The Angel of Highgate (18 page)

Tongue working frantically, Thraxton choked down the rest of the petit four. “Ah… you are entertaining. I didn’t realize. I beg your indulgence…” Thraxton’s eyes roved around the room. The Wakefields looked mildly surprised. But Constance Pennethorne and Algernon both wore the guilty expressions of conspirators caught plotting treason. For his part, Thraxton’s face reddened as he realized he had just committed yet another social blunder. “I, puh-please, I,” he stammered. “Forgive my intrusion. I… I should come back another time.” He bowed dramatically to all present and took a step backward, closing the doors after him, an act that made him look and feel like the mechanical bird in a cuckoo clock.

No one in the parlor spoke of Thraxton’s dramatic appearance and even more dramatic disappearance. Algernon had a cup of tea balanced on his knee, a marzipan in his hand that he was just about to take a bite out of when his friend had burst into the room. Forgetting the tea, he leaped to his feet dumping a full cup of Darjeeling onto the Persian rug. He looked down distractedly at the broken china and steaming puddle, then ran after Thraxton, the cake still clutched in his hand.

Algernon rushed down the hall to the front door, dodging around the slow-witted Horace, who was still lurking. But by the time he snatched the door open, Thraxton’s brougham was pulling away.

Blast
, Algernon thought.
Now I’ve done it!

* * *

When Doctor Garrette snatched open the office door in response to the indefatigable knocking, Death hovered on the threshold. Or, at least, Death’s ambassador: an undertaker in full regalia—black top hat and frock coat—a slender figure wrapped in black crepe and slathered with the lugubrious air that is a requisite of the trade.

The doctor had been
relaxing
in his closet and his mind had not yet fully surfaced from its chloroform stupor. He recognized the figure instantly, but his tongue lolled clumsily in his mouth.

“Doctor Garrette,” the undertaker said.

“Dear, dear me!” Suddenly, a round, fat face squeezed in beneath the undertaker’s arm: Mrs. Parker, the landlady. “An undertaker at your door, Doctor Garrette! I do hope nothing is amiss with your family?”

“Um, no, nothing of the kind,” Garrette said, dragging his voice from its hiding place in the shadows.
Damn the woman!

“A patient, then?” Mrs. Parker wheedled. “An unfortunate outcome to one of your treatments? I understand, even the best of doctors can only do so much when it comes to matters of mortality—”

“It is nothing,” Garrette began, his voice choked with exasperation to be rid of the over-inquisitive nuisance. “A private matter. Good day, Mrs. Parker.” And with that he gripped the undertaker’s shoulder, yanked him inside, and slammed the door in his landlady’s face.

As soon as he had the undertaker to himself, Garrette rounded upon him. “I told you to never come here in person!”

The undertaker’s grim-faced countenance never wavered. “I sent a boy three times to your door. He knocks but receives no reply. Perhaps, on future occasions, I should send him round with a note—”

“No! No notes. Nothing written. I have expressly told you so!”

“Then how, pray tell, am I to communicate with you?”

As he struggled for an answer, Garrette threw a quick glance back at the door to the inner room. To his relief, it was shut. He had remembered to close the door behind him. But what if the children began to call? He must be rid of the undertaker as quickly as possible. When he looked back, Garrette was alarmed to see that the undertaker’s eyes had followed his gaze to the door of his cupboard and lingered upon it, clearly speculating as to what lay inside. His heart kicked in his chest. “What is it?” he snarled. “What have you come for?”

The undertaker dragged his gaze from the door and met Garrette’s beady eyes. “My fee. The duel for which I recommended your services as attending physician. We had an agreement.”

“Yes.”

“The gentleman was wounded but survived.”

“Yes.”

“Therefore, he is still your patient.”

“He is.”

“Three pounds was the sum we settled upon.”

It was a lie: two pounds was the actual sum, but Garrette was frantic to be rid of the man. He snatched his Gladstone bag from the desk and opened it. As he did so the bank notes he had taken from Augustus Skinner’s top drawer spilled onto the floor. Garrette swooped down and snatched them up, but the undertaker clearly saw the notes and could likely guess their denomination by their size.

“It appears your practice is very profitable at the moment,” the undertaker said. “Clearly the gentleman requires a great deal of doctoring. Yet it looked as if he received but a simple flesh wound.”

Silas Garrette’s hands trembled with rage as he jammed the bills back inside his black bag. He peeled off a single bill—five pounds, he had nothing smaller—and dangled the note for the undertaker.

“Take it and go.”

The undertaker plucked the bill from Garrette’s hand, folded it carefully, and slipped it into a pocket. The ghost of a smirk rippled across his features for an instant before his face resettled into the placid lake of mournful sobriety. “I shall trouble you no more, then.” And with that he turned to go. But as he palmed the doorknob, he paused and turned back to the doctor.

“Ah, there is some other business.”

“What?” Garrette snapped.

“A duel. Tomorrow morning at dawn. The usual place, Wimbledon Common. Once again the seconds have asked me to provide an attending doctor. Are you free… or shall I find another physician?”

Garrette’s hatred for the man was temporarily eclipsed by the greed that flared in his chest.

“No. Yes. That is, I shall be there.”

“Good. Then we must hope for a happy outcome. Perhaps one duelist will die and the other be grievously wounded, so that we may both profit equally.”

Silas Garrette said nothing as the office door opened and he watched the back of Death’s ambassador step through it. He banged the door shut after him and turned the key in the lock, securing the door. He detested the fact that he was reliant upon the undertaker. Involving another in his affairs always posed a risk, and yet he needed another source of income—and soon.

Augustus Skinner was clearly about to take a turn for the worse.

“
If your nightmare had a nightmare, it would look like Mordecai Fowler,” that was how the saying went in the Seven Dials Rookery.

The “rookeries” were underworld strongholds, slum-land enclaves inhabited by entire communities of criminals and their women and children. Rookeries existed in virtually every large city, including Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and especially London, which was home to several. The most notorious of these was the Seven Dials, a squalid huddle of smoking chimneys and grime-blackened buildings that seemed to have been formed of filth and soot. Snaking through the Seven Dials was a labyrinth of narrow alleyways that wound through a dismal clutter of shabby forecourts, decrepit tenements, dilapidated warehouses, and abandoned factories.

The eastern boundary of the Seven Dials was marked by a narrow canal the locals called “Filthy Ditch.” It had originally been a tidal stream, but now was little more than an open sewer, for it was used by the inhabitants of the rookery as a place to dump all their unwanteds: old rags, rubbish, rotting food, dead animals, human excrement, and the occasional abortion. In summer, the reek from Filthy Ditch often drifted as far as the Houses of Parliament where ministers, confronted by a symptom of urban blight too noisome even for them to ignore, would resolve to forward a motion to appoint a committee to conduct a study to look into cleaning up the ditch. But then the summer recess would begin, the members would return home to their constituencies in the countryside, and the matter would be quietly forgotten.

Guarded by ferocious guard dogs and gangs of club-wielding thugs, rookeries such as the Seven Dials were too dangerous even for London’s Metropolitan Police force to enter, except in large numbers and heavily armed. Even then, the prospect of actually catching a criminal once hidden in the warren of buildings was slim, for the denizens of the rookery had cut hidden escape hatches and doors through walls and ceilings, into cellars and out of roofs. At the first blast of a Peeler’s whistle, a fugitive could flee through a maze of secret passageways, skylights, manholes, trap doors, tunnels, cellars and hidden entrances and exits. Because of the danger, and the meager chance of actually making an arrest, the police shunned entering such places except under the most exceptional circumstances.

If it was dangerous for the police, then it was doubly so for the honest citizenry. Anyone foolish enough to enter the rookeries would be lucky to escape with his life. Once a Protestant missionary, newly returned from spreading The Word amongst the savages in Africa, entered the Seven Dials for the purposes of ministering to the poor. The hapless missionary soon found the natives of the Seven Dials far more savage than any he encountered in the Dark Continent. The women attacked him first, beating him insensible and stripping him naked. When their menfolk arrived, they completed the job by shaving the missionary’s head, ramming his mouth full of hot mustard, and hurling him into the reeking canal.

Unlike most of the denizens of the rookeries, Mordecai Fowler was the product of a respectable middle-class family. Few of his childhood memories of that time remained, and those that did were bleak. Fowler’s father, a bank officer, suffered from a weakness for the drink. After his drunkenness led to a discrepancy in the books of some thirty shillings (which was never found), he was sacked from the bank and subsequently plunged even more precipitously into the ravages of alcohol. Over the weeks that followed the family’s meager savings were exchanged for small glasses of gin which Fowler’s father tossed down his throat. Soon little Mordecai, scarcely six at the time, grew accustomed to hiding in the closet under the stairs with his mother while angry creditors pounded their fists upon the door. Mordecai saw his father only infrequently during that period, which was just as well, for on the occasions when he staggered home, drunk and railing, it would end with a beating for Mordecai and his mother, whose loud wailing would go on for hours.

With no money to pay for school, Mordecai was left to his own devices, and spent most of his days running wild on the streets around his home. Mordecai had no friends, and being unnaturally small for his age, soon became the target of local bullies. Soon he began to shun human company and spent most of his time by himself, playing in the alleyways behind his house. Here Mordecai found new friends that he, in turn, could bully—rats. The junior Fowler whiled away many happy hours crucifying them against walls, amputating their arms and legs with an old pair of scissors, or dousing them with paraffin and setting them alight so he could watch them run in wild circles. How their agonized squeals made little Mordecai laugh. His experiments soon diminished the local rat population enough to make them scarce, and then he became the terror of the neighborhood cats and dogs.

But it wasn’t just the power of life and death he wielded over the lesser creatures that fascinated little Mordecai. More intoxicating still was his ability to induce suffering. He applied himself to the pursuit of this knowledge with a diligence he had never shown at school. He knew exactly the right size of rock to tie to a cat before he threw it in the canal, so it would frantically paddle for long, agonizing minutes before exhausting itself and being pulled under. After physics came self-taught lessons in anatomy, as Mordecai knew which tendons to sever so that when he set fire to the dog, its hind legs dragged uselessly as it frantically sought to get away.

By the time he was nine years old, an age at which most middle-class boys were playing with tops, or cantering a broomstick horse up and down the hallways, little Mordecai could have taught the agents of the Inquisition a trick or two.

Then one day the police came to inform Mordecai’s mother that her husband’s body had been dredged from the canal where he had fallen in a drunken stupor. At the news, Fowler’s mother began a keening that continued for days. Once the news of his father’s death reached the family’s creditors, they descended upon the house like buzzards on carrion, for they knew there was little chance of being paid with the family breadwinner dead.

For Mordecai’s mother, the breaking point came when the court-appointed bailiffs entered the house with a warrant to take away the family silver, the only items of value the family still possessed. Shrieking and wailing, she had to be restrained by police officers as bailiffs stuffed the plates, tureens, cutlery, and serving trays into canvas sacks and lugged them out. By this time the house was bare to the floorboards, and Mordecai and his mother were sleeping on bundles of rags. After the episode of the silver, Mordecai’s mother fell into a distraction, and wandered the house, moaning and sighing as she wrung an old polishing rag in her hands, her long gray hair hanging down in dishevelment.