Traitor and the Tunnel (21 page)

Perhaps in its utter conviction. And why hadn’t the Agency come through with this information, days ago? It was a matter of public record. She repressed a flash of resentment and focused on Honoria’s stony, elegant features. “And … if I can’t persuade the gentleman to tel me what happened?”

Honoria bared her teeth in another predatory grimace that only just qualified as a smile. “Then you shal have to work harder.”

Twenty

Wednesday evening

Tower of London

One of the ridiculous things about London was that although it was almost always faster to walk to one’s destination, the streets were clogged with vast numbers of carriages, hansom cabs, wagons, omnibuses and horses, al desperate to be somewhere, al il ustrating the triumph of hope over experience. Despite the satisfaction she took in the walk from Buckingham Palace, Mary felt her confidence dip as she neared the Tower of London.

Part of this, she knew, was by design: its approach was a bleak stone wal interrupted only by arrow loops that enhanced its forbidding aspect. Al the same, she felt very smal indeed as she presented herself at the gate.

“Here to see who?” The guard looked her up and down.

“A new prisoner: Lang.” She was wearing her best hat and Sunday coat, and on leaving the Palace had swiped an old silk umbrel a that may or may not have been Mrs Shaw’s. The overal effect was of prim respectability – a governess or a lady without much money, rather than a servant.

Even so, something about her seemed to give the guard pause. “And who might you be to the prisoner?”

“My name is Miss Lawrence, of the St Andrew’s Church Ladies’ Committee. We heard of the prisoner’s plight and wish to be al owed to minister to him.”

“Bit irregular, this,” grumbled the guard. “Usual y it’s a delegation of ladies.”

Mary leaned forward and lowered her tone. “I hope I may rely upon you not to repeat this, sir, but this Lang was rather an unpopular prisoner within our committee. There have been so many rumours about his offence, and with some of the ladies very proud of their distant connections with the best families…” She smiled, a weak apology that nevertheless seemed to go a long way.

“Aye, he’s a troublemaker, that Lang,” agreed the guard, unlatching the gate. “And he’s none too polite, neither, so you want to watch yourself, miss. He ain’t above using strong language to a lady.”

“Thank you,” murmured Mary. Now that she was inside, she found it difficult to tolerate the guard’s easy chatter. She wanted perfect silence as she picked her way through the vast, slushy courtyard; a last few moments of futile hope, aimed at the man who might be her father. Absurd. She didn’t even know what she hoped for.

She turned her mind away from childish wistfulness and concentrated on her surroundings.

The Tower of London, she’d always been told, was actual y many buildings within a single set of fortifications, built by different kings over hundreds of years. This made sense only now, as she stood within its bounds, craning her neck up at the different towers. She would need a map to navigate between them al . But she would remember each step of her journey to this particular tower that loomed over her, weather-blackened and Gothic.

“Cradle Tower,” said the guard easily, as they came to its entrance and he passed her into the care of another guard. “Al the best traitors were kept here.”

“History repeats itself,” said the new guard in a portentous tone.

The two men chuckled and Mary wondered how much of the gossip about Lang they actual y believed. Not that it mattered. She scarcely knew herself.

The second guard was less inclined to conversation. After a cursory glance at the contents of her handbag, he led her up a narrow flight of stairs that smel ed of mouse nests, circling higher and higher until they emerged on the top floor. They passed through a low, arched doorway into a dim antechamber. It smel ed different here, of ancient meals, burnt tal ow and unwashed bodies.

Mary felt a lurch of fear. Somehow, she’d expected the approach to be longer, more complicated; to have time to prepare herself. Yet perhaps a dozen paces before her was a stone wal , interrupted by a door made of iron bars. She seemed unable to persuade herself that the prisoner was right there.

“Visitor, Lang,” said the guard in a bored tone.

Mary held her breath. The voice: would it be her father’s? Yet several seconds passed, and the only reply was a soft susurration – like tree branches moved by a moderate breeze. Was Lang shuffling his feet? Chafing something against the wal ?

“Lang!” barked the guard. He eyed Mary with suspicion. “He expecting you?”

She shook her head, voice temporarily lost.

The guard strode to the door and banged on the bars with his truncheon. “Get up, Chinaman. There’s a lady here to see you.”

Stil nothing.

The gaoler looked at Mary, eyebrows raised, as if to ask, what now?

She cleared her throat. “Is he always like this with visitors?”

The man snorted. “Ain’t had none. ‘Less you mean the chaplain, and he ignores him. He ain’t violent, missy – don’t let them stories frighten you. He just sleeps al day, unless he’s got the shakes.”

“The shakes?” Her voice echoed sharply off the stone wal s.

“Drug fiend. He were found in an opium den, weren’t he? And he ain’t had none for four days, now. Raving, he were, the first couple of days. A regular madman.”

“And now it’s passed?”

“Wel , he couldn’t keep up that malarkey; lord, it were tiring just to see.”

“What about food or drink?”

The guard shrugged. “Prisoners, they got their notions. Most of them try a hunger strike, sooner nor later.”

“But – if he’s had nothing for four days, he’l soon be dead. He’l never make it to trial!” Mary fought to keep a sharp note of panic from her voice.

“To my thinking, it saves a world of trouble. But we got our orders. He gets whatever muck we can force-feed, three times a day, ma’am. He ain’t starving.”

Only in the most literal sense of the word, thought Mary. How long could a man subsist on a few spoonfuls of gruel forced down his throat? That shuffling, almost whistling sound had continued as she questioned the gaoler, rising and then fal ing in cycles. “Wil you open the door, please?”

The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. Though he ain’t like to talk to you. I ain’t heard him say a word, these last two days.” Stil , he unlocked the iron door and stepped back, with an elaborate gesture to Mary.

“Miss.” He palmed the half-crown she offered him with a neat gesture and, with one more obsequious bow, took himself off to the far end of the antechamber, at the mouth of the stairwel .

Mary closed her eyes for a long moment, summoning an image of her father: Lang Jin Hai.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been a handsome man in his thirties. Tal for a Chinese, with some resemblance to the Prince Consort –

something her mother had been proud of. But that had been twelve or thirteen years ago, and she’d been a young child. Memory was an unreliable guide. At least it always seemed to be, for her.

Enough. She opened her eyes and tried to see into the cel . It was windowless, and thus dark; al daylight came from a narrow window in the antechamber and it didn’t penetrate far. As Mary’s eyes adjusted, she began to see shapes, perceive depth. The cel was narrow and long, furnished only with a low cot pushed against one wal . There was nothing else in the room: no chair, no table, no washstand or water jug – though judging from the fetid smel , there was a chamber pot beneath the bed that hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned in recent memory.

And final y, the thing she most and least wanted to see: a smal figure, crumpled on the bed, shaking beneath a thin, wool en blanket. Mary’s stomach turned over. So that was the cause of the shuffling sound: a sick man shivering to death, in the presence of a guard and a visitor. She wanted to charge from the cel , screaming for blankets and hot-water bottles and bowls of steaming broth. She stopped herself, with difficulty. This man had heard enough screaming and been the subject of orders too many times already.

She cleared her throat, not because it was necessary but to give him some warning. “Mr Lang?”

Stil no response, but she didn’t expect one.

“My name is Mary Lawrence. I may be able to assist you.” Lang remained mute but Mary thought his shivering lessened, somewhat – as though he was concentrating on her words. “I have no connection either to the police or to the family of the dead man. But I am interested in the facts of what happened that night.”

There was a slight pause in the shivering, as though it was being suppressed by force of wil . Very slowly, the lump under the blanket uncurled a little.

And although the shaking resumed, Lang’s body continued to unfurl until, very slowly, a tousled head poked, turtle-like, from one end of the blanket. The skul was capped by a shock of greasy, thinning hair, yel owy-grey in colour. The skin was almost the same colour, a sal ow map of a sad country, with dark, bruised craters below the eyes. And the eyes themselves – Mary repressed a shudder. They were defeat made human, a world of pain entire.

They were also her eyes.

Her lungs seized. Heart suddenly hammered against throat. Mouth went dry. It was out of the question. This old man, this drug-addicted, incarcerated old sailor – her father? She’d prepared herself for the possibility, and yet now that it confronted her, found it impossible to believe.

And yet there were the eyes. They weren’t hers in colour; hers had always been a changeable hazel.

But their shape was the same. And now they blinked at her, slowly, atop that stinking prison blanket.

Blinked to clear the film that covered his eyebal s, although the weight of the eyelids seemed more than he could bear. He looked decades older than forty.

He looked like death itself.

“Your name?” The voice was that of an elderly invalid – raspy, faint. He seemed to be searching her face, looking for something to latch on to.

Mary looked him square in the eyes. “Are you Lang Jin Hai, formerly of Limehouse?”

And then the unthinkable happened: he closed his eyes, turned his head away and said, “No.”

She frowned. “No to what?”

“Not of Limehouse.”

He

looked

nothing

like

the

father

she

remembered, but she couldn’t be wrong about something this important. The eyes – the name – the fact that he’d asked her name… “If not Limehouse, where?”

No reply. Lang continued to shiver, to curl back into a bal , facing firmly away from her.

Mary waited a minute. Then two. Then three.

Final y, she said, “I don’t believe you. You are Lang Jin Hai, formerly of Limehouse. You were married to Maire Quinn, a seamstress.”

No reply, but that near-stil ness again – a cessation of shaking that showed she’d struck deep.

“You had a daughter named Mary. She would be nineteen or twenty years old, now.”

He remained almost motionless.

Shock and disbelief passed slowly into anger.

“You went to sea in 1848 or 1849. On an important mission. You left your pregnant wife and your daughter. And a box of documents in the care of a Mr Chen, to be opened in the event you did not return.” Her voice was shaking now, but stil he refused to turn. To look at her. His only child. “Do you deny this, Lang Jin Hai?”

An excruciating pause. Then, so softly she scarcely heard the syl able: “Yes.”

“You deny it?”

Silence.

“You unspeakable coward,” said Mary, her voice low and trembling. “Have you anything more to lose by tel ing the truth?”

The man on the bed remained stil and mute.

Outside the cel , Mary heard the ravens screaming.

Perhaps they were being fed.

Time passed. Her anger did not abate, but it was cold and corrosive rather than hot and fierce. She didn’t want a reconciliation – not with this lying shel of a man. But she did want answers. “Very wel ,” she said at last, after a ful five minutes’ silence. “You don’t want to answer questions. But I can compel you to do so.” She reached into her handbag, fingers closing round the slim, stoppered vial. The guard hadn’t seemed to notice it when he peered into her reticule. Even if he had, a smal amount of laudanum required no explanation; half the ladies in London seemed to rely upon its restorative effects.

Deliberately, she let the glass clink softly against a flagstone.

The

effect

on

Lang

was

instantaneous,

transformative. He rol ed to face her with a swiftness that surprised even Mary, his expression intent, alert

– if not quite alive. “Give me that.”

She whisked it out of range but let it dangle enticingly. “Answer my questions.”

“I need it, you devil! I need it!” His voice crescendoed to a shriek, and Mary suddenly questioned her wisdom in forcing his hand like this.

But it was much too late to turn back. “Quiet,” she said with authority. “If you scream, the guard wil come back and you certainly won’t get any laudanum then.”

He subsided, then, but his eyes remained fixed on the bottle. “Please…”