‘Now, then!’ the policeman boomed. ‘What’s going on, here?’
‘There he is!’ a familiar voice cried. It belonged to Miss Eames. She was hovering behind the constable, pointing down the hall. ‘Doctor Roswell Morton! I accuse that man of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and false imprisonment!’
Doctor Morton spun around to face her. He wasn’t looking quite as suave as usual, because his oily hair was in disarray, and his clothes were dishevelled. Even so, when he addressed the constable in his calm, dry, slightly bemused tone he sounded very convincing – or so Birdie thought.
‘Constable, I was called here for a medical emergency, and immediately found myself threatened by a low type with a spear. I believe he and his cohorts were robbing the place . . .’
By this time Alfred had let Birdie slide to the floor. She was still plastered to his side, though, and could feel him take a quick, deep breath. But before he could say anything, Jem cut him off.
‘Help! Help!’ Jem cried. ‘Untie me, damn you!’
He was still in the parlour. As the police constable swerved towards it, Birdie tugged at Alfred’s coat. ‘Is it dead?’ she squeaked. ‘Did you kill the bogle?’
‘Aye, lass,’ Alfred replied, without taking his eyes off Doctor Morton. Though Miss Eames had followed the policeman into the parlour, Ned had stayed behind; he was guarding the front door, which was shut again. Birdie could see him out of the corner of her eye, standing there with his legs apart and his arms folded. He looked very frightened, despite his brave stance.
‘I thought there weren’t no bogle!’ Birdie exclaimed.
‘So did I,’ said Alfred – and the doctor gave a little start. Birdie saw him do it. Alfred must have seen him too, because he smiled sourly and tapped Doctor Morton between the shoulders with the point of his spear. ‘Aye, that’s right. We lured you into our trap, just like a bogle. You’re not the only one as can set a snare.’ Before the doctor could do more than hiss, Alfred laid his free hand on Birdie’s head and muttered, ‘It just goes to show, lass, that you can’t never be too careful. Not where bogles is concerned.’ And he finally added, in a preoccupied tone, ‘That bogle must have come out o’ the basement and used the dumb waiter to get up here. I wonder if Mr Fotherington ever lost a boot boy?’
Meanwhile, the noise from the parlour had been increasing, with Jem and Miss Eames both jabbering away at once. Birdie caught the words ‘chloroform’, ‘brandy’ and ‘poison’. It crossed her mind that the doctor’s bottle of chloroform had to be somewhere in the house. And although every trace of the bogle was rapidly evaporating, she suddenly felt quite sure that proof of the doctor’s wickedness would soon be found – and that one day it would be used against him in a court of law.
Then the police constable reappeared, with Jem in tow and Miss Eames tagging along behind them.
‘All right,’ the big man trumpeted, ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but I can see that something isn’t right, here. And I intend to get to the bottom of it, even if we have to spend the whole day talking . . .’
31
FOUR MONTHS LATER . . .
Alfred’s new address was on the sixth floor of a big old house off Drury Lane. To reach it, Birdie had to climb flight after flight of rickety stairs, past rooms full of crying babies, grubby children, toiling dressmakers, quarrelling grandmothers and pale-faced girls with chesty coughs. They all stared at Birdie, who had come straight from her singing lesson in a dress of plaid poplin under a velvet mantle trimmed with silk.
Some of the children started to follow her, whining for money, until she told them to hook it. ‘I ain’t no blooming toff,’ she snapped, ‘and I’ve just enough for me ’bus fare home. So you might as well save yer breath.’
Startled by her Bethnal Green accent (which was sharply at odds with her Paddington Green appearance), the children fell back, allowing her to trudge on alone. Alfred’s room was a former servants’ garret, high up under the roof. By the time she knocked on his door, she was red in the face and puffing like a pair of bellows. If he ain’t home, she thought, I’ll be blowed if I’ll come all this way again!
But he was at home. He even smiled when he saw her.
‘Hello, Birdie. Does Miss Eames know you’re here?’
Birdie chose not to answer his question. Instead she folded her arms and scowled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d left the old place?’ she demanded. ‘I had to find it out from Ned!’
Alfred shrugged. ‘I thought Miss Eames might not want you to know . . .’
‘Miss Eames ain’t got nothing to do with it!’ Birdie exclaimed, before correcting herself. ‘I mean, she doesn’t have nothing to do with it.’ Still this sounded wrong; after a moment’s reflection, she added, ‘Anything to do with it.’
Alfred raised his eyebrows and wiped a hand across his scrubby chin. ‘Well, now you’re here, at last, you’d best come in,’ he said, stepping aside to let Birdie cross the threshold. ‘You look a picture, lass. Like you was born to a life o’ luxury.’
Birdie snorted. ‘Luxury! Hah!’
Alfred raised an eyebrow. ‘Ain’t you getting enough jam tarts?’ he asked dryly.
Birdie blushed. ‘There’s no end to the food,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve all the clothes I want, and I ain’t got to cook or clean or carry.’
‘Which sounds like a throne in Paradise to me . . .’
‘It is. And I’m grateful. Truly I am,’ Birdie mumbled. Then she burst out, ‘But there’s so much else I have to do! The reading and the writing and the singing and the speech training . . .’ She shook her head, trying for the moment to banish all thoughts of her new life. In many ways it was easier than her old life, because she no longer had to help kill bogles. In other ways, though, it was much harder. Sometimes she felt as if her head were going to explode with all the information that had been stuffed into it: information about grammar, music, the alphabet, clothes, table manners, ladylike deportment . . .
It was quite a relief to find herself in a place where she didn’t have to keep her back straight or her voice hushed.
‘Is that where Ned sleeps?’ she asked, gazing at the heap of old shawls and coats and blankets that occupied one corner.
‘Aye,’ said Alfred.
‘How’s his cooking?’
Alfred gave her another crooked smile as he closed the door. ‘Not too good. But Ned’s doughty on them stairs. Especially with bags o’ coal.’ Birdie grunted. She had been half-hoping that Alfred’s new living arrangements would fail. It had annoyed her when he’d offered to house Ned, rent-free, in exchange for the boy’s domestic services – though she understood that both of them would benefit. Ned would no longer have to pay threepence a night for a bed in a common lodging house, and Alfred wouldn’t have to darn his own socks. But while she liked Ned well enough, and was glad that Alfred had someone to look after him, she couldn’t help feeling that she’d been replaced like a worn-out shoe. Especially now that Ned had started exhibiting an interest in bogles.
‘Is that Ned’s?’ she asked suspiciously – for there was a large and very beautiful doll sitting in one corner. It had a china face, blue glass eyes, and real hair coiled into ringlets. It wore a dress of white muslin and a straw hat.
‘Nay,’ Alfred replied, settling himself onto his old stool. ‘That’s Jem’s.’
‘Jem’s?’
‘He says he came by it fair and square, though I ain’t convinced.’ Watching Birdie approach the doll, Alfred remarked, ‘If you tip it over, it makes a noise.’
He was right. The doll bleated ‘Mama’ when Birdie picked it up – almost causing her to drop it again.
‘I’ll be . . .’ she murmured. ‘But why did Jem bring it here?’
‘Oh, Jem had a notion it would make good bogle-bait, no matter who might be holding it.’ As Birdie frowned, trying to imagine what would happen if you put a little old woman in a magic circle with a talking doll, Alfred continued, ‘Jem’s forever coming here with i
deas like that. If you ask me, he ain’t finding a delivery-boy’s life so congenial. You know he’s ’prenticed to a grocer now?’
‘Yes,’ said Birdie. She knew all about Jem because Miss Eames had taken an interest in his progress. After Jem had angrily denounced both Doctor Morton and Sarah Pickles to the police – thereby triggering the doctor’s arrest and Sarah’s sudden disappearance – his sad story had found its way into the newspapers, and had aroused the sympathy of an Islington grocer named Barnabus Leach. Mr Leach had thought Jem a promising lad, bright and quick though badly raised, and had offered to take him in off the street. At the time, Jem had been at a loose end. Sarah had either gone to ground or been killed for betraying one of her own boys (no one seemed quite sure which), and Jem was too widely known, by then, to earn his bread picking pockets. So he had agreed to work for Mr Leach.
‘Jem says as how I should start bogling again, but I’ve a suspicion it’s him as wants to be a bogler,’ Alfred went on. ‘Ned, too. They never leave me alone – allus going on and on about bogles . . .’
Birdie was well aware of this. Ned had twice waylaid her outside her singing teacher’s house with the news that Alfred had turned down yet another bogling job. After Doctor Morton’s trial had been reported in the newspapers, Alfred had become something of a household name. Appeals had started flooding in from all over England. A village in Cornwall had lost a couple of children in a large pond; a coalmine in Yorkshire had mysteriously mislaid four of its ‘hurriers’, or coal-dragging girls; six children had disappeared in the vicinity of Maidstone, Kent, over the past three years.
But for every appeal there had been half a dozen insults. While accusing Doctor Morton of being an evil and deluded maniac, the newspapers had also condemned Alfred for defrauding bereaved working folk of their hard-earned wages with his stories of child-eating monsters hiding in chimneys. After two members of the Victoria Institute had interviewed him, and had come away scoffing at his claims, people had begun to abuse him publicly – though not, for the most part, in his own neighbourhood. The inhabitants of Bethnal Green knew Alfred well enough to defend him when nosy journalists, drunken thrill-seekers and prying folklorists came poking around, asking questions.
Even so, Alfred had decided to move. Too many strange people had found out where he lived and were soon waylaying him in the street, or knocking on his door, demanding bogle-slime for their potions or offering to save his soul from the devil. He wasn’t comfortable in the limelight, and wasn’t happy talking to gentlemen who used long, scientific words. What’s more, he had decided to give up bogling, after his discovery that some bogles were actually desperate enough to attack an armed grown-up. How could he protect his apprentices if he couldn’t protect himself? Miss Eames had been right, he said. Bogling was not safe for apprentices, and until an alternative bait could be found, he wasn’t about to put any more children in danger – no matter how many times Jem or Ned might plead that bogling was better than picking pockets, or sifting mud, or cleaning bacon-slicers.
‘But what about all the missing kids in Yorkshire and Kent and Sussex?’ Birdie inquired, as she inspected the talking doll. It had ruffled pantaloons, silk stockings and white leather boots. ‘Don’t you care about them?’
‘Not enough to throw more kids into a bogle’s mouth.’
‘But what if you don’t have to?’ Birdie put the doll back down and focused her attention on Alfred. ‘See, I came here to tell you summat – something – that I heard today at me singing lesson. There’s a cove in France has used a machine to copy part of a song onto a cylinder. So it won’t be long before there’s a machine as can record songs and play ’em back! Like a self-playing piano . . .’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Alfred queried as he settled down onto his usual stool.
‘Well – if you had a machine as could sing like a child, you wouldn’t need a real child no more!’
‘And how much do you think this new machine’ll cost, when it’s finally invented?’ Alfred asked in a dry voice.
‘Oh, that don’t matter.’ Birdie dismissed the question impatiently. ‘Miss Eames’ll buy it for you.’
‘I think she’d prefer it if I didn’t bogle at all,’ said Alfred, plugging his old clay pipe with tobacco. ‘Which I won’t, if I have to wait for a machine that ain’t bin invented yet.’
‘Then how will you live?’ Birdie had been worrying more and more about Alfred, who had refused to take money from Miss Eames, and who was fast running through the fees paid to him by various journalists. According to Ned, Alfred’s first foray into rat-catching had left him with an infected bite that had put him in bed for a week. ‘You ain’t no vermin-hunter, you’re a hero!’ Birdie cried. ‘You’d be wasted as a ratcatcher, or a nightwatchman or – or—’ She was suddenly interrupted by a tentative tap on the door. ‘Who is it?’ she barked.
There was a brief pause. Then a startled voice said, ‘Birdie?’
‘Come in, Ned.’ Alfred’s tone was long-suffering. ‘You know you ain’t got to knock.’
‘Yes, but I brought a visitor,’ Ned explained, as he sidled into the room. Behind him was a swarthy young navvy wearing moleskin trousers, hobnailed boots, and a velveteen coat. A gaudy handkerchief was tied around the navvy’s neck; he carried a white felt hat that he kept rubbing between thick, nervous fingers.
‘This here is Fettle Joe,’ Ned announced awkwardly. ‘He works on the London and North Western Railway.’
Fettle Joe bobbed his head, which was crowned by a dense thatch of black hair. More hair covered his throat, jaw, arms, hands and upper lip. His brown eyes looked softer than the rest of him.
‘Me ganger sent me to find you, Mr Bunce,’ he said. ‘We heard all about that wicked doctor as went to gaol on account o’ you.’
‘Oh, aye,’ Alfred replied, in a noncommittal way.
‘It’s just . . . well, we’ve got boys working alongside us in the tunnels, see, and some no more’n ten years old. But two of ’em vanished, last week. We ain’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since, though I did hear one scream, afore he disappeared.’
‘They work underground,’ Ned interposed. ‘And bogles like deep holes.’
‘Mr Bunce knows what bogles like!’ Birdie snapped. But Alfred said nothing.
‘We thought as how you might help, if there’s a bogle dogging us,’ Fettle Joe continued. ‘Which we’re inclined to believe there is.’
Alfred hesitated. ‘I don’t kill bogles, no more,’ he growled at last. ‘’Tis a thankless job.’
‘I can appreciate that, sir, but they was stout little lads, one supporting a sick mother with his wage and the other learning to read.’ Seeing Alfred frown, the navvy softly pleaded, ‘Will you not take pity on the other boys, Mr Bunce? Who must give up either their lives or their livelihoods?’
Everyone stared at Alfred – including Birdie. He wouldn’t look at her, though.
‘We’d pay double,’ Fettle Joe added.
‘And I’d be yer boy,’ Ned volunteered, much to Birdie’s disgust.
‘You!’ She couldn’t contain herself. ‘What do you know about bogling?’
‘Not much,’ Ned had to concede. He fixed his clear, trustful gaze on Birdie. ‘You could teach me, though.’
Birdie glanced back at Alfred, who was shaking his head. ‘If there’s smoke again, or summat worse . . .’ he began. But she forestalled him.
‘We’d have more’n one lure, to protect ourselves,’ she pointed out. ‘Say there was three of us, widely spaced. You saw what happened at Mr Fotherington’s; the bogle didn’t know which of us to eat first. Suppose there is smoke, which I doubt, since you’ve seen only one smoking bogle in yer whole life. We can slow the bogle by confusing it with three different voices: Jem’s, Ned’s and mine.’
‘Not yours, lass,’ said Alfred. ‘Miss Eames wouldn’t like it.’
‘Miss Eames needn’t know,’ Birdie retorted. ‘And it’s only this once.’
‘I’ll do it,�
� Ned cut in. ‘And so will Jem.’
‘Please, Mr Bunce,’ begged the navvy.
‘The next boy who’s taken will be on yer conscience if you don’t help,’ Birdie warned Alfred. ‘Can you live with that? For I cannot!’
‘And me and Jem – we need the experience,’ Ned mumbled. ‘We’ve our hearts set on bogling. ’Tis a respectable trade, and mudlarks don’t make old bones.’
‘There’s no one can do this but you, Mr Bunce,’ Birdie argued. ‘And there’s still more underground lines to build, with boys slated to work ’em. Ain’t that right?’
She appealed to Fettle Joe, who nodded gravely. Meanwhile, Alfred sat hunched in his old green coat, sucking on his pipe, looking tired and worn and grim but somehow indomitable, like an ancient ruin. At last he pulled the pipe from his mouth.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ Before the navvy could thank him, however, Alfred addressed Birdie in a tone that she knew well – a tone that had governed her life since their first meeting in the Limehouse canal, when she was just four years old. ‘But this is the last time, d’you hear? The very last. For you’ve passed beyond this, Birdie. I ain’t yer master no more. We’re on different roads now, and must stick to ’em.’
‘Of course,’ Birdie answered – because Alfred was right. He wasn’t her master. They were on different roads. And for this very reason, she no longer had to do what he said.
She could plot out her own course, towards her own goal, in her own way. And if that meant a bit of unofficial bogling – well, then Alfred wasn’t going to stop her. Certainly Miss Eames wasn’t. If Birdie wanted to be a music-hall singer with a sideline in bogling, there was no reason why she should abandon that dream.
‘So shall we give Jem’s doll a try, while we’re about it?’ she suggested, bright-eyed and keen-voiced. ‘Since there’s more’n one way to skin a cat, it might be the same for a bogle. Don’t you think so, Mr Bunce . . .?’
A Very Unusual Pursuit Page 20