minutes.
“Ah, Dumb Tom,” exclaimed Marko softly as Doyle once again sidled into the alley where he waited. He held out his sack and Doyle dug handfuls of change out of his pockets and tossed them into it. “Yer doin’ splendid, lad. Now listen, I’m movin’ over to Malk Alley by Bedford Street this time, and I’ll be there for the next half hour. Got it?”
Doyle nodded.
“Keep up the good work. And cough sometimes. You do a stunning cough.”
Doyle nodded again, winked, and moved back out into the street.
This was his sixth day of begging, and he was still surprised at how good at it he’d proved to be, and how relaxed a life it was. He was even coming to terms with the idea of getting up at dawn and walking a dozen miles a day—covering both sides of the river west of London Bridge—for the appetite he worked up was always lavishly sated by the dinners at Copenhagen Jack’s house in Pye Street, and the captain had no objection to his beggars stopping at public houses for the occasional pint, or taking short naps on disused street to street rooftop bridges or between coal barges on the shore by Blackfriar’s Bridge.
The make-up around his eyes was making his skin break out, though. It had been Jacky’s idea to exaggerate Doyle’s already pale complexion to the point of looking consumptive by having him wear a white cloth around his head like a toothache sling, with a black cap above and a red scarf around his neck—to make his face seem very blanched by contrast—and applying some pink make-up around his eyes. “Makes you look more smitten,” Jacky had said as he’d smeared the smelly stuff into Doyle’s eye sockets, “and if Horrabin should happen to see you, let’s hope it’ll keep him from recognizing you.”
Jacky puzzled Doyle. The boy sometimes struck him as effeminate in certain spontaneous gestures and word choices, and he certainly had no apparent interest in young ladies, but Wednesday after dinner, when a floridly handsome Decayed Gentleman beggar had cornered Jacky in the hall, calling him his little hot cross bun and trying to kiss him, Jacky had reacted not just with a firm refusal but with disgust, as if he considered all that sort of thing distasteful. And Doyle couldn’t understand why a young man of Jacky’s intelligence would settle for begging as a means of earning a living, even in such a relatively pleasant operation as Captain Jack’s.
Doyle himself certainly didn’t intend to stay with it for very long. Three days from now, on Tuesday the eleventh of September, William Ashbless was going to arrive in London, and Doyle had resolved to meet him, strike up a friendship with the poet and then somehow get Ashbless—who had never been noted as hurting for money—to help set him up with some decent sort of job. He knew that the man would arrive at the London Dock on the frigate Sandoval at nine in the morning, and at ten-thirty would write the first draft of his best-known poem, “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” in the front room of the Jamaica Coffee House. Doyle intended to save some begging money, buy a passable suit, and meet Ashbless there. Having studied the man so thoroughly Doyle already felt that he knew him pretty well.
He wasn’t letting himself consider the possibility that Ashbless might be unable, or unwilling, to help him.
“My God, Stanley, will you look at that poor creature!” said a lady as she stepped to the pavement from a hackney cab. “Give him a shilling.”
Acting as if he hadn’t heard, Doyle resumed gnawing the piece of dirty bread Captain Jack had equipped him with six days ago; Stanley was complaining that if he gave Doyle a shilling he wouldn’t have enough for a drink before the show.
“You value your filthy liquor more than the salvation of your soul, is that it? You make me sick. Here, you with the bread or whatever that thing is! Buy yourself a decent dinner with this.”
Doyle was careful to wait until she’d approached closer, and then he looked up sharply as if startled, and touched his mouth and ear. She was holding a bracelet out toward him.
“Oh, will you look at that, Stanley, on top of it all he can’t hear nor speak. Low as a dog the poor fellow is.”
She waved the bracelet at Doyle, and he took it with a grateful smile. The couple moved on toward the theater, Stanley grumbling, as Doyle dropped the heavy bracelet into his pocket.
The tickling itch had been building in his throat over the last few minutes, and an elegantly dressed couple was approaching at an unhurried pace, so he unleashed his much admired cough; he tried not to let himself do it too often because it tended quickly to change from a simulated ordeal into a genuine lung-wrenching paroxysm, and in the last few days it had been getting worse. He supposed glumly that he had picked it up from his midnight dip in the chilly Chelsea Creek a week ago.
“Holy Mother of God, James, that walking corpse is about to cough his livers right out onto the pavement. Give him something to buy himself a drink with.”
“Be wasted on that sod. He’ll be dead before dawn.”
“Well… perhaps you’re right. Yes, you certainly seem to be right.”
* * *
Two men leaned against the iron palings of the fence that flanked the wings of the theatre. One of them tapped ash from a cigar and then drew on it, making a glowing red dot in the shadows. “I asked somebody,” he said softly to his partner, “and this boy is a deaf-mute called Dumb Tom. You’re sure it’s him?”
“The boss is sure.”
The first man stared across the street at Doyle, who had pulled himself together and was lurching away, again pretending to gnaw the bread. “He sure doesn’t look like a menace.”
“Just the fact of him is a menace, Kaggs. He’s not supposed to be here.”
“I guess so.” Kaggs slipped a long, slim knife from his sleeve, absently tested the edge with his thumb and then slipped it away again. “How do you want to do it?”
The other man thought for a moment. “Shouldn’t be hard. I’ll bump him and knock him down, and you can act like you’re helping him up. Let your coat hang forward so nobody’ll see, and then slip the knife all the way in just behind his collarbone, blade perpendicular to the bone, and rock it back and forth a little. There’s a big artery down there that you can’t miss, and he ought to be dead in a few seconds.”
“All right. Let’s go.” He tossed his cigar onto the street and they both pushed away from the fence and strode after Doyle.
* * *
Red-rimmed eyes peered out of the face colorful with grease paint, and Horrabin took two knocking steps forward. “They were watching him, and now they’re going after him,” he said in a growling whisper quite different from his fluty voice. “You’re certain they’re not ours?”
“I’ve never clapped eyes on ‘em before, yer Honor,” said one of the men standing on the pavement below him.
“Then never mind waiting until this crowd’s inside,” hissed the clown. “Get Dumb Tom now.” As the three men sprinted away after Doyle and his two pursuers, Horrabin pounded a white-gloved fist against the brick wall of the alley and whispered, “Damn you, Fairchild, why couldn’t you have remembered yesterday?”
* * *
