The Strangler Vine (37 page)

It was a cold, bleak day, and the sooty brick of the city made it seem all the greyer. I had not long returned from India, and years in hot climes had lost me the habit of English cold. I pulled my coat more tightly around me and checked my pocket watch for the tenth or twelfth time. I did not wish to be late.

It was only the second time I had ever been to London. The first had been when I was a child. I recalled almost nothing of it save that we had visited my rich, scowling great-uncle at his gloomy abode in Golden Square – a place which greatly disappointed me as I had expected it actually to be golden – and I had seen a hurdy-gurdy man with a dancing dog in the street. This time, I had been in London less than a day and, while I marvelled at it, I also felt I was not entirely fitted for the capital and its overwhelming deluge of sensations, nor for the whole brave new world that I had encountered since my return from India.

I had left England a country traversed by horse and carriage; I had returned to find it in thrall to steam and iron.

The day before, I had taken my first train journey, riding the Exeter mail-coach to catch the Great Western Railway at Swindon, bound for the Paddington terminus. I had sat on the wooden pews of the second-class carriage and watched the air fill with steam, felt the thrust of speed, heard the clank and chug of the wheels on the rail, and watched the curious effect of the countryside melting into a blur of green as it rushed past the window, or rather as we rushed past it. We had reached a speed of thirty miles an hour. It was remarkable and thrilling, and yet it left me ill at ease. I had grown up in Devon and was accustomed to slower, country ways. We had threshing machines of course, but the women and children still gleaned the fields after harvest. Mills, mines and steam machinery had all been a very distant prospect. Now the whole country seemed
to be hurtling towards an unpredictable future of engines, belching chimneys and noise – noise everywhere. It was a world I did not recognize and one in which I was not sure I had a place.

Of course, London stirred and excited me too. I was lodged in the most fashionable part of town, in handsome rooms equipped with every convenience, at the Oriental Club in Hanover Square. I had admired Trafalgar Square and the slowly rising girth of the column to Nelson. I had walked down Whitehall to observe the foundations of the new Houses of Parliament. Everywhere ambitious new constructions were rising up. But I was also unsettled by the chaos and scale of the city, its crowded raucous streets, and the sense of being alone in a vast multitude of unsmiling faces. Nor was I overfond of the city’s particular kind of ubiquitous, black grime – an oily, sooty extrusion that seemed to bear little relation to country dirt.

I emerged from the Blackwall railway terminus – an elegant new brick building with a hotel and custom house attached, rather incongruous against the rough landscape behind – on to the East India dock road. I consulted the scrap of paper on which my directions were written and walked towards the great stone gateway of the East India dock itself, which loomed like the entrance to some stolid Hindoo palace. I had been brought here by my second train journey – from the Tower of London on the Blackwall railway. This had provided glimpses of a meaner London: a moving picture of shabby streets, half-finished terraces and dilapidated workshops; then, as we moved further from the city, scrubby marsh, broken fences and overgrown market gardens half shrouded by murky, low-lying wisps of fog; and vast stretches of open dock filled with masts and populated by beetling stevedores.

The walls of the East India docks were pasted thick with bills, most of them advertising the lower sort of popular papers such as the
Ironist
,
Bell’s Life in London
and
Woundy’s Illustrated Weekly
. In the lea of the walls, small sheds and shacks served drink and tobacco, and a crowd of poor-looking sailors and stevedores clustered around them. On my side of the highway there was a new church, an old timber-framed house and, next to it, a rickety, smoke-blackened
edifice that announced itself in large faded letters as ‘The Hindoostanee Coffee House and Seamen’s Hostel’: my destination.

The door was stiff and rattled. I found I was slightly breathless. I pushed past a thick canvas curtain and entered a dim-lit room of exposed brick. There were perhaps twenty or thirty men seated at tables, eating. It took me a moment to take in that all were Indian natives. Rushing between the tables, two or three more young Indian natives carried bowls and collected plates. The air was thick, warm and slightly fetid, a familiar marriage of perspiration and curry smells that I had not expected to encounter again. I removed my coat, hat and gloves. No one paid me any mind.

Most of the diners were dressed in the thin calicoes and canvases of the southern oceans that would have provided little comfort against the bitter cold outside. Some looked quite ragged, and in far from good health. There was a low buzz of talk, but mostly they simply ate, with a dedication that bespoke considerable hunger. I concluded they must be Lascar sailors come in from the docks. Puzzled, I looked about again, more carefully. In a fireplace at the far end of the room, a large grate overflowed with glowing embers. Above it hung a wooden crucifix with a painted sign attached to it which read ‘Jesus saves’. To the left of the fireplace in a corner sat a lone European eating his dinner. He seemed as down-at-heel as the Lascars around him.

It was over three years since we had last met.

He was scooping up his stew with shreds of rotee, eating in a calm, methodical manner, and had about him the insistently solitary, aloof quality that until that moment I had quite forgotten. The surge of concern and pleasure I had felt was succeeded by a twinge of unease. I ignored it and pushed my way through the close-set tables towards him, and when I reached the table I said warmly, ‘Jeremiah!’

‘Captain Avery.’ He looked up, his expression guarded.

‘Mr Blake,’ I mumbled. Involuntarily, I took a step backward.

‘Sit down,’ he said, gesturing with his piece of bread, and returned to his food.

I pulled out a chair and wedged myself in, looking for somewhere
to place my coat and hat, electing at last for my own lap, and attempted to quell my feeling of bitter dismay. I realized that I had forgotten more about Jeremiah Blake than I had remembered, and cursed myself for a fool for having dropped everything and rushed to London.

A plate was set down before me along with a steaming bowl of curry and another of rice, from which Blake began to help himself. Reluctantly, I put a spoonful of curry upon my plate and took a furtive look at my companion. He seemed to me frail and more lined than I remembered, and his skin was slightly clammy. He kept his left hand, with its two missing fingers, under the table. His clothes looked hardly sufficient against the cold. His rusty, threadbare suit had clearly been through several owners; the waistcoat had lost all but one button, and the neckerchief – closer to yellow than white – was pinned on, probably to hide a tattered shirt beneath. I was suddenly reminded of Mr Dickens’s painful descriptions of the London ‘shabby-genteel’. On the table next to him was a small bundle that included a battered hat and a ragged muffler and what Mr Dickens might have described as ‘the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves’.

My mind teemed with questions. What had become of him? How was he earning his living – was he, indeed, earning his living at all? How had he learned I had returned from India? For the moment I felt too awkward to ask any of them.

Blake looked up suddenly and fixed me with an appraising stare.

‘What is this place?’ I said.

‘Hostel for Lascar seamen,’ he said. Then he scooped another mouthful of curry on to his rotee and put it into his mouth.

‘So,’ I tried again. ‘Three years. More.’

Blake nodded.

‘How have you been?’

‘Well enough. You were in Afghanistan,’ he said, deflecting my question.

I remembered how much he disliked talking about himself, and I nodded.

‘Decorated for bravery, promoted to Captain, I heard.’

‘Yes.’ I shifted uneasily.

‘Papers say the war’s going well.’

‘Is it?’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I do not keep up.’

‘And you married Miss Larkbridge.’

I did not wonder how he knew these things, and I was not surprised that he did.

‘We are expecting our first child. That is to say …’ I stopped, not wanting to say more. ‘It was one of the reasons we decided to return home.’

I half expected him to press me on the matter, but he said nothing. Silence. Long pauses, I recalled, did not discomfit Jeremiah Blake. He leaned back and wiped his hands on a handkerchief he drew from his pocket. I could not forebear to look for the two stumps on his left hand, but the movement was swift and then he wrapped his right hand over the left, so it was impossible to see the missing fingers. He tapped his right forefinger on his left knuckle and looked at me. His hands seemed somewhat red and chafed, but it was hard to be sure if this denoted he had fallen on hard times or was simply due to the ravages of the winter.

‘Have you,’ I said, casting around for a subject, ‘visited Mr Haydon’s painting at the Egyptian Hall?’

‘
The Death of Mountstuart?
’ He shook his head. ‘You?’

‘I went yesterday. There was an hour’s queue to see it.’

‘And?’ said Blake. He took another bite of rotee.

‘Let us say it is lively rather than accurate.’

Mr Benjamin Haydon, the history painter, was exhibiting a large canvas purporting to show the now notorious ambush and murder of the poet and adventurer Xavier Mountstuart by a gang of Hindoostanee bandits known as Thugs. Death had transformed Mountstuart into a saint and a martyr, famous and revered across Europe. In the painting, he lay in the foreground, reclining on the ground in a beautifully laundered white shirt, one arm raised in elegant defiance, as a mass of bloodthirsty Thugs attack him with knives. To the left, in the background, two other Europeans fought off a
battalion of savages with pistols. Jeremiah Blake and I were those two Europeans, the only living witnesses to what had actually taken place.

‘Mr Haydon wrote to me in India,’ I said, ‘asking for an account of what happened. He said he wanted
colore.
’

‘Didn’t listen to you then.’

‘I said that I could not help him. I did not get the impression he would much have appreciated my version. Besides, I do not like to talk of it. I assumed he must have approached you.’

‘Mmm,’ said Blake noncommittally.

We met each other’s gaze at last.

I said, ‘Are you in trouble, Blake? Is that why you wrote to me? Forgive me, but I cannot but notice you seem, well, not exactly flushed with good fortune. I mean, finding you here, among these poor wretches, I …’ I trailed off, not sure how to proceed. ‘If you are in straitened circumstances, please, Jeremiah, let me be of assistance.’

For the first time he looked almost amused. ‘No,’ he said.

‘No, you will not accept my help?’ I said.

‘No, I am perfectly well, William. I eat here because I like it. It reminds me of the street stalls in Calcutta. I talk to the sailors, keep up my Hindoostanee. And when he’s minded, Mohammed cooks the best Bengali food in London.’

‘Indeed?’ I said. I glanced doubtfully down at the dark brown mess on the plate before me. It did not smell too bad. ‘I have taken rooms at the Oriental Club. They say it has the best curry chef in England – you really should let me take you.’

‘No,’ said Blake.

‘No?’

‘I’ll never set foot in that place.’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Foolish of me to ask. But, Blake, I have to say, you do not look well. And your clothes are …’

‘I’ve had a bout of fever,’ he said irritably. ‘That’s all. It returns every so often. Especially in winter.’

‘Well, you have managed to mystify me entirely, Blake. I have no idea why we are here, save that you have a taste for the cooking, nor
why I have journeyed the seventeen hours from Devon to London. You should know that when I received your letter I dropped everything and came at once. I suppose I should not be surprised. But I think you might oblige me with some explanation.’

‘I wrote to you because I have an appointment with someone who wishes to meet you too.’

‘Me?’ I said, bemused.

‘You may decide you don’t want to meet him, but since you’re here …’

‘Someone in London who wants to meet me?’ I said stupidly.

‘Viscount Allington.’

‘The Evangelical?’ I said, even more puzzled.

Blake nodded.

‘He asked for me? For us?’

‘He has some particular work – a case, a task – for you and me. But you’re under no obligation to take part. You can leave if you want.’

‘You and me? But how …’

‘Theophilus Collinson knew you’d returned. Recommended you.’ As he said the name, Blake’s expression darkened. We had both had dealings with Collinson, the former head of the East India Company’s secret department, before his return to London. In India, it had been said that he had a finger in every curry. Blake did not trust Collinson, but he had offered him his patronage in London. At the time Blake had declined it. I was flattered, and at the same time experienced a pang of disappointment. It was not Blake who had summoned me at all.