By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Be ground up like meat, them three, one of the guards, a Texan, grinned.

  But I expect the boy won’t be much troubled by it, Roemer said, eyeing Foole shivering through the bars.

  Why’s that?

  Because he’s already dead, Roemer said. Isn’t that right, Sergeant? Aren’t you already dead?

  Leering and dragging the swaddled elbow of his crutch across the bars as he spoke.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The scarred, vicious face of Muck Annie haunted William in the days following. He had left Foole at the sewer entrance two nights earlier on the understanding that they would meet again, this night, at a public house on the edge of Shadwell. He had stooped in under the crooked timber door frame and peered about at the dejected in their cups feeling a sudden uneasiness and then turned and gone back out. But ten minutes later Foole had approached, whistling softly under his breath, and together they started down into the crowded East End. The streets were lit only by old-fashioned lanterns creaking from hooks that had been nailed into the lintels of public houses in the murderous days of George III and there were no lights else but for the flare and sheen reflecting off the puddles and rivers of muck in the streets.

  St. George’s Street. Whatever else it was not England. Bearded Jews with their ringlets and prayer shawls wading powerfully through the crowds like some ancient warning from the East, their shoulders wide-set, their necks bullish. Walking five abreast and wringing empty sacks in their fists. Peddlers with stacks of stained silk hats tottering on their lice-ridden heads, tiny pickpockets running barefoot through the sludge. Once the crowds parted like a sea and out of the throng William saw emerge a very short Turk in a tall white headdress and in his fist was a rope and at the end of that rope a brindled cow. Drunk Swedes with faces painted like acrobats shouted out some mournful song over the heads of the crowd. Laughing at their own misery as if it were some joke. Pigs ran loose underfoot. At the corner of Cannon Street Road William met the dark Asiatic stare of a woman selling Bibles from an overturned crate and he looked quickly past her. Just beyond, like a pale horror rising from the blackness, the limestone tower of St. George-in-the-East. Foole mingled, Foole did not slow. The air was cold. They passed two ladies in fur collars leading a monkey on a leash north towards Shadwell station and William looked at it and understood it would be dead within the week. They walked downwind from Jamrach’s Menagerie, the reek of offal and shit and animal fear shouldering past them, they passed the walled rose garden of the old Wesleyan graves. At a pie stand he saw a thin man wrapped in rags exhibiting a bucket of turtles to a gaggle of urchins. Cloth caps folded into little fists, eyes agog. The man swung the turtles in an elegant dance and he saw the man’s milky stare and he knew that the wretch was blind.

  Then they were turning north into Victoria Street and all around them came the spice from cooking fires and he saw in the crowds the grim faces of Chinese and Indians and Malays. He could smell hashish and opium, cinnamon and oranges. He felt dizzy with the noise. Squalid figures squatted over cook fires in alleys stirring pots with weird sticks wrapped in beads and feathers and half-breed children half stunned from the cold whistled to them from dilapidated courts. Ahead in the darkness William could see the taller darkness of the viaduct. They passed four gin saloons each identical to each where a piano clattered off-key on the boards within and the stamping and roars of men reached them from out of the smoke. The dazzling brightness of a Ragged School, beggar children lounging on its stairs and picking tobacco from their lips and passing a bottle of some black liquor. Foole led him past Quashie’s where a tattooed barker called to passersby some display of wonder and talent within and William stared at a monochrome poster of a man in a mask cutting the throat of a girl.

  They were seeking a shabby yard known as New Court and at an arched passageway Foole pulled him aside out of the crowds. It was quieter there. The passage opened into shadow beside the Royal Sovereign public house but they did not go down it. After a moment a Malay sailor stumbled through the front door of the pub and leaned up against one wall in the weak light of the windows with a hand for balance and started to piss. The two men watched in silence. He was wearing a Confederate uniform.

  William grunted. Now where do you think he got that from?

  Then the sailor was staggering away from the wall like a man from a losing hand of cards and pulling at his fly with both fists and then without so much as a glance he went back in.

  The moral few, Foole murmured.

  The moral few. William laughed a caustic laugh. Four men equal a lion.

  How many times did you hear that in a day?

  William regarded Foole in the dimness, trying to make sense of the man. Where did you fight at? he asked at last.

  I didn’t. Foole shrugged an apologetic half shrug. I never saw action. I was stationed with the Fifth in Washington as a quartermaster’s apprentice in the railway drops. We kept you boys fed.

  We weren’t fed. We could have eaten our shoes.

  Foole nodded. Well. We tried to.

  William levelled his gaze and stared down Foole, a man slight, elegant, dapper in his cutaway and starched collar. He did not believe a word the man was saying.

  I, like you, found the war a more complicated thing than most wish it to be, Foole said quietly. It’s hard to have faith in our fellows when you see what they’re capable of.

  Yes.

  I would not relive those days for anything. I still dream of them.

  Their breath like smoke in the cold. Frost crept in slow webs over the cobblestones. Beyond was a shabby square of a dozen or so lodging houses and William could see the stiff grey lines of washing not taken in, a cart upturned on its handles with one wheel pried away. Seated on a sunken stair was a cripple in an old sailor’s coat, his crutch crosswise in his lap, head nodding. After a moment a group of four well-dressed gentlemen emerged from the shadows smiling dreamily each to each and they did not even glance at Foole or William as they slid past. One of them was brushing his fingertips back and forth over the deckled pages of a city guidebook and William could almost see the black poppy boiling the man’s blood.

  Sightseers, Foole murmured contemptuously. But I expect she’s in.

  The Lascar’s a woman?

  Used to be, at least. She’s old Latou’s widow. Lascar Sal. You’ve heard of Latou.

  He had not.

  Welcome to Shadwell, Foole said. He tapped his walking stick on the bricks of the arch. Sal’s is the only den left now. He fixed William with his glowing catlike stare. They say Charles Dickens used to come here.

  Just then a tinker burst staggering backward from the door of the Royal Sovereign his arms wheeling for balance. The man started to laugh in the cut of light cast from the open door and then he wiped at his face and muttered something in German and went back inside. William watched this in distaste. He said he thought it strange a place like Sal’s could exist when the substance could be purchased at any chemist’s. It’s everywhere, he said. They feed it to teething babies, for god’s sake, you can buy it over the counter. Why come here?

  Ah, but this is pure, Foole murmured. From Canton itself. There’s an art to the mixing I’m told.

  An art.

  It’s like cooking.

  William shook his head in disgust. There’s no art to feeding a starving man, he said.

  Foole lifted a patched curtain with care and held it for William to pass. In the doorway slouched two men, hands deep in pockets, coats rucked up over their wrists, and they were smiling absently out into the night. They had the leeched grey throats of men staring down the grave.

  The interior was small, perhaps eight feet by eight, the water-stained ceiling low. William stooped, took off his hat. The Lascar’s room was sparse, dim, lit only by a solitary lantern in the far corner half concealed by a divan where a bundle of wet rags had been thrown and left to dry. He could see a small framed watercolour of what must once have been St. George-in-the-East, hanging now askew on
its nail, and there was a low shelf just off the floor near the divan. Five leather-bound books, with gold Chinese script upon their spines. A polished box of dominoes with dragons carved into its sides, the lid left up. A scale for weighing opium. A three-legged chair propped against a wall.

  Where is she? William said.

  There was a doorway at the far end of the room and Foole was staring into its gloom as if to discern some shape in the beyond. Then William felt a slow thrum rising from the dirt floor and the watercolour began to rattle and the walls were shuddering and then the full fury of the East London line thundered under their feet and past. He glanced at Foole. And it was then he saw, under the rags on the broken divan, the tiny translucent body of Lascar Sal.

  He had seen many dead in his life but the hearts of those dead had stopped and Lascar Sal’s beat on. She was skeletal, shrivelled, she seemed scarcely able to lift a wrist to wave the two men forward. There was a waxiness to her skin and her eyes had shrunk to slits, the lashes ringed in a crust of tears. She was breathing fast laboured breaths and her ribs rose and fell like the shallow ribs of a hurt animal. All this William saw and did not see. She lay with her birdlike ankles crossed and a heat rising from her skin the two men could have warmed their knuckles by and her long white throat with its ropy swallowing as she smoked her pipe over her lamp.

  Sal? Foole murmured.

  Her eyes unfocused, her face turning. Dearies, she said. A whisper like dried leather. You’ll pay up according, dearies, won’t you? You’ll pay up according?

  Foole held out a hand as if to assure her but he did not touch her and it hovered over her still form for a long suspended breath. We’re looking for someone, he said. We’ll pay for that.

  You’ll smoke a pipe won’t you, like a good soul, dearies? You’ll pity poor Sal?

  William could almost not hear, so soft was it.

  We’re looking for a man named Cooper, Foole said. Goes by the name of the Saracen.

  Her eyes closed and her eyes opened. Her lips moved soundlessly.

  Foole withdrew a shilling from his pocket and held it before her in the low light and William felt something at his back and turned. The two addicts at the doorway were staring at the coin in Foole’s fingers.

  No ships, no ships, she whispered.

  Foole set the coin with a quiet click down before her and the Lascar’s sinewy white hand very slowly drifted to the coin, slid it scraping across the floor and under the blanket.

  They waited.

  She did not stir. Foole glowered at the two men in the doorway and then he tucked the hem of his coat around his legs and took up his walking stick and shuffled past William into the room beyond.

  It was smaller than the first, darker, hushed but for the quiet bubbling of the pipes. Against one wall a tattered bed slouched on ancient iron bedposts, two figures sprawling out upon it smoking. Three others lay huddled in blankets against a wall and not one stirred as the two men picked their slow way over them, peering into the faces of the dreaming dead.

  All were men, all were old. Sallow figures sunken in bliss and lost to the world. The skin of each burned with an awful luminosity as if lit by a lantern from within and when William rolled one onto his side to see his face the man felt papery and light as a wasp’s nest.

  Foole passed on into the third room, and he followed. A narrow closet, unlit but for the weak light at their backs. He stood pressed close to the small thief neither man speaking and it was then they saw, laid out on his ancient back with his bony hands folded at his chest and his huge eyes shut in their sockets, what was left of the fearsome Saracen.

  There could be no uncertainty. He was huge, even wasted as he was. An old man, his cheek dried and pulling away from the old wound there so that the red slash of his mouth could be seen in all its horror. Weird scars curled down across his face and over the ruin of his nose and the skin there had discoloured to the stained brown of old tea and the scallop of one mangled ear gleamed in the light. He was very near death, William knew.

  It’s not him, said Foole.

  It’s him.

  Foole looked like he was going to speak but then he did not. William tried to put a hand on his shoulder but he stepped away like a man avoiding a draft. He was still staring down at the figure in its rags.

  There’s nothing for us here, Mr. Foole, William murmured. And then: Adam.

  Foole looked up. His eyes were creased and sad. He didn’t kill her, he said.

  No.

  Look at him.

  William studied the dying man in the bad light. I see him, he said.

  They made their way back out into the night and the air felt cold and clean on William’s face. He was tired. He glanced sidelong at Foole, knowing it was time the man held up his share of the bargain and told him what he knew about Edward Shade. They did not retrace their steps but went north towards Shadwell station and Foole took them through a warren of unlit courts and alleys. William struggled to keep his footing, to keep pace. He could feel eyes watching from the pitch but shook this feeling off. His Colt was in his coat pocket, the weight of it against his ribs as he went. There were lanterns in some few of the yards they passed, a smell of livestock.

  Hold up, William hissed. Mr. Foole?

  His fingers moved across the fungal slick of the bricks and over the sharp lead gutter of a rain spout or what he trusted must be a rain spout and then he kicked some clattering twist of metal and stumbled and his foot rolled over a soft cold thing like a dead cat and caught the ground again and he righted himself and kept going. Foole was ahead of him now.

  There was a light. All at once he found himself face to face with a figure in a battered top hat and a patched cloak and the man was leering a toothless leer. He held in one hand an ancient bull’s-eye lantern, its leather strap crossed and double-crossed over his sleeve like the lashing of a harness. His grizzled jaw, his cheeks pitted from some long-survived smallpox, his one eye turned lifelessly out.

  Pity a poor lad, mister, the man whispered.

  William shook him off.

  Give us a copper for the old missus. Just a copper, like.

  The man was tugging with strength at William’s sleeve though William was a good head taller. Get off, he snapped. Go. But as he began to shoulder past he felt something like the brush of a crow’s wing at the back of his neck and he raised his fingers to the spot and they came away wet. It was blood.

  A sudden shadow, a shock of pale hair in the lantern light. He could not say how many there were. Only that he fell into the cold muck with his arms cradling his head as the kicks came sharp and furious at his back and ribs and elbows and hands. There was blood in his eyes. He thought he saw a massive shadow block out the light in that alley and then there were men lifting into the air like sacks of wheat thrown from a waggon and that giant silhouette was wading like a reaper through the fury but then William shut his eyes in pain and when he opened them it was only Adam Foole, torn and bloodied and quick, his walking stick carving through the four men surrounding him, striking first one and then another with a violent grace and at each gentle touch from his stick a froth of blood would explode in the weak light and the men would clutch their faces and crumple.

  It could have lasted moments, it could have lasted hours. He could hear Foole breathing in the darkness. The man did not stoop over him, he did not offer his hand. But only stood swaying upon his walking stick and staring wild-eyed around him as if they might return at any moment. William rolled slowly onto his elbows and sat up and he saw two urchins crouched in the light of an overturned lantern and when they locked eyes the small boys vanished.

  Son of a bitch, he said. His ribs ached but he did not think he had broken any bones. There was a wetness at the back of his collar and down his back and he knew the blood there would ruin his shirt. He pressed a handkerchief to the cut.

  Foole said nothing.

  You came back. William fixed on the thief through one swelling eye.

  He watched Foo
le shrug.

  Why?

  A long quiet look. Then the man said, softly, I always keep my word, Mr. Pinkerton. I always pay my debts.

  But there was a sadness and a disappointment in his voice and William studied him thinking of the Saracen and feeling overwhelmed. He asked no more. He had lost his hat and the shoulder of his chesterfield was ripped at the seam. His face in the morning would be mottled and lumpen and yellow. He imagined what Shore would say and he winced.

  Foole was coughing with one hand against a brick wall and the other clutching his ribs and his feet were straddling some foul muck of the street and then he straightened and looked at William. Four men equal a lion, he said.

  Some lion, William said.

  Limping they found a wretched pub next to a butcher’s stall with sawdust on its floors and a lantern burning at either end and there was murder in William’s face as they stumbled in. No patron looked twice to see their state. They dragged a table nearer the fire and gestured for a bottle of gin.

  Foole’s hand shook as he poured. The cold bottle with its paper label in the firelight, the gin glowing like silver nitrate.

  Foole raised his glass. To Jonathan Cooper.

  To Cooper, William muttered. May he never awake.

  They drank. Poured a second and drank again.

  Foole held the gin in his mouth and then swallowed. It’s the not knowing, he said after a moment. He looked up, vulnerable, as if something had been peeled away. I’d heard rumours about the Saracen. I thought, I don’t know, perhaps there might be some truth in them.

  William dabbed gingerly at his neck. What will you do now?

  I should ask Charlotte that.

  Ask Charlotte—?

  It’s nothing. A joke.

  He sipped at his gin and felt a warmth prickle in his throat and then he blinked heavily and knew he would soon be drunk if he did not slow.