Pax Britannia: Human Nature

by Jonathan Green

  Ulysses in turn regarded Nimrod's contact with a look of intense curiosity. He had a scruffy, worn appearance. Everything he wore from the crumpled cloth cap that barely kept an unruly grey thatch in check, to the scuffed hobnail boots on his feet, even if it hadn't started out as a uniform had nevertheless ended up that way.

  The man himself appeared to have worn even less well than his clothes, his jutting, angular features marked with the tell-tale scars of smallpox and other scars acquired through misadventure rather than misfortune. He hadn't shaved for a number of days and he didn't appear to have washed either. But he did have most of his own teeth by the look of things.

  As to how old he was, it was anyone's guess. The grey hair with its straw-like texture could put him at as old as fifty, but there was a certain youthful sparkle in his eye that could have made him prematurely grey at thirty.

  Deciding that someone needed to do something to progress this meeting, Ulysses held out his hand to the wastrel. "Mr Rat. Delighted to meet you."

  "It's just Rat," he said, leaving Ulysses' hand well alone.

  "Nimrod's told me so much about you," Ulysses went on, feeling that he wasn't getting anywhere very fast with his current tack.

  "Has 'e?" Rat replied suspiciously, taking a wary step backwards, glancing between Ulysses and his manservant, his features knotted into a feral grimace. Ulysses could see now why the name Rat suited this ne'er-do-well so well. Nimrod shook his head, never once taking his eyes off the shady character.

  "Well, no, he hasn't," Ulysses admitted, "but he has told me that you're the man who has all the answers."

  The man known as Rat appeared to relax, although only ever so slightly. He still looked like he could turn tail and run at any moment. "For a price," he said, by way of confirmation, his own appraising gaze fixed firmly on Ulysses again.

  "That's understood. Nimrod has made your terms clear to me."

  Rat said nothing but continued to subject Ulysses to uncomfortable scrutiny.

  "'Ere, I know you," he said suddenly, with devilish glee.

  "Well, I should hope so; we have just been introduced."

  "Yeah," Rat continued, as if Ulysses hadn't said anything at all. "I've seen your mug on the cast screens."

  "Oh, you know me like that, you mean."

  "Yeah. I'm right, aren't I?"

  "Well, how privileged you are. You seem to have me at something of a disadvantage," Ulysses said, tiring of the grass's cocky swaggering manner.

  Ulysses had not taken his eyes off the man's face since the two of them had been introduced. He saw Rat's eyes narrow and could almost hear the k-ching of the ringing cash register.

  "Is there a problem?" Ulysses asked with icy calm, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling, already knowing what the other was about to say.

  "Well that changes things, see?"

  "In what way?"

  "Information is a valuable commodity, isn't it?" Rat spoke the word commodity as if every syllable was a separate word. "Much more valuable than say, gold, jewels or... a bit of the foldin' stuff. And much more valuable to a man of your... standing, Mr Quicksilver, who, at the present time, if I might say so, one might be so bold as to presume is not short of the latter but sadly lacking in the former."

  The grass grinned, revealing the yellow pegs of his teeth. This simple action made him look even more like his namesake.

  "Rat," Nimrod spoke up suddenly, "we agreed terms at the same time as we arranged this meeting."

  "Ah, but Mr Nimrod, you weren't entirely honest with me, were you?"

  "I am scrupulously honest," Nimrod growled.

  "Well then, let's just say you weren't entirely... forthcoming regarding all the particulars of this 'ere exchange."

  "Don't worry, Nimrod," Ulysses said wearily, still not taking his eyes off the opportunist thief as he reached into his coat. "I'll handle this."

  Rat's eyes began to sparkle, as if shining with the reflected shine of the money he was hoping to acquire.

  "Will this suffice?"

  Ulysses' hand came free of his coat in one sudden sharp movement, but it wasn't as sharp as the rapier blade he was now holding under Rat's chin, the sheaf formed by his black wood cane in his other hand.

  His body rigid with fear, Rat swallowed, his Adam's apple sliding against the razor-edge of the blade, which gleamed darkly.

  "Let's get one thing clear, Mr Rat," Ulysses said, he voice like steel. "No one rips me off!"

  Rat said nothing, his bulging eyes darting from Ulysses' own steely gaze to the steel of his sword-cane and back again.

  "Do I make myself perfectly clear?"

  Rat gulped again and nodded slowly, anxious not to cut himself on the keenly-honed blade.

  "Good. I'm glad we've got that sorted out."

  Ulysses waited for a moment, holding his fencer's stance, his blade at the grass' throat, before slowly withdrawing the rapier and sheathing it.

  "Now, Mr Rat, I am sure that we both have places we would rather be right now so, let's not waste each other's time any longer. I think the expression is, spill the beans. The theft of the Whitby Mermaid - what do you know?"

  Rat gulped again and despite the rapier blade being sheathed and safe it still seemed to be hovering there, a metaphorical ghost of itself, just under his chin.

  It took him a moment to find his voice. When he did speak, his earlier cocksureness was gone, his voice cracked, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, parched from fear.

  "Word is, the Whitechapel Irregulars had something to do with it," he managed at last.

  "And who might they be?"

  "Gang of thieving street urchins. Conniving little bleeders, if you ask me."

  "And where would I find them?"

  A momentary look of disbelief knotted the man's face and he opened his mouth as if he was about to make some sarcastic comment.

  Ulysses pre-empted any such inappropriateness by arching an eyebrow at the still quivering man.

  "Humour me," was all he needed to say to make his point.

  "Make your way to Whitechapel and if you don't find them first they'll be sure to find you, I 'ave no doubt." Rat gave Ulysses a bitter smile. "Failin' that, you could look in the Blind Beggar. That's all I know."

  Ulysses relaxed a little. "There. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

  Rat said nothing but just glowered at him in return.

  "Now then, Mr Rat," Ulysses said happily as, beaming, he reached inside his coat again. Rat tensed. But rather than a blade, this time Ulysses brought out his wallet. "The matter of your fee."

  "So, this is Whitechapel?" Ulysses declared, as the cab pulled away, a look of child-like wonder on his face.

  "Yes, sir."

  Ulysses paused, cane in hand, looking all around him and inhaled deeply, absorbing the aroma of the place as much as the sight of the slums. The teeming hordes making their way through the streets of Whitechapel - hawkers, pedlars, navvies, dockers, gong cleaners, street sweepers, whores and scruffy children by the score - milled around and past him, not giving him a second look.

  There were few droids present here; it wasn't the sort of place where (a) people could afford them, or (b) where it was safe to send them; within an hour they could be melted down for scrap, or disassembled and their parts cannibalised to make something else or sold on the black market. Neither was it the sort of place Ulysses wanted to risk his Rolls Royce Mark IV Silver Phantom, hence the need for the cab.

  Here, the desperate and the destitute laboured under the almost permanent shadow of the Smog as the factories of the industrialised East End belched their foul clouds of toxicants into the atmosphere. It was said that inhaling the lungfuls of dust present in the air here shortened people's lives considerably.

  "Incredible, isn't it? In all my years living in this teeming metropolis and hunting down villains within its winding streets, and I've never set foot in Whitechapel." He turned and looked at his manservant. "I suppose you've been here many times befor
e, Nimrod. In the past, I mean."

  "Oh, I know it well, sir. You might say, far too well."

  Ulysses took a step forward. He looked up at the street sign nailed to the crumbling brick of a junction above him, letting the tide of struggling humanity wash past him.

  "Old Montague Street," he said. "And where's the Blind Beggar?"

  "Up this way." Nimrod pointed, indicating the crowded street ahead of them. The way was packed with all manner of people going about their daily business, minding their own, while other more prying eyes looked on.

  "Well, no point in hanging around here. If we're going to do this, we'd best get going."

  Beggars and others skulked in the many secreting shadows, small bright eyes watching their every move by the light of crackling electric street lamps and a chestnut seller's brazier.

  The night was cold, this close to winter - for all the talk that certain meteorologists and protest groups spoke of the new-fangled phenomenon of 'global warming' - and come the morning a crust of ice would cover the effluent streams running down the street. A bag of hot roast chestnuts wouldn't go amiss on a night such as this, Ulysses thought, pulling his scarf tight at his neck. While he was at it, he pulled the cashmere up over his mouth to filter out the worst of the ripe stench of raw sewage and lung-tarring smoke. The noxious stink seemed to characterise Whitechapel rather too well.

  This place had been the haunt of prostitutes, thieves and ne'er-do-wells for centuries. When Covent Garden had been cleared, the scum had ended up here, washed east like the rest of the effluent produced by the city.

  Ulysses paused again. That old familiar feeling that was both reassuring and at the same time unnerving, had returned; his near-prescient sixth sense scratching away at the edges of his conscious mind.

  "Tell me, Nimrod, do you get the feeling that we're being watched?" he said.

  "Indubitably, sir."

  "Then we have their attention."

  "I should say so, sir."

  "Excellent. Then let's be having them, as the Peelers would put it."

  The two men continued on their way up Old Montague Street, navigating the bustling crowds, Ulysses looking like a fop out to find some diverting entertainment for the evening, with his fixer-manservant at hand to keep an eye on him; just the sort of image they wanted to portray, in fact.

  Ulysses had the manner of a hedonistic cad down pat, quite possibly because that was what he himself had once been. The enticements offered by the ladies of night were not totally unknown to him, as the infamous Queen of Hearts herself could vouch.

  But that wasn't what he was looking for tonight as he enjoyed the change of scene from the more conservative streets of Mayfair and Bloomsbury. Whitechapel had a look all of its own, its walls plastered with layer upon layer of bill posters - promoting everything from the Chinese magician Lao Shen's show at the Palace Theatre to the new panacea of the modern age, Dr Feelgood's Tonic Stout - until Ulysses could quite believe that it was these layers of paper and glue that were all that was holding some of these crumbling tenements together.

  And then, the dull throb of his subconscious became a white hot flare of awareness, just as Ulysses felt what might have been someone simply brushing past his coat tails, but wasn't.

  He spun round, fast as a pouncing panther and grabbed the child by the wrist in a grip of iron. The urchin - his clothes rags, his face a smear of soot, the whites of his eyes almost all that was visible beneath the grime, a mop of filthy, lice-ridden hair contained within a cloth cap that was obviously too big for him - squealed like a stuck pig. Meanwhile, a waist-coated monkey, with an ugly, old man's face, jumped up and down on the boy's shoulder shrieking, tugging at the string the boy was still holding fast in his free hand.

  Ulysses bent low, eyes blazing and he looked into the boy's terrified pale face. His devilish gleeful grin only made his aspect all the more terrifying as far as the cowering child was concerned.

  A triumphant laugh escaped Ulysses' lips. "Got you!" he growled.

  Chapter Five

  The House of Monkeys

  "So, Sidney, where do you want to begin?"

  The boy put down his tankard, containing a double measure of gin, but did not relinquish his grip on the handle.

  "Don't send me back to the spike, sir. Please, sir. Not that, sir."

  "No one said anything about the workhouse, did they Nimrod?" Ulysses said calmly, regarding the boy's anxious expression with something somewhere between suspicion and almost paternal concern.

  His manservant muttered something under his breath that obviously wasn't really intended for his master's ears, and continued to nurse his hand. The monkey had bitten him when he had tried to wrest it from the boy's grasp, Ulysses having apprehended the would-be pickpocket. That had been the last straw as far as Nimrod was concerned, and if Ulysses hadn't stopped him he would have throttled the simian with its own leash. The creature now sat hiding behind the boy's head, peering at the older man with a malevolent, gargoyle scowl whilst picking the occasional louse out of Sidney's hair to chew on.

  Ulysses looked to his companion again. "You all right there, old chap?"

  "I've suffered worse, sir." That was true, Ulysses thought. "The whiskey's helping." With that Nimrod dipped his bloodied handkerchief into the glass again and dabbed it onto the bite. He hadn't swallowed a drop of the stuff.

  "Soon as we're done here, we'll see about getting you a tetanus jab."

  "Very good, sir."

  Ulysses turned his attention back to the boy, who was taking another noisy slurp of gin. Ulysses didn't have any children of his own - at least none that he knew of - but if there were any of his bastard progeny out there, then he hoped that they were growing up with people who loved them and who could care for them, and not scraping a living from the streets - if it could be called a living - like the poor wretch in front of him.

  The boy was small. Under all the dirt and hand-me-down rags he appeared to be about seven or eight years old. He was pale-faced, like so many who lived under the permanent pall of the Smog and thin through obvious malnutrition. The gin probably didn't help, but it was what the boy had wanted.

  He was strong, Ulysses would give him that. There'd been a tussle when the dandy had first seized the young dip-thief. The boy had kicked and screamed and tried to get away, as Nimrod tried to stop the monkey from joining in the fracas, but Ulysses had won in the end, bundling the boy away under one arm, the hand of the other covering his mouth. People in the street had watched the confrontation and resulting abduction with nothing more than passing interest and nobody acted to stop Ulysses or Nimrod. It just went to show that such incidents weren't uncommon in the rougher parts of town. The general consensus of opinion seemed to be that it was best just to avert your gaze and mind your own business. The boy had probably wronged the finely-attired gentleman in some way they figured, or owed him for services paid for but not yet rendered. Best to keep out of it.

  If Ulysses had stopped to consider it for a moment, he might have pondered on what manner of life could crush a person's spirit so much that any sense of compassion for one's fellow man had been crushed along with it.

  "How old are you, Sidney?" Ulysses asked, lowering his voice so that he came across as unthreatening as possible.

  "Eleven years old, sir," the child said proudly. Appearances could be deceiving, Ulysses mused. "At least so's I'm told," he added.

  "How do you mean?" Ulysses asked.

  "That's what they told me at the workhouse where I's was born. Born in the flood of '86, they said, when the Thames burst its banks. Don't send me back there, sir. Don't send me back to the beadles. Please don't."

  "Look, calm down. No one's going anywhere at the moment, Sidney."

  The boy looked at him with wide, watery brown eyes. They appeared large in comparison to the rest of his head, doeishly cute and appealing, thanks to his stunted growth.

  "You're one of the Irregulars, isn't that right?"

  "Irregular
what, sir? Don't know whatcha mean." The boy's sudden show of bravado told Ulysses everything he needed to know.

  "Best gang in the East End, I heard."

  The boy eyed him suspiciously, knocking back the last of the rotgut that passed for gin round these parts.

  "Another drink?"

  "Don't mind if I do, guv'nor! Seein' as 'ow you're payin'."

  Once Ulysses had the boy in his grasp and had carried him away from the main thoroughfare of Old Montague Street, he had dropped him in the archwayed entrance to a blind alley. By that point the boy had realised that it was pointless trying to run, at least for the time being, and so had sat and listened as Ulysses had made his claim that he only wanted to ask him a few questions over a drink. The child had certainly had much worse threatened to be done to him, so he had taken the two high-falutin' gents to a drinking den he knew.

  There had been little conversation made over the first round but now the gin was starting to loosen the boy's tongue, as Ulysses had hoped. He did not stop to consider the moral implications of getting the boy drunk so that he might disgorge all that Ulysses' needed to know about the urchin street-gang. If he had done, he might as well have given up on ever solving the case of the missing Whitby Mermaid altogether, and he wasn't prepared to do that, not by a long shot.

  Ulysses watched his aide's progress at the bar, through the blue fug of tobacco smoke. The barkeep gave Nimrod what could only be called 'a look' but didn't refuse him his drinks. His money was good and money was all that mattered here. This was Victorian England after all and what rich gentlemen got up to with young waifs and strays wasn't anyone's business but their own. There was always the possibility that the man was a philanthropist who would rescue the boy from poverty and take him away to a better life somewhere else. At least that was what the barkeep tried to tell himself as he looked away from their table again.