Horatio Lyle

by Webb, Catherine

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Thomas? Are you paying attention?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ And there’s something he needs to remember. ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, boy?’

  ‘Did . . . did Moncorvo . . .’

  ‘A damn good fellow. What of him?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Where is he? What do you mean, boy, where is he? How is this relevant?’

  ‘I . . . where is he?’

  ‘Do you mean is he voting for Disraeli?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  . . . and there were eyes and . . . nothing else . . . except, perhaps, just on the edge of smelling, the faintest scent of decaying leaves falling in an autumnal forest, that blows out with the wind.

  The night settles on the city, and somewhere a man with a black leather voice and a white glove pricked with old blood that is not his own says, ‘The boy is a fool, my lady, and so is his father.’

  ‘That does not concern me, my lord. What of the Plate?’

  ‘Lyle does not have it. Even if he does, he cannot use it.’

  ‘If blood is spilt in it before it is repaired . . .’

  ‘It will make no difference! Mr Dew has almost found Bray, Bray has the Plate and he will give it to us, and we will repair it, and we will be restored. We will bring back the power, my lady. Lyle cannot stop us.’

  ‘Can he hinder us? I know Lord Lincoln is watching, and we cannot afford mistakes now.’

  ‘Lincoln is a fool too! They are all fools, they are just human!’ The echoes die away.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Forgive me, my lady. I . . . have lived in iron too long.’

  ‘It is understandable. I think, if Lyle gets too close, we should have him killed. Just to be sure.’

  A shrug. ‘I see no reason why not.’

  ‘Very good, my lord.’

  And the night settles, and the city sleeps, a deep, cold, dozy sleep as the furnaces idle in their halls of steel and the day’s dirt slowly rains out of the black sky on to the black roofs. And the carriages fall silent and the horses start to snore in their stables and the dirty clothes flap in the dirty wind and the fires slowly start to burn out. And somewhere, a boy dreams of emerald eyes and running through a forest of dead black leaves, falling from a dead black sky, and wakes in a cold sweat, not knowing why.

  CHAPTER 7

  Fruit

  Tess woke with the sun. It was her habit: in winter she could sleep sixteen whole hours just waiting for daylight, in summer she could get by with barely six hours’ sleep. For a second she had difficulty remembering where she was, but when recollection slowly settled like feathers on her mind, she was surprised to realize that she felt almost pleased at the thought. Her stomach was full, her feet were warm and the room was all hers.

  Having got up, she drifted around the house, trying door handles, a lot of which were locked, before wandering down to the kitchen. No one there. She peered into a few cupboards looking for anything that wasn’t in mysteriously unlabelled jars, before finally pulling open a large wardrobe door. The wardrobe itself was empty, but her eyes fell on its back wall, which seemed to protrude at a very slight angle. She ran her hands thoughtfully over it, wondering. Something clicked. She pulled gently at the wardrobe door and behind her a voice said, ‘Erm, you ought to know about the mantrap inside.’

  She very slowly let go of the detachable door. ‘You ought to disguise it with coats, Mister Lyle,’ she said, backing away.

  ‘No, no, no! That ’s not the point at all! If I disguised it with coats, people wouldn’t start looking inside it for a hidden compartment. ’

  She frowned up at him. ‘But, an’ this might seem slow, but ain’t the point of a hidden compartment to be . . . hidden?’

  ‘And if anyone opens that up, they’ll not be able to look for another compartment for a very long time, will they?’

  She scowled. ‘You’re horrid, Mister Lyle.’

  He looked almost embarrassed. ‘Yes,’ he muttered. Then he brightened. ‘More positively, I think I’ve found something.’

  ‘Miss Laskell?’

  ‘Yes, Master Thomas?’ Miss Laskell, Thomas’s governess, waited patiently.

  ‘If . . . have you ever seen my father write a letter?’

  ‘Of course I have, Master Thomas!’

  ‘I mean . . . on the paper with the family crest, with the family seal?’

  ‘Yes. When he wrote references for Violet he wrote it on the family paper.’

  ‘And signed it?’

  ‘How strange of you to ask, Master Thomas!’

  ‘It ’s important.’

  A sigh. ‘Yes, of course he signed it, Master Thomas.’

  ‘Where does he keep the paper?’

  ‘Now why would you be . . .’

  ‘It ’s important. Please?’

  Another sigh. ‘Locked in his desk. Only he has the key to it. And only he ever uses the family seal for special documents, things from the Palace, you know.’

  ‘None of the servants could get to it?’

  Her voice darkened. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been thinking, young Master Thomas, but no one except your father gets into that desk.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘Is that all, Master Thomas? If so, I’ll just—’

  ‘No. Wait! I . . . I need your help.’

  Lyle put his elbows on the desk in the dark basement and said, ‘It’s boiled.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The orange was boiled before it was sold, to make it look bigger and juicer.’

  ‘Oh.’ She saw his expression. ‘Oh.’

  He looked back down at the two pieces of fruit on the table and said in a slightly less enthusiastic voice, ‘There were also traces of formaldehyde on the orange peel, a drop of rabbit’s blood and some salt, so I’m assuming it came from somewhere near the meat markets. And I found out what the fruit is.’ From a shelf near a giant wardrobe that looked, to Tess’s eyes, even more suspicious than the one upstairs, he pulled down a large encyclopaedia, and opened it on the desk. ‘It’s something called a “lychee”. An incredible delicacy. I think there must be about two men in the whole city who’d be able to sell something like this, and to a very specialist clientele. The tooth marks on the stone are remarkable - razor-sharp teeth, very pointed, one of those sets of teeth you’d recognize anywhere.’

  ‘Anywhere?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a stuffed predatory fish, a freshwater trout, perhaps?’

  ‘Uh . . .’

  He scowled. ‘A dead fish with big teeth?’

  ‘Urgh.’

  ‘So you’d better get your shoes on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to find the people who sold these pieces of fruit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they were found too close to the bloodstains in an area where no one eats that kind of food to be coincidence.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because of your charitable, helpful character?’

  Now she scowled. ‘What are you goin’ to do?’

  ‘I’m going to take Tate for a walk.’

  A man wearing a crooked top hat, who turned up his collar in all weathers and had a taste for ginger biscuits, still watched Lyle’s house, but now his narrow, alert eyes were tired in his face with its unusually almond-dark skin that was once yellow but had been baked and lined by exposure to all elements, including the worst of humanity. He had been standing and waiting too long, relieved on his endless watch for but a few hours by a colleague, who long ago left him to his task. He stretched, tight shoulders bunching under the thick coat, and yawned.

  The door opened on the other side of the road, and the girl, who he knew was called Teresa but about whom he knew nothing else, slipped out, looking furtively around. She didn’t see him as he drew back into the shadows, and he smiled. For a moment yesterday, he ’d worried that she had.

  He didn’t follow her. He wa
tched the house expectantly.

  It took Lyle fifteen minutes more to emerge, with Tate padding at his feet, then look around thoughtfully, eyes flickering over where the man stood but not focusing on him, before turning and marching in completely the opposite direction from Teresa. Lyle today was wearing an anonymous grey overcoat and a broad-brimmed traveller’s hat that was very distinct indeed. In the shadows, the man almost smiled.

  He followed Lyle.

  He followed him up to the Strand, through the throngs of people and carriages, up the bustling, shoulder-to-shoulder wide streets of yellow Regency houses nestling against each other, through Covent Garden where the stall holders called out, ‘Pineapples, ha’penny a slice’; ‘Penny a bunch turnips’; ‘Oranges, two a penny’; ‘Cherry ripe, two pence a plate’; ‘Wild Hampshire rabbits, two a shilling’; ‘Fine ripe plums, penny a pint’. And then on, elbowing past the hawkers and the buyers and the penny-gaff clown with his penny gaffs and the Silly Billy chanting ‘Eh, higgety, eh ho! Billy let the water go! . . . Nicky nickey nite, I’ll strike a light!’ - and on, up Long Acre.

  He followed Lyle as he skirted the St Giles rookery, a maze of dark alleys and dens that huddled round the church of St Giles and the brothels of Seven Dials. Avoiding the looks and eyes of the blackcaps and garrotters hiding in the shadows of the cheap boarding houses, twelve to a room, seven rooms a house, five houses a privy, he followed Lyle around St Martin’s Lane, past the shut doors of the dancing halls and the music halls where each night the crowd pressed in on each other’s feet to hear the lady in the red rouge scream and the man with the fake nose howl. He followed Lyle into Trafalgar Square and then down towards Charing Cross Station, where steam billowed up in huge gusts that shrouded the seedy hotels around it and drove the men waiting with their hansom cabs to shout out loudly, ‘Cabby, cabby’ to draw attention to themselves. Briefly, in this mêlée of crushing human life, he lost sight of Lyle, but almost immediately saw that distinctive hat and, more telling yet, Tate ’s paws and ears contending for which could pick up more dirt from the cobbles.

  He followed Lyle up towards Green Park, but at Haymarket Lyle seemed to change his mind and cut north again up a wide road adorned with heroic statues and stately clubs, a clean, far cry from the brothels that co-existed just a few blocks away under roofs held up with strategically perched planks and mouldering below gutters of stagnant green water. He followed him all the way back up to Piccadilly Circus, starting to wonder when Lyle was going to tire of his sport. Suddenly, in front of a new building that narrowed to a desperate point on one corner, Lyle stopped, bent, scratched the dutiful Tate behind the ears, straightened up, surveyed the clattering jungle of streets hung over with the perpetual smoke and haze of London, and briefly took off his hat to swipe a finger along the sweatband across his forehead.

  Underneath his hat, Lyle ’s hair was black.

  The man with the crooked top hat and taste in ginger biscuits stopped dead, almost in the middle of the street.

  Underneath his hat, Lyle was not Lyle. But Tate was definitely Tate, and as the man watched, the dog turned and started trotting away back towards Covent Garden seemingly without a care. He tried to follow the dog through the crowd, but quickly lost him, and before the man knew it he was standing in a heaving mass of people pushing and shoving towards Regent Street. He stopped again, and scanned the crowd with a slow, intense gaze.

  There was no sign of Lyle. Anywhere.

  He started walking, nearly a run. He doubled back, avoiding the dangerous narrow streets to the west of Regent Street that led into the notorious, cholera-ridden, smoke-drenched, crime-ruled dens of St Giles, and marched determinedly back towards the wide expanse of Green Park. The second he stepped on to the grass, oppressed by the blackened trees that dotted it here and there, he stopped again, and his gaze swept the park. No sign of Lyle.

  He marched quickly through the park, stopping every now and again to turn and scan every face that passed. Then he walked again, almost running, sending ducks scattering around the stagnant brown lake, as a smelly, acrid rain began to drizzle, that spattered the damp mud and sounded like a distant muffled drum.

  He stopped one last time as the rain thickened to a grey blanket, and people started scurrying for shelter, collars turned up. He saw couples sheltering under coats and running for trees or gazebos; workmen trudging on with the same resolute expressions; children, filthy, black with soot and grime, dancing under the water as the dirt flowed down their faces and into their brown clothes. He saw a woman in green; a man in a black overcoat, his collar turned right up against the rain, darting under a tree with a newspaper over his head; a man in corduroy; a man in tweed; a woman in plain wool; a horse in harness. He thought, for a second, he saw a dog of uncertain parentage, ears trailing in the mud, rolling over and getting himself thoroughly dirty in glee, but when he moved towards the dog it saw a pigeon and started barking, galloping away through the rain and sending up a spray of water behind it, overwhelmed with enthusiasm for this new cause.

  The man gave up. He turned and started to walk west.

  Lyle watched him go.

  When the man was more than forty yards away, just a vague shape in the rain, Lyle shook the water off the newspaper he held over his head, did up the last button on his black coat, pulled his collar higher around his chin, and followed. Tate, turned brown with the mud, padded along behind him.

  At its very north-western corner, Green Park joins Hyde Park’s south-eastern corner, after which Hyde Park bends sharply north up Park Lane, where the carriages with the padded seats and expensive ladies of taste and tastes clattered around, looking for someone to keep them company. And just behind Park Lane, tucked into a surprisingly well-kept street that bordered the slum of hidden factories mazing the narrow byways behind the wider, more popular arteries of the city, was a mews. The stables were empty, the horses being out on their long day’s work. Above the stables and occasionally in them were the homes of the horses’ owners: messengers, cabbies, and costermongers with their carts. Beyond these stables was a house that might once have been luxurious, but now was crumbling, old red bricks cracked from neglect, windows half-covered by tatty curtains. Through a small door below these windows darted the man. He bounded up a flight of stairs that shook and warped under him, pushed open a loose door and went into a room, empty except for some furnishings covered over with dust cloths that would never be moved and a few mats on the floor. Sitting around a small fire set in a cauldron in the centre of this floor were a group of Chinese men. They paid the man no attention as he strode in, unwinding his long red scarf to reveal his worn face in full, and stripping off the coat, to toss it lightly into a corner.

  A man with a fat pigtail almost down to the bottom of his back, looking out of place in an overlarge waistcoat, said serenely in near-accentless English, ‘Why are you back so early?’

  ‘He knew I was following.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He went to great pains to lose me.’

  ‘That is unsatisfactory, Feng Darin. What are you going to do to remedy the situation?’

  Feng Darin stared thoughtfully out of the window at the rain. As he watched, a shadow, greyed in the rain, sandy-red hair soaked dark brown and clinging to its scalp, looked back up at the window. At his side, brown mud trickled off a dog. In the rain, the man seemed to smile, then turn slowly and walk away.

  ‘Feng Darin,’ repeated the man with the pigtail from inside the room. ‘What are you going to do to find him again?’

  ‘I won’t have to do anything, xiansheng. He has found us.’

  The other man smiled faintly, and nodded. ‘If he can find us, Feng Darin, he can find the Plate.’

  ‘Before the Tseiqin?’

  ‘We can only hope.’

  Feng sighed. ‘But hoping is too passive, xiansheng. The Tseiqin have no hesitation about taking matters into their own hands. I think we should not hesitate either.’

  ‘Well then? What are
you doing standing here?’

  CHAPTER 8

  Slum

  There was one other place Lyle wanted to take Tate that day, and it was on the other side of town. He found a hansom cab and sheltered inside, shivering from the rain pelting the loose cab window and drying on his coat, while water slowly pooled around Tate at his feet. The wet weather brought premature darkness down on London so that, even though it was still morning, the whole city had the feeling of dusk, before a long night.

  The driver of the cab wouldn’t take him closer than half a mile, and even then he took convincing. The Bethnal Green rookery was cold, dark, damp. Out of dark doorways dark faces leered; from the broken crooked windows in blackened crooked walls, tattered rags serving as curtains flapped wetly. Under each passage and arch across each street, pipes dripped on to mildewed surfaces; at the end of each street refuse mouldered; between each courtyard and alley there was a cellar through which people passed as a common thoroughfare, dipping in and out of a darkened doorway that opened up through a smoky wall. Not even the most intrepid costermongers ventured into the heart of the rookery with their wares or carrying anything more than a few pennies. Children gambled on the edge, hiding behind shattered crates dumped on ruined muddy streets. In the heart of the rookery, boarding houses boasting no beds and only a partial roof hid scowls that lurked around each bubbling wrought-iron pot where strange concoctions slowly burnt black and each inn was full of the silence of broken men taking their tankards too seriously to be safe.

  Lyle padded through all this, hands deep in his pockets, chin buried in his coat, avoiding the glares that flew his way, Tate trying to pretend he wasn’t with Lyle at his side. Barely the only people attempting to ply their wares were the patterers, who leapt out of doorways to thrust in Lyle’s direction pamphlets with titles like ‘The Serving Girl Surprised!’ followed by a suggestive picture that promised worse inside. Lyle scowled, shook his head and scurried on.