The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  The sky had darkened into a deep blue across which lacy ribbons of pink and gold were sliced into scraps by a scaffold of dark chimneys. Between the step and the outbuilding that housed the privy the stretch of empty yard was baked hard and the patch of weeds that had flourished at the south end in late spring were bleached and dry. Treacle-mustard, mostly, and goosegrass. Soot had drifted into the corners like black snow. William scratched in the dust with a stick, a cross-hatch of lines. They made bricks from this London clay, yellow stock mostly, a sand-coloured brick flecked with black where the ash it was mixed with had burned into the bricks during firing. Yellow stock was cheap and plentiful but it was much too soft for sewers. It sucked up moisture like a sponge. What was required was for the bricks either to be naturally dense, like Staffordshire Blues which were expensive and in short supply, or to find a technique by which ordinary brick might be glazed, as Mr Doulton had so successfully managed with earthenware pipes at the Lambeth potteries. But how to manufacture glazed bricks, which were habitually used only for decorative purposes, economically and on the required scale? The new man, Hawke, claimed it could not be done, that London bricks, fired a little longer than usual, would be perfectly adequate. After all, there were brickworks aplenty in the city and Bazalgette's system would require tens of millions of bricks at the very least. But William had disagreed with him. There was only one place he believed might be able to do it, a Works in Strowbridge where the first-ever glazed porcelain baths had been perfected and manufactured. The baths had won a Gold 'Isis' Medal at the Exhibition in 1851 and were now in great demand from hospitals and public institutions. In order to produce them the firm had patented a series of ten kilns covering two acres of ground which, through an ingenious design and elaborate system of flues, managed to combine great size with economical fuel consumption which allowed for the production of hundreds of baths every week. If they could only expand their kilns or turn their entire production over to bricks —

  A soft footfall on the flags of the passage recalled him. The light was almost drained from the sky and the little yard was striped with silver by a coin moon. If she asked he would tell Polly he had been thinking about the garden, he decided hastily. She would like that. But when he turned around it was his son who stared at him, his eyes drooping sleepily, his thumb jammed in his mouth. Tears had dried into salty tracks on his freckled cheeks.

  'Hello there, little man,' William murmured, holding his arms open. The boy stumbled into them, already halfway back to sleep as William stood and carried him back up to bed. His bed was bright with moonlight as he laid him down and drew the sheet over him. His eyelids bore the same tracery as his mother's, William thought, as fine and complex as a leaf. Patterns of the kind he drew in the dust with a stick or on his blotter in Greek-street, patterns like —

  Reflexively he stroked the underside of his forearm, tracing the lines beneath the thin cotton of his sleeve. There were no open cuts there, nothing but fading scars and clean pink lines marking where the last of the scabs had peeled away. The cravings came less and less often these days. Of course there were many days when he felt uncertain and awkward, carrying himself cautiously and with stiffened arms as though he were water in a flat dish that might spill at any moment. But he no longer felt that he was disappearing. At night he touched Polly's damp slippery summer skin with his fingertips and felt a responsive quiver in his groin. He held his son in his arms and felt the soles of his feet ache with love. He studied the design of a brick and felt his mind stretch and flex. On the best days, if he sat very still, something settled upon him that was almost like contentment. And on the bad ones, when he felt the dish of himself begin to quiver and slop, he took himself quietly into the sewers and remained there until the cravings withdrew.

  He had not cut in almost a month. He hardly dared to hope it but in the back of his mind he thought that perhaps the last time had purged him finally of the blackness in his blood. That time the intensity of the experience had transported him beyond any place he had been before and in the exquisite ecstasy of relief he had abandoned himself completely. Time had rushed away. When at last the warning clang of the manhole echoed through the tunnel it took him some minutes to recall himself to the present. His entire being was suffused with a kind of white clean tranquillity across which the letters of his name repeated themselves into infinity. He was William. His thumping heart confirmed it: William — William — William. He was safe. He stood and fumbled in his lap for his knife but it was not there. It was not in the recess either. He could remember nothing but he supposed that at some point it must have fallen from his hand into the stream. It was of no consequence. He felt serene, composed. At ground level he pressed a shilling into the palm of the grateful flusher and walked slowly home. It was not until much later that he thought to bathe his arm. He bathed it briskly, hardly looking at it, and swabbed it with iodine. But when he took the pad away and glanced cursorily at the yellow-tinted flesh it was not the sharp sting of the antiseptic that made him draw in his breath. He blinked hard and shook his head to clear it but what he saw remained quite steady. It was unmistakable, the up and down cuts perfectly precise. Hurriedly he washed and wrapped his arm. He would not look at it again. He would think no more of it. It meant nothing. The cuts converged at their edges, that was all. It was a mere happenstance that, instead of the usual long parallel slices drawn across the flesh, he had carved into his arm the deep and distinct shape of a W.

  It was another two weeks before the blistering weather broke. But, before it did so, the heat had managed to achieve for the sanitary administration of the capital what the Bengal mutinies the year before had done for the administration of India. The newspapers called it simply the Great Stink. Day after day, week after week, the Stygian pool of the Thames had stewed in the relentless sun and sent its putrid reproaches directly and powerfully into the House of Commons. It was claimed that no one who inhaled the sickening stench would ever forget it, assuming, that was, that he lived long enough to remember it. Sheets soaked in chloride of lime were hung in the riverside windows of the House but they were powerless against the river's onslaught. The stink pressed into the cracks in the mortar, through the painted wood of the panelled walls and upwards through the cellars. The Home Secretary himself was seen rushing from the chamber, his cheeks whiter than the handkerchief he held pressed against his mouth. Parliament could no longer ignore the parlous state of the city's drains. In the week before the summer recess Bazalgette's proposals were approved in full. The Board was endowed with all the powers necessary to proceed without recourse to the vestries. Most importantly an undertaking for the provision of three million pounds was accepted by Parliament, to be repaid by the levying of an extraordinary tax on the city's residents over the next forty years.

  London would never be the same again.

  VIII

  It all changed in the tunnels after that terrible summer, and not for the better neither. For a time, when the heat lay over the city like a filthy blanket, things were quiet. Everyone was strained, weary, oppressed by thirst and terror of the cholera. Grown men fell in the street, unable to take another step. Healthy infants weakened and died. For days there was no water, for all they left the standpipe open day and night, just in case. And everywhere there was the choking shit-reek of the river, persistent as lice. It burrowed through the fibres of your shirt and into your skin. It set up home in your hair and whiskers. It occupied every inch of you, cramming itself into your ears and eyes and nostrils so that you carried it with you and could never get free of it. There was many as had to drink that filthy stream too, there being nothing else. It never rained.

  Tom and Joe took Lady down the tunnels nearly every day. While it wasn't so much as cool down there at least you could breathe without the stink forcing your breakfast up into the back of your throat. Over the familiar stench of the stream the air smelled agreeably of wet brick and darkness. The rats were made stupid by the heat, giving themselves up to the crates
easy as infants, but at the Badger business was slow. For a while Brassey even shut up shop, claiming that the weather had robbed both men and dogs of their appetite for the kill.

  The rats they could not sell Tom put out for Lady. The heat didn't seem to bother her. Methodical as ever, she was, and a quick learner too. Tom taught her all he knew that summer. He showed her where to clamp the rat behind the head when she bit into it so that her teeth pierced its throat and killed it in a single movement. He showed her how to toss her head as she dropped it so that the corpse might be cast aside, out of the way. All the tricks of the trade. And every night he washed out her mouth with peppermint-water to stop the canker coming on and fed her with meat soaked in a little milk to strengthen her muscles. She lay across his legs and panted, her tongue pink as her eyes, Tom's hand upon her head. When he laid her on the bed to sleep his trousers were damp from the heat of her.

  At last, as the days shortened, the rain came. As it pitted the brown surface of the river the people poured out of their cramped lanes and courtyards and flowed through the muddy streets. Bad as the rats they were, scrabbling and scrambling and pushing, not even knowing where they was going but bent upon going there all the same. And as for the sewers, why, they was almost as busy. Tom could barely believe what he saw. The rain stopped them for a while. You couldn't go down when the rain was heavy. But once the floods receded there were men of all kinds down there day and night. Small wooden sheds with tarpaulin lids sprouted over gratings and manholes. Often Tom caught the echo of voices and had to retreat into the darkness or take a different path. You couldn't rely on the flushers to help you out no more neither. There had been a time when the flushers had known what was what, when them and the toshers had rubbed along together well enough. One of the old gangers over Bermondsey way had even been on the tosh himself when he was a lad. It was only when his old man died and the business wasn't so good that he'd gone over to the flushing, tempted by the regular wage. The two of them weren't so different when it came to it, Tom reckoned, both of them making their livings by knowing the tunnels like the backs of their hands and sorting out what got itself stuck there, only because they wasn't in competition or nothing there wasn't no need for trouble. The same way the flushers helped the tosh by making sure the tunnels didn't block up or collapse, the toshers cleaned out the overflows and kept down the rats. It was true that the flushing had the advantage of being lawful but it wasn't as if flushers were the kind of folks that had much affection for the law. When it came to a choice between a tosher and a trap the sensible flusher knew whose side he was on.

  Until now. Something about the elegant company they were suddenly keeping had gone to the flushers' heads. Or perhaps it was the newspapers, trumpeting on fit to bust about the triumphal glories of civilization and all that whatnot. Time was, you only had to worry about the peelers or the johnnies on the water. Now the flushers were worse than both put together. The boatmen and the coppers only got the whiff of you if you were fool enough to let them. They had to see your lantern from the river or through a grating, or spot you as you were slipping in and out. But the flushers were right there in the tunnels with you. If a flusher heard something suspicious he'd go after it. And any flusher worth his salt knew the tunnels well as you did. If he was fixed on finding you and had the time for it, you were in trouble. All you could do was to go slow and steady and hope to the Almighty that if you got too close they were with their fancy gents. There wasn't any flusher who'd risk leaving them alone with naught but a lantern for company. A gent'd scream bloody blue murder.

  It was around the time of the shooting star they called Donati's Comet that Limping Gil and two of his men got hauled up and given three months in Mill-bank.

  'The sky lit up like Moses & Son, folks on every bridge and street corner, and what does he do?'Joe scoffed when he heard the news. 'He couldn't have showed himself up more clear if he'd gone to Parliament and asked 'em directions.'

  Tom laughed but he was uneasy. The back of his neck prickled, the way it did when something wasn't right. And then a week later the two of them almost got done for under Newgate. They were in the cavern where the rats bred, had their crates open and all. There was barely time to pull the basket into the shadows. The flushers had open lanterns and they swung them about, splattering light into all the safe corners. They'd have been fingered for sure except that all of a sudden the cornered rats had got it in their heads to fly at the intruders like a swarm of wild bees.

  'Those dumb beasts don't know which side their bread's buttered,' Joe remarked dryly when he and Tom finally emerged on to the street. 'Taking our side? Anyone'd think they was after getting themselves topped.'

  But they were both more cautious after that. They didn't say anything to each other but both of them knew what the other was thinking. Bit by bit the sewers were shutting themselves up tight as mussels and there wasn't nothing could be done about it. They might be able to eke it out for another year or two but, the way things were headed, with the sluice-gates and the gents and the flushers on the nab, it was only a matter of time before the business would be gone. It wasn't so bad for Joe. He knew a few men from his days on the pure, he might be able to find something in the way of work in the tan-yards even it was just hauling skins. But Tom was too old. He'd made good money in his day, from the rats especially, but it wasn't the way of toshers to be prudent with their haul or to hold something back for a rainy day. You went in, you got what you could, you spent it, and when your belly and your pockets were empty and the landlord needed paying you went back in. The sewers would always be there, that's the way the toshers had it figured, ready to give up their prizes to them that knew the game. Only now it seemed they'd figured it wrong.

  Except Tom had Lady. The night after they burned the effigy of Guy Faux at Vauxhall Tom took her to the Black Badger. When he told Brassey he would be putting a dog of his own into the ring the proprietor merely shrugged. He was distracted. That day he'd had word that, after a long absence, the Captain was due to return. Hastily he scrawled Lady's name on a grimy piece of paper and nodded towards an empty bench.

  'She's good,' Tom said quietly.

  'Is it?' Brassey shrugged carelessly. His eyes were pinned on the door. 'Well, throw it up there when the time comes. It can go in if there's interest enough.'

  'Ain't that pink beast old Jeremiah's bitch?' one man asked another as the room filled up, jabbing a finger in Lady's direction. In his grubby choker and torn frock-coat he had the disgruntled whiff of a clergyman fallen on hard times. His face was veined with blue like Stilton cheese.

  His associate, a costermonger who smelled strongly of tainted meat, shook his head as he squeezed Lady's paws.

  'Can't be. Jerry hopped the twig more than three months back. Anyways his dog had nothing in the way of flesh on its bones. This one's a rum looker, I'll grant you, but there's power in them haunches —'

  At this the costermonger threw a cautious glance over his shoulder and dropped his voice to a whisper.

  A little later Brassey skipped over to the door. The Captain had arrived. Again he was accompanied by his narrow-faced friend who looked, to Tom's reckoning, even thinner than before.

  'You'd better have some killers here tonight, Frank. Some fresh blood.' The Captain smiled, baring his teeth. 'I have no wish to be disappointed again.'

  'Captain, Captain, disappointed? With the sport we have for you tonight?' Brassey oozed, his neckless head rolling in its socket. 'I hardly think so.'

  His toad smile stretched wide. But when he spun round to seize his boy by the scruff of the neck, it shrivelled like it'd been sprinkled with salt. If the upstairs room was not open in two minutes, he hissed into the lad's ear, punishments would rain down upon his head like all the judgements of Hell.

  Pointing the way with his toes, Brassey led the Captain to his box. But the Captain wouldn't sit. Instead, cheered by his companion who shrieked and clutched his handkerchief to his mouth like a lady prone to the faint, he c
limbed into the pit. Pushing Brassey's lad aside, he began to yank the rats one by one from their crate by their tails. The omnibus driver cautioned him against being bitten but he took not the least notice. When one of the creatures attempted to scramble up his leg he snatched it off and tossed it into the air.

  'Get off of me, you varmint,' he snarled and, kicking out with a boot while the creature was still in mid-air, sent it flying across the pit where it landed with a dull smack against the far wall. A loud cheer went up from the Fancy. The Captain gave a bow and, kicking out at two more rats that sniffed at the cuff of his trouser, climbed out of the pit and snapped his fingers.

  'Come on!' he growled. His face was flushed and he leaned so far forward over the pit that the gas-lamps lit flames in his dark eyes. 'Let's have it.'

  The first dog wasn't up to much, nor the second neither, come to that. Angrily the Captain summoned a couple of dependable owners and demanded that they put their animals into the ring. Reluctantly they shook their heads, claiming their dogs to be out of sorts or not yet ready for such big ones. The Captain's face darkened. Grabbing his friend's cane he swung its round silver top hard at the milling rats. It wasn't long before he caught one on the skull. The creature staggered across the pit and collapsed.