toads. The chain that had come with the watch was silver, the ruby genuine. Beaumont had hidden the ruby and chain away, part of the treasure that he was hoarding against old age, when he was past work and his fingers were no longer nimble. The fourth watch was no longer a watch, because he had turned it into a simple automata. Its bulbous case was very like the round carapace of an insect. He had painted it with many coats of black lacquer and then laid on fiery red daubs, the exact shape and color of a four-spot lady beetle, although many times the size. Its jointed, wire legs made little swimming motions when it was wound by means of twisting the head, and it could walk an erratic line across the floor, its head turning from side to side until it wound itself down. He had no idea of trying to sell the object, which he had built merely to pass the time, and because the watch inside the case wasn’t worth repairing.

Beaumont wore an old beaver hat that he had purchased from a hatter in a Piccadilly shop some ten years ago, when he was gainfully employed as a watchmaker. He had remarkably nimble fingers and a sharp eye, but he had come down in the world since those days, his last situation being employment as a coach driver for Dr. Narbondo, which he had liked well enough, being partial to horses. The beaver hat added a foot to his height, making him something over four feet tall. A complementary beard of the same length and shape mirrored the hat in a startling, topsy-turvy way, so that his wrinkled face seemed to peer out from the center of a hairy, elongated egg. At the moment he was down on his luck, having lost his position as coachman a year ago and not having found steady employment since. Now he was compelled to earn a hard living by the quickness of his hand, and he dwelt in squalid lodgings in Limehouse, which was better than sleeping on a filthy porch in a damp and stinking alley such as this.

The pawnbroker had been recommended to him as being “discreet.” The shop was unlicensed, given the absence of the usual golden balls on the sign, which meant that there would be no questions put to him when he displayed the watches, all three of which were of fairly high quality. Treasures of the meanest sort lay beyond the shop window: chipped china cups, foreign coins, dusty glassware, a hodgepodge of bric-a-brac, and a basket of severed porcelain dolls’ heads – awful things with staring eyes.

Shoes lay heaped in bins inside the shop, and an array of petticoats, gowns, shawls, and old coats hung from wooden rods affixed to the ceiling. The store was apparently empty of customers, and the shopkeeper was attentive to his work. Beaumont’s eyes returned to the clutter of items in the window, where there lay a nine-key, four-part German flute with ivory and silver filigree, the fine-grained wood polished to a luster by handling. He stared longingly at it, having pawned his own flute, not as nice as this one, some months back. German flutes were neither rare nor expensive, even to a person of modest means, but he couldn’t afford the flute no matter what he was offered for the watches, which represented several days’ careful labor. He had been hungry and cold so often these past months that he had become like the ant in the fable: for every shilling he spent, he put two away for tomorrow, even if it meant that on two-shilling days he went hungry. Still and all, he had eaten his fill of bread and cheese just now in Rodway’s Coffee House, meat being too dear, and so hunger was a remote worry.

He heard the rattle and squeak of loose wheels now, and looking up toward Lower Thames Street, he saw a costermonger wheeling a hot potato cart in his direction, compelling him to step up onto the shop’s stoop among a litter of ironmongery in order to let the cart pass. “Watch your poke in that there shop,” the boy said to him without looking up. Beaumont was tempted to stop him, to buy a potato that he didn’t want, but he stepped noiselessly into the shop instead, seeing that the shopkeeper’s back was turned. He leaned in toward the broad window-sill, his hand darted out, and he grasped the flute lightly, flipping it round and thrusting it up the sleeve of his coat, and then letting it slide back down into a pocket sewn on the inside of the sleeve for just such a purpose. The flute lay there snug and safe by the time the shopkeeper, a surly-looking dark man in a leathern apron, with the face of a dried French prune turned and looked at him with evident disapproval.

“I’ve got these time pieces, Squire,” Beaumont said to him, and he drew the watches out of his purse, lining them up in a neat row on the counter. Lying beneath the dirty glass was an array of costume jewelry, virtually all of it pinchbeck rubbish, and a half-dozen decorated snuff boxes. No doubt the proprietor kept the real wares somewhere else, another shop, perhaps.

The man grunted by way of reply when he saw the watches. He picked up the best of the three and snapped it open, looking at the interior of the cover, which was unfortunately engraved with its owner’s initials. Shaking his head doubtfully, he examined the other two. “How does a villain of your size come by
three
silver pocket watches?” he asked. “Half a watch would do the likes of you, I should think.”

“My old grandfather died yesterday,” Beaumont told him. “That’s how I came by them. They were his.”

“What was his name, then? Old Scratch, I don’t doubt.”

“Bartholomew Compton, your honor, of Dove Court in the Seven Dials. He was uncommon fond of knowing the time of day, and used the one watch to check the accuracy of the other two.”

“And yet the one watch is engraved with another man’s initials – an ef and a zed. That’s mighty curious – suspicious some might say.”

“Not at all, sir. He couldn’t read nor write. It’s the great pity of the world, for he would have been a great man, else.”

The shop door opened just then and a squalid, thin woman who was losing her hair in patches came in wearing a worn cotton gown raveled at the neck and sleeves. A tiny, fair-haired girl trailed at her heels, her eyes on the floor. Both of them had seen hard times. The woman held a lidless iron pot containing a striped bonnet forty years old if it was a day. The stripes might have been red once, but now were the color of dried blood, and yet were scarcely distinguishable against the dirty white of the rest of the bonnet, which had evidently been trodden flat and then batted back into shape and fixed with glue and water. She pushed past Beaumont and endeavored to set the heavy pot on the counter.

“Put it on the floor, Mrs. Billings,” the shopkeeper told her, “and wait your turn. And I don’t want the bonnet today, ma’am, any more than I wanted it last week or the week before. There’s not a living soul in London would want the bonnet, nor a corpse neither, which is apparently who’s been wearing it.”

Looking at Beaumont, he said, “Four crowns for the three of ’em. The engraving’s spoilt the best of the three, without Mr. Filby Zounds comes in to claim it. You won’t get more elsewhere, but you might get taken up for theft, and you knew that very thing when you walked into my shop. Take the money or leave it, Dwarf. It’s all one to me.” He set four coins on the counter, and without waiting for an answer he swept the watches into a box, which he placed in a drawer, turning to stare silently at Beaumont, who looked at the coins for a moment before picking them up. He had been swindled, but that was the way of things. And the swindle meant that he was quits for the flute, which meant that his conscience was clear.

He pocketed the coins, hearing a wet sort of noise behind him. Mrs. Billings was weeping, her narrow hand pressed to her forehead to hide her eyes. Beaumont said, “Don’t weep, my lady. I’ll buy the bonnet if you’ll part with it.” She looked up, suspicion in her eyes until she saw the silver coin in his hand. She plucked it from his palm before he changed his mind, holding it in her fist and wiping her eyes with her knuckles.

“Thank you for your great kindness, sir,” she said, handing him the bonnet. “You’re a small man with a large heart, not like some I could name, whose hearts are shriveled like an apple john left in the barrel.” She gave the pawnbroker a hard look, and he either laughed or snorted, it was difficult to say.

Beaumont was indifferent to the man now, although he had a high regard for Mrs. Billings, who had said a kind thing to him, which was rare. Cuffs and insults were more usual, as they no doubt were for her and her daughter. He touched his fingers to his forehead by way of a salute and held out the lady beetle automata to the small girl, twisting the head twice, meaning to give it to her. It walked straight off his palm, landing on its back on the floorboards, its legs gyrating, a grinding noise coming from within it. The girl shrieked and clung to her mother, who slapped her on the side of the head. Beaumont picked up the bug and hurried out into the foggy afternoon, berating himself for frightening the girl. Certainly he hadn’t meant to. He felt the German flute tapping against his forearm, and that went some distance toward easing his mind. He was glad that he had pinched it.

There sounded the rattle and creak of the costermonger’s cart again, and that very item once again materialized out of the fog, bearing down on him from the opposite direction. “
Hot
potatoes!” the boy shouted. “
Hot
roasters!” The afternoon had grown even colder, and Beaumont drew three pennies out of his pocket and handed them to the boy, who gave him a potato wrapped in a triangle of damp newsprint.

“No rot in this one, sir, and twice the size of the others. Prime King Edwards. Nothing but the best. And I’m to give you this,” he said, taking a printed sheet of foolscap out of his pocket and handing it to him – a handbill of some sort, of which the boy apparently had a quantity. Beaumont put the potato into the pocket of his coat and then looked at the handbill to see what it advertised – General Clinky’s Raree Show, perhaps, the bearer of the handbill to receive a tuppeny discount at the ticket window.

But it wasn’t any such thing. This was more interesting by far. The legend across the top read, “Have you seen this man?” and below that there was a middling good sketch of the upper body of a demonic-looking gent who was evidently a hunchback, with short, straight hair and canny eyes. Beaumont stared at it in growing disbelief. “I
do
,” he whispered in answer to the query. And then, without reading the rest of it, he tucked it away in his coat.

The boy was off again, shouting “
Red
hot potatoes!”, very shortly leaving the alley and disappearing into the fog-shrouded traffic of Lower Thames Street. Mrs. Billings and her daughter came out through the door of the shop and hurried away, leaving the door standing open. The proprietor stood just inside, watching Beaumont with evident distaste.

Beaumont realized that the bonnet was still tucked under his arm, and so he pitched it through the open door and said cheerfully, “Bugger off, old cock.” He thumbed his nose at the man, removed the potato from his pocket, unwrapped it and bit off the top, wishing that he had a shaker of salt.

He walked along the alley to the Goat and Cabbage, pushing through the door and buying a pint of plain before sitting down in the corner to finish his potato in peace. He thought about how the boy had warned him to watch his poke, although he had no call to do so. He was a good boy, not a blackguard like some, but civil, and he had given Beaumont a vastly interesting piece of paper. There was something right with things today – not luck, maybe, for to call it luck might kill it – but the world spinning plumb and true for the moment, and out of the spinning had come opportunity. Who knew what it would bring to a man who didn’t ask for more than he deserved?

The Goat was nearly full, several of the patrons weeping drunk and one man was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his eyes closed and his mouth open and wheezing. Most were dressed in greasy coats and caps that stank of fish. There was the smell of gin and spilled beer and fried oysters and a general human fug. One of the hot potato boy’s handbills lay on the adjacent table, three glasses sitting atop it, the three men surrounding it hunched over and talking to each other in low voices. They were useless, mean, hateful men with low habits. Beaumont could smell it on them – the stink of poisonous thoughts, nothing to recommend them but their ugly faces.

One of the three stared back at him, a heavy man with a red beard, and Beaumont averted his eyes so as not to further summon the man’s attention – attention generally coming to no good when one is a dwarf. He heard one of them say, “…a goddamn leprechaun, or I’m a codfish.” Another of them said, “I say we stuff him into a bag and make him give up his gold. Either that or throw him in the river, the little frog.”

Beaumont swallowed the last of his potato and drank off half his beer. Perhaps he was mistaken about the quality of the afternoon. He raised his right hand and patted the top of his beaver hat, feeling the flute slide out of its pocket and up his sleeve, and when he dropped his arm along the chair leg, the flute slipped neatly into his fingers. He left it there, easy to hand.