Blue Jacket introduced himself as Mr Yardley. His hand was grimy. “The ’earse wuz a nice touch, Rev’rend. No difference these days twixt a duke an’ a dancing-master when it comes to ceremony.”
“If my friends had been dukes,” Parson replied crisply, “they wouldn’t have found themselves in the dock to begin with.”
“True ’nuff.” Blue Jacket nodded sagely. “Well, look at it this way, they may ’av trudged about on their trotters all their days, but they wuz carried by ’orses after their deaths. Belated congratulations to yerself, by th’ way. We wuz taking wagers on a six stretch, or worse. Who d’yer bribe?”
Who had he bribed? Parson stared, the memory of his trial a year ago suddenly raw again. Who had he bribed? Hadn’t he been dragged from his own pulpit in the Obelisk Tabernacle, hauled past a burning effigy on the steps, FILTHY SODDY-MITE scrawled on the door?
The heavyset man offered a hand at smooth odds with his rough exterior. “Mr Cooke, at yer. Who paid fer th’ service?”
Parson brought the tips of his fingers together piously. “The Obelisk’s faithful.” No need to mention the dead men’s benefactor, the Country Gentleman (who’d also paid both men’s legal fees). No need ever to mention him. “The warden’s a worse felon than Leager or Oakden ever were,” he said, changing the subject. “Takes five shillings for a man carried at shoulder height, seven pence for a child under the arm.”
“Does that include the digging?”
Parson nodded. “The digging, but not the filling.” His eyes slid to the side. “We’ll need to take another collection for the stones.”
Yardley shrugged. “Should have persuaded ’em to flog their carcasses to the surgeon. They could’ve chipped in with the expense of seeing themselves under th’ earth.”
Parson’s lips smiled.
“We’ve got a proposition for you,” Cooke began quietly. “You have a congregation, we have a new house. Might be some mutual interest.”
“A house?” Parson was on his guard now. Bow Street had special officers trained in the art of tempting men into misdemeanours. “What kind of house?”
“The kind your friends would’ve been at home in.”
“A house of private meetings,” Yardley added, twisting his ring around his knuckle. “Lots of ’em about town, fer them as know where to look. Oh, it’s a vast geography . . .” He rubbed his palms together. “Don’t fret, they’re tolerated.”
Parson tried to ignore the dull katoum of pulse in his ears. “The name of this establishment?”
“The White Swan,” Yardley replied evenly. “Jus’ a simple matter of marrying our patrons a couple of ev’nings a week. In an upstairs room. Well away from prying eyes.”
“Think of yer chapel funds.” Cooke winked.
“Think of them stones you mentioned,” Yardley said. “An’ if yer pick up some handsome converts, all t’ the good, I say.”
Parson felt a stirring in his lap.
“An upstairs room? Away from prying eyes.”
6. Briefs
“What are you, would you say? Thirty-five?”
“Not quite so old, sir.” Wyre wondered in turn about Mr Best. The old barrister’s sharp, classical features were at marked variance with his lined complexion.
Pursing his lips, London’s legal éminence grise signed a heavily embossed letter with tiny dancing movements of his crow-quill. “And where are you from, Wyre?”
“Felpham, sir.”
“Before that.” Best glanced up.
The question appeared to exist in a simple enough dimension, but nothing the Chief Barrister uttered ever did.
“I grew up in the Forest of Dean.”
With a precise action of his wrist, Best dropped a bleb of wax onto the envelope’s flap. He pushed his seal into it, leaving an impression of a beetle, or possibly the more exotic scarab. “Your name, is it common in those parts?”
“I believe it’s originally Welsh, sir. I’m told it would have been pronounced with two syllables. Wier-rey.” He repeated his name, suddenly no longer his, with a Welsh catch in the throat.
“Glad to have left it, are you? The forest?”
Wyre hesitated. For most of his adult life he’d struggled to see Dean. Not wanted to see it. He thought of the thickets of twisting trees, the clints and grikes that pocked the land, left over from centuries of digging. Of the Buckstone, a cottage-sized boulder perched at the top of Buckstone Hill. Three or four men working away at either side could rock it quite easily. He’d taken his turn beneath it with the other boys, felt its unholy weight nudging over the fulcrum.
It had all started there. If ‘it’ could ever be said to start anywhere, really.
Despite himself, the old names resurfaced. Sinkaway, Bogo, Pauncefoot, Kyllicote Wood.
“It’s an odd place, sir.”
The old barrister kept his eyes on Wyre as if completing a puzzle only to find it had no picture. “I suppose,” he said at last, rising, “we all have to come from somewhere.” He extended an arm.
Was that it? No word of advancement, not a single syllable alluding to more dignified, more lucrative, briefs? Wyre tried not to show his disappointment. He’d dared to hope Rose was wrong about Best, dared to imagine the Chief Barrister had simply been testing him with seemingly endless molly work before offering a portfolio more commensurate with his talents.
No, Rose had been right in Felpham, and she was right in London.
Best followed him out of the office. Their footsteps made echoing halls of the Courthouse’s narrow upper corridors. At a row of wide arched windows, the barrister stopped, and turned to the city, the enormous dome of St Paul’s rising above the roofs and chimney pots.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I used to spend hours sketching plans for great gardens. Vistas with grand arcades, balconies, double deceptions. I still have them somewhere.”
7. Signs
Sarah Cooke bustled along Carey Street, cutting through Clare Market with its lean-to stalls and out-of-plumb façades, its butchers and higglers. Past the area they set aside for Jews to slaughter lawful meat, and stamp with leaden seals. Past the hocks hung from hooks. Vere Street was the second turning on the right. Such places always were.
She started as an enormous booming sound rang out around the city, like some heavy object falling in the attics, instinctively hunching her shoulders as if something was indeed about to come down around her ears. The noise echoed around the rooftops, gradually fading. She didn’t think it was thunder, though rain would be welcome after a fortnight of baking weather. The dust got everywhere. In all the nooks and crannies.
Sarah reached the ancient tavern, which nestled six doors down from the old theatre where Mr Ogilby first drew his lottery of books, squashed between two taller buildings across from the blackened ruins of the Bear Yard. Number 11. Hers to govern. She still couldn’t quite believe she’d persuaded James she was capable of turning a profit. She glanced around at the little lanes, cross-alleys and courts leading off, all with their funny names, or without names altogether, and not to be found on any map.
The instant she’d set eyes on the alehouse’s uneven bays, the roof that rose to three points, St Clement’s Church with its good ring of bells close by, she’d known it was meant to be. The leaseholder claimed the building went back to the time of Queen Bess. Sarah could credit it. She thought of those queer spellings carved above the twisted lintel – O Lord in the is al my traist – and above them, the words that still made her swell with pride: Sarah Cooke, licensed to sell Spirituous Liquors.
When James acquired the premises the signboard was a roughly drawn cat, its front paw resting on a cartwheel. Old Mr Shadworth, who seemed to come with the lease, explained that ‘Cat and Wheel’ was a corruption of Catherine’s Wheel, the instrument on which the virgin-saint was broken. The legend of the four cutting wheels had upset Sarah, who asked James to paint it over. He did so with a smirk.
The swan had been the child of James’s imagin
ation. Mr Shadworth was able to shed light on that design, too. The bird was the device of Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales, slain at Tewkesbury along with Sir William Bottler and John Daunty of Wooty-Under-Edge.
“Thus,” Mr Shadworth lectured, brushing crumbs from one of her coveted Parliament cakes off his waistcoat, “time is preserved in the signs attached to our inns and taverns.”
The old buffer also approved of the address itself. In Babylonian religions, he’d explained, ‘1’ stood for the male member. “How doubly propitious, then, Mrs Cooke, must be two such numerals, standing proudly side by side. How apt for what you have in mind.”
Her first act as landlady was to wash the hallway dark blue. It kept the flies down, she explained to James. The creatures were fooled into thinking day was night, and flew straight out again.
8. Charity
Freshly ejected seed turns paper stained with mallow blossom green. Exposed to air, it forms crystals in the shape of wheel spokes, which gradually become four-sided pyramids. Beautiful under the microscope, acrid almond to the taste.
Miss Crawford sat at her writing desk, a foxed copy of Bache’s and Thomson’s System of Chemistry in front of her. She hesitated a moment before lifting it to her nose. It still smelled of Spanish Town. With a rush of sensations, she remembered the childhood thrill of smuggling the volume from her father’s library, of slipping it into her travel chest before they left for England.
Her mother had raised a cordon round her father’s groaning shelves, afraid of the bald truths lying in wait among the musty treatises on such topics as anatomy and wounds . . . Eyes filling, she smoothed her dress, chasing a few ugly wrinkles from her lap to her knees.
That first, expansive afternoon with Bache and Thomson had taken place a decade ago, in a different world. She suddenly saw again the face of the mulatto she’d questioned about the taste. It depended on what the man had been eating, the reply came, on whether he was a drinker, smoker or in ill-health. But – the mulatto brushed Miss Crawford’s cheek with her fingertips – it depended most on the woman’s mood whether the flavour was stronger or less strong.
Watch my eyes while I’m spoiling the Captain, and you’ll know.
Miss Crawford pictured the pretty mulatto at work in the barn. Tears were a relief for women and a torture for men. It was the other way round with seed.
An odd-shaped insect hung above the door. It seemed to be peering into her study. The scorching weather had dragged all kinds of strange creatures up from the equator, causing her father’s English maids much consternation. But Miss Crawford didn’t recoil – her Jamaican girlhood had accustomed her to all the tribes of crawling things. She thought back to the cockroaches that used to devour leather saddles as easily as ladies’ gloves and shoes, or the bindings of her childhood picture books. She recalled the carapaced monsters scuttling over the fruit bowl, dropping their egg-cases. Back then, she used to race them with her friends as they’d seen the black boys do.
Her mother swore by castor oil, and used to rub it over father’s boots. But mother was dead, succumbing to ship-fever during the crossing. Father’s boots were her responsibility now.
Miss Crawford’s mind drifted back to the Sugar Islands. She remembered being told to watch for spiders, the deadliest no larger than a pea with a single bright scarlet spot on its head; officers straddling alligators and riding them down the high street; long-tailed pigs wandering past bone-white European façades into the slums; rats destroying sugar cane; gabbling-crows with human voices. She remembered wading for groopers, snappers, snook. Land-crabs running on the beach from black devils with torches. The fishy flesh of turtles. Moths huge as plates. Big brown snakes, said to be fatal but which caused no more than a slight fever and swelling (an inflammation she’d suffered at eleven was removed with sweet oil and warm lime-juice). Yellow snakes, which slaves stood on, believing the ritual cured bone-ache. And black snakes that darted at the eyes when attacked. Their pet dog had been blinded.
Once, deep in the woods, she’d found a snake’s skeleton wound round that of a cat. Her mother said the pair must have fought and perished together. Osonoko told her she’d found a mumbo jumbo charm.
Her fiancé made her promise to take him to the islands. He wished, he said, eyes gleaming, to present an account to his improving society. Even as she’d agreed, she’d known the idea was absurd. Robert Aspinall, junior mental physician at the Wood’s Close asylum, would never grasp her family’s past. Was incapable of grasping it. For him, Jamaica was, always would be, a den of exploitation, the backdrop for Three-Fingered Jack and his glorious maroon uprising. She knew it as a land of prickly pear and Turk’s-head cacti; of heavy rains and fireflies.
From her study, Miss Crawford heard the maid drawing back the bolts. That would be Robert, late as usual, rushing back from his morning’s meeting for the manumission of slaves, or the relief of unfortunate lunatics, or indigent, or both. The endless adjectives of Charity.
Rogues and vagabonds, her father would say.
She prayed Robert wouldn’t allow second-hand principles to get in the way of a business opportunity. She pictured the iron-haired engineer and her father waiting in the drawing-room. It was a rare opportunity to get on, if Robert could be persuaded to take a practical view of things. Half the members of his improving societies had interests of one sort or another in the Sugar Islands, so why not Robert? Indenture touched them all. Could he name a manufacturing town on England’s coasts whose pavements, theatres and libraries hadn’t been built on the wealth of the triangle voyage? Worthless beads to Africa, human cargos to the Caribbean, rum, sugar and cotton back to the seat of empire.
Her poor gullible, principled fool.
Through her study window, a sound like a great gun being fired made her jump, as if Three-Fingered Jack had risen again, and was touring the fine houses, slighting them with captured munitions.
Pushing Bache’s and Thomson’s filthy treatise from her, she rose to meet Robert in the hall. His neck-tie was askew, his pale cheeks flushed from hurrying. Without a word, she ushered him to the threshold of the drawing-room, then stepped behind the door to observe through the safety of the crack.
9. The Bridge
He ought to be at his desk going over affidavits, rescuing a flagging case against a drayman. (The swine was charged with assaulting a banker’s son.) But the offer that sweltering morning of some angelic shop-talk with Leighton at the scene of an actual misdeed had proved too precious to pass up.
Today, the Runner was sans velocipede, his limp seemingly much improved. Not that the dandy-charger would have been much help here, Wyre thought, as they picked their way across the vast, brick-strewn waste that led down to the workings.
“You’ll like this,” the Runner said with a grin. “In the early hours, one of our lads made a pinch at Pye Corner. The gentleman was decked out like a milliner’s dummy, and the pego was a solider he’d propositioned at a pissing-post. First thing our gem’man did, standing before the magistrate, was to accuse the swad. Claimed he’d threatened to blacken his name unless he handed over his silver buckles.”
“Standard defence,” replied Wyre. “We hear it all the time.”
“Queer rogue: all lisps and mincing steps, done up in a tye-wig. The ladies in his cell were ready to puke at him. He sat there canting to be let out.”
“Let me guess, some fancy lawyer swanned in?”
Leighton nodded.
“You won’t see him again. He’ll be halfway to France by now.”
A huge crack reverberated over the city. Wyre cringed, drawing his arms about his head. Had the Tyrant arrived? Were his ships sailing up the Thames? He imagined vast arrays of sea-mortars. Priming irons thrust into touch-holes. He thought of the door Rose slammed, the day she left.
Leighton scoffed. “Artillery practice, Kit. Don’t say you haven’t heard it before?”
The building site was deserted save for half a dozen builders who stood around a steaming kettle le
aning on spades, bare-chested, muscle-bound. The largest took a step towards them, a questioning look on his face.
“Bow Street,” said Leighton.
Continuing onward, they plotted a course around scattered planks, loose piles of burned clay tiles and thick coils of ropes, the half-completed bridge looming over them, dark and skeletal, a decayed abbey or cathedral. Ladders and pulleys added to the picture. Fat Henry’s thugs must have erected similar scaffolds when they stripped the lead from the roofs. It would make a fine painting, if a touch gothic. A huge sea of mist rose up obligingly from the water around the granite pillars, lending the whole scene a spectral sublimity.
Leighton made for a low service tunnel of some sort, its diameter barely that of a span. Wyre turned at crude laughter drifting across the site; surely the workmen didn’t think . . . ?
When he turned back, Leighton was already a vanishing shadow. Wyre stepped gingerly into the passage. Why hadn’t Leighton brought a lantern? If this was something to do with his ‘method’, he should have given advance warning. The darkness was that of the Sibyl’s cave. Soft underfoot, a smell of damp plaster and piss, worse than a bog-house. Hardly the place he’d choose for a romantic assignation, yet mollies flocked to the bridge for a clinch. He supposed a great deal of police work was conducted in such dire undercrofts.
How far did they need to go? The muffled thuds of Leighton’s shoes ahead gave no indication the officer was slowing. Wyre raised an arm, brushing his fingertips along the rough granite ceiling, imagining the weight of stones above their heads, the new road above that, carriage wheels turning incessantly, hoofs beating down, fine gentlemen and their prinked-up sloys seated vis-à-vis, making cow eyes at each other. He shuddered.
Leighton was here to ‘absorb’ the place. A strange modus, standing about waiting for inspiration to strike, like a poet palely loitering. Wyre’s eyes strained uselessly. A simple bull-lamp, Leighton!
The Cunning House Page 3