It was here that Cavanagh’s knowledge of Pushtu came in handy. Indeed, it saved their lives. Coming over the brow of a hill, with their horses slipping and sliding on a frosty, flinty path, they were hailed by a lookout.
Thank God. The man had taken one look at their garb and from a distance taken them to be Afghans. When he called hello, Cavanagh’s quick thinking once again saved the day, for instead of showing surprise and taking flight, he kept his composure and replied in kind.
At his signal, the three men came to a halt. Some two hundred yards in front of them the lookout had risen from behind a rocky outcrop, his jezzail slung across his back. His features were indistinct as he cupped his hands to his mouth and called again in Pushtu. ‘Hello!’
Cavanagh’s mind raced; there was no way they could get too close: they would be recognized as imposters. But the Afghans would mount a pursuit if they turned tail and fled, and being the superior horsemen it would in all likelihood be a short pursuit indeed.
Sitting beside him, Lavelle’s eyes flicked nervously. ‘What the hell are we going to do, man?’
‘Shut up,’ hissed Cavanagh, oblivious to Lavelle’s outrage. ‘I’m thinking. Just whatever happens, don’t say another word and follow my lead.’
Meanwhile, the lookout, again with his hands cupped to his mouth, was calling to unseen others behind him, and faces appeared from the landscape. Six or seven men. Christ, they’d almost ridden slap-bang into the middle of the camp. They now stood staring across the space between the two groups, one or two of them shielding their eyes against the dying winter sun, all no doubt wondering why their three visitors had stopped on the perimeter of the camp.
Cavanagh’s mind reached for answers. Couldn’t run. Couldn’t advance. And any attempts to answer any further interrogation would surely expose his shaky grasp of Pushtu.
One of the men unslung his rifle, but Cavanagh pre-empted what might happen next and called out to him before he could bring the weapon to bear. ‘My good friend, we come from hounding the British cowards. With us is a captured Sikh scum. A man trying to adopt our dress and escape as a deserter.’
From over the way came Afghan laughter. Unschooled in Pushtu, the sepoy sat oblivious to what awaited him. Loyal, faithful.
‘What are you saying, man?’ demanded Lavelle.
‘Quiet,’ snapped Cavanagh back.
His voice rose again. ‘Here. We’ll leave our prize with you as a gift for your women, and take our leave if we may.’
With that he drew his stolen Khyber knife and in one quick movement pretended to cut binding at the sepoy’s hands. Confused, the sepoy turned in his saddle to face Cavanagh, his face clouding with confusion. ‘Sir?’ But Cavanagh reached down, snatched the man’s foot and dragged it upwards, unseating him at the same time as with one almighty and merciless slice of the Khyber knife blade he slashed open the desperate man’s Achilles tendon.
As the Afghans over the way jeered and laughed, Cavanagh waved goodbye, and he and Lavelle pulled their horses round. At the same time the sepoy tried to pull himself off the ground, but his torn-open heel folded beneath him gushing blood, and he was sent back to the ground mewling and pleading. ‘Sir? Sir?’
But they left him there, to his fate at the hands of the Afghan women. Flaying alive or death by a thousand cuts. They left the nameless sepoy there to die an unspeakable death, so that they might save themselves.
‘Christ, man, that was cold,’ said Lavelle later, when they had made camp in the rocks above the pass.
‘It was him or us,’ said Cavanagh.
That night the sound of gunfire came to them, and both men fancied that they could also hear the screams of the sepoy in the far distance, as the Afghan women began their work.
22
The Ghost had seethed with hatred for Cavanagh. A month or so later, when he faced the men in the churchyard, he understood the strength of the impulse to survive. That he understood. But what he could not understand (and maybe this was why he was never truly cut out for a life of bloodshed) was the ability to sacrifice another man’s life, to let another man die in your stead. Not only that, but a man who’d shown you nothing but loyalty.
He wondered whether the face of that sepoy haunted Cavanagh in his dreams. Did he feel anything at all?
The dossier had gone on. Cavanagh and Lavelle had turned up at Jalalabad a day after William Brydon had made his historic appearance. Their survival went unheralded, shrouded as it was in rumour and suspicion.
Despite their insistence, and the fact that they had steadfastly stuck to a prepared and detailed story about becoming detached from a cavalry section and losing their way, the gossip at the Jalalabad Cantonment was that the two men had deserted. Nothing about Lavelle suggested any other explanation, but when, on 7 April 1842, the Jalalabad garrison attacked Akbar Khan’s lines, Cavanagh acquitted himself well, proving indomitable in combat.
His movements were next noted some years after his return to England, by which point he had gained a position for himself within the Templar Order. It was shortly after this that Colonel Walter Lavelle met with a fatal accident. According to the dossier the Assassins believed it was Cavanagh who had not only recommended but carried out the execution.
Up until this point, The Ghost had been wondering where he came in. Why was he reading about this man Cavanagh?
Then it became clear. The next time Cavanagh appeared as a person of interest to the Assassins was when, quite out of the blue, he had secured an appointment with the company building the world’s first underground railway line. He became a director at the Metropolitan Railway and directly involved with the excavation. The company’s ‘man on the ground’, as it were.
Now The Ghost was beginning to understand.
When he arrived in England he did as he’d been told by Ethan. He found lodgings at the tunnel and he gained an appointment to the Metropolitan dig, though in a rather less exalted position than his quarry. And so it was that he had been there at New Road to see the shaft sunk. He had seen wooden houses on wheels come into view, then wagons piled high with timbers and planks, men armed with pickaxes and shovels marching by their side like an oncoming army.
He had bought a spade from a drunken man in a pub, etched the name of ‘Bharat Singh’ into it and then joined them. He had helped to enclose hundreds of yards of roadway, when New Road had been transformed from a part of London’s history to a significant part of its future. Horses, carpenters and troops of navvies had arrived, the sound of pickaxes, spades and hammers and the passing of steam began, a clamour that was rarely to cease, day or night.
Huge timber structures sprung up at intervals along the centre of the road, spots for opening shaft holes were marked out, iron buckets had been brought on to the roadway, which was dragged up, peeled reluctantly away from the surface of the earth and carted off to be tilted down a gaping pit; the noise of it like a storm – another distant rumble to add to the din that was to reign from then on.
The Ghost had been there for all of the problems encountered by the line. On paper it had been a simple – well, a relatively simple – operation: Paddington to Euston Road and the Fleet Valley to the city. But gas pipes, water mains and sewers had all stood in its way, and along Euston Road they had discovered that the land was made up of sand and gravel, which had to be drained, while at Mount Pleasant the usual policy of cut-and-cover had been abandoned and a tunnel dug.
Meanwhile, The Ghost had watched the world around him change. He had seen the squalid streets of the Fleet Valley destroyed. A thousand homes were demolished and the twelve thousand people w
ho lived there (a damning statistic by itself) displaced to other slums.
Some of them had come to the Thames Tunnel. Perhaps some of them had enjoyed the benefit of the benign form of protection that The Ghost provided there. There was a circularity to the process that he could appreciate.
At the site his bare feet were often the subject of a remark, and of course his skin tone marked him apart, but otherwise he never did anything to stand out. He never attempted a jump he knew he could make. He never carried loads he knew he was capable of bearing. If a joke was cracked, he laughed. Not too loudly, and not distinctively. This was how he maintained his cover, by ensuring that it remained solid at all times. So that when in future he was called upon to penetrate the organization further it would withstand any amount of examination. He must be Bharat, the dirt-poor but conscientious Indian worker, below contempt and thus above suspicion. He must maintain that cover at all times.
Maintaining his cover was essential to staying alive.
The first day he clapped eyes on Cavanagh he had been manning one of the buckets, dragging it from the mouth of the trench to deposit its contents into a cart. Over the way he’d seen the door to the mobile office-on-wheels open and a familiar face emerge. Not Cavanagh, but Marchant, who managed the roster, ticked off names and passed the worksheets to the wages’ clerks who appeared every Friday, setting up desk and handing out coins with pained expressions, as though it was their very own money. Oh yes, The Ghost knew Marchant. A weasel of a man with a wheedling, nasal voice.
And then came Cavanagh himself.
Just as The Ghost had been led to believe, Cavanagh had a horizontal scar below his right eye, almost two inches long. The eyes themselves were hard. The chin set. In all the times that The Ghost ever saw Cavanagh, it was impossible to know what he was thinking.
‘I want to find out what they’re up to,’ Ethan had said.
They had met in the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, just as arranged on the harbour wall at home in India. Ethan had led The Ghost to a folly in the hospital grounds, where foliage obscured them from view. There the master had taken a good look at his former pupil, eyeing up the boy’s rags, his general demeanour.
‘Very good,’ he said, when he’d finished giving the boy the once-over. ‘Very good. You look the part, that much is certain.’
‘I have a position at the dig,’ said The Ghost, ‘just as instructed.’
Ethan smiled. ‘I know. I’ve been keeping tabs on you.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
In response, The Ghost shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Anything that increases the chance of my deception being uncovered is to be discouraged.’
‘Well, I see I taught you well,’ smiled Ethan.
‘You need to practise what you preach.’
‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t accept advice from a young pup like your good self.’ Ethan smiled in pretence of a little friendly badinage, but his eyes were flinty.
‘You know,’ said The Ghost, ‘you shouldn’t sit with your chin on your leading hand.’
‘Oh?’ Ethan’s eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘Pupil has turned teacher, has he? You have another lesson in Assassin-craft for me?’
‘You risk an accident with the blade.’
‘I deceive any potential opponent.’
‘There are no opponents here.’
‘Now who’s being careless?’
‘I didn’t say you were being careless, master. Just that mistakes can happen. They can happen to the best of us.’
He hadn’t meant that last statement to sound as significant as it did, and for a second he allowed himself to hope that Ethan might not pick up on it, but of course what Ethan lacked in focus he more than made up for in intuition and perception. ‘You think me careless?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t need to.’
The Ghost glanced away. He had been looking forward to this meeting. Part of him anticipated his master’s praise. Somewhere along the line – and he wasn’t even sure how – the conversation had taken a wrong turn.
When he turned back to look at his old friend and tutor, it was to find Ethan regarding him with hard baleful eyes, but he decided to ask a favour anyway. ‘May I try on your hidden blade, master?’ he asked.
Ethan softened. ‘And why would you want to do that? Check it for maintenance, perhaps?’
‘I’d like the feel of it once again, to remind myself of what I am.’
‘To remind yourself you are an Assassin? Or to remind yourself of home?’
The Ghost smiled, unsure of the answer. ‘Maybe a little of both.’
Ethan frowned. ‘Well, I’d rather not. It’s perfectly calibrated.’
The boy nodded understandingly, though sadly.
‘Oh, get the stick out of your arse!’ exploded Ethan. ‘Of course you can have a go.’ And he yanked up the sleeve of his robes and reached for the buckles …
Some time later the two men, having resolved their unspoken differences, sat in silence. The Ghost could see the bronze glowing lights of the Foundling Hospital from his seat inside the folly and thought how peaceful it seemed, and how difficult it was to believe that just a few hundred yards away lay the turbulence of the Metropolitan dig. The new underground line was like a bended arm, and right now they sat somewhere near the elbow: Grays Inn Road, New Road – a world of turmoil.
Beside him, Ethan finished recalibrating his blade. That familiar snicking sound it made when he ejected it. Ethan was right – wearing it hadn’t made The Ghost yearn for his life as an Assassin. It had made him yearn for home.
The older Assassin flexed his hand to check for unintended discharge. He slapped his hands on his thighs, satisfied all was in order.
‘I wonder if now is the time to tell me the purpose of my mission,’ said The Ghost.
‘You’ve guessed it is something to do with our friend Cavanagh, of course?’
The Ghost nodded. ‘The dossier on him made interesting reading.’
‘His position at the Metropolitan is an example of the level of power the Templars currently hold in London. They are very much in the ascendancy. They have the advantage of knowing how weak we are, though I rather doubt they realize just how weak. “We” in this context being myself and another member of the Brotherhood based not far away. And now you.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it, my dear boy. The best we can do to challenge their supremacy is take little potshots in the hope of diminishing some of their fringe activities. Well, we can do that and we can do this. This being we can try to find out what their game is.’
‘This?’
‘Yes, this. This area of land in the north-west of London is, we think, of interest to the Templars. We think that they are digging for something. Perhaps a Piece of Eden.’
‘A Piece of Eden? Like the Koh-i-Noor diamond?’
‘Something like that, perhaps. Who knows? Something related to the First Civilization, Those Who Came Before. The point is we don’t know and nor do we have the resources to interrogate the issue at any higher level.
‘There is an advantage to that, of course. Without our involvement the Templars have no need to suspect that we harbour any suspicions about their activities. As a result, they may get careless. Nevertheless, it’s a sad state of affairs. The fact is we have no idea how deep the Order has penetrated into London society, beyond a handful of names.’
The Ghost nodded as though satisfied, but nevertheless harbouring doubt
s. Meanwhile, Ethan opened his robes to reveal the brown-leather strap of a documents case. He lifted the flap and pulled from it a dossier – bound in the livery of the Assassins, just as the Cavanagh file had been – and handed it to The Ghost, watching wordlessly as the younger man began to leaf through pages of information gathered on active Templars in London.
Leading the pack, of course, was Crawford Starrick, the Templar Grand Master. Owner of Starrick Industries, Starrick Telegraph Company and the Millner Company, he’d once been called ‘a great rail baron’ by none other than Charles Dickens. Then there was Benjamin Raffles, the Templar kingpin and Starrick’s ‘head of security’, as well as another kingpin, Hattie Cadwallader, the keeper of the National Gallery, who maintained Starrick’s extensive art collection.
Another kingpin: Chester Swinebourne, who had apparently infiltrated the police. Then there were Philip ‘Plutus’ Twopenny, the governor of the Bank of England no less; and Francis Osbourne, the Bank of England manager.
Second-in-command was Lucy Thorne. She specialized in the occult. The Ghost had seen her at the dig. Starrick too. Then there was Rupert Ferris of Ferris Ironworks. He’d been spotted at the works as well. As had Maxwell Roth. He wasn’t a Templar, but he had helped them set up the London gangs.
Dr John Elliotson. Ethan knew him personally. He was the inventor of the panacea Starrick’s Soothing Syrup.
Then there was Pearl Attaway, the proprietor of Attaway Transport and a cousin to Starrick. A gang boss called Rexford Kaylock. A sleazy photographer by the name of Robert Waugh (and now, of course, The Ghost knew all about him).
Still others: Sir David Brewster, Johnnie Boiler, Malcom Millner, Edward Hodson Bayley, James Thomas Brudenell, otherwise known as ‘Lord Cardigan’, a soldier called Lieutenant Pearce, a scientist called Reynolds …
The list was seeming endless.
‘This is a rather large dossier,’ said The Ghost at last.
Ethan smiled ruefully. ‘Indeed it is. And these are just the ones we know about. In opposition? Just the three of us. But we have you, my dear boy. One day you will be recruiting spies of your own. One of them may very well be in this motley crew we have here.’
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