Kill-Devil and Water

by Andrew Pepper

  As he moved along the Ratcliff Highway from east to west, tramping between brothels, slop-shops, taverns, pawnbrokers, gin palaces and beer shops, past vendors selling pies, chestnuts, gingerbread and baked potatoes, he didn’t exactly feel unsafe but he did make a point of not catching anyone’s eye unnecessarily. He also kept the purse he’d been given by Tilling close to his body. It was a warm, early spring afternoon but the weather did nothing to improve the Ratcliff Highway: it had always felt like the kind of place where someone might slit your belly as easily as shake your hand.

  The pavements were full, but many of the faces were alien to Pyke. Lascar and Malay sailors with their dark skin and tear-shaped eyes; bearded Jews hawking piles of old clothes; German and Scandinavian stevedores, recognisable by their uniform, biding their time before their ships sailed for home; and black dockers who could carry a hogshead of sugar on their shoulders. There were the children, too: bow-legged, malnourished, running alongside the wagons and drays barefoot. Everyone was going about their business but Pyke couldn’t help feeling that people had noticed him, noticed that he was different, that he didn’t belong there. Even as a Bow Street Runner, he’d rarely ventured to this part of the city: a Runner who had tried to serve a warrant on a tavern landlord here had been dragged out on to the street and kicked to death. Pyke couldn’t say with any conviction that it was either the poorest or indeed the most dangerous part of the city - St Giles and parts of Shadwell and Rotherhithe came close - but it was undoubtedly the street whose reputation cast the greatest terror into the hearts of most Londoners.

  He had also heard a lot about Craddock’s brothel but had never had a reason to visit it. Not that he had missed much. Its ill repute was based on the promise of its madam, Eliza, that no reasonable offer would be turned down: that a ‘reasonable’ offer could sometimes be as little as a shilling was indicative of the kind of customer it hoped to attract. Pyke had once been told by a woman who’d worked there that a mattress might see five or six different bodies in the space of an hour. The same woman had had her face slashed by a broken bottle wielded by a drunken sailor, but Eliza hadn’t even contacted the authorities, saying it would be bad for business. Instead, the woman had been dismissed. She’d been told no one would want to fuck a girl with a scarred face. There were few businesses Pyke knew of where the laws of the market were practised with the same cold efficiency.

  ‘So who is she?’ Eliza Craddock asked, when Pyke showed her the drawing of the dead woman. She sat behind her desk like an enormous beached whale, folds of blubber hanging off her arms and face.

  ‘I take it she’s not one of yours?’

  Craddock grinned, revealing an enormous gap in her front teeth. ‘Most of the bucks come in here would just as well poke a hole in the wall. But a gal like that would cause a riot.’

  Pyke nodded. Her thoughts confirmed his own suspicions that the dead woman probably wasn’t a prostitute, at least not one who plied her trade on the Ratcliff Highway.

  Craddock had another look at the charcoal sketch. ‘You reckon she might be a blue-skin, then?’

  Pyke had already mentioned this. He then described Arthur Sobers and asked whether she had seen him.

  ‘I don’t know him but we see all sorts in here. I ain’t prejudiced against the darkies. Even employed one for a while.’ She crossed her arms and shrugged. ‘You could talk to her, if you like. Popular with the Lascars and the blackbirds, she was. But I had to let her go.’

  ‘You know where I can find her?’ It was unlikely that this woman had known Mary Edgar or Arthur Sobers but it was worth a try.

  Craddock held out her chubby hand and Pyke tossed a shilling coin on to the table. She scooped it into her apron and rested her arms, two mounds of flesh, on the table. ‘Jane Shaw. Last I heard she’d taken a room in the old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street, near New Road.’

  ‘Is that how it works?’ Pyke felt the skin tighten around his temples. ‘You use them up and when they’re beyond repair you toss them away?’

  But the criticism was lost on Eliza Craddock. She stared at Pyke, as if he’d spoken to her in a foreign language, and asked, ‘The girl you’re looking for. Is she dead or just missing?’

  ‘Would it make any difference?’

  Craddock shrugged. ‘I don’t like it when a girl gets killed. Makes folk jittery and it’s bad for business.’

  ‘It’s bad for the girls, too.’

  She regarded him with cynical good humour. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’ll always be more girls.’

  The old lepers’ hospital on Cannon Street had long since been overrun by rogues and vagabonds of every hue: broken-down coiners, their skin eroded by the liquids used to oxidise base metal; footpads waiting to beat up their next marks; ageing prostitutes prowling the corridors; distillers inhaling fumes that would kill them; pickpockets as young as ten emptying stolen pocket handkerchiefs into the hands of their receivers; rampsmen polishing their brass cudgels; and mudlarks picking caked mud and faeces from their old boots.

  Pyke found Jane Shaw in one of the rooms right at the top of the building. There was no heat or light and he’d had to pay for a lantern to guide his way through the mass of bodies, either sleeping or staring vacantly into space. A few of them begged for money, but he kept moving, only stopping to ask where he could find the ‘blackbird’ and only giving a farthing or two to those who helped him. Most were drunk or, as he discovered later, pacified by laudanum.

  Jane Shaw could have been thirty or sixty, for all Pyke could tell. Her hair and all of her teeth had fallen out, and when he brought the lantern up to her face and saw her ravaged nose, it confirmed what he had suspected from the first moment he had stepped into the room. She was dying of untreated syphilis.

  ‘You the first visitor I had in t’ree months,’ she said, the whites of her eyes accentuated by the inky blackness of her skin.

  Pyke knelt down and showed her the charcoal etching of Mary Edgar. Wincing, she sat up so that she could get a better look at it, and as she did so, she sniffed his skin. ‘You smell good, like soap.’

  The room, on the other hand, reeked of human faeces and for a moment he wondered how and where she defecated.

  ‘Her name is Mary Edgar.’ He put the lantern down next to the drawing so she could see it properly.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I wondered if you might know her.’ As soon as it had left his mouth it struck Pyke as an absurd proposition, but he needed to find a way of getting her to talk.

  She peered at the etching and laughed without warmth. ‘That why you come here? ’Cos I’m black and she’s mulatto so we must know each other?’

  Pyke acknowledged the truth of her observation with a rueful smile. ‘I don’t know a thing about her apart from her name and that she recently arrived from Jamaica. I thought she might have fallen into the game.’

  That drew a more serious nod. ‘So how did you find me?’

  ‘Craddock.’

  Jane bit her lip, or what was left of it. ‘That bitch had me there to serve them Lascars and Africans but it was the whites who ask for me because I was cheap and they reckoned they could do what they liked with me.’

  ‘And as soon as you contracted syphilis she tossed you out.’ Pyke tried to keep any sympathy from his voice; he guessed it would only anger her.

  ‘She gave me a bottle of mercury, told me that would cover it.’ She touched her bald head self-consciously.

  Pyke brought her attention back to the drawing. ‘Have you got any idea where I might start looking for her?’ He paused and then told her that Mary Edgar had been sharing a room at the Bluefield lodging house with a black man called Arthur Sobers.

  Jane shook her head. ‘Why are you looking for her? What she done?’

  Pyke shrugged. He didn’t want to tell her that Mary Edgar was dead. Nor, for obvious reasons, did he want to reveal that the woman’s eyes had been gouged out. But if the murder had a ritualistic element to it, as
he now suspected, he wanted to find out as much as possible about such things.

  ‘Whether she black or white, it look like she got money. So why you looking for her in a black hole like Craddock’s?’ Jane snorted through her disintegrating nose. ‘And why you think she want to be friends with a nigger like me?’

  He felt the anger of her stare. ‘To be honest, I hardly know a thing about the black community in the city.’

  This much was true. Whereas forty or fifty years earlier, London had had a thriving black population, buoyed by émigrés from the United States who’d fought on the side of the Crown during the revolutionary wars and former slaves who’d earned their freedom and decided to stay and work in the capital, the effects of grinding poverty and falling numbers of immigrants meant there were now probably just a few hundred - or maybe as many as a thousand - black men and women left in the city, in a population of more than a million. Pyke was used to seeing coloured faces around the docks but these men were often sailors and merchant seamen who would spend their shore leave in and around the Ratcliff Highway before leaving for the next port.

  ‘And you think I do?’ Jane looked at him. ‘I was born in Gravesend. I can point it out on a map if you don’t know where it is.’

  ‘If you were a black man or woman recently arrived in the city, where would you go to eat and drink?’

  ‘Anywhere I could afford that would take my money.’ She hesitated. ‘You seem to think there’s one place all black folk go to spend time with each other. That’s not how it is. The only thing black people got in common is being poor and getting exploited by white men like yourself.’

  Pyke absorbed her insult. ‘But if I did want to speak to people who might have known Mary Edgar and Arthur Sobers ...’

  She studied his face for a few moments, deciding whether she wanted to help or not. ‘There’s a beer shop at the bottom of Commercial Road, near the docks. Ask for Samuel.’

  Pyke thanked her and stretched his legs, but when he reached down to gather up the drawing, she touched his hand. ‘You want to know something? That’s the first time I touched another human being in a month.’ She looked away suddenly, perhaps because she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

  Pyke went to kiss her on the cheek but at the last moment she turned her head towards him and he had no choice but to embrace her mouth. Her lips were softer and saltier than he had imagined. Momentarily Pyke closed his eyes and put the smell of faeces out of his mind. When he pulled away, he expected that she might say something, but whatever had happened in that moment passed and she was staring up at the ceiling, as though nothing had happened.

  ‘I lie here trying to remember happier times but when I shut my eyes all I can see are the faces of the men who fucked me.’

  Pyke left her without saying goodbye. He guessed that she would be dead before the end of the year.

  THREE

  William Maginn’s face glistened like a ham that been soaked in briny water and boiled vigorously until it had turned a burnished shade of pink. He was pontificating about the merits of Shakespeare’s tragedies while imbibing from a hip-flask. Around him, a coterie of admirers hung on his every word. At one time, he had been the most respected and feared journalist in the city, though this had been before he had burned his bridges at Fraser’s magazine and spent time in prison, like Pyke, for failing to pay his debts. Godfrey told Pyke all this while fretting nervously at the edges of the circle, trying to find a way of interrupting Maginn and maybe limiting his consumption of gin, at least until after the speeches.

  Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly was full and Pyke was momentarily surprised by the number of people Godfrey had persuaded to attend the event, until he remembered that the book they’d all come to toast had attracted more than its fair share of notoriety in the months following its publication. Figures as worthy as Dickens and Bulwer had described Godfrey’s book as a ‘brutally honest account of wrongdoing’. Godfrey had framed those reviews. But other critics had torn it to shreds. Thackeray, for example, had compared it unfavourably to the ‘already lamentable’ Eugene Aram and had lambasted it as a ‘foul, sordid piece of writing’ that should be ‘consigned to the nearest cesspool’ for fear that ‘it might irrevocably contaminate those whose misfortune it was to turn its pages’. Godfrey had framed that review as well, claiming that a book capable of provoking such hostility had to be doing something right. Pyke suspected that beneath his bluster, his uncle cared very deeply what a man like Thackeray thought and that the review had wounded him more than he cared to admit. It had been something of a surprise, then, when Maginn had written to Godfrey to offer a cautiously favourable verdict, because Maginn and Thackeray had once been good friends, and perhaps still were.

  Pyke hadn’t read The True and Candid Confession of an ex-Bow Street Runner, nor did he have any desire to do so. He had talked at length with Godfrey, while his uncle scribbled notes, and he had been as truthful and as candid as he thought appropriate. But Pyke had known from the start that what appeared in print would bear only the slightest resemblance to his own experiences. Godfrey wasn’t interested in virtue and goodness; rather his writing and publishing reflected a preference for the tasteless, sordid, low and morally repugnant. Pyke knew there were things he had done in his past that fitted this description, and that his uncle would doubtless embellish such episodes into something even nastier, but he hadn’t robbed or killed to satisfy his own primal urges. He had done so only when absolutely compelled to and wherever possible he had tried to do what was right, even if this meant hurting other people in the process. But none of this would make it into his uncle’s book; instead it would be a fictional tale that wallowed in its own stench with the sole purpose, Pyke believed, of offending the refined sensibilities of a particular kind of educated reader.

  But Pyke wasn’t interested in Maginn’s stories or in helping Godfrey keep a muzzle on him. He had come to his uncle’s event only to spend some time with Felix, and now he surveyed the mass of faces for a sign of his son, hoping that this encounter would be better than the last one. Perhaps Felix would look him in the eye this time or maybe even allow Pyke to take him in his arms. That was all Pyke had wanted to do when Felix had shunned him at Godfrey’s apartment.

  It was Jo who spotted him. When she touched his arm, Pyke spun around and found himself staring into her smiling face. Felix was holding her hand, as though his life depended on it. His hair had been brushed and he wore a clean shirt. Pyke bent down and ruffled his hair the way he used to, but Felix seemed to recoil from his touch. Pyke stood up, trying to conceal his hurt from Jo. She was wearing a plain cotton dress and a straw bonnet, tied under the chin with a piece of red ribbon.

  ‘We’ve been reading Ivanhoe together, haven’t we?’ Jo said, for Pyke’s benefit, while squeezing Felix’s hand. She raised her eyes to meet his. ‘He really is a demon of a reader.’

  Pyke tried to think of something he could say about Scott’s book but nothing came to mind. ‘I’m sure it’s a good deal more uplifting than, Godfrey’s book.’

  ‘I’ve read that one, too,’ Felix piped up.

  They both looked at him. ‘You’ve read Godfrey’s book?’ Pyke asked, appalled by the notion.

  Felix stared at him, still gripping Jo’s hand. ‘At the end, I thought they should have hanged him by the neck for all he’d done.’

  Pyke felt dizzy. Felix had read a book purporting to be an account of his life as a Bow Street Runner. Would the lad have known this? Not having read the book himself, Pyke didn’t know what claims it made, but knowing his uncle, he was quite sure it wouldn’t make for a comfortable read.

  ‘You understand that it’s all made up,’ he said, adopting what he hoped was a suitably stern tone.

  ‘Then why does it say it’s a true and candid confession?’ Felix replied defiantly.

  Pyke glanced over at Jo for assistance but she gave him an apologetic shrug, as if this was the first she’d heard of it. ‘What I meant,’ he
said carefully, ‘was that it’s not based on any one person’s real experiences.’

  ‘But weren’t you a Bow Street Runner?’

  Pyke tried to hide his consternation - and anger - that his son was speaking to him in such a manner. ‘That’s beside the point, Felix.’

  Thankfully their conversation was interrupted by Godfrey, who told Pyke he needed help. Maginn was steaming drunk and, even worse, he’d seemingly now taken against the book. Godfrey delivered this last piece of news in such a grave tone that Pyke felt he had no choice but to help. He told Felix they would resume their little chat in a moment.

  ‘I’ve already paid him a king’s ransom to be here and now he’s savaging my book to all and sundry,’ Godfrey said, as they made their way across to Maginn’s growing coterie.