The Fiend in Human Read online

  He turns to confront the speaker – unless it is two speakers. Or perhaps he is seeing double, which would not surprise him in the least. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss, but I don’t believe I have had the honour …’

  ‘My name is Phoebe. And this is my companion, Dorcas. And this is my father, whom you may address as Mr Owler, and whom you have sorely ill-used, sir.’

  ‘Grievous bad,’ adds Dorcas, with a pretty smile.

  So there are two of them. Having established this fact, the correspondent directs his attention to his captor. ‘Have I been kidnapped, Sir? Am I under torture?’

  The ruddy, whiskered face assumes a pained expression: ‘Nothing so barbaric, sir. A medically necessary procedure, is what. You was in a bad way when we brought you here, was my observation. You was into trouble with an unusual wariety of persons – surely you remember the circumstance yourself.’

  ‘A bad way? What sort of a bad way was I in?’

  ‘There was an assault, Sir. A most wicious assault of which you was the recipient. Hardly what one expects from a member of the gentler sex, if I do say so. The lady proposed to wield a coal-shovel to wery bad effect, as she ushered you out of the building. When the lady returned inside, you was then attacked by two other gentlemen who came out of the shadows – like they was standing in a queue, waiting their turn.’

  ‘Such a popular gentleman,’ remarks Phoebe to Dorcas.

  Blast. The ratters.

  ‘I’m not one to pry into the business of others,’ continues Owler, ‘yet had we not intervened I am certain you would surely have suffered a serious injury.’

  Whitty massages his pounding temples, for it is as though someone has driven a nail straight through one side of his head to the other. ‘Would the lady with the coal-shovel by any chance have been speaking in a foreign accent?’

  ‘Irish I believe, Sir. A handsome people, but with a temperamental streak in my observation. You was in a sticky situation. You was lucky to have escaped without broken bones.’

  ‘I am grateful to you, Sir.’ Although at a loss as to how a man and two girls might hold back two ratters, Whitty must take the patterer’s word for it, for the scene is but a vague memory of unintelligible voices and terrible curses.

  Feigning a gentlemanly calm, the correspondent extends his hand. ‘Edmund Whitty of The Falcon, Sir, at your service.’

  Owler does not reciprocate. ‘Oh, I knows who you are. You are the newspaperman.’ He spits out the word as though it has a vile taste.

  While Whitty considers this alarming utterance, Owler turns to the two young women: ‘Now I’ll thank you young ladies to be on your way, whilst I have a word with the newspaperman.’

  ‘Certainly, Father.’ Phoebe nods to her companion, confirming a private set of plans, the particulars of which her father would prefer not to know. Now she turns to the gentleman guest with her most refined smile: ‘Good-day to you, Sir.’

  ‘My compliments to you, Miss. Your presence has been the highlight of my day thus far.’

  Thinks Phoebe: What must he think of her, having been held prisoner in a privy?

  Alone now with his captor, Whitty’s mind has recovered sufficiently to gather that this is the same standing patterer upon whom he heaped defamation in the hanging piece – a far more damning shot, now that he recalls it, than he would deign to aim at a fellow correspondent. For the moment he chooses not to refer directly to this connection, but to affect the aspect of a victim of mistaken identity.

  ‘You done me an injury and an injustice, Sir. Yet life goes on.’ Owler gestures toward the door like a head butler. ‘And now Mr Whitty, you may accompany me to the dining-room.’

  ‘Excellent. Might one have the opportunity to wash?’

  Mr Owler finds the question highly amusing.

  The instant the two men emerge through the creaking door of the bog-house, it all becomes horribly clear: Whitty will be fortunate to get away with the clothes on his back; indeed, he will be lucky to get away with his back.

  They are situated amid a warren of yards and passages crammed with outcast humanity, a dense mass of worm-eaten houses with walls the colour of bleached soot, so old they only seem not to fall, their half-glazed windows patched with lumps of bed ticking.

  He is a man lost in a maze, without hope of extrication by calculation or craft: between these houses curve and wind a series of narrow and tortuous lanes; stagnant gutters bisect the lanes, filled with substances Whitty does not wish to think about; above them is a formless architectural mass, interconnected by an elaborate complex of crude runways between roofs, with spikes located beside the upper windows to permit a party literally to climb the walls. Below ground, Whitty has heard, bolt-holes link one building to the next in a maze of escape routes. The cumulative result is that a fugitive can pass over and under a series of houses and emerge undetected in another part of the rookery in a matter of moments. Should the Peelers or some other authority dare to pursue him, their prey will simply have vanished. Should a foolish crusher follow him into the cellar, chances are good that the policeman will drown in a concealed cess-pool like the one of Whitty’s recent acquaintance; surviving that, the constable will in all likelihood place his head in a bolt-hole and promptly lose it.

  ‘My God, it’s the Holy Land,’ Whitty whispers, turning somewhat paler than normal.

  Owler smiles: ‘Werily, Sir. And welcome.’

  Straddling New Oxford Street, extending from Great Russell Street to St Giles High Street and bounded by a series of frightful brothels, is an immense, squalid warren crammed with outcast humanity – in effect, a foreign country, as though in the core of Empire dwells a race of cannibals from the far end of the Nile.

  When ancient trades became obsolete and ancient villages became uninhabitable, families whose existence depended upon them migrated into the city, there to form villages in miniature amid the gracious estates behind Regent Street and the Strand, causing their well-born inhabitants to wonder if London was any longer the place for them.

  Meantime the pace of progress stepped up, and with each change more hands went out of work. As the income of the working classes descended, more people and lower people – chimney-sweeps, washerwomen, tripe-sellers, beggars – poured into London’s centre to pack the back streets, courts, squares and mews.

  Naturally, the social tone coarsened. Inhabitants of the quality were set upon by ruffians and had their watches stolen, and the presence of the lower orders became simply too oppressive to be endured. So the quality moved away, leaving their fine houses to be subdivided by agents on commission.

  As these houses deteriorated, the subdivisions divided again and again. Whole families moved into single rooms in which to do piecework to pay the rent, pawning the spoons at the end of each week to make up for the shortfall. As these meagre spaces became insupportable, parts of rooms were sublet, then beds, then parts of beds. In the meanwhile, primitive shanties were constructed in the back-yard, then let, then sub-let, then sub-sub-let.

  By this point the area had become known as the Holy Land, after the impoverished Irish Catholics who poured in as though it were Jerusalem.

  It is the common wisdom that no person has any business there who is more than one step away from death by starvation, disease or hanging. Despite a variety of pecuniary and social embarrassments, Whitty has never sunk quite this low.

  True, one’s chance of being murdered for one’s money or clothing is greater in the lanes behind the Ratcliffe Highway, and the opportunity to become infected by an appalling disease is more available on the mud-flats where the sewers empty into the Thames; yet the Holy Land is more feared. In scope it has attained a macabre grandeur, like a canto out of Dante, as though majestic Britain, the pinnacle of civilized progress and Christian virtue, has somehow brought about within its own bosom an equal majesty on the other side.

  The patterer conducts his guest across Carrier Square – if the term ‘square’ may usefully be employed to describe an outdoor sp
ace bisected by a drain and cluttered with coster carts, upon which lie the bodies of sleeping prostitutes of the lowest sort, skirts every which way, white legs indecently exposed, dangling over the rims like the necks of plucked geese. In the reeking hubbub of Rosemary Lane, festoons of second-hand clothes wave like pennants from tiny cave-like shops; other surrounding streets – alleys really – emanate from the square like arteries from a heart, filled with sick persons and stick-persons, monuments to the act of loitering.

  A woman with a bloated face, a short pipe in her mouth, tiny eyes darting incessantly back and forth and with a wolfish dog by her side, tears rags in strips for some commercial purpose. A young man with a consumptive cough, covered only by a blue rug stolen from a livery stable, cries out piteously while banging a tin alms cup. A group of black Irish keep watch for someone who might profitably be waylaid – assuming themselves already lost to the Devil in this heathen Protestant city.

  Having no idea where he is other than somewhere south of New Oxford Street and north of Leicester Square, keenly aware of the potentially fatal consequences of every breath taken in this fetid warren, Whitty determines his best course to be one of discretion: retain a cordial accord with his host on all issues moral and political, express deep regret for harm done, and negotiate the best possible terms of release by agreeing to everything. Not the boldest strategy, but Whitty is not in a bold mood.

  ‘May I ask where you are taking me, Mr Owler?’

  ‘Tea-time, Mr Whitty,’ replies the patterer. “Course, if you prefers to be on your own …’

  ‘Not at all. Absolutely delighted to join you.’

  Through a set of green stable doors they enter what can only be a kitchen, to judge by the pervasive smell of burnt animal fat and fish. Visually, the room is obscured by thick grey smoke (a loathsome miasma carrying every disease in Europe), pierced by a narrow shaft of light from a hole in the roof.

  Whitty has found himself in some appalling hovels, but nothing to compare with this.

  ‘Be it ever so ’umble, Sir. Consider yourself my guest.’

  ‘Most grateful, I am sure,’ replies the correspondent as though charmed by the quaintness of it, lighting the stub of a cigar he has found in a pocket, the better to breathe without retching.

  As they cross the room Whitty’s eyes adjust to the gloom so that he can now make out a blackened chimney, which stands out from a brick wall like the flying buttress of some dismal cathedral. Blackened beams hang from the roof and down the walls, supported by a floor of packed dirt. The two men pass beneath an iron gas pipe whose flame provides a feeble illumination; as they reach the opposing side Whitty can see that the entire wall is a long, projecting wooden bench, in front of which stand a series of tables of various heights, sizes and shapes, with each one of them at some stage of collapse.

  Across the tables loll the torsos of at least twenty sleeping men, lying back to back for warmth, knees bent like sleeping infants. At the end of the room, a group of men and women huddle about the stove in blankets and coats the colour of soot. A few are toasting herrings, which smell strongly of overripe oil and add to the unwholesome sweetness of sheep fat. To one side of the stove, three men occupy themselves by drying the ends of cigars collected in the street.

  Whitty has never seen so ragged and motley an assemblage in his life – hair matted like sheared wool, unshorn beards slick with grease, pallor approaching a luminous green. Two men – either artists or thieves who stole from artists – wear tatty smocks; another sports a rotting plush waistcoat with long sleeves; another an ancient shooting-jacket.

  Even in such company, the appearance of the party who rises to greet Mr Owler defies comparison: his cheeks are so sunken that it is impossible that the man can have any teeth; a skeletal frame covered by an ancient coat, stained black and worn shiny; a shirt so brown with wearing that only close inspection can discern the shadow of a chequered pattern. The sight of the man is of such overpowering wretchedness as to be almost comical. Whitty wonders for how much longer the man will be able to stand up at all, especially with the lady’s side-buttoned boots he wears on his feet, the toes of which have been cut out so that he can get them on.

  The man executes a wobbly bow. ‘Good afternoon, Henry. Lovely to see you.’ His voice seems to emanate from some distance away.

  ‘Good afternoon, Jeremy. Mr Whitty, allow me to present Mr Hollow, my former associate – former I regret, owing to illness and infirmity. Mr Hollow is a very fine poet.’

  Whitty bows; the hand in his feels not unlike a packet of twigs. ‘I am extremely pleased to make your acquaintance, Sir.’

  ‘Jeremy, this is a newspaperman, moniker of Whitty.’

  Replies Mr Hollow, ‘You have heard of The Husband’s Dream perhaps?’

  ‘Regretfully, I have not had that honour.’

  ‘Henry, we really must revive The Husband’s Dream.’

  ‘Should have done so already, Jeremy, but for the cost of paper.’

  ‘Very popular in the streets it was, in its day.’

  Owler turns to the correspondent. ‘And a stunning instructive piece of work it is, Sir. Imaginatively conceived and cunningly wrought. Consider: a drunkard falls asleep in the gutter and is redeemed in a dream. Simple, true, and wery uplifting to the sensibilities of all as read it.’

  ‘I shall certainly read it at the next opportunity.’

  ‘That will be difficult, Sir,’ replies Mr Hollow. ‘We have no copies for want of capital.’

  ‘And yet,’ says the patterer, ‘we must never forget as how the writer lives on in the memory of the faithful reader.’ As though to prove his point, Owler begins to recite in a purposeful, resonant baritone:

  ‘O Dermot you look healthy now,

  Your dress is neat and clean;

  I never see you drunk about,

  Then tell me where you’ve been …’

  ‘That is the opening, for your information Mr Whitty,’ says the poet. ‘It sets the scene of a chance encounter.’

  Adds Owler: ‘In the next stanza, Dermot recounts as how he dreamt of his wife’s sudden death.’

  ‘The dream is, or so it seems to me, a most poetic state of mind – do you not agree, Mr Whitty?’

  ‘I do not doubt it, Mr Hollow.’

  ‘Indeed,’ says the patterer, ‘the misery of his children as they cry over their mother’s dead body is wividly described – one can see it before one’s eyes as t’would squeeze a tear from a banker. Now, hark to the redemption:

  ‘I pressed her to my throbbing heart

  Whilst joyous tears did stream;

  And ever since I’ve heaven blest

  For sending me that dream …’

  At the concluding line, the patterer’s substantial baritone tapers to a whisper as though drained; in response, a ripple of applause erupts among the wretches seated about the stove. ‘Of course, with no sheets to sell, even a masterpiece is not worth a farthing.’

  ‘May I take it, Gentlemen, that you are business associates?’

  ‘Mr Hollow were my wersifier for many years, until his infirmity.’

  ‘And what, may I ask, is the infirmity?’

  ‘The eyes, sir,’ says Mr Hollow. ‘I am nearly blind.’

  ‘That is indeed a terrible affliction, and I am sorry to hear it.’

  ‘You are generous, Sir. I can still compose my verses, but they die with me for want of copying.’ Mr Hollow turns to Whitty, who can now perceive a milkiness of the eye. ‘As a professional man, what might be your honest opinion of my work?’

  Honest? Whitty side-steps the subject, having no desire to undermine the raison d‘être of a blind man. ‘Empty praise is cheap, Sir. Allow me to offer you some small sustenance as a gesture.’ So saying, he reaches into his pocket, retrieves the few coppers remaining from the unremembered events of last night, and slides them across the table between Mr Hollow and Mr Owler.

  Sighs the poet, transfixed by the sound of money: ‘A kind gesture, Sir, most kind.
Although material reward is a poet’s last consideration, I confess that remuneration of late has reached an unusually low ebb. To make ends meet, I have been occupied in collecting dog manure for use by tanners. I go by the smell, you see.’

  Whitty didn’t know such an occupation existed. ‘A lean business, I should imagine.’

  ‘Not nearly so lean as the writing of poetry, sir.’

  ‘I readily admit it, Mr Hollow.’

  ‘Now, Gentlemen,’ Owler announces, ‘enough banter, for we are here on a wery sober business.’

  He leans over the table (its deal surface has developed into a series of rolling hills, with a long, flat indentation in the centre), removes his crooked hat, sets it upside-down, intertwines his fingers sausage-like and assumes the worrisome aspect he displayed earlier in the privy.

  ‘Mr Whitty, I am not one to mince words or to dance around a thing. I likes to call a thing by what it is, and we are here on a serious matter. Jeremy, this here Mr Whitty, a newspaperman, has indicated in the public mouth that my “Sorrowful Lamentation” concerning Chokee Bill is, to put it baldly’ (the patterer stammers as though he can scarcely produce the word) ‘a c-c-cock, Sir. A flam.’

  ‘Oh dear, Henry, that is very bad.’ The poet turns to the correspondent with grave aspect: ‘I will have you understand, Sir, that in the trade Mr Owler is known as a scholar of murders who has not missed a public execution in a quarter-century. For sheer devotion to the craft he is without peer, having spent more than an hundred hours altogether with criminals in the death cell, conversing with them in great seriousness on the prospect of that eternal world upon whose awful precipice they sit. You may take my word on it, Sir, Mr Owler shines as a beacon of integrity. Mr Owler has been a steadfast friend to me, Sir – indeed, more than a friend …’

  Aware that he is not out of danger and with no escape in sight, Whitty chooses an aspect of judicious, measured dignity.