The Ebb Tide

“But he sent his simian cohort back in tonight and bloody well took it,” Tubby said.

“Ah! Ha ha! He believes he took it!” Merton said, brightening up, but then shut his eyes and held his forehead with the pain of laughing, and it took him a moment to get going again. St. Ives had a keen look on his face.

“Now, here’s the long and the short of it,” Merton continued, looking around again, his voice dropping. He tipped us a wink. “I hoped I’d seen the end of the gentleman, you see, and yet I’m a careful man. I set to work and devised a false map on a piece of the same sort of paper — but quite a different part of the Bay and with the landmarks changed. Correct in all other ways. I doctored the ink so that it ran, as if the paper had been soaked in seawater, but not so much that the map couldn’t be made out. Then I colored it up with dyes made of algae and tobacco and garden soil, and I slipped it into the box under the counter, where I keep small money to make change for the customers. Our man searched for it, as you can see, throwing things around the floor. Then he spotted the box, helped himself to the money, and found the map. Of course I played my part. ‘Take the money,’ I said to him, ‘but for God’s sake leave the other! It’s of no value to you.’” Merton sat back in his chair now, smiling like a schoolboy, very satisfied with himself, but then his face fell.

“His response was to hit me with a length of lead pipe. Quick as a snake. Perfectly unnecessary. I hadn’t so much as twitched.”

“The stinking pig,” Tubby said, and of course we all voiced our agreement, but what I wanted to know was, what about the map, the real map? Merton had it safe as a baby, it turned out — rolled up, tied neatly with a bit of string, and thrust into the open mouth of a stuffed armadillo in the window. No thief, he informed us, would think to look for valuables inside an armadillo.

Merton leered at us for a moment, making us wait, and then said, “Fancy having a squint at it?” He was enjoying himself immensely now. He was resilient, I’ll say that for him, but perhaps too enamored of his own cleverness, which the ancients warns us against. Still, he had done what he could to help St. Ives, and had nearly had his skull crushed into the bargain. He was a good man, and no doubt about it, and his ruse de la guerre seemed to have worked. He helped himself to a third glass of brandy, which he drank off with a sort of congratulatory relish before fetching the map out of the maw of the preposterous scaled creature nearby. He handed it to St. Ives, who slipped off the string and unrolled it delicately. After a moment he looked up at Hasbro and I and nodded. “It’s as we thought,” he said.

Just then the door swung open and Finn Conrad came in carrying meat pies and bottled ale, and, it turned out, most of St. Ives’s money. St. Ives slipped the map into his coat while Finn set down his burden, handed back the bulk of the coins, and advised the Professor (begging his pardon for saying so) not to be quite so liberal with people he didn’t know, not in London, leastways, although it mightn’t be a problem in the smaller towns, where people were more honest, on the whole.

My appetite had fled when I saw Merton bleeding on the floor, but it returned now in spades, and that apparently went double for Tubby, who crushed half a pie into his mouth like an alligator eating a goat, and then settled back into his chair for some serious consumption, the rest of us not far behind him. Tomorrow morning, St. Ives told us, we would take a look into the Goat and Cabbage, if Finn would be so kind as to show us the way. Finn said that nothing would give him more pleasure, and then pointed out that someone should guard the shop tonight in Merton’s absence, and much to Merton’s credit he said that he would be quite happy if Finn would make up the settee in the workroom, and sleep with one eye open and one hand on the shillelagh in case the rogues returned.

“Out the back door and over the wall at the first sound of trouble, that’s my advice,” I told him, and Hasbro echoed the sentiment.

St. Ives was doubtful about leaving the boy alone in the shop at all, now that he knew something more of the men who possessed the false map.

“The stolen item,” St. Ives said to Merton,” “you say it’s a…satisfactory specimen?”

“Oh, much better than satisfactory, I should say,” Merton said, grinning. “Considerably better. Not that I claim to know anything about the art of…reproduction.” He had been going to say “forgery,” but there was no reason to utter the word with the lad standing by. Reproduction said rather too much, it seemed to me at the time. Certainly there was no profit, and perhaps some danger, in Finn’s knowing things he didn’t need to know. St. Ives, sensibly, brought the conversation to a close.

And so we locked young Finn safely into the shop and went out into the evening to see Merton home, where we delivered him safely to Mrs. Merton, he having fully recovered his spirits, and with an extra measure into the bargain. Mrs. Merton gasped to see the bloody bandage on her husband’s head, but Merton was markedly indifferent to it. “Happy to be of service,” he said to St. Ives, saluting. “I’ll do my part!” We assured him that he already had and left him smiling gloriously on the doorstep.

In the morning Finn was already up and working when St. Ives, Hasbro, and I returned. Tubby had domestic duties and hadn’t come along, which turned out to be to our advantage, given what happened later, although I’m getting ahead of myself. Finn had shelved the fallen books, made an orderly stack of the papers, swept the place out, and was soaking the blood out of Merton’s lab coat, which, he said, wanted cold water and not hot so as not to “set the stain,” which was something else he had learned during his years in the circus, where he had put in his time in the laundry. “All shipshape,” he told us.

We breakfasted along Thames Street on kippers and eggs and beans, and then set out with Finn walking far on ahead, which was Hasbro’s idea. No one would associate the boy with us, you see, when we were in the neighborhood of the Goat and Cabbage, and I was reminded once again that there might be some danger in our undertaking. To tell you the truth, it had begun to seem more like a holiday to me.

CHAPTER 3 The Goat and Cabbage

Lower Thames Street from the Pool to the Tower is busy night and day, with cargo coming off the ships and going onto them, and shops open, and fishmongers hauling carts and pushing hand barrows of whiting and oysters and plaice and whelks toward Billingsgate Market, which smelled of brine and seaweed and, of course, fish. All manner of trade goods and all manner of people crept up and down, jostling in and out of coffeehouses and shops, intent on doing business or on getting in the way of other people doing theirs. I was knocked sideways by a grimacing man with an unlikely large and wet bag of oysters over his shoulder, and knocked back again by a donkey hauling a cart of herring barrels, but nobody meant any harm and it struck me as rather agreeable than otherwise to be out and about on a busy spring morning, last night’s blustery cold having given up and gone back to whence it came.

In all that seething crowd we lost sight of Finn, but then saw him again, lounging against a store front, eating something out of his hand, giving the last of it to a mongrel dog and setting out again without so much as a look in our direction, the dog at his heels. Half a block farther along, I smelled a waft of pipe tobacco, Sobranie again. The tobacco isn’t all that rare, but it naturally put me in mind of the tall workman in Lambert Court last night. Then I thought of the small man who had been with him earlier in the evening, and then of Merton’s description of his apelike assailant and of the tall man from the pub in Poulton-le-Sands, and suddenly, like a bonk on the conk, it didn’t feel like a holiday any longer as the truth rushed in upon me. The two men in Lambert Court yesterday evening weren’t the navvies they had appeared to be. One had evidently stayed behind to keep an eye on us, and the other had gone down to the embankment to beat poor Merton over the head with a pipe. Hasbro’s untimely entrance must have complicated things for them, and yet they had managed to remain one step ahead of us.

Abruptly I wished I had taken along the leaded cane, and I looked around, trying to catch sight of the pipe smoker while I was revealing all this to St. Ives, who narrowed his eyes and nodded at me. But I saw no one who might be our man, or our men. Soon we drew abreast of a narrow alley that angled away toward the river. Finn was just then buying a bag of hot chestnuts from a man with a kettle on wheels, and he nodded discreetly up the alley, where there hung a weather-battered sign depicting the head of a goat wearing a cabbage leaf cap.

There was nothing for it but to push through the door into the fug of the gin shop, which was busy enough for