The Deadwood Stage

by Mike Hogan

  “Not at all, sir,” Churchill said sharply. “Billy gets a cut of all tips to deliverymen and telegraph boys. If my income were thus dependent, I would be a mathematical genius.”

  We arrived at the pavement outside the British Museum and found Holmes waiting with a uniformed attendant. We dismissed our hansom, and the museum attendant hailed us a four-wheeler. I batted away a street urchin trying to get my attention; another boy accosted Holmes. I checked my pocketbook - thinner after the latest depredation by Wiggins - and found that it was untouched. As we drove off, I was astonished when Churchill waved goodbye to the attendant in a most familiar manner. He called out that we would see him at nine at the World Turned Upside Down, south of the River.

  “You received my wire, Holmes?” I asked as I checked my watch. “We are expected at 19, Southampton Row for tea with Miss Caspar and Mrs Barker. I sent them a polite note of acceptance. We will just make it on time.”

  Holmes called to the driver.

  “Spitalfields, the Ten Bells.”

  He turned to me.

  “Spencer-Churchill has been busy. However, I have other, more urgent, news. Wiggins just sent me word. They have cooped the servant, Aaron!”

  10. Leather Apron

  The Ten Bells

  We alighted at a busy corner of Commercial Street at the entrance to a dilapidated pub. On one side of the pub door was a clutch of street vendors selling broken crockery, a few wizened apples, some sad fish, and a nest of cracked and leaking meat pies. On the other, a man rested against the wall, sweating profusely and smoking a pipe. He was sandwiched between two enormous advertising boards showing the Spiritualist harridan Mrs Weldon commending Pear’s Soap.

  The road was a hot, malodorous and noisy. A deafening crush of wagons and buses crowded the highway and pedestrians ducked and weaved between them. The only patch of colour in the grey and brown mass of humanity and horseflesh that teemed in the roadway behind us was a muscular, magnificently-whiskered, scarlet-uniformed, sergeant of Foot Guards. He was in undress uniform with his forage cap at a rakish angle on his head. He adorned the passenger seat of a parked wagon that carried a hoarding advertising life insurance.

  “No, no,” said Holmes glancing at the sergeant as he swept past the advertising boards and entered the Ten Bells public house. “Wrong shade of scarlet, buttons awry and sabre instead of sword. The Duke of Cambridge would be livid.”

  “His sabre is rusty,” said Churchill following him. “And his boots are cracked.”

  “His moustache is surely non-regulation,” I added as I closed the door behind us.

  I reflected on the gullibility of the lower classes. Would they flock to buy insurance for the spurious reason that a fake guardsman endorsed the company? Would they buy a particular brand of soap because Mrs Weldon, the celebrity agitator who had brought several doctors and madhouse keepers to court, suggested that it protected her complexion? The sad truth of course was that -

  “Doctor,” said Churchill breaking into my reverie, “four pints of ale.”

  I handed him a coin.

  “A half for you. Why four?”

  “Wiggins is with Mr Holmes, Doctor. They are beckoning us to that table in the corner.”

  I followed Churchill. He pushed through the throng of pub patrons, men and women, all loud and smelly, and bought the drinks with a worryingly practised ease.

  “Evening, Doctor,” said Wiggins as we sat. “The Irregulars strike again, eh?”

  I ignored the gibe.

  “Wiggins, the facts,” said Holmes.

  The boy bent forward and spoke in a low tone.

  “First off, we’ll need our wits about us here, gents. I’m not known, and this ain’t a polite neighbourhood.”

  I snorted.

  “You may laugh, Doctor, but you haven’t seen the half of it.”

  “So I am constantly being told.”

  “I had a couple of the lads on the canary paint shop, like I told you gents,” Wiggins continued. “We was stretched, what with the so-called Mr Wolff laired in his hotel, his two heavy geezers searching for Bobby’s track down Blackfriars way, and then keeping a watch on Mutton-chops. I had to take on extra help, Mr Holmes, all accounted for down to the farthing.”

  Churchill laid a tray of pints of ale on the table. I took my drink and sipped; it was surprisingly good.

  “What of Aaron?” Holmes asked.

  “Yesterday, as the second shift at the canary paint shop was going in, one of the lads spots a Negro man slipping in with them. The man goes up to the office and stays ten minutes. Then he’s off along Brick Lane until he turns in to a court. It was a regular rookery, gents, and my lad was unknown and not young enough to pass unnoticed. He reported, and I talked to a mate or two, and found a bloke that knows the courts back there. He’s the bald cove in the leather apron up at the bar.”

  Holmes looked over my shoulder. I held Churchill’s gaze and resisted the temptation to turn around.

  Holmes turned back to Wiggins and raised his eyebrows.

  “I know he’s a rum-looking bugger, sir, but you work with what you’ve got, as my old dad used to say. Leather Apron says he knows where the Negro kid lives, and he can lead us there. I bunged him five-bob up front with a half-sovereign more promised on delivery. And I don’t trust the bugger an inch.”

  Holmes touched my arm.

  “Do you have your pistol with you?” he murmured.

  “I do not, Holmes. I did not think that there would be much call for a revolver while taking tea with Miss Caspar. It is heavy, and it makes my jacket pocket droop. Do you have yours?”

  Holmes frowned and shook his head. He turned back to Wiggins.

  “Can your Leather Apron persuade the boy to join us here for a drink?”

  Wiggins slipped out of his seat. I followed Churchill’s gaze and found that I could see the bar reflected in a mirror above us. I saw Wiggins approach the counter and buy a cigar. He stood next to a short, fat, bald man in a black shirt and waistcoat wearing a filthy leather apron. I watched as Wiggins accepted a light for his cigar and sauntered back.

  “No go, sir. He says Aaron is main flighty, all of a quiver, like. He won’t talk on it, but he knows he’s being sought.”

  “Does he not go out?” asked Holmes.

  Wiggins shrugged. “He goes out with the dippers. He does the fakery that gets folks staring and not minding their pockets, the Faint, maybe, or a Bedlam dance. People stare at him anyway for his colour. But then he’s mob-handed, so he feels safe.”

  “Nothing on the boy, Bobby?”

  Wiggins shook his head.

  “What do you think, Watson?” Holmes asked softly.

  “I have my cane,” I said. “I’m game.”

  Wiggins slid the end of a thick leather cosh out of his sleeve and grinned.

  “We must send Churchill home in a cab,” I said firmly.

  I was surprised when he did not object. He merely smiled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you must think of these courts as primitive jungles teeming with wild beasts that would think nothing of killing you for your socks.”

  He laughed. “Whatever would wild beasts do with my socks? Anyway, they wouldn’t get them. Not while I have this.”

  He laid a two-barrel Derringer pistol on the table. Wiggins instantly swept it off and into his lap. He blinked and looked nonchalantly around the pub.

  “I say,” cried Churchill. “You beast -”

  “Shut it,” said Wiggins fiercely. “You’ll have us all in lavender.”

  “Give it here,” I said.

  I surreptitiously examined the gun under the table. It was the same type that I had seen Taylor carry. I looked a question at Churchill.

  “Mr Taylor gave it to me,” he said with a
sulky look. “He didn’t have much ammunition and it’s not readily available here. I told him about a shop in Bond Street where he could buy a bigger gun that takes our regular loads.”

  I looked at Holmes. He shrugged.

  “If the police go in to this rookery,” said Wiggins. “If they go in, mind, if they venture in at all, they go in threes with barkers drawn. We ain’t in Lambeth now, gents.”

  “We are four,” said Churchill with a wide grin.

  I passed the pistol to Churchill under the table. He nodded and slipped it into his waistband. I pocketed the two cartridges I had removed from the chambers.

  “Gentlemen,” said Holmes standing.

  Leather Apron left the pub without looking at our party. We followed at a slow saunter.

  The Rookery

  Outside on the street, the heat seemed even more oppressive than in the pub. The insurance wagon was gone, and in its place was a reeking butcher’s cart. A line of men wearing sandwich boards trooped past. They advertised a bare-knuckle fight between Joe Heenan, the Mayo Mauler, and Bethnal Green’s own, Bruiser Bonner. The contest would take place that evening in the yard of the Horn of Plenty pub just up the road in Dorset Street.

  “Might we look?” asked Churchill.

  “The fight starts at seven-thirty,” Holmes answered with a grin. “We might have a peek.”

  I shook my head. Bare-knuckle fighting was a dying art, strangled by public opinion. Several bouts had ended in death or permanent injury.

  “I expect the police will intervene and forbid the fight,” I said.

  Churchill muttered something under his breath, that, had I caught it, might have earned him a cuffed ear.

  We followed Leather Apron along Fournier Street and into the teeming heart of Brick Lane. I saw Holmes tuck away his gold watch chain, and I did the same. I regretted putting on my pearl tiepin that morning. Churchill followed along whistling an annoying tune.

  Tawdry shops lined both sides of the street, some of them already lit up to lure customers to their wares. Here the fruit on display glowed freshly, and from a dozen steaming cook-shops an enticing smell of roasting meat and baking pies wafted along the pavement until it was overpowered by the stench of crowds, smoke, and horse dung.

  We passed a line of glaring gin-palaces, a dark church and mission hall, and a rickety house that advertised waxwork facsimiles of several gruesome murders. Horrible pictorial representations with all the dreadful details were posted up outside. Boys, men, and women, some with children in their arms, crowded through the doorway, pennies in their hands.

  A street preacher stood on a box in front of a shop overflowing with rags and made-up clothes. A dozen loafers gathered around him as he discoursed on the wages of sin. We edged past the crowd. I had one hand on my pocketbook and my cane at the ready. The owner of the rag shop, evidently a foreigner from his accent, called to the preacher to move on; he used a coarser term. The crowd’s sympathy was with him; a pair of laughing oafs knocked the preacher off his box and pushed him away. If not for our mission, I should have intervened.

  Suddenly Leather Apron was gone, and Holmes with him.

  “This way, Doctor,” said Churchill, plucking me by the sleeve.

  We went through a narrow archway into a festering alley that was as almost as dark as in full night. The cobblestones at my feet were uneven and slimy and the walls were streaked with filth. The alley opened out after twenty feet or so into a dim, high-walled court with several gloomy openings. Leather Apron leaned against the far wall, next to an arch. Holmes stood to one side, lighting a cigar. A dozen or so men lounged at the doorway openings, or against the walls, and smoked evil-smelling pipes. Bare-headed women with thick arms clustered in twos and threes, or sat gossiping on steps leading to upper passages dark as Erebus. A shallow gutter or conduit ran down one side of the yard; a black liquid oozed along it and overflowed where masses of stinking, decaying filth blocked it. The yard, gutter and passageways teemed with half-ragged children, fighting, chasing one another or kicking a broken bottle back and forth. The older boys lounged in doorways smoking and spitting like their elders.

  A pack of little children swarmed around me, begging and plucking at my clothes. As Churchill shooed them away, I saw the loafers exchanging glances and looking in our direction. I took a firm hold of my stick.

  Leather Apron slipped into another alleyway; I followed close behind Wiggins and Holmes, with Churchill at my heels.

  People moved aside to let us by. Some cowered fearfully in doorways staring wide-eyed as we slipped past, others spat in our path and only moved to let us through with evident distrust and disdain. I had an uncomfortable feeling that a hostile group was assembling behind us. I pushed Churchill ahead of me. The smell of foetid, unwashed bodies and fresh and festering excrement was overpowering. I rejected the impulse to cover my nose with a handkerchief. I ignored the sleek brown rats that pattered unconcernedly before us.

  We entered another tiny square, again with a dozen black doorways off it and an open sewer running through it. No children played here, and no loungers stood in the doorways. Two ragged bundles that might have been bodies lay against the wall to the right. Leather Apron stopped in a doorway on the other side. He lit a pipe. I looked away and fumbled for my cigar case.

  Not a glimmer of light came from the dark windows that looked out onto the court from the four floors above us. I turned back and thought I caught a signal from Leather Apron to Holmes: a gesture with his pipe stem and four fingers extended. Then Leather Apron was gone.

  Holmes nodded.

  I followed Churchill and Holmes into the dark doorway that Leather Apron had indicated. A brick staircase with no handrail stood before us.

  “Stay in the hall, Wiggins, and guard our backs.”

  Wiggins nodded, his eyes wide and fearful.

  “Fourth floor, right,” whispered Holmes.

  He led the way. More rats squeaked and gibbered at us as we ascended. I heard no other noise except our heavy breathing. The stench was worse: the staircase had been used as a communal lavatory. I staggered and thought I might swoon and topple off the unguarded edge. I pulled out my handkerchief and breathed through it. Holmes and Churchill quickly followed my example.

  From the third floor, the stairs were steeper and made of tarred wood, sticky to the touch. We stopped at the fourth floor landing. Again, there was no rail, only a black yawning empty cavern down to the ground level. We had not seen a single soul on the stairs or in a doorway.

  Holmes lit a match. In its flare, I saw a door of peeling wood blocked the doorway on the right. It hung on one hinge.

  Holmes knocked with his stick. “Aaron?”

  There was no answer. I thought I heard a scuffle within, but it might have been rats, or my imagination.

  Holmes called again.

  He looked back at me and gestured a warning, then he took hold of the edge of the door and inched it open. It ground across the uneven wood of the landing, the single hinge creaking.

  “Aaron?” Holmes called again. “We are friends -”

  The door burst open, Holmes fell back, and I was knocked off my feet onto the landing. I heard a screech and a thump, then silence.

  Holmes and I heaved ourselves up. He lit a match.

  The slim body of a young man in a dark suit lay face down, hanging off the edge of the stairs. Churchill clasped his trouser legs and held him.

  “He’s slipping,” he said.

  Holmes and I grabbed at the body and hauled it onto the landing. Holmes lit another match and I examined him. It was a young Negro, in his early twenties perhaps. He looked like the corpse at the mortuary, except he was younger and very thin. He was unconscious, but he was breathing.

  “He fell over me,” said Churchill. “He banged his head on the wall and bounced to the edge.” />
  “Well caught, Churchill,” said Holmes.

  He turned to me. “Will he live?”

  “It’s a serious contusion, but yes. He needs be cleaned up, and by the look of him, given some proper nourishment.”

  “Let us withdraw. Take a shoulder, Watson. For God’s sake watch yourself on the way down.”

  He handed Churchill his box of matches.

  “Light our way.”

  We staggered down to the ground floor. No one was in sight, but I had a strong feeling that we were watched. The light was slightly better in the archway, and I examined the young man again.

  “We should get him into the air, Holmes,” I said.

  Holmes put his hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw that, where before the yard had been empty, a throng of ragged, silent men now stood at the entrances to the alley and the rooms. They stared across the court at us. Each carried a club or a blade.

  “Back inside the entrance, Watson. We must make a stand. Our backs will be to the wall.”

  Holmes and Wiggins guarded the entrance, as Churchill and I dragged the body back inside the dank corridor and laid the man on the paving stones.

  I joined Holmes, my stick at the ready.

  The men stared, but made no move to molest us. I stepped forward.

  “I am a doctor,” I said. “I must take this young - oh.”

  A lump of masonry crashed into the yard from above. It missed me by inches. It spattered us all with dust and fragments. A woman screeched from a window above us.

  “Resurrection men! Body snatchers!”

  The crowd growled menacingly and moved forward, brandishing their weapons.

  “Oh, dearie me,” said Wiggins.

  “Wrong place, wrong profession, old man,” said Holmes, smiling at me. “They are not fond of doctors.”

  The mob circled, shuffling and shoving, elbowing one another. Their eyes gleamed with bloodlust.

  A high-pitched scream and Churchill burst past us and into the centre of the yard. He wore no jacket or shirt, and he had blackened his torso and face with dirt. His hair stood up wildly. He whooped like a Red Indian. He pointed one arm up into the air.