by Tim Mason
“Very amusing, Mr. Field. Then I had a word with Peter Sims, our friend in the royal stables. Sims says the royal couple are off to Germany come September. You see, I was engaged doing my job as per your requests, sir, and in the meanwhile setting up a fund for Josiah’s aged parents. So what am I supposed to do now? Do you not know that I’m going to catch it because of what you done? Everybody knows that Llewellyn belongs to Field—the bloke who told the commissioner to stuff it!”
“Line them up, Sam, the corpses, one by one. Stevie Patchen. The shooter, Rendell. The young student, David Gates. Josiah Kilvert. They have a story to tell us, Sam. They’re fair desperate to tell us how they all link up to the plot against Her Majesty the Queen, or they’ll never have no peace.”
“You’re drunk, Mr. Field.”
“Start with Kilvert. Up front in that library they’re arguing for and against Mr. Darwin’s notions, do we come from monkeys or not. In the middle of that, Kilvert must have spotted our killer. What would make Kilvert so certain of his man? What did he do or say to him? Kilvert must have posed such a threat to the man that he had to top him then and there. And why is the killer at this debate in the first place? What’s the link? That’s the problem.”
“Your problem, the way I see it, is how are you going to feed your wife and keep a roof over her head now you’ve lost your position!”
Martha Ginty slammed a tray of empty glasses on the bar. “He says he’s seen my Tom. So where is he? He’s the police—why don’t he bring me back my boy? If this is the police, what good is the police?”
Goodfellow moved quickly along the bar. “All right, Martha. That’ll do. You heard what the officer said: he had your boy by the hand, but he went off. If Tom wanted to come, he would have come, but he didn’t want to, did he?” She glared at her employer and the policemen. Then she pulled off her apron, threw it onto the bar, and pushed her way out of the tavern.
“Well,” said Goodfellow, “at least I’m shut of Martha Ginty. She’s gone off her nut, you ask me.” He leaned across the bar. “Listen, old friend, if you ever find yourself in a bind, you come to me.”
“I’m not in a bind.”
“I’m just saying, as the proprietor of a public house hard by Smithfield, I could use a good man. A guard, like. A protector. These are dangerous times.”
“You want to engage me?” said Field, incredulously.
“I pay well, Charlie. Far better than the Metropolitan, I think you’d find.”
“When all the rivers in all of hell are crusted over with ice and adorned with skating fairies, I’ll be sure to knock you up for a position, Mickie.”
Goodfellow colored. “See, this is why you find yourself in a bind, old friend, no matter what you say. You’ve an irritable nature.” Goodfellow moved down the bar again.
Llewellyn shook his head in disgust. “He’s right, you know. Does Mrs. Field know what you’ve done?”
“Sod off,” said Field, suddenly dangerous. The two men stared at each other for a long moment; Field was the first to look away.
“I’m a bloody fool, Sam. Always was. No better than my old man, and he was no good whatsoever. I always needed someone to think well of me ’cause he bloody well wasn’t going to. I had to go and be a big man, I had to win praise and accolades. And then, out of the blue, Mr. Dickens put me in his magazine. And then look: he’s put me in a book! I thought, I’ve done it! I’m bloody marvelous, am I not! I’ve got the blessing of the greats! I’m a man of stature! Well, the joy of that particular lie lasted all of an hour, didn’t it. Who was I kidding? I was forever waiting for the honors to roll in, and they never did, at least not the way I thought they ought.”
Llewellyn snorted. “Stop, sir, you’re breaking my heart.”
Inspector Field was staring off. He held up one hand. “Wait a moment.”
“Why should I?”
“Dear God, it’s so bloody simple,” said the inspector, finally. “Waiting for the honors to roll in, that’s it exactly.”
“What’s simple, sir?” said Llewellyn with barely suppressed impatience.
“I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me.
“Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.”
Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head.
“You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?”
Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass.
“Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?”
Llewellyn shrugged.
“I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.”
“And?”
“Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.”
“So why kill the Queen? Why not kill Mr. Darwin?”
“The book’s out, ain’t it. Nothing to be done about the book, that horse has bolted, there’s no locking the stable door now. So what’s the call to action? What’s so urgent? We only just assumed it was the Queen who Philip Rendell was aiming for, Sam. He even told me it wasn’t, and I didn’t listen. I’m guessing the Queen don’t know Darwin from Adam’s off-ox. But Albert? Lover of natural philosophy and all things scientific? He’s Mr. Victoria, ain’t he. And even if his good wife don’t care about Darwin’s monkeys, Albert does. All the Prince has got to do is put a word in her ear. Round Christmastime.”
“Land of my bloody fathers, the Honors List,” said Llewellyn.
“The Honors List.”
“Sir Charles Darwin.”
“Come the New Year, that’s it exactly, lad. Knighted by Her Imperial Majesty, Darwin and his theory given the blessing of the Crown. There’d be no putting that genie back in the bottle, not ever.”
“Damn it, sir, you’ve got to apologize to the commissioner! You’ve got to get your position back!”
“I can’t do that, Sam.”
“They’ll kill him, sir! Or the two of them together, him and the Queen both! You can’t leave me holding the bloody bag!”
“I wonder, is someone grooming the Prince of Wales even now? You might look into that, Sam.”
“Get stuffed, sir! You think I won’t be demoted now, with you having got the sack? I won’t be foll
owing no lines of inquiry. I’ll be back where I started, or worse. But when Albert gets himself topped, it’ll all be down to me and my incompetent ways, I’ll be finished!” Llewellyn turned and pushed his way out through the crowd.
“Sam!”
Field watched Llewellyn go, and Goodfellow watched Field.
When the inspector arrived home that afternoon, having rehearsed his terrible confession, he found his wife in the kitchen, weeping silently. She was flanked by Martha Ginty and Bessie Shoreham, both of them glaring at him. The admission clearly was not needed; everything was known. He wished he were more sober, but not by much.
“I’ll find another position, Mrs. Field,” he said.
“A man’s already been to make a list of the furniture,” said Jane wonderingly. “And the landlord, giving a warning. Does somebody hate you so much, Mr. Field?”
It was remarkably fast work; premature, in fact. Clearly, someone’s malice was behind it; Sir Richard Owen, most likely. Or maybe it was Sir Jasper Bushy-Beard.
“I’m very sorry, my dear. You have the keys to the household box; there should be enough coin in it to keep you for at least a bit. I will find work, Jane. I will provide.”
He turned and left the house.
25
Blinky stared at the door set into the kitchen wall. The dumbwaiter was descending, she could hear it in the walls. It was the wrong time of day for it. The shelf always went up to the top of the house at midday, laden with food, and came down again with empty platters in the evening. Night slops arrived each morning, and Blinky was summoned to deal with the covered pot and its contents.
Blinky glanced round the kitchen. Mrs. Hamlet was sleeping on her usual stool in the corner. Hamlet himself was absent. The girl moved quietly to the dumbwaiter. Furtively, she grabbed hold of the knob, slid the door up, and there, all by itself on the shelf, was the ring she’d given Tom.
Her ten-year-old heart raced. She stared at the little circlet of gold, trying to make out what it could mean. That it was a message for her, there could be no doubt.
It meant he loved her as she hoped he might.
It meant (no please no) he did not love her.
It meant (oh dear God no) that the woman above had done for Tom and this was all that was left of him. Blinky snatched the ring and shut the door.
“Wot’s that, then?” the voice behind her croaked. Blinky froze. How could she not have smelled Hamlet before she heard him?
“Mouse,” she said.
“You’re a mouse. Where?”
“Gone.”
“Give us a cuddle, then,” breathed Hamlet through the blackened stumps of his few remaining teeth.
“Mrs. Hamlet!” Blinky cried.
The woman in the corner woke with a snort, her bonnet askew. “What? Where?”
“I’ll get you,” whispered Hamlet venomously in Blinky’s ear.
Mrs. Hamlet, coming into focus, shrieked at her helpmate. “You! Goat! Get your stinking hooves off the girl!”
“I’ll give you to the master,” hissed the old man quietly.
“And you, you little hussy,” shrilled Mrs. Hamlet, “stop pawing at ’im, can’t you?”
Hamlet whispered. “He’ll have your ears off, girlie, and everything else as well!”
Mrs. Hamlet bolted off her stool and charged across the kitchen, grabbing what there was of her husband’s long greasy locks and jerking hard.
“Aow!”
“Come along, goat,” she said, dragging him toward a door leading off the kitchen into the back garden and the shed, which was where the couple slept. Belinda knew what that meant. The old buzzards’ yells would change to shrieks and moans of greater intensity but equal rage, and then they would sleep.
Master was out, and John Getalong, as far as she knew. The house was quiet.
“The girl in the kitchen can help us,” Tom was saying. Mary Do-Not stood at the soot-smeared window, staring out at the vague shapes of rooftops and chimney pots. Tom knew he had taken a risk, sending down the ring. He hoped his message, if it reached Blinky at all, would give her the courage to climb the stairs to the forbidden room at the top of the house.
“She can let me know when it’s safe to go. Give me a signal, like. They can’t all be watching every minute. If I can once get to the Fortune of War, my mother will fetch the Worshipful Brotherhood. The butchers won’t be afraid of Master. They’ll come, the butchers will set us all free.”
The young woman sighed. “If you manage to go from this house, Tom, I promise you, you will never come back.”
“I will do, I swear!”
Mary shook her head adamantly.
“We can take my mother and go where Master will never find us, Mary. We got family down in Dorset, he’ll never know where we got to.”
“You are very young,” said Mary, tracing letters on the window with a finger.
“I’m not afraid. I’d do anything for you, Mary.”
She turned and looked at him with a sad smile.
“Can you get me a position in service?”
Tom didn’t have an answer; he wasn’t entirely sure what was meant by the phrase.
Mary pulled out the chair and sat at her writing desk. “Did you know, Tom, that the Flood carried camels to these shores, riding on the rooftop of pharaoh’s house?”
“What?”
“Camels. Those few that weren’t on the ark, I mean. And when the Romans arrived, centuries later, they found all these camels here in England, and they thought nothing of it—it looked just like home to them!”
Tom looked at her blankly.
“So you see, Tom,” she said, gently, “you may think you understand a thing when really you don’t. In point of fact.”
The boy was silent, trying to work out what he’d just been told. A dropping, hopeless feeling at his belly said it was all an elaborate version of the word no. “What happened to the camels?” he said finally.
“I don’t know, Tom,” she said. “Died out, I suppose.”
A noise in the wall startled them both. The dumbwaiter was rising up from far below. It was making more racket than usual, starting and stopping in jerks. Tom and Mary stared at it in suspense. There was a final thud, near at hand. The boy took a breath and lifted the door.
Blinky, her small form squeezed onto the shelf and still gripping the rope, looked out at him fearfully. Her eyes darted to Mary and back to Tom.
“Was you wanting me?” she whispered.
Charles Field had heard of priests being defrocked. He thought he knew now what they felt. As an officer of the law, he had been a man set apart. Like a priest, he had been the human representative of a force that transcended the individual. He had communed with the mystery and majesty of the law, which in turn had endowed him with authority and power. Now he was bereft.
Also, he was hungry. He fingered the coins in his pockets, regretting the expense of the bottle of whiskey earlier in the day, as well as its aftereffects. He stopped at a public pump, laid his top hat carefully to one side, and put his head under. Having thus refreshed himself he continued on his way to the row of insurance companies whose granite faces frowned implacably over the City.
In 1860 there was still no public fire brigade in London. Firefighting was a privately owned business affair run entirely by insurance companies. Each company supported its own brigade: horses, wagons, pumps, and men. Their sole purpose was to save the companies having to pay out claims. A fire might break out in a building near one of these private fire brigades, but if it was not insured, never mind the shrieks and cries of those within, the firefighters would not stir. Even so, the insurance companies’ fire brigades were overworked. London was densely built, accidental fires were frequent, and arson was a big business. This is why the companies also employed individuals who acted in investigative and enforcement capacities, and as spies. Mr. Field thought he would be able to obtain such a position without delay.
In this, he was mistaken.
F
rom one establishment to the next he was warmly greeted and firmly rejected. He was well known to many of the security men of the insurance industry—they had often worked together to achieve convictions. But he was better known as Inspector Bucket.
“My dear fellow,” went the refrain, “you’re not fit for a position like this—you’re famous! Everyone knows you. For this sort of work one has to be unknown. Why ever did you give up being a policeman?”
Thank you very much, Mr. Dickens! Cashiering on your fame, am I?
After being turned down by a half-dozen companies in quick succession, Field made his way to Newgate Prison.
“Charlie!” said an old friend there. “Are you mad? You can’t be a prison guard—you’re responsible for a good portion of Newgate’s population being here! Don’t go looking for death, man, it will find us all soon enough!” South of the river he had a similar reception at the prison in Horsemonger’s Lane. Footsore and very hungry, he made his way back across the river as the light began to fail. He ate a penny pork pie standing at the bar of a down-at-heels pub, pondering his options. To go home without having secured a position was not one of them.
As he continued walking through the gathering dusk, he saw a theater marquee being lit by a jolly-looking little man on a ladder. The bill featured A Life for a Life, or The Burden of Guilt and an act called the Four Mowbreys. The actors within would be dressing and painting themselves for the evening’s performances.
I could have been a Mowbrey.
Field sighed and walked on to the Fortune of War, his feet like lead. He paused before the door.
What fates impose, Field recited inwardly from his store of memorized Shakespeare, That men must needs abide.
He pushed resolutely into the tavern. Mickie Goodfellow was in the middle of the evening rush, but he stopped when he saw the inspector. He moved to him and leaned across the bar to hear him above the din of the public house.
“What do you pay?” said Field.
Goodfellow burst into laughter. “I love this man!” he said to the heavens. “Do you hear me, God? It’s love!”