She set down the paper knife, feeling slightly foolish. There was a hesitant knock, a shuffling of feet.
She arose and opened the door, bracing it with the toe of her shoe. A tall, lanky, haggard-looking man stood on the landing, twisting his cap in his hands. He had evidently taken two steps back from the door, so as not to impose himself upon her.
“I’m Bill Kraken, ma’am,” he said. “You don’t know the name, but I’m a friend of Mother Laswell, and I’ve come up to London to see her safe back home to Aylesford. I come here straightaway on the chance that she called upon you, you being her friend.”
There was something about his demeanor that appealed to Mabel – a natural humility, certainly, and some sort of goodness that shone in his admittedly odd features. “She did indeed,” Mabel said. “Will you come in?” She stood aside and gestured.
He entered hesitantly, as if it were beyond his station to do so. “I’m main desperate to find her,” Kraken said. “She left Hereafter Farm this morning in a thundercloud. When I found out I most despaired of finding her once I got here, London being the behemoth of old. But it come to me to search for her logbook before I left, which is what she wrote in before supper. It took me most of an hour to find it. I come across your name in it, ma’am, and a mention of the Ship Tavern, what stands below on the street and what I knew well enough of old, and here I am, a-searching for lost things, like your sign says, and I mean to find her come what may.”
“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Kraken,” she said, “and I’m happy to hear that she has a stalwart friend. Take a chair at the table and eat a morsel. You’ve had a long day of it.”
He stood staring, still twisting his cap, which she took from him and laid on the sideboard before gesturing at a wooden chair by the dining table. “Right there, sir. You can take five minutes to collect yourself and eat some of this cheese and bread. I can offer you a glass of this capital French brandy or a bottle of ale, or both.”
“Ale would go down most grateful, ma’am,” Kraken said.
She set the plate in front of him and fetched the ale from her small kitchen. “Eat that, sir,” she said. “Don’t stand on ceremony. I’ll tell you straightaway that Mother’s gone into Spitalfields to find…”
“I know who she means to find and what she means to do to him,” he said, talking from behind his hand as he chewed his food. “I mean to stop her, although I’m late in coming. It ain’t right that she kill her own son, and no matter the reason. It would do for her, do you see? For good and all. I’ll gladly take up the burden and…”
“Yes, ma’am. She took her little flintlock pistol out of the case. She’ll use it, too, if I don’t find her, or else she’ll come to harm trying. Spitalfields, you say?” He rose from the chair, draining half the bottle of ale at a gulp and apparently determined to be on his way, dinner or no.
She picked up the vellum map and handed it to him. “It’s just here,” she said, pointing at the endpoint of the tear. “Do you know the area? It’s a Hell on Earth, the rookery is, so mind yourself.” She picked up a napkin and loaded the bread and cheese into it, tying it up into a bundle.
“When I was a pea-pod man I knew it well enough, although it’s nowhere for…” He shook his head darkly. “Ah, Christ,” he said. “I thank you for your kindness ma’am, but I’d best be on my way. If she should return, you’d do her a service were you to lock her in.”
With that Kraken snatched his hat from atop the sideboard, put it on, and took the bread and cheese in both hands. Mabel opened the door, and he loped away down the stairs clutching the torn map under his arm, his footfalls quickly fading. She stood for a minute looking down after him. In the many years she had known Mother Laswell, she had thought that both her sons were dead, but apparently she hadn’t known her friend well at all.
She closed the door and sat back down, taking another swallow of brandy, which she relished – a small good thing at a time like this. The clock on the sideboard chimed midnight, but sleep was even farther off than it had been fifteen minutes ago. She settled into her chair again, opened her book, and took up where she’d left off.
TWENTY-THREE
Finn Conrad hunched across the rooftop, keeping out of sight as best he could. If he were seen he’d be taken for a thief, and although he could evade pursuit, he didn’t want to be forced to do so. He contemplated a return to Angel Alley – and why not? – no one knew his face. He might have a second chance to find Eddie, the dawn being hours away yet. Finn knew that there had been desperate fighting in the courtyard, with several shots Fred. If it had been the Professor and Hasbro, it might have changed everything. And yet if things had changed, he needed to know how. The fighting also meant that different lots of them were looking out for Eddie, if you counted the game old woman who had fired the pistol at Narbondo before following him out onto the bridge. She hadn’t any idea of shooting, but he honored her for the attempt. He also wondered who she was. In any event, she couldn’t help Eddie any more than she could help herself.
Crouching in the shadow of a chimney pot, he looked down at the alley and courtyard just west of Angel Alley, very nearly its twin, the same dozens of layabouts lounging in the yard, gin served out of a keg, a trussed up pig just then being hauled down from a spit over an open fire, the process watched intently by a knot of men, the smoke blowing away on the breeze. There was a curious smell on the air – not the roasting pig – rising apparently from directly below him – the smell of rotten eggs mixed with the odor of pitch. Finn had smelled it before during his days in the circus. It was a memorable smell, nothing else quite like it, not in his experience, anyway. What he remembered was something called “flaming syllabub” by the man who concocted it in order to cast liquid fire on the Witch of Winter in an open field where Duffy’s Circus was set up in Yorkshire. The man’s face was burnt off when the siphon tube blew to pieces. They had buried the corpse, its head and upper body charred, no longer recognizably human, behind a hedgerow, along with the syllabub and the pressurized device for spraying it. It was quite the most awful thing that Finn had seen in his life, and the dreams had taken months to pass away.
He could see it below him now – a heavy iron pot lying atop a coal stove set out of the wind in a lamp-lit alcove. The pot had a lid on it, but thin smoke rose from the coals that heated the pot and from around the lid. In the light of a lamp hung on a peg, a bearded dwarf tended the fire beneath the kettle, which glowed with a raw white flame. He noted the dwarf’s careful attention to it. The man was leery of getting too close, as if the pot might explode. Very nearby stood a coster’s barrow, doctored up fancy. It had a polished metal bed, brass, apparently. It was long and narrow and with springs at the axles. Three kegs sat atop it. Finn took it at first to be a portable coffee stall, although soon enough he saw that he was wrong. The iron-bound kegs had no spigot. Instead, in one of them there appeared to be a bronze pipe set in the bung, with a flexible brass tube affixed to it, the excess coiled beside it on the bed, perhaps twenty feet of it. There was a nozzle on the end – the siphon, he thought, for spraying the syllabub. He saw the handle of a pump atop the keg, no doubt meant to pressurize it. The thing looked like a cross between a beer keg and a hubble-bubble, but he knew it was nothing as innocent as that. The long hose would allow a man to stand a good way off. A second keg with a funnel atop sat beside the first, an India-rubber hose with a broad-throated bellows connected to it, the bellows affixed flat to the wagon. A third keg, large enough to hold a couple of gallons sat alongside in a small heap of black dust.
He speculated over the apparatus for a moment, but couldn’t puzzle it out, and it was none of his business anyway… unless it was. He made his way back to the peak of the roof and looked across toward Angel Alley, which was still mostly hidden by the warren of buildings. He could see the roof of Narbondo’s apartment, directly opposite where he stood, which meant it was just opposite where the dwarf was cooking up syllabub. Were the buildings connected? Another way in and out, perhaps? He returned to his perch above the smoking kettle. Some distance away stood a convenient drainpipe that led downward to a lean-to roof that wasn’t above eight feet off the ground – easy enough to climb down. He moved away in that direction, testing the strength of the drainpipe before making his way hand over hand until his feet stood on the lower roof. He leapt from there to the stones of the courtyard, knees bending to take the force of the drop, and then walked around the side of the lean-to toward where the dwarf worked at his oven. The best way was the bold way, when you were up to acrobatics.
“I’ve got a message from the Doctor,” he said to the dwarf, who turned and looked Finn up and down as if he were a walking dustbin.
