Once a monster, p.20
Once a Monster, page 20
Nell rushed into Sally-Anne’s arms the moment she and Gander came through the fissure. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she cried. ‘It’s – Christmas!’
Not a Ratcliffe Christmas, that was for sure. Not Christmas in the Water’s Edge. ‘I’ll bet Mr Murdstone never had a Christmas like this, not even on Hanover Square,’ beamed Nell, as the rest crowded into the cavern.
‘But where does it all come from?’ whispered Potato Rot.
Twelve mudlarks looked at Minos. There he was, bowed at a low-burning fire, pulling hot potatoes out of the embers. It took him some time to understand he was being studied. But then, his leathery hands hardly seeming to feel the fire as he pulled each potato out, he lifted his protuberant jaw and said the only two words he could think of, the only two words that could make sense of such an otherworldly occasion.
‘Happy Christmas.’
And, ‘Happy Christmas,’ they ventured in return.
Come, join the fray . . .
They say there is not magic in the Modern World. Well, let them tell that to a family of famished mudlarks, presented with their very first Christmas feast. Let them say there is no wonder to twelve children starved of fantasy, as they gaze around their secret den and find it dressed up like the nursery of some Kensington townhouse. Try saying there is no such thing as enchantment to Packrat Jack as his face grows sticky with honey; to Sally-Anne, as she gets to play mother, dishing up baked apples and sugar; to Potato Rot as he warms his toes in front of embers stoked up for exactly this reason.
Say it to Nell, who watches her friend’s courage grow, bit by bit, as the others ask him of his life before the river, of his work in the tunnels beneath London, of all the cities and countries, the times and places, he has been in his long, varied life.
‘But where do you come from?’ Potato Rot asked.
‘How did you get all this?’
‘How did you really survive the river?’
Questions, questions, questions: such dangerous, slippery things.
‘I was a sailor, before I came to London.’ This much he remembered. ‘I don’t sleep in lodgings any more. I work and I toil.’ And, as for the river, ‘By good fortune, and a small girl’s grace.’
‘A story!’ Nell declared, when bellies were growing full and hearts grown warm. ‘Minos tells the best tales.’
Silence settled across the seaward cave. There had been enough stories in the Water’s Edge over the years. Sally-Anne had spun them for Nell and the rest, back at the beginning. And yet, wasn’t there something special about sitting here with the lumbering giant, expecting a tale from some other place, some other time?
‘Any tale, Minos, any tale at all!’
The mudlarks watched as Minos settled at the back of the seaward cave.
What story was this to be? Minos knew so many, though their origins were as indistinct as the music that flowed from his fingers at the Lamb & Flag. Stories curdled at the back of his mind. They pillaged each other for plots and spare parts, so ravenously that it was difficult to know where one tale ended and another began. But wasn’t that just storytelling? He had a dim impression, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he’d earned his supper, once upon a time, by telling tales on nights just like this.
But never to an audience of mudlarks.
Never to Nell.
‘There once was a traveller, who came to a city—’
‘What city?’ piped up Potato Rot, whose heart had grown bold now his belly was full.
‘This was the city of Paris. But the Paris I’ll tell you of was not the Paris that exists today. The brightest, boldest city in the world was, back then, a chaos of rutted tracks and barracks for armies. But it was yet a city of kings, the beating heart of the old world. And the traveller who came to its gates, just as summer was reaching its height, did not come freely. No,’ said Minos – and, unless Nell was mistaken, a strange dewiness came over his eyes – ‘he came in the back of a wagon, trussed up like a hog, accused of a crime he did not commit . . .’
‘Not this story!’ Nell exclaimed. She was not sure why, but some dark frisson had come over her. ‘A happier story. Aren’t they the best?’ She faltered as she said it; she was suddenly not sure if she was right. The best stories ended in happiness – but along the way, didn’t there have to be peril and darkness, tragedy enough to bring tears to the eye?
‘Give us a story where there’s a hero,’ said Packrat Jack.
‘And a villain,’ said Potato Rot. ‘That’s what the best tales are made of – heroes and villains.’
‘The hero has to go on his quest,’ said Gander, his interest piqued.
‘Yes, he has to go to the tower, to rescue a maiden.’
‘Or to a fortress, to slay a wicked king.’
‘But he kills him, and makes his way home, and then – then there’s only good, and all the wickedness is banished.’
The wicked and the good, thought Nell. Yes, that was the heart of every story.
‘I think I know just the tale,’ said Minos. A sudden inspiration had come upon him, though by the furrows on his face Nell knew that he was still hunting for the story, still turning left, turning right through the back roads of his mind. ‘Yes, yes,’ he ventured, with the smile rising on his ungodly features. ‘This is the tale of a king, lost far from home. A king who’d been at war, but now that war was done. And all that he wanted was to make his way home – home to . . . to Ithaca! – and the wife and son he’d left behind. But for ten long years would he roam, and one by one his crewmates were devoured by one-eyed giants, or tricked by poison flowers or . . .’
The mudlarks, rapt at first, had started shrinking towards each other. No, thought Nell, nor was this the tale for a Christmas night – wherever it had come from, however it might end. Now that she heard Minos speak of the witch goddess who turned the king’s men into swine, she flurried to her feet and said, ‘I know something better than stories. Minos?’
Minos stopped his telling.
In Nell’s hands, drawn out of her raggedy waistband, were the two satin slippers. She’d slipped them, in hope, out of the mattress as she coaxed the others from the Water’s Edge.
‘Yes,’ said Minos, his own eyes lighting up in wonder, just as they had when he recalled the story of Ithaca’s lost king. ‘Yes!’
If the other mudlarks ogled the treasure Nell was holding, she did not notice; besides, what kind of a miracle were satin slippers when they shared the seaward cave with Minos himself? ‘And now you have dancing shoes too,’ she said, and nudged his enormous leather boots.
‘I think, perhaps, I might dance in my footprints tonight.’
Out of them he stepped, revealing his sprawling, horned feet. Then he took Nell’s hand and led her out into the midnight white.
Outside, the world was a glorious whirlwind. The tide, which had reached its height as they luxuriated within, had started to recede. Snow settled on the mud it left behind, making crystalline fields of the slurry they’d be searching in only a few short hours.
‘Shall we show them?’ asked Minos.
With her small hand grasping Minos, Nell entered the ring of low fires.
‘Imagine what Sophia Chrétien would say, if she could see you now.’
And she danced.
She supposed it was graceless. She supposed the beautiful ladies her mother had stitched for had soared on the music, just like they did at the Alhambra Circus. She supposed the students Sophia taught did not take partners who towered over them, nor shatter shale as they danced. In all likelihood, they were like spirits, light as the air. But did they laugh as heartily as Nell, when their partner scooped them off the ground and whirled them in a circle, as if to make them one with the snowflakes? Did they feel the very world melt away, as the land that had taunted them for so long became something other – no longer the river to which they were yoked, but the river down which they might sail away, to a bigger, better life? Did they forget that they were motherless, all because of a dancer’s touch? Did they forget that they were condemned? Did they realize, when balanced on high, that nothing else mattered, nothing but this feeling of freedom, nothing but this hope of deliverance?
Did they understand that, in the bleakest midwinter, there was still joy?
‘Come on!’ Nell cried. ‘Join us, join in!’
They had orchestras in the Alhambra, but on the river the only music was the sound of the tide, the shanties being sung in far-flung taverns, the wassailing of the mudlarks as they rushed onto the shale.
But never was a music hall finer. No palace ballroom could ever compare. Minos was about to sweep Nell back into his arms, but she resisted his draw so that she could watch the other mudlarks dance. Ungainly dance, unordered dance – dance without rhythm, dance without instruction, dance without care. She thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. They crashed together like waves. They scissored and laughed and came apart. One partner pirouetted from another, finding themselves by chance in another’s arms.
Not one of them left out. All of them together, making a stage of the shore.
Then it struck Nell: there was something wrong about this image. It wasn’t the beauty, set against the bleakness; it wasn’t that, for a moment, everything seemed right with the world.
There was something missing.
No – someone missing.
Twelve had come to the river. For as long as Nell danced in Minos’s arms, one of the mudlarks ought to have been dancing alone. And yet, as she scoured the shore, she saw no solitary dancer.
Only moments before, Nell’s heart had been soaring. Now it was falling, falling into the dark.
She started counting them off, one by one. Here was Gander, and in his arms Sally-Anne. Here was Potato Rot. There, Packrat Jack. She named them all, though already she knew whose name would be missing. He’d betrayed her once already, sold a dying man’s boots for a fried fish supper – but she’d thought: Christmas night, fat sausages on sticks, hot tea and friendship, stories and dance; how could past treacheries matter on a night such as this?
Nell scrambled across the shale, clawed her way back to the seaward cave. Inside, the air was thick with grease and soot. Yes, she thought, a second deceit had surely been too enticing – but there the boots sat, in the very spot where Minos had left them.
She crashed back onto the shore. Strange, but the cold was touching her now. Gone was the night’s magic, and in its place just the sting of the winter dark. So too could she see the snow for what it truly was: there was no enchantment in it, not any longer; the flakes that had beguiled her were only the bitter shards that would rime the river by morning, making it impossible for a mudlark to do their work.
Across the shale, the dancing continued. Not one of them had noticed. Not one of them understood.
Nell supposed it was she who would have to tell them, and by doing so end their night’s magic. It was this that hurt her most of all. She would have liked to remember this as a perfect moment, a Christmas crystallized in time, something she could come back to whenever life got hard – but if he hadn’t run away with the boots, he’d run away for some other reason, and there was only one she could think of. It would ruin them all.
‘Noah!’ she cried, into the whirling white. ‘Noah!’
17
Each Man a Monster
Off the Ratcliffe Highway, Christmas Night 1861
‘The river,’ cried Sally-Anne, ‘what if the river took him?’
The tide was almost obscured by the shifting white veil, but Nell watched as the mudlarks cantered towards it, recoiling with horror as they plunged into its frigid waters. Noah’s name was being torn out of every mouth: upriver it went, downriver it went, over the rocks and wharfs, into the frozen heart of Ratcliffe. But it would not stop him, nor summon him back – for Nell knew, with a certainty she could not describe, that he had not danced himself into the river, nor grown disoriented in the white and somehow got lost. ‘Noah!’ Gander was bellowing, but it was all in vain. He was not coming back.
She scrambled down the shale, until she reached Minos. For the first time, Nell thought she could truly read his expression. He was frightened. Bewildered. Betrayed, she thought, as he dropped to his haunches and cupped her cheeks with one enormous hand.
‘Nell?’
‘I think he’s gone to find Mr Murdstone,’ she stuttered. ‘I thought it would be different on Christmas night – that it didn’t matter about the boots, or, or . . .’
‘It’s a trap,’ breathed Minos.
‘No!’ she sobbed, and tried to cling onto him – but Minos was already standing, and Nell already staggering back onto the shale. She landed hard, the wind beaten out of her, and there she would have stayed, if only Sally-Anne hadn’t picked her up. ‘Minos, I want to come,’ she called out. If he heard her, he did not look down. He was already striding backwards, then turning to bound over the guttering fires. One great stride turned into a second; with the third, he launched himself along the shore like something animal. The bound he took was surely greater than any man might have achieved. He vanished, momentarily, in the swirling white, then reappeared, fainter now as the veil closed around him.
‘Get off me,’ Nell said, and squirmed out of Sally-Anne’s grasp. She staggered forward, shouting his name – but, in the end, it was only her cries that followed Minos as he charged downriver.
Her friend was already too far gone.
A trap.
He was in the jaws of a trap.
Minos had known, the moment Nell cried out the name, that a trap was being sprung. It wasn’t only animals that knew when they were being hunted; a man could develop intuition every bit as powerful. Now, though the snow kept closing and unclosing its fist around him, every sense told him he was being tracked – not just by Nell, but by others as well. Men would beach their riverboats and stagger through the tide to apprehend him. City guards would stream off the wharfs, armed with halberds and spears.
He didn’t know when, and he didn’t know where, but he’d been here before. He’d felt the chains and ropes. That story he’d tried to spin, of the shackled man being taken by cart into Paris – he didn’t know where it had come from, but he knew it wasn’t imagination.
‘Minos!’
Somewhere ahead of him, the Thames began its long arc south. The lights of a wharf he hardly recognized glimmered above, crowding the tops of the sandstone cliffs. Nell’s voice was tinier now, and that was as it should have been. Think, he told himself. All he had to do was think. Yet somehow, it seemed the most difficult thing to do. There was another part of him, one that wanted nothing to do with consideration and thought. It was the part, he realized now, which had told him to tear apart the brawler in the vice ring above the Lamb & Flag. Its fury frightened him so much more than any trap Murdstone could spring. And he realized, then, that this was what he was running from: running, in vain, from the compulsions of his own heart.
It was only thought that could slow his breathing. Only by thinking could he conquer the thunder in his veins. He stopped at the cliff-side, taking his bearings by the sights, the sounds, the scents that reached him through the snow. And he realized, then, that he ought to leave the river. If he took to the streets, perhaps he could find his way. There were yet sanctuaries in the city where a man could go unseen. Christmas night in a sewer – it was as fitting a way to spend it as any.
Onward he goes.
Left he turns; then right.
Forward he ploughs; then back.
He had hardly risen to the wharf-side when the figure emerged from the shadows. Between the storehouses that crowded the wharf, the snow was not as all-consuming as it was on the river. Consequently, when Benjamin Murdstone revealed himself, Minos was able to see him for what he was: just a small, crooked man. That secret part of him said: swat him aside, go to the sewer; they won’t find you there, not in the tunnels you built for yourself. But the thinking part of him wrestled the feeling away. He realized, now, that Murdstone was not alone. Noah was standing in the shadows behind.
Minos strode forward, a feint meant to test the man’s mettle. Murdstone skittered, near dropped his cane.
‘I merely want to talk.’ Murdstone opened his palms, as if to say he posed no threat. A lie, of course. Minos could smell a lie; that was an instinct too. ‘Sir, I think you would agree that we began our association in unfortunate circumstances. I have realized, on reflection, how blunt and heavy-handed I was, with you just recovering from your ordeal in the river. I’ll make this plain, Mr Minos: I was wrong. I haven’t said as much very often in my life. The fact of the matter is, I’ve rarely had to. But I was wrong that day on the river, and I’m here to put it right.’
Minos lifted his nose to the air. The blackness was in his blood again. He tried to calm himself by breathing deeply, but there were other voices sailing towards him now, whether real or imagined he could not say. ‘Lycias, don’t fight him! Lycias, play dead!’ He whipped his head around, as if he might see drunken sailors reeling along the wharf-side. But no – the voice was within him, just as it had been that day in the Lamb & Flag.
The voice was within him, but the panic was real.
‘What do you want with me? I’m nothing to you. I don’t owe you my life.’
‘You misunderstand me, Minos. I’ve been searching for you for some time, just so that I can say these words. Sir, I believe I can help you. I know how you live – in the lice-infested lodging houses, the hedgerows and gutters, the sheltered lees underneath the London Bridge. And I know how you work – existing only in darkness, hiding away where no man might see. But I can change all that. You might consider it the craft of my life: to lift a man from his sorry beginnings to a higher station. No, I am not here to possess you, Minos. I am here to present a business proposition. A trade, if you will: my time for yours, that we both might live out our days in the safety, the surety, the comfort we deserve.’
