Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

by William Sutton

  On the platform in front of me, Miss Villiers was being attended by Fairfoul and a few Worms. Near her was some kind of ruined body, attached to the turntable. On the departing train sat Bertie, still at his ease, still eating. Wardle called out to him, but Bertie shaded his face, like a child whose parents have embarrassed him in front of his friends. Miss Villiers’ attendants upped and fled after their chums. She was unharmed as far as I could tell, thank God. I left Wardle to deal with the mischief on the turntable. I had missed that train once already and I was not about to let it leave without me again.

  * * *

  It was sheer luck that let me leap onto the running board without Worm seeing me. He was stoking the furnace to build up steam for that final run. As we picked up speed, I edged my way down the running board. I reached out to steady myself, but the burning hot engine scalded my hand.

  The rush of wind stung my eyes as we drew out of the station. I crawled towards the carriages, trying not to picture what the wheels would do to me if I slipped.

  The ground below us suddenly fell away, and I saw another railway line far beneath us. I looked around in panic. We were passing over a bridge, even in the depths of that monstrous cutting, a railway upon a railway. It was all I could do to cling on.

  Up ahead in the open carriage, Bertie looked up as Skelton appeared beside him, removed his bowler hat and nodded cordially. They fell into earnest conversation. I was struck by the absurd thought that the two of them were alike, able young men whose dreams the world has decreed impermissible. Both of them loved Nellie, the Prince and the pauper, and both of their loves were doomed.

  Accelerating towards the tunnel, black and forbidding, we passed under a great wrought-iron pipe, as broad as a man is tall, then plunged into the darkness. I recalled certain other tunnels I had crawled in. I am no wizard at geography, but I knew that this train line crisscrossed any number of pipes, rivers and sewers on its path across the capital. I tried to put from my mind the tales of miners perishing up north the year before, unable to breathe in the underground depths. Yet Pearson had assured us that his tunnels would be safe.

  I grasped at the handrail beneath the funnel and rounded the engine. We emerged from the tunnel, and I called out to the Prince. My words were lost in a rush of wind. I glanced around in wonderment. We were again in a cutting, the sides rising sheer above us. The roar redoubled as we entered another station. King’s Cross.

  I pulled myself upright as Worm peered around the end of the engine, his face aglow. He was astonished for a moment, but it was too late for him to stop me.

  I turned back. Up ahead, the station ended in the broad flat arch leading the underground tracks gently left, under the Euston Road. I had to leap across to the open carriage before we entered the tunnel.

  The train shook, and we veered off to the right. We were headed for the wall and destruction, I was sure of it. I clung to the handrail and awaited the final crash. Instead we plunged into the narrowest of openings, a siding, rank and ill-lit. A gate clanged shut behind us, blocking out the lights of the station. A blast sounded above us, and the train shuddered. Foul sludge sprayed down on me. I shielded my face, spitting and coughing. I could just make out where it came from: the vast iron pipe that ran above us, built into the apex of the tunnel. Alongside it ran a lesser pipe of gleaming steel. This second duct had mechanisms attached at intervals. As I stared through smarting eyes, these began to blow open, water spraying out of them.

  A huge blast echoed ahead. I looked up to see the great iron pipe cracking apart, discharging its sludge on to us.

  In that moment, I could see it all with desperate clarity. I knew that the mechanisms stolen from London’s finest houses were no gift, as Worm had dissembled. I knew that Skelton had used them as timing devices, booby traps springing hydraulic spouts across the city. But now I saw that he had kept some in reserve for this, his masterpiece, to set off charges along the Fleet Sewer itself, cracking open the ironwork, with the valves of Coxhill’s hydraulics rigged to sluice water into it, pumping the foulness out onto us, drenching us, covering everything.

  I reached across to the open carriage. The wood was wet. Everything was darkness and dirt. The waters were rising, filling the siding, yet the train ploughed on. I could barely see, with excrement in my hair, on my face, in my eyes, but in disgust and anger I clambered across.

  Skelton saw me first. It was he I had spoken to at Buckingham Palace, not Bertie. For an instant, I looked in his eyes. There I saw no malice, no fury. Only a resigned smile. He seemed to me almost a ghost already.

  There was no time for more. I tugged at the Prince’s arm. He turned to me in utter horror. Berwick made no effort to stop us. Quite the contrary, he let us go.

  I pulled the Prince with me into the frightful flowing blackness, shutting my eyes against the foulness. The tunnel had become a river, already deep, and I strained to hold the Prince above water. The train roared on with a dreadful screeching, as if the tunnel were on the verge of collapse. I did not know where the train was headed; I only knew that I must get away from it, down the tunnel, and back to the open air. The Prince was a useless swimmer, and I could barely buoy up his dead weight.

  The waves of sludge swept us down, the current battering us against the tunnel walls. I had one arm around the Prince, and one hand out in front of me. He clung to me, coughing and spluttering, driving me under the foetid water. It was unendurable.

  We washed up against the sluice gate. The end of the tunnel must be at hand, for there was light high above. That would not save us if the waters kept rising. Even now the Prince was losing consciousness. Good God, I thought, he’s brought us here to drown in filth and ignominy.

  I braced myself between the metal grating and the tunnel wall. The Prince was still breathing. The waters rose, lifting us higher, and my shoulder bumped against a box affixed to the sluice gate. I stared at it in the deathly light. A large steel panel. Cogs and springs, affixed to an iron bolt. A release catch. I peered closer, my eyes stinging. The maker’s name was inscribed on the panel: Allnutt & Ganz. The workings of the Euston Square clock.

  An almighty explosion reverberated around the tunnel, and an unearthly light gleamed far behind us: the train and its finishing end.

  I clutched the gate for purchase. My hands ached, and I could barely breathe. Before long the tunnel would be inundated. There was no time for delicate fingerwork. I raised my good leg, aimed my boot at the beautiful mechanism, and smashed it to pieces.

  With a great swoosh, the sluice gate gave way.

  A wave swept down the tunnel, flushing us out into the open air. Tumbled in the flood, I lost hold of the Prince.

  * * *

  I awoke to find myself being hauled out of the water by sure hands. I was back at King’s Cross. Darlington’s crowd heaved me up onto the platform and laid me down, gasping for breath. I tried to sit up, spitting and retching, but could only raise myself onto my elbows. I looked around desperately. I tried to speak, tried to tell them that somewhere under the filth was the Prince. Worm, still at the engine. Berwick on the train. The words would not come.

  * * *

  There was a shout further down the platform as they pulled Bertie out of the abating flood. He was covered in excrement and looked like he had seen the devil. As he came to, the Prince started upright and splashed back into the tide of filth.

  I jumped down and caught hold of him. “Your Royal Highness, you need to rest.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” he blurted out, trying to shake free, and turned back towards the dark mouth of the tunnel. “We must go after him. Goddammit. He saved my life.”

  “Who?”

  “The little fellow.” He glanced past me and with sudden strength broke free. “I’m damn well going back for him.”

  I caught him and held tight until he explained. In the final surge, a little fellow had swum up and kept him afloat. He had been drowning and the little fellow had saved him. I shouted to Darlington’s crowd that they
must go in, up the tunnel, to look for survivors.

  “My friend,” Darlington intervened, “it’s half an hour ago we pulled you out. You’d fainted quite away. We can’t go sending nobody in there. It’s a death trap, that is. Heaven knows what else is waiting to blow.”

  And yet, I thought, Shuffler and friends used to work in those foul sewers every day, on the off chance of spotting a half sovereign.

  Bertie plumped himself down on the platform beside me with a look of despair. He put his head in his hands, mindless of the grime in which he was covered. I warmed to him as we sat there, dirty and disgusting. He would have gone back in, this prince, if we had let him, to try and save Worm of the Euston Square Worms, public company as yet unlimited.

  “That little fellow,” said Bertie, “he was as valiant as those bloody Scots at Balaclava.” He pursed his lips. “I believe he has given his life for me. The little fellow.”

  The Prince began talking, ten to the dozen. He was dreadfully shaken, and babbled of things I did not understand. Of his childhood. His father. He seemed to see it all as a punishment organised from beyond the grave by Prince Albert. It had given him the scare of his life, he said. He rose on a sudden and vomited over the edge of the platform.

  * * *

  I sent the Prince back to the Palace. He said his chaise was waiting at Paddington. Damn the chaise at Paddington, I told him. I would deal with that. He must go home and never speak of this night again.

  At the platform, there was no sign of Worm. Exhausted from our journey into oblivion, I had no tears to weep. The flow of debris was ebbing now. On the last surges, flotsam and jetsam from the banquet washed out: empty crates, wine bottles, ruined fruit. I stared, sore-eyed and stinking, at Berwick’s bowler hat bobbing on the water at the mouth of the tunnel.

  AFTERWORD

  (1863, 1911, 1888)

  THE BUGLE—WORDS & TRAINS SOMETIMES A PERSON GETS DESPERATE

  EUSTON DAILY BUGLE

  10th January, 1863

  METROPOLITAN TRIUMPH

  As the Bugle predicted from the start, the opening of the Metropolitan Railway today was an enormous success. Despite a delay of twenty-one months, the public were united in their enthusiasm. Thirty thousand Londoners flocked to the latest in our city’s great panoply of wonders. From nine o’clock in the morning till past midday it was impossible to obtain a place on the upward line.

  What a tragedy that the Hon Charles Pearson MP, who endured such derision over the scheme, died before its fruition. How jubilantly would he have looked upon the throng of working men exulting in this new service. The first-class carriages were filled with London’s elite and famous, although there was no royal patronage at last night’s banquet in Farringdon Station, despite the Queen’s predilection for novelty trains. (The Prince of Wales will, however, open Bazalgette’s sewerage works next year, where the fourth of James Watt’s monumental pumps is to be named for the Royal Fiancée, Princess Alexandra.)

  Dissonant notes were nonetheless sounded amid the fanfare. Some deplored the crush, like the first night of a pantomime. A few expressed regret that ten thousand were made homeless during construction. Others complained that the sulphurous fumes and flickering gaslight gave the sensation of plunging into unknown and infinite danger. Just two months back, a drunken driver overshot the works in a siding beneath King’s Cross; the Fleet Ditch burst in, drowning workers in sewage; and a hydraulics manager was killed while testing out the system. Since the GWR’s intervention, however, these teething problems have been firmly resolved, and the Board of Safety have withdrawn their concerns.

  Another step towards the modernisation of the capital. The Bugle predicts a tremendous impact. There is talk of using wind power or dried sewerage ordure as fuel. Besides the line being built into the Victoria Embankment, lines could be laid along the Regent’s Canal and the bed of the Thames. Such a raft of proposals faces Parliament that, if all the schemes were effected, nearly one-half of the City itself would be demolished, every open space in the metropolis would be given up for the erection of termini with their screaming and hissing locomotives, and we would find ourselves living in a junction yard.

  Instead, is not the moment ripe for a glass-covered double-decker thoroughfare spanning the heart of the world’s greatest city, the Bugle’s own Crystal Way?

  WORDS & TRAINS

  Were we right or were we not? They enjoined us to keep silence, cited reputations at stake, and lives to be ruined by scandal, not least those of Campbell’s superiors. One thinks too of Mr Dickens. One thinks of the King—or the Prince, as he was then.

  It is fifty years since those dreadful events. Now that all the principal players are dead, Bertie the last to go, I have assembled this memoir. Principally it comprises Campbell’s recollections, written in the 1880s. I have interpolated relevant cuttings, snippets of Skelton’s writings and notes of my own, where gaps needed filling.

  For my failure to publish, I make no further apology, except to say that even in this flippant day and age when we are told that anything goes, I preferred to excise references to certain nefarious practices in gentlemen’s clubs and gambling hells, which point to a range of royal peccadilloes that cast unnecessary slurs on the late Edward VII. In my work, I have had occasion to discuss the case with the odd aspiring novelist, but I will now bind the memoir and print a very limited edition, to be discreetly catalogued in the publication libraries, where I pray that some diligent scholar may one day stumble upon our story.

  Bertie, as we all know, has presided over an era of change. Many lamented the passing of Victorian standards, but I find something honest about our Edwardian frivolity. They say he loosened our morals with his gambling and mistresses. Yet all were agreed that he loved Queen Alix fondly.

  Wardle retired. There seemed no sense in exposing his compromises, but he felt the scandal keenly. He and his wife did not retire to Yorkshire, as planned, but instead set sail for Argentina, where they purchased a thriving plantation, only to be ruined by the abolition of slavery. His son, Charlie—in fact Albert Charles Wardle—found success in Queensland, Australia, though ever in conflict with the authorities as a leader of the fledgling trades unions movement. Campbell liked to hear tell of him, I think he always envied Wardle Junior his great adventure.

  Nobody knew at that time about the problems between Catherine Dickens’ father and mother, sparked by another actress. She escaped the broken home by marrying Wilkie Collins’ invalid brother, a desperate move, as they were forced to live in Italy in penurious exile.

  Madame Skelton, it transpired, did not lose everything in the destruction of Clerkenwell. She moved to Willesden, dutifully tended by Fairfoul, and became the hub of a thriving community rehoused by Bazalgette. Whether or not Campbell’s plea was responsible for this good fortune, heaven knows.

  As for Hester, by the time Campbell returned to the Home for Fallen Women, it was too late. She had hanged herself in her dormitory. She had a pauper’s burial in St Giles in Camden, with not one friend or relative. Campbell was uncommonly upset about it, and erected a small headstone for her at his own cost.

  The Nation Underground vanished into thin air. By the time the police unearthed the vault off Battle Bridge Road, the books, furnishings and accoutrements were gone, save for one Tom Thumb chair. I imagine the Worms voted to disband and went off to join other groups; a few, with Campbell’s help, found gainful employment at the Metropolitan Board of Works. How long the wider cells associated with them survived, I do not know, nor how broad their effects, only that Campbell took to reading the international news pages. I remember his amusement at an account of robberies in the style of the skeleton thefts in the Berlin sewers of the late Seventies. If a new generation of Worms had set up there, Campbell did nothing to blow the whistle on it. Sometimes I’d catch him studying reports of riots in Paris or Balkan uprisings. I believe he thought they had a hand in it all. For neither Worm nor Skelton were ever found, and Campbell harboured a notion that one
or both of them escaped. After all, they knew those underground passageways as nobody else, and losing your hat is no proof that you have died. It would have pleased him to imagine an aged Berwick heading the 1905 revolution against the Tsar, with Worm marching beside him. The Professor has never said a word, but the glint in her eye suggests she knows something.

  Of course, Campbell did not witness Skelton’s most barbarous act, as I did, rending Coxhill on the turntable like a villain of Greek tragedy, and he never quite believed him capable of such a dark deed. Worm’s suggestion that Skelton originally planned to drown hundreds also haunts my dreams. The authorities never let a word of it be breathed; I suppose even those who repaired the tunnel believed the story given out that it was another accident. Exactly two months after Skelton’s attack, two hundred important personages rode on the train to a feast on that same Farringdon platform.

  Campbell was fond of telling other stories from his career, but of this case he remained loath to speak. Always one to put on an unwavering front, he was anything but cold. If anything, he felt things too deeply. I urged him to write it all down, as a form of catharsis more than anything else. He would reply with some claptrap to the effect that our words are just trains, moving through the underground passageways of the mind, past things that can never really be named.

  I was surprised, then, to find among his papers and case notes when he passed away this long account, neatly filed along with the newspaper cuttings. I dare to hope that he wanted it read, to convey to future generations something of the horror that faced us in those dark times. His final meditation I include hereafter.

  I have omitted to mention three of our players.