by Tony Pollard
For the second time we were cast adrift on the river, only this time we really had been shipwrecked. The timber was doing only a partial job of keeping us afloat and we would be lucky to reach shore without having to swim. Lying on my belly, I watched as the barge’s paddle wheel sank out of view, leaving behind it a gently rotating whirlpool and a scatter of floating timbers, amongst which we were just one more piece of flotsam. I had almost forgotten about the Shearwater, but the slap of a bullet landing in the water close by served as an effective reminder of her presence.
Visible on the stern of his vessel and no doubt enraged at our success, Perry was making one last desperate attempt to dispatch us. Reloading the rifle, he took aim once again and put a bullet through the wood not three inches away from my head. Had his shooting platform been stationary then I would have been dead in the water. But the Shearwater was on the move again. To my surprise, though, she was not turning tail but making towards the stern of the Great Eastern, where the gap between the ship and the shore was wider than at her bow. Ockham took a pause from paddling with a plank. ‘He’s going to try and squeeze through!’
We watched transfixed as the Shearwater drew parallel with the northern shore and picking up a little more speed made a straight course for the only part of the channel promising any hope of escape. Dwarfed by the towering bulk of the ship, Perry’s vessel approached the overhanging stern where he would throw everything into gaining passage between the ship and the shore.
But Perry had not counted on Russell’s next order, which carried with it the Shearwater’s fate as it travelled along the ship’s telegraph from bridge to engine room. On its arrival the ship’s chief engineer ordered his minions to make the giant paddle wheels rotate again, only this time in an anti-clockwise direction. He had put the ship into reverse! The stern propeller, one blade of which protruded like a shark’s fin from the river, also began to turn, churning up as much mud as it did water this close to the shore. In a move that in normal circumstances would have been the height of folly, the ship travelled backwards before crashing into the bank, scattering the small crowd of bystanders freshly gathered to watch the bizarre proceedings. The force of the impact pushed the ship’s rudder aside and, like the fluke of a huge whale, it slammed against the port bow of the Shearwater, forcing her into the path of the propeller as though she were nothing more than a length of timber being pushed on to a band saw.
New sounds of destruction rent the air as the massive propeller made contact with the smaller vessel. All efforts to manoeuvre the boat out of harm’s way were fruitless and the knife-edged blades ate into her hull, shredding timber and metal with equal ease. The screams of men accompanied the evisceration of flesh and bone. Severed limbs flew through the air and landed in the water like so much bait thrown to flesh-eating fish. Blood and gore mixed with the mud churned up by the propeller and spattered up against the ship’s underside, to cling there like the plaster on the ceiling of the devil’s own house. Two crewmen leapt over the side, only to be drawn into the propeller on the strong current swept up by its revolution. Within moments they too were turned to splinters and pulped flesh.
Inch by inch the Shearwater was being devoured by the revolving iron teeth, and what destruction the blades did not wreak the exploding boilers did. Only when the great ship was itself in danger of injury did Russell give the order for the engines to be stopped, by which time the Shearwater had been reduced to nothing more than an oil slick in which were suspended the remains of both man and machine.
I picked up a length of timber and tried to keep in time with Ockham as we paddled back to the shore. We had not made much progress when a man in a rowing boat pulled alongside and took us on board. He introduced himself as the waterman responsible for this stretch of the river. Far from being upset about the destruction we had wrought on his territory he seemed quite delighted at the prospect of so much debris floating on the water.
‘I’ll drop you off just opposite,’ he said, making as much speed as he could manage towards the shore. ‘I’ll need to get to work before this stuff drifts off my beat.’
Ockham looked over to where the Shearwater had gone down. ‘You may find more than you bargain for out there.’
The waterman just laughed. ‘That won’t worry me none, sir. I’ve pulled dozens of bodies from the river in my time. Why, over the past year and more there must have been eight or nine.’ He paused, not seeming so chipper all of a sudden. ‘A strange business it’s been, real strange.’
I looked over at an uncomfortable-looking Ockham but said nothing.
36
The waterman dropped us on to the muddy shore, and we watched as he began his frantic collection of floating objects.
‘He’s de – de – dead, isn’t he?’ I wondered out loud through chattering teeth.
‘Perry?’ replied Ockham, who knew full well who I meant. ‘Oh yes, he’s dead all right. No one came out of that mincing machine alive.’ His voice was flat, without any hint of satisfaction, and I knew why.
‘If it makes you feel any better, that wasn’t the original heart blown to kingdom come in the torpedo.’
‘What the blazes are you talking about?’ replied Ockham as he paused to watch the great ship turn once again, stirring up water cluttered with floating wreckage as she went. Russell was reopening the gate.
‘The heart, or should I say the engine, in that torpedo wasn’t the original, the one Bittern stole from us. They used ours as a template to build others at the yard, probably after taking it apart and drawing up a full set of plans. One of the copies was driving that torpedo.’
Ockham shot me a piercing glance, his bloodshot eyes boiling within the cauldrons of their sockets. ‘My God, man, why didn’t you say so before? I hadn’t given any thought to that. Do you think there would have been any gain from recovering a copy, a counterfeit of the original?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My guess is not. And if that is so then where the hell is the original?’
‘Perry put it in the torpedo he launched from the yard.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘He told me so as he was doing it!’
Impassioned again, Ockham pulled off his one remaining shoe and in stockinged feet strode off along the shore. ‘Then we have one more chance! Come on, man. What are you waiting for – pneumonia?’
By the time we arrived back in town, in a carriage laid on by a Russell relieved to have at least in part redeemed himself, it was too late to take any further action. And so after returning to my rooms to dry off and take what rest our dreams would allow we made for Rotherhithe the following morning.
We were on the south side of the river, directly across the water from Perry’s yard and close to the entrance to Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames. Thin traces of smoke were still shifting in the breeze and black feathers of ash drifted across the cobbles even on this side of the river.
The tide had just turned, and close to the bank below us the receding water revealed a growing expanse of thick black mud. Ockham handed me his telescope, which took some time to focus. The yard was a wasteland, nothing more than a smouldering heap of charred timbers, some of them still upstanding but now nothing more than blackened and broken teeth arranged around the mouth of a huge crater. People moved across the debris, like maggots wriggling over a corpse, picking up a likely object here or discarding something too far gone there. Despite this devastation, the fire seemed to have limited itself to within the perimeter of the yard, for even the paddle ship in the dry dock had survived unscathed.
‘Take a look at the ramp,’ said Ockham, guiding the telescope towards the river in front of the yard.
The rear of the ramp, the part that had been inside the building, was now nothing more than a knot of twisted iron, but the front portion, where it extended out over the river, seemed to be entirely undamaged. ‘It’s still there.’
‘Now take a straight line out from the front – where does it bring you?
’
Dropping the glass from my eye, I drew an imaginary line back across the water. ‘Right here,’ I said, realizing it terminated on the bank just below us.
‘Now, if we assume the torpedo travelled on a straight trajectory, it should have hit the bank just in front of us.’
And exploded?
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ockham, moving closer to the edge, where the piled bank dropped down on to the black mud freshly exposed by the falling tide. ‘That may have been his intention, to remove it from our grasp, that or save it from destruction. Whatever the case, if it had exploded there would be some trace, a destroyed vessel or damage to the bank this side of the river.’
‘You mean –’ I cried, rushing forward to join him on the edge – ‘it’s down there, in the mud? We can get the heart back, and the original one to boot? But how?’
‘Someone has to go and find it.’
‘You mean go down there? Into that foul, stinking mud?’
Ockham looked a little dismayed at my lack of enthusiasm. ‘You want the heart back, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do but…’
He picked up a stone and tossed it into the mud, where it quickly sank out of sight. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, his face breaking into a smile, ‘I made an arrangement. Look behind you.’
I turned to see walking towards us the most bedraggled-looking band of men, women and children I had ever laid eyes upon. Their tattered clothes were caked with mud and their unshod feet blackened through prolonged exposure to the same. Each of them carried a stick and several of the adults had sacks slung over their shoulders.
‘Mudlarks,’ I said, seeing at once what Ockham had in mind.
One of the men stepped forward from the pack, his eyes shielded beneath the peak of his leather cap. ‘Right, mister, ‘ere we is. Where do you want us?’
‘Down there,’ said Ockham, pointing to where the stone had landed.
‘There’s rich pickin’s on the other side after that fire. For us to stay on this side’ll cost yer two bob now and another two when we’re done.’
Ockham reached into his pocket and pulled out a purse. Handing over a small clutch of coins, he issued instructions. ‘You are looking for a large metal object. I will keep you right from up here. Check as close to the water as you can and all the way up the bank.’
‘Right you are, guv, but anything else we find is ours,’ said the chief lark, closing his dirty fingers around the coins and turning to the others. ‘You ’eard the gentleman. Let’s be at it. The quicker we finish ’ere the quicker we can get over the other side.’
The motley crew trooped down a nearby flight of steps and ventured out on to the flats, where only the flat planks of wood now strapped to their feet prevented them from sinking to the waist, while the smallest of the children barely made an impression in the mud. When feet were pulled free of the clawing quagmire the holes left behind immediately filled with water. Following Ockham’s directions from the bank, the larks began to probe with their sticks, wiggling them before pulling them out to move to a new spot. The children were sent out closest to the water, where the mud was softest. Every now and again someone would bend over and pull an object from the morass, give it a quick wipe and then drop it into a sack.
We watched from above like medieval lords supervising peasant labourers.
‘What a way to make a living,’ said Ockham.
It was quite fascinating watching them, entirely at ease in an environment where most of us would fear to tread. ‘They seem cheery enough though.’ And indeed they did, laughing and joking among themselves as they picked their way across the slime.
They had been working for about an hour, their progress marked by the watery pockmarks left by their feet. ‘They should have found it by now,’ admitted Ockham.
‘Perhaps it’s buried deeper?’
‘No. If it’s there it shouldn’t be too far under the surface, at least not yet.’
The implication was obvious. ‘It didn’t make it this far, did it?’ Ockham made no reply.
I looked towards the deep water in the middle of the river. ‘Then it’s out there somewhere. It’s sunk, and so are we.’
The tide was beginning to turn again, the water slowly creeping back across the mud. Unable to stave off the inevitable, the larks retreated to the shore. Ockham handed over the balance of their fee and, not seeming too downcast at having missed low water on the other side of the river, they went on their way, leaving behind them a trail of muddy footprints.
The water grew closer and closer until at last it drew level with the iron lip of the hole at my feet, from where it threatened to continue upward and drown us like kittens in a barrel. But there it stopped, and as the bell was lowered beneath the surface it looked as though the river had been reduced to nothing more than a circular puddle. Ockham was shouting into a funnel attached to a tube, our only link with the men on the barge above us.
‘Steady as she goes. Levelling out now.’ I could already feel the change of pressure inside my ears but reassured myself that this was keeping the water at bay.
After failing to find the torpedo trapped in the mud we had returned to our lodgings, once more disappointed. There was, it appeared, to be no getting round the fact that the heart was lost, and with it all our hopes of escaping the nightmare. The next day, still tired after another exhausting sleep, I returned to the hospital, where I spent half of the morning pondering which poison would make the swiftest end.
I glanced up from the apothecary’s manual to see Ockham standing there, looking as though he had been dragged through a bush backwards. ‘Ah, the man of my dreams,’ I quipped wearily.
‘Come on, I have a cab outside,’ was all he said, already making for the door. I folded down the corner of the page and followed him – stopping just short of calling William to let him know I was leaving.
And so we returned to Rotherhithe and there boarded a waiting steam barge not unlike the hulk we had lost two days before, but this time she was crewed and carried a diving bell. It was the same bell I had first seen in operation on the Great Eastern, perched on a platform which enabled access through the hole in the flat bottom.
Ockham slapped the side of the device. ‘The torpedo may be on the bottom of the river, but thanks to this we should still be able to reach it.’
‘But isn’t it a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack?’ I asked, the barge now pulling away from the shore.
‘Not at all,’ was his confident reply. ‘The torpedo sits somewhere on that line between the ramp and the place we searched yesterday. All we have to do is drop the bell and scour the riverbed along that line. We’ll start at the ramp and work our way across until we find the point where it hit the bottom.’
The barge cast off and with her stern-mounted paddle wheel stirring the water set out for the ramp on the opposite side of the river. Looking back beyond the wheel, I noticed that the place from where we had watched the mudlarks was marked by a red flag, which, Ockham told me, would provide an aiming point once we began our sweep.
And so here we were, descending through the dark waters of the Thames, not far from the end of the ramp down which the torpedo had been launched. Although my dreams should have prepared me for such an experience I had to try hard not to think about the tiny space in which we were enclosed, but it wasn’t long before the water in the hole turned to the foul-smelling mud that was the riverbed. Mimicking the actions of the mudlarks, Ockham took up an iron rod and began to probe the silt. Meeting no resistance on the first insertion, he pulled the rod free, an act that served only to release even more of the terrible odour locked inside, and immediately drove it back in again a few inches away.
This process was repeated perhaps half a dozen times, each with the same result, before he was satisfied that the torpedo did not lie beneath us. Setting the muddy pole aside, he took up the speaking tube and bellowed into it. ‘Lift and take us forward five yards.’
There was a j
erk as the bell was pulled free from the sucking mud, and a slight lurch as we were dragged through the water. We were left dangling for a while as the bell, like a stone on a rope, steadied itself. Plonked into the mire again, Ockham worked away with the rod, standing astride the hole and using both hands to drop it down and then draw it back out. Again instruction was sent to the surface and the bell shifted location.
‘Here, let me take a turn,’ I said, holding out my hand. If the rod itself were not heavy enough, the effort involved in drawing it back out of the sucking mud was almost backbreaking. In and out went the rod, each time returning with nothing but a fresh coating of slime.
Four submersions later and we still had nothing to show for our efforts, unless you count an old anchor, three bottles, half a dozen links from an old chain and a chamber pot. We were beginning to run out of riverbed. ‘You don’t think there’s a chance we missed it? We are searching a very narrow corridor, an inch or two to the left or right and we would pass right by without knowing it.’