The Dream Thief (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  ‘I am not! I grant you that accountancy has its own particular numerical language whose fluffy, vague details elude a mind as finely trained as my own.’

  ‘See! You don’t know nothin’!’

  ‘This,’ growled Lyle, ‘is exactly what is meant by the undermining of parental authority.’

  But Tess did have a point. So they went to see a banker. Or, perhaps more usefully, they went to see a banker’s wife.

  They headed north.

  Once a wooded countryside where royalty rode out from town to hunt deer, even Stoke Newington, Lyle noticed, was showing signs of urbanisation. Rows of identical terraced houses were springing up along new paved roads. A grand Gothic-style church now stood across the village street from its ancient, rural predecessor. By the old-fashioned Unitarian chapel on Newington Green a series of plodding, teetering omnibuses were laden twice daily, morning and night, with a never-before-seen number of City clerks in top hats.

  At a tall house in a terrace by the local park, gleaming in all its proud newness, Lyle came to a door painted the same black as every other nearby, with a black iron door knocker in the same style as its neighbours. A maid answered his knock, wearing, no doubt, the identical uniform of every other maid along the street. She looked him up and down and said, ‘You sellin’ something?’

  ‘You buyin’?’ asked Tess quickly.

  Lyle smiled with all the humour of a hungry crocodile and carefully pushed Tess back behind the more respectable shape of Thomas. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m here to see the lady of the house.’

  ‘You got a card?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A card? Gentlemen what comes to visit the lady of the house brings cards that I put on a tray, an’ then give to the lady of the house.’

  ‘I haven’t got a card.’

  ‘Oh. That ain’t normal.’

  Thomas leaned carefully past Lyle, smiling thinly. ‘Actually, good madam,’ he announced smoothly, ‘the fashion for exchanging cards is one mostly indulged in by the middle-class business sort. When one moves in circles such as we do, one needs no introduction but is merely immediately known.’

  The maid tried to translate this.

  Tess kicked Thomas in the ankle. ‘Ow! I was just trying to—’

  ‘Bigwig!’

  Lyle said quickly, ‘Bless him for trying. He ’s . . . keen. Could you just tell Mrs Hobbs that Horatio Lyle is here to see her? I’m sure she’ll understand.’

  She did.

  The lady of the house was a woman in her mid-fifties, with a head of grey hair crimped down so immaculately close to her scalp that it looked sewn on like some kind of bonnet. She wore a rustling blue dress ornamented with nearly as much lace as there was flesh to cover. As Lyle entered, she rose with a broad smile on her face. ‘Horatio! I’m so glad to have you call! Oh look! You’ve brought some . . . some . . . individuals with you!’

  Lyle half bowed. It was an old-fashioned gesture for an old-fashioned lady, one who, if she put her mind to it, could remember the battle of Waterloo, in a time when news of Britain’s great victories was spread, not by the electric telegraph, but by the stagecoaches as they passed through each town. Her name was Mrs Veronica Hobbs - no relation to that dreadful philosopher fella - and she was the esteemed wife of Mr Hobbs of Scrounge and Hobbs, bankers to the comfortably rich and essentially naïve.

  Lyle was comfortably rich, but far from naïve. He knew, and had known from the start, that Mrs Hobbs, before her frowned-upon marriage (‘Finance is such a crude enterprise,’ was her mother’s assessment), had been Miss Bowen, daughter of a Mr Bowen whose knack for finding and digging up coal under innocuous looking mountains was surpassed only by his incompetence at keeping hold of the ensuing profits. Thus, for part of the first twenty-five years of her life, Miss Bowen had, politely and calmly, looked after the accounts of one of the largest and most feckless businessmen in South Wales. So it was to Mrs Hobbs, rather than her husband, that Lyle looked for guidance in all things financial. She would never take any public credit for the work she did. But it was her capacity to be more than discreet - to be, in fact, utterly unnoticed because, well, she was just the wife and that, in Lyle’s experience, made her an excellent guide to the world of money.

  He put down on her writing desk the ledger stolen from Mr Mullett’s office. ‘I pinched it from a workhouse. I had a quick read through and it’s utterly unintelligible.’

  She picked the ledger up and flicked through a few pages. From behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles balanced on the end of her needle-sharp nose, her eyes narrowed at the scrawled writing. ‘In my experience,’ she said, ‘messy financial documents are nothing more than an attempt to disguise illegality with incompetence.’

  ‘I also found a lot of money in the master’s room. And no sign it was being spent on the workhouse.’

  Mrs Hobbs tutted, but made no other sound. Grey midday light drifted through the wide bay window, catching the thin floating dust in the air. Tess found a seat in one corner of the room and sniffed. ‘Is that . . . bakin’?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘You’ve just eaten, Miss Teresa!’ blurted Thomas.

  ‘Yeah . . . but proper bakin’!’

  ‘Teresa!’ growled Lyle, and tapped the pocket of his coat from which Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice could just been seen peeking.

  Tess scowled, and slouched deeper into her chair. Tate contentedly chewed on the end of Thomas’s torn trouser leg.

  After some time, Mrs Hobbs murmured, ‘From a workhouse, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  Silence a while longer.

  ‘And what drew your attention, Horatio dear, to this workhouse? ’ Lyle hesitated. Mrs Hobbs’ eyes flashed up above the spectacles balanced on the end of her nose, sharp, bright. ‘Or would you rather not discuss it?’

  ‘Children.’ Thomas was as surprised as everyone else to hear himself speak. ‘Children have been going missing.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. And they’re not accounted for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Parish records, registers . . .’

  ‘We were hoping you might be able to help with that,’ said Lyle quickly. ‘I’m more of a . . . a combustible elements man.’

  ‘You want to know if there’s something - illicit? Suggestive? In these accounts?’ she asked, eyes twinkling.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Children go missing from workhouses all the time, Horatio. They run away; they die. We all know this.’

  ‘Yes. But how many workhouses do you know of that take their children to see the circus?’

  ‘The circus? None. The idea is ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, quite.’

  Mrs Hobbs sighed, put the book to one side, pulled the glasses away from the end of her nose, carefully folded them between her fingers, and rested her fingers on her lap. ‘You know these children?’

  ‘Not personally, not well.’

  ‘I do,’ snapped Tess sharply.

  ‘But it is the unspoken rule,’ Lyle went on, ‘the one that didn’t have to be written down, didn’t have to be said, the one the coppers don’t need to tell the sneaks: you don’t hurt children. Children have been hurt. Will you help me?’

  ‘Horatio,’ she said carefully, ‘as a very old friend of your family, I have to ask you: are you sure you know what you’re becoming involved with? The kind of people who are willing to arrange for the disappearance of children, will have no problem arranging for the disappearance of adults. We must not be naive about these things.’

  Lyle sat back and shrugged. ‘My reasoning is that the kind of people who let children vanish and don’t ask questions, deserve everything that comes to them.’

  Thomas beamed proudly.

  Mrs Hobbs leant across the desk and patted Lyle on the hand. Her mouth towards his ear, she whispered, just for him, ‘That, Horatio Lyle, is why you are such a nice young man, and why, i
f you don’t mind me saying so, you probably won’t last to be a nice old gentleman.’

  He smiled. ‘Strangely enough, Mrs Hobbs, that thought doesn’t bother me.’

  She leant back. ‘I need a day, maybe two, to make some suitably polite enquiries. Are there any names I should look for?’

  ‘Two children in particular. A girl called Sissy Smith - any records relating to her - and a boy known as Scuttle. Real name Josiah. Take these.’ Lyle reached into his jacket pocket and carefully passed across the two folded certificates. Tess’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What’re they?’ she asked.

  ‘Medical certificates,’ replied Lyle quietly. ‘One relates to Sissy Smith. It claims that she’s dead when she’s clearly not.’

  ‘An’ the other?’

  ‘It . . . it claims the same for Scuttle, Tess. It says he’s dead. However, the certificate for Sissy lied.’

  ‘I see,’ said Tess quietly. Lyle didn’t think he’d ever seen her so still. ‘I get it.’

  Mrs Hobbs coughed politely. ‘And these names on these certificates: Mr Mullett, Dr Preston?’

  ‘Mr Mullett is the manager of the workhouse and a particularly dubious character. I don’t know anything about Dr Preston except that he has signed a death certificate for a child who isn’t dead. Anything you can find out about him would be appreciated. ’

  ‘Shall I find you at the usual place?’

  ‘Mrs Hobbs, you are a wonder.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell anyone,’ she sighed, ‘it’d take away the charm.’

  The circus. The idea bothered Lyle, worried him to his core, as he sat, his feet buried in filthy straw inside a creaking omnibus heading away from Stoke Newington. An old phrase kept running round his mind, sneaking into his thoughts and stumping rational deduction.

  It went: Once upon a time . . .

  That wasn’t quite right either.

  He twiddled his fingers and chewed the end of his thumb, a boyish habit that still haunted him in moments of worry.

  Run away to the circus . . .

  He’d never understood the glamour of running away to the circus. At best, you’d end up doing dangerous or demeaning stunts, in the worst case, you’d spend the rest of your days shovelling exotic dung. But to a child in the workhouse, who had never seen electric lights and smiling faces, the idea might have some appeal.

  CHAPTER 6

  Circus

  It wasn’t hard finding Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus.

  Its arrival in the city of London, with music playing, animals processing, jugglers juggling and a woman slipping rum into every third cup sold from the parade, had not been subtle. Its presence was noted in every self-respecting newspaper and news-sheet under titles ranging from ‘Electric Marvel!!’ to ‘Vice and Bawdry Comes to London’, with the praise or condemnation of the event largely proportional to the length of the editor’s side whiskers.

  There had been posters too, stuck up on every space on every wall and door in whichever street it was felt that the inhabitants had a respectable chance of being able to read. The main picture showed a woman passed off as a ballerina, if ballerinas could have breathed in such a corset, seeming to balance a ball on her head while prancing on the back of a pony.

  On every wall, the posters had a great deal of competition from signs inviting you to visit the best barber in London to advertisements for squalid penny-gaffs where, every night, boys and girls stood on a barrel and sang out-of-tune bawdy songs for an audience more appreciative than any that could afford to sport its own top hat, for the daintiest pie shop, or to buy, for no more than five shillings and sixpence, a cure for the scourge of consumption that would not only heal you, but protect your whole family by mere proximity to the precious fumes of this concoction. Railway trips for the family were advertised, to such exotic places as Brighton or Southend-on-Sea, or to take the waters at Bath or Leamington Spa. For just half a crown, you, the lucky reader of this notice, could be the first to invest in a marvellous mechanical apparatus which will revolutionise the tallow-making industry as we know it. For you there can be real Chinese silk imported direct from India for only seven shillings two pence per yard, or music hall girls in Shoreditch and entertainments down by Crystal Palace. Every industry or enterprise whose leaders felt their audiences could be beguiled by a picture and a simple word, had plastered up their message in the London streets.

  But of all these, few received such rapturous attention as the picture of the curvy lady prancing on the back of the pony, round which children and, it had to be admitted, some lonely men and envious ladies flocked to read the sign which declared:

  MR MAJESTIC’S MARVELLOUS ELECTRIC CIRCUS!!

  HYDE PARK, LONDON

  (ADMISSION 3D)

  To every onlooker’s surprise, when Lyle saw this, he started to laugh. ‘Hyde Park.’ He chuckled because the alternative was to cry. ‘Of course it would be in Hyde Park.’

  ‘It would?’ demanded Tess.

  ‘Sissy Smith,’ he replied, ‘had cuts from long grass on her feet and ankles. There are very few places in London where grass grows. Come on.’

  Once upon a time, Hyde Park had been farmland, well beyond the city, with a few trees. Then some bright spark had decided that a corner of these fields would serve as an excellent place to hang people. For a few hundred years this had drawn the crowds to come and cheer the demise of their favourite apple thief. Eventually though, the judiciary had grown soft, and judges started replacing the traditional Saturday afternoon family entertainment of torture and execution with deportations to such vile places as Australia. The gallows were taken down and moved to a more convenient location, nearer the prisons, where street vendors could more easily sell their goods to the expectant crowds. Around the space where the gallows had stood, great houses grew up, often of architectural note, round the confines of the field until it was encircled, and dubbed by royal decree a park, where the nobility could take their leisure without the inconvenience of being driven in a carriage for one full day or more to places as inaccessible as Hampshire or Sussex.

  And though in these days the park’s great elm trees were stained with smoke from the neighbouring chimneys, for many years there had been a lake, made to look like a bend on a mighty river, on which young men might court their ladies without much fear of drowning for, while the average crinoline weighed almost as much as the creature within it, the water was mostly not a fish’s fin deeper than it had to be. On Sundays there was patriotic music from a bandstand and, as if to bestow on the entire landscape a splendour nothing else could achieve, the royal family, Victoria Regina and her many progeny, were - at least theoretically - in residence no more than several hundred yards away.

  Lyle, however, knew the unspoken truths about the park: the men who might haunt the place at night, cudgel in pocket, or the grown-up things that could happen in the more secluded areas. Even the carriage rides along Rotten Row were sometimes much more than an innocent-seeming jaunt with the blinds down. Which knowledge may have helped his ears turn pink when Tess, surveying the edge of the park, said, ‘Is this where the marks go with their painted ladies for a bit of a swagger inna night?’

  ‘Teresa!’ he blurted out. ‘Well-brought-up young women do not even conceive of what young men may do with their painted ladies!’

  ‘Are we,’ enquired Thomas, ‘still talking about clowns?’

  Tess brightened, and prepared herself to divulge the Facts of Life. ‘Bigwig . . .’ She looked into his face, saw optimistic eagerness hoping to be enlightened as soon as possible, the better to serve the world. ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘we’re talkin’ ’bout clowns.’

  Lyle raised his eyes to heaven. Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice hadn’t anything to say about this particular conversation.

  Welcome to Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus!

  Wonders you have never seen before just wait to be discovered. You, sir, may we show you creatures from the exotic Indies, strange dancing monke
ys on top of the organ grinder’s table cavorting for your delight? You, madam, if your heart is strong enough, come see for yourself the horrific freaks born - through no fault of their own, God’s mercy on them - with faces like melted wax and stooped backs from which stubby little arms hardly deign to grow! If your child fears such things, then put them out of your mind, for here instead you may drink of fresh fruit juice (laced with a little something for only three pennies more, sir) while watching a dancing bear spin to the sound of the flute! Be careful where you put your feet, sir, the elephants are mighty in all their functions; but no matter, for a small army of boys waits to scrub your shoes clean again in exchange for nothing more than the three pennies they need to be allowed into the great tents of the circus. Madam, have you an eye for scientific wonders? Here we have an electric bulb and, yes indeed, it may seem a little smoky - that is just the carbon burning - but see how much light is made for just a little electricity. And here we raise two towers of metal between which we can make the lightning dance in blue fire; and here the hall of mirrors - see yourself a thousand times and wonder if you will ever escape! Have you witnessed a man eat such quantities of fire, or drive a sword - how sharp the blade! - down his own gullet? Marvel at the agility of our acrobats as they flop and dive from sky to earth with not a net in sight. Have you courage? This man can throw a knife to a spinning target and never miss his mark. Do you delight in music? Here we have every kind of exotic tune, the pipers of the east, the fiddlers of the west, a German opera singer with a great beard growing from her woman’s chin, an Italian boy who sings more sweetly than the nightingale, the family favourite of Punch and his puppet adventures. Or if this is not to your taste, come visit Mysterious Mai, Mistress of Mystic Mysteries - the Veil Lifted, the Past Revealed, the Future Divined - in her tent of a Thousand Secrets. Truth can be yours for just sixpenn’orth of copper coin. Or, for a shilling, we give you technological marvels, as our very own photographer captures you and your whole family in no longer than a twenty-minute sitting before his miraculous glass!