The City of Secret Rivers

by Jacob Sager Weinstein

  The river sped up. It turned into a waterfall and spurted us over the edge.

  With a splash and a clang, we landed in a puddle of water, just deep enough to break our fall. I staggered to my feet and looked around. We were surrounded by four iron walls that must have been fifteen feet high. Three of them were hidden behind thick waterfalls. The fourth was a mass of solid iron. The floor we had landed on was a big grating, dotted with thousands of holes, so that the water never got higher than a small pool.

  “How do we get out?” I asked.

  “Oh, am I in charge again? How kind of you, but really, I wouldn’t dream of imposing my will.”

  Well, fine. I wasn’t going to apologize again. I was the one who had gotten us away from a giant angry pig and an evil tea-using magician. If she wanted me to be in charge, I’d be in charge.

  I strode confidently over to the one wall that wasn’t blocked by a waterfall and climbed up it.

  Or, at least, I tried. It was wet and smooth, and I didn’t accomplish much more than breaking a nail.

  I tried again. This time, I accomplished twice as much. I broke two nails.

  “Fine!” I said to Lady Roslyn, who was not trying very hard to hide her amusement. “What would you do?”

  “I? I would have kept going upstream, and we would have reached the surface very quickly—”

  “We didn’t look very quick to me.”

  She ignored me. “At present, the best option seems to be waiting here while you attempt to claw handholds into solid iron.”

  I found the whole thing much less funny than Lady Roslyn seemed to. Maybe that was because it wasn’t her mother who was being held hostage by monsters in who-knew-what kind of horrible dungeon.

  I wished my family were there. Time and time again, when Mom had gotten us into some horrible fix, my grandmother or one of my aunts had bailed us out. But they weren’t there now, and I was on my own.

  Or was I? What was it my grandmother’s note had said, before it disappeared? Your aunts and I have done what we can to prepare you. As long as you remember, I will always be with you.

  Well, I was pretty sure nobody had prepared me for being in a wet, smelly iron prison …

  … Wait a minute. Maybe somebody had.

  I always loved it when Aunt Talia babysat, because she’d let me stay up late while she told me endless bedtime stories. And one of my favourites had been about a princess trapped in a pit in the centre of a wet, smelly maze. A maze whose walls were made out of iron! I always thought it was just a story – but was she preparing me for this? Did my aunts somehow know what was going to happen? As soon as I got a working phone, I was going to call them and demand some answers.

  But in the meantime, I tried to remember how the princess in the story had escaped. None of the princes could find her, so she had to take matters into her own hands. She put her ears up to the iron wall, and she could hear the footsteps of the nearest prince. Then she banged a message to him, telling him the secret of the maze so he could get a ladder to her.

  It was worth a try. I pressed my ear to the wall and concentrated. At first, all I could hear was a rumbling sound, which I knew came from the water pouring into the room. But as I listened, I gradually made out another, more rhythmic sound. Footsteps? Maybe.

  I banged on the wall, then listened again. All was quiet. If the noise I had heard before was footsteps, then maybe whoever was making them had stopped to listen.

  Aunt Talia never specified how exactly the princess managed to tell the prince anything more useful than “BANG BANG BANG.” But on another occasion, my aunt Topsy had taught me Morse code. Of course, a code was only useful if the person on the other end knew it, too. Still, there was one Morse code phrase that more people knew than any other, and it happened to apply here.

  I hammered out three fast bangs, then three slow, then three fast: “SOS.”

  I waited, holding my breath. Silence for a moment. And then, through the wall, from far away, the footsteps again. No – they weren’t footsteps. Somebody was stomping. Stomping in Morse code, one letter at a time.

  “W-H-E-R-E A-R-E Y-O-U?”

  I banged back, “S-Q-U-A-R-E R-O-O-M. 3 W-A-L-L-S W-A-T-E-R-F-A-L-L-S. 1 W-A-L-L D-R-Y.”

  Again, a moment of silence. And then: “H-A-N-G O-N. T-H-E-R-E I-N 5 M-I-N-U-T-E-S.”

  Those five minutes gave me time to wonder. Unless there was some underground society of telegraph operators, the odds must have been pretty small that anybody in earshot knew Morse code. Had I just gotten lucky? Or was this more evidence that my aunts somehow knew all this would happen?

  I hadn’t reached any conclusion when I heard footsteps coming from the dry corridor above our heads. A few moments later, somebody stuck his head over the wall.

  I thought he was about my age, but I couldn’t be sure, because his face was hidden by shadows. Then he cocked his head, and the shadows didn’t shift from their places on his face. Those black smudges weren’t actually shadows, then. I didn’t want to think about what they actually were.

  “Oozidge, den?” he said.

  “Um, I’m sorry?” I said.

  I guess he thought that was a funny response to whatever question he had asked, because he grinned. It was such a charming grin that I found myself smiling back, even though I kind of had the feeling he was laughing at me.

  “Wujdee madder, you doh speak inlidge??” he asked.

  “Um,” I said again.

  “This gentleman,” Lady Roslyn said, “initially inquired as to our identity. His subsequent question expressed doubt that you understood the English language. You must excuse her, sir.” Lady Roslyn dropped her voice as if she were about to tell him some kind of horrible secret. “She’s from America.”

  He tapped a smudged hand on his smudged forehead. “Shay no mower,” he said, and I guessed he meant “Say no more.” I felt like my ears were getting used to his accent, kind of like my eyes had gotten used to the dark down here. So when he added, “Si tie. Oil be rye ba,” I was pretty sure he meant “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

  He vanished, and his footsteps faded away.

  “Who was that, and why did he talk like that?”

  “He is a tosher,” Lady Roslyn said. “A scavenger. Powerful artifacts collect down here, and ordinary objects gain power once they’re down here long enough. You can eke out a living looking among the rubbish for tosh, as they call it. Provided, of course, you don’t mind dressing like a tramp and stinking like something worse. The toshers have been living down here for centuries, passing their dialect (and their unwashed clothes) from generation to generation.”

  A few moments later, the footsteps click-clacked back, and the young man peered over the edge again. He made a series of strange noises that, I realized, meant “I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Newfangled Troy.”

  Somebody else peered over the edge, with the longest face I had ever seen. He looked a few years older than Troy. “I’m Longface Lucky,” he said with the same accent.

  A third face peered over the edge. It was as round as Longface’s was long. When this person spoke, he had the same accent as the other two. Like Longface Lucky, I would say he was in his late teens. “I’m Richard the Raker,” he said.

  I wondered if everybody who lived underground had a weird nickname. I had always thought my name was kind of bizarre, but now it was feeling almost plain. “I’m just Hyacinth,” I said.

  “Better to be ‘just’ than ‘longface’ or ‘newfangled’, ain’t it?” said Troy, with a wink. “Well, gents, shall we get them out of there?”

  “Just one minute,” said Longface Lucky. “Newfangled Troy, what with him being newfangled and all, he don’t know who he’s got down in this hole. But I ain’t so newfangled, and I know Lady Roslyn when I sees her.”

  “Well, what of it?” Lady Roslyn asked.

  “Well, the what of it is, I don’t know if a hole ain’t such a bad place to keep Lady Roslyn when you got the chance to keep her in one
.”

  “Lady Roslyn and the toshers ain’t exactly on Friend Street, if you see what I mean,” Richard the Raker added.

  “What about the girl?” asked Newfangled Troy. “I don’t hear as you’re saying she done nothing. It don’t seem what you’d call chivalrous to leave her down there.”

  Lucky’s long face didn’t look impressed. “If she’s one of Lady Roslyn’s gang, it don’t seem what you’d call smart to take her with us, neither.”

  “We ain’t done so well with Lady Roslyn’s chadwicks, neither, if you see what I mean,” Richard the Raker added.

  “So that’s settled, then,” Lucky said. “You’re staying down in the hole, and we bid you good day. But don’t you ladies worry. It ain’t forecast to rain up above for another hour yet, which therefore this chamber ain’t going to start filling up too fast for the drain to empty for another ninety minutes, which therefore you ain’t going to drown for ninety-two minutes roughly, depending as how long you can holds your breath.” He tapped his forehead politely. All three of them pulled their heads out of sight.

  CHAPTER 13

  “We can pay you,” I said. Immediately, the heads reappeared.

  “Well now, why didn’t you say so up front?” Longface said.

  “If you’ve got the millbank, we ain’t so thorny, if you see what I mean,” Richard the Raker added.

  “Come to think of it, what you got in that there glowing umbrella might recompense us for our troubles,” said Longface.

  “What I have in the umbrella,” Lady Roslyn said, “would cause you far more trouble than you imagine.”

  “Well, now, that may be so, and that may be not.”

  “You know full well I can’t lie to you here.”

  Longface Lucky and Richard the Raker looked at each other and laughed. “There’s an awful lot of toshers what would find that awful funny,” Lucky said, “if only they wasn’t so dead.”

  “I promised Short-Nose Jack I would tell him how to find the source of the Tyburn, and I kept that promise. I didn’t promise to hold his hand for the entire expedition. If I had, I wouldn’t have let his men die.”

  “We ain’t saying you’d be such a lollard as to lie outright,” Richard the Raker said. “But when it comes to phrasing things, you may be going round the glasshouse, if you see what I mean.”

  “Very well,” Lady Roslyn said, holding up the umbrella. “See for yourself.”

  Longface Lucky nodded to Newfangled Troy, and Newfangled Troy lowered what looked like a hoe over the wall. The handle must have been eight or nine feet long. By stretching out his arms, Troy was able to lower it far enough for Lady Roslyn to hook the umbrella over it.

  Newfangled Troy started to raise it up, but before it was halfway there, Longface stopped him. “Hold on just a minute.” He stuck his head down, peering into the umbrella from a few feet away, then let out a low whistle. “Well, boil me in Betty,” he said. “You wasn’t half joking. Put that back down, Newfangled Troy. You oughtn’t be touching that with an eight-foot pole.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew one thing: I was going to have to start saying “boil me in Betty.”

  Troy lowered the hoe, and Lady Roslyn took the umbrella back.

  “Would you take Lady Roslyn’s ribbon?” I said. “It was tied around the umbrella when it went through the Lost Property Office, so maybe it absorbed some magic. That would make it tosh, wouldn’t it?”

  “We’ll sees about that,” Longface said. “Let’s have a sniff.”

  Lady Roslyn hesitated for a moment, as if she wasn’t willing to give the ribbon up. Then, reluctantly, she took it out of her hair and tied it around the hoe.

  This time, Longface Lucky let Troy lift the hoe all the way up. He took the ribbon, held it up to his sharply pointed nose, and inhaled, swishing the scent around his nostrils like I had seen my dad do with wine in his cheeks. “Very nice. Circle line, ain’t it? Fresh, too. And is that – no. Can’t be. Can it?” He looked at us in amazement.

  I wondered what he smelled. Actually, I wondered why he wanted to smell anything. If I could have, I would have been holding my breath the entire time we had been down in the sewers. But whatever he smelled, it was impressive. He nodded at us.

  “Good enough?” I asked.

  “Good enough, and three kinds of better. You have the word of a tosher: we’ll get you out of that hole and show you the way to the surface, if that’s whereas you want to go.”

  Troy lowered the hoe back down. Lady Roslyn grabbed on to it, and Troy and Richard pulled her up. Then they lowered it and pulled me up, too.

  Now that I was standing next to them and not just looking at them from below, I could see their bodies as well as their faces, and they didn’t quite match up like I would have expected. Longface Lucky’s long face was on a hugely round body. He looked like a snowman with a baguette for a head.

  On the other hand, Richard the Raker’s round face was on a long and scrawny body. He looked like a scarecrow with a watermelon on top.

  Newfangled Troy, though… He was just right. He had not only a cute face but a really cute stomach, which I hadn’t even thought was a thing, but it was. I could see it because he and his friends were shirtless. All they had on were canvas trousers and long velveteen coats with lots of bulging pockets. Each of them had one of those long hoes in one hand and a lantern in the other. Also, Troy had a cute stomach. Did I mention that? I probably mentioned that. It was definitely a thing.

  Say something intelligent, Hyacinth, I thought. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, intelligent or otherwise. Newfangled Troy didn’t seem to mind. He winked at me. His face was dirty enough that I couldn’t see much other than his eyes, but up close, they were really nice eyes.

  I hoped my own face was dirty enough to hide how much I was blushing.

  Longface Lucky started walking. His two friends followed him, with Lady Roslyn and me behind.

  I whispered to Lady Roslyn, “What he said about his friends who died—”

  “I believe I have already offered a satisfactory explanation,” she said, and I had a feeling that was all I was going to get out of her.

  The toshers led us through a maze of passages, turning at every intersection we came to. A couple of times, I recognized places we had already been, which made me pretty sure they were just trying to confuse us. Maybe they didn’t want us to be able to find wherever they were taking us on our own.

  Finally, the tunnel ended in a sight I never expected to see down in the sewers: two beautifully carved wooden doors, set in a stone arch covered with gargoyles.

  Longface Lucky turned to Lady Roslyn. “Now, anything what we finds in here belongs to us, don’t it?”

  “I rather doubt that anything you’d find would interest us,” Lady Roslyn said, but Longface simply stood there, waiting, until she sighed and added, “Fine. Anything what you finds belongs to you.”

  Longface nodded to Richard the Raker, who pulled a small set of wire tools out of one pocket. He stuck them into the iron lock and wriggled them around, and in a few moments, there was a click. The doors swung open.

  The toshers stepped in, and I followed them.

  As far as I could tell, we weren’t in the sewers any more. We were in a massive, non-smelly cathedral, with row after row of empty pews, and stone ceilings arching way overhead.

  Or maybe it wasn’t an actual cathedral, because I couldn’t see any religious symbols. And the beautiful stained-glass windows showed stories that weren’t from any Bible I had ever read. Most of them were totally mysterious to me, like one showing a big stone covered with Egyptian symbols sinking underwater.

  But I did recognize others, like the one showing men in top hats holding handkerchiefs over their noses as they ran out of a fancy-looking building. And not just any building: it was Parliament. The Great Stink! I thought.

  The window next to it showed a sink with separate hot and cold water taps. It looked a lot like the sink in Aunt Polly�
��s flat. No, wait – those were the exact same black-and-white tiles on the wall behind the sink. It didn’t just look like Aunt Polly’s flat – it was Aunt Polly’s flat. Was there some connection between this building and my family?

  I looked around for more clues, but nothing else seemed to have much to do with me. Weirdly, the highest set of stained-glass windows was entirely blank. They were just big tinted rectangles, glowing as if the sun were setting behind them.

  In fact, the higher I looked, the less finished the building seemed. On the floor under my feet, the tiles were crazy detailed. I had to kneel down to make out the millions of tiny figures, all doing everyday stuff like cooking or sewing. Just above that, at ankle level, the wall was nearly as busy with stone and wood carvings. But as you went higher and higher on the wall, there were fewer and fewer carvings, until you got to a row of carved stone scrolls with no words on them. And above them, there were just blank walls and those blank stained-glass windows, under a plain stone roof.

  “Here’s what I don’t savoy,” said Richard the Raker. “Every time we comes here, there ain’t nobody else here. Every time we leaves here, we leaves the door open. And every time as we come back, that door there is locked again. So who’s doing all that locking, if you know what I mean?”

  Longface Lucky shrugged. He didn’t look especially interested in big questions. Instead, he started shining his lantern all around, looking for something. The other two toshers followed him, searching in the carved nooks as they went.

  “Where are we?” I whispered to Lady Roslyn.

  “Every one of the secret rivers has a sacred place – a sort of a basin in which some portion of its power collects. This would appear to be the sacred place of the Tyburn.”

  That made sense, kind of. Maybe all the little people on the floor tiles were the people who had lived along the Tyburn over thousands of years. Maybe the stained-glass windows showed things that had happened at some point in the river’s history. And if the magical drop of water I had unleashed into the river was as powerful as Lady Roslyn said – well, maybe Aunt Polly’s sink was now part of the river’s history, too.