The Dream Thief (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  ‘I’m Tess!’ came the proud reply.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Tess? Teresa Hatch? Best pinch in the house? Fastest runner, best at pretendin’ to be sleepin’ when I weren’t, could steal anythin’ an’ did, never caught, climb any wall, sneak out any night? Tess? You gotta ’ave heard of me.’

  The child shook her head. ‘Don’t know nothin’ ’bout that.’

  Tess’s face fell. ‘Fame ain’t no good no more,’ she grumbled. ‘Look, you heard of a girl called Sissy Smith?’

  Edith’s eyes widened. ‘Ain’t s’posed to say nothin’ to no one! I got in trouble for sayin’ summat ’bout her!’

  ‘Smart attitude what you got goin’,’ agreed Tess, ‘but I wanna know ’bout Sissy, see? Cos someone gone an’ hurt her, and that means they hurt one of us. So you tell me everything what you know ’bout Sissy toot sweet, chop chop, right?’

  And Edith White, who hadn’t heard of the legendary Teresa Hatch, but then again, had never seen a child who wasn’t in workhouse uniform, told her.

  She whispered, ‘It happened at the circus . . .’

  CHAPTER 4

  Information

  It was too good to last.

  As Lyle looked at the money in the master’s little lock box, wondering whether that amount of money could look back, it had simultaneously occurred to him that, yes, things had been going rather well.

  Half a second after this thought had begun its progress across Lyle’s brain, another, smaller thought chased after it, waving its arms and shouting indignantly, determined to point out, dammit, that if it was too good to last, odds were it wouldn’t.

  Two seconds after that, the door opened.

  It was Mr Willocks, starting in with a cry of, ‘What the bloody hell do you think . . .?’ What followed had been mostly obscene. To avoid hearing any more than necessary, the some-time copper ran straight at Willocks, shoved him into the wall and belted past, down the steps outside two at a time. Lyle had always known that in any fight, he’d be the one with the bleeding nose, but when it came to the 200-yard sprint, he was unsurpassed.

  Behind him, Willocks, struggling to recover breath, shouted, ‘Oi! He’s got the . . .’

  Lyle rounded the corner, leapt down another flight of stairs, and barged past a tattered collection of beggars and tramps being turfed out of their overnight dorm onto the street to work. As he ran, he fumbled in his pockets, feeling by the marks on the cork of each vial which potion was contained within, until at last he pulled two glass containers from his coat and, reaching the end of the corridor, turned to face the furious features of Mr Willocks.

  ‘Thief!’ blurted the man.

  ‘Special constable!’ retorted Lyle, and smashed the two vials together.

  If Lyle hadn’t let Tess do some of his routine lab work while he was focusing on more exciting projects, there would have been a quiet, satisfactory puff of smoke. As it was, he did recall asking her to throw together a couple of potions in passing, please. And now he thought about it, at the time it had seemed that she was using too much lead nitrate.

  The blast knocked him back off his feet and into the soft wall of shuffling beggars and excavated inmates, an elbow knocking into his side as his feet slid out from beneath him. His fingers itched and stung with the flying sparks and shattered glass from the two smashed vials. Smoke billowed down the hall, sending dark fumes into every corner; it crawled under doors and pressed its angry tumbling face against each window.

  In the courtyard, Mr Mullett, halfway through describing the exercise regime for elderly inmates (ten minutes of walking round the yard twice a day), looked up, and exclaimed to see black clouds billowing through several windows.

  Thomas scratched Tate quietly behind the ears, and looked for the nearest way out.

  On the top floor of the building, Tess said, ‘Can you smell smoke?’

  Edith nodded.

  From downstairs came the sounds of hacking coughs and a half-hearted attempt to shout, ‘Thief!’ through the darkness.

  ‘Gettin’ caught!’ sighed Tess, every inch the frustrated professional. ‘Amateurs!’ She stood up and headed for the nearest window. A pair of blackened claws closed round her wrist; with a start she realised they were the thin, coal-stained fingers of Edith.

  ‘There ain’t no gettin’ out! Greybags comes an’ finds you when you dreams!’

  ‘Right,’ said Tess, as nicely as she felt she could, circumstances permitting. ‘Course he does.’

  ‘Children die,’ whispered Edith frantically. ‘I heard it, I seen it! He tells you the stories an’ then . . .’

  ‘ ’Ere,’ muttered Tess, glancing frantically towards the end of the corridor, where smoke was now roiling in under the door, ‘not as how I ain’t interested, but this ain’t a good time. So, tells you what, if you gets out, I got this pal, name of Scuttle.’

  From downstairs, she heard the sound of breaking glass, and Tate barking.

  ‘Scuttle?’ whispered the girl. ‘I know Scuttle! He were caught! He were took to the circus!’

  Tess, usually the leader of the pack when it came to rapid escape, hesitated. ‘Wha’?’

  ‘He was took! Same as Sissy was!’

  Tess stared into Edith White’s pale little face and saw, somewhere in the sunken eyes, a bright burning flame whose one fuel was fear, pure, smokeless, glittering fear. She pulled free of the girl’s grip, and Edith seemed to shrivel away into herself. The door at the end of the corridor was thrust back, letting in a wave of smoke and the irate schoolmaster, who began, ‘Who are you and what are you . . .’

  Tess was at the window, crawling out and reaching for the nearby drainpipe, digging her toes into the uneven bricks and wrapping her fingers round the cold rusting iron as she began the climb towards the ground, the cobbled street and escape. Behind her, she heard Edith White start to scream empty incomprehensible words, and felt a lump of coal fly by her head as the schoolmaster, leaning out of the open window, tried to knock her from her perch. But he was already much, much too late.

  An hour later, a passing packman, his bag full of old nails, printed fabrics, French chocolates and penny remedies, happened to glance aside as he waddled down the crowded, dirty byway of Exmouth Market, and saw three unusual figures eating eel pie. The youngest, a girl with a mess of dark hair, face stained with coal dust, was surreptitiously feeding fragments of pastry to a dog that had claimed her feet for its own. The next youngest, by his clothes clearly a gentleman, was wheezing from what seemed like sudden and violent exercise, one of his trouser legs torn almost to the knee, while the eldest was using his sleeve to wipe smoke stains from his face, the ends of his once redblondish hair scorched and slightly curled by heat.

  The three of them were having some sort of argument.

  ‘Next time, next time,’ said the man, ‘when I say two parts lead nitrate to five parts calcium carbonate, I actually and really do mean—’

  ‘You can make your own next time!’ exclaimed the girl with the reckless rudeness the packman firmly believed was proof of the decline of the times.

  The boy said nothing, but peered into the depths of his pie as if both fascinated and repulsed by the contents within its hard pastry crust. It was clear he found the experience unpleasant, but he screwed up his face, half closed his eyes and took a bite. A little, ‘Unnnngh! Unnn unnnghh! ’ noise escaped the boy’s lips, and the ends of his ears started to resemble a boiled beetroot.

  The packman walked on, leaving the three of them to their discussion.

  A few streets on, he passed a very angry-looking workhouse master, and two baffled coppers.

  Lyle said, ‘All right! Regardless of the chemical consistency, let us all be grateful to have got in and out safely! I, for one, found the experience most enlightening.’

  Thomas had got a piece of bone from his pie lodged between his teeth and was trying his very best to find a way to dislodge it without upsetting decorum.

  Tess turned from her ritual adorat
ion of Tate to Lyle. ‘Uh?’ she queried.

  ‘Enlightening?’ suggested Lyle.

  ‘Um . . .?’ said Tess helpfully, as Thomas tried to work his tongue between his teeth without catching anyone’s attention.

  ‘Educational.’

  ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Informative?’

  Tess’s face stayed blank. ‘Teresa,’ said Lyle, ‘I know you know exactly what these words mean, and are merely trying to provoke me into saying something rude and ungrammatical. Well, it isn’t going to work! According to Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice . . .’ he groped in his coat pockets, and produced, after great struggle, a little leather-bound book that had been lodged between a pen and a fold-up magnifying glass. ‘It says . . .’ he flicked through the pages, while Thomas, Tess and even Tate stared in wonder, ‘a child must learn from the fathe—from the paternal figure, and will come to speak as he speaks. Thus, good grammar, an economy of language and a moral, leading to verbal fortitude in times of trouble will all illustrate by example the—’

  ‘Wha’ the hell is that?’ squeaked Tess indignantly.

  ‘Um . . . this is Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice on Family Life,’ stammered Lyle, his confidence waning in the triple face of Thomas’s, Tess’s and Tate’s incredulity. ‘It ’s . . . it’s a guide to . . . well . . . to running a family . . . to . . . uh . . . to . . . Look, can we please focus on Tess’s consistent refusal to conduct herself in a ladylike manner and her over-enthusiastic deployment of rapidly oxidising compounds!’

  Silence.

  Lyle was aware he was still holding the book. He tried to force it back into a bulging pocket, which chinked and creaked under the pressure.

  Thoughtfully, a strange expression on her face, as of one not entirely listening to her own speech, Tess intoned, ‘I found out that the children ’ave been goin’ missin’, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘Missing? What sort of “missing”?’

  ‘As in . . .’ Tess sucked in a long breath, ‘as in “absent like” or “gone” or “not in the vicinitininy no more” or “totally bugge . . .”’

  ‘All right, thank you, I think I have the idea.’

  Thomas raised a hand in polite enquiry.

  ‘See!’ exclaimed Lyle, gesturing at the boy. ‘This is what well-brought-up young gentlemen do! Yes, Thomas, what is it?’

  ‘I was wondering if Miss Teresa might clarify by what means the children in the workhouse are going missing?’ suggested Thomas meekly.

  ‘Oh. Yeah. They’re troublemakers, Edith said. Children what don’t do right by the master, an’ then they get taken out for the day, an’ then they ain’t never come back. Edith were this girl what I found in the cupboard.’

  There was a pause while the others considered this. ‘A cupboard? ’ Thomas hazarded.

  ‘Yep. Cos if you do summat bad, or summat they think is bad, an’ if you get caught, see, then you get punished. Like sometimes you get beat with the cane or get no supper, or in winter, like, you ’ave to ’ave a cold bath, or if you done summat an’ they can’t be bothered to think of nothin’ special, then you get locked in the coal cupboard for a few days.’

  ‘A few days?’ gasped Thomas.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I suppose, discipline . . .’

  Tess stuck out her tongue, puffed out her cheeks and made an indecent noise that Thomas had never heard before from a female - or even a male - of his acquaintance.

  Lyle coughed, in an attempt to assert authority and direction. ‘All right, Teresa,’ he said, ‘so your time was not entirely unfruitful. Did you, by any chance, get information on Sissy Smith?’

  ‘Yep. She were taken away yesterday mornin’. Her an’ . . .’ Tess hesitated, and for a moment, a creature older than a child was watching from behind her eyes. ‘Mister Lyle?’ Her voice was soft, serious.

  ‘Yes, Teresa?’ Lyle was suddenly still and gentle.

  ‘Sissy Smith were taken away with Scuttle.’

  ‘Scuttle? As in . . .’

  ‘As in spotty little Scuttle what is really called Josiah. As in spotty Scuttle, king of the mudlarks of Wappin’. Scuttle, what took us into the sewers when we had to go an’ save you from your big trouble, Mister Lyle. They caught him.’

  Lyle nodded slowly, sadly, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘sometimes the mudlarks need a roof over their head. Perhaps . . . perhaps he chose to go to the workhouse? ’

  ‘Scuttle ain’t never chosin’ that! He were my friend! He wouldn’t never . . . An’ he were taken with Sissy Smith, he were taken an’—’

  ‘Taken where?’

  ‘The circus.’ It was Thomas who’d spoken, sudden, sharp, confident.

  The others turned.

  He shrugged uneasily, tried to smile with confidence but couldn’t quite muster it. ‘Mr Mullett said - he said they took the children to the circus. Mr Majestic’s . . . Mr Marvellous’s - something like that. A big circus. I thought how strange it was, a workhouse master taking the children, especially since Mr Mullett didn’t seem a gentleman of . . . of appropriately caring disposition.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lyle at last, ‘I’ll admit to being a little confused by the activities at your old workhouse, Tess.’

  ‘But none of this don’t make us no closer to curin’ Sissy Smith, do it?’ demanded Tess with a sulky pout.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something in this?’ asked Lyle, pulling out the leather account book he’d taken from the master’s office.

  ‘You pinched the accounts?’ asked Tess, brightening a little. ‘Mister Lyle!’

  ‘Thievery earns me respect.’ He sighed. ‘I build airships in my spare time and have invented a revolutionary theory to explain the diffusion, refraction and reflection of light through the atmosphere while casually walking down Baker Street. But what earns me respect? Illegality.’

  ‘I respect you, sir!’ piped Thomas.

  ‘Erm . . . Thank you, Thomas.’

  ‘Toff,’ whispered Tess, nudging him in the ribs.

  ‘I think,’ proclaimed Lyle, attempting to impose some sort of authority on the proceedings, ‘that there may be something to investigate here after all.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Money

  And as she sleeps, she dreams of . . .

  . . . she dreams of . . .

  . . . once upon a time

  . . . a long time ago . . .

  . . . there lived . . .

  . . . a long way away . . .

  . . . a beautiful princess . . .

  . . . an evil witch . . .

  . . . an angry dragon . . .

  a child in a coal cupboard who said to the darkness, let me tell you a story once upon a time there was a child in a coal cupboard who said to the darkness, let me tell you a story

  . . . and her name was . . .

  . . . her name was . . .

  No.

  Nothing.

  All gone now.

  Sissy Smith turns over in her bed, and sleeps a little more.

  Horatio Lyle liked numbers. He liked it when they did what they were told - when you said to them, ‘Now go like that’ and they did, because with numbers either you were right or you were wrong. It worked, or it blew a hole in the laboratory roof. And when it worked - if it worked - it was beautiful.

  That said, numbers relating to money were of almost no interest to Lyle. They were simple, dull this plus that equals that, income and expense. Any fool could count pennies into shillings, shillings into pounds and, thank you kindly, he had more interesting things to do with mathematics than worry about the grocery bill. As his financial affairs had grown, and with them their need for subtleties, rules and regulations, Horatio Lyle had fallen behind the times. One morning he’d woken up and realised that, yes, he should be able to calculate the distance to the moon based on its relative position to its background objects if only he could sort out the angle versus time of observation details . . . but ask him to name the price of a hot plum pie and he’d be i
n trouble. As far as Lyle was concerned, he operated on such a sublime mathematical level that stooping to consider everyday money matters would violate twenty years of intellectual training.

  ‘You is just sayin’ that, ain’t you?’ said Tess snottily. ‘Cos of how you don’t know what all the squiggly bits down the side mean.’