Beneath london, p.11
Beneath London, page 11
Mother Laswell worked to keep her mind from running off course as she chewed on the fabric of the handkerchief, trying to gnaw through it, watching as Shadwell led Clara up the path toward the farm, guiding her gently along as if he had a vast concern for her welfare. The girl did not so much as cry out now. Good, Mother Laswell thought. Clara had gumption. She was a cipher to the likes of Shadwell, and that might be the small bit of hope in this affair, which wasn’t finished by any means, not while she had any life left in her.
The thought seemed to mock her, however, as time passed. The thin roll of cotton cloth was unyielding, turning between her dry teeth, and she worked to wet it, grinding away at it long after the two of them had disappeared from sight and sound.
TWELVE
MISS BRACKEN
The train entered Cannon Street Station amid a shriek of air brakes and clouds of roiling steam. Alice looked out of the window at the crowds of people hurrying to and fro with what seemed to her to be a celebratory air, although no doubt it was her own high spirits that she felt. She had first stepped out into Cannon Street Station as a young woman, looking up in awed disbelief at the immense glass and iron arch that roofed the station, nearly seven hundred feet in length, the immensity of the place quite taking her breath away. At the time she was accompanying her Aunt Agatha Walton to a meeting of the Royal Society, where her aunt was to read a paper upon the curiosities of salmon scales.
Alice had found herself seated very near a young man who was rather handsome in a craggy way, and who turned out to be a scientific-minded student of Richard Owen, the famous naturalist, an acquaintance of Aunt Agatha’s. The young man’s name was Langdon St. Ives. She thought now of his question earlier that day – whether he was a romantic creature at all. His idea of wooing her had involved squiring her to lectures from time to time, and once, under the supervision of Aunt Agatha, to the Kent Downs where they had dug ancient seashells out of a sandstone cliff. After a time, Alice had begun to feel unhappily like a mere occasional companion. It was Aunt Agatha’s advice, however, that she should encourage St. Ives to pursue his natural enthusiasms, which he was likely to do in any event, and to wait until the time was right.
Shortly thereafter he had gone off to Edinburgh, to the university. They had written to each other sporadically, but his wanderlust often led him to out-of-the-way-corners of the natural world, at which times he disappeared out of her life, and in time she found herself being wooed by a man named Benson Winn, who had inherited an estate and an income in Abbey Wood. He was cheerfully pleasant and handsome, and with an enviable tenor voice, a member of no fewer than three choirs. Alice was twenty-four years old at the time, not ancient, but not anxious to live alone, as did Aunt Agatha, who was utterly and happily self-reliant.
And then one afternoon, home from Edinburgh and from his travels, St. Ives had come round to her home in Plumstead without warning, carrying nets and large collecting jars. He was searching out juvenile crested newts in marsh ponds and wanted company. St. Ives had the idea of making a study of them and then returning them to their ponds the following month, in time for their metamorphosis into adult newts. Alice was fond of newts, especially crested newts, which she had kept as pets when she was a girl.
Carrying a picnic basket, they went out into the Plumstead Marsh to a pond that Alice knew, where they found four exotic-looking specimens along with snails and tadpoles to fatten them up on. The two of them were watching the newts paddle about among the waterweeds in their glass containers, the afternoon warm and empty, silent but for the sound of birds and the light breeze whispering through the trees, when Alice decided that the time was as right as it would ever be and kissed him – a shockingly bold kiss – which led to more of the same, much more. The following day she had made her apologies to Mr. Winn. Things had worked out very nicely indeed, and all of it due to newts.
They descended to the platform now and straightaway caught sight of Tubby and Gilbert Frobisher swarming along toward them, looking happy and thoroughly overfed. Gilbert’s double-breasted dinner coat bore silver buttons the size of half crown coins that glittered against the black satin. Tubby, who cared little for fashion, wore a brown flannel coat and checked trousers, very large examples of their type. Weighed together, Tubby and his uncle would tip the scale at well over thirty stone, but they had a hale and hearty look about them, as if they would happily beat the stuffing out of Satan himself.
Holding onto Gilbert’s arm was a fair-haired woman of perhaps thirty years of age, buxom and markedly short. She wore a hat with what was evidently a small crow secured to the side of it with an immensely long hatpin. A ball of polished amber was affixed to the end of it. The bird, its wings half spread, appeared to be launching itself into the air. It was an eccentric hat to be sure, although so was her own hat, Alice thought, decorated with the spring dun fly.
“Allow me to introduce Miss Cecilia Bracken,” Gilbert said to them. “Cissy, these are my great good friends, Langdon St. Ives, his wife Alice, and the inimitable Hasbro, which is just what his friends call him.”
Miss Bracken curtsied like a schoolgirl. “Charmed to meet you, Mr. Inimitable,” she said to Hasbro, and then she favored St. Ives with what could only be called the glad eye – a startlingly lascivious look – and then a quick glance in Alice’s direction, giving her an up and down inspection.
Tubby, Alice noticed now, was looking away, his demeanor one of suspicion, disgust, and impatience, among other things. “Cecilia… made herself known to my uncle in Jamaica,” he said. “It was the most miraculous thing…”
“Indeed it was,” Gilbert said to St. Ives, cutting Tubby off short. “I told you about my own Miss Bracken, I believe, directly after our trial with the great octopus.”
“The love of your youth, as I recall – Miss Bracken, I mean to say. Did you locate her?”
“She passed away some years ago, alas, but Cissy is that good woman’s daughter – Miss Bracken’s Miss Bracken, if you will. It was my undeserved fortune to find her – an astonishing turn of fate. Born and raised in Kingston, she was, and would still be there if Tubby and I hadn’t brought her back to London.” He gazed at Miss Bracken with evident pride.
“And how do you find England?” St. Ives asked her.
“Colder than a sailor’s arse,” she said, and then laughed out loud, as did Gilbert, who put his arm around her shoulders.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Tubby muttered. “She’s familiar with that particular item.” He noticed that Alice had apparently heard him, and he muttered, “My apologies, ma’am,” although without evident regret.
Miss Bracken looked hard at Alice now and said, “Is that not a fly on your hat, ma’am – a fisherman’s fly, I mean to say. Surely it is.” She smiled broadly. “We’re fish and fowl, you and I, ha ha!” She reached up and waggled one of the crow’s wings.
“Did you hear that, Tubby! Fish and fowl!” Gilbert said, enormously happy with the quip.
“My husband, who’s dead now, thank Christ, fished for mullet in Bluefields with something like the same fly, tied up out of goat’s hair – a black goat, although no blacker than his heart, I dare say.”
“There’s very little that you don’t dare say,” Tubby put in. “Tell them the woeful tale of your husband’s demise, Miss Bracken.”
“His throat was cut,” she said flatly, staring at Tubby. “From ear to ear, and deep enough so that his head was dislodged.” And then to all of them, she said, “No one confessed to the crime. I know I wouldn’t have, but I’d give a guinea to the murderer if I happened upon him. He did me a service, if it was a man that done it. Like as not it was a woman, though. My husband was a right bastard who had done enough women wrong, just as he did me. He died the death he deserved.”
“And yet you must have loved the man dearly when you were wed,” Tubby said, shaking his head sympathetically. “Were the two of you wed, Miss Bracken?”
“We’ve hired a lad to see to your dunnage,” Gilbert put in hastily, gesturing at a sad-looking boy in livery, the ill-fitting clothing apparently bought out of a rag stall near Tower Hill. “My coach is waiting with provisions aboard: Champagne, petit fours, and canapés – what the French call amuse-bouche, sweet and savory both, ha ha! That should forestall cannibalism until James Harrow arrives. He’s anxious to descend into the cavern at high noon tomorrow. Perhaps he’s waiting out on the road as we speak. He’s bringing in a wagonload of supplies from Chiswick, where he lives with his sister. It’s a crying shame that the lot of us cannot undertake this adventure together, but the Board of Works was adamant. They’re a timid lot – afraid of another collapse and anxious to limit the carnage.”
They found their way outside, their bags following along, where Gilbert’s coach-and-four was waiting. His cockney driver, Boggs, was busy retying the complication of reins, one of which had apparently parted from the bit, and Gilbert hurried off forward to give him un-needed advice, Miss Bracken trailing along behind. Alice, Hasbro, St. Ives, and Tubby climbed into the commodious interior, their bags strapped on behind by the boy in livery.
“There it stands,” St. Ives said, gesturing toward the Thames, where lay the rubble of a row of collapsed buildings some twenty running yards along the river side of Upper Thames Street.
The sink-hole itself was hidden by barricades put up by the Board of Works. Some short distance farther up the river, very near Swan Lane Pier, a fire burned in a heap of debris at the base of a set of stairs, and in the glow of the fire one could see the flaming wreck of a wagon that had somehow gone off the embankment near the upriver end of the sink-hole, evidently dangerous ground until repairs were complete.
“Gilbert and Miss Bracken are taking a stroll up the river, it would seem,” Alice said, watching as the two of them made their way past the barricades. Boggs still worked with the reins, and James Harrow was still pending. Alice took a small round of bread with a paste of smoked salmon from an array of small tarts. She was determined not to eat more than four of them, since they would consume one of Henrietta Billson’s vast suppers at the Half Toad within the hour.
“I could do with a hogshead of this Champagne,” Tubby said, drinking off half a glass. “But I’m at the very brink of saying something that will make me sound like an ungrateful scrub, so I shall practice moderation.”
“Not a bit of it,” St. Ives told him. “Let me refill your glass. You’re among friends here. You don’t have it in you to be a scrub of any variety.”
“This alleged Miss Bracken…” he said, shaking his head darkly.
“You’re not convinced that she’s the daughter of Gilbert’s lady friend of old, are you?” Alice asked.
“No,” Tubby said. “I am not. I would lay five hundred pounds against it without a qualm. I have it on good authority that she was a common prostitute in and around Kingston, although Uncle Gilbert flew into a rage when I revealed it to him. He was apoplectic. I had to recant before his head exploded. And as for her husband, he is apparently dead, murdered, just as she makes him out to be, his throat slashed so deeply that his head hung from a bit of tendon. This false Miss Bracken was tried for the crime, in point of fact, but evidence was wanting and no one on the island had an interest in digging any up. She was found innocent for lack of an alternative, but it’s good odds that she cut the man’s throat.”
“Gilbert spoke of Miss Bracken when we were in the Caribbean,” St. Ives said, “the Miss Bracken of old. I don’t mean to encourage gossip or idle speculation, but are we moderately assured that the current incarnation of Miss Bracken is not Gilbert’s natural daughter? That there’s no scandal, I mean to say.”
“No,” Tubby said, shaking his head. “No scandal, not in that regard. She’s too young, for one thing, far too young, and Gilbert has reassured me that it’s impossible, thank God.”
“There are two Miss Brackens, then?” Alice asked.
“That’s debatable,” Tubby told her, “but my uncle believes that there were two, the first Miss Bracken allegedly being the second Miss Bracken’s mother. Miss Bracken the elder – the authentic Miss Bracken – had allegedly married after she and my uncle parted ways thirty-five years ago, and this second Miss Bracken is the alleged result of that union.”
“And yet she bears her mother’s surname?” Hasbro said. “How did that come to pass?”
“It seems as if the husband of the first Miss Bracken was a cardsharp,” Tubby told them, “and was shot to death some two years after the daughter was born. This was a genteel crowd, you see. The first Miss Bracken despised her wicked husband and so retained her own name when she was widowed. When we were in Jamaica only a month ago, Uncle Gilbert happened upon the daughter, the second Miss Bracken, or so she claims, in a Kingston Tavern. And now, as you see, she rides about London in Uncle Gilbert’s coach. To my mind she’s a base deceiver. And that is the scrub-like notion that I threatened you with. Favor me with another glass of Champagne, if you will, Hasbro, so that I can wash the taste of this out of my mouth.”
“But how can you know that?” Alice asked, holding out her own glass. “Perhaps both are authentic Miss Brackens.”
“My uncle was searching for his lost love, the Miss Bracken of his youth. He busied himself making inquiries in and around Kingston, and like a fool I wished him good luck and went off to Montego Bay in order to fish for tunny, which are often the size of small cows in that part of the world. When I returned to Kingston at the end of the week, he threw this second Miss Bracken in my face. ‘She’s a great beauty,’ he says to me, ‘a rare goddess. It was the most wonderful chance occurrence,’ he says – ‘the kind of luck rarely seen outside the theater.’ I was fully persuaded. As luck goes it was too good by half, and theatrical enough to make one sneer. I discovered that the old man had made no effort whatsoever to be discreet in his search, but had advertised his aims to everyone who would listen to him, and the result is that whereas I caught nary a tunny, he caught this… this land shark, who leapt bodily into his net. And now he’s brought her back to England entirely against my wishes, not that I expect my own uncle to pay heed to my wishes. But he intends to marry her, for God’s sake.” Tubby shook his head regretfully. “I should have kept close by him in Kingston,” he said. “I would have sent her packing, by God.”
“Might you say something to dissuade Gilbert, Langdon?” Alice asked. “Tubby is quite possibly right. It would be easy for a man of Gilbert’s wealth and disposition to find Miss Brackens under every stone. I’m surprised he didn’t return with a harem.”
The coach joggled as Boggs climbed up onto his seat now, and Alice glanced out the window, searching for Gilbert along the river, and saw that he and Miss Bracken were just then topping the stairs above the still-burning debris, apparently returning from their tour of the debacle.
“I cannot,” St. Ives said. “Not in so many words. I’m sorry to say that, Tubby, but as you well know, Gilbert is a juggernaut once he’s made his mind up. And it’s his mind to make up, after all. Unless he is clearly threatened, his affairs are entirely his own to mishandle.”
“You’re in the right of it, of course,” Tubby said, “but in this case your being right is cold comfort.”
Alice was fond of Tubby Frobisher. Indeed, Langdon owed the man his life twice over, most recently in a brawl in the rookery around Flower and Dean Street, where Tubby had allegedly brought down a man with a pistol who was an ace away from making Alice a widow. He was a good friend in every sense of the word. His Uncle Gilbert’s fortune had grown like a honeysuckle vine over the years, and Gilbert was currently wealthier than the Queen. Tubby would inherit a fortune when his uncle died, and so it was naturally difficult for him to make an issue of Gilbert’s enthusiasms. It would not do to appear to be grasping, but he would be understandably loath to let the Miss Brackens of the world deceive his uncle.
“It is possible, Tubby, that you’re simply mistaken,” Alice said.
“Perhaps,” Tubby said darkly. “The guilty flee when no man pursueth, as the scriptures tell us. I’ll keep a weather eye on Miss Bracken. If she flees, I’ll happily let her go to the devil.”
The coach door swung open now, and Gilbert looked in at them wide-eyed and pale. Miss Bracken peered past him, authentically upset, it seemed to Alice. Gilbert was holding a tan felt top-hat, battered nearly flat and splashed with blood.
“That’s James Harrow’s wagon burning along the river,” Gilbert said in a tired voice. “It went off the embankment at the edge of the sink-hole, and his paraffin lanterns smashed and set the wagon aflame. His horse is drowned in the Thames, as is much of his equipment.
“What of Harrow?” St. Ives asked.
“Dead. Stone dead.” He held the hat out by way of illustration. “The police informed me that he was kicked in the head by his horse in the melee. They’ve taken the body to a dead house.”
THIRTEEN
NED LUDD
Finn lost the first of his flies almost at once. He had tied it on badly, and the fish had taken it away without so much as breaking the line. He tied on the second fly, giving it a yank to tighten the knot and making his way around a rocky outcropping to a shady pool with a fast-moving riffle that was happily clear of low-hanging boughs. He cast his line, whipped out another length of it, and hooked a fish before he had time to think, the trout darting nobly back and forth through the shallow water half a dozen times before throwing the hook and escaping. Despite his near-luck, Finn decided to move on. He had spent too much time reading, and he ran the risk of being late.
There was an exposed bit of shoreline some distance farther downstream, indented with animal prints – badger and fox, for certain, and what might be the tiny paw prints of a hedgehog. All of them had come down out of the forest along a narrow path. Finn followed it, working his way downhill, the stream tumbling over rocks away to his left now. He stopped short and listened when he heard someone calling out – a woman’s voice.
