The Quickening and the Dead

by J C Briggs

  They made a careful search, but there was nothing to see that suggested that Will had been here.

  Jones was satisfied. ‘So, let’s work our way back like policemen rather than two children lost in the dark. Let’s assume that they — or, I admit — one or the other — saw the blank wall here and turned back. We are looking for traces of them going through these alleys — and as quickly as they could. So, we go slowly and we use our eyes.’

  They went back the way they came. There was another turning before they got to the end.

  Jones looked down the turning. ‘Let’s suppose they took the first turning — it would be natural. They’d want to get away from the dead end — they’d not want to be trapped.’

  And so they went on, picking their way through the refuse and puddles, using the lamp to light up the walls and the ground.

  ‘Look, sir — someone’s passed by — look at that mark, as if someone banged against the wall. Looks like the shoulder rubbed against the wall and smeared the mud.’

  Jones looked. ‘The height tells us it was probably a man — bit smaller than you.’

  ‘Mr Dickens?’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  Rogers shone the light on the ground. Before the mark on the wall, they saw a long print in the mud as though someone had skidded and there was another footprint where the runner had put his right foot down. A man’s foot — not a big man. To the right of that print, further away on the other side of the alley was the print of another foot — a boot, this time, a man’s boot.

  ‘Two people — two men. It might mean that someone was with Mr Dickens.’

  ‘But, they wouldn’t be running, surely,’ Jones said. ‘And why so far apart? The man on the left here — if it was Mr Dickens — was running free. He skidded in the mud, banged into the wall, righted himself and went on. The one on the other side was too far away to be holding onto a prisoner.’

  ‘But it’s not a kid’s boot — too big for Scrap.’

  Jones had a sudden vision of Scrap sitting in his office by the fire with his feet on the fender — feet in boots too big, boots tied with string that he’d got from Zeb Scruggs. Scrap in the disguise he had been so proud of — plain clothes, he’d said. Let him be safe. He looked again at the boot mark. ‘Scrap was wearing a man’s boots. I saw them. Let’s go on.’

  In another alley, they found the scarf, caught on the jutting iron. Jones recognised it, and they saw, further on, the way in which the gravel had been scattered where someone had tripped over a big stone and fallen. Muddy water had been splashed onto the wall. And there were more footprints, signs that two had run together through these alleys.

  ‘They’ve escaped, surely. There’s no sign that they were followed. If they’ve got out of this maze, they’ll have gone to the chop house, surely.’

  ‘Yes, and we’ve ter get out yet — I still don’t know where we are.’ Rogers looked about him, shining the light into the blackness ahead.

  ‘No more do I — we’ll just have to follow the signs so conveniently left by our friends.’

  Threading their way through more twisting alleys, patiently following the signs left by the runners, they eventually found themselves by an open doorway. The lamplight showed a muddy handprint on the door — small, a boy’s hand. Dickens had been wearing gloves.

  ‘Scrap?’ whispered Rogers.

  Inside the yard they saw the old stables where the cows were kept. In the first one, they saw the cow. It sighed again — more visitors. And, they saw that two people had sat in the straw by the wall, but they had gone now. The only sound was the cow’s breathing.

  Outside in the lane, they looked left. A gas lamp flickered at the corner. Two women hurried by, one with a bundle and the other with a basket. They went down to the ordinary street. Rogers looked up at the sign.

  ‘Paradise Street.’

  ‘So, it is — Paradise, indeed,’ said Jones.

  Stemp lay still in the foetid cellar to which his attackers had brought him. He could feel the wetness seeping through his jacket — pity he didn’t have his uniform coat — but the thin jacket and the canvas waistcoat were his plain clothes, the clothes of a labouring man. One eye was closed and the other seemed so, but through the slit he was aware of the flickering of his lamp held by the boy.

  They’d thrown him down some steps. Nothing broken — he hoped. There would be bruises, but he could put up with that. He wondered what they were going to do with him.

  There were two — a man and a boy, muffled up to the eyes in scarves. The man had grabbed him from behind and the lad had snatched the lamp. Then they’d dragged him down the alley. He’d not resisted — more use to Mr Jones alive, he’d thought. He’d relaxed his body so that when they’d thrown him down the stairs, he’d fallen like a sack of spuds. Then he’d lain quite still — hoping that they’d think him unconscious. When the boy had opened the cellar door, he’d caught a glimpse of two hard, mad eyes, greedy with excitement — the boy wanted to hurt him. Wicked little sod, Stemp had thought, but he gave no sign.

  A shadow loomed over him, blotting out the light. The figure gave Stemp a kick, and then another.

  Stemp didn’t move, though he felt each blow. He wasn’t an easy man to frighten, but this lad — he was capable of anything. He wondered about the man. The boy picked up a large stone, ready to bring it down on the policeman’s head.

  ‘No killin’ — for fuck’s sake, Jimmy, come away. Yous’ll ave the whole feckin’ police force down ’ere if you kill ’im — police know you. You said yourself. Come away.’

  Irish, thought Stemp — and he caught the name. Jimmy Brady — it must be — the lad Scrap had seen and Superintendent Jones and Mr Dickens. Well, if I live, I’ll find ’em again.

  ‘Leave ’im be — sure, you’ve done enough. If yous wants to please Satan, let’s find that Italian kid — Satan wants ’im back.’

  Stemp felt the last vicious kick to his head. Sickened, he heard them going up the steps, the key in the lock and then silence. But he couldn’t move. The darkness seemed to swim about him as he tried to sit up. He felt himself drifting. Then there was nothing.

  Chapter 27: Conversation with a Philosopher

  ‘See, Mr Dickens…’ Between mouthfuls of hot pie, Scrap was responding to Dickens’s speculations regarding the whereabouts of Superintendent Jones and Sergeant Rogers. ‘Mr Jones’ll deal wiv ol’ Satan an’ ’is knife. See an’ Mr Rogers — they’ll be tergether an’ they’ll come ’ere ter find us.’

  ‘I don’t doubt you’re right,’ Dickens answered, feeling, however, more anxious than the sanguine Scrap — those alleys. And Stemp — where was he?

  ‘Mr Jones ain’t afraid of nothin’ — I seen ’im — villuns is more afraid of ’im. Ol’ Satan’s got no chance.’

  It was true. Dickens had seen all kinds of villains quail before Sam Jones, and in all sorts of miserable cellars and thieves’ dens. He had heard the steel in his voice and seen the flint in his eye. And Stemp was tough, too. Nevertheless, he worried about that dark, secret place where eyes watched and shadows flitted in the darkness in which a man might vanish out of the world.

  Scrap was speaking again. He seemed to have read Dickens’s thoughts. ‘Mr Stemp, ’e’s tough that one. ’E’ll find ’is way — we did, dint we?’

  ‘So we did.’

  ‘Eat yer pie, Mr Dickens — gotter keep yer strength up.’

  Dickens obeyed, laughing inwardly. It wasn’t bad, either.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind…’ Scrap began. He stopped and ate another mouthful of pie. Dickens waited. Scrap looked at his plate. ‘I wouldn’t mind bein’ a policeman — later o’ course when I’m older.’

  And a bit bigger, Dickens thought. He looked at Scrap. He was bigger than he had been — good food, light and air did it — but he was still small in stature for his age. He’d be about twelve, he supposed. ‘You would?’

  ‘Plain clothes, o’ course — I’d like ter be one o’ them detective perlice.
I could work fer Mr Jones, I daresay — jest as I does now, but mebbe I could get ter be a sergeant like Mr Rogers. Excitin’ life.’

  ‘You might need to go to school, perhaps.’

  ‘Don’t fancy it, Mr Dickens — Mrs Jones is teachin’ me. That’s enough, I reckon. Did yer go ter school yerself?’

  ‘For a couple of years when I was your age.’ Dickens had spent two years at Wellington House Academy after his removal from Warren’s blacking factory — but it wasn’t much. As his father had once said when asked where his son was educated, Charles could be said to have educated himself. And he had. His real education, like Scrap’s, had been in the streets and alleys.

  ‘Yer not tellin’ me that yer learnt all them things yer know in school fer two years. Nah, Mr Dickens, yer woz out an’ about like me.’

  ‘I was — out and about, as you say…’ A memory came to him of his twelve year old self wandering about the darkness of the Adelphi arches, lingering by a little public house to watch some coal-heavers dancing, pacing the stones, counting the dull chimes of the clocks, feeling more utterly alone and cast away than in a trackless desert.

  Scrap waited, wondering at the change in Mr Dickens’s face. Somethin’ sad there — memory p’raps. Scrap knew about that — he remembered his ma, and how when she had died, no one had told him anything. There was just a big hole in his life that had never been filled until — and he thought of Mrs Jones’s crumpled face the other morning — until Mrs Jones, and o’ course, Mr Jones and Eleanor and Tom, and Sergeant Rogers an’ Mollie, too. An’ Mr Dickens. Rich, I am, rich as — as a king. He smiled at the thought.

  Dickens saw him smile and looked at the boy’s black hands — blacking. Well, John Forster knew. And the readers of David Copperfield knew the bottle factory where the boy, David, had laboured but not that it was his own blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs. ‘I worked before I went to school — in a blacking factory.’

  Scrap nodded. ‘Just the way o’ things, I serpose. Still, funny way round,’ he observed, ‘folk gen’rally goes ter school before they goes ter work.’

  The great secret, thought Dickens, half-laughing to himself, the secret so old that it seemed to have grown into him so that the writing of it had seemed to tear his very fabric. And to Scrap, it was just the way of the world.

  The philosopher had not finished. ‘All that stuff yer knows now, wot yer put in the books, where’s that from?’

  ‘Well, being out and about, and reading, too. I read a lot when I was a boy.’

  ‘There yer are then, s’wot I says — Mrs Jones is teachin’ me. She reads yer books ter me and Eleanor an’ Tom — an’ I reads for meself, o’ course. I’m readin’ … well, I’m not sayin’ yet. But it stands ter reason. I don’t need no school.’

  The argument won, the great writer trounced by ineluctable logic, the young Socrates finished his pie and began on the rest of the pie that Dickens couldn’t eat.

  How long should they wait for Jones and Rogers? He could not really believe that they were swallowed up in that terrible darkness. People didn’t simply disappear. But if they’d been separated? Then again, as Scrap had reasonably pointed, they had found their way out — and in the dark. Rogers had his lamp, but so had Stemp and he had vanished. His thoughts went round and round. They should go to Bow Street, surely and report that the Superintendent was missing. He half rose from his seat, ready to act. Anything was better than this infernal waiting.

  The door opened and he saw Sam come into the chop house, carrying the scarf. He sat down. His heart seemed to lurch in his chest. I was terrified of losing him, he thought. Scrap put down his fork.

  ‘Well, you two look all right — good pie is it?’ Jones asked, but his swift glance at Dickens showed his relief.

  ‘It was,’ said Scrap. The plate was empty.

  ‘Bruised, bloody, battered, squelched — but ne’er undone,’ said Dickens.

  ‘Your moustache is unharmed, I see.’ Jones smiled at him.

  ‘What did I tell you? Neither tempest nor hurricane can move it. You found my scarf, I see.’

  ‘Yes, we followed the trail you left and saw that you’d been at the Dairy. We came out in Paradise Street.’

  ‘Out of Inferno.’

  ‘Quite. We saw the brazier and we picked up this.’ He took the mask from his pocket. ‘You saw him.’

  ‘I saw a young Italian man — not Will — he had no injury to his hands — one of which, incidentally, he used to throw a knife at me.’

  Jones raised his eyes. ‘He missed, clearly.’ Not the moment to discuss the fact that Dickens might have been killed. Later, when they were alone, his eyes said to Dickens.

  ‘Scrap grabbed me — saved my life. He threw it when I asked about the Italian boy.’

  ‘Hm — the gang master, we think. The boy is one of his, perhaps, and he wants him back. No sign of the lad?’

  ‘No — nor of Stemp.’

  ‘We didn’t see him, either. However, there was no one about. Before we discuss anything else, Rogers and I must go to the Marylebone Police Station. I want to get a search party to look for Stemp. He may be injured somewhere.’ Or worse, Jones thought, but there was no use in saying it. By their faces, he knew that the others had the same thought.

  Chapter 28: Mog Chips

  Something woke Stemp. Some sense of change. Light, and something, he was sure, had tapped his face. Something like a little hand, gentle and cool. Stemp opened his eyes and looked into two little brown ones which were gazing at him with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

  The eyes were in a little, wrinkled brown face, and it was a little brown paw that had tapped softly at his face — a monkey’s paw. That’s what his visitor was — a monkey in a red jacket. Stemp stared back and the monkey cocked its head. It looked at him as if it understood all that had happened. Human eyes, wise eyes, kind eyes — so kindly that tough Stemp could have wept.

  Then he realised that a light was coming from above. He looked up. Someone was shining a lamp down.

  A voice said, ‘That’s Pete — follow him up if you can.’

  There was a ladder leading up to some kind of trap door in the ceiling of the cellar. The monkey looked at him, its human eyes asking. He nodded and the monkey climbed lightly up the ladder.

  Stemp got to his feet, swaying rather. Stiff as a corpse, he thought, but I’m alive and that’s somethin’. He could feel the stiffness in his jaw where Jimmy Brady had kicked him and he was aware of the sore places where the vicious boots had landed their blows. But there was a way out. He looked up to see Pete peering anxiously down at him.

  ‘Can you manage it?’ the voice asked — a London voice, he thought, not Irish. Warm not cold. Well, let’s see who it belongs to.

  ‘I think so.’

  Stemp climbed gingerly up the ladder — he hoped it would take his weight. But it wasn’t far up — six or seven feet. He wormed his way through the trap door and found himself in a loft — a clean and tidy loft where there was a makeshift bed and a sailor’s box serving as a table upon which Pete now sat. And there was a man, a man who was undoubtedly a sailor with a brown face, tight grey curls, wearing a peacoat, and looking at him out of brown eyes as kindly as the monkey’s.

  ‘Mog Chips, sir, and Pete, you’ve already met.’ The sailor held out his hand, warm as the voice.

  ‘Frank Stemp, sir. I’m more than glad ter meet yer, Mr Chips — and Pete, too.’ Stemp gave a nod to the monkey, which bowed to him. ‘I don’t know ’ow as I’d got outer that there hole.’

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Stemp,’ said Mog Chips, pointing to one of two rough packing cases which served as his chairs. ‘You’ll take a glass of rum? I’m afraid I’ve no warm — Pete an’ me’s off this day.’

  He poured two measures of rum into two tin mugs and they sat. Mog Chips lit his pipe.

  ‘I heard somethin’ of what went on down there — terrible boy, that. Heard ’im say you’re a policeman.’

  ‘That’s right.
The boy and his pa jumped me — thought I’d ’ad it at one point.’

  ‘Yes — I was ready to jump down. Thought at first it was a row between thieves. Then the dad pulled him off an’ I waited till the coast was clear and sent Pete to have a look.’

  ‘I’m obliged to yer, Mr Chips.’

  ‘Mog’s fine.’

  ‘Mog?’

  ‘Aye — short for Mahogany. That’s what they called me — on account of me darkness. Father black, mother white — not that I ever knew him. Gone afore I was born — by the docks. Went to sea when I was but twelve. It ain’t a bad life, Mr Stemp, for a man whose got no one — ’cept Pete, o’ course. Had a sister — younger than me — different father. When our ma died, I went to sea and she was taken by our auntie. Not me — not Mahogany — too dark.’

  ‘Goin’ back ter the sea?’

  ‘Don’t know yet. Came back to find my sister. When a man’s out there in the dark, lookin’ at the stars an’ the moon ridin’ there like a great silver dollar — millions o’ stars out there, Mr Stemp — he gets to thinkin’ about the meanin’ o’ things. Just wanted to know for sure that there was no one but me and Pete.’

  Stemp looked at Pete who was watching his master with the same look of concern he’d shown to Stemp. Worried about ’im, he thought. Why, that monkey knows more and feels more than most human beings. He thought of Jimmy Brady’s hard, greedy eyes. No more feelin’ than a snake.

  ‘Did yer find ’er?’

  ‘No — I came this way because I knew that Penny lived with our auntie in Dab Lane, but it was too long ago — course it was. I should ’ave known, but a man gets an idea an’ he has to follow it. Who were you followin’?’

  ‘I was lookin’ fer an Italian lad — witness, maybe, to a murderer. In danger, my chief thought.’

  ‘The Irish man mentioned an Italian boy — I wondered about that. Saw a little lad up near the workhouse. I went there to ask about Penny. Curled up in a doorway — I stopped to have a look. Could have been dead, I thought, so I spoke to him. You’d ’ave thought I was the devil himself, the way he stared at me. Terrified. Then he ran off.’