by Tim Powers
“And who says so?” inquired the clown, somehow freeing one arm from a stilt to point at Punch. “Who says you ought to be hanged? The police? A crusher-lover, are you?”
Punch shook his head.
“The magistrates? Are they anything more than a bunch of fat old fools that want to stop you having your fun?”
On reflection Punch had to admit they were not.
“Is it God, then? Some bearded giant that lives in the clouds? Have you ever seen Him, or heard Him say you mustn’t do as you please?”
“Well—no.”
“Then come with me.”
The two puppets began walking in place, and after a few moments a beadle puppet appeared, and announced that he had a warrant “to take you up, Mr. Punch.” Punch looked abashed, but the clown pulled a tiny gleaming knife out of a sleeve and stuck it into the beadle’s eye. The boys sitting around Doyle cheered as the beadle fell.
Punch danced a hornpipe, clearly pleased. “Mr. Horrabin,” he said to the clown, “can you get us some dinner?”
The show went back to the standard story line and Punch and the clown stole a string of sausages and a frying pan from a public house landlord, though Doyle didn’t remember the landlord being actually killed.
Punch, feeling frolicsome, was doing a whirling dance with the string of sausages when a headless puppet entered, also dancing, the stump of its neck bobbing up and down to the beat of the accelerated organ music. Punch was terrified by this apparition until Horrabin explained that it was only his pal Scaramouche, “and isn’t it fun to be pals with things everybody else is afraid of?” Punch pondered this, knob chin on his fist, then laughed, nodded, and resumed his dance. Even the Horrabin puppet was dancing on its stilts, and Doyle was awed to think of the contortions the puppeteer must have been going through to keep three puppets dancing and the music going too.
Now a fourth puppet whirled on stage—it was a woman, with the sort of exaggeratedly voluptuous figure that little boys chalk on walls, but her white face, dark eyes and long white veils made it clear that she was meant to be a ghost. “Judy, my sweet creature!” exclaimed Punch, still dancing, “you’re ever so much more beautiful now!”
Punch jigged to the front of the stage, and all at once the music stopped and a curtain dropped behind him, isolating him from the others. He did a few more hesitant steps and then halted, for a new puppet had appeared—a somber figure in a black hood, and it was pushing along a gallows with a little noose swinging from it. ,
“Jack Ketch!” said Punch.
“Aye, Jack Ketch,” said the newcomer, “or Mr. Graball, or the Grimy Reaper. It don’t make no difference what you call me, Punch. I’ve come to execute you, by order of the Law.”
Horrabin’s head popped out for a moment from the wings. “See if you can kill him,” he said, and withdrew.
Punch clapped his hands. Then with a lot of double talk he got Jack Ketch to put the noose around his own neck, just to show how it’s done, and Punch pulled the rope, hoisting the executioner puppet into the air, its legs somehow kicking realistically. Punch laughed and turned to the audience with spread, welcoming arms. “Hooray!” he cried in his cartoon character voice. “Now Death is dead, and we can all do as we please!”
The curtain behind him snapped back up and the music came on with a crash, very fast and wild now, and the puppets were all dancing around the gallows, Punch hand in hand with Judy’s ghost. A couple of the boys and one of the old men got up from the pavement and walked away, the old man shaking his head in disgust.
Punch and the Judy ghost danced up to the front, so that when the curtain dropped again and the music ceased they were alone at the front of the stage. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” piped Punch, “was the new and corrected Punch’s Opera.” Punch slowly looked round his audience—thinned down to only two old bums, three boys and Doyle. Then he did a quick jig and pinched the ghost puppet obscenely. “Horrabin did your humble servant a good turn or two, lads,” he said. “And any of you that’s interested can come talk to me backstage.” He gave Doyle a stare that was surprisingly intense for glass eyes, and then the outer curtains swept in from the sides. The show was over.
One old man and one boy walked around with Doyle to the back of the narrow booth, and the Punch puppet, looking very small away from the scaled down stage, waved at them from over the top of the curtain that served as a stage door.
“My admirers!” the puppet squeaked. “One at a time—Lord Foreigner last.”
Feeling like a fool, Doyle stood behind the evidently imbecilic boy while the old man shuffled into the booth. It’s as though we’re waiting to get into a confessional, he thought glumly. The image was reinforced by the murmured questions and answers he could hear from inside.
Doyle soon noticed that certain members of the milling market crowd were looking at him in peculiar ways; a well-dressed man leading a child by the hand glanced at him with a mixture of pity and contempt, one stout old fellow stared with obvious envy, and a policeman—to Doyle’s alarm—gave him a squinting, tight-lipped stare as though half resolved to arrest him on the spot. Doyle stared down at the sprung, bag-like shoes Chris and Meg had let him have in exchange for his elegant boots. Whatever it is, he thought, if there’s money in it and it’s not too illegal, I’ll take it—for a while, anyway, just till I get on my feet in this damned century.
The old man pushed the curtain aside and walked away without a glance at the boy or Doyle, and Doyle, watching him recede into the crowd, was unable to guess whether the old fellow was pleased or disappointed. The boy had stepped inside, and could soon be heard laughing delightedly. He was outside again in a moment, skipping away with a bright new shilling in his hand—and, Doyle noticed, a chalked cross in a, circle, which definitely hadn’t been there before, on the back of his oversized coat.
He looked back at the booth and met the cunningly worked gaze of the voluptuous Judy puppet peering around the curtain at him. “Come play in my pint pot,” she whispered, and winked.
The kid got a shilling, he reminded himself as he stepped forward—and I’ll check my coat afterward for chalk marks.
The puppet disappeared inside a moment before Doyle swept the curtain aside and edged in. The interior was dark, but he could see a little stool, and he sank onto it.
He could just make out the silhouette, a foot or two away, of a head in a tall, pointed hat and an upper torso in a coat with grotesquely padded shoulders; the form moved, leaning forward, and he knew it was his host. “And now the ruined foreigner,” came a fluty voice, “trying to look at ease in an alien land. Where do you come from?”
“Uh… America. And I am broke—penniless. So if you do have some kind of job offer, I’ll be—gaah!”
The sliding panel of a dark lantern had been clanked open, and the silhouette was abruptly revealed to be a clown, its face hideously pied with red and green and white paint, its inflamed eyes wide open and crossed, and a startlingly long tongue protruding from between puffed-out cheeks. It was the same clown he’d seen stumping about the market on stilts earlier, the model of the Horrabin puppet.
The tongue withdrew and the face relaxed, but even in repose the face paint made it impossible to guess its expression, or even much of its form. The clown was perched cross-legged on a stool a little higher than Doyle’s. “I perceive you’ve nearly used up your woodpile,” the clown said, “and are about to start shoving the chairs and curtains, even the books, into the fireplace. Lucky I came across you today—tomorrow or the day after I don’t think there’d have been much left of you.”
Doyle closed his eyes and let his heartbeat slow down. He was alarmed to note that even this scanty sympathy made him feel ready to burst into tears. He sighed deeply and then opened his eyes. “If you have an offer,” he said quietly, “state it.”
The clown grinned, revealing a set of yellowed teeth that pointed every which way, like tombstones in an old and shifting graveyard. “Haven’t quite ripped up the floo
rboards yet,” he noted approvingly. “Good. You have, milord, a sensitive and intelligent face; it’s clear that you’ve been well brought up and that garbage clothes like these aren’t what you’re accustomed to. Have you ever been interested in the dramatic arts?”
“Well… no, not particularly. I was in a play or two in school.”
“Do you think you could learn a part, gauge an audience and alter your role to suit their tastes, become whatever sort of character they’d be most sympathetic toward?”
Doyle was mystified, but timidly hopeful. “I suppose so. If I could just get some food and a bed first. I know for a fact that I don’t get stage fright, because—”
“The question,” interrupted the clown, “is whether you’re susceptible to street fright. I’m not talking about caperings in a playhouse.”
“Oh? What, then, street performing? Well—”
“Yes,” said the clown patiently, “the subtlest of street performances—begging. We’ll write you a role, and then depending on what… sacrifices you’re willing to make, you can earn up to a pound a day.”
The realization that what he’d thought was flattery was just a clinical evaluation of his ability to evoke pity struck Doyle like a slap across the face. “Begging?” Anger made him dizzy. “Well, thank you,” he said tightly, getting to his feet, “but I’ve got honest employment, selling onions.”
“Yes, I observed your aptitude for the job. On your way, then—but when you change your mind, ask anyone in the East End where Horrabin’s Punch show is playing.”
“I won’t change my mind,” said Doyle, leaving the booth. He walked away, and didn’t look back until he had reached the edge of the long wharf paralleling the street. Horrabin, once again on stilts, was striding away, pulling behind him a wagon that was apparently the booth itself, collapsed and folded up. He shuddered, and turned away to his left, toward the quays, looking for Chris and Meg’s rowboat.
It was gone. There were fewer boats now along the quays that projected out into the river, and the water was dotted with boats sailing away east and west—what’s the problem, Doyle thought worriedly, the market can’t be closing, it’s only mid-morning—and he could see a rowboat several hundred yards out that might have been the one with Chris and Meg and Sheila in it.
“Hey!” he tried to yell, and was instantly embarrassed at how weak his voice was—even on the next quay over they couldn’t have heard him. “All right, what’s the difficulty?” Doyle turned around and saw the policeman who’d given him the unfriendly eye a few minutes before. “What’s the time, please, sir?” he asked the policeman, trying to swallow his vowels the way everyone else was doing.
The officer yanked a watch on a chain out of his waistcoat pocket, cocked an eyebrow at it and put it away. “Coming hard on eleven. Why?”
“Why are they all leaving?” Doyle waved a hand at the boats scattered across the face of the river.
“It’s nearly eleven o’clock, isn’t it,” the officer answered, speaking very clearly as though he thought Doyle might be drunk. “And it’s Sunday, you’ll be interested to learn.”
“The market closes at eleven on Sundays, is what you’re saying?”
“You’ve stated the case. Where are you from? That’s no Surrey or Sussex accent.”
Doyle sighed. “I’m from America—Virginia. And though I”—he dragged a hand across his forehead—”though I will be doing fine as soon as a friend of mine arrives in the city, I’m destitute now. Where is there a charitable institution that might give me food and a bed until I can get my… affairs in order?”
The policeman frowned. “There’s a workhouse by the slaughterhouses in Whitechapel Street; they’ll give you food and lodging for helping tan hides and drag out the offal bins.”
“A workhouse, you say.” Doyle remembered the way Dickens was to portray the places. “Thanks.” He started to slouch away.
“Just a moment,” called the policeman. “If you’ve got any money on your person, let me see it.”
Doyle dug into his pocket for the six pennies and held them out on his palm.
“Very well, I can’t take you up for vagrancy now. But perhaps I’ll see you about this evening.” He touched his helmet. “Good day.”
Returning to Thames Street, Doyle expended half his fortune on a plate of vegetable soup and a trowelful of mashed potatoes. It tasted wonderful, but left him at least as hungry as before, so he spent his last three cents on another order of the same. The vendor even let him have a cup of cold water to wash it down.
Policemen were walking up and down the street, calling, “Close ‘em up now, day of rest, eleven o’clock it is, close ‘em up,” and Doyle, a genuine vagrant now, was careful to stay out of their way.
A man of about his own age was striding along with a bag of fish in one arm and a pretty girl on the other, and Doyle, telling himself just this once, forced himself to step into the man’s path.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said hastily. “I find myself in a distressing—”
“Get to the point, fellow,” interrupted the man impatiently. “You’re a beggar?”
“No. But I was robbed last night, and I haven’t a penny, and—I’m an American, and all my luggage and papers are gone, and… I’d like to solicit employment or borrow some money.”
The girl looked sympathetic. “Give the poor man something, Charles,” she said. “Since we’re not going to church.”
“What ship did you arrive on?” Charles asked sceptically. “That’s no American accent I ever heard.”
“The, uh. Enterprise,” Doyle answered. In his confused fumbling for a name he’d almost said Starship Enterprise.
“You see, my dear, he’s a fraud,” said Charles proudly. “There may be an Enterprise, but no such ship has landed here lately. There could conceivably be a stray Yankee still about from the Blaylock last week, but then,” he said, turning cheerfully to Doyle, “you didn’t say the Blaylock, did you? You shouldn’t try a line like that on a man in the shipping trade.” Charles looked around the thinning crowd. “Plenty of constables about. I’ve half a mind to turn you in.”
“Oh, let him be,” sighed the girl. “We’re late anyway, and he’s clearly in some sort of distressed circumstances.”
Doyle nodded gratefully to her and hurried away. The next person he approached was an old man, and he was careful to say that he’d arrived on the Blaylock. The old man gave him a shilling, and added an admonition that Doyle should be similarly generous to other beggars if he ever found himself with money. Doyle assured him that he would.
A few moments later, when Doyle was leaning against the brick wall of a public house, debating whether he dared drown his embarrassment and apprehension by spending some of his new-won wealth on a glass of beer, he was startled to feel a tug at his pant leg; and he nearly cried out when he looked down and saw a ferociously bearded man, legless and sitting on a little cart, staring up at him.
“What dodge are you working and who are you with?” the man demanded in an operatically deep voice.
Doyle tried to move away, but the man tightened his clutch on the corduroy pants and the cart rolled after Doyle for a pace or two like a little trailer. When Doyle halted—for people were staring—the man repeated his sentence.
“I’m not working any dodge and I’m not with anybody,” Doyle whispered furiously, “and if you don’t let go of me I’ll run off the wharf into the river!”
The bearded man laughed. “Go ahead, I’ll wager I can swim farther than you can.” Seeing the breadth of shoulder under the man’s black coat, Doyle despairingly guessed that was true. “Now I saw you hit up those two, and you got something from the second one. You might be a new recruit of Captain Jack’s, or you might be one of Horrabin’s crew, or you might be freelance. Which is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—Get away from me or I’ll shout for a constable.” Once again Doyle felt ready to burst into tears, for he could imagine this creature nev
er letting go, but rolling angrily along behind him for the rest of his life. “I’m not with anyone!”
“That’s what I thought.” The legless man nodded. “You’re apparently new to the city, so I’ll just give you some advice—freelance beggars can take their chances east or north of here, but Billingsgate and Thames Street and Cheapside are staked out for either Copenhagen Jack’s lads or the vermin Horrabin runs. You’ll find the same sort of arrangements west of St. Paul’s. Now you’ve been warned off by Skate Benjamin, and if you’re seen freelancing in the East End’s main streets again you’ll be… well, frankly, pal,” Skate said, not unkindly, “you’ll be rendered unfit for any employment save begging. So go on, I saw silver and I should take it from you—and if you say I couldn’t I’ll be forced to prove I could—but you do look like you need it. Go!”
Doyle hurried away west, toward the Strand, praying that newspaper offices didn’t close down as early as Billingsgate market, and that one of them might have a position needing filling, and that he’d be able to shake his dizzy feverishness well enough to convince an editor that he was literate and educated. He rubbed his jaw—he’d shaved less than twenty-four hours ago, so that was no problem, but a comb would have been handy.
Oh, never mind looks, he told himself, a little deliriously—I’ll win a position by sheer eloquence and force of personality. He squared his shoulders and put a bit of spring into his step.
CHAPTER 4
“The fruit that was to grow upon this Tree of Evil would be great, for it should be fit to be served to Don Lucifer’s table as a new banqueting dish, sithence all his other meats, though they fatted him well, were grown stale.”
—Thomas Decker
It was a subterranean grotto formed by the collapse, God knew how long ago, of roughly twelve levels of sewers, the debris of which had all long since been carried away by the scavengers and floods of other seasons. It formed a huge hall, roofed by the massive beams that supported the paving stones of Bainbridge Street—for the collapse hadn’t extended quite all the way up to the surface—and floored with stones laid by the Romans in the days when Londinium was a military outpost in a hostile Celtic wilderness. Hammocks on long ropes were suspended at various heights across the cathedral dimness, and ragged men were already crawling like spiders out along the lines to pouch themselves comfortably in the swinging sacks. Lights were beginning to be lit, smoky red grease lamps hung from the timbers exposed in cross section at the many open sewer-mouths in the walls. A rill of water ran steadily from one of the higher mouths, losing its solidity as it arched down through the dim air to splash in a black pool off to the side.