The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  On the bridge he paused, looking down at the brown water. The river was busy with coal barges and brightly coloured hoys, laden with straw, stately as little swans beside the great steamers which, despite their size, seemed always to be engaged in racing one another, their bells ringing and their wheels churning frantically while, all the while, their funnels belched smoke as though they were panting for breath. Above their racket, carried on the strong westerly breeze, came the shouts of the labourers and the striking of metal as the men toiled on the new Westminster Bridge. The river was choppy, whipped up by wind and paddle. The clouds were gathering in dark fat worms along the edges of the sky, there would be rain before nightfall, but for now the red winter sun glinted on its churned surface, so that it sparked and flashed like a blacksmith's anvil. He had written May's message down, so as not to forget it, and the envelope was heavy in his pocket. This morning he had thought to post it but the news of the bayonet had changed his mind. May would hang next week, his name a synonym for wickedness to be whispered with greedy disgust in taverns and coffee-houses and drawing-rooms across the metropolis. His wife deserved more than a hastily scribbled note.

  York-street was a narrow uncobbled street of terraced cottages squeezed on the diagonal between two noisy thoroughfares. It was as if, Rose thought, the houses had been nailed and glued into their rows before being brought here, only to discover upon arrival that the calculations had been inaccurate and they were too long for the space originally allotted them. Naturally there was not a builder in London who would have allowed so finicky a detail to deter them and so the street had been wedged in all the same, triangles of rough ground sprouting at either edge like fraying cloth where the seams did not line up. For the most part the houses were small but respectable, their paintwork fresh and their front steps scrubbed. But towards the far end of the street there was something of a commotion, shouts and tea chests spilling out on to the street. As Rose drew closer he saw that the door to number eight stood open, and two boys with faces Rose would have been unsurprised to see peering over the rim of the dock ran to and fro, boxes and crates balanced precariously against their narrow chests. Already there was a stack of possessions set upon the pavement. A bentwood chair accommodated a chipped china jug without a bowl and a sampler bearing the words HOME SWEET HOME. Rose hesitated, his fingers very lightly tracing the silky knots of the words.

  'What the blazes d'you think you're doing?'

  Rose looked up guiltily. A woman stood in the doorway. Her chestnut hair straggled around her face and her caramel eyes were ringed with purple shadows. An apron held in the waist of her shapeless dress. Behind her a small boy sought refuge in her skirt, his little hands kneading the sprigged cotton into balls.

  'Mrs May?'

  The woman narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

  'Who are you?'

  'Rose. Sydney Rose. I'm representing your husband.'

  The woman frowned, placing one hand on the boy's blond head and drawing him closer to her.

  'I'm his lawyer,' Rose added. 'I saw your husband yesterday. He asked me to come. With a message.'

  He fumbled in his pocket. The woman's mouth tightened as though it had been pulled together with a drawstring.

  'Message isn't much good. It's money we need. Don't suppose he sent any of that, did he?'

  'I'm afraid not.'

  'Go on then,' the woman said brusquely, not moving from the step, but Rose was sure that she trembled. 'What's the message?'

  'Might I come inside?'

  'Hardly seems necessary with most of what we got out here,' she said but her voice had lost its sharpness and she stood aside to let him in before showing him into a small parlour. There was no furniture. The floor had been swept but the walls were marked in places where candles had left their sooty traces. Rose stood awkwardly in the centre of the room, his red hands clamped behind his back. The little boy had followed them into the parlour. While he did not relinquish his grip on his mother's skirt he no longer hid his face. Instead held his head stiffly erect, his feet set slightly ahead of his mother's as if he hoped to shield her from the force of whatever Rose might say, and he stared at Rose unblinkingly. He had the same wide-set toffee-coloured eyes as his mother, Rose thought. She must have been a pretty woman once, before she grew old and lost hope. Rose cleared his throat, his Adam's apple catching uncomfortably on the starched rim of his too-tight collar. The woman plaited her fingers together and stared intently at them, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

  'Your husband asked me to tell you that he loves you,' he rushed, without preamble. 'That he's sorry for all the trouble he's caused.'

  'That's it, is it?' The woman did not look up.

  'Not quite. He said he was planning you a beautiful garden. Something about milkwort, I think, and sweet william, although I fear I misheard.' Rose grimaced apologetically. 'I'm afraid I am a terrible ignoramus when it comes to flowers.'

  For a moment the woman stood so still Rose was alarmed she might have fainted. Then she covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook. Rose took a step forward and placed one of his red hands gently beneath her right elbow.

  'Mrs May, I'm so terribly sorry —'

  He waited for her to compose herself, to look up, but her hands remained pressed over her face. She made no sound. The little boy gazed up at her intently, stroking her leg through the shabby cloth of her skirt.

  'Mrs May, perhaps you should sit?' Rose cast around for a chair. 'Perhaps on the stairs?'

  Gently he steered her out of the parlour and into the narrow hall. From the room at the back of the house came a thin high cry, like the wail of a kitten. The boy glanced anxiously towards the noise but his mother paid it no heed. She sat on the stairs silently for a long time. The boy laid his head in her lap. Then, at last, she took her hands away from her face and, wiping her eyes on her apron, sent the child to the kitchen.

  'They'll hang him, won't they?' she asked when he had gone, her voice soft but almost steady.

  'I think so.' Rose faltered, twisting his fingers painfully behind his back. 'They've found the knife, you see. Hidden beneath his desk in Greek-street.'

  'No.' Polly shook her head, her forehead creased with disbelief. 'No. That's not possible.'

  'I'm sorry —'

  'But you don't understand. It's not possible.'

  'I know how difficult this must be for you, Mrs May —'

  'No!' Polly's head jerked up. 'They can't have found the knife. I — I — it's not the knife. It can't be.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because I have it.'

  Rose stared at her.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'I have it. William's knife. The one he had with him that night. It was in his pocket when those policemen brought him home. I found it. I — I was afraid. In case they came back. I buried it. In the flour bin. I didn't know what else to do.'

  'And you still have it?'

  'Yes. After that I locked up all the knives. So — so he'd be safe.'

  'Might I see the knife? Please?'

  Polly nodded. She tried to pull herself up by the banister but suddenly the blood drained from her face and she doubled over, clutching at her stomach.

  'Are you quite well?' Rose asked anxiously.

  Carefully, Polly straightened up.

  'Come with me,' she said.

  The kitchen was not yet entirely packed up, although the small space was crowded with boxes and baskets. The boy was staring into one, poking its contents with a finger. Polly thrust her hands into the flour bin. The dust rose obediently, settling on her arms and whitening her already pale face.

  'Here.'

  She handed him something wrapped in an old handkerchief. Flour sprinkled his shoes as he unwrapped it. A knife. Flour clung to the blade. Rose made to brush it off.

  'There's blood on it, Mrs May.'

  'He used to cut himself.' Polly glanced towards the boy and swallowed. Her voice was almost inaudible. 'I don't know why.'
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  'Did he ever use a bayonet?'

  Polly closed her eyes, steadying herself on the edge of the range.

  'Mrs May, I shouldn't —'

  'He could not have taken a knife back to Greek-street, Mr Rose. He came straight here from the sewers that night. That knife was in his pocket. After that I kept all of our knives locked up. As for a bayonet —' Polly's face softened at the memory. She was still pretty, thought Rose. And hardly older than him. 'We threw his into the river. Together. A few months after he came home. We might have got something for it, if we'd sold it, but he said that knowing it was rusting at the bottom of the Thames would help put that terrible time behind him. He was getting better, you see. He was almost well.'

  Again the thin reedy cry. The boy pulled his hand hurriedly from the basket.

  'She's hungry, mother.'

  Polly reached into the basket and lifted out a bundle, crooning gently. The cry came again. Polly began to sing very softly, a lullaby Rose had never heard before. He felt a tug at the leg of his trousers. He looked down into the boy's caramel eyes.

  'That's my new sister,' the boy said. 'Her name's Edith. She's coming with me to live with my Uncle Maurice. In Kent. That's in the country.'

  'Is she now?'

  The boy nodded.

  'Mother's coming too, soon as she can. So we can be all three together. Three's a lucky number, Mother says.' He gazed at the baby, his eyes wide with fear and pride. 'That's why the baby has three names. Not just Edith. Edith Elizabeth Violet.'

  It was raining hard by the time Rose left York-street. The two boys scrambled to pile the last boxes into the waiting wagon but the bentwood chair was still where they had left it, a bead of rain lingering uncertainly on the spout of the chipped jug. The silk threads of the sampler bled faint streams of colour into their linen ground. Rose pulled up his collar. All along the river, as the grey rain flung itself into his face, he practised the words, addressing himself with stern intransigence. This time he did not intend to be brushed off.

  The policeman grumbled under his breath as he heaved the box of papers on to the table. The papers were nothing but routine, he said. No one had thought them worth keeping. They contained only information that might easily be verified by any number of gentlemen at the Board. That said, they was private papers and the policeman was not at liberty to release them into Rose's custody. They were to be returned to the Board's offices the following morning.

  'Then I shall deliver them there myself,' Rose informed him, lifting the box. 'Once I have satisfied myself to their contents.'

  'Look here, you can't just —'

  'Oh, I think you'll find I can. Thank you, sir. You have been most helpful.'

  The policeman's moustache twitched but he made no move to stop him. Rose folded himself around the carton. It was heavy and unwieldy and Rose was not a strong man. But as he walked down the steps of the police station, the rain dripping from his nose and running in cold streams down the back of his coat, Rose's step was unnaturally light.

  XXVII

  Prisoners were not given chloral. The first two days without it were terrible. William's heart had raced, his limbs twitching and jumping in their iron fetters. His tongue was a wad of wool in his parched mouth. He was tormented by pain, by elusive terrors that, if he ceased for a moment in his vigilance against them, crept upwards through the soles of his feet and breathed their cold black breath down the nape of his neck. His head screeched and throbbed. He dared not sleep. The scrabblings of the rats in the straw made him start up in fear. Much of the day he spent hunched over, squatting over his rusty bucket, clutching desperately at the cramps that twisted his gut as his skin oozed a cold greasy sweat that stood out upon his forehead and congealed in his hair. No one emptied the bucket. No one spoke to him. His meals, such as they were, were passed on a bent metal dish through the trap in the door. At first William could not stop himself from calling out to the attendant, begging for a dose of the sedative, but there was never a reply. The trap opened, the food was pushed through, the trap was shut. If William tried to speak it was slammed. Three times a day this ritual was repeated. The food was meagre and consisted mostly of hard bread and a thin flavourless soup but William found himself longing for it, not so much because he was hungry but because he found himself comforted by the familiar blunt shape of the dirty hand that held out the dish. In those first days it was the only contact he had with another human being.

  On the third day, or perhaps it was the fourth, he had woken to the clank of a prisoner being taken in irons from the cells. It was morning, he guessed. He had slept, perhaps for several hours. His head felt clear, the pounding headache no more than a fading bruise behind his eyes. If he kept his head still he might almost imagine it gone. His heart pumped quietly, evenly, in his chest. He held his hand in front of his face. It did not tremble. Carefully William took a deep breath. The stench from his bucket choked him. When his breakfast came William called to the attendant and asked for it to be emptied. The trap slammed shut. But an hour later it opened again, the familiar blunt hand folding itself over the iron slot. Each ragged nail was finished with a perfect curve of grime. William raised his head a little from his knees.

  'Well, well. You got a visitor.'

  Polly, he thought, and the thought exploded like a scarlet firework in his chest. He strained for the first sound of her sweet voice. Instead he heard the tentative voice of a young man and saw, through the slot, another hand, clean this time but red and raw, all knuckles and joints. Sydney Rose. His lawyer, courtesy of the Crown.

  'Good luck to yer,' he had heard the attendant mutter with a low laugh. 'Gawd knows yer's goin' to need it.'

  That afternoon William had talked until he was hoarse. The lawyer had seemed competent enough. But after the lawyer left he had felt hollow, the underside of his ribs bruised with misery. Dread too. He hadn't been afraid before. The asylum, the gaol, even the gallows, they had held no terror for him for all the fear he felt had been for himself, for what he might be capable of. He had believed himself mad. He had known himself mad. There was a devil within him, a devil that had buried itself in the darkest corners of his heart, a devil that poisoned his blood and stopped his eyes and ears and stole his hands so that it might commit crimes of unbearable horror in William's name. He had seen the certainty in other people's eyes, the detectives and the doctors and the lawyer too behind his iron mask. They stared at him and the disgust and the moral outrage and the fascination had combined to stretch their eyes and flood their mouths with saliva. They none of them had any doubt that he had killed Alfred England.

  Chained in his cell as his body screamed out for chloral, William had struggled to smooth out the shaking sweating wreck of his thoughts but they slipped and jerked beneath his fingers, refusing to hold their shape. He would remember, he told himself, and he implored himself to believe it. He would remember if he had killed a man. At Inkerman he had killed a man, two men. The Russians had crept up on his tent in the thick fog and stabbed their bayonets through the canvas. The engineer who slept beside him had woken to find a blade penetrating his neck. Still stupid with sleep William had stumbled outside and, in his underclothes, had stabbed a Russian soldier between his shoulder blades as he crouched to reload his musket. Later, much later, he had killed another man but by then the carnage had distorted things so incomprehensibly that it had seemed almost ordinary. The first, that was different. William remembered every detail of it still, the pull on his shoulders as he raised the bayonet, the dull thud as he thrust the blade through the man's grey greatcoat, the way the man's back jerked, the gurgle in the man's throat, the force required to wrestle his blade free, the blood that bloomed like a flower across the rough cloth as the Russian fell sideways on to the mud. The man's thin ordinary face had been twisted with astonishment, his scabbed lips parted. He looked no different from a thousand British soldiers. William had vomited then, but hurriedly, wiping the blade of his bayonet on a tussock of grass as he doubled over
. The screams and curses were all around him, lumps of sound in the fog. Blindly William stabbed, plunging his bayonet over and over into the man's chest. The blood ran between his fingers. The memory of it curdled William's stomach and he dug his nails into his palms, forcing it away. He could not have killed England, he pleaded with himself over and over. He could not possibly have forgotten.

  The day the lawyer came was the first day his thoughts lay smoothly, without rucking and tearing beneath his fingers. They were flimsy but they held their shape, hemmed with the first threads of certainty. In the asylum the chloral had dulled his senses, suppressing thought and appetite. Now hunger shrivelled his belly but it prised open the fissures of his brain, letting in light. Letting in fear. For the first time since he had been brought to the ship he understood that he did not want to die. He longed to move unfettered, to breathe untainted air, to wash the matted grime from his hair. He thought of Polly, of Di, and, as he longed for them, he twisted his chains into tight knots, grinding his shins and his wrists hard against the rough edges of the irons. They were too blunt to draw blood but the pain calmed him.

  He had asked Rose to return the following day. All that morning William waited, laying out his memories one by one and turning each one over and over, just as he had done in his notebook in the days after the murder. This time there was no possibility of paper and ink but as he forced himself to remember, his head tipped intently, he laid out a straw for each recalled scrap of sound, laying them like the rungs of a ladder on the floor next to him. When the Russian memories threatened, and the sucking thud of knife in flesh rose in his ears, he thrust them away. He had only to focus on that night. There had to be something he had forgotten. Something hidden inside those husks of sound, in the scrapes and the splashes and the squelches and the groans. Something that would hold.