The Deadly Fire

by Cora Harrison

  ‘I just thought I’d bring Sammy along,’ said Alfie in an off-hand manner. ‘I had a bit of trouble today – with Mary Robinson.’

  ‘Those leaflets that Mr Elmore got printed!’ Sarah had a quick, clever brain.

  ‘That’s right. That woman tried to strangle me.’ Alfie stopped under a gas lamp, tilted his chin and showed the black bruises on his throat. ‘She threatened Sammy, too. She said that she knew where we lived so I thought I would bring him with us.’ He didn’t mention Mutsy; he didn’t like to admit that he felt uneasy about walking through the streets of St Giles without the presence of his faithful dog. In every shadow he seemed to see the huge, burly form of Mary Robinson, dressed in a man’s overcoat and a man’s hat.

  ‘Coward,’ taunted Tom. ‘You nearly wet yourself, didn’t you, just because a woman gave you a shaking! Can’t think of nothing else but Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson! He’s been going on about her for the last hour or so, Sarah. He’s scared stiff, poor little boy!’

  ‘You shut up or I’ll make you sorry,’ retorted Alfie. He doubled his fists, but then uncurled them reluctantly. He didn’t want to upset Jack. Jack was such a good friend as well as a cousin, never complaining, always ready to do the worst jobs like spending freezing hours up to his knees in the filthy water of the Thames, searching for pieces of coal. Without Jack, their life in the damp cellar in Bow Street would be a lot less comfortable. His brother just had to be put up with.

  Without saying a word, Alfie walked on. A flood of bad language was coming from Tom, but Alfie ignored it. Tom wasn’t too bright; he would soon run out of things to say and then they could forget their quarrel.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ said Jack, the peacemaker, after a few minutes. ‘Cheer up.’

  ‘Well, I’m tired of him bossing me. Who’s he to say that I should waste my evenings going to school?’ Tom moodily kicked a stone from the pavement right under the feet of a passing horse.

  ‘Give it another try,’ advised Jack. ‘It will come to you all of a sudden, you’ll find.’

  ‘We’ll probably all be turned out anyway, what with Alfie dragging Sammy and Mutsy along,’ said Tom. Typically, he sounded quite good-humoured, now.

  Alfie didn’t turn his head. He had worse things to worry him than Tom. His eyes were fixed on the tall, broad figure emerging abruptly from a darkened doorway and then striding away from them, rounding the corner towards Great Russell Street.

  He met Sarah’s eyes and said in a low voice, ‘I think that might have been Mary Robinson.’

  CHAPTER 4

  THE SCHOOL

  The Ragged School in Streatham Street was the last of the old houses built hundreds of years before, when St Giles was just a village outside London. Its ancient wooden frame had begun to rot away, and it lurched to one side, looking as though it would fall down any day in a gust of wind, or just sink back into the mud around it. Inside, it had a stone floor with two rooms downstairs and a large walk-in cupboard beside the front door. A crazily leaning wooden staircase led up to three more rooms.

  Mr Elmore, a small, heavily bearded figure, dressed as usual in a slightly shabby black frock coat and close-fitting black trousers, was at the door when they arrived.

  ‘Come in,’ he said with a warm smile at Sarah, who was one of his star pupils. ‘And who is this?’

  He had seen at a glance that Sammy was blind and he took his hand with such gentleness that Alfie felt doubly ashamed to think how he had betrayed this kind man.

  ‘This is Sammy, my brother,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit worried . . .’ He gulped a bit and decided not to mention the name of Mary Robinson. ‘I thought you might not mind if I brought him along,’ he finished.

  ‘Come and learn your ABC, Sammy,’ said Mr Elmore gently. He ushered them into the big room to the right of the front door, saying, ‘You’re very welcome to our school.’ He eyed Mutsy with a slight smile. ‘And what about this fellow? Can he read yet?’

  ‘I thought we might need him on the street. He’s a good dog to protect us. I’m a bit worried . . .’ Once again Alfie lapsed into silence and Mr Elmore gave an understanding nod.

  ‘Tell me about it later. First, let’s get these two settled into class.’

  The alphabet class was conducted by one of the monitors, a tall, skinny boy called Albert. Like the other monitors, he had already learned to read and write and was paid sixpence a week to teach the other children. Mr Elmore introduced Sammy to Albert and told him that Mutsy would be staying too. Albert looked surprised, but grinned as Mr Elmore said, ‘He seems a good dog.’

  Mutsy gave an extra wag of the tail in appreciation of this kindness and sat down beside Sammy and Tom.

  The other pupils came crowding in a few minutes later. After a quick stare at Sammy and Mutsy, they took their places on the three battered benches that lined the room. Each bench seated six and Albert stood in front of them and started to sing the alphabet song which they all joined in with cheerfully.

  Sammy was quick and clever, used to learning songs, and he rapidly picked up the chant of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Mr Elmore smiled appreciatively as he heard Sammy’s clear, high, beautiful voice soaring up with the words, And now I know my ABC . . . He left the monitor to instruct the rest of the class in fitting letters together to make DOG, CAT and other three-letter words while he took Sammy to the back of the room, asking him to sing song after song.

  ‘You have a rare gift here,’ he said, patting Sammy on the shoulder. ‘I wish that I had the money to pay for lessons for you. However . . .’ He stopped and thought for a moment and then smiled.

  ‘I know a man in Ludgate Hill who loves music and has more money than he knows what to do with,’ he went on. ‘I’ll have a word with him and see what he can do.’

  Sammy smiled a smile of sheer joy but Alfie, waiting patiently until Mr Elmore was free to hear about Mary Robinson, felt a pang of fear that this hope would be disappointed.

  ‘Why should this rich man in Ludgate Hill be interested in what you say about Sammy?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘Because he is my father,’ said Mr Elmore. ‘Now tell me how you got on with those leaflets.’

  ‘Can we go up into your office?’ asked Alfie nervously. He was worried about the other children listening in, but also his feeling of shame at having betrayed the teacher’s name made him reluctant to begin his story.

  Mr Elmore’s office was a small room crammed with books. It had only one tiny window high up in the wall and the floorboards were badly broken in places. In one corner was a rickety, worm-eaten desk with the remains of a couple of loaves of bread on it. Any hungry pupil was welcome to some of the teacher’s supper before or after lessons.

  Mr Elmore brushed Alfie’s excuses aside and did not seem to be worried about the threat to him. His face darkened, however, when he heard the full account of the attack on Alfie and the threat to Sammy.

  ‘I’ll go straight down to Bow Street police station tomorrow morning,’ he said decisively. ‘We have a perfect right to tell these unfortunate costermongers the truth. She won’t get away with this again. I plan to distribute leaflets in all of the markets in London where that woman operates. These are for Smithfield, these for Petticoat Lane, these for Leadenhall and for Newgate.’ He nodded at the separate piles of leaflets on his desk. Alfie felt his heart sink as he gazed at them. He had no desire to meet Mary Robinson again. He looked from the leaflets to Mr Elmore and found that the man was smiling.

  ‘Don’t worry, boy, I wouldn’t ask you again. Now get on with your work, Alfie. You are making very good progress. I think you will probably be finished with the writing class this week and then I’ll move you up to the third class and you can study spelling there. Keep up the reading practice. Every time you see a piece of print, try to get its meaning. We’ll have you reading your Bible before long. Now don’t you worry about Mary Robinson. I’ll get the Bow Street runners on her tail.’

  Alfie nodded and left the room, bu
mping into Tom outside the door. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped. ‘No wonder you can’t learn if you don’t stay in your own classroom.’ It was a relief to lose his temper with Tom, but Alfie felt slightly ashamed of himself when his cousin turned without a word and stomped down the stairs.

  Back in the classroom, Alfie practised his handwriting, still worrying about Mary Robinson, despite Mr Elmore’s words. He had a feeling that Bow Street police station would not take too much notice of the teacher. Even if he were a toff, the eldest son of a rich goldsmith, he had chosen to spend his life working with the poorest of the poor children of London.

  Mr Elmore wasn’t like any other toff he had ever met, Alfie thought to himself as he dipped his quill pen into the ink pot. The Ragged School and its pupils seemed to be the most important thing in his life. He had dismissed a teacher, Thomas Orrack, because he had been violent towards the children. He had refused to allow the terrible building to be pulled down and houses for the rich to be built on the spot.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Alfie had heard a gentleman in a frock coat and tall hat say to Mr Elmore a few months ago. ‘There will come a time when the whole of St Giles will be pulled down. You might as well give in now.’

  ‘I bought this building and it’s mine to do what I like with, and what I like is to teach the poor unfortunate children of St Giles to read and write.’ The whole school had heard their teacher yell those words.

  ‘You didn’t take those leaflets from my desk, did you?’ Mr Elmore suddenly appeared at Alfie’s shoulder, making him jump.

  ‘Take the leaflets? No, I never.’ Not likely, thought Alfie. He had had enough of Mary Robinson and would be glad never to hear her name again.

  ‘Odd! They seem to have disappeared.’ Mr Elmore thought about it for a moment and then seemed to dismiss the matter from his mind. ‘Your brother, Sammy, is a bright boy,’ he continued. ‘I’ve got an idea for teaching him to read. I read in a book about a man called Braille who invented a touch-system that is used to teach the blind. He’ll need to know his letters first, though, and how the letters join together to make the words. I was just thinking that if we could get some clay from the brickworks, some of the children in the alphabet class could make him some letters so that he could feel the shape and then learn the sound. Just run down there, Alfie, will you? Tell the foreman that I know Mr Lambert, the property developer. You could say he and I are great friends – he comes to see me often enough! Anyway, say that I’m sure that Mr Lambert would want to please me. We only need enough clay to make a brick.’

  Alfie got slowly to his feet. He was reluctant to leave his work. He gazed with admiration at the page of perfect copperplate handwriting that he had produced. He had just got the hang of the mystery, he thought. Suddenly all of those squiggles that surrounded him were beginning to make sense. He had learned to read print and now he was learning to write and to read other people’s handwriting. He could talk to people without a word being spoken by anyone.

  ‘Couldn’t Tom go?’ he asked.

  ‘Can’t find Tom anywhere,’ said Mr Elmore dismissively. ‘He has a bad habit of wandering from class to class. I scolded him earlier when I saw him coming out of my office so now he is probably sulking. Go on, like a good lad. Between us we might start teaching your blind brother to read this very evening.’

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BRICKWORKS

  The brickworks were busy when Alfie arrived. They worked past midnight there, Alfie knew, turning out the bricks to build the new houses in Bloomsbury. Clay was everywhere. Piles and piles of it were being thumped by children as young as seven or eight. From time to time the foreman came up and tested a piece, and, if all the air had not been wedged out, the child got thumped. He seemed to be a bad-tempered man who was continually shouting at everyone.

  Alfie put on his politest voice. ‘Mr Elmore, from the Ragged School, asked if you could give me a slab of clay. He said that he knows Mr Lambert and that he was sure that Mr Lambert would not refuse him.’

  ‘Well, Mr Lambert isn’t here now,’ sneered the foreman. ‘I don’t think you would expect to find a man like that working at this hour of the night. He’s probably at home eating a ten-course dinner in his posh house.’

  ‘He’s rich, then, is he?’ Alfie was always curious about people.

  The foreman snorted. ‘Rich! Of course he is rich! What do you think? He has built half the houses around here and plans to build more. Go on, get out of here and stop wasting my time.’ Then his face changed. ‘Good evening, Mr Lambert. Didn’t expect to see you here at this hour of the night, Mr Lambert.’

  Alfie immediately recognised Mr Lambert as the man in the frock coat who had made Mr Elmore lose his temper. He was a small man with a large stomach, quite round in shape, and with a smiling face. He had approached them very quietly and Alfie was fairly sure that he must have overheard the foreman’s words.

  ‘Who’s this young man?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Sent by Mr Elmore from the Ragged School, sir,’ said the foreman nervously. ‘Wants some clay, sir. Said that you would give him some.’

  Mr Lambert laughed pleasantly. ‘Are you one of his prize pupils?’ he asked genially. ‘Go on, we can spare some clay for such a good man as Mr Elmore. Let him take what he wants,’ he said to the foreman.

  Alfie waited until Mr Lambert walked away, stumbling slightly on the uneven ground, and then he found a flat piece of wood and piled plenty of clay on to it. He didn’t think it would matter how much he took. Tons of the stuff was being pressed into moulds, then tipped out on to boards, carried to the kiln, baked and put out to cool.

  By the time that Alfie arrived back at the school, his arms aching from the heavy load of clay, he was half sorry that he had taken so much – about four times as much as Mr Elmore had told him to get.

  He pushed open the front door and stood in the hallway for a moment.

  ‘What you got there?’ asked Albert, who was busy filling the inkpots from a large bottle of black ink that lived in the large, walk-in cupboard beside the front door.

  ‘Mr Elmore wanted some clay, but I’ve got much too much,’ explained Alfie, looking ruefully at the enormous lump on the piece of board. ‘Perhaps I should throw half of it away. What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Albert. ‘You’d never know, it might come in useful. Put it in here.’ He surveyed the cupboard and stared dubiously at the rickety shelves, stacked with old slates, broken pieces of chalk, offcuts of paper and a few quill pens.

  ‘Best put it on the floor,’ he decided and watched while Alfie put the large wet lump of clay on the cupboard floor.

  When Alfie came into the alphabet class with the rest of the clay, Mr Elmore was still with Sammy, fascinated by the speed with which the blind boy was learning. He seemed to be the brightest pupil in the first class. Mr Elmore had taken out some letter cards, and Alfie rubbed long worms of clay between his hands and bent them to cover the letters.

  Mr Elmore was teaching Sammy words beginning with the letter D.

  ‘Doctor, dig,’ said Mr Elmore. ‘Down, desperate, dirt, disease, despair, destroy . . .’

  ‘Dog,’ said Sammy with a grin and a quick pat of Mutsy, who was sitting bolt upright beside him, looking intelligent and alert.

  Quickly Alfie arranged the letters DOG on a small tray and handed them to Sammy, helping him to trace the shape of the three letters. Sammy’s face lit up as he understood. Alfie grinned and showed the tray to Mutsy, barely forming the word ‘Bark’ with his lips, and Mutsy barked.

  Then Alfie made RAT, allowed Sammy to feel the three letters and then, in a whisper as low as a sigh, said ‘Growl’ to Mutsy and Mutsy growled.

  At the end of school time, Mr Elmore brought the whole school into the big room downstairs to see the fun. Over fifty children were standing around laughing as time after time Alfie tested Mutsy. Every time Mutsy saw the word DOG he barked and wagged his tail, and every time he saw the word RAT
he growled and stripped his teeth.

  ‘Make a great new trick, this. We should earn some more money with the reading dog,’ said Jack and looked around for Tom to share the joke.

  But there was no sign of Tom anywhere and now school was finishing for the evening.

  Tom had been missing for over two hours.

  Where had he gone?

  The figure of Joseph Bishop flashed through Alfie’s mind.

  CHAPTER 6

  FIRE!

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Sarah.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Sammy. Alfie said nothing; he was too busy scanning the crowd in St Giles High Street, looking for Tom. Jack, he noticed, was doing the same thing with a worried look on his freckled face.

  ‘I’ve left my key behind,’ explained Sarah. ‘I took it out of my pocket because Mr Elmore asked us to write about an everyday object and I forgot to put it back when I had finished describing it.’

  ‘We’ll go back – Mr Elmore will probably still be there,’ said Alfie. In a way, he was glad of an excuse not to go home. What was he going to do if Tom was not there when they arrived back at the cellar in Bow Street? He and Jack would have to go out again and look for him. But what about Sammy? He didn’t fancy dragging his blind brother around the midnight streets of St Giles. He didn’t fancy any of them being out with the menace of Joseph Bishop or Mary Robinson hanging over them!

  ‘Let’s go quickly,’ he said decisively, setting such a fast pace that after a few minutes, he and Sarah were well ahead of Jack, Sammy and Mutsy.

  The fog was very dense that night; even the gas lamps in the High Street were dimmed by it. But when they turned the corner, they stopped in amazement.

  Streatham Street had no gas lamps, but the whole street was bathed in a red-gold radiance lighting up one of the windows of the Ragged School.

  And there was a strange smell. Not the usual stench of rotting filth. A sharp smell, a scorching, smoking, blistering, breath-robbing stink. The foggy air seemed to hold something else, too: some tiny particles of black that Sarah brushed hastily from her face.