Legion of the Dead

by Paul Stewart

  All four wore feathered Highland shakos and black kilts, and stamped their heavy boots in time to the low, sonorous funeral songs they played. They were a professional dirge band, expert at providing a mournful musical backdrop to the proceedings.

  I recognized an old music-hall song about a saloon girl called Daisy Monroe in amongst them, much slower than the original, but with the tune intact. I guessed that it must have been one of the Emperor’s favourites, and was about to say as much to Will when a black hearse drew up.

  Will looked impressed, and I could see why. Resting at the back of the black and gold carriage, every inch of it decorated with orange, yellow and purple chrysanthemums, drawn by a pair of jet black stallions, sprays of ostrich plumes fixed to their heads, was one of the grandest coffins I had ever seen. It was made from highly polished oak, furnished with solid-gold handles and crowned with vast bouquets of roses and lilies, their petals trembling as the horses danced about on the spot. The young driver – his black suit a couple of sizes too large for his bony frame – had pushed back his top hat and was watching Thump McConnell keenly, waiting for his nod to flick the reins and spur the horses into action.

  ‘They do things in style down here in the quays,’ I murmured to Will.

  He frowned. ‘But where’s his family?’ he asked. ‘His wife? His children?’

  ‘As far as I know, this was his family,’ I told him, with a broad sweep of my arm.

  All twelve of the district gangs were here; the Ratcatchers, the Flour Bag Mob, the Bevan Street Crew, the Harness Riggers, the Tallow Gang, the Lampblackers, the Pressers, the Joinery Blades, the Barrel Boys, the Fetter Lane Scroggers, the Spike-Tooth Smilers and, last but not least, the formidable Sumpside Boys. All were under strictest orders to remain on their best behaviour, and the atmosphere was as brittle as a duchess’s smile. No gang leader wanted to be slighted or disrespected; no one wanted to lose face. Stewards with black armbands were passing between the crowd, organizing them into the ranks that they would take as they marched from Angel Square, through the narrow streets of Gatling Quays, to Adelaide Graveyard.

  All twelve of the district gangs were here.

  Finally, with the dirge band at the front, the funeral carriage immediately behind, surrounded by the Sumpside Boys in their ankle-length bearskin coats and straw boat-caps, we were just about to set off, when there was the sound of raised voices behind us. I looked round. Two stewards – elderly members of the lowly Pressers gang – were patting the air, trying to calm the situation down, but neither the leader of the Harness Riggers, in his brass-buckled leather overcoat, nor his portly opposite number in the Barrel Boys – the gold threads of his embroidered waistcoat glinting in the sunlight – were having any of it.

  ‘This is out of order,’ the leader of the Harness Riggers was snarling. ‘Third most powerful gang in the quays and we’re dumped all the way back here …’

  ‘Bunch of prancing ponies, the lot of you,’ the leader of the Barrel Boys shot back, punctuating each word with a stab of his finger. ‘The Barrel Boys were skimming ale wagons when you lot were still in stained knee-breeches.’

  ‘One second,’ said Thump McConnell, tapping the drummer on his shoulder.

  The drummer nodded without missing a beat on the great drum that was strung round his shoulders and hung, vertically, at his chest. Strolling back along the line, his huge bulk cutting a swathe through the ranks of hoodlums, Thump approached the two furious gang leaders. There was a smile on his lips, but I noticed the vicious glint in his eyes as he leaned towards them.

  ‘Not now, lads,’ he said quietly. ‘Not today. Have you forgotten about the truce?’ The smile grew broader, even as his eyes narrowed. ‘I want you to be nice to one another.’ He raised his two great hams of hands and placed them on the back of the two leaders’ heads.

  Then, with a grunt of exertion – and maintaining that sinister smile of his – he shoved the two heads hard together. There was a loud crack! and, with a muffled groan, the two gang leaders crumpled to the ground. ‘And show some respect!’ Thump snarled.

  Back at the front of the line once more, the drum now silent, Thump McConnell and five other Ratcatcher gang members chosen to be pallbearers, stood on one side of the carriage, while six enormous Sumpside Boys stood on the other. Two emaciated-looking young lads provided by Frimley’s Funereal Supplies – their pale faces set with the solemnity of the occasion – stood beside them. The rest of us stood behind, with the other gangs of Gatling Quays, in ordered ranks. The cellist, trumpeter and bagpipes player fell silent. The drummer raised his arms, the creamy felt-covered heads of his drumsticks quivering in the air for a moment, then …

  B-bang!

  He struck the two sides of the drum once more, a resounding thud that brought everyone to attention. The trumpet and pipes started up a new tune; the carriage driver cracked his whip and the whole dismal parade lurched forwards. As we marched through the shadowy streets, windows were flung open all about us, and scrawny children and grey-haired matrons leaned out, their heads bowed in respect. Crowds of people gushed from the front doors, their hands filled with flowers, which they tossed at the passing carriage – carnations, gladioli, garlands of Michaelmas daisies …

  Thump turned to me as we rounded the corner onto the Belvedere Mile, the broadest avenue of Gatling Quays, thicker crowds than ever greeting our passing by. The carriage, already half-hidden beneath a mountain of blooms, clattered softly over a carpet of still more flowers that littered our route.

  ‘A good turn out,’ he said, his eyes moist with emotion.

  ‘He was a well-respected man,’ I said, choosing my words carefully.

  Thump nodded, satisfied, and turned back again.

  At the end of the avenue, the road divided into two narrower roads. The left-hand fork led down to the mudflats and jetties; the right, along to Riverhythe. Between the two, the dark green of its gnarled yew trees speckled with waxy blood-red berries, was Adelaide Graveyard, black cast-iron railings separating it from the roads on either side. We marched on between the throngs of bystanders towards the arched entrance, its tall and ornately forged gates decorated with lions and lambs, and came to a halt.

  I glanced up at the deserted Adelaide Mansions opposite. There was no sign of Ada Gussage at any of its many windows.

  At Thump McConnell’s signal, the five other pallbearers – each one as tall as him, though none quite as bulky – pulled off their flat caps and seized the edge of the coffin. On the other side of the carriage, the Sumpside Boys did the same. Then, having lifted it off the bier, they gripped a gold handle each with a great fist and hefted the coffin up onto their shoulders. From their grunts and sighs, it was clear that the coffin was as heavy as it looked. The music grew quieter till all that was left was the slow rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the drum.

  All round, the bystanders fell still. Then, guided by the sombre beat, we fell into step once more, passed beneath the archway and on into the graveyard.

  It was a mournful place, without a doubt. There was a low, swirling mist snaking its way around our legs, and the bottle-green yew trees rustled softly, muffling the air and shutting out the sun – and making the hairs at the nape of my neck stand on end.

  I wasn’t the only one to feel ill at ease. The ranks of mourners behind me seemed just as troubled. Several of them were looking anxiously about them, glancing over their shoulders or craning their necks as they peered nervously into the shadows between the trees. A member of the Lampblackers crew, the characteristic ring of candles round the broad brim of his barrel-hat flickering, suddenly started back, his teeth bared with fear – before gathering himself self-consciously. A Tallow Gang member pulled a yellow handkerchief from the pocket of his high-buttoned waxed acton and patted it to his brow.

  Then I noticed Lol – the tough who had challenged me and Will the previous day. Our gaze met, and I saw that his eyes were filled with terror.

  ‘This place makes my skin crawl,’ I hear
d Will whisper.

  ‘Me too, Will,’ I whispered back. ‘And they don’t like it either,’ I added, nodding back at the two stallions at the gate, who were pawing the ground and whinnying nervously as the hapless carriage driver struggled to keep them from bolting.

  The stewards, meanwhile, were darting between us, giving instructions. We took our places round the grave in a wide circle, the twelve gangs forming themselves into a dozen narrow wedges, like the five-minute sections of a great clock. Will and I stood with the Ratcatchers, our coalstack hats clutched in our hands, directly behind the vast marble headstone, which was fresh from the stonecutter’s yard, chiselled and polished that very morning. It marked the Emperor’s last resting place. Before us stood the vicar, nodding to each of the mourners in turn as they arrived.

  The Reverend Simeon Spool was his name. He was a stooped and desiccated individual with thin, flaxen hair, parted low on one side, and that bounced up and down on his head like a square of plaited straw every time he nodded. From what I’d heard, he’d once had a church on Gallup Row full of fine gentlemen and generous, charitable ladies. But a love of Congreve’s port wine and gambling on racing snails had proved his undoing. The archbishop had dealt with the resulting scandal by sending him to a rundown chapel in the quays. There, he’d kept himself to himself. But when the gangs snapped their fingers, he jumped. The good reverend was clearly nervous – but then who wouldn’t be in this gloomy graveyard, surrounded by Gatling Quays’ most fearsome inhabitants?

  ‘G-g-good m-m-morning, M-Mr Mc-Mc-Mc-Mc …’

  With the other pallbearers, Thump laid the coffin gently down beside the grave amongst the wreaths and bouquets already delivered and waiting. Then he slowly straightened up, flexed his shoulders and smiled at the Reverend Spool.

  ‘Mc … Connell,’ said the hapless vicar, spitting the name out at last. His face was so pale, it looked as though the Flour Bag Mob had paid him a recent visit.

  ‘If such a morning as this can be called “good,” Vicar,’ said Thump, nodding down at the coffin solemnly.

  ‘Ind-d-d-d-d-d-deed,’ stuttered the vicar, his tongue hammering against his teeth like a woodpecker’s beak, while his cheeks and ears abruptly turned the same colour as the purple sash that hung down over his priestly robes.

  I have to say, given the state of him, I didn’t hold up much hope for the service – and I knew that Thump McConnell would not take kindly to the Emperor’s sendoff being spoiled by the vicar’s inability to string a sentence together. Yet, from the moment he began to recite the burial rites, the Reverend Spool’s voice was transformed into one as clear, as deep, and as unbroken as a tolling bell.

  ‘We have come here today, before God,’ he intoned, ‘to remember our brother and to commit his body …’

  Above our heads, a raven spiralled down out of the sky, letting out a loud rasping shriek that made the vicar and several of the onlookers jump. It was followed by several more of its noisy brothers. The hoarse, screeching cries grew louder as more and more of the jet-black birds swooped down to the graveyard, their finger-like wing-tips scraping the needles of the yew trees as they came in to land. They perched at the ends of the spreading branches, which bowed under their weight, opened their great ebony-like beaks and screeched so loudly that the vicar had to raise his voice to be heard above the raucous cawing.

  There were two dozen of them – a haberdasher’s handful – and as I counted them, it seemed to me as if a thirteenth gang from the quays had arrived to pay its respects. They sat in a circle, their heads cocked and cold black eyes glinting as they watched the pallbearers lower the coffin down into the gaping hole.

  ‘Earth to earth,’ the vicar intoned, tossing a handful of claggy mud down on the lid of the coffin. ‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’

  Heads bowed, we murmured a final prayer, and then it was over. The circle of mourners broke up, and gang members began to file away. I was about to follow them, when Will tugged the sleeve of my coat.

  ‘What are they doing?’ he hissed.

  I turned and looked back. Gravediggers had appeared, to shovel the mound of earth back into the grave. One of them, however, had climbed down onto the top of the coffin. I heard a soft jangling sound. Meanwhile, the second had thrust a long pole, its top curved like a shepherd’s crook, into the ground just to the left of the headstone, and was attaching a bell from the hook. The next moment, the first gravedigger re-emerged and climbed from the grave, a length of chain clasped in his hand.

  Ada had done her job well, I noted. I looked round at Will.

  ‘It’s an extra that the higher class of undertakers provide,’ I told him grimly. ‘Insurance against being buried alive.’

  I heard Will take a sharp intake of breath. The first gravedigger reached up and attached the gold ring at the end of the chain to the bell. The other end, I knew, was already looped round the Emperor’s right index finger. I nodded down into the grave.

  ‘It’s just in case the doctor has been a little hasty. If the dear departed wakes up in the coffin, he can pull on the chain, ring the bell, and the graveyard watchmen will dig him up again.’

  ‘Buried alive …’ Will breathed. ‘Can you imagine?’

  I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to. But I knew there were many who did. When sickness swept through the city – like the blackwater fever epidemic of a few years ago, or last summer’s outbreak of bloody flux – wiping out great swathes of the population, the overworked doctors hadn’t always been as scrupulous as they might have been. There had been more than a few stories of those who had been pronounced dead, only to wake up in pitch-black darkness six feet under. That was why those who could afford it paid for a finger-chain and bell to be attached. Some went even further. Theodore Boyle – a millionaire financier – had, on falling ill, changed his will, insisting that he be beheaded after his death and he had employed a samurai swordsman in advance to carry out the deed.

  ‘Come, Will,’ I said, clapping my hand on his shoulder. ‘Enough of these morbid thoughts. Let’s be off.’

  The pair of us turned to go. The graveyard had emptied quickly after the burial. The vicar had already gone, as had the funeral carriage, while the last of the mourners were hurrying through the arched entrance. We trudged after them through the wet grass, glancing back nervously over our shoulders as we wound our way between the centuries of graves. The ravens had stopped shrieking, but were still there, their black wings folded round their plump bodies making them look like a group of sinister black cowled monks.

  The next moment, as one, the entire flock clapped its wings and flapped up noisily into the air, the raucous cawing louder than ever. Leaving that eerie place, we turned onto the Belvedere Mile and climbed to the rooftop of a tea-importer’s warehouse. Through a gap in the buildings behind us, the graveyard was still visible, the thick fog swirling round the dark trees like curdled milk. Above it, the ravens circled.

  ‘That place gives me the collywobbles,’ said Will, his voice trembling.

  ‘Don’t worry, Will,’ I said. ‘Old Firejaw’s dead and gone, and we’ve paid our respects, so there’s no reason for us ever to go there again.’

  Little did I realize, as those fateful words left my lips, just how wrong they would prove to be …

  A few weeks later – the memory of that bleak funeral having faded from my mind like a night-watchman’s brazier at dawn – I dropped in on my old friend, the eminent zoologist Professor Pinkerton-Barnes. I was in a cheerful mood, and with good reason.

  My protégé, Will Farmer, had just landed his first highstacking job. An apothecary by the name of Arnold Tilling had taken Will on as his regular tick-tock lad, to deliver potions and pills to his many customers all over town. Now Will was practising his high-stacking skills over the city’s rooftops, from noisy Potter’s Reach, the air ringing with the tapping and banging of its coopers, wheelwrights and coppersmiths, to hushed Blackchapel with its barristers and clerics; from flea-bitten Eastgate to toffee-nosed Ch
alfont; from silk emporia in the opulent Asquith Arcade to grubby attics in the rundown Wasps’ Nest …

  I was delighted for him, and with his wages he’d been able to afford to take attic rooms next to mine and invest in a fine new coalstack hat and gamekeeper’s waistcoat. Smiling to myself at Will’s good fortune, I shinned down a drainpipe to the window-ledge of the professor’s laboratory and climbed inside.

  The professor – or PB to his friends – was perched on a green velvet-upholstered ottoman, a raised scientific journal obscuring his face. I cleared my throat. He jumped, sat upright, and the journal fell to the floor with a soft clatter.

  ‘Barnaby!’ he cried out. ‘You startled me!’

  ‘Sorry, PB!’ I said. ‘I—’ The words stuck in my throat. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Done?’ he said.

  ‘Your eyes,’ I said, nodding towards the two thick black circular marks that ringed them. ‘You look like a panda!’

  The professor frowned, took off his spectacles and crossed the room to a large mirror, where he examined his reflection for a moment.

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘It appears to be residue from the resin I used to seal the goggles …’

  ‘Goggles?’ I echoed.

  ‘Yes,’ said the professor, dabbing at his panda eyes with a grubby handkerchief. ‘I was trying to make them watertight – but to no avail. They leaked horribly. Still, I’ve come up with something much better …’

  The professor paused when he saw the puzzled look on my face. Polishing his spectacles on the front of his lab coat before putting them on, he took me by the arm.

  ‘First things first, Barnaby, my boy.’ He smiled. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’