The Dream Thief (Horatio Lyle)

by Catherine Webb

  It was, however, enough to slow her down.

  She could see the bobbing grey head of the strange young man vanishing into the crowd as her fingers became entangled in strings and wood. For a moment as she looked at the puppet, she could have sworn that the painted eyes looked straight back at her, and they were angry.

  By this time, mass hysteria was beginning to take hold of the crowd. Somewhere she could hear Thomas’s imperious voice barking, ‘Now, I’m going to inherit a seat in the House of Commons, you know, and this is really too . . .’

  She kicked the Punch puppeteer in the kneecap and tried to push her way into the crowd. Somewhere nearby, horses were screaming, a wild, terrified sound and children began to cry and tumble beneath the running feet of the indifferent public, who now ran because they were afraid, because marvellous things were suddenly frightening things, and because they didn’t know - above all because they did not know - why it was they ran. Which just made running all the more important. Someone knocked Tess to the ground. She got up blearily and saw a space between a pipe organ on little wheels, painted in red and gold that was still happily tinkling its merry tune and a knocked-over stand selling nougats of toffee. She crawled into it, rubbing her head, hands grazed and muddy. For a moment, as the chaos ignited into panic, she thought she smelt . . .

  . . . ginger biscuit . . .

  . . . autumn leaves . . .

  . . . trodden on grass . . .

  She looked up.

  A purple tent, seemingly untouched by the storm, was set a few yards back from the rest of the circus attractions. It was trimmed with silver thread, and above the closed flap, a sign declared:

  MYSTIC MAI’S MAGICAL EMPORIUM - SECRETS EXPLORED, MYSTERIES SOLVED, THE ETHER PARTED AND THE ASTRAL VOID PENETRATED. SPIRITS, ANCIENT SEERS AND FAERIE PROPHETS INVOKED - ENTRY 6D.

  Tess staggered uneasily to her feet as a donkey, its ears swept back in terror, broke free from its head collar and started bucking and furiously kicking in its narrow stall. Somewhere in the distance, coppers were swinging their rattles, signs were being torn from fences and a pair of angry lions roared. She took a cautious step towards the tent.

  A hand fell on her arm.

  She jumped back instinctively, and looked up into Thomas’s mud-splattered face.

  ‘Did you see him?’ Thomas snapped. ‘Did you see where he went?’

  Tess shook her head.

  ‘We have to find him!’

  ‘In this lot?’

  ‘It’s our duty!’

  ‘Ain’t doin’ nothin’ if our necks get broke, bigwig,’ grumbled Tess, quickly pulling Thomas down as a round tent hook went flying overhead. ‘You may be smart at the whole deductiving thin’, but let me handle the stayin’ alive part.’

  ‘We have to find him!’ wailed Thomas, almost pulling at his hair in frustration. ‘You saw what they did; they tried to poison the children!’

  ‘An’ we stopped ’em! Ain’t that neat for us?’

  ‘But . . . but we know so little. We don’t know why or who or how or . . . or . . .’ Thomas’s voice trailed away. ‘Or where Mister Lyle is.’

  Tess rolled her eyes. ‘Oh yes.’ She sighed. ‘That’s so bloody typical. Me an’ a token bigwig, goin’ an’ savin’ Mister Lyle from all his mistakes, again. Cos you just know he’s gonna be in the poo poo don’t you? Come on.’ So saying, she grabbed Thomas by the sleeve, and dragged him out into the sweeping, scampering crowd.

  From the doorway of the dark purple tent, someone watched them go.

  Her name was . . .

  Concentrate . . .

  Her name was Effy Hall. Yes. That was it. That was what the teacher said, and that was what it was.

  The teacher had said, ‘You can have a bit of cake, Effy’ and the man had said, ‘Here you are’ and she’d eaten some of the cake and then . . . and then . . . Then there’d been that boy and he’d said . . . He’d said . . . And there was the room and the sound, always the sound, nagging in her ears since the first bite of cake, the first singing cry of it, echoing, always echoing, and it had gone: ‘Once upon a time . . .’

  oh god oh god oh god run run run run

  Pretty stories . . .

  She’d said, knowing it to be true, ‘I’m going to run away to the circus now.’ And undone the string round her wrist, turned and walked away.

  And her name was Effy . . . Effy . . . her name was . . .

  Running away to the circus . . .

  He’d said, ‘Don’t be afraid, little girl. You eat your pudding now. All children like their pudding.’

  Once upon a time there was a girl who . . .

  . . . never mind.

  She’d sleep on it.

  Everything would be clearer in the morning.

  Good night, Effy Hall.

  Sweet dreams.

  It was a truth acknowledged really quite often that when you wanted a cab in London, you could never get one. Thomas had read books, of course he’d read books, where you could wave a hand and, lo, a hansom would appear. But that was wishful thinking, in this day and age, not least when you were trying to catch a cab from outside a smoke-filled, elephant-plagued circus with - all due respect - a pickpocket, a long-eared dirty dog and a man whose chief cause of concern at that exact moment of time was, ‘How, and I mean in precisely what chemical manner, how can anything cling to a fibrous object with such persistency?! ’

  Horatio Lyle, his clothes covered in a mixture of mud and less salubrious things, fumed as the four companions marched down the edge of Hyde Park in search of a hansom cab. His hair stuck up tattily from his head, his clothes were torn and smeared with things that bore little polite contemplation, and blood was still drying down one side of his face. In all the fuss, he seemed to have forgotten about this last detail, proclaiming, ‘Do you think it sanitary to attempt to clean it now? No! Me neither! Let the clotting process do its own business until we are in a hygienic domestic environment. This is what the human body was designed for!’

  All of which Thomas took as nothing more than a sign of Lyle’s intense frustration, since, by his own admission, human biology was something Lyle regarded as a basely common scientific pursuit. Or as Tess might put it, ‘He gets all queasy at the sight of blood, see?’

  Tess was remarkably silent. Finding Mister Lyle attempting to disentangle Tate from the bars of an elephant pen was, she felt, a subject of mirth too easy for her skills. Besides, the expression on Lyle’s face, that very special expression he wore only in the face of sloppy laboratory procedure, the twice-weekly battle of the bathtubs and cold-blooded murder, suggested that now was not the time to discuss his curious predicament. Nor to mention in full detail exactly the part he, Tate, the children and a particularly bewildered elephant surprised to find its pen gate ajar, had played in reducing a large part of Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus to a chaotic tumble of snapped ropes and tumbled tents.

  ‘Chimney sweeps and undertakers can get hansom cabs!’ pronounced Lyle furiously, ‘but upright citizens, nobly injured upholding the bloody law, oh no!’

  In the end, they took the omnibus.

  Thomas didn’t know whether to feel proud or alarmed that of the three of them, he received the most bewildered stares. One old lady in her sixties even offered him her seat.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she explained, ‘ain’t s’posed to stand.’

  If it was possible for Lyle’s scowl to deepen, it did.

  It was a place for the children to sleep.

  Red bricks. Black iron bed frames and soft white beds.

  The ladies in peaked white hats ran water between their lips. Sometimes, in the children’s more lucid moments, they could even be persuaded to eat, slurping down soup, or munching absently on warm, soft, fresh-baked bread.

  But mostly, they slept.

  Sweet dreams, children.

  Until now.

  He said, ‘They came to the circus an’ they nearly ruined everythin’ an’ it ain’t fair an’ I only got one
of them to dream an’ then she didn’t eat much of the cake an’ they knew they knew ’bout the puddin’ an’ they tried to stop it an’ one of them were a grown-up but the other two were children as spoil the fun an’ it ain’t fair it ain’t it ain’t fair!’

  She said, a soft voice, like the whispered wind on the edge of a screaming gale, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. There there . . .’ and stroked his thin grey hair as he pressed his head against her shoulder, and held him by the shoulder and comforted him, just like a mother would. ‘It’s all right. Who were these nasty people?’

  ‘Don’t know name of the boy an’ girl, they didn’t say nothin’, they just spoilt it for the rest! But Mr Lovell what looks after the elephants he talked to the man an’ he said he said his name were . . . it were . . .’

  ‘There there,’ crooned the woman again, empty words for a mind that didn’t really care. ‘You can tell me. You can always tell me everything.’

  ‘His name were Horatio Lyle.’

  For a moment, she stiffens. Her back is cold old steel, her fingers dead meat on a pair of limp stubby arms. But the creature with grey hair, wrapped in her arms, doesn’t care. Doesn’t notice. Doesn’t know how.

  So she whispers, like the trees bending when the rain begins to fall, ‘It’s all right. We’ll take care of it. They won’t bother you again.’

  And strangely, she means it.

  For the good of the children.

  CHAPTER 8

  Domesticity

  The sun set, a great burning golden blaze across the sky that would never quite reach the horizon, but suffocated in the brown stain of smoke that hung above the western edge of the city.

  Tess struck a match to light a lamp in the downstairs parlour. As the flame caught and the yellow light grew, she looked round at the high shelves on the walls, and contemplated supper.

  In what Thomas supposed had to be the master bedroom - a place whose floor was nine part books to one part floorboard, with occasional exposed places between the great paper stacks to be used as stepping stones between door and bed - he tried on one of Lyle’s old shirts, to replace his own muddy, torn garment. It floated round him like the sails of a fat merchant ship, and smelt faintly of sawdust.

  In the small washroom next door, Horatio Lyle patted carefully at the side of his head with a strip of white cotton, flinching at each touch to his skull and resolving that this was the last time, repeat, the last time that he disdained a man based on the ridiculousness of his moustache. On the table behind him, he’d emptied out some of the stuff from his pockets. Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice had fallen half open, the pages turned towards the ceiling.

  . . . the son will most easily learn his father’s trade, which, if base, will serve as a reminder of the family from which he will rise, and if learned, will endow him with the necessary ambition to advance further his understanding and ability to support his family when the time comes. A daughter must naturally learn from her mother all the skills necessary for being a wife and mother in her turn . . .

  Tate was in his basket under the kitchen table. It was an ideal spot for him, the perfect mixture of close to the fire, and close to those frequent cast-offs from Lyle’s cooking that Tess dropped down to him from her dinner plate. He didn’t even have to move his head to catch them.

  Sissy Smith slept.

  And dreamt.

  And slept some more.

  ‘Things were peculiar at the circus, sir,’ said Thomas.

  They sat round the kitchen table, the lamplight stretched up the low grey walls.

  ‘“Peculiar”?!’ squeaked Lyle indignantly. ‘That is no way to describe events! I woke up in an elephant pen covered in - Half of investigation is precision, lad! Exact detail! Analysis!’

  ‘So what is it?’ asked Tess casually through a mouthful of pie.

  ‘It ’s . . . Well, it ’s . . . there are events happening at the circus - situations - circumstances that perhaps can be best described as . . . well . . . as . . .’ Lyle’s voice trailed away. ‘Besides,’ he pronounced so suddenly Thomas jumped in his chair, ‘even if we cannot clarify matters immediately, there is no need to imply any sort of semi-mystical or supernatural explanation to an event based purely on our ignorance of the entirely explicable and natural cause.’

  Tess raised one hand. ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Mister Lyle, I think, wants us to assume that ignorance is not proof,’ explained Thomas helpfully. ‘It’s an argument commonly used by these atheist sorts who claim that, while they cannot at the moment explain how the world came to be the thing it is, it is clearly not the creation of some theologically defined deity, as there is no proof for such an event any more than there is proof of, say, a giant spider spinning the universe out of yak hairs.’

  Silence.

  Then Lyle said, ‘I’m not sure I was saying that.’

  Silence again.

  ‘Although,’ he conceded, ‘in principal you have a very sound philosophical point.’

  Under the table, Tate scratched busily behind one of his dangling ears.

  ‘I’m sorry - what were we talking about?’

  ‘How there is sinister forces what is workin’ at the circus an’ all, an’ how you don’t have no answer for what them is ’cept as how it isn’t a giant spider spinnin’ stuff from yak hair,’ Tess explained helpfully.

  ‘Right. Yes. I thought so. For example: children going to the circus from the workhouses.’

  ‘An’ then not never comin’ back,’ added Tess helpfully.

  ‘Or coming back in such a manner as the unfortunate Miss Smith,’ agreed Thomas. ‘In some way afflicted by a narcotic, which narcotic, Mr Lyle, I’m fairly certain I found being freely distributed in a cake served by a - a young man.’

  ‘What young man?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Tess. ‘He were a bit odd, see? Like as how he weren’t . . . all sorta . . . He had this grey hair, right, which were like an old codger, see, but then he had like this young face an’ he spoke . . . odd. But I saw him hold iron fine, so he can’t be one of them.’

  ‘The ringmaster was “odd”.’ Lyle flinched at the imprecision of the word. ‘Mr Majestic. Not as though he wouldn’t give me his true name but as if he couldn’t understand the question when I asked him for it. I asked him about children and he reacted with a distinct lack of social responsibility.’

  ‘You mean as how he went an’ clobbered you one, an’ stuck you in the elephant sh—’ began Tess cheerfully.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Mister Lyle, an’ don’t go seein’ nothin’ bad in this, but I can think of lotsa people as would wanna go stick you in the elephant poo.’

  ‘Teresa, even leaving aside your attempted assassination of my good character,’ said Lyle firmly, ‘I am entirely confident that Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice on Family Life has stern words about children who repeatedly try to find ways to work excess biological products into conversations.’

  Thomas raised a helpful hand. ‘Sir? About that narcotic substance. ’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. What about it?’

  ‘I was merely going to suggest that if we could perhaps find a sample of the substance in which it had been introduced—’

  ‘Bigwig?’ Tess’s voice cut through, bored.

  ‘A sample of the substance, and then perhaps subject it to ruthless chemical analysis—’

  ‘Bigwig!’

  ‘Polite young ladies don’t interrupt slightly more polite young gentlemen!’ said Lyle briskly.

  ‘But, bigwig . . .’

  ‘Then we may be able to isolate the chemical compound responsible for the unfortunate condition of Miss Smith and perhaps determine—’