The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  A brazier lit up the small window of the watchman's hut with a cosy glow but the lodging house was dark, its sooty façade set into its habitual disapproving scowl. Rose hesitated. His heart was as cold as a stone in his chest. The Abbey Dining Rooms would be warm. They served boiled mutton on a Friday, and jam pudding. He had not eaten since breakfast and he suffered from severe headaches when he went too long without food. Rose knew it would be prudent to eat. But instead he walked towards the river, following it east. At Waterloo Bridge he paid his halfpence to the man who sat muffled to his nose in the tollbooth. He wanted to keep on walking, to walk and walk until he walked clear of the city and the miserable sooty chill of another failed day. He did not have the letter. Likely he would not get it. He had not even succeeded in gaining access to the tunnels. Huddled in his coat as he leaned over the stone parapet of the bridge Rose felt the hopelessness of the enterprise bearing down upon him. Even if he had managed to persuade someone to take him into the sewers, what then? For pity's sake, neither he nor May had anything but the vaguest notion of what it was he was supposed to be looking for.

  May's map was still in the pocket of his trousers. He fingered it. He had folded and refolded it until it was barely larger than a postage stamp and the corners were sharp. There was almost no traffic on the bridge. The vagrants used the bridge at Southwark where there was no toll. There, even on a night as bitterly cold as this one, they crammed themselves into the recesses in the walls, huddled together for warmth until the police moved them along. But here there was only a single hansom, the coachman so swaddled in his blanket that only the tip of his nose could be seen beneath his hat. He hurried his horse on, his whip cracking like breaking ice.

  Rose sighed, looking down at the river. The tide was running out and the wet slopes of the mudflats glistened stickily, exhaling their winter stink of salt and rotting turnip-tops. The chill insinuated itself up Rose's sleeves and down his collar, pressing itself through the worn fibres of his coat. Hurriedly, he tightened his muffler around his throat and thrust his hands back into his trouser pockets. The folded square of paper jabbed a little at the pad of his thumb. He turned it over in his pocket as he leaned out. A breeze had got up. It played down the length of the river so that the water was chased into little overlapping waves. As the moon slid out from behind a shawl of cloud, casting a pale silver light on the water, they glistened and squirmed. A gigantic black sea monster, Rose thought, that was the Thames, slithering through the city's ditch towards its lair beneath the open sea. A grotesque beast that devoured and half-digested the waste of the largest city in the world, its open maw ceaselessly swallowing its rotting vegetation, its excrement, its dead. Its appetite was voracious, indiscriminate, its tentacles stretching even into the city's bowels to lick at their squalid deposits. A scrap of paper would not trouble it at all. All Rose had to do was to open his fingers and let the square fall on to its powerful back. It would be gone, with a flick of the river's meaty spine, swept beneath London Bridge and alongside the Pool, past the rusting prison-ship at Woolwich. The cells had no windows. It would pass quite unnoticed to the sea, its fibres softening and melting until it was no more than the water itself. Or perhaps Fate, with its taste for the penny dreadfuls, would adhere it to the mouldering underbelly of the prison hulk itself, a letter returned unopened to its sender, addressee unknown. Perhaps it would still be there, clinging to the rough dark metal, when they took May away to Newgate to be hanged. Tell her I am planning her garden.

  Rose shivered. He was chilled to the bone and a headache nudged his right temple. The muscular writhings of the river made him nauseous. Stamping his feet, burying his hands more deeply in his pockets, he walked back the way he had come. The paper was still sharp against the palm of his hand. He clenched it more tightly, finding solace in the discomfort. This time he walked briskly, without thinking. It was with considerable impatience that he encountered a knot of people blocking the narrow lane just short of Inner Temple. The gas-light above them had been turned up so high that it roared and its brutal glare scored the faces beneath it with inky lines of shadow. Muttering to himself Rose made to skirt around them but his attention was caught by a thickset man in a fan-tailed leather cap and high leather boots who stared down between his feet, frowning, a thick disc of iron propped against his leg. Beside him stood a policeman holding another lantern. Rose paused, then pushed a man in a top hat to one side. The policeman held up a warning hand. His palm was square and seamed with grime.

  'Not too close, sir. This ain't a tourist attraction, you know.' He glared at the group of curious onlookers who had already begun to drift away. 'We don't want any accidents.'

  Rose looked down. The round hole in the cobbles measured perhaps twenty inches across. Bolts of iron set into a vertical brick shaft led downwards into the darkness. Rose had a sudden image of Tom, lying in the darkness, his dead body bobbing like a bony white turd in the filthy underground stream, and he felt a twinge of horrified remorse.

  'What — has something happened?' he asked.

  The policeman shrugged and rubbed his lump of a nose with the back of his hand.

  'Constable saw a light through the gratin' up by Kings-court. Obliged to go down after the blighters, ain't we. Regulations.'

  Rose stared at the policeman.

  'The police have access to the sewers?'

  'It's them flushers go down,' the policeman corrected, screwing up his face. 'Gawd 'elp 'em.'

  'But you have the authority to send them down? Any time? You don't need permission from the Board of Works?'

  "Ow else we's'posed to enforce the law?'

  The policemen involved in the May case were more than a little put out by Rose's demands. After the bruising criticism that had accompanied a string of unsolved crimes, the newspapers had been full of praise for the swiftness with which the perpetrator of this particularly grisly offence had been detained. It was late and they wished to go home. Rose's persistence was both unanticipated and unwelcome. The sewer regulations were in place to prevent unlawful entry to the system, they informed Rose loftily, not to facilitate public access. But Rose was importunate, his determination to secure his legal rights as the prisoner's attorney set into stony intransigence by the headache that stabbed at the back of his eyes and by the discomfiting realization that he should have known of them from the outset. For all that the police officers considered his demands as meaningless and as irritating as the buzzing of a horsefly, they had obligations as officers of the law, however onerous and tiresome they might be. When at last they understood that Rose was not to be swatted away, they agreed, with considerable sighing and shaking of heads, that, if Rose settled with one of the gangers upon an appropriate time to enter the system, they would provide two sergeants to accompany him. It cheered the inspector a little to select two of his least favoured men for the unsavoury duty.

  The next morning Rose went as arranged to the excavations at the corner of Hyde Park. He was required to wait for over an hour before the ganger he was to meet emerged from underground. The western end of Piccadilly was closed to traffic and all around him cabs and carriages jostled for space as they tried to find their way through the narrow Mayfair lanes. Where the road had been there was now a rough gash the width of several men, criss-crossed with planking and set all about with a pandemonium of vast scaffolds and beams and cranes. An army of navvies and barrows and horses and steam engines swarmed over and around great heaps of earth and clay and bricks and planks, brandishing pickaxes, spades and hammers, their shouts and clanks lost beneath the thunderous clamour of a machine that appeared intent upon burying itself in the frozen ground. May's world. As the living embodiment of London's engineering pre-eminence it might have raised Rose's dreary spirits but instead the fortifications put him in mind of a giant guillotine, presiding over an open grave. The previous night he had dreamed that, still alive but unable to speak or move, he had watched in frozen horror as an undertaker bound his motionless body in a shroud. He
had woken to find his sheets twisted as tight as a tourniquet around his legs. Everywhere, it seemed, he was surrounded with the presentiment of death. He sighed, his heart heavy, chafing his arms with both hands. Around him the houses sagged wearily against their huge timber props as though they could hardly find the strength to remain upright. The chilly air tasted of earth.

  Rose had expected Harker but the ganger he met was a wiry man with skin weathered to the rough brown of roof shingles. Close on ten of them there were, he told Rose, working all over the city. Naturally he'd do what he could to oblige but there wasn't no chance of getting down till the next day, not now the tide was on the up. You could argue with Parliament itself, if you had a mind to, but you couldn't argue with the tide. Rose bit his lip and his heart sank lower still. Noon on Sunday would hardly leave him time to prepare his case for the Sessions. He would never get into the tunnels now, whatever he did. And, if by some miracle he managed it, there would be nothing there. The entire endeavour was doomed, he understood that now. The realization hardened his resolve. There were two tides daily, he said mulishly to the ganger. Surely they could go down that night. A man's life was at stake. He pulled the scrap of paper that May had drawn upon out of his pocket and handed it to the ganger. The ganger hesitated then. He tipped his leather hat back and rubbed his forehead. Rose crossed his arms, his jaw set with the unflinching obduracy of those who have quite lost hope. The ganger took a long drag of air, his hand cupped over his mouth as though he was pulling on a cigarette. When he nodded it was no more than a jerk of his head. There'd be a supplementary charge to the boys on account of the inconvenience, of course, payable prior to the arrival of the police officers, but it could be managed. Eleven o'clock. Regent's-circus. Any later and they wouldn't wait.

  XXXIV

  'So.' Tom thrust his hands into the cavernous pockets of his coat. A scrawny dog nosed around the ash-heap, its thin grey coat sucked between its protruding ribs. But when it cringed from his boot it was her white face that looked up at him, her snout that sought his palm, and the hole inside of him stretched and ached like hunger. Tonight. Perhaps it would be tonight. He didn't know if he had it in him to wait it out. Beneath his feet the plank bridge bounced a little. 'I hears from Dawson the Captain's expected here tonight.'

  'Mmm. So they say.'

  'Queer he'd come back. What with him in hock to you and all.'

  'Wants to fight the dog. Who can blame him? He'll pay me when he wins.'

  'Cosy.'

  Brassey arched an eyebrow.

  'Shame I can't make it,' Tom added.

  'No?' Brassey's toad eyes narrowed a little. 'That is a shame.'

  'By my reckoning the Captain'll be gutted.'

  Brassey licked his lips uncomfortably.

  'What you talking about? The Captain wouldn't hardly dare show his face if he expected you there, would he? Not given how things stand. Far as he's concerned you're barred.'

  'Oh! So it's us against him, is it now? Well, ain't that nice.'

  Brassey gave a modest little shiver, flexing his slippered foot.

  'Us ordinary folk, we got to stick together, right, Tom? Tell you what. By way of setting things straight I'll even give you the rats back. Penny a pair. What d'you say to that?'

  'You'd not set that in a legal document, now, would you? I got myself a bit of a taste for papers, with all their fancy stamps and signatures and whatnot. After all, rats or sand, what's the odds? Between ordinary folk, that is.'

  Brassey's smile flickered uncertainly.

  'You hear this, Brassey.' All trace of congeniality was gone. 'I ain't coming nowhere near this place tonight. If the Captain wants what I got, he can meet me at the entrance to Adams-lane at midnight. And he'd better bring the dog. You got it?'

  Brassey's head slid forward.

  'Anyone else with him, that's the end of it. You can tell the Captain there's a Mr Rose interested if he ain't. Close as ticks, me and Mr Rose. And Mr Rose'd bite his right hand off for what I've got. If the Captain don't show.'

  'Mr Rose,' Brassey echoed in a whisper.

  'You tell him that, Brassey. Get this right, who knows? P'raps I mightn't come after you for what you done to screw me, you filthy lump of sewer shit!'

  Tom stepped off the end of the plank.

  'Course, I wouldn't reckon yourself out the woods just yet,' Tom added thoughtfully. 'You can't be sure of nothing these days. Not even a lawful covenant.'

  Lifting the plank, he hurled it to one side, leaving Brassey stranded on the threshold behind a sea of mud.

  'By the way. You send anyone with the Captain, or try any tricks on, I'll hack your fingers off one by one and feed them to those rats of yours.' Tom's smile stretched wide as a bulldog's over his dark stumps of teeth. 'I'd even charge you for the pleasure. How does a penny a pair sound to you?'

  XXXV

  William lay on his back in the filthy straw, his fettered legs twisted awkwardly beneath him. It was bitterly cold. Hunger clamped his belly and gnawed at his bones. It made him dizzy to stand. Without his leg irons holding him down he had the strange sensation that he might float upwards, dissipating into the contaminated underwater air like smoke. Since the lawyer's visit his entire body had been given over to imagining the lawyer's investigations, the character references he would elicit on William's behalf, the evidence he would uncover. The justice he would see done. William had gorged himself on hope, ravenously, not knowing that hope was like tainted meat, alive with worms that would in turn sate themselves upon him. But the lawyer had not come back. Now William's chest, his legs, even the bowl of his skull felt quite empty. Far away, out of reach, thoughts moved like distant twists of cloud that cast faint moving shadows and were gone. Even his dreams were thin, tentative things, frail as cobwebs, yielding without protest to the insistent slap of the tide against the ship's hull or the scream of chains as the iron cage was lowered or raised. When in the deathly hours before dawn the ship lapsed into uneasy silence, he talked quietly to himself, drawing comfort from the familiar cadence of his voice, the steady certainty of words. Tongue, breath, sounds, they could not rob him of those. They might chain him like an animal, tethered in his own filth, but he spoke like a man. He murmured the words into his cupped hands, stringing them together like beads, his eyes closed and his breath warm upon his fingers. They bore him forwards, rhythmic and repetitive as the rattling wheels of a steam train. I am alive. All will be well. All will be well. I am alive. William May. William May. William May.

  The lawyer did not return. In the grey gruel half-light of the lower deck, William slid between sleep and wakefulness, barely able to tell one from the other. Time slipped. He heard the clang of the bell that signalled the distribution of bread at noon and knew it to be dawn, or midnight. He did not know what day it was. The lawyer sent word that his investigation continued, that he was cautiously hopeful of progress. William was not permitted to see the letter. Instead it was read out to him by a warder who stumbled over the words, taking a breath between each one as though he were instructing the grocer's boy. William listened and the hope twisted in his belly, turning his bowels to water. He no longer found it possible to imagine a trial. They would bring him up from his iron dungeon into the daylight and the glare of the white winter sky would blind him.

  He was not mad. But memories and dreams folded themselves into the empty submerged hours, printing their bright shapes upon his solitude. Late one evening, or perhaps it was morning, he could not tell, he turned and for a fleeting moment he was sure that he saw Polly's caramel eyes framed in the slot of his rusting door, heard the soft murmur of her voice above the animal cries of the other prisoners. But when he called out her name the only reply was the sharp strikes of the warder's boots as he marched along the iron corridor. The cravings rose in him, so suddenly that a scream was forced from his throat and the roots of his hair burst with black fire. The wall of the cell was rough with rust. William pressed his knuckles against it, his cheek, grinding them up and do
wn as the cravings exploded in every part of him. Ripping his nails with the urgency he hauled himself to his feet, grinding and scouring his legs against their fetters until the metal burned against his skin, but still he did not bleed. He closed his eyes. The longing was so strong that he could almost feel it, the cool perfect curve of the knife handle in his fist. He picked it up and stabbed, and stabbed and stabbed. The face looked up at him then, its eyes black holes in its ghostly white face. Clenching his fists at his sides William bit down upon his tongue. For a moment he tasted only the black soot of his saliva. And then, in a beautiful red rush, his mouth filled with blood. He bit again and again until, bubbled with saliva, the blood spilled out from his lips and ran triumphantly down his chin.

  Polly heard the scream as she hurried ahead of the warder but she said nothing. She kept her handkerchief pressed to her mouth. She could hardly stop herself from crying out with impatience as the warder fumbled clumsily with the cage's barred door. There was a stain on the hem of her carefully sponged dress. Her best dress now. She should never have come. All she wanted was to be gone, to be lost in the busy bustle of the day so that she might forget all that she had seen.

  'You sure you don't want me to rouse 'im?' the warder asked again, frowning as the cage shuddered and began to grind its way upwards.