The Difference Engine (39 page)

“See what her paddle-wheels do!” Tom marveled. “That river-water must be thick as neat’s-foot jelly . . . ”

No one saw fit to remark on this observation. Fraser pointed downstream. “Listen, lads. Some rods away lies a deep-dredged channel. It leads into the moorings for the West India Docks. With the river this low, with luck, a man might creep through that channel, to emerge within the docks unseen.”

“Walk o’ er the mud o’ the shore, you mean to say,” Mallory said.

“No!” Brian cried. “There must be another stratagem!”

Fraser shook his head. “I know those docks. They’ve an eight-foot wall about ‘em, topped by a very sharp cheval-de-frise. There are loading-gates, and a rail-head, too, but they’ll be close-guarded sure. Swing chose well. The place is nigh a fortress.”

Brian shook his head. “Won’t Swing guard the river, too?”

“Doubtless,” Fraser said, “but how many men will stand sharp lockout over this stinking mud, for Swing or anyone else?”

Mallory nodded, convinced. “He’s right, lads.”

“But it’ll daub us neck to foot with smeechy filth!” Brian protested.

“We’re not made o’ sugar,” Mallory grunted.

“But my uniform, Ned! D’ye know what this dress-coatee cost me?”

“I’ll swap ye my gurney for that shiny gold braid,” Tom told him.

Brian stared at his younger brother, and winced.

“Then we must strip for it, lads,” Mallory commanded, shrugging out of his jacket. “Like we were farm-hands, a-pitching sweet hay on a nice Sussex morn. Hide that city finery in the rubble, and be quick about it.”

Mallory stripped to the waist, tucked his pistol in the belt of his rolled-up trousers, and lowered himself down the embankment wall. He half-slid, half-hopped to the evil mud below.

   The river-bank was as hard and dry as brick. Mallory laughed aloud. The others joined him, Brian coming last. Brian kicked a cracked dinner-plate of mud with his waxed and polished boot. “Damme for a fool,” he said, “to let you talk me out of uniform!”

“Pity!” Tom taunted. “Yell never launder the sawdust out o’ that fancy forage-cap.”

Fraser, removing his collar now, was in white shirt and braces — surprisingly dandyish items, of watered scarlet silk. A new shoulder-holster of pale chamois held a stout little pepperbox pistol. Mallory noted the bulge of a neat padded bandage beneath the shirt and strap. “Don’t go griping, lads,” Fraser said, leading the way. “Some folk pass their very lives in the mud of the Thames.”

“Who’s that then?” asked Tom.

“Mudlarks,” Fraser told him, picking his way. “Winter and summer, they slog up to their middles, in the mud o’ low tide. Hunting lumps o’ coal, rusty nails, any river-rubbish that will fetch a penny.”

“Are you joking?” Tom asked.

“Children mostly,” Fraser persisted calmly, “and a deal of feeble old women.”

“I don’t believe you,” Brian said. “If you told me Bombay or Calcutta, I might grant it. But not London!”

“I didn’t say the wretches were British,” Fraser said. “Your mudlarks are foreigners, mostly. Poor refugees.”

“Well, then,” Tom said, relieved.

They tramped on silently, breathing as best they could. Mallory’s nose had clogged solid and his throat was thick with phlegm. It was a relief of sorts, to be spared the sense of smell.

Brian was still muttering, a monotone to match their tramping step. “Britain’s a sight too hospitable to all these damn foreign refugees. If I’d my way, I’d transport the lot to Texas . . . ”

“All the fish here must be dead, eh?” said Tom, stooping to rip up a china-hard platter of mud. He showed Mallory a mash of flattened fish-bones embedded in it. “Look, Ned — the very image of your fossils!”

They reached an obstacle a few yards on, a dredger’s muddy hollow, half-filled with black silt, marbled with veins of vile pale grease like the lees from a pan of bacon. There was no help for it but to leap and dodge and splash across the ditch, and Brian had the evil luck to miss his footing. He came up foully smeared, flicking muck from his hands and cursing wildly in what Mallory took to be Hindustani.

Beyond the ditch, the crust grew treacherous, plates of dried mud skidding or crumbling underfoot, over a pitchy, viscous muck full of ooze and bubbling gas-pockets. But there was worse luck yet at the entrance-channel to the Docks. Here the channel’s banks were close-packed tarred pilings, slick with greenish fur and oily damp, rising fifteen feet above the water-line. And the water itself, which filled the broad channel from bank to bank, was a chilly grey sump, seemingly bottomless, writhing with leg-thick wads of viridian slime.

It was an impasse. “Now what’s our course?” asked Mallory grimly. “Swim?”

“Never!” Brian shouted, his eyes reddened and wild.

“Scale the walls, then?”

“We can’t,” Tom groaned, with a hopeless look at the slimy pilings. “We can scarcely breathe!”

“I wouldn’t wash my hands in that damn water!” Brian cried. “And my hands are caked in stinking muck!”

“Stow it!” Fraser said. “Swing’s men will hear you sure. If they catch us down here, we’ll be shot like dogs! Stow it, and let me think!”

“My God, the Stink!” Brian cried, ignoring him. He seemed near panic. “It’s worse than a transport — worse than a Russki trench! Christ Jesus, I saw ‘em bury week-old pieces of Russki at Inkermann, and that smelled better than this!”

“Knife it!” Fraser whispered. “I hear something.”

Footsteps. The tramp of a group of men, coming nearer. “They’ve got us,” Fraser said in sharp desperation, gazing up the sheer wall and putting a hand to his pistol. “Our number’s up — sell your lives dear, lads!”

But in one moment — a series of instants shaved so thin as to be normally useless to the human mind — inspiration blew through Mallory like a gust of Alpine wind.

“Don’t,” he commanded the others, in a voice of iron conviction. “Don’t look up. Do as I do!”

Mallory began to sing a chantey, loudly, drunkenly.

” ‘At Santiago love is kind,

And we’ll forget those left behind —

So kiss us long, and kiss us well,

Polly and Meg and Kate and Nell — ‘ ”

“C’mon, you lads!” he urged cheerily, with a boozy wave of his arm. Tom and Brian, direly puzzled, chimed in the chorus, faltering and belated.

” ‘Farewell, farewell, you jolly young girls,

We’re off to Rio Bay!’”

“Next verse!” Mallory crowed.

” ‘At Vera Cruz the days are fine,

Farewell to Jane and Caroline . . .’ ”

“Ahoy!” came a brusque shout from the top of the wall. Mallory glanced up, in feigned surprise, to see foreshortened bodies. Half-a-dozen marauders were looming over them, rifles slung over their backs. The speaker crouched at the top of the pilings, his head and face swathed in kerchiefs of knotted silk paisley. He held a gleaming, long-barreled pistol, with seeming carelessness, across his knee. His trousers, of white duck, looked immaculate.

“Ahoy the shore!” Mallory shouted, craning his neck. He flung his arms wide in jovial greeting, and almost toppled backward. “How might we be o’ service to you flash gentlemen?”

“Here’s a conundrum!” the leader announced, in the elaborate tone of a man casting pearls of wit before swine. “Just how very lushed, how utterly well-pissed indeed, can four London pigeons be?” He raised his voice. “Can’t you smell that dreadful stench down there?”

“Surely!” Mallory said. “But we want to see the India Docks!”

“Why?” The word was cold.

Mallory laughed harshly. “Because it’s full of things we want, ain’t it? Stands to reason, don’t it?”

“Things like clean linen?” said one of the other men. There was laughter, mixed with grunts and coughing.

Mallory laughed too, and slapped his naked chest. “Why not! Can you lads help us? Throw us down a rope or the like!”

The leader’s eyes narrowed between his paisley wraps, and he tightened his grip on the pistol-butt. “You’re no sailor! A jack-tar never says ‘rope.’ Rather, he always says line’!”

“What’s it to you, what I am?” Mallory shouted, scowling up at the man. “Throw us a rope! Or a ladder! Or a bleeding balloon! Or else go to hell!”

“Jolly right!” Tom chimed in, his voice shaking. “Who needs you lot, anyway!”     The leader turned, his men vanishing with him. “Hurry up!” Mallory bellowed, as a parting shot. “You can’t keep all that fancy swag to yourselves, you know!”

Brian shook his head. “Jesus, Ned,” he whispered. “This is a damn tight pinch!”

“We’ll pass as looters,” Mallory said quietly. “We’ll pose as drunken rascals, primed for any kind of mischief! We’ll join their ranks, and make our way to Swing!”

“What if they ask us questions, Ned?”

“Act stupid.”

“Halloo!” came a shrill voice from above.

“What’s that?” Mallory cried roughly, looking up. It was a masked and scrawny boy of fifteen years or so, balanced atop the pilings with a rifle in his hands.

“Lord Byron’s dead!” the boy yelled.

Mallory was dumbstruck.

Tom shrilled out in the silence. “Who says he is?”

“It’s true! Old bastard’s kicked the bucket, he’s dead as mutton!” The boy laughed in giddy delight, and capered along the edge of the pilings with his rifle waggling over his head. He vanished with a leap.

Mallory found his voice. “Surely not.”

“No,” Fraser agreed.

“Not likely, anyway.”     “Wishful thinking on the part of these anarchists,” Fraser suggested.

There was a long, empty silence.

“Of course,” Mallory said, tugging his beard, “if the Great Orator truly is dead, then that means . . .” Words failed him in a foundering rush of confusion, but the others watched Mallory for guidance, silent and expectant. “Well . . .,” Mallory said, “the death of Byron would mark the end of an age of greatness!”

“It needn’t mean much at all,” Fraser objected, his voice under firm control. “There are many men of great talent in the Party. Charles Babbage yet lives! Lord Colgate, Lord Brunel . . . the Prince Consort for instance. Prince Albert is a sound and thoughtful man.”

“Lord Byron can’t be dead!” Brian burst out. “We’re standing in stinking mud, believing a stinking lie!”

“Quiet!” Mallory commanded. “We’ll simply have to suspend any judgment on this matter until we have firm evidence!”

“Ned’s right,” nodded Tom. “The Prime Minister would have wanted it that way! That’s the scientific method. That was what Lord Byron always taught us . . . ”

A thick, tarred rope, its end knotted in a fat noose, came snaking down the wall. The anarchist lieutenant — the dainty man with the paisley kerchiefs — posed one bent leg atop the wall, with his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. “Put your arse in that, my friend,” he suggested, “and we’ll hoist you up in a trice!”

“I thank you kindly!” Mallory said. He waved with cheery confidence and stepped into the noose.

When the tug came, he braced his mud-caked shoes against the slick and nasty timbers, and stamped his way up, and over the top.

The leader tossed the emptied noose back down, with a kid-gloved hand. “Welcome, sir, to the august company of the vanguard of mankind. Permit me, under the circumstances, to introduce myself. I am the Marquess of Hastings.” The self-styled Marquess bowed slightly, then struck a pose, chin cocked, one gloved fist poised on his hip.

Mallory saw that the fellow was in earnest.

The title of Marquess was a relic from the years before the Rads, yet here was a young pretender of some sort, a living fossil, alive and in command of this vipers’ crew! Mallory could scarcely have been more startled to see a young plesiosaur lift its snaky head from the depths of the stinking Thames.

“Lads,” drawled the young Marquess, “pour some of that Cologne over our pungent friend! If he does anything stupid, you know what to do.”

“Shoot him?” someone blurted, idiotically.

The Marquess winced elaborately — an actor’s gesture indicating a breach of taste. A boy in a stolen copper’s helmet and a ripped silk shirt slopped chill Cologne from a cut-glass bottle over Mallory’s bare neck and back.

Brian rose next, at the end of the rope. “Those are soldier’s trousers, under that muck,” the Marquess observed. “Absent without leave, comrade?”

Brian shrugged mutely.

“Enjoying your little holiday in London?” Brian nodded like a fool.

“Give this filthy personage new trousers,” the Marquess commanded. He looked about his little troupe of six, who were once again lowering the line with the clumsy enthusiasm of a May Day tug-o’-war. “Comrade Shillibeer! You’re about this man’s size — give him your trousers.”

“Aw, but Comrade Markiss —”

“To each according to his needs. Comrade Shillibeer! Doff the garment at once.”

Shillibeer climbed clumsily out of his trousers and proffered them up. He wore no undergarments, and he tugged nervously at his shirt-tails with one hand.

“For heaven’s sake,” the Marquess said quizzically, “must I tell you sheepish dullards every little thing?” He pointed sharply to Mallory. “You! Take Shillibeer’s place and haul that line. You, soldier — no longer the oppressor’s minion, but a man entirely free! — put on Shillibeer’s trousers. Comrade Shillibeer, quit that wriggling. You have nothing of which to be ashamed. You may go at once to the general depot for fresh garments.”

“Thank you, sir!”

” ‘Comrade,’ ” the Marquess corrected. “Get something nice, Shillibeer. And bring more Cologne.”

Tom came up next. Mallory helping with the heaving. The bandits were badly hampered by their clattering, poorly slung rifles. These were general-issue Victoria carbines, heavy single-shot relics now consigned to native troops in the Colonies. The rioters were rendered yet more clumsy by fearsome kitchen-knives and home-made truncheons, stuffed at random into their looted finery. They wore gaudy scarves, sweaty silks, Army bandoliers, and more resembled Turkish bashi-bazouks than any kind of Briton. Two of them were scarcely more than boys, while another pair were thick-set, lumpish, thievish rascals, sodden with drink. The last, to Mallory’s continued surprise, was a slender, silent Negro, in the quiet dress of a gentleman’s valet.

The Marquess of Hastings examined Tom. “What is your name?”