The Ebb Tide (3 page)

“His response was to hit me with a length of lead pipe. Quick as a snake. Perfectly unnecessary. I hadn’t so much as twitched.”

“The stinking pig,” Tubby said, and of course we all voiced our agreement, but what I wanted to know was, what about the map, the real map? Merton had it safe as a baby, it turned out—rolled up, tied neatly with a bit of string, and thrust into the open mouth of a stuffed armadillo in the window. No thief, he informed us, would think to look for valuables inside an armadillo.

Merton leered at us for a moment, making us wait, and then said, “Fancy having a squint at it?” He was enjoying himself immensely now. He was resilient, I’ll say that for him, but perhaps too enamored of his own cleverness, which the ancients warns us against. Still, he had done what he could to help St. Ives, and had nearly had his skull crushed into the bargain. He was a good man, and no doubt about it, and his ruse de la guerre seemed to have worked. He helped himself to a third glass of brandy, which he drank off with a sort of congratulatory relish before fetching the map out of the maw of the preposterous scaled creature nearby. He handed it to St. Ives, who slipped off the string and unrolled it delicately. After a moment he looked up at Hasbro and I and nodded. “It’s as we thought,” he said.

Just then the door swung open and Finn Conrad came in carrying meat pies and bottled ale, and, it turned out, most of St. Ives’s money. St. Ives slipped the map into his coat while Finn set down his burden, handed back the bulk of the coins, and advised the Professor (begging his pardon for saying so) not to be quite so liberal with people he didn’t know, not in London, leastways, although it mightn’t be a problem in the smaller towns, where people were more honest, on the whole.

My appetite had fled when I saw Merton bleeding on the floor, but it returned now in spades, and that apparently went double for Tubby, who crushed half a pie into his mouth like an alligator eating a goat, and then settled back into his chair for some serious consumption, the rest of us not far behind him. Tomorrow morning, St. Ives told us, we would take a look into the Goat and Cabbage, if Finn would be so kind as to show us the way. Finn said that nothing would give him more pleasure, and then pointed out that someone should guard the shop tonight in Merton’s absence, and much to Merton’s credit he said that he would be quite happy if Finn would make up the settee in the workroom, and sleep with one eye open and one hand on the shillelagh in case the rogues returned.

“Out the back door and over the wall at the first sound of trouble, that’s my advice,” I told him, and Hasbro echoed  the sentiment.

St. Ives was doubtful about leaving the boy alone in the shop at all, now that he knew something more of the men who possessed the false map.

“The stolen item,” St. Ives said to Merton,” “you say it’s a…
satisfactory
specimen?”

“Oh,
much
better than satisfactory, I should say,” Merton said, grinning. “
Considerably
better. Not that I claim to know anything about the art of…reproduction.” He had been going to say “forgery,” but there was no reason to utter the word with the lad standing by.
Reproduction
said rather too much, it seemed to me at the time. Certainly there was no profit, and perhaps some danger, in Finn’s knowing things he didn’t need to know. St. Ives, sensibly, brought the conversation to a close.

And so we locked young Finn safely into the shop and went out into the evening to see Merton home, where we delivered him safely to Mrs. Merton, he having fully recovered his spirits, and with an extra measure into the bargain. Mrs. Merton gasped to see the bloody bandage on her husband’s head, but Merton was markedly indifferent to it. “Happy to be of service,” he said to St. Ives, saluting. “I’ll do my part!” We assured him that he already had and left him smiling gloriously on the doorstep.

In the morning Finn was already up and working when St. Ives, Hasbro, and I returned. Tubby had domestic duties and hadn’t come along, which turned out to be to our advantage, given what happened later, although I’m getting ahead of myself. Finn had shelved the fallen books, made an orderly stack of the papers, swept the place out, and was soaking the blood out of Merton’s lab coat, which, he said, wanted cold water and not hot so as not to “set the stain,” which was something else he had learned during his years in the circus, where he had put in his time in the laundry. “All shipshape,” he told us.

We breakfasted along Thames Street on kippers and eggs and beans, and then set out with Finn walking far on ahead, which was Hasbro’s idea. No one would associate the boy with us, you see, when we were in the neighborhood of the Goat and Cabbage, and I was reminded once again that there might be some danger in our undertaking. To tell you the truth, it had begun to seem more like a holiday to me.

Chapter 3
The Goat and Cabbage

Lower Thames Street from the Pool to the Tower is busy night and day, with cargo coming off the ships and going onto them, and shops open, and fishmongers hauling carts and pushing hand barrows of whiting and oysters and plaice and whelks toward Billingsgate Market, which smelled of brine and seaweed and, of course, fish. All manner of trade goods and all manner of people crept up and down, jostling in and out of coffeehouses and shops, intent on doing business or on getting in the way of other people doing theirs. I was knocked sideways by a grimacing man with an unlikely large and wet bag of oysters over his shoulder, and knocked back again by a donkey hauling a cart of herring barrels, but nobody meant any harm and it struck me as rather agreeable than otherwise to be out and about on a busy spring morning, last night’s blustery cold having given up and gone back to whence it came.

In all that seething crowd we lost sight of Finn, but then saw him again, lounging against a store front, eating something out of his hand, giving the last of it to a mongrel dog and setting out again without so much as a look in our direction, the dog at his heels. Half a block farther along, I smelled a waft of pipe tobacco, Sobranie again. The tobacco isn’t all that rare, but it naturally put me in mind of the tall workman in Lambert Court last night. Then I thought of the small man who had been with him earlier in the evening, and then of Merton’s description of his apelike assailant and of the tall man from the pub in Poulton-le-Sands, and suddenly, like a bonk on the conk, it didn’t feel like a holiday any longer as the truth rushed in upon me. The two men in Lambert Court yesterday evening weren’t the navvies they had appeared to be. One had evidently stayed behind to keep an eye on us, and the other had gone down to the embankment to beat poor Merton over the head with a pipe. Hasbro’s untimely entrance must have complicated things for them, and yet they had managed to remain one step ahead of us.

Abruptly I wished I had taken along the leaded cane, and I looked around, trying to catch sight of the pipe smoker while I was revealing all this to St. Ives, who narrowed his eyes and nodded at me. But I saw no one who might be our man, or our men. Soon we drew abreast of a narrow alley that angled away toward the river. Finn was just then buying a bag of hot chestnuts from a man with a kettle on wheels, and he nodded discreetly up the alley, where there hung a weather-battered sign depicting the head of a goat wearing a cabbage leaf cap.

There was nothing for it but to push through the door into the fug of the gin shop, which was busy enough for that hour of the morning. A man was singing “Pretty Mary Tumblehome” in a voice like a broken cartwheel, and there was a good deal of low talk, which staggered just a little when walked in. It evened out again when we three trespassers had navigated the tavern and found calmer water in a corridor beyond.

There were a couple of straw pallets along the near wall of the first room off the corridor, and a chamber pot, and boxes of destitute old junk that you might see for sale in a two penny stall in Monmouth Street. Against the far wall stood a heavy oaken wardrobe with a broad, high door, considerably scarred and black with age—nothing that interested us in the least. We jibbed without a word, angling back out into the dark corridor, sailing past other dead-end rooms and none the wiser for any of it. Evidently we had come on a fool’s errand.

“They’ll no doubt find
us
soon enough,” St. Ives said, shrugging, and he turned back down the corridor with us following, anxious to gain the street—or at least I was. But Hasbro stopped outside the room with the wooden wardrobe, cocking his head as if listening to something.

“Commodious wardrobe,” he said in a low voice.

“Just so,” St. Ives said. “Just so.” He darted a glance up and down the corridor. “Jacky, watch the door,” he whispered. “Give us a whistle if anyone appears.”

But there was no need to whistle, because no one, apparently, was interested in us, a fact that had begun to seem peculiar to me. The entire mob had been aware of our entering the place. Someone, you’d suppose, would begin to wonder what we were about. I looked back to see Hasbro fiddling at the lock with a piece of wire and St. Ives endeavoring to see behind the wardrobe, which appeared to be pressed tightly against the wall, perhaps affixed to it. I wondered why the wardrobe would be locked at all, but just as the question came into my mind, the door swung open to reveal that it was utterly empty.

“Interior lock,” Hasbro said, indicating an iron latch that was attached to the inside of the door, identical to and directly behind the outside latch. There was a key in it, which Hasbro removed and slipped into his pocket.

St. Ives reached in and pushed on the panel at the back of the wardrobe, fiddling with the mouldings, and very shortly the panel slid sideways to reveal a dark passageway beyond. Without an instant’s hesitation St. Ives stepped through the door and ducked into the passage, waving at us to follow. I was quick enough to comply, half of my mind worrying that someone from the tavern would look in to see what we were up to, the other half worrying that they hadn’t already done so.

I glimpsed a precipice ahead—stairs leading downward beyond a small landing, more or less in the direction of the river. St. Ives was already descending along a rusty iron railing. Hasbro followed behind me, swinging the wardrobe door closed, the passage instantly disappearing into utter darkness. I heard him step out onto the landing, and then the panel in the wall at his back slid into place with a clicking sound.

“Steady-on,” St. Ives said from somewhere below.

There was a cool updraft, and a wet, musty smell that might have been the river itself. I heard what sounded like the roar and hiss of a boiler letting out steam. “Can you find your way, sir?” Hasbro whispered into my ear in a disembodied sort of voice.

I told him I could, and I stepped off, one foot in front of the other, gripping the railing with one hand and feeling my way along the wall like a blind man with the other, hoping that no rotten stair tread would catapult me into the abyss. Soon, however, I found that I could see tolerably well. There was light somewhere below, which brightened as we descended.

A vast room—more a cavern than a room—opened out, and we paused for a moment to take in the sight below us. The floor lay at a depth that must have been beneath or near the level of the river. On that floor lay two strange undersea craft set on stocks, one of them evidently half built. Roundabout them lay a litter of metal panels, casks of rivets, and heavy glass sheets in wooden racks. One of the ships was the length of a yacht, and might have been completely built for all I could see in that dim light, with a shape that reminded one of an oceangoing prehistoric monster—finny appendages and convex, eyelike portholes. The other vessel was smaller, just a shell, really, of a similar craft. Some distance away stood a third craft, exceedingly strange and unlikely, a sort of elongated orb standing on bent iron legs—apparently an underwater diving chamber. It had nothing of the diving bell about it, but was altogether more delicate, built of what appeared to be copper and glass, and probably capable of independent movement, if the jointed, stork-like legs and feet were any indication.

A few feet beyond that lay a broad pool of dark water, the lamplight glinting off little eddies and swirls on its otherwise still surface, as if it were flowing eastward, perhaps a subterranean channel of the Thames, or a backwater of one of the underground rivers that transect the city—the Walbrook, perhaps, or a branch of the Fleet.

The ceiling soared away overhead, supported by arches of heavy, cut stone. There were gaslight lamps some distance up the walls, with iron ladders leading up past them to a web of narrow walkways. The walkways ran hither and yon far above our heads, linking platforms on which lay what appeared to be tools and crates, perhaps shipbuilding paraphernalia, too dim in the gaslight to make out clearly from where we stood near the base of the stairs. The platforms, evidently, could be raised and lowered: they dangled from heavy chains that angled away in a complicated, block and tackle system. The boiler and coal oven of an immense steam engine hissed and glowed beyond.

We were apparently alone in the room, and we descended the last few steps warily, the bottom stair-tread hanging a foot above the stone floor, held aloft by heavy chains suspended from above. The entire bottom flight shuddered with our movements like a ship in a cross sea. I was on the lookout for some sort of activity, and a little surprised (I speak for myself again) not to find any, especially with the boiler stoked and glowing. No one with legitimate business in this vast place would have any reason to hide. We were the intruders, after all, just as we had been intruders in the gin shop above.

St. Ives, however, didn’t have the air of an intruder. He stepped down off the precarious stairway and walked eagerly to the half-built ship on the stocks. “A submarine vessel in the making!” he said, his mind instantly taken up with questions of science and engineering. He pointed at slabs of neatly stacked grey stone, weighted down by pigs of iron. The stone looked as if it had been cut out of blocks of sea foam. “Pumice,” he said. “Do you see this, Hasbro? They’ve cut it into slices and encased it within the aluminium shell. Ingenious.” He stood looking for a moment at a tub full of water nearby. Wires looped down into either end of the tub, dangling beneath floating rubber bladders with tubes running out of them. “They’re producing hydrogen gas,” he muttered, rubbing his chin. “I believe they’re pumping it into the shell of the craft to further increase buoyancy. But what motive power? Electricity, surely, but what source…?” He went on this way, peering into recesses of the craft, talking mainly to himself, pointing out incomprehensible odds and ends, apparently having forgotten what we’d come for.