第 37 页

Fraser leveled the derringer, and fired. The mufflered man doubled over, his knees buckling, and fell to the street, writhing in a fit. “He’s killed me,” the ruffian squawked. “I’m gut-shot, he’s killed me!”

Fraser gave Tally Thompson an admonitory cuff on the ear. “This barker of yours is rubbish, Tally. I aimed for his bloody legs!”

“He didn’t mean no harm,” Tally sniveled.

“He’d a five-pound flat-iron.” Fraser glanced back at Mallory and Brian, where they stood astonished in the coal-wain. “Come down, you lads—look sharp now. We’ll have to leave your gurney. They’ll be looking for it. We have to hoof it now.”

Fraser yanked Tally Thompson to his feet, with a cruel jerk of the cuffs. “And you, Tally, you’ll lead us to Captain Swing.”

“I won’t, Sergeant!”

“You will, Tally.” Fraser hauled Tally forward, with a sharp beckoning glance back at Mallory.

The five of them picked their way around the squealing, choking ruffian, who rolled in his spreading blood on the pavement, his dirty bow-legs trembling in spasm. “Damme if he don’t take on,” Fraser said coldly. “Who is he, Tally?”

“Never knew his name.”

Without breaking step, Fraser slapped Tally’s battered tophat from his head. The wrinkled topper seemed glued to the ruffian’s scalp with grime and macassar-oil. “Of course you know him!”

“No name!” Tally insisted, looking back at his lost hat with a leer of despair. “A Yankee, inne?”

“What sort of Yankee, then?” asked Fraser, scenting deceit. “Confederate? Unionist? Texian? Californian?”

“ ’E’s from New York,” Tally said.

“What,” Fraser said in disbelief, “you’d tell me he was a Manhattan Communard!” He glanced back once at the dying man as they walked on, then recovered himself swiftly and spoke with tepid skepticism. “He didn’t talk like any New York Yankee.”

“I don’t know nothing ’bout any commoners. Swing liked ’im, is all!”

Fraser led them down an alleyway crossed with rusty elevated cat-walks, its towering brick walls glistening with greasy damp. “Are there more like that one, in Swing’s counsel? More men from Manhattan?”

“Swing’s got a deal of friends,” Tally said, seeming to recover himself, “and he’ll do for you, he will, you trifle wi’ him!”

“Tom,” said Fraser, turning his attention to Mallory’s brother, “can you handle a pistol?”

“A pistol?”

“Take this one,” said Fraser, handing over Tally’s derringer. “There’s but one shot left. You musn’t use it lest your man is close enough to touch.”

Having rid himself of the derringer, Fraser then reached, without pause, into his coat-pocket, pulled out a small leather blackjack, and commenced, while still walking steadily, to batter Tally Thompson, with numbing accuracy, on the thick meat of his arms and shoulders.

The man flinched and grunted under the blows, and finally began to howl, his flat nose running snot.

Fraser stopped, pocketed his truncheon. “Damn ye for a fool, Tally Thompson,” he said, with a queer kind of affection. “Know you nothing of coppers? I’ve come for your precious Swing all by meself, and brought these three jolly lads just to see the fun! Now where’s he lurking?”

“A big warehouse in the docks,” Tally sniveled. “Full of loot—wonders! And guns, whole cases of fancy barkers—”

“Which warehouse, then?”

“I dunno,” Tally wailed, “I never been inside the bloody gates before! I don’t know the bloody names of all them fancy go-downs!”

“What’s the name on the door? The owner!”

“I can’t read, Sergeant, you know that!”

“Where is it, then?” Fraser asked relentlessly. “Import docks or export?”

“Import …”

“South side? North side?”

“South, about middle-ways …” From the street behind them came distant shouts, a frenzied shattering of glass, and drum-like echoed booms of battered sheet-metal. Tally fell silent, his head cocked to listen. His lips quirked. “Why, that’s your kerridge!” he said, the whine gone from his voice. “Swing’s lads a-come back hotfoot, and found yer kerridge, Sergeant!”

“How many men in this warehouse?”

“Listen to ’em breaking ’er up!” said Tally. A queer variety of child-like wonder had chased all fear from his sullen features.

“How many men?” Fraser barked, boxing Tally’s ear.

“They’re knocking ’er to smithers!” Tally declared cheerily, shrugging from the blow. “Ludd’s work on your pretty gurney!”

“Shut yer trap, ye bastard!” young Tom burst out, his voice high with rage and pain.

Startled, Tally regarded Tom’s masked face with a dawning leer of satisfaction. “What’s that, young mister?”

“Shut up, I told ye!” Tom cried.

Tally Thompson leered like an ape. “It ain’t me hurting your precious gurney! Yell at them, boy! Tell ’em to stop, then!” Tally lurched backward suddenly, snatching his manacled hands from Fraser’s grip. The policeman staggered, almost knocking Brian from his feet.

Tally turned and screeched through his cupped hands. “Stop that fun, my hearties!” His howl echoed down the brick-work canyon. “Ye’re hurtin’ private property!”

Tom pounced on the man like lightning, with a wild spinning swing of his fist. Tally’s head snapped back, and the breath left him in a ragged gasp. He tottered a step, then dropped to the cobbled floor of the alley like a sack of meal.

There was a sudden silence.

“Damme, Tom!” said Brian. “Ye knocked his lights out!”

Fraser, his truncheon drawn now, stepped across the supine ruffian, and peeled one eyelid back with his thumb. Then he glanced up at Tom, mildly. “You’ve a temper, lad….”

Tom tugged his mask free, breathing shakily. “I could have shot him!” he blurted, his voice thin. He looked to Mallory, with a strange confused appeal. “I could ha’, Ned! Shot him down dead!”

Mallory nodded shortly. “Easy, lad….”

Fraser fumbled to unlock the handcuffs; they were slick with blood from Tally’s lacerated wrists.

“That was mortal strange, what the rascal just did!” Brian marveled, in a hushed Sussex drawl. “Are they bedlam crazy here, Ned? Have they all gone ellynge, these London folk?”

Mallory nodded soberly. Then he raised his voice. “But nowt that a good right arm don’t cure!” He whacked Tom’s shoulder with an open palm. “Ye’re a boxer, Tommy lad! Ye blowed him down like a slaughtered ox!”

Brian snorted laughter. Tom smiled shyly, rubbing his knuckles.

Fraser rose, pocketing truncheon and cuffs, and set off up the alley, at a half-trot. The brothers followed him. “It warn’t so much,” Tom said, his voice giddy.

“What,” Mallory objected, “a mere lad of nineteen, layin’ out that brassy-boots brawler? It’s a marvel surely!”

“It warn’t any fair fight, with his hands bound,” Tom said.

“One punch!” Brian gloated. “Ye stretched him flat as an oaken plank, Tommy!”

“Stow it!” Fraser hissed.

They fell silent. The alley ended by the vacant ground of a demolished building, its cracked foundation strewn with bits of red brick and greying spars of splintered lumber. Fraser picked his way forward. The sky rolled yellow-grey overhead, the haze breaking here and there to reveal thick greenish clouds like rotting curd.

“Hell’s bells,” Tom declared, in a tone of thin jollity. “They can’t a-heard us talking, Mr. Fraser! Not with that almighty rucket they were making on my gurney!”

“It isn’t that lot worries me now, lad,” Fraser said, not unkindly. “But we might meet more pickets.”

“Where are we?” Brian asked, then stumbled to a halt. “God in heaven! What is that smell?”

“The Thames,” Fraser told him.

A thick wall of low brick stood at the end of the vacant plot. Mallory hoisted himself up and stood, breathing very shallowly, his mask pressed hard to his bearded lips. The far side of the brick wall—it was part of the Thames embankment—sloped down ten feet to the river-bed. The tide was out, and the shrunken Thames was a sluggish gleam between long plazas of cracked muddy shore.

Across the river stood the steel navigation-tower of Cuckold’s Point, adorned with nautical warning-flags. Mallory could not recognize the signals. Quarantine, perhaps? Blockade? The river seemed nigh deserted.

Fraser looked up and down the mud-flats at the foot of the embankment. Mallory followed his gaze. Small boats were embedded in the grey-black mud as if set in cement. Here and there along the bend of the Limehouse Reach, rivulets of viridian slime reached up through the gouged tracks of channel-dredgers.

Something like a river-breeze—not a breeze at all, but a soft liquid ooze of gelatinous Stink—rose from the Thames and spilled over them where they stood. “Dear God!” Brian cried in weak amazement, and knelt quickly behind the wall. With a sympathetic ripple of queasiness, Mallory heard his brother retch violently.

With a stern effort, Mallory mastered the sensation. It was not easy. Clearly, the raw Thames surpassed even the fabled stench in the holds of Royal Artillery transports.

Young Thomas, though he’d also gone quite pale, seemed of tougher stuff than Brian—inured, perhaps, by the chugging exhaust of steam-gurneys. “Why, look at this nasty business!” Tom suddenly declared, in a muffled, dreamy voice. “I knew we’d a drought upon the land, but I never dreamt of this!” He looked to Mallory with astonished, reddened eyes. “Why, Ned—the air, the water—there’s never been such a dreadfulness, surely!”

Fraser seemed pained. “London’s never what she might be, in summer….”

“But look at the river!” Tom cried innocently. “And look, look, yonder comes a ship!” A large paddle-steamer was working her way up the Thames, and a very queer-looking craft she was indeed, with her hull flat as a raft’s, and a cheese-box cabin of sloping, riveted iron, the walls of black armor patched bow-to-stem with large white squares: cannon-hatches. On her bow, two sailors, in rubber gloves and nozzled rubber helmets, took soundings with a leaded line.

“What sort of vessel is that?” asked Mallory, wiping his eyes.

Brian rose unsteadily, leaned across the wall, wiped his mouth, and spat. “Pocket ironclad,” he announced hoarsely. “A river gun-ship.” He pinched his nose shut and shuddered from head to foot.

Mallory had read of such craft, but had never seen one. “From the Mississippi campaign, in America.” He stared beneath a shading hand, wishing for a spyglass. “Does she fly Confederate colors, then? I didn’t know we’d any of her class here in England…. No, I see she flies the Union Jack!”

“See what her paddle-wheels do!” Tom marveled. “That river-water must be thick as neat’s-foot jelly….”

No one saw fit to remark on this observation. Fraser pointed downstream. “Listen, lads. Some rods away lies a deep-dredged channel. It leads into the moorings for the West India Docks. With the river this low, with luck, a man might creep through that channel, to emerge within the docks unseen.”

“Walk o’er the mud o’ the shore, you mean to say,” Mallory said.

“No!” Brian cried. “There must be another stratagem!”

Fraser shook his head. “I know those docks. They’ve an eight-foot wall about ’em, topped by a very sharp cheval-de-frise. There are loading-gates, and a rail-head, too, but they’ll be close-guarded sure. Swing chose well. The place is nigh a fortress.”

Brian shook his head. “Won’t Swing guard the river, too?”

“Doubtless,” Fraser said, “but how many men will stand sharp lookout over this stinking mud, for Swing or anyone else?”

Mallory nodded, convinced. “He’s right, lads.”

“But it’ll daub us neck to foot with smeechy filth!” Brian protested.

“We’re not made o’ sugar,” Mallory grunted.

“But my uniform, Ned! D’ye know what this dress-coatee cost me?”

“I’ll swap ye my gurney for that shiny gold braid,” Tom told him.

Brian stared at his younger brother, and winced.

“Then we must strip for it, lads,” Mallory commanded, shrugging out of his jacket. “Like we were farm-hands, a-pitching sweet hay on a nice Sussex morn. Hide that city finery in the rubble, and be quick about it.”

Mallory stripped to the waist, tucked his pistol in the belt of his rolled-up trousers, and lowered himself down the embankment wall. He half-slid, half-hopped to the evil mud below.

The river-bank was as hard and dry as brick. Mallory laughed aloud. The others joined him, Brian coming last. Brian kicked a cracked dinner-plate of mud with his waxed and polished boot. “Damme for a fool,” he said, “to let you talk me out of uniform!”

“Pity!” Tom taunted. “Ye’ll never launder the sawdust out o’ that fancy forage-cap.”

Fraser, removing his collar now, was in white shirt and braces—surprisingly dandyish items, of watered scarlet silk. A new shoulder-holster of pale chamois held a stout little pepperbox pistol. Mallory noted the bulge of a neat padded bandage beneath the shirt and strap. “Don’t go griping, lads,” Fraser said, leading the way. “Some folk pass their very lives in the mud of the Thames.”

“Who’s that then?” asked Tom.

“Mudlarks,” Fraser told him, picking his way. “Winter and summer, they slog up to their middles, in the mud o’ low tide. Hunting lumps o’ coal, rusty nails, any river-rubbish that will fetch a penny.”

“Are you joking?” Tom asked.

“Children mostly,” Fraser persisted calmly, “and a deal of feeble old women.”

“I don’t believe you,” Brian said. “If you told me Bombay or Calcutta, I might grant it. But not London!”

“I didn’t say the wretches were British,” Fraser said. “Your mudlarks are foreigners, mostly. Poor refugees.”

“Well, then,” Tom said, relieved.

They tramped on silently, breathing as best they could. Mallory’s nose had clogged solid and his throat was thick with phlegm. It was a relief of sorts, to be spared the sense of smell.

Brian was still muttering, a monotone to match their tramping step. “Britain’s a sight too hospitable to all these damn foreign refugees. If I’d my way, I’d transport the lot to Texas….”

“All the fish here must be dead, eh?” said Tom, stooping to rip up a china-hard platter of mud. He showed Mallory a mash of flattened fish-bones embedded in it. “Look, Ned—the very image of your fossils!”

They reached an obstacle a few yards on, a dredger’s muddy hollow, half-filled with black silt, marbled with veins of vile pale grease like the lees from a pan of bacon. There was no help for it but to leap and dodge and splash across the ditch, and Brian had the evil luck to miss his footing. He came up foully smeared, flicking muck from his hands and cursing wildly in what Mallory took to be Hindustani.

Beyond the ditch, the crust grew treacherous, plates of dried mud skidding or crumbling underfoot, over a pitchy, viscous muck full of ooze and bubbling gas-pockets. But there was worse luck yet at the entrance-channel to the Docks. Here the channel’s banks were close-packed tarred pilings, slick with greenish fur and oily damp, rising fifteen feet above the water-line. And the water itself, which filled the broad channel from bank to bank, was a chilly grey sump, seemingly bottomless, writhing with leg-thick wads of viridian slime.