Underworld

by Oliver Bowden

  Huge timber structures sprung up at intervals along the center of the road, spots for opening shaft holes were marked out, iron buckets had been brought on the roadway, buckets that were 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 that 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 who lived there (a damning statistic by itself) displaced to other slums.

  Some of them, of course, 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 the 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 at a 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.

  Which was?

  * * *

  “I want to find out what they’re up to,” Ethan had said.

  They had met on the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, just as arranged on the harbor wall at home in India. Ethan had led The Ghost to a folly in the hospital grounds, where they were obscured from view by foliage. There the master had taken a good look at his former pupil, eyeing up the boy’s rags, his general demeanor.

  “Very good,” said Ethan, 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.”

  “I know,” said Ethan. “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.”

  “I see I taught you well.” Ethan smiled.

  “You need to practice what you preach.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t accept advice from a young pup like your good self.” Ethan smiled in pretense 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 Assassincraft 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 favor 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.”

  Then 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 . . .

  * * *

  Sometime 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 Line dig. The new underground line was like a bent arm, and right now they sat somewhere near the elbow: Grays Inn Lane 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 has 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, 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 here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here. This area of land in the northw
est of London is, we think, of interest to the Templars. We think that they are digging for something. Perhaps an artifact.”

  “An artifact? 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 harbor 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 harboring doubts. 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 was once 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. Philip “Plutus” Twopenny, the Governor of the Bank of England, no less; 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 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 seemingly 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.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The night after the body was discovered, The Ghost glanced into the graveyard as he always did on his way home from the dig, and as usual his eyes sought out the gravestone through which Ethan communicated, and as usual it was . . .

  Ah, no it wasn’t. Not tonight. It was leaning to the right. Danger. Which to The Ghost meant something significant. Not that he was being followed by Cavanagh’s men. He already knew that. But that Ethan was around, keeping tabs on him still.

  But to more pressing matters. There were indeed men following him. One of them had left the dig a few minutes before him. As the shift-change bell rang, The Ghost had seen Marchant nod discreetly to one of the three hired hands who were constantly to be found hanging around the office or on the dig. Their names were Hardy, Smith and Other Hardy—Cavanagh’s own predilection for using his surname had either rubbed off on his men or been imposed upon them—and they were passed off as payroll security. The other men called them “punishers,” a certain breed of men who were expert at giving out a good hiding if you greased their palm with silver. But while The Ghost didn’t doubt they were punishers of a sort, he also knew them for what they really were: Templar fighters. They were professionals, too. Big men, they were fit and alert; they didn’t spend their time cracking jokes or whistling at the prostitutes who hung around by the perimeter fence touting for business. They kept their minds on the job.

  But they weren’t that good, as the commencement of their covert pursuit of The Ghost proved; they weren’t good enough to hide from him. The man who left at Marchant’s signal—Other Mr. Hardy—was next to be seen leaning on a barrow wearing a look of studied disinterest, like he wasn’t really scanning the crowds of departing workers who thronged the street for his quarry. When he caught sight of The Ghost, Other Mr. Hardy pushed himself off his barrow and moved on with a walk that could only be described as an “amble,” like he wasn’t really set on staying just the right distance ahead of The Ghost.

  Meanwhile, there would be another man behind him. Probably two: Smith and Hardy. And that was good, thought The Ghost, because that was just where he wanted them.

  I hope you like a nice long walk, my friends, he said to himself, then spent the rest of the journey speeding up and slowing down, setting himself the challenge of making life as difficult as possible for his pursuers without actually tipping them off that he knew they were there.

  Until, at last, he reached the tunnel. He’d long since left the crowds behind, of course. Ahead of him Other Mr. Hardy was an almost lone figure now, as The Ghost approached the shaft. Some way away, the man stopped, making a pretense of needing to tie his bootlace, as The Ghost took the steps down into the tunnel rotunda. He had spent his day underground, and now he would spend his night there too.

  Reaching the bottom, The Ghost stood among the neglected statues and careworn features—once so swanky and plush, now rotting—and gazed upward, making a show of enjoying the view. Sure enough, he sensed figures on the steps above him pushing themselves into the shadows. He smiled. Good. This was good. He wanted them to see where he lived.

  * * *

  “Some men may come in the next few days,” he told Maggie later. By then he had checked on Charlie and given him bread, and he’d attended to Jake, pleased to see the old lag’s leg was on the mend. And with those two tasks complete, he had continued farther along, deeper into the sepulchral darkness of the tunnel, picking his way past alcoves crammed with rag-swaddled bodies.

  Some of them slept; some stared at him with wide white eyes from inside their unwelcoming hidey-holes, silently watching him pass; and some greeted him, “Hello, Bharat,” “Hello, lad,” with a wave, or perhaps a simple blinked salute.

  Some he knew by name, others from their jobs: Olly, for example, who was a “pure-finder,” which meant he collected dog shit to sell on Bermondsey Market, but who had a tendency to bring his work home with him. The Ghost held his nose as he passed Olly, but raised a short wave anyhow. Many of them had candles, and he was grateful for the light; many did not, and lay shivering in the dark, alone with their pain, weeping as they awaited the crispy dawn and the beginning of another day of soul-destroying survival in London—the world’s most advanced city. The shining jewel of Her Majesty’s great empire.

  He reached Maggie, who tended a small fire. She would have been doing so most of the evening, ladling broth into the bowls of any tunnel inhabitant who came asking. They all received their food, or “scran,” as it was known, with a mixture of gratitude and devotion, and left thanking Maggie and singing her praises. Mostly they all looked fearfully beyond her, too, to where the light finally lost its battle with the dark shadows, and darkness reigned literally and metaphorically, and they thanked God for the young Indian man whom some of them knew as Bharat and some of them knew as Maggie’s lad, who had brought order to the tunnel and made it so that they could sleep more easy in their alcoves at night.

  There they
sat, side by side, Maggie and The Ghost with their backs against the damp tunnel wall and the dying fire at their feet. Maggie’s knees were pulled up and she hugged herself for warmth. Her long gray hair—“my witchy hair,” she called it—lay over the fabric of a filthy gray skirt, and though her boots had no laces, she said she preferred them that way. She hated feeling “trussed up” she always said. Once upon a time, long ago—“before you were even a glint in your daddy’s nutsack”—she’d seen pictures of Oriental ladies with bound feet, and after that she’d never worn laces in her boots again. She felt things keenly for her fellow man, did Maggie.

  Now her features rearranged themselves into a picture of apprehension and concern. “And why,” she asked, “will men be coming for you?”

  “They’ll be asking questions about me,” The Ghost told her, “and they might well be pointed in your direction.”

  She gave an indignant harrumph. “Well, I bloody well hope so. They bloody well ought to be.”

  As well as helping others, Maggie liked people to know about it. She liked her efforts to be recognized.

  “I’m sure they will,” said The Ghost with a smile. “And I would like to ask you to be careful about what you say.”

  She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that there will be others who live in the tunnel who will say that I protect you from the thieves and vagabonds who live farther along, and that is acceptable; they will paint a picture of me as a man who is no stranger to violence and I have no problem with that. What I don’t want is for these men to be furnished with an exaggerated account of my abilities as a fighter.”

  She dropped her voice. “I’ve seen you in action, don’t forget. There ain’t no exaggerating your abilities as a fighter.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Maggie. That’s exactly the sort of thing I don’t want you to say. A man of violence but not necessarily a man of great skill, do I make myself understood?”