Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

by William Sutton

* * *

  I came back at the cowshed from the Smithfield side, sneaking in while the youth was lighting up again. I found myself in a den of hopelessness. Half of Clerkenwell was squeezed in there. Bodies huddled together upon blankets and straw that smelt as if it had not been changed since the cattle left. Good God, I thought, what is this place? Have they herded the dispossessed out of sight while they build grand offices on the wrecks of their homes?

  My whispered questions brought mistrustful glances. But for two farthings I was pointed towards a gloomy corner. There, to my amazement, stood the great brass bed from the Rose & Crown. Tucked up in clean linen, amidst a mountain of packing cases, lay Berwick’s mother, exuding a beatific aura at odds with the disorder about her.

  “Madame Skelton,” I said, reining in my astonishment. “May I speak with you?”

  She reached out and squeezed my fingers, the warmth of her hand surprising me. “The benign police,” she said. “A pleasure. Will you have a cup of tea?”

  This left me at a loss. Did the poor woman not understand where she was?

  She saw my concern. “Our circumstances,” she assured me, “are somewhat reduced. But look past the dishevelment and you will see we still have some graces. Alors, child! Tea for the gentleman.” A nearby lad scurried off towards a steaming urn.

  “Graces aplenty,” I said. “But, Madame, what has brought you to this pass?”

  “The housing they have promised is not ready. Soon, they tell me. What use is soon to me? Ah, your tea.” She took a tin cup from a bedraggled child and handed it to me. “Now, tell me, young man. What news have you of my Berwick?”

  My heart was ready to burst for her. The shame of it, for a life like hers to end here, in a cowshed. Despite her vivacious air, the pallor of her skin spoke of the shocks she had endured; the sharpness of her cheekbones of hunger. I managed a rueful smile. “I hoped to ask you the same. He wouldn’t leave you in a place like this, would he?”

  She inclined her head. “He is busy, I am sure of it.”

  “You don’t think he has gone away? Like Fairfoul said?”

  “Not at all. John Fairfoul has always been a naughty boy. Let me not speak of jealousy. But he has grown up in Berwick’s shadow. I dare say, though he misses him, there is a part of him that is glad to see my boy gone. He tells me not to raise up my hopes. Let me tell you a secret.” She leaned forward and spoke softly. “I saw him. He came, before they knocked down the inn. He came late at night to see me.”

  I nodded forlornly. I wished for her sake it were true, but I feared that Fairfoul was right, that she was deluded, summoning up ghosts of days gone past.

  “Yes, he will be busy with these schemes of his. Writing. Studying. Mixing with the lofty upper sets. His father was the same, you know. When Monsieur Brunel and Monsieur Stephenson took him on, well, on grand engineering projects you have not time to waste. Everything must be drawn and redrawn, drafted and rechecked. Can you imagine? It was a struggle for his father, who only learnt his letters late in life. Reading was a chore for him. He studied at the Red Lion College, you know. Prince Albert gave him a medal. I have it here somewhere.”

  Before I could assure her she need not look for it, she reached under the bed, with surprising agility, and heaved out a brass cornered wooden trunk. I hefted it up for her, wondering if it did not contain all the secrets I needed to unravel Skelton’s plan. I glanced around, suddenly conscious of so many eyes fixed upon us. My arrival had doubtless been broadcast across the length and breadth of London.

  “Let me see,” she said. Taking a tiny key from her pendant, she unlocked the box, and drew out the faded sheet that used to hang above her bedside, by the engraving of the banquet in the tunnel. Red Lion Club, the Royal Seal and that florid signature—a signature I now recognised as Prince Albert’s. Her stories were not all vain dreams, then.

  She replaced it among her treasured heirlooms, and smiled, drawing out a little daguerreotype in a silver frame. She gazed at it fondly. “Happier days. Always a smile on his face. My boy.”

  “Is that Berwick?” I said, fascinated. I stared, trying to fix in my memory the contours of the face, the brash muttonchop whiskers, the cheeks pleasantly chubby, the bowler hat, the smile that hinted at secrets. “And his notebook? I would dearly love to read some of his writings.”

  She gestured vaguely. “Somewhere here.”

  There was no way to insist, however much Miss Villiers wanted that book. Looking about in frustration, I spotted the lanky youth loitering in the doorway. I had better make good my escape.

  “I do worry for him so,” she frowned. “His father died young, you know.”

  I could not endure more. I resolved in my heart to send to Bazalgette. Perhaps, out of his esteem for Skelton, he could find a leafy suburb for this grand old dame. “I’ll be back, Madame Skelton. I’ll be back another day,” I said. And yet, as she squeezed my hand and settled down for a sleep, I thought, with the panic of a thousand missed opportunities, I will never see you again.

  WORM CORNERED

  As the summer drew to a close, I could see no way forward. Nellie had gone, Wardle said, to live on the continent. Perhaps our worries were at an end after all. The Exhibition was also drawing to a close, the public flocking to it through the balmy September afternoons.

  I saw nothing of Miss Villiers through these weeks. Besides my disappointment at not recovering Berwick’s book for her, I was chastened by Wardle’s scolding. I was disgruntled, too, to think that our carefully planned operation had come to nothing in the end. It shamed me to think that my report was full of lies, even if it was for the best of motives, and I was loath to speak to Miss Villiers about it. Often, though, I stood uselessly on guard at the Greenhouse, wondering what she would make of the new-fangled world on show. I sent via the Worms, offering to show her round. I received no reply.

  Mr Wetherell, late of Lloyds, called me to his club in Charles Street. He warned me not to come in uniform. So, in my Sunday best, I was led through an imposing hall and into a grand smoky drawing-room, where gentlemen reclined in plush leather armchairs. Mr Wetherell called for port and Stilton and informed me of fresh rumours afoot. A full investigation of claims made by the HECC and its subsidiaries was pending.

  “Subsidiaries?” I said. “From what I saw there’s barely enough money to keep their own yard from closing.”

  “That’s just it, old chap. My banking friends are hinting at darker secrets.”

  “Bankruptcy?”

  “Worse. You know, old Hudson used to pay dividends out of capital. It’s a way to boost confidence, long before you sniff the real profits. Highly dubious.”

  “And George Hudson is Coxhill’s idol,” I concurred.

  “Takes all sorts, I suppose,” Mr Wetherell frowned pleasantly. “By the by, your man Coxhill is personally spending like billy-o, either to drum up some confidence, or just from a wastrel nature. But where’s the cash from, old chap? Answer me that.”

  * * *

  On quiet days, I took the chance to visit some newspaper offices, adding one or two from my own investigations to Miss Villiers’ list from the stack. Most of the editors were impossible to find or else recalled nothing of Skelton. The Red Republican had been summarily closed down, the Poor Man’s Chronicle was no more, and the Beehive had folded in ignominy, bankrupting the mighty Potter. In the Punch offices, I found Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew quarrelling amiably over engravings for a new book about the criminal classes. The prints put me in mind of the characters I had encountered: Shuffler and Smiler, the legless singer in Green Park, Worm and the Professor.

  They told me about Skelton’s dispute with Dickens.

  “Charles liked his articles,” said Lemon, “but wouldn’t publish.”

  “He attacked big business, you see,” explained Mayhew, “specifically the railways. Fiery stuff. Only Household Words—Charles’ paper back then—was specifically backed by railwaymen. Dickens trod a fine editorial line between his own inclinati
ons and their requirements. I think it quite ended their friendship. Since that, Skelton’s vanished from the face of the earth. Pity.”

  I nodded. “Did he not submit work to you?”

  “He did.” Lemon said.

  “And why didn’t we publish him?” said Mayhew.

  Lemon grimaced. “He couldn’t quite catch our whimsical tone.”

  At the Euston Evening Bugle, they directed me towards the ferret, Scholes. As I waited for him to finish speaking with his editor, I glanced idly through a recent copy of the paper. It hardly seemed Skelton’s style. Indeed, the editorial had a report on the HECC so glowing it sounded as if Coxhill himself had written it.

  Scholes surprised me, sneaking up silently. “Enjoying the rag, Sergeant?”

  I pointed at the editorial. “Is Coxhill on your staff?”

  He smiled an oily smile. “Mr Coxhill has made a certain contribution to our retirement fund.”

  “I care not how you fund your business. Did you publish pieces by a certain Berwick Skelton?”

  “Name rings a bell.” Scholes wrinkled his nose. “Ah, you mean Berton Kelswick, I presume? Yes. I liked one piece about the East End slums. The angle wasn’t right, though.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Bright chap. Writes well enough. I told him to read the paper more closely. Study the house style.”

  “You mean compromise?”

  “Tricky business, being a newsman. Navigating Skilly and Char-Bydis.” He scratched unpleasantly at his nose. “Kelswick had facts, but that reformist stuff doesn’t wash with us.”

  “Let me guess. You stole the facts and wrote it afresh.”

  “Officer, don’t you know how this city works? Wheels within wheels.”

  “And I’ll bet you paid him nothing for his trouble.”

  “Come now,” he said, entwining his fingers together, “let’s not be hostile. You and I should be working together.”

  Foolish as it was, it rankled me to think of Scholes mauling Skelton’s fervent prose for his own low purposes. I turned tail and left.

  * * *

  It was the end of October and the last days of the Exhibition. Heading into the Yard one morning, who should I finally see crossing Whitehall up ahead of me but Worm? There had been next to no sign of him since I was in the hospital, and I was delighted to see my old amanuensis. I darted behind a cart crossing from Downing Street and caught the little fellow unawares as he was nearing the office door. I say little, but he had shot up since I saw him last. Thin as a rake and swaying in the breeze, it was hard to credit him as the wight who had summoned me so cheekily three years before.

  “The early bird,” I said, jumping into step with him. To my sorrow, he ducked away from my grasp and crouched down, fists cocked, ready to fight or flee. “Hold your horses, young fellow. Just me.”

  He stood up, holding his hand to his heart. “Bleeding heck, Watchman, you nearly gave me a turn.”

  “You’re jumpy today, Worm. Got a guilty conscience?”

  “Which of us ain’t?” He presented me with an envelope. “I was looking for you and all.”

  I inspected the frail handwriting. “From whom?”

  “Some admirer of yours.” He nudged me in the ribs. “Mustn’t dally. Business to attend to.”

  “Business,” said I, clasping a hand on his shoulder, “can wait a few minutes, can’t it? There’s one or two matters I’d like your opinion on.”

  “Kind of you to think so highly of me, Captain Clocky, but you know how it is.” He wriggled free and set off with a somewhat hurried gait.

  “Come, come, Worm.” We fell into step again and I put my arm round him to shepherd him along. For all my height and weight, he was such a wiry young thing he might well throw me off. He would run quicker too, if need be. “Can you not spare a moment for an old friend? I’ll shout you a lemon sherbet. Or is it ale you drink? How old are you now?”

  He laughed as if the question was meaningless. “The river taverns is gone, old cove. Ain’t nowhere to get a drink this time of day, nowhere that’ll accept the likes of me.” He looked me up and down. “Or you, for that matter.”

  We fetched up at an unsavoury pie stall that had survived by Horse Guards Parade. I ordered a steak and kidney tartlet and sat him firmly down. “Worm, which of your lot work down the sewers?”

  He looked up from the pie. Rather than dive into it ravenously, he had cut it neatly in half with his pocket-knife. “Come on, Watchman. You look desperate underfed. Get some of this down you. Now, what’s this?”

  “There’ll be no wool-pulling over these eyes, young man. You know, and I know, that friends of yours have worked down in the sewers.”

  He kept an amused silence.

  For once, I had no patience for ironic sparring. “For God’s sake, man, your boy Numpty is deep in it. I have protected him, in deference to you. If I should blow the whistle, Wardle will send out the troops in such force that your business will be presently crushed. Crushed forever. They will have his head on a platter and throw you in the Tower with as many of your chums as they can find. Into the river, why not, and be done with you. That’s more the inspector’s style.”

  Worm bit into his half of the pie. “My. Excuse me talking while I’m eating, but you have given me something to chew on. I don’t know, I’m sure. Eat up, Watchman. Good food getting cold.”

  With a sigh, I took a bite. “You know a deal more about all this then you let on.”

  “I’m a man about town, Watchman. I know my arse from my elbow. I wouldn’t be no sort of gaffer if I didn’t. But you’re telling me young Numpty is mixed up in what exactly?”

  I stared at him. Was he playing me along or genuinely in the dark? “The details I can’t explain, but I have reason to believe Numpty is up to his ears in the thefts.”

  “The skeleton thefts?” he guffawed. The pie maker looked over in our direction, and the customers at the counter. Worm rubbed his brow remorsefully and looked at me with those eyes. “Look, Watchman. I don’t know everything that goes on in this town. Besides us Worms in the north, you’ve got your Eels further east, your Roaring Boys out west, Filchers, Bravadoes and who knows what south of the river. We’re one of hundreds. There’s the ’Dilly boys, theatre lads, station luggers, sweeps and touts. All partitioned and segregated. It’s a fine balance, I tell you. Continual negotiating it takes, else the whole deal falls down. And yet, despite the convoluted windings of it all, Watchman old cove, I think I can assure you that if Numpty was in on something as big as the thefts I would know about it.”

  There seemed sense in that. I nodded. “You know what toshers do?”

  “An ancient trade, if a grimy one.”

  “That man we took to hospital, the night we met. He was a tosher.”

  Worm considered a moment. “He was that.”

  “You did know him after all?”

  “Shuffler wasn’t just anyone. He was a master tosher. Everyone knew him.”

  “And Numpty worked for him?”

  Worm raised an eyebrow as if pleasantly surprised how much I knew. “Shuffler was a good man, and there was many folks relied on him. Not my lot, but many folks. We was all saddened to see him done. Not to mention the end of his business.”

  “You know about Bazalgette and the sewer job?”

  “Heard they had work. All the better for us. Don’t want some new crowd emerging from holes in the ground and invading our streets.”

  I smiled. Worm’s phlegmatic stance was not so harsh when you considered that “reputable” gas companies blew up each other’s buildings in their struggle to dominate. “You’d rather see them working in the stinking tunnels?”

  “It’s hardly my fault.”

  “It’s an illegal trade, you know.”

  “There’s a lot of illegal trades around, and I don’t see you putting a stop to the most of them. It’s so much hot air, all this talk of reform. They say they’re helping the poor. So they ban small boys from cleanin
g chimneys. What if you are one of them small boys? What if that’s the livelihood you was brought up into, then they only go and make a law against it? Selling turds from your cellar may be unsavoury, I grant you, but where else do you turn for extra pennies when they ban that? Them toshers the same. Doomed to early death, I don’t doubt, but they ain’t going to live any longer if they can’t eat.” He had forgotten his pie and I stared at him, struck how the cheeky urchin, whose patter I had smiled at, had turned into a cynical youth. “How are we to get excited over reforms that ruin us? For this railway they’re constructing underground, they invited us to vacate the Euston Road. A fairly robust invitation it was too, but they did promise us new homes some place else. Out in the leafy suburbs, they said. Strange to say it—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I sighed. “The leafy suburbs haven’t materialised. Look, your place at Euston Square—”

  He cut me off. “It’s years since we was chucked out of that.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Little hole we found. No thanks to all the promises.”

  “Where, though?”

  “That,” he grinned, “would be telling.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” I smiled.

  “You?” He laughed. “No! Haven’t you learned? Bad habit, trusting anyone, even your own mother. Can’t have a worm trusting a copper!”

  He was right. I was foolish to think we had a friendship. It was a professional relationship, an exchange of services.

  “Though you,” he piped up, swallowing the last of the pie, “I probably could trust.”

  Because I was his friend? No. As if I were a fool, incapable of guile. Indeed I felt strangely guilty, trying to wheedle information out of him. But I had to stop the thefts. I sighed. “Indulge me for a moment, Worm. Picture, if you will, a little tosher, who’s learned his trade well, in the old style. Like a magpie, can’t resist a shiny thing. Let’s say he now finds himself working for the government. An ironical twist, banned by parliament one day, paid by them the next. This little tosher, going about his business surveying the sewers, spots something shiny in a cellar. And he reasons that a shiny thing abandoned in a cellar won’t be missed. In fact, in the scheme of things, it would be rude not to take it. When he gets this shiny thing back to his friends, and his guv’nor, they’re curious as to its provenance. They encourage him to expand his search a little, go up the cellar stairs, try the door, why not, pick the lock if need be, because careless folk leave other shiny things lying round their households it would be equally rude not to take. All his friends and acquaintances get involved, selecting the aptest spots and spicing up the daywork with little night jaunts. Thus is born a beautiful new scheme.”