The Vice Society (46 page)

And what is that noisily chattering group there on the Southwark shore: a number of dock workers pulling a figure from the freezing waters and laying its sodden form upon the mud. Does anyone know his name? Yes – he is none other than the mariner Ned Coffin: the only Holywell-street witness unaccounted for. By the looks of his bloated and rotting corpse, he has been in the river for some time. In fact, during that entire period when the constables of the city were urgently seeking his testimony, he had been dead the whole time, having toppled into the waters that very same night owing to a surfeit of rum. Such are the vagaries of fate.

Looking further afield, we see a man standing over a freshly dug grave at one of those airy new burial grounds at the edge of the city. The soil is dark against the snow and the bare black branches rake the frigid wind. We cannot see the man’s face, though he is rather slight in build and his legs are a little bowed from his years of walking the city streets. He wears a black coat and a top hat. The name on the gravestone, which nestles in consecrated ground, is newly chiselled: Katherine Williamson.

There is one more. He is passing from Ludgate-hill past the blackened visage of St Paul’s and into the darkness of Paternoster-row. He is an author clutching his latest work, holding it to his chest lest he slip and soil those precious pages. This time he will be lucky; this time the publisher’s reader will advise the publisher to print a thousand copies with all haste; this time the faceless author will succeed where countless others of his kind have failed, for his work is as broad and as complex as the city that urged it, as dark and as malodorous as the alleys in which it was bred, as incisive as the razor’s slash, and as characterful as the lunatics that haunt these alien streets.

It is I.

Acknowledgements

Moniczka – sorry for leaving you alone so often

Monika Wolny – first reader and best critic

Jennifer White – still holding the card

Diana Cecilia de Graff – Dutch angel

Malcolm and Angus – for the energy when I had none

Nicholas Pearson – for the unpaid work

JW – unsolved death, 1849

MB – suicide, 1839

Also by James McCreet

For Dad

Author’s Note

The name of Persephone would have been virtually unknown to the general population of 1840s Britain. Not until later in the century did a new wave of Victorian Hellenism raise the Greek names of the deities from academic obscurity to rank with the Latin versions.

First published 2010 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2010 by Macmillan
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Copyright © James McCreet 2010

The right of James McCreet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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