The Fiend in Human Read online

Though she was of a class above,

  My station she forgave;

  But family ties will oft belie

  The purest of the pure:

  I, in her sight, a shining knight,

  In father’s sight, a boor.

  Corrupt and mean, a libertine,

  Ancient, bald and stout;

  A suitor from a class above -

  For him I was cast out;

  And in my wrath from the path

  I stumbled and I fell,

  While in her pride, my would-be bride

  Did sell her soul as well.

  Here Bigney emits a laugh which is, as always, at Whitty’s expense. ‘Did yor not make the connection? Ought I to say it in Gaelic?’

  ‘Blast! The business in Scotland. Of course.’

  ‘Further discussion will cost yor a half-crown in advance and a half-crown after.’

  ‘That is a grotesque overpayment for a reference which I could have deduced on my own.’

  ‘Try to sell it to Sala without me news clips. Believe me, my prince, yor onto a stunner. Think I’ll hike me advance to two crowns.’

  ‘Outrageous!’

  ‘Ah the fury of the jabbering classes, when the laws of provide and require don’t play in yor favour.’

  ‘Bigney, I shall pay you a half-crown in advance and one on approval, but only so that I may be free of your impudence.’

  ‘Done.’ The engraver bites the coin with his black teeth to test its genuineness, then leans forward and holds Whitty’s eye in his. ‘Yor recall the Inquiry on the State of Girls’ Fashionable Schools?’

  ‘Indeed, I received a small advance on it this week.’

  ‘Well, consider yorself a lucky man, because now yor got two birds to kill with the one stone.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘No recollection at all? Yor wrote it yorself at the time.’

  ‘Surely, you don’t mean Mrs Gorton’s Academy for Young Women.’

  ‘The very one.’

  ‘A cabal of young ladies blackmailed the servants in order to carry on in a most disgraceful manner, and with the most inappropriate customers. A thoroughly indecent business and a national disgrace. The report never appeared in print, of course. The interesting facts would never pass.’

  ‘Who do yor think was a graduate of that very institution?’

  ‘Not this Mrs Cox you mentioned, surely.’

  ‘Not by that name, matey. Yet she’s the one, or I’m not a Christian man. Not only is she one and the same, but she were a large part of the interesting yet unprintable bits yor mention.’

  ‘The young lady who had it off with a young rounder – hired on to do repairs and the like, who made a sideline smuggling opium and romances to the girls.’

  ‘So yor got a memory after all.’

  ‘That man was William Ryan, you say?’

  ‘I’ll take that remaining crown before I continue if you don’t mind, Guv.’

  Cursing his failure to summon the details of such a notorious case, Whitty reluctantly parts with a heartbreaking portion of his cash, bitterly aware that it is worth every penny.

  ‘This will require full documentation.’

  ‘Publication or money refunded, as usual. But there will be no call for a refund. Hark to this: upon her graduation, our young lady returns home just like the entire affair never occurred, or so it would seem to those what knew her, and in less than a year our Miss Hurtle is Mrs Cox – wedded to an auld Scot with a fortune, a laird of the manor that one. Excepting, within a month of the wedding, our Mr Cox is dead.’

  ‘I remember it well. The jury simply couldn’t believe that a well brought-up young woman would do such a thing. Found her Not Guilty.’

  ‘In actual fact the verdict was Not Proven – the Scottish way of saying we have not a clue. Created a delicious scandal, of course. One poem deserves another – listen to this:

  ‘When lovely lady stoops to folly,

  And ancient husband in the way;

  What charm will soothe her melancholy,

  What gentle art will save the day;

  What artful means her sin to cover,

  And rescue her from prison locks -

  To repossess her handsome lover?

  Arsenic for Mrs Cox!’

  Whitty thinks back to Ryan’s cell – the improved living conditions which could, by the turnkey’s admission, only have been purchased from outside the walls of Coldbath Fields. By an unknown purchaser. For the benefit of a man with a way with women. A man who has formed a bond with a woman sufficiently strong that the condemned man will not reveal her name, even to save himself.

  Arsenic for Mrs Cox.

  ‘Pay attention, matey, yor drifting off on me again. You people have no urgency, life’s all a dream for you, ain’t it?’

  ‘I’m not drifting off, Mr Bigney, I am thinking. Please continue.’

  ‘The rest yor can examine for yorself, assuming yor can still read. It will cost two crowns for the whole packet payable on publication. I’ll be pleased to know now if yor have the wherewithal to buy, otherwise Mr Fraser of Dodd’s has expressed enthusiastic interest.’

  Fraser – that predatory warthog crouched by the wayside, waiting to cut him off at the knees.

  A dose of restorative snuff to buff up the spirit, then: ‘Agreed, Mr Bigney. You shall have it.’ The two men shake hands – one black hand, one white (the correspondent will later clean his palm with his handkerchief), after which the engraver reaches beneath his apron and produces a greasy envelope.

  The transaction done, Whitty takes his leave with all possible dispatch from this unpleasant, hostile, necessary man. A deep fatigue has come over him, calling for rest and renewal, followed by a period of concentrated, uninterrupted thought.

  Standing atop the church steps and in the shadow of the arch, two patient men in cloth caps watch and wait. One party has a barrel chest, a broken nose, arms like legs and hands like clubs. The smaller man is missing a left hand.

  ‘When shall I do ‘im then, Norman?’

  ‘He’ll pass by at any moment. This here square’s a cul de sac, Will, meaning that he cannot be leaving other than the one way. We’ll wait for the other gentleman to enter the building. There is no need for a witness to our appointed task.’

  So mentally preoccupied has Whitty become, so entangled in Mr Bigney’s diverse, almost random information, by the time he notices the two men on either side it is too late; neither fight nor flight are open to him, especially since his feet are no longer touching the ground – rather, he is being lifted by both elbows and propelled into the middle of the square to come to a bone-smashing halt against the lone plane tree.

  ‘Have a quiet word, Jimmy?’ A rhetorical question, for the correspondent’s neck is about to snap.

  ‘Certainly, Gentlemen, and how may I be of service?’ the correspondent pleads through one side of his mouth.

  ‘It is about a spot of money what is owed, Jimmy.’

  ‘Whatever money can you mean, Sir?’

  The neck hold becomes firmer, the grip on the arm is tightened, joints are in jeopardy.

  ‘The interest on a certain debt of honour.’

  ‘Best not toy with us, Jimmy. Our mutual friend is fussy about regular payments.’

  Of course, thinks Whitty, sick at heart. The ratters.

  ‘I take it that my friend the Captain sends his greetings.’

  ‘Greetings yes, and a small caution,’ returns the smaller man. ‘A reminder that the Captain emphasizes honesty and thrift as core values in his good work.’

  ‘Quite. Please convey my best wishes, together with my assurance …’

  Whitty is at this moment unable to continue, for he is slowly sinking to his knees, the breath having been knocked clear out of him thanks to a sharp blow to the left kidney.

  ‘Hit him again, Will. Just so the particular is clear.’

  To which Will is only too happy to obey with a fist to the solar plexus.

  On his
hands and knees, vomiting his luncheon on the trunk of this spare, unwholesome tree, Whitty contemplates his options. Brassing it out seems the only alternative.

  ‘Be careful with me, Gentlemen. I have not been well of late, and a dead client is a dead loss.’

  ‘Ease back, Will. Apparently our Jimmy has not been well.’

  Will, who stands ready to break the correspondent’s left arm using the trunk of the tree as a lever, interrupts his labour with an impatient exhalation of breath: ‘Could I break a couple of his fingers then, Norman?’

  ‘Gentlemen, Gentlemen,’ rasps the correspondent, through swollen, fluttery lips. ‘None of this is the least bit necessary, for I am assured of a handsome advance within the week. Of this I swear you may give the Captain my unequivocal guarantee as a gentleman.’

  ‘Your unequivocal guarantee as a gentleman? Within the week?’ The smaller man smoothes a whisker with the stump of his right forearm.

  ‘We can count on that, Jimmy?’

  ‘Will is trying to convey to you that, in the case of default, the Captain’s response will be interesting.’

  Will smiles. ‘Especially interesting for Rodney.’

  ‘Rodney? I regret that I have not had the pleasure of meeting Rodney.’ Massaging the numbness from his left arm, Whitty glances from one face to the next: the larger man appears hairless underneath his top hat, the face seemingly composed of scar tissue.

  The smaller party smiles more broadly. ‘How neglectful of us, Will. Let us introduce Rodney. Mr Whitty really must meet Rodney.’

  ‘And who might be——’

  Even as these words issue from his mouth, the correspondent regrets their utterance, for the larger man has forcefully pulled open Whitty’s tweed trousers; the smaller man reaches carefully into his jacket pocket with his one hand, extracts something soft and drops it inside the opening provided by Will – something warm, moving, something the size and shape of …

  ‘Now you’re dancing, Jimmy!’ exclaims the smaller man, stroking his whisker with the bad hand. ‘We were hoping we’d see you dance – am I not right, Will?’

  ‘True for you, Norman. Nothing better than a good dance.’

  ‘Though not too energetic. Rodney bites harder when he is shaken about.’

  Whitty is dancing in the square, dancing with great leaps and twitches, trying to work the dreadful thing down his trouser leg and away from his person. He hears someone screaming.

  ‘Look at him go, Will! There is nothing like a rat in the trousers to move a party to dance. Do you see? What he is doing is very like a jig.’

  ‘True for you, Norman. And he be singing as well. Would you listen to him sing!’

  17

  Coldbath Fields

  Most men desire fame, to have themselves known to strangers and recognized in public; yet in practice it is the unknown about a man which is of more value to himself than that which is known – especially a man who, for one reason or another, finds himself a member of the criminal class. For one thing, the unknown has more than one side to it. One never knows when a piece of the unknown will emerge to one’s advantage or disadvantage. For this reason, William Ryan has always had a great respect for the unknown – specifically, the need to lessen it in others but not in himself.

  An unknown such as the fact that, while a ward of the parish, William Ryan occupied the position of climbing-boy or chimney-sweep – which occupation he chose over farm labourer, sewer-hunter or dredgerman, on the theory that the ability to gain access to a house through a small opening might come as an advantage later in life, with the potential to produce a profit; more so than the ability to feed animals.

  His career as a legitimate chimney-sweep came to an end by the age of ten, before he could be deformed, or killed by fire, or smothered. Ill-used by his master-sweeper, one day young Ryan found it expedient to hit him over the head with a brick when his back was turned, necessitating a change of employment, for his employer could no longer talk properly, nor could he manage the accounts.

  Such it is with a general education in the school of life that one can never know what knowledge will prove useful in future. Now, twenty years later, in his prison yard, left alone after twilight by his overconfident turnkey (counting the day’s bribery receipts), and having over past weeks strengthened his upper torso by means of assiduous work on the crank, Mr Ryan is about to make surprising use of his childhood vocation.

  Crouched in the corner of the wall beneath the cistern, having previously noted every irregularity in the stonework and memorized the pattern, Ryan pushes his back hard against one wall, braces his feet hard against the other, and secures his fingers in a pair of small indentations established earlier for that purpose. Thus poised, he begins to levitate, inch by inch, working his way slowly up the rough stone, using the angle of the wall to brace himself in the way that a climbing-boy uses the turn of the chimney to gain a purchase. At length he reaches the cistern and is able to clamber onto it. Crouching atop the cistern, without hesitation (he has mentally rehearsed the action countless times), he lunges for the bar which holds the chevaux-de-frise , thus gaining a purchase for both hands between the sets of spikes. Hanging from the instrument, his feet against the stones, he now makes his way painfully along the wall, crab-wise, hand by hand, three-quarters around the yard. An arduous business: unable to avoid the intermittent revolving blades, by the time he reaches the wall abutting the press yard building, Ryan is deeply lacerated about the chest and arms and bleeding copiously therefrom; he sustains further injury in pulling himself onto the bar over the top of the spikes. Many men would grow weak from loss of blood, yet after weeks in a cell he feels his strength return, together with the rage for survival and the animal smell of freedom.

  From the wall (stone embedded with shards of glass) he leaps some eight feet to the roof opposite, scrambling over the lead tiles and the gutters of the prison and adjacent buildings until he finds himself above a nearby street. Seeing a woman hanging her washing on an adjacent roof, he hides by a chimney stack until she completes her task, then follows her down into the house and into the kitchen, by whose stove an older man and a young boy are sitting down to a meal of boiled mutton. The woman, the man and the boy are sufficiently alarmed by Ryan’s wild and bloody appearance that they remain silent; indeed, the boy obligingly shows him to the door.

  Ryan winds his way down Mount Pleasant, possibly the most sarcastically named piece of geography in the British Empire; nothing can compare with it for meanness, melancholy and inexplicable dread, with its peculiar smell of past ages, a murky closeness that arises from deep decay. He keeps to the alleyways wherever possible to Guilford Street, where a convenient trough affords him the means of removing the most conspicuous evidence of blood from his clothes.

  In the street nearby, the prisoners’ van known as Long Tom’s Fraser passes by, a gleaming black omnibus manned by two crushers; a moving pest carrier whose halfway house is the gaol and whose bourne is the gallows.

  Sing ventilator, separate cell

  It is long and dark and hot as well

  Sing locked-up doors – get out if you can

  There’s a crusher outside the prisoner’s van …

  Still a weary distance from Russell Square, he enters the Grave Maurice, an ancient gin palace covered with advertisements for ‘The Out-and-Out’, ‘The Makeshift’ and ‘Medicated Gin – Strongly Recommended by the Faculty!’

  He passes through a heavy door held part-way open by a leather strap and pauses in its shadow to survey the room inside – the long zinc-topped counter backed by piled casks painted green and gold, at which sits a line of customers, bent over as though to say grace and drinking in this fashion, being too drunk to raise the cup to their lips. Along a narrow, dirty area beside the bar and out of the publican’s sight (a florid man with a bottle-nose from sampling the product), customers recline on old barrels, having received full value for money. It is here he directs his attention to a lone, sleeping gentleman in s
hirt-sleeves and waistcoat; his heavy coat, which appears to have been a naval officer’s, has been tossed carelessly across the table in front of him …

  Concealed within his new coat, William Ryan can afford to take the main thoroughfares as far as the Holy Land, where the sight of a man bleeding from wounds inflicted by a sharp instrument is nothing uncommon in any case. Though weakening from his wounds, he none the less moves at a brisk walking pace through the familiar neighbourhood, the better not to attract interest on the part of the spectral, feral young men who lurk everywhere in the dark, standing in doorways and seated on rotted steps, waiting for the source of their next drink. Upon emerging onto Regent Street he turns north, adjusting his pace to that of a man with an appointment or other specific business. Down Regent Street it is but a short way to Portland Place and the woman who has occupied his thoughts, in one way or another, for fifteen years.

  Finding the strength that often accompanies an improvement in prospects, William Ryan breaks into a run.

  18

  Camden Town

  Whitty has often asked himself how he become an opium-eater. Was it attraction, defiance, ignorance, misery, fraud?

  In actuality, all of the above – combined with, of course, availability. In these fast-paced modern times, there is hardly an anodyne in the chemist’s shop which does not contain a generous quantity of that useful substance; and as a man who is never more than a week away from utter ruin, who lives by his ability to generate new and interesting material upon demand, Whitty deeply values the drug’s efficacy in silencing, temporarily at least, that black cormorant of despair which will, when least welcome, perch itself upon a writer’s shoulder and cackle into his ear: Naw! Naw! …

  As with other pleasures, the drawbacks of opium are discovered well after its advantages, not the least of these being the growth in required dosage for desired effect. For his part, Whitty manages on a relatively modest level of three hundred drops of laudanum per dose (an alternative to the raw drug, which would constitute a form of euthanasia); this represents his chief disciplinary accomplishment since he was sent down.