Part 17 (1/2)

The Savoy Chapel, a remnant of an older London that was quickly becoming a ghost, was very humble indeed, dwarfed as it was by the structures that were rising around it. She saw the wide, cobbled path around the side of the chapel, leading to the churchyard behind, and she followed it along the edge of the building. She would look into the chapel when she had completed her work.

At the rear of the chapel sat the old cemetery, a hummocky collection of graves with tilting headstones, the enriched gra.s.s high and green from recent rains. A long, narrow out-building stood at the far side of the cemetery, affixed to a high wall.

A horse and empty wagon stood beside it, the horse cropping gra.s.s. And beside that stood a gold-painted coach, very elegant. The door to the shed was open, and a man, vigorously smoking a pipe, lounged in the doorway, no doubt preferring the reek of tobacco smoke to the smell of the charnel house. He nodded at her, and then came out to meet her when he saw that she took no interest in the graves. Despite the breeze, the air was rank with the stink of decaying corpses.

”Good day to you, sir,” she said, and he nodded noncommittally and continued to smoke. ”I was sent here by the Metropolitan Board of Works, in order to look into the death of a Mr. James Harrow. I'm told that his body was conveyed here after his unfortunate accident the night before last. It might not have been identified, however.”

”It's just as you say, ma'am,” the man said to her. ”The police brought it. I'm the watchman, and I was here when he came in, dead as a stone. Kicked in the forehead by his horse, he was, his head stove right in, and soaking wet into the bargain. He'd got into the river when the horse did for him, and if there was any life left in him, the river took it. They fished him out and brought him here. He'll go out to Necropolis Cemetery at Brookwood tomorrow morning if there's naught else to do with him.”

”So his body is here now?”

”Oh, aye,” he said, knocking his pipe out against the sole of his shoe and then slipping it into a pocket of his vest, which was threadbare and stained. ”Do you want to have a look at him? He ain't pretty, mind you.”

”It's my duty to view Mr. Harrow's body, if you don't mind.”

He nodded again and waved her inside. The dim room was perhaps twenty-feet long and ten-feet wide, with a wooden bench along one wall. Sunlight shone through a bank of filthy windows at either end. There were broken gravestones heaped in the corner, and sundry shovels and barrows. Cut planks, ready to be nailed together into coffins, were stacked alongside crates of nails, and there were hammers, saws, chisels, and sundry other tools hung neatly on the wall above the bench. The floor was trodden dirt, and the smell of death was enough to make Alice's eyes water. Six coffins lay upon wooden horses, all of them closed up, thank goodness, except for one that was empty, the lid leaning against it, waiting to be set into the top and nailed down. The watchman went to one of the closed boxes, removed the top and set it aside, and then stepped away and motioned Alice forward.

She peered into it, holding her breath. Within lay a long-dead corpse, a man's corpse, its flesh withered, its eyes staring, its lips shrunk back so that its teeth and gums seemed to stand out. Obviously this could not be Harrow's corpse. There was no sign of a wound in the forehead. The corpse's coat gave a small twitch now, and a rat leapt out from beneath the arm, sailing with a loud squeak out onto the floor and running out through a hole in the wall.

Alice trod backward, her mouth opening to speak but unable to make a sound. The watchman, standing at her back, threw his arms around her shoulders, and another hand snaked around and covered her mouth with a cloth smelling of a sweet chemical. She held her breath, struggling to free herself, but she couldn't move another man obviously having joined the first, his free hand clutching her hair. She gasped for air finally, drawing the chemical into her lungs, and within moments she felt her hands tingling. She began to fall but was held upright, and she knew that she was beyond fighting. She thought of Mr. Lewis, his sending her here, sending the boy Jenkins out with an urgent message. In the next instant the world went dark, and her mind fell silent.

Bill Kraken found Mother Laswell at the door of Temple Church, and without wasting a moment they hurried back along Fleet Street and onto the Strand, Mother telling the story of seeing Finn Conrad at the window, the note that he pitched at her, about the woman called Miss Bracken at another window, and about Clara in the coach with Shadwell, and no harm done to her, except Miss Bracken was being misused.

”So he seen you?” Kraken asked unhappily.

”He did, Bill. He might not have known me. I can't be sure.”

”It's much of a muchness whether he did or did not, Mother. If he did and he wanted to catch you, he would have done it.” Bill took her by the hand now and picked up the pace, so that Mother had to hurry to keep up.

”This is good news, Bill,” Mother said to the back of his head. ”They're all safe, it seems, except that poor woman from the inn.”

”It'll be good news when we get them out. There's the church across the way, Mother. Alice was to wait for us in the chapel.”

They crossed the road and opened the chapel door. Mother uttered a small, surprised, ”Oh,” when she looked up at the coffered ceiling, painted in shades of deep blue and decorated with gold stars. Several people sat at the pews, but Alice was not among them, and Kraken immediately turned around and went out, muttering the words, ”d.a.m.nation h.e.l.l.”

Mother Laswell followed him, around the side of the chapel and into the lonesome churchyard behind. Again, Alice was nowhere to be seen, only a solitary man smoking a pipe in the open doorway of a shed. A horse and wagon with a coffin on the bed stood nearby. The man took the pipe from his mouth and gestured with it, nodding at the two in greeting.

Kraken hurried toward him, speaking out in a loud voice. ”We're a-looking for a woman who was just hereabouts.”

”The dark-haired beauty, you mean? She was here indeed. Not fifteen minutes past. I'm to tell you that she went on to the King's Head, on Maiden Lane, across the road and take the left turning. She'd been walking all morning, she said, and needed something cool to drink.”

Bill shouldered past him, into the shed, and the man followed him, Mother Laswell at his heels.

”She's gone on,” the man said, ”as I told you. It couldn't have been but a few minutes since.”

”If you're a-lying,” Bill told him, ”and you're thick with this p.i.s.s-ant Klingheimer...”

”There's no call for that tone, Bill,” Mother said, taking him by the elbow. ”We'll just nip around to the King's Head, like this man says. If she's not there, and they haven't seen her, then we'll come back here for another chat.” She looked at the man, whose face was blank, and said, ”Do you hear me, sir? We'll take you at your word, but it will go ill with you if you've lied.”

”The lot of you is stark crazy,” he said, ”coming in here and blackguarding a man. 'Another chat,' by G.o.d. If I see you again I'll take it ill.”

”Then you'll eat a blue pill, you h.e.l.l-bent snipe,” Kraken said.

”Now, Bill!” Mother said, leading him out through the door. ”We'd best find Alice and get on about our business. We've got trouble enough without making more for ourselves.”

Bill pulled his arm away, but went along with her, looking back twice before they were around the corner and walking up along the chapel again.

”You shouldn't have uttered Klingheimer's name. It's not safe,” Mother said.

”This here pipe-smoking, brazen-faced s.h.i.+te, he's got a liar's eyes, and I can't abide a liar.”

”Don't dwell on it, Bill. Here's Maiden Lane, just as he said, and there's the public house yonder, a nice enough place, it seems to me. We can have a pint of something ourselves when we've found Alice. Catch your breath, Bill.”

They went in through the door, the pub half empty and no sign of Alice. ”I'll inquire of her, Bill,” Mother said in a small voice. ”If the publican hasn't seen her we'll go back to the chapel straightaway.”

”She'd be here if...” Kraken started to say, but Mother stepped up to the bar and began to speak to the publican. When she turned back a moment later, her face stark, Kraken said, ”You'd best wait in the chapel, Mother, whilst I parlay with that bugg... that scoundrel.”

She followed him out the door and up Maiden Lane again. ”No, Bill,” she said. ”Two is better than one. I wish I did have a pistol.”

”Pistols is noisy, Mother. Did you see the tools a-hanging on the wall? A man don't like the look of a sharp saw, not if it's lying over his throat.”

They had just crossed the road, nearing the chapel, when the horse and casket-bearing wagon that had stood in the churchyard issued from the cobbled path. The man driving the wagon saw the two of them and whipped up the horses, out into the traffic on the Strand, making away in the direction of Charing Cross, where he nearly ran down a trio of old men.

”Shadwell!” Kraken shouted. He gave chase, running at a loose-limbed gallop, dodging between carts and carriages, caroming off a chaise, the driver slas.h.i.+ng the whip at him.

Mother Laswell stood helplessly on the pavement, watching him disappear and feeling utterly empty. She knew beyond doubt that it was Alice who had been borne away in the coffin on the wagon. She strode up and down, looking in the direction that Bill had taken, and at last she saw him hurrying back. He was evidently tuckered out, and he came along with a limp, his trousers torn open along his b.l.o.o.d.y leg.

”What have you done to your leg?” she asked.

”Nothing,” he said. ”Caught the hub of a wagon on my s.h.i.+n. It was that Shadwell, and no doubt, and Alice in the box, or I'm a Dutchman.”

”It was her, Bill,” Mother said. ”I sensed her clear as I've ever sensed anyone, although it wasn't so when we were in the reek of the dead house. She's alive, Bill. They're taking her somewhere. If they wanted her dead, she'd be dead already.”

”Let's have a word with Mr. Pipe,” Bill said. ”Put me right, Mother.”

She straightened his hair, wiped blood from his chin with spit and a kerchief, and took up the flap of torn cloth from his trousers and simply glued it to his b.l.o.o.d.y leg.

”We won't fool that man for more than a moment,” she said. ”We must take him unawares.”

Kraken jerked his head in agreement, and the two of them strode around to the back and across the graves toward the empty doorway. They saw the pipe smoker at the bench, turned away from them. Bill rushed silently upon him, his hands gripped tightly together overhead. He clubbed the man hard, striking him to the ground, his pipe flying from his mouth. He rose to his knees, and Kraken knocked him sideways with a second heavy blow, the man lying stupefied, his wits addled. Mother had closed the shed door and latched it.

Kraken fetched a piece of rope from beneath the bench and whipped it around the man's ankles, tying them tight, and taking the loose end and doing the same to his wrists. He put a foot on the man's stomach now and hauled the rope upward, hanging it between the open jaws of a bench vise, so that the man dangled there like dead game, his lower back just touching the ground.