Strand he glanced to his right, toward the river, and whispered, “How ye doin’, Chinnie me lad? Cold, ain’t it?” Another man on the sidewalk had started toward him as if he recognized him, but drew back, disconcerted, when Chinnie burst into maniacal giggling and did a fast, if inexpert, dance step on the pavement.
He continued muttering to himself all the way down Fleet Street to Cheapside. “Hah!” he exclaimed at one point, bounding into the air. “Good as Benner’s, this is. Better! Don’t know why it never occurred to me before to grab the West End sort of merchandise.”
* * *
The first part of the dream was devoid of horror, and Darrow never remembered until he woke up that he’d been through it many times before.
The fog was so thick that he could see no more than a few yards ahead, and the damp black brick walls on either side were visible only because they were so claustrophobically close. The alley was silent except for an irregular knocking somewhere in the fog overhead, as though an unfastened shutter was swinging in a breeze.
He’d been taking a short cut that should have wound up at Leadenhall Street, but he’d been lost for what seemed like hours in this maze of courts and alleys and zigzagging lanes. He hadn’t met a soul yet, but he’d stopped now because he’d heard a low cough from the dimness ahead.
“Hello,” he said, and was instantly ashamed of the timidity in his voice. “Hello there!” he went on more strongly. “Perhaps you can help me find my way.”
He heard the shuffle of slow steps, and saw a dark form begin to emerge from the wall of mist; then the figure was close enough for him to see the face—and it was Brendan Doyle.
A hand seized Darrow’s shoulder and the next thing he knew he was sitting bolt upright in his own bed, clenching his teeth against the despairing cry that in the dream had burst from his lips and resounded flatly in the fog-deadened air:
“I’m sorry, Doyle! God, I’m sorry!”
“Jeez, chief,” said the young man who’d awakened him, “didn’t mean to startle you. But you said to roust you out at six-thirty.”
“Right, Pete,” Darrow croaked, swinging his legs to the floor and rubbing his eyes. “I’ll be in the office. When the fellow I described gets here, send him in, will you?”
“Aye aye.”
Darrow stood up, ran his hands through his white hair and then walked down the hall to the office. The first thing he did was pour himself a glass of brandy and drain it in one long swallow. He set the glass down, lowered himself into the chair behind the desk and waited for the liquor to sluice the images of his dream out of his head.
“May the damned dreams go with the body,” he whispered, fumbling a cigarette out of a box and lighting it in the lamp flame. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, leaned back and blew it toward the ranked ledgers on the shelf next to the desk. He considered, then discarded, the idea of doing some more work on his already complicated network of investments. He was getting rich again rapidly, and it was irritating to have to work without computers and calculators.
Soon two sets of boots could be heard ascending the stairs, and in a moment there was a knock on the office door.
“Come in,” said Darrow, forcing his voice to sound easy and confident.
The door opened and a tall young man strode in, a smirking grin on his handsome, clean-shaven face. “Here it is, yer Honor,” he said, doing a satirical pirouette in the middle of the room. “Okay, hold still. The doc will go over you in a few minutes, but I wanted to eyeball it myself first. How’s it feel walking?”
“Springy as new French steel. You know what surprised me? All the smells on the way over here! And I don’t think I ever was able to see this well.”
“Well, we’ll get you a good one too. No headache, stomachache? He’s been making a living for years as a prize fighter.”
“None atall.” The young man poured a brandy for himself, bolted it and refilled the glass.
“Easy on the sauce,” said Darrow.
“The wha’?”
“The sauce, the booze—the brandy. Want me to get an ulcer?” With an injured expression the young man set the glass down. His hand went to his mouth.
“And don’t bite the nails, please,” Darrow added. “Say, do you … ever catch any of the old tenant’s thoughts, left behind in the, like, cupboards of his head after his eviction? Uh, do things like dreams ever stay with the old body?”
“Avo—I mean, yes, yer Honor—I believe so. It’s not the sort of thing I pay attention to, but sometimes I find myself dreaming of places I’ve never seen, and I believe it’s bits from the lives of the lads I’ve passed through. No way of knowin’ for sure. And,” he paused, and his eyebrows drew together, “and sometimes when I’m just driftin’ over the line from awake to asleep, I hear… well, picture standin’ on the forecastle of an emigrant ship, you know, in the middle of the night with all them bunks like bookshelves all over the walls?… And imagine that each of those men is talking in his sleep… “
Darrow reached across the desk, took the filled glass and drained it. “This stomach doesn’t matter,” he said, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Come on, let’s go see the doc.”
* * *
Young Fennery Clare, his bare feet still tingling from having stood for a while in the warm pool below the sheet metal manufactory by Execution Dock, waded out from the docks, skirting the Limehouse Hole, and tried to line up the landmarks he’d memorized this morning. It was getting darker by the minute, though, and the two chimneys across the river were completely invisible, while the crane on the third pier downstream of him seemed to have been moved since he saw it last. And though the tide was on its way out again, he was already in up to his waist, and like most Mud Larks he couldn’t swim.
Damn that bunch of Irish kids, he thought. If they hadn’t been hanging about the Hole here this morning, I could have just picked the sack up and carried it out, for I can thrash any of the local kids. Them Micks would have taken it from me for sure, though, and a stroke of luck like this might come only once in a lifetime: a cloth bag, evidently dropped by one of the workmen who were re-sheathing that big ship here last week, absolutely filled with copper nails!
The very thought of the money he’d get from the rag shop for the haul—eight pence at least, more likely a shilling and some—made the boy’s mouth water, and he resolved that if he found it and couldn’t work it back up the slope with his feet, he’d risk being swept away and just bend down and pick it up. It would be well worth the risk, for he could live high for several lazy days on a shilling, at the end of which time he’d be ready to do his usual early winter trick of getting caught stealing coal from one of the barges up at Wapping so as to be sent off to the House of Correction, where he’d have a coat and shoes and stockings and regular meals for several months, and not have to wade half-clad out into the cold mud in the winter dawns.
He tensed and the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, for the toes of his left foot had plunged through the top layer of silt and found cloth. He turned, trying to get his other foot onto it without losing his balance.
“Can,” croaked a voice from a few yards out in the water, “can someone… help me?”
The boy recovered his balance after starting in surprise, and belatedly realized that some of the river sounds that he’d been too absorbed to pay attention to had been the ripple and swish of weak swimming.
There was the spatter of a wet head being shaken. “Hey… boy! Is that a boy there? Help me!”
“I can’t swim,” said Fennery.
“You’re standing there, aren’t you? The shore’s so close?”
“Aye, just behind me.”
“Then I can… make it myself. Where am I?”
“I’ll tell you if you come pick up this sack of nails for me.” The swimmer had been angling toward the boy,
