The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  Tom peered suspiciously at the document that the Captain held out to him. There was fancy lettering at the top of it and a stamp and a seal, both marked with the same pattern. There were two parts to the writing, both done in thick black ink. Tom could not make head nor tail of it.

  'I don't hold with no papers,' Tom muttered.

  'Come now, that will have to change now you are a man of means,' the Captain said and the gaslight flashed on the sharp points of his teeth. 'The law is no longer an adversary to a fellow but must become his friend, when he has money. Is that not so, Mr Brassey?'

  Brassey nodded, revolving his head in his shoulders, and the smile twitched across his face.

  'Indeed it is, sir,' he agreed eagerly. 'Indeed it is.'

  'I am quite sure Mr Brassey is familiar with documents of this kind. But perhaps you would prefer to look it over first on your account?'

  Tom stared at the paper and the black letters jumped and scattered across its creamy surface like ants. Forty guineas! Forty guineas was a fortune in itself and he could see nothing suspicious about the papers, being as they were awash with stamps and wax and signatures and the like. But the back of his neck prickled and he held Lady tight, her solid warmth against his chest.

  'I want my money,' he said again, doggedly. 'All of it.'

  'Ah,' exhaled the Captain. 'Well, of course you do.' He weighed the bag of money in his hand. 'And naturally it must be your decision whether or not you accept my terms. Either you accept one hundred guineas over three weeks or — well, let us just say that I would consider very carefully whether I might not be able to strike a more advantageous deal with someone else.' He squeezed the purse one last time and made to put it back in his pocket. 'I am surprised you would consider passing up so considerable a sum. However, as I say, it is for you to decide.'

  'Tom!' urged Brassey, his eyes swivelling. 'You're offending the Captain. It ain't a handful of ha'pence now. This contract was drawn up by proper lawyers, in a court of law. Watertight, far as I can see. Straight as a die. Look here, I'm for signing my part right now.'

  'Good man, good man.' The Captain slapped Brassey jovially on the shoulder. 'Tom?'

  Lady licked Tom's ear, her breath hot and metalled with blood. Sudden as you like, Tom thrust her out in front of him, half dropping her into the surprised arms of the Captain. The Captain recoiled and dropped her hastily to the floor. Tom didn't look at her. He couldn't.

  'Take her. Just take her.' He thrust his hand out and the Captain placed the purse upon it. 'I want them papers, mind.'

  'Of course you do.'

  The Captain signed with a flourish and passed the pen to Tom. He hesitated, the pen held aloft.

  'And if you don't pay me I get her back.'

  'Assuredly.'

  Jabbing at the paper as if he'd run it through, Tom made his own clumsy mark.

  'Excellent,' the Captain said briskly. 'I believe we are done here. Tom, I shall see you a week from today with the next payment. It has been a pleasure to do business with you. Brassey, take the dog. I shall send someone for it in the morning.'

  Brassey caught Lady by the collar and, his toad's face compressed with distaste, made to pull her out of the parlour. She dug in her heels, staring at Tom with an expression of bewildered appeal. Tom turned away from her towards the fire, staring hard at the dusty figure of Beauty in her glass case. His mouth was dry as dust. He heard Brassey summon his boy and instruct him to install Lady in the scrap of yard at the back of the tavern but he did not turn around. There was the scrape of her claws on the wooden boards and at last the boy's heavy footfalls as he clumped along the stone floor of the tavern's narrow back passage. It seemed strange to him that he could hear any of it at all, so loud was the roaring in his ears. The weight pressed down upon his chest, leaden as a dead man, so he couldn't hardly breathe. And, all of a sudden, he was back there, at Cuckold's Point, barely more than a boy, and the Thames mud was sucking him down, sucking him down as he floundered and scrabbled for anything with the faintest purchase until the mud clamped his ribs together and pushed down on his shoulders and he was looking at the sky and tasting the mud and the shit in his mouth and waiting for the feel of it packing his nostrils and his eyes and pressing into all his private corners until it had taken every last trace of warmth and breath and life and filled him instead from front to back and top to bottom with thick and stinking muck, rotting him away from the inside until he was as black and cold and dark and rotten as ever it was.

  The purse containing the forty guineas was heavy. He'd not held so great a sum of money in his whole life. He weighed it in his hand as the Captain had weighed it and it gave him a hot respectful little shiver in his chest. Forty guineas. He rolled the words around his mouth, savouring their cold sweet taste. Next week there would be thirty more. And the week after that. The candle flame in his chest grew brighter, pushing back the shadows. He squeezed the purse tightly in his fist until the coins pressed uncomfortably into the palm of his hand and then, as the Captain had done, he buried the purse in the concealed pocket of his canvas coat and patted it. The weight of it tugged at his coat and he could've sworn it gave off a faint golden glow, warming his old bones. The papers he secreted in another corner of the hem. He'd stash them down in the tunnels with the others, where they'd be safe. One hundred guineas. His face twitched into a smile. It was time to go home. Natural as breathing, he snapped his fingers and held out his palm. He had glanced impatiently at the floor before he remembered. His hand felt big and empty and foolish as he buried it deep in his pocket and closed his fingers tightly around the lumpy bulk of the purse. Then, together, he and the guineas made their way homeward.

  XVII

  In accordance with his agreement with Polly, William made no mention of a murder to the authorities when he returned to work at the offices in Greek-street immediately after Christmas. Indeed he said little of anything to anyone and instead hid himself in his narrow carrel, speaking only when spoken to. Even then it was often necessary to touch him upon the shoulder so that he might realize that he was being addressed. As he bent over his work, he pressed his pencil downwards with such force that the lead snapped and the blotter beneath his paper was carved with a perfect facsimile of his calculations. His face had a sickly pallor, save for the dark smudges that stained the skin beneath his eyes, while the eyes themselves were yellowed and bloodshot beneath their heavy lids. As Hawke remarked with interest to Lovick, the illness seemed to have aged the surveyor ten years at the very least. Surely, Hawke added, the burdens of May's position were now likely to prove intolerable to the poor man, particularly given his history of ill health and what might justly — and here Hawke trusted that this was a frank exchange between men of professional integrity — be called downright unsteadiness. Greek-street was not an infirmary, the Board hardly a charitable institution for convalescents. Should not some other surveyor be appointed in his place?

  Lovick, who disliked Hawke and privately harboured grave doubts as to his professional integrity, was forced to agree. May was clearly unwell. He therefore had the surveyor discharged from his underground duties. He did not, however, dismiss him. Instead he reassigned William to the group of men responsible for the construction of the pumping station at Abbey Mills where all three northern intercepting sewers would combine. Bazalgette's careful ingenuity of design ensured that the high- and the middle-level sewers discharged to the east by gravitation alone but, in order for the stream from the lower-level sewer to converge with its fellows, its entire contents had to be pumped upwards more than fourteen feet to meet the other streams before the aggregate river could flow along an outfall sewer, to be built above ground across the marshes, to a reservoir just west of Barking Creek. To that end Bazalgette had commissioned James Watt & Co. to build eight vast beam engines to his particular specifications. He also designed a building to accommodate them and to provide access to the vast tunnel system required by the confluence of the three huge and separate sewers.
r />   There might have been little difficulty in the design and construction of a structure that would adequately fulfil its practical function, although the sheer weight of the vast coal-powered beam engines would ensure it was the source of headaches amongst the surveyors and builders charged with its execution. A simple matter of walls and a roof would likely have sufficed, with ladders to provide access to the upper reaches of the engines. But, for Bazalgette and the Board, the pumping station was invested with considerably greater significance than a lodging house for pumps and gauges. London had committed more than three million pounds to the overhaul of its drainage system. A new threepenny tax had been introduced to finance the scheme. Every property owner in London owned a little stretch of the eighty-odd miles of new tunnels that had begun to bury themselves under the metropolis. Along with its sister structure at Crossness, which would serve the southern sewer system, Bazalgette was determined that the edifice at Abbey Mills was to stand as a monument to the greatest and most costly feat of engineering that the world had ever known, but which almost no one in the world would ever be privileged to see, a magnificent emblem for a system that, by dint of its function, would always be unromantic, unattractive and underground.

  Bazalgette's drawings for Abbey Mills depicted a magnificent building in the Venetian Gothic style, a cross-shaped brick-built structure crowned with a spectacular cupola and flanked by two vast chimneys, each over two hundred feet high. The brickwork was to be extravagantly patterned, employing three different tones of brick as well as stone covings intricately carved with fruits and flowers, while the interior was dominated by an octagonal structure of iron columns with richly ornamented capitals, supporting an elaborately wrought iron gallery. It would have been impossible for William not to be cognizant of the grandeur of the design but, unlike his fellows, he found himself quite indifferent to its charms. He concentrated instead on the logistical demands of the building. There was much to be calculated. In order to pump the stream efficiently it was necessary for the beam engines to be set directly over the tunnel system, which, given that the flywheels alone were proposed to weigh in at over fifty tons each, made for considerable difficulties. William set about his work with dogged determination but joylessly, as though the beam engines were an occupying army by whom he had been captured and enslaved. All the same he derived some consolation from the methodical columns of figures that marched across the page in front of him. In his carrel he was, if nothing else, safe. Outside, in the street, without the figures to hold him steady, he found himself frequently lost or confused. The wound in his leg had not healed well and he walked awkwardly, rickety on the rutted ground. The thick winter fogs panicked him. Faces loomed out of the darkness like the ghosts of murdered men. Once he wandered directly into the path of an omnibus and would certainly have been knocked down had a sharp-eyed crossing-sweeper not snatched at his sleeve and dragged him to safety. He purchased a knife for the gutting of fish from the Italian scissor-grinder in Broad-street and concealed it in a locked drawer in his desk. The cuts were shallow, barely more than scratches, but their patterns were frantic and he embellished them daily.

  His new companions, claiming for themselves a considerably loftier position in the Commission's hierarchy than they allowed the tunnel crews, left him alone. It was their habit to take their midday meal together at a coffee-house on Dean-street but, after William declined their first reluctant suggestion that he accompany them, they were glad to be relieved of the obligation to extend the invitation again. Instead William ate his lunch alone and, every day, as he ate, he forced his memory to walk again through the same sewers he had walked on that terrible night, his senses straining for every remembered sound and smell that might tell him something, anything, of what had happened. If he could remember, he told himself again and again, he was not mad. He would show Polly that he was not mad. And so he clung to memory, as a miner might cling to a rope, so that it might lead him safely out of the darkness. He no longer carried his botany journal with him. He hardly knew where it was. Instead he kept a leather-bound notebook in which he wrote down the faintest scrap of recollection. Soon he had covered almost half its pages with his closely scribbled notes. Very slowly, fragment by fragment, a picture was emerging. He looked at it aslant, through faltering eyes, at the same time thrilled and terrified by what he might be about to see.

  He mentioned it to no one. There was no one he could talk to. He no longer had any wish to speak of it with Polly. Something in the way she had looked at him the night that she had spat at him to keep his mouth shut about the murder had cut him adrift from her. Each evening that followed, the gulf that separated them grew wider until William was certain that, even as they sat on either side of the kitchen fire, she with her head bent over her mending, he staring unseeingly at a book in his lap, he could have shouted himself hoarse and still she would have been unable to hear a single syllable. He could not forget the rasping bitterness with which she had rounded on him, the way the skin had stretched and tightened across her white face. That face. It loomed like a winter moon over the dark night of his memory, the eyes closed, the nostrils clamped and bloodless, the mouth and neck twisted away from him in disgust, as though the very sight of him was intolerable to her.

  He revolted her. William had seen it quite clearly, scored into every rigid filament of that white face. He disgusted her and he frightened her. She thought his frailty abhorrent, a cowardly and deplorable submission to a foe that, with only a little grit and effort, he might have been able to overcome without difficulty. But at the same time she feared his strength, the terrible courage that drove him to plunge a knife into his own flesh. She looked at him and she could not bear it, that the rock upon which she had built her life had crumbled into sand. Her husband, who had represented for her all that was steady and grave and wise, who had, for the love of her, willingly borne the weight of both their worlds upon his shoulders that she might dance and spin through life unencumbered by anything more substantial than a flower tucked behind her ear, her husband had allowed himself to be broken. And he would take her with him because that was the way of things. It was not only, or even primarily, a matter of prosperity or good character. Polly had become used to the security provided by William's wages, to the comforts of their little home, to the elevated status that came with having a girl to do the worst of the work. She enjoyed her new-found respectability. But, no stranger to life's vicissitudes, she could have reconciled herself to the loss of it all, she could have withstood any number of physical hardships, as long as she might believe herself happy. All her life she had meant to be happy. She had thought it the easiest, most natural thing in the world. To Polly, happiness was like goodness. It always won. It might be tested, just as the virtuous children in stories were tested, so that it might prove itself true, but, like goodness, if those that upheld it turned their faces resolutely against those who would have it corrupted, happiness would invariably triumph.

  The Russian War had been such a test. But Polly had waited and forborne until, as she had known they would, the warm rays of happiness and hope chased away the grey ghosts of William's war just as the sun burned off the early morning mist. They had been happy again, for a while. But now the misery drifted from him and around him like a poisonous black miasma, infecting all that it touched. Her laughter could not light it. Her sweet kisses were turned to soot. Her cheerful words and snatches of song were returned to her unheard, stripped of merriment and meaning. It was too strong for her, and too cruel. And so her laughter hardened and her lips too, so that they might no longer shape themselves into kisses. The songs caught in the back of her throat and made her cough. In the shadowed darkness of his unhappiness she lost sight not only of her husband but of herself.

  All this William saw and he wrote it all in his notebook. Every day he scoured the newspapers for information that might pertain to the events of that night. There were no reports of a body recovered from the sewers, no mention of a missing person. But Will
iam's certainty continued to grow. He was not mad. There had been a murder. In the tunnels that night a man had been killed. Somewhere in the system there would be a body. Given the change in his circumstances it would be difficult for him to find a legitimate reason to go down into the tunnels himself but there were others that might. There were pretexts that could always be found, the checking of measurements or a householder who had complained to the Board of subsidence. He was still involved a little with the Strowbridge contract. Hastily he summoned Donald Hood, one of the apprentices, and instructed him to carry out a precise examination of the stretch of tunnels that extended from Regent-circus to Seven-dials. He wished for a written report by the end of the week.

  By Thursday there was still no word from Hood. That night William sat in his carrel long after the last of the engineers had gone home and stared at his notebook. Somehow he had heard a man die. Drowning? he wrote first, and then, beneath it, Strangulation? It was considerably later, as he rehearsed the man's soft gurgle over and over in his head, that he understood he had made a mistake. Striking both words out he paused and then wrote in thick black pencil, pressing very hard, Throat cut. He underlined it twice.

  For a long time he stared at the words he had written. More than anything, he wanted to hold time still, to sit here quietly, the voices silent in his head, and to defer forever the moment when he must rise and put on his greatcoat and go home to see once again the disgust and the horror etched into the soft curves of her face. But time would not be stopped and the voices would not quieten. At last, William picked up his pencil and wrote the words that until that moment he had not permitted himself to think.

  She believes I killed him.