from the roof of the brougham.
The driver. There had been a driver, thought Godall wildly and ineffectually as he was borne down onto the wet street. His gun clattered away along the cobbles. He grappled with his attacker, striking at the man whose arms encircled his neck. But the backhand blows were worth nothing, and the man slid his forearm in beneath Godall’s shoulder and around the back of his neck. Godall’s head pressed against his own chest. His right foot kicked back and found the curb. He pushed, rising to his knees. His assailant was curiously light, but light or not, the pressure he exerted on Godall’s neck sharpened. His hat had been shoved down half over his eyes and somehow clung there as tenaciously as the man on his back, unwilling to let go. Below the brim he could see the two thugs rounding the corner, loping toward them, and the old evangelist stooping to pick up the fallen pistol.
Godall stamped once in that direction, but accomplished nothing. He stood up, the man clinging like a bug, and ran backward into the side of the brougham. The wagon lurched on its springs; the horse bolted forward. There was a guttural shriek in Godall’s ear as the man on his back twisted away, jerking Godall after him and off balance. As he fell he saw Shiloh recoiling from a blow. It was Nell with Godall’s stick. She held it by the tip, and, when Shiloh made another feeble attempt to grasp the fallen pistol, she cracked him in the ear with the ivory moon handle, then turned to thrust the tip into the throat of the turbaned man, who sailed in to aid his fallen comrades.
Godall leaped on the pistol, rolled heavily onto his side, and waved it menacingly. The turbaned man kneeled in a huddle, gagging. The evangelist sat dripping blood along the line of his scalp, shaking his head slowly, casting Nell a dark look of pain and rage. The driver of the brougham lay entangled in the spokes of the rear wheel, which had caught his foot when the horse leaped forward, and had spun him from his perch on Godall’s back.
The battle, clearly, was over. Godall hesitated. Should he take the old man with him? But Nell was already hurrying away, carrying his stick. The sky was clear and gray. An approaching wagon jangled in the silent morning. Godall gave the pistol a final wave, turned, and jogged after Nell Owlesby. When he passed Lexington two blocks down he looked back to see the ghouls bent over their hunched saviour.
NINE
Willis Pule leaned against the embankment railing, looking out over the tumult of Billingsgate market. The sun was up, but not far, and it cast an orange, rippling slash along the placid waters of the Thames through parted clouds. The streets were clean and wet. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant enough morning, what with masts and ropes of sailing vessels rising above tiers of fishing boats against the lavender sky and hundreds of men landing fish along the docks. But Pule hadn’t slept that night. Narbondo would have another carp, and he’d have it now. His were dead of swim-bladder disease. The oceanarium couldn’t be attempted twice in a single day. There was the chance that breeders from fisheries in Chingford would have carp for sale at Billingsgate. And if they were fresh — if they hadn’t begun to dry out — there was the chance they could restore Joanna Southcote after all.
The hunchback had been tearing his hair since the old man had left with Nell Owlesby. Narbondo was mad to suppose they could do anything with the corpse on the slab — even madder to trust Shiloh to keep his end of the bargain. The evangelist would sell them out. And his power was accumulating. Pule could see a half-dozen of his converts passing out tracts in the market, most of which were immediately put to use wrapping fish. None of the supplicants appeared to be Narbondo’s animated dead men. Even the farthest-fetched, vilest sort of religious cult could develop a sort of fallacious legitimacy through numbers.
Pule wondered whether his prospects wouldn’t be better if he were to throw in with Shiloh, if he were to become a convert. He could do it surreptitiously — keep a hand in with Narbondo — play the one against the other. He stared into his coffee, deaf to the whistles, cries, and shouts of the basket-laden throng around him.
The loss of sleep would play hell with his complexion. He fingered a lump on his cheek. With all the powers of ages of alchemical study at hand, he couldn’t seem to prevent these damned boils and pimples. Camphor baths had nearly suffocated him. Hot towels soaked in rum, vinegar, and — he shuddered to recall it — urine, had merely activated the boils, and it had taken two solid months before he could go abroad without supposing that everyone on the street was whispering and gesturing at his expense. And they probably were, the scum. He rubbed idly at his nose, sniffing at his coffee, the acrid fumes of which just barely disguised the seaweed odors of whelk and oysters and gutted fish — odors that lay like an omnipresent shroud over the market. The smell of fish, of dead, out-of- water fish, sickened him.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up darkly into the face of an earnest youth in a cap and neckerchief. A tract fluttered in his hand. “Excuse me,” said the youth, smiling vacantly. “A wonderful morning, this.” And he looked about him as if he were surrounded by evidence of it. Pule regarded his face with loathing. “I’m here to offer you salvation,” said the youth. “It’s easy to come by, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” responded Pule truthfully.
“It is, though. It’s in the sunrise, in the river, in the bounty of the sea.” And he waved his hand theatrically at a heap of squid laid out on a sledge below. He smiled all the while at the disheveled Pule, who absentmindedly rubbed a rising blemish on the tip of his nose. The youth, apparently satisfied with the squid illustration, rubbed his own nose, although there was no profit in it. “I’m a member of the New Church,” said he, thrusting forth his tracts. “The New Church that won’t have a chance to get old.”
Pule blinked at him.
“Do you know why?”
“No,” said Pule, rubbing at his nose once more.
As if powered by magnetism, the young man was after his own nose again, thinking, perhaps, that something clung to the side of it, a speck that eluded his previous rubbing. Pule noted his behavior and felt his face grow hot. Was the fool having him on? Pule clenched his teeth. “What the hell do you want with me?” he cried.
The violence of Pule’s epithet seemed almost to catapult the youth backward. He recovered, pulled the slack out of himself, and smiled all the more widely. “The end is near,” he announced, grinning. The idea of Armageddon seemed to appeal to him. “You’ve days to save your immortal soul. The New Church, I tell you, is the way. He, Shiloh, the New Messiah, is the way! He raiseth people from the grave! He redeemeth the dead! He…”
But Pule interrupted. “So you’re saying I should become a convert to save myself? Conversion by extortion is it?”
The youth gazed at him, his smile broader, if anything. “I say,” said he, having another innocent go at his nose, “that he who was born of no man can lift you out of misery, can…” and with this, the youth put his hand on Pule’s forehead, as if to heal his soul there and then, in the midst of tramping men carrying baskets of shark heads and eels. The touch of a human hand on the ravaged forehead electrified Pule, but in a way other than had been intended.
Pule screamed an oath, dropped his cup and with both hands tore the tracts from the youth and flung them in a heap to the stones of the embankment. “Filthy… blathering… scum!” shrieked Pule, dancing on the tracts, scuffling and tearing at them with the soles of his shoes. He bent, grabbed a handful, and flung them over the railing, the wind sailing them merrily away like penny whirligigs. Pule cut another half-dozen capers, his eyes like saucers, his mouth twisted in rage. The youth, his smile gone with his vanishing tracts, edged backward a step at a time, until, certain that Pule was too far away to leap on him, he cut and ran toward the embankment stairs, cries of “Scum-sucking pig!” and “Damnable filth!” lending him wings. Pule grasped at the railing, oblivious to the stares of passersby, who gave him a wide berth, anxious not to set him off. He had called attention to himself, to his livid face. They would speak to each other, nudge each other, twigging him. He stared into his retrieved cup, chest heaving, until he saw, beneath his feet, a last tattered tract, smeared with gravel and rainwater footprints. He picked the thing up. On it, sketched rudely by someone whose understanding of perspective was nonsense, was an elongated dirigible, sailing among the clouds. And above it, streaming across a progressively darkening sky, a flaming comet, strangely phallic, arched in toward the flat earth. “The time is at hand!” shouted the caption below the illustration. But what time it was that was at hand wasn’t at all clear, lost as it was in the unfortunate footprint. Pule folded the tract and shoved it into the pocket of his coat, then stepped away down the stairs into the interior of