Ned flushed, but didn’t say anything. He knew that Thames watermen viewed mudlarks as dirty, greedy, thieving pests. He’d suffered enough abuse himself in the past, though he’d done nothing to deserve it. The smell of the river stirred up bitter memories for Ned; he found himself wondering if he was about to see anyone he knew at Fresh Wharf, and what he would say if he did.
‘Ned!’ Alfred hailed him from the back of the boat. ‘Watch the water.’
‘The water . . .?’ Ned echoed in confusion.
‘Lest there’s bogles about.’
‘Oh.’ Ned’s heart skipped a beat. He peered overboard, but realised at once that, even if the river was full of bogles – dead or alive – he didn’t have a hope of seeing them. For one thing, the water was filthy, full of floating debris and as cloudy as pease porridge. For another, very little of the river was visible between the keels of all the boats clustered about the wharves. Ned could almost have walked to Billingsgate Market, using boats as stepping stones – except, of course, that some of the vessels were quite large, with towering masts and high bulwarks. It was amazing to see how Donny Donkin threaded his way between them, darting around like a fish in his little wherry.
‘Tide’s on the rise,’ he remarked. He had pulled away from the market towards Fresh Wharf, which reared up out of the water on rickety wooden stilts. But soon, through a thicket of masts and pilings, Ned was able to make out dark figures on a mud slope beneath the wharf.
‘Be quick, for I’ll not stay long,’ Donkin warned. His vessel glided between two brigantine hulls, then gradually slowed until it passed under the wharf and bumped gently against solid ground. By this time he had already raised his oars. ‘Why, there’s Mizzle Meg!’ he exclaimed, upon craning around to check the scene behind him. ‘Meg! What’s yer game? That ain’t no eel, you nickey old dollymop!’
Ned assumed that he was addressing the only woman in sight, who stood hunched over something that looked, from a distance, like a bloated pony’s corpse. She was ragged and middle-aged, with a face that could have been made out of melted yellow candle wax, and a straw pad tied on top of her crushed calico bonnet.
Around her were half-a-dozen grimy boys, ranging in age from about eight to fourteen. Ned didn’t recognise any of them.
‘Where’s yer basket, Meg?’ Donkin continued. ‘Ain’t you going to load it up? That thing’ll taste no worse’n the eels you normally sell, I’ll be bound.’
The woman didn’t answer. Instead she glared at Donkin and waddled away.
‘Mute,’ the waterman said to Alfred, by way of an explanation. ‘No one knows why. Someone cut out her tongue, I expect, on account o’ she were a scold.’
Alfred, however, wasn’t listening. Having climbed out of the boat, he’d begun to stagger through a dense, oily mud that sucked at his boots like glue. Ned would have liked to remove his own boots, but realised that it would be too risky because of all the jagged spars and mussel shells that were probably buried just below the surface. So he vaulted over the side of the boat, only to end up ankle-deep in sludge.
‘It’s a boggart, sir!’ one of the younger boys informed Alfred. ‘And I found it!’
‘You don’t know it’s a boggart,’ the eldest boy cut in. He was rake-thin and pallid, with lots of shaggy red hair. ‘You ain’t never seen no boggart before.’
‘But what else could it be?’ a third boy interposed. ‘T’ain’t no pig. T’ain’t no horse, neither.’
‘Could be summat as dropped off one o’ them foreign ships,’ the redhead speculated. ‘A seal or a hippomouse, or some such thing . . .’
‘It’s a bogle,’ said Alfred. He had already reached the mysterious shape, and was bending over it. When Ned finally joined him, the bogler straightened up and murmured, ‘I ain’t seen nowt like this. Not in all me years on the job.’
Ned studied the bogle. It was covered in a sodden mat of jet-black bristles or thorns, which had bits of thread and peel caught in them. Two barbed grey horns sprouted from its head. Its snout gaped open, displaying a limp forked tongue and three rows of razor-sharp fangs. One fixed yellow eye sent a shiver down Ned’s spine.
‘It’s a bogle,’ he confirmed hoarsely.
‘How do you know?’ the redhead demanded. His tone was abrupt – almost rude – but Ned didn’t take offence. The boy was so thin and dirty and ragged that Ned could hardly bear to look at him.
It was like looking at what might have been . . .
‘I’m a bogler’s boy,’ Ned declared, more boldly and gratefully than he ever had before. ‘And Mr Bunce is a bogler.’
To Ned’s surprise, the reaction was one of muted disappointment. ‘You mean you’re going to take this here thing away?’ the youngest boy asked Alfred, who shook his head.
‘Nay,’ replied the bogler, frowning. Then he turned to his apprentice. ‘I seen enough,’ he rasped. ‘Let’s go.’
Ned was startled. ‘What about Mr Gilfoyle? Won’t he want a piece?’
‘Ain’t no time for that. The tide’s coming in.’ Alfred began to retrace his steps, lurching and stumbling towards Donny Donkin’s boat through water that had already risen a good six inches. Ned set off after him, moving more nimbly, thanks to years of practice.
‘Real bogle teeth!’ a voice piped up behind them. It was the youngest boy speaking; Ned recognised his high-pitched squeak. ‘I’ll wager they’d fetch a pretty penny – eh, Barnabas?’
‘Don’t you touch them teeth!’ Alfred stopped abruptly, his hand on the wherry’s bowsprit, his head snapping around. ‘There’s poison on a bogle’s teeth, and worse besides! You leave that creature alone and get along now, afore you all perish.’
‘Won’t be no great loss if they do,’ Donkin rumbled. He spat into the river, then steadied his boat as Alfred clumsily boarded it. He didn’t, however, extend the same courtesy to Ned, who only reached the vessel when it was already afloat, and had to throw himself into it before it glided away from the shore.
Once Ned had finished flopping around like a landed fish, and was sitting upright in the bow again, he craned his neck to see if the mudlarks had scrambled out from beneath Fresh Wharf. But it was too late. His view was already obscured by distance, by shadow, and by the waterman’s bulky silhouette.
‘What’s happening, Mr Bunce?’ Ned couldn’t keep silent any longer. Bogles were dying like flies. They were being killed by untrained men with household tools. It made no sense. There had to be an explanation. ‘Is some sort o’ poison weakening them creatures?’ he asked Alfred, who was staring off into the distance.
‘I don’t know, lad,’ Alfred replied. ‘Mebbe it’s poison. Mebbe it ain’t.’
‘If bogles keep dying like this – if people keep killing ’em with pokers—’
‘Then there won’t be no need for a committee,’ Alfred finished. ‘Nor for a bogler like me.’
He then lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and stayed silent until long after their boat had arrived back at the Custom House Quay.
27
THE HIDDEN LABORATORY
‘There’s plenty o’ poisons dumped in the sewers by tanners and fullers and the like,’ Ned observed. ‘And new poisons must be devised every day, what with all the factories opening up across London.’
‘Aye,’ said Alfred. ‘That’s true.’
‘But I don’t know how one load o’ poison could sicken the bogles in Billingsgate and Clerkenwell.’ Ned was thinking hard as he trudged along Lower Thames Street. ‘It can’t be the same sewer as passes under both. Unless the poison is in the river, and the bogles come from there?’
Alfred didn’t answer. He was too busy navigating his way towards the Monument, which lay quite close to Billingsgate Market. From Lower Thames Street he turned right into Pudding Lane, through a district of rotting warehouses, dilapidated churches, and sooty, dismal little churchyards. Ned spotted a few handsome structures here and there – including two that might have been guild or company halls, judging from the coats-of-arms set
over their front doors – but for the most part the streets were lined with ugly office buildings or dank, ancient, half-timbered inns converted into shops or cheap lodging houses.
‘If it ain’t poison, it might be magic,’ Ned suddenly remarked, wondering if Birdie had been right after all. ‘Mebbe it’s a curse, or a spell.’ He shot a doubtful glance at Alfred. ‘That Morton feller’s still in gaol, ain’t he?’
It had occurred to Ned that someone, somewhere, might be using magic against London’s bogle population. And there could be no likelier candidate than the wicked Doctor Roswell Morton, who fancied himself as a necromancer, and who had once fed several young boys to a bogle in order to gain power over it. But why would he want to destroy the city’s bogles?
‘Aye, Morton’s still in gaol,’ said Alfred. ‘He ain’t going nowhere.’
‘So he couldn’t be laying spells, then.’ Ned frowned. ‘You don’t suppose it might be Mother May?’
‘I don’t suppose nowt,’ Alfred replied shortly, ‘and neither should you. We ain’t sure if every bogle is affected, and won’t for a good while yet. Not until we visit all the people as wants to see us.’
‘But what if they don’t want to see us no more? What if they don’t need to?’
‘Stop fretting on it, lad, for you’ll get nowhere.’ Alfred refused to discuss the subject any further. It was impossible to tell how he felt about this unexpected threat to his livelihood. Ned didn’t know how he felt about it himself; on the one hand, it was frightening news, because it meant that Alfred might be reduced to killing rats, or making flypaper. It also meant that Ned would have to find work as a mudlark or a coster’s boy again. And none of those jobs would pay well – certainly not as well as bogling did.
But mixed with Ned’s fear and anxiety was a growing sense of relief. If all the bogles died, he would never have to face another one. He would no longer have to be a bogler’s boy. And it wouldn’t be because he had quit his job; it would be for a perfectly justifiable reason. How could Alfred be disappointed in him for abandoning work that didn’t exist anymore?
‘If all the bogles die, no more kids will be eaten,’ Ned blurted out. ‘That’ll be a wonderful thing. Won’t it, Mr Bunce?’
‘Aye,’ said Alfred. ‘A thing I never expected to see.’ All at once he turned left, into a narrow alley that widened into a spacious square. The square was ringed by fine, big, ornate buildings, and at its centre was the Monument, like a giant grey candle with a gold flame on top. The towering stone column stood at least two hundred feet high, on a square plinth as big as a watch-house. Ned was aware that it had been built by someone called Christopher Wren, to commemorate something called the Great Fire of London, because Mr Harewood had told him so. But he knew nothing else about it, and had never actually been close to it before – though he had caught glimpses of its fiery crest, rearing above the rooftops.
‘Mr Harewood told me to speak to the guard,’ said Alfred, peering across the cobbled expanse that surrounded the Monument. Sure enough, a door had been punched through the base of the column’s pedestal, and a man sat by this door, smoking a pipe. As Ned drew closer, he saw that this man wore brass buttons on his fraying blue coat, and a stiff cap rather like a telegraph boy’s – beneath which his warty, weathered face was set in lines of blank boredom and resentment.
‘It’s threepence a body to get in,’ the man drawled, before Alfred had even opened his mouth.
‘Not for me, it ain’t,’ Alfred replied. ‘I’m here on a job. Bunce is the name. Alfred Bunce. You sent for me.’
‘I did?’
‘You got a bogle,’ said Alfred, causing the guard to straighten so abruptly that he nearly fell off his chair.
‘Oh – ah – yes!’ Recovering himself, the guard jumped to his feet, his face reddening. He looked quite shocked, Ned thought, and not at all pleased to see Alfred. ‘So you’re the bogler, then?’
‘I am.’ Alfred produced a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘You sent this telegram to the Sewers Office, asking for help. Well, I’m yer help.’
Watching the guard take the telegram and stare at it dumbly, Ned began to doubt that it had been sent by such a seedy-looking fellow. And his suspicions were confirmed when the guard said, ‘This telegram weren’t down to me, though it were me as told Clarkson about the bogle. I expect he sent you this.’
‘Clarkson?’ Alfred echoed, frowning.
‘At the Guildhall. He’s the one as banks the fees.’ Squinting up at the mighty edifice that loomed over them, the guard added, ‘I can’t let you in just yet. There’s a lady and a gentleman still up at the top, and we cannot have them eaten by a bogle.’
‘Bogles don’t eat ladies and gentlemen,’ Alfred pointed out, eyeing the guard in a speculative manner. Ned wondered fleetingly if it were still true that bogles didn’t eat adults. The city’s bogles had been behaving so oddly over recent weeks, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the bogle in the Monument had started attacking every human being in sight.
‘How do you know it’s there?’ Alfred inquired of the guard. ‘This bogle. Did you have a child go in and never come out?’
‘I seen it,’ the guard replied. ‘It’s in the cellar.’
Suddenly Ned remembered something else that Mr Harewood had told him. There was a basement laboratory under the Monument – and this, Ned assumed, must be where the bogle was hiding.
‘I don’t normally go down the cellar, save to fetch a mop or a bucket,’ the guard continued, his gaze skipping around the square as if in search of potential sightseers. ‘But the other day I heard a strange growling noise, and when I lifted the grate, I spotted the bogle.’
Alfred regarded him intently for a moment, then said, ‘You’re sure it were a bogle?’
‘Ain’t no mistaking a bogle, Mr Bunce.’ The guard began to wave his pipe around, his voice rising dramatically. ‘It had huge great claws, and great big teeth, and it roared like a lion!’
Ned caught Alfred’s eye. It was unlikely that the bogle had roared, since the creatures tended to be rather quiet until you stuck a spear into them. But Ned had already decided that the guard was either imagining things or embroidering the facts. And Alfred must have thought the same thing, because he remarked drily, ‘’Tis strange behaviour for a bogle, Mr . . . uh . . .’
‘Copperthwaite,’ the guard supplied. Then the click of a latch made him turn his head. ‘Ah! Here’s the other visitors come down again.’
At that very instant the Monument door swung open, and two people emerged. One was a man with luxuriant dark whiskers, who wore a tall hat and carried a cane. The other was a lady dressed in the very latest fashion, with a huge bustle and lots of feathers in her bonnet.
Both were damp and red and puffing like bellows.
‘I must sit down!’ the lady whined, leaning on her companion’s arm.
‘I’ll take you to a tea-shop,’ the gentleman promised, before fixing his angry gaze on Copperthwaite. ‘Those stairs are a deal too much for a well-bred young woman!’
‘Three hundred and forty-five of ’em, sir,’ was the guard’s jovial response. ‘I told you they’d be a challenge.’ As the couple moved away, he said to Alfred in a sly undertone, ‘It’s worth twice the money to stop down here, but folk will never be warned. Oh no!’
‘You’d best show us the basement,’ said Alfred, ‘afore someone else comes along.’
‘You can’t miss it. It’s under a grate in the middle of the floor.’ Without warning, Copperthwaite abruptly sat down again. ‘I’ll stay and guard the entrance. You’ll not need me in there.’
Ned decided that Copperthwaite must be telling the truth after all; why else would he be scared to step inside? Alfred sniffed, but didn’t comment. Instead he jerked his chin at Ned and advanced towards the Monument’s shadowy little door, which looked so much like the door to a tomb that Ned found it quite unnerving.
But he summoned up the courage to follow Alfred into the darkness, only to
discover that the Monument’s interior wasn’t so dark after all. The endless shaft above them was lit by a series of windows set into deep alcoves, which were placed at regular intervals up the circular staircase. This staircase was made of black limestone, and was coiled around a gap that reached all the way from the ground floor to the column’s highest point – which Ned couldn’t even see, from where he was standing.
He remembered Mr Harewood’s words: ‘By opening a trapdoor in the gilded orb at the top of the tower, you can watch the night sky from a laboratory in the basement.’ This gap, then, was obviously part of the ‘giant zenith telescope’ that Mr Harewood had mentioned. And if the trapdoor in the orb was directly above Ned, then the entrance to the basement had to be . . .
‘Down there,’ said Alfred. ‘Under yer feet.’ As Ned quickly stepped aside, Alfred let his sack drop to the stone floor. Only after he had retrieved his spear did the bogler stoop to shift the circular manhole cover in front of him. ‘Stand back, now,’ he warned his apprentice. ‘We don’t know what’s down there.’
Ned swallowed. Though he couldn’t actually feel the presence of a bogle, he knew quite well that this meant nothing – not anymore. Edging towards the doorway, he kept his eyes fixed on Alfred, who was dragging aside the heavy iron cover.
Clan-ng-g! The cover hit the floor, exposing a round, black hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through. Ned was craning his neck to peer into it when the Monument door swung shut behind him.
‘Tell Copperthwaite to open that up again, will you?’ Alfred was squatting by the hole, studying it intently. ‘Tell him we need an escape route.’
The words were hardly out of his mouth when Ned heard the clink of a key turning in a lock. ‘Mr Copperthwaite?’ he cried. ‘We need that door open, sir!’
But no one answered. And as Ned spun around to hammer on the iron-studded door panels, he was nearly deafened by a huge explosion.
A Very Singular Guild Page 18