‘Peter,’ said Mama Thames, and beckoned me over to her chair. She indicated that she wanted to tell me something private. I tried to bend down with as much dignity as I could but I found myself, much to Brent’s amusement, on my knees before her. She leaned forward and brushed her lips against my forehead.
For a moment it was as if I stood high up on the middle cowling of the Thames Barrier looking east over the mouth of the river. I could feel the towers of Canary Wharf rising triumphantly at my back and beyond them the docks, the White Tower and all the bridges, bells and houses of London town. But ahead of me over the horizon I could feel the storm surge, the fatal combination of high tides, global warming and poor planning, waiting. Ready to drive a wall of water ten metres high up the river and bring down the bridges, towers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
‘Just so you understand,’ said Mama Thames, ‘where the real power lies.’
‘Yes, Mama,’ I said.
‘I expect you to sort out my dispute with the Old Man,’ she said.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘And because of your good manners, I have a last gift.’ She bent her head and whispered a name in my ear: ‘Tiberius Claudius Verica.’
The paratroopers were gone by the time I got back to Russell Square. I was back in charge of the Folly, and also responsible. Toby slammed into my ankles as soon as I was across the threshold, panting and thrashing affectionately, although once he’d established that I wasn’t carrying anything edible he lost interest and scampered off. Molly was waiting for me at the foot of the western stairs. I told her that Nightingale was conscious and then lied and said that he’d asked how she was. I told her what I was planning to do and she physically recoiled.
‘I’m just going to my room to get some stuff,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back down in half an hour.’
As soon as I reached my room I pulled out my Latin notes and checked the stuff about Roman names. Which, I’d learned, often have three bits – praenomen, nomen and cognomen – and, if you can read your own handwriting, tell you a lot about the individual. Verica wasn’t a Latin name; I suspected it was British, and Tiberius Claudius were the first two names of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, otherwise known as Emperor Claudius, him who was in charge when Britain was first conquered by the Romans. The Empire liked to co-opt the local ruling elite wherever possible – it being easier to get your leg over a country if you forked out for dinner and a dozen roses first. One of the bribes on offer was Roman citizenship, and many who took up that offer kept their native name and prefixed the praenomen and nomen of their sponsors – in this case the Emperor. Thus, just from the evidence of his name, Tiberius Claudius Verica was an aristocratic Briton who lived around the time the city was founded.
Which meant nothing, as far as I could tell. If I survived the next hour or so, I planned to have a word with Mama Thames about it. But I had more immediate problems.
*
In 1861 William Booth resigned from the Methodists in Liverpool and headed for London where, in the grand tradition of metropolitan reinvention, he founded his own church and took Christ, bread and social work to the heathen natives of east London. In 1878 he declared that he was tired of being called a volunteer and that he was a regular in the army of Christ or nothing at all; thus the Salvation Army was born. But no army, however pure its motives, occupies a foreign country without resistance, and this was provided by the Skeleton Army. Driven by gin, bone-headedness and growling resentment that being the Victorian working class was bad enough without being preached at by a bunch of self-righteous northerners, the Skeleton Army broke up Salvation Army meetings, disrupted marches and attacked its officer corps. The emblem of the Skeleton Army was a white skeleton against a black background – a badge worn by right-thinking ne’er-do-wells from Worthing to Bethnal Green. I’d spotted one on the ghostly form of Nicholas Wallpenny, a candidate for the Skeleton Army if ever there was one, and it was this badge that I’d recovered from the graveyard of the Actor’s Church. Nightingale had said that I was going to need a spirit guide, and in the absence of mystical bears, coyotes or whatever, a larcenous cockney was going to have to do.
The badge was where I’d left it, in the plastic box where I kept my paperclips. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. It was just a cheap little thing, pewter and brass. When I closed my hand around it there was the fleeting taste of gin, old songs and just a little stab of resentment.
If this was to be a spiritual journey I wasn’t going to need anything else, and I’d put off the moment long enough. I went reluctantly downstairs to where Molly was waiting for me in the middle of the atrium. She stood with her head bowed, her hair a black curtain hiding her face, hands locked in front of her.
‘I don’t want to do this either,’ I said.
She raised her head, and for the first time looked me directly in the eye. ‘Do it,’ I said.
She moved so fast I didn’t see it, throwing herself against me. One arm snaked around my shoulders and grabbed the back of my head, the other went around my waist. I could feel her breasts pressing against my chest, her thighs clamping hard around my leg. Her face was buried in the hollow of my neck, and I felt her lips against my throat. Fear rolled over me: I tried to pull myself free but she held me tighter than a lover. I felt her teeth scrape at my neck and then pain, strangely more like a blow rather than a stab, as she bit me hard. I felt the action of her swallowing as she sucked at my blood but I also felt the connection with the tiles beneath me and the bricks in the walls – the yellow London clay – and then I was falling backwards into daylight and the smell of turpentine.
It wasn’t like a VR or a how you imagine a hologram should work; it was like breathing vestigia, like swimming in stone. I found myself in the Folly’s own memory of the atrium.
I’d done it – I was in.
*
The atrium looked largely as it should but the colours were muted, almost sepia in tone and there was a ringing in my ears like the sensation you get when swimming near the bottom of the deep end. Molly was nowhere to be seen, but I thought I caught a glimpse of Nightingale, or at least the imprint of Nightingale on the stone memory, making his way wearily up the stairs. I unclasped my hand and checked that I was still ‘holding’ the skeleton badge. It was still there, and when I closed my fingers back around it I felt it tug, very gently, towards the south. I turned and made my way towards the side door in Bedford Place, but as I crossed the atrium floor I was suddenly aware of a vast darkness beneath my feet. It was as if the solid black and white tiles had been rendered transparent, and through them I could glimpse a terrible abyss – dark, bottomless and cold. I tried to move faster but it was like walking into a violent headwind. I had to lean forward and push hard to make progress. It wasn’t until I’d carefully steered myself through the narrow servants’ quarters under the east stairs that I wondered whether, this being the realm of ghosts, after all, I might just walk through the walls. After knocking my forehead a couple of times I just opened the side door like a normal person.
I stepped out into the 1930s and the stink of horses. I knew it was the 1930s because of the double-breasted suits and gangster hats. The cars were nothing but shadows, but the horses were solid and smelled of sweat and manure. There were people walking on the pavements; they looked perfectly normal but for an abstracted look in their eyes. I stepped in front of one man as an experiment, but he just walked around me as if I were a familiar and inconsequential obstacle. A sharp pain in my neck reminded me that I wasn’t here to sightsee.
I let the skeleton badge tug me onwards down Bed-ford Place and towards Bloomsbury Square. Above, the sky seemed strangely ill defined, blue at one moment, cloudy the next and then gritty with coal smoke. As I travelled I noticed that the clothes on the passers-by changed, the ghost cars vanished completely and even the skyline began to alter. I realised I was being drawn back in time through the historical record. If I had gue
ssed right, then Nicholas Wallpenny’s badge would not only take me to his Covent Garden haunt but to the point in time when he started haunting it.
The most recent book on the subject I could find had been from 1936, and written by a guy called Lucius Brock. He’d speculated that vestigia were laid down in layers like archaeological deposits, and that different spirits inhabited different layers. I was going to Wall-penny in the late Victorian era and he was going to lead me to Henry Pyke in the late eighteenth century and Pyke, whether he wanted to or not, would reveal his last resting place.
I’d made it as far as the top of Drury Lane when the Victorian era drove me retching to my knees. I’d been getting used to the pervading smell of horseshit but the 1870s was like sticking your head into a cesspit. It may have been vestigia, but it was strong enough to heave my imaginary lunch into the filthy gutter. I tasted blood in my mouth and realised that some of that was my own – no doubt fuelling whatever occult shit Molly was doing to keep me here.
Bow Street was crammed with enormous carts and high-sided vans drawn by horses the size of decent family hatchbacks. This was Covent Garden at its height, and I expected Wallpenny’s skeleton badge to lead me down Russell Street to the Piazza but instead it pulled me to the right, up Bow Street, towards the Royal Opera House. Then the carts changed shape and I realised that I was too far back in time and that something had gone wrong with Plan A.
As if being cleared for the start of the next scene, the heavy carts vanished from outside the Opera House. The sky dimmed and the street became dark, lit only by torches and oil lamps. The ghost images of gilded carriages drifted past me while bewigged and perfumed ladies and gentlemen promenaded up and down the steps of the old Theatre Royal. A group of three men caught my eye. They seemed to be more solid than the other figures, denser and more real. One of them was a large elderly man in a big wig who walked stiffly with the aid of a stick – this had to be Charles Macklin. The light clung to him as if he were being singled out for a close-up – no prizes for guessing who by.
This, I assumed, was going to be a re-enactment of the infamous murder of Henry Pyke by the dastardly Charles Macklin and, right on cue, enter Henry Pyke in velvet coat and a state of high emotion, his wig askew and an outsized stick in his hand.
Only, I recognised the face. I’d first seen it on a cold January morning and it had introduced itself as Nicholas Wallpenny – late of the Parish of Covent Garden. But no, not Nicholas Wallpenny, it was Henry Pyke. It was always Henry Pyke, right from the start, from the portico of the Actor’s Church, making the most of his chirpy cockney impression. Well, at least it explained why Wallpenny wouldn’t show himself in front of Nightingale. It also meant that the scene at the church that had led me to my impromptu excavation of a priceless London landmark had been just that – a scene, a performance.
‘Help, help,’ cried one of Macklin’s companions, ‘murder!’
Some things are universal: birds got to fly, fish got to swim, fools and policemen got to rush in. I managed to restrain myself from shouting ‘oi’ as I ran forward, and as a result got within two metres before Henry Pyke saw me coming. I got a very satisfying ‘oh fuck’ expression from him and then his face changed – he became the ludicrous quarter-moon caricature that I had come to know as Mr Punch, spirit of riot and rebellion.
‘You know,’ he squeaked, ‘you’re not nearly as stupid as you look.’
Standard operating procedure for dealing with mad fuckers; keep them talking, sidle closer, grab them when they ain’t looking.
‘So was that you pretending to be Nicholas Wall-penny?’
‘No,’ said Mr Punch. ‘I let Henry Pyke do all the deception, lives to act, poor thing, it’s all he ever wanted out of life.’
‘Except he’s dead,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said Mr Punch. ‘Isn’t the universe wonderful?’
‘Where’s Henry now?’
‘He’s in your girlfriend’s head having carnal knowledge of her brain,’ said Mr Punch, and then threw back his head and shrieked with laughter. I lunged but the slippery bastard turned on his heel and legged it down one of the narrow alleys that connected to Drury Lane.
I took off after him, and I’m not saying that I could feel the spirit of every London thief taker flowing through me as I ran, but consider – we did start outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, and I could no more have not chased him than I could have stopped breathing.
I burst out of the alley onto a winter’s Drury Lane, pedestrians bundled into anonymity, steam rising from the horses and the men who carried the sedan-chairs. In the rush of cold and snow the city smelled clean and fresh and about to be rid of one irritating revenant spirit. Spring came with a stuttering stop-start motion swiftness, and Mr Punch led me down grimy side streets that I knew didn’t exist any more until finally we passed a newly built St Clements and onto Fleet Street. The great fire of London went by too fast for me to register it, just a blast of hot air as if from the open door of an oven. One minute the top of Fleet Street was dominated by St Paul’s, and the next the dome had been replaced by the squared-off Norman tower of the old cathedral. To a Londoner like me it was a heretical sight – like suddenly finding a stranger in your bed. The street itself was narrower and crowded by narrow-fronted half-timbered houses with overhanging upper floors. We were back in the time of Shakespeare, and I have to say it didn’t smell nearly as bad as the nineteenth century. Mr Punch was running for his afterlife, but I was gaining.
London was also shrinking. Gaps were opening in the buildings on either side. I could see green pastures with hayricks and herds of cows. Things were losing focus around me. Ahead the River Fleet appeared, and suddenly I was dipping down to cross a stone bridge, while on the other side of the valley there were walls – the ancient walls of London. I only just made it through Ludgate before the actual gates had grown back and barred my way. The old cathedral was long gone; we’d missed the Anglo-Saxons and what modern go-ahead historians like to call the sub-Roman period, and paganism was back in fashion.
If I’d been thinking about it, I probably should have stopped and had a good look around, answered a few important questions about life in Londinium, but I didn’t because that’s when I closed the last couple of metres on Mr Punch and rugby-tackled the dead fucker to the ground.
‘Mr Punch,’ I said. ‘You’re nicked.’
‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘Black Irish bastard dog.’
‘You’re not making yourself any friends here, Punch,’ I said. I got him back on his feet with both his arms jacked far enough up behind his back that he wasn’t going anywhere without at least a broken elbow.
He stopped squirming and turned his head until he could watch me with one eye. ‘So you got me, copper,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do with me now?’
It was a good question, and a sudden savage pain in the hollow of my throat reminded me that I was running out of time.
‘Let’s see what the hanging magistrate makes of you,’ I said.
‘De Veil?’ asked Mr Punch. ‘Yes please, I’m sure he’ll be delicious.’
Revenant, spirit of riot and rebellion, I thought, you idiot. He eats ghosts. I needed something stronger. Brock had written that the genii locorum, the gods and spirits of place, were stronger than ghosts. Was there a god of justice? And where would I find him – or maybe her? Then I remembered: a statue of a woman stands atop the dome of the Old Bailey. In one hand she holds a sword and a set of scales. I didn’t know if there was a goddess of justice or not, but I was willing to bet big money that Mr Punch would know.
‘Why don’t we go and ask the nice lady of the Old Bailey?’ I suggested.
He tensed, and I knew I’d bet right. He struggled again and slammed his head back, aiming for my chin, but that isn’t exactly a new one for a policeman, so I had my head back safely out of reach.
‘You’re going up the steps this time,’ I said.
Mr Punch went limp, defeated I thought, but then he b
egan to shake in my grip. At first I thought he was crying, and then I realised it was laughter. ‘You’re going to find that a bit difficult,’ he said. ‘You seem to have run out of city.’
I looked around and saw that he was right. We’d gone back too far, and now there was nothing left of London but huts and the wooden stake rampart of the Roman camp to the north. There was no stonework at all, nothing but the new-cut smell of oak planking and hot pitch. Only one thing stood complete – the bridge. It was less than a hundred metres away and constructed of square-cut timbers. It looked more like a fishing pier that had got ideas above its station and crossed the river in a fit of exuberance.
I could see a crowd halfway across, sunlight flashing off the brass fittings of a file of legionnaires standing at attention. Beyond them a cluster of civilians in togas chalked to a blinding white for a special occasion and watching a couple of dozen men, women and children in barbaric trousers and brass torcs.
Suddenly I understood what it was Mama Thames had been trying to tell me.
I think Mr Punch understood as well, because he fought me all the way as I dragged him across the bridge and in front of the toga-clad officials. These were more echoes from the past, memories trapped in the fabric of the city – they didn’t react when I threw Punch down before them. I was in Year Five when we did Roman history at school, so we didn’t learn a lot of dates but we did do plenty of group work on what it was like to live in Roman Britain. Which was why I could recognise the officiating priest by the purple-striped stole that covered his head. I could also recognise him by his face, although he looked a lot younger than he had when I’d seen him in the flesh. Plus he was clean-shaven and his black hair hung around his shoulders, but it was the same face that I had last seen propping up a fence at the source of the Thames. It was the spirit of the Old Man of the River as a young man.
Suddenly a great many things became clear to me.
‘Tiberius Claudius Verica,’ I called.
Rivers of London Page 30