The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  Behind his back the other engineers called William the Sultan of the Sewers. Although they knew he was scrupulous in his habits, a few clamped their noses with their fingers as he passed them in the corridors. As a taunt it was light-hearted enough but there was no affection in it. The other men thought him aloof and resented it. Had William been born of high estate they would doubtless have respected his reserve as fitting to a man in his position but in the son of a humble shopkeeper such chilly pride was intolerable. There were many men in Greek-street with connections to the military and whispers circulated of a less than worthy service in the Russian War, of a dishonourable discharge, even of desertion. Before his appointment by the Board William's character and reputation had been burnished by the personal recommendations of Robert Rawlinson. Now the sticky dust of rumour settled over him and dulled his sheen. William knew it and, fearful of attracting any more attention, withdrew further. He kept his face close to the paper as he hunched over his table in his narrow wooden carrel and whenever it was possible he retreated into the private recesses of the sewers. He knew at least that his work could not be faulted. His inspections were detailed and precise, his recommendations judicious. In time it was suggested, to the considerable satisfaction of his fellow engineers, that he assume the burden of the Commission's routine inspections. After that he spent a part of every day crouched beneath the city's granite crust.

  Months passed. And still the cravings came. William would feel them massing, stealthy and threatening, in the spaces between his ribs. When the blackness started, spreading like ink through the frills of his lungs and pressing its knuckles into the soft flesh of his throat, he made his way underground. There might have been other places he could have cut which he could have reached more easily and where he would not have been discovered. In the single tiled water-closet at Greek-street, for example, or in the midnight silence of the house in Lambeth while Polly and the child slept. But he went always into the tunnels. In the tunnels moral judgements were suspended. The strict and immutable precepts that governed the behaviour of those who walked directly over you, their feet striking the granite above your head, those rigid demarcations of right and wrong, of reputation and respectability, underground became fluid, elusive. The darkness accepted him without question or condemnation, receiving him silently into its embrace. The darkness had no curiosity and no memory. In the darkness there was only silence and solitude and safety and the extraordinary brilliant explosion of self as blade found flesh.

  It was a warm May evening when William stumbled into the cavern. The city was drowsy and lit with a soft lilac light, the pale sky trimmed with flounces of gold and pale pink. William noticed nothing as he hastened towards the King-street sewer. His saliva was sour, bitter and metallic. His breath came in painful snatches. The muscles in his face jumped. The manhole at Dean-street had been locked. He had spent some minutes struggling vainly to lift it, forcing the tips of his fingers under the iron cover and wrenching at it, but to no avail. Now the blackness gripped him, forcing its elbows into his chest, twisting his guts into knots. It prised open his arms, pushing rods of blackness along his fingers that pressed upwards with such hot insistence from beneath the restrictions of his filthy fingernails that William ripped at them frantically with his teeth. The taste of blood in his mouth lit such a flare of anticipation through his belly that he was certain he would scream. He broke into a run. The blackness crowded his head, narrowing his concentration to the next paving stone, the next. His heart and his boots beat out the frantic rhythm. The metal casing of his lantern banged painfully against his thigh but he barely noticed it. Closer, closer. Around the next corner. And there it was, the small hut of the flushers, set up like a sentry-box on the corner. William held the master-key. His hand trembled so much that he could hardly steady it sufficiently to enter his pocket. The key caught in the lining of his coat. Desperate, blind with urgency, William ripped it out and fumbled it into the lock. The door opened. William half-climbed, half-fell, into the opening, his feet insensible to the iron ladder set into the wall. The stink immediately flooded his head, the stink of shit and sea and rotting brick. He devoured it, the tears squeezing from between his clenched eyelids, as he pushed his way into the darkness, burying himself in its soft folds. When he had gone far enough he leaned against the oozing wall and fumbled for the knife. The water was high, nearly to his knees. It was of no consequence. He would not need to be here long. His hands no longer trembled. The knife was steady. He cut. For one eternal suspended moment his heart was perfectly still, caught in the perfect beauty of ecstasy, and then it burst. The blood sang out from his arm, clear and triumphant. Exultantly, William thrust the knife aloft, his fist clenched around the handle. The blackness hovered for a moment, like a scream echoing on the air, and then it was gone. Once more William was himself. He was free.

  Some time later William lit his lantern and began to make his way out of the tunnel. This stretch of the sewers was unfamiliar to him. It was not long before he realized he was lost. This did not disturb him unduly. The King-street sewer had many exits, a number of them newly constructed with a trap which could be opened from beneath in situations of emergency. He had only to find one. The water was rising but he walked steadily and without alarm, treading carefully on the uneven floor. The light from his lantern glinted on the dark surface of the stream. When he reached a place where the tunnel branched in more than one direction, he paused only fractionally before choosing the likeliest-looking course and continuing on his way. He had been walking for perhaps ten minutes when the tunnel began to rise. Although the stream, to his surprise, seemed if anything to grow deeper, the air was notably less thick, the stink of excrement leavened by salt and the light kiss of circulating air. The echo of William's boots no longer throbbed against the narrow walls of the tunnel. He must be close to ground level. William looked upwards, searching the crown of the tunnel for an exit. Instead he saw only a black arch of stone, as though the tunnel had come to an end. There would be a grating beyond the arch. William scrambled towards it, holding his lantern as high as he could.

  There was no grating. But William had already forgotten that it was a grating he sought, for what he saw instead captivated him so utterly that all he could do was stand and stare. Before him lay a vast chamber, perhaps thirty feet in length, its roof soaring high above it like a cathedral's. The chamber had no floor. Instead, in front of William, there stretched a magnificent expanse of black water, as glossy and pristine as polished slate, elevated somehow so that it stood away from the chamber's walls and yet forming a perfect rectangle. Along its length on both sides the water murmured as it slid in gauzy silver ribbons down on to the cracked brick below. On one side of the lake the wall rose in great slabs of grey granite that glittered with tiny stars of mica. On the other they ascended in sweeping curves of brick, so slick with nitre that they looked as though they were cast from molten bronze, and adorned with a sequence of chamfered Gothic arches, each one set with panel of stone for a window. Dominating the chamber, set into the glassy surface of the water, were eight stone pillars, their hexagonal columns as thick and silvery as birch trees reaching out their branches twenty feet above the water into a forest canopy of arches. From these arches clusters of pale stalactites hung like pendants of flawless ivory, golden-white in the light of the lantern.

  William stared and his breath caught in his throat. Apart from the whisperings of the water the chamber was perfectly silent and still. It wasn't real. It could not possibly be real. William stared and he knew he stared into his own heart. He knew already that he would never come back to this place. He knew that, if he tried to look for it, it would be gone or changed, lost to him in a way he would not be able to bear. But he also knew that he would hold it inside himself forever, this place which by its existence made his own existence possible.

  As the months passed, William came increasingly to depend upon the tunnels as the one place where the world was steady. He never again tried
to find the chamber. It was enough to know it was there. In the tunnels he breathed more deeply. He had never understood why some of the men found themselves nauseated by the stink underground. To his mind the odour was infinitely more tolerable down in the cold purity of the darkness than it was in the streets above him. In the sewers the smell was simple and direct. In the streets the stink of excrement was but one enemy in an ambush of torments. It knitted itself into the stench of fog and bodies and factories and refuse and the choked tangle of traffic and the never-ending racket and clatter to throttle the senses and make a man mad. In the sewers there was filth and the unpredictable anxieties of tide and weather but within that there prevailed a kind of order. In the sewers a man might feel himself measured by heights and spans and gradients. A man who had never ventured down into the bowels of the capital, be he a man of London all his life, could surely not imagine such a place. For the man who was there, alone in the darkness, it was London that was impossible to imagine.

  William's work was largely a matter of routine but its methodical nature satisfied and soothed him. Slowly he grew to understand the shape of the old sewer system, to know his way through its maze of branching veins and arteries. And slowly, so slowly that he hardly dared permit himself to become aware of it, the cravings began to retreat. He went for two weeks without cutting, then three. Time spooled away smoothly and the calmness that settled on him after he cut prevailed in him for longer, persisting for a day, then several days, and on occasion as long as a week. When he returned home to Lambeth he found himself able to listen almost attentively to his wife's chatter, to play with baby William without snapping in frustration at his son's childish demands. Quietened by laudanum he slept at night and his sleep was soft and blank. When Polly rolled against him at night he no longer cried out in fear. Instead he arranged himself around the curve of her and slept on.

  At the offices in Greek-street the talk of the other men no longer sounded as indistinct echoes in his ears. William attempted pleasantries and his lips formed them in the correct shapes. He smiled, tentatively, perhaps, but at the appropriate moments. It was too late for warmth but little by little the coolness that the other men had determined to reflect back at him was brought up to room temperature. May would always be a queer fellow, on that they were all agreed, but his history, real or imagined, was no longer a subject for muttered discussion. He was an able chap, respectable and polite. He did the work that was required of him quietly and without ceremony. He was content to perform the tasks others disliked. By the time he had been there a year he had become as much a part of the place as the narrow mullioned windows that looked out towards the grey-green scrub of Soho-square, and, like the windows, the other occupants of the office would no doubt have felt the lack of him if one day he was no longer there. While he remained in place, however, they took him quite for granted.

  Except for Bazalgette. On more than one occasion William's diligence and eye for detail had brought him to the attention of the Chief Engineer and he watched him with interest. The bulk of his men were competent and almost all of them were better educated and more thoroughly steeped in the theories of civil engineering than May, but no other man under his jurisdiction, engineer or surveyor, had so thorough a practical knowledge of the London sewers in their current state of disintegration. According to the logs, May had covered at least five times more of the network below ground than any other surveyor to the Board. His brick samples, removed from parts of the tunnel at various heights and in varying states of disintegration before being boxed and meticulously labelled in his careful hand, occupied almost a complete room on the fourth floor. When Bazalgette became preoccupied with the problem of bricks and mortar and their mutual inability to withstand the absorption of water, he had his clerk place a table there where he could work, the samples laid out before him. There could be no drainage without flow of water, that much was clear. But there could be no mains sewerage, to Bazalgette's mind at least, for a city that would soon number three million souls, without bricks and mortar. Local sewers could be constructed from glazed earthenware pipe but they would need to flow into a channel capable of taking many millions of gallons of water every day. In order to accommodate such a flow the main drainage channels in even his earliest plans were twelve feet wide and up to fourteen high. No pipe in the world could be constructed to those dimensions. Stone was expensive and impractical. Only bricks and mortar provided the required strength with the necessary structural flexibility. But ordinary bricks and mortar were porous. They absorbed water and effluvium which caused them to crumble and rot so that they collapsed and caused obstructions. The maintenance required to keep them functioning would be expensive and deleterious to the system's effectiveness. A different solution was required. Experiments had already been undertaken with Portland cement and its results had exceeded all expectations. Bazalgette had proved that it would provide not only a basis for a mortar that resisted water but one that would harden without needing to dry out. This left him only one problem. In the first short days of 1858, when the snowdrops in Soho-square were still pale green and shuddered unhappily in the windy chill, Bazalgette summoned May and two other engineers to his office and charged them, under the expert guidance of his deputy, Lovick, with the responsibility for developing a prototype for an affordable waterproof brick.

  William stared at his supper and rubbed his damp palms on his knees. Though he wore only a cotton shirt the sweat gathered in his armpits and glued the thin fabric to his back. He had no appetite. The limp fish glistened on the plate, its mouth hanging open, as if it too were overcome by the heat.

  A penny for them?'

  William blinked and then, recalling himself, smiled up at his wife.

  'I was thinking about Staffordshire Blues,' he said apologetically.

  'Let me guess. I don't suppose those would be a kind of brick, would they now?'

  'I'm afraid so.'

  Polly giggled as she lowered herself carefully into a bentwood chair.

  'Well, then, I'm keeping my money, thank you kindly,' she said, shaking her head. 'Your Staffordshires might be as blue as sapphires and a wonder of the world but I've already bought myself enough bricks these last months to build me a mansion.' Breathing heavily she leaned back and fanned herself. 'Oh, will you look at that! How many times have I told that girl to tend to the corners of the room? Ninepence a week and the spiders still have the better of her!'

  Polly waved an irritated arm towards the cobweb that drooped from the ceiling but she did not stand. Tendrils of hair clung to her damp face. In the oppressive heat her ankles had swelled and her wrists and even her cheeks until, propped in the hard chair, she resembled an overstuffed doll. Every morning for six long weeks the waking city had stared up into the relentless white kiln of the dawn and wished the sun had already set. There was not the faintest breath of wind. Instead, an open window brought in only the stale sour exhalations of a million bodies in a thousand breathless lanes and courtyards and, more insistently still, of the thick brown putrefying river. The steamboats struggled up and down its soupy length, their wheels churning up its foul shallows and sending the stink slapping against the stone facings of bridges and buildings. In the streets passers-by clutched handkerchiefs to their mouths or wrapped their neckcloths over their faces and tried not to breathe. Everyone feared the cholera, its miasma swelling and thickening until it squatted over the city like a November particular. Those who could had long since left.

  Polly's new dress had dark circles beneath the arms and there was a sore patch on her neck where the collar pinched her. She rubbed at it with a puffy finger. The dress had cost more than they could afford but she was a respectable woman now. It would not do to continue to wear the dresses she had worn in service. Besides, the pretty striped stuff had been irresistible. She stroked it fondly.

  From upstairs came a low whimper as little William wriggled in his sleep, seeking out a cool place on the sheets.

  'Poor lamb, his stomach'
s still troubling him,' Polly said, tilting her head towards the sound. 'Godfrey's Cordial always worked a treat with George, especially if you added a little extra poppy-powder, but Sweetie won't take it.'

  Her husband was silent. The bulky heat wadded the room. Even the walls sweated, damp patches spreading across the whitewash. When he finally spoke it was so softly that Polly didn't catch the words.

  'Dianthus barbatus.'

  Polly stretched.

  'What was that, dear?'

  'Dianthus barbatus.' He said it slowly, letting the words melt on his tongue. Then he raised his head and looked at her. 'Sweet William.'

  For a moment Polly stared at him and her caramel eyes widened.

  'You looked it up.'

  'Yes.'

  'Sweet William. You looked it up.'

  The smile spread across her face and through her chest. She had almost given up hoping. His botany books had remained on their high shelf, untouched, their worn leather covers thick with dust. But how silly she'd been, to think he had forgotten. He had been busy with his important work for the Board, that was all. And besides, it hadn't been so long a wait. Baby William was barely three years old. When the time came to enchant him with the story of how his Papa had insisted upon giving them both, his own sweet flowers, their very own scientific names there would be no need to add that he had come by his a little late.

  'I shall never remember all of that, you know,' she declared happily, letting her head fall backwards. The sweat slid through her hair, oiling her scalp. 'I shall have to make do with Di.'

  'Di will do very well.'

  Still smiling Polly ran her fingertips over the silky fabric of her new gown and shut her eyes. William pushed away his plate and contemplated his wife. Her flushed face sparkled and, where it met the curve of her forehead, the chestnut of her hair was stained dark as mahogany. It was unbearably hot. Quietly he picked up an old straw bonnet that hung by its ribbons from a hook by the door and fanned her with it. She touched his arm and murmured something, tipping her head back to catch any trace of coolness in the stirred-up air. Her closed eyelids were oyster-pale and traced with a pattern of blue and violet lines. He fanned her for a long time until her head lolled backwards and tiny snores started to snag in her throat. Then he picked up his botany journals and took them to the back step.