He turned to face the new arrival, perversely relieved to discover that the grey man was not a giant, nor even a man of average height. Ned realized that he had not the slightest idea whether this was one of the resurrected dead from the house in Purfleet or one of the others, raised from the grave by his own sinister kind. He was, however, somewhat reassured by the fact that the grey man was not carrying a weapon.
“I don’t suppose, by any chance, that you know your name, mon ami,” he said, as lightly as he could.
“I have not forgotten it,” the grey man said, speaking far more coherently than Sawney had, “but I have discarded it. Do you know yours?”
“I do,” Ned confirmed. “Have I, then, the honor of addressing Monsieur Mortdieu, the general of the great army of the dead?”
“I have not forgotten sarcasm either,” the grey man said, apparently lacking nothing in intelligence or articulacy, “but I no longer find much use for it. Would you like to be raised from the dead, mon ami, when your time comes?”
“I’d rather it didn’t come for a while yet,” Ned replied. “And if the occasion should arise sooner than I hope and expect, I think I’d rather be among friends.”
“You might find,” the grey man observed, “that the friends you had before are no longer your friends, and that it will be to your advantage to make new ones.”
“I might,” Ned agreed. “You don’t seem to be afraid of me, even though I have a sword, while your height and reach are almost as meager as my own. Would you care to tell me why that is?”
“You did not charge with the others,” the grey man pointed out. “You’re evidently a man of extreme discretion.”
“So much for having no further use for sarcasm,” Ned said. “You’re evidently a man of discretion yourself. Your army might stand a greater chance of victory if you were at their head, leading by example.”
“Do you think so, mon ami?” the grey man said. “That would depend, would it not, on exactly what their objective is?”
As the grey man pronounced the last two words, as neatly as any living man could have done, Ned was deafened by a mighty bang. He was hurled forward by the blast-wave that spread out along the quay from the Prometheus. He sprawled face-down on the floor of the cart, and felt the cutlass plucked from his hand. The two horses reared and neighed, but they could not break the tether that had secured them to a windlass, and were thus unable to bolt. The cart continued to rattle and jolt, but the grey man was not thrown out of it.
Ned tried to get up, but a heavy boot came down on the back of his right hand and pinned him.
The grey man knelt down beside him, but did not cut his throat. “The house is mine, now, mon ami,” he said, “as it should be. The dead-alive imprisoned there are mine, now, as they should be. Fear not–I’ve a ship of my own at Tilbury, and I’ll be gone in less than 48 hours, as soon I’ve gathered everything I need. You won’t see me again, if you have no wish to do so–but you ought to remember what I tell you, and mark it well. I have nothing against the living, if they do not seek to rule the dead-alive. Indeed, I love the living, for they are the seeds of my own kind. If the living will only let me alone, and leave me to my work, I and my kind will let the living alone, but if your kind takes up arms against me, or tries again to usurp the privilege that is mine, I shall be an enemy more terrible than any you have ever faced before. I have no wish to harass the living, and every hope that your kind and mine will be able to share this world in amity, but I have observed the reactions of your kind to the sight of mine, and I thin it politic, for the time being, to be a man of extreme discretion. If anyone should ask you what took place this evening, tell them that the dead-alive have won the liberty that is their right as human beings, and hope to use it peacefully and productively. Tell them that we have no wish to go to war–but that if we are forced to do so again, as we have in the past, we shall do so with all the might we can muster. Can you remember all that?”
“I can remember the gist of it,” Ned told him, resentfully. “I’ve the mind of a living man, and have no need to be taught to think all over again–but if you want your message to be heeded, you would probably have done better to confide it to a taller man. People of our humble stature are rarely taken seriously, as you may well remember.”
“I remember everything,” Mortdieu assured him. “I never had the slightest difficulty in being taken seriously, and I beg you not to underestimate your own potential. I’m truly sorry to have lured so many of your friends aboard the doomed ship, and to have left them without the slightest help of resurrection, but you can be sure that I’ll treat Germain Patou far more gently, for old time’s sake. Please don’t return to the house, tonight or any time tomorrow. Go back to London, and retire to your bed for a while. It will be better for both of us if I am gone before you tell your tale.”
The cart lurched drunkenly as the grey man jumped down, and then continued to vibrate as the horses twitched and fretted.
Ned got down himself as soon as he felt able, nursing his bruised hand. He raced to the water’s edge, where the gangplank leading to the Prometheus had been. The gangplank had been blown apart, and one of the two hawsers securing the ship to the dock had been severed. The one at the bow had held, though, so the ship had merely changed its attitude as the stern drifted away from the quay. The upper deck was ablaze, although the furled canvas had not yet caught alight. The hull had been holed at the waterline, and the cargo-holds were filling up with water, but the ship was going down slowly.
There were men still on deck–living men, not grey ones–and two of them were howling for help. Ned found a rope and threw it to them, but could do no more. He found a lifebelt, though, and hurled that into the dark water, where there were heads bobbing amid all manner of debris. He hunted for more ropes to let down the side of the dock. He called for help too, but none came from the shoreward side.
There was no sign of the ci-devant Comte de Belcamp. Three men had gained the base of a flight of stone steps leading up to the quay, but there the fight broke out again, although none of them was grey. The one who was beset by two was hurled back into the water, but he seemed well able to swim, and struck out towards another place where he might climb up. Not everyone in the water was as fortunate–several were injured, and were having difficulty keeping afloat, let alone striking out for the dock.
There was a mighty gout of steam as the weight of the water in Prometheus’ holds pulled the upper deck level with the water. The fire died, and the best of the light with it. There was a man directly below Ned, who had grabbed one of the ropes he had let down, but his arm was injured and he could not climb. Ned set his legs and began to pull hard, calling down to the man to set his good hand and his feet in whatever nooks and crannies he could find, so as to take as much of his own weight as he possibly could. Ned was small, but he was strong. After five minutes of struggling, the man grasped the rim of the dock with his good hand, and Ned caught hold of him while he scrambled for footholds, eventually wriggling over the edge on to the apron.
“Thanks, mate!” the sailor said, spitting out a quid of tobacco and a mouthful of river-water. “Never thought I’d make it.”
“Some didn’t,” Ned said, regretfully, peering over the edge to see if there was anyone else who might benefit from his immediate assistance.
“Tricked and bested by a handful of men–and half of them walking corpses, by God!” the sailor went on. “I wish I could be sorrier to see her go, but she’s been about the Devil’s work since we shipped out of Lisbon. If I’d had any sense, I’d never have signed back on–but I’ve always been a fool for money.”
The sailor was looking back at his ship as he spoke. Prometheus was sinking into the harbor now, although she hit bottom long before her masts were fully submerged. The arms carrying the topsails were level with the waterline, and Ned saw two swimmers grasp them gratefully, desperate to rest.
“They’ve a ship of their own at Tilbury, if Mortdieu wasn’t lying,�
�� Ned said. “If Henri can regroup his forces, there might be time for a counter-attack.”
“Who’s Henri?” the sailor demanded, as he came to his feet, wringing wet.
“The erstwhile master of the Prometheus. Pevensey, is he calling himself now? The pretended Cornishman.”
“He’s not my master any more,” was the sailor’s curt reply. “I’ve lost my ship and must find another. This time, I’ll stick to the tea trade if I can. If I must, I’ll ship convicts to Botany Bay–but I’ll have no more of demonkind, that’s for sure.”
“Best of luck to you, then,” said Ned, sincerely. “What chance would we have, do you think, of finding a boat to carry us upriver, if we walk westwards?”
“Little or none,” the sailor opined, hugging his wounded arm to his chest. “Far more chance of getting stuck in a bog. We’d best seek shelter for the night–I need to dry my clothes by a roasting fire and find out if my forearm’s broken. I know an inn, if you’d like to come with me–I don’t think they’ll turn us away, even though they know we’ve been trafficking with the Devil, if we plead our innocence loudly enough.”
“No,” said Ned, with a sigh. “I’m dry, and there’s always the road. But you might pass the message along, if you see any of Master Pevensey’s servants, or the man himself. Mortdieu says that he has a ship at Tilbury, waiting to carry him away, once he’s seized Patou and plundered the house. If he’s lying, then his ship is somewhere else–but he certainly intends to be gone as soon as he can. Once he’s at sea, Henri will never catch him, and probably won’t find it easy to locate him again.”
“I’ll pass the word along,” the sailor agreed, “If I have the chance. I owe you that much.”
“Thanks,” Ned aid, sincerely. “Good luck to you.”
As it turned out, he had more than one opportunity to pass his message on himself before he quit the quay. He gave the same intelligence to the footman who’d brought the deadly warning to the cellar, and to another soaking wet sailor from the Prometheus. Ned formed the impression, however, that the footman and the second sailor were of much the same mind as the first, firmly resolved to be done with the Devil’s work forever.
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” he murmured to himself, as he went in search of a hirer’s or a coaching stop. “If Mortdieu withdraws from England, and takes Patou with him, it’ll put an end to the burking epidemic and things will soon return to normal.”
By the time he was fortunate enough to find a stop with a mail-coach expected imminently, however, Ned had changed his mind about that final judgment. Things would never return to normal. How could they? However slowly matters might evolve, a crucial bridge had been crossed that had delivered the human race into a new era. The greatest of all the old certainties had fallen by the wayside. Death was no longer the end–not, at least, for everyone. Whether Mortdieu contrived to hoard the secret or not, it had been discovered and would be again. Science was a method, after all; what one scientist could do, another could repeat–and another and another, ad infinitum. The day of the grey men had come, and there was no way to turn back the clock.
“Have you come from the docks?” asked one of the businessmen waiting to board the London-bound coach. “I heard an explosion over that way, not half-an-hour ago, and saw flames in the sky.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Ned assured the tall man, looking upwards to meet his eye. “Just the living and the dead-alive fighting over the dubious privilege of controlling the process of transition, while it’s still esoteric. The Prometheus was blown up, but there were at least a dozen survivors, probably more. I don’t know how many were killed, but probably not as many.”
The man, inevitably, looked down at him as if he were mad. When the coach eventually came, the man and his fellows climbed up inside, while Ned was forced by the leanness of his resources to take a place on top, where stouter men than he had frozen to death on journeys not much longer. By the time he dismounted–in Fleet Street yet again–he was chilled to the bone. He jogged all the way to Jenny Paddock’s.
Because it was Sunday there had been no performance that evening, and the parlor was half empty. There was no sign of Jack Hanrahan, but Sam Hopkey and Jeanie Bird were snuggled together in their favorite booth.
“Buy me a brandy, Sam, for God’s sake,” Ned croaked, as he sat down on the bench beside Jeanie, forcing her to move into even closer proximity with her leading man, until he jumped up to obey his director’s command.
“Did you find Sawney?” Jeanie asked, eagerly, while Sam was at the counter.
“I found the place where he was, an hour ago,” Ned told her, glumly, “but how long he’ll be there I don’t know. He’s among his own kind now–I doubt that we’ll be seeing him again, although I’m sure we could have done him a power of good, between the three of us.”
“And what is his own kind?” Jeanie asked, fearfully.
“I believe they like to style themselves the dead-alive,” Ned said. “It wasn’t the hangman’s carelessness that spared Sawney, or a miracle that brought him back to life. It was science, like Mr. Davy’s and Mr. Faraday’s.”
“Science?” echoed Sam, as he set a generous brandy down in front of Ned and took the stool where Ned would normally have sat. “What kind of science can bring the dead back from beyond the grave?”
“I’ve see it done,” Ned told him, before swilling the brandy down. “It’ll cause trouble, I don’t doubt, but in a hundred years’ time, it will be the destiny of every living soul–and I, for one, will welcome it.”
“You’ve seen it done by the Frenchman who was here last night?” Sam said, just to make certain.
“The very same,” Ned said. This time, he did not have his back to the door, so he knew as soon as anyone else what was happening as the Constables and Town Sergeants poured through it with their truncheons at the ready. There were a dozen in all. They had not come to start a fight, though, but merely to make sure that no one else would. A single man strode in behind them, with his head held high and the air of a man who had just recovered something that was rightly his. Given that he could not have been reappointed Chief Superintendent of Scotland Yard, Ned had to assume that it was his dignity, or his sense of purpose, or both.
Gregory Temple marched straight to the booth, where Ned Knob only seemed to be cowering because his limbs were so infernally cold.
“Edward Knob,” Temple said, taking less relish in the pronouncement than Ned might have anticipated, “I arrest you in the name of the law, on the grounds that in St. Luke’s Churchyard, at three o’clock this afternoon, in company with John Hanrahan, you purchased the dead body of a young girl for use in unspeakable practices.”
Ned heard the chorus of gasps that greeted this announcement, and could imagine the whispers that would follow it. Ned Knob a burker! Ned Knob a necrophile! Who would ever have thought it? Well, what can you expect from a miserable dwarf?
“Mr. Temple,” he said, unable to suppress a shiver as he stood up to meet his fate, “you don’t know the half of it, or even the tenth. Jack Hanrahan is a hero, and not only because he went to see Dan Eaton pilloried, in order to defend him against anyone wishing to do him harm, but because he gave that little girl a second chance to live–exactly as he did for Sawney Ross. You’ll not find a man or woman in here willing to chide him for that.”
A silence fell then, as profound as the one that had greeted the sight of Sawney’s grey face, but Ned knew that it would not last.
“And before you take me away,” Ned went on, striking the best leading man’s pose that he could contrive, without the benefit of Sam’s or Sawney’s height, “I have a message for the world from General Mortdieu of the Necromantic Empire, which is this: He has nothing against the living, provided that they do not take up arms against the dead-alive. Indeed, he loves the living, for we are the seed of his own good folk. Nor should we hate or fear him, since he offers us the hope and expectation of a better resurrection–a radical resurrection. Down wi
th King George, and long live the Republic!”
The audience was too dumbstruck to cheer him, but he knew that they would remember what he had said for a long time to come. They were living people, after all; they needed no help to learn to think for a second time.
Chapter Six
The Interrogation Cell at Bow Street
This time, Ned was not taken to some secret covert in Newgate Prison, but to Bow Street Police Station, where he was immediately lodged in an official interrogation cell. This one was better furnished than the one in which he had been entertained the previous evening, although it had neither bed nor window. Its table was much sturdier, it was far better lit, and it had two uniformed constables in attendance. On the other hand, the chair in which Ned was placed could not be described as well-upholstered or comfortable. Gregory Temple remained standing, obviously feeling that no height was too great from which to look down on a man like Ned Knob.
“You should not have arrested me, Mr. Temple,” Ned complained. “I was not a accomplice to Jack Hanrahan’s crime–if it can still be reckoned a crime, now that we know what we know. Had you let me at liberty, I’d have got to the bottom of this mystery in no time at all, and you may be sure that I’d have told you everything.”
“You will forgive me if I doubt you,” Temple said, curtly. “You will be doubtless be glad to know, since you say that you are innocent of any crime, that I have been seconded to Scotland Yard, and am able once again openly to wear the title detective. You may be less delighted to know that Jack Hanrahan has agreed to testify for the Crown against all his old associates, including yourself and Germain Patou. He has told us everything.”
“And a great deal more, I don’t doubt,” Ned said, with a wry smile. “You couldn’t possibly order me a cup of tea, by any chance? I’m still cold, having been forced to sit on top of a mail-coach in highly unsuitable weather, with the wind blowing in my face all the way from Purfleet to Fleet Street. A bite to eat would be nice, if it wouldn’t overburden or hospitality. I was just about to order supper at Jenny’s when you burst in with your guard of honor.”
Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night Page 36