Whitechapel Gods Page 7

  “Spreading fear, perhaps,” Oliver had suggested, “to scare the average cove away from helping us.”

  Hews had perked up at that, and a little of that prideful red glow came back into his cheeks. “Ha. British men don’t scare that easily.”

  Oliver had thought of Missy. “Neither do the women.”

  After that, they’d both lapsed into silence. The constant proximity of Grandfather Clock’s followers and occasionally the Boiler Men limited the instances of their conversation.

  Oliver was dying to know more about this Aaron. He wanted to know how a man who knew so much could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. When asked, Hews snapped that it was not the time to discuss it and fell back to his silent worrying.

  Hews’ first breath as they stepped out of the car sent him into a fit of coughing. Oliver hooked his arm and gently drew him out of the way of the rest of the passengers as the coughs evolved into wet hacks. It was several minutes before Hews regained his composure. He righted himself and wiped the spittle away from beneath his kerchief. A sudden sheen of sweat mixed with the soot on his face. The man seemed drained of all vitality and every seeming of health.

  “That entertaining, am I?” Hews croaked.

  Oliver swallowed. “Is it…?”

  “Cancer of the lungs, aye,” Hews said. “The same as took my Barbara.”

  “You might have told me.”

  “You knew it,” Hews scolded. “As a lad, you were never less than observant. She always told me so.”

  “There’s a difference, knowing it and hearing it,” Oliver said.

  “You needn’t tell me that, lad.”

  They stood in silence a moment, while Hews stowed his handkerchief and tied on a fresh one from his vest pocket.

  “She was kind to me,” Oliver said to fill the silence.

  “Aye, she was. And her only price was the enduring of her constant sermons, bless her Anglican, Anglican soul.”

  Hews cleared his throat and straightened his coat and hat. “Well,” he said. “Now that I’m done making a spectacle of myself, let’s get on, shall we?”

  “But…are you all right?” Oliver asked.

  “Chipper as the day I shot out of my mum, lad. I’ll have none of your pity.” He began a brisk walk. Oliver scrambled to keep pace.

  The station exited onto the lowest point of the concourse: a half bowl of concrete that sported benches, unconvincing false trees, and dormant wrought-iron lampposts of angular design. It was almost deserted, owing, Oliver figured, to the choking air. A black cloak scuttled by, moving on all fours like a spider, emitting an audible mechanical grinding as she moved.

  Oliver shied away.

  “Sold their souls,” Hews said once she had gone. “Nothing in their hearts now but a few lumps of burning coal and Mama Engine’s excrement.”

  And they’d do it to all of us, if we let them, Oliver thought. The metal grew in a human being as easily as in a tower or a factory; a man would not know he had it until black iron started poking through his skin. Thomas was already half a machine, and he had never joined any order.

  In a few steps they lost themselves in the fog.

  “I hope you know the way, Hewey.”

  Hews waved him on. “I know it better than my own wrinkles, lad. Just follow me, and make sure there’s something under your foot before you commit to the step.”

  Oliver halted in midstride, foot hanging above the concrete ahead. The air was so thick, holes in the concourse would not be readily apparent. He shot Hews a venomous look.

  “Did I not look preoccupied enough for you?”

  “Not at all, lad. Just wanted to warn you to watch your step, that’s all. One never knows, in a place like this.”

  “You’re a fiend, Hewey,” Oliver said. For emphasis, he stomped his front foot down hard. The satisfying smack of rubber on concrete echoed back up.

  Hews smiled weakly. “Mr. Savvy today, eh? Well, if you take such pride in your own wit, try to tell me where we are twenty minutes from now.”

  Frowning, Oliver followed Hews’ ghostly shadow through the smog to the start of a rickety staircase. They ascended several storeys before coming to a landing, then found another stair, another landing, another stair, and so on for what seemed an eternity. Never could Oliver see more than five paces in front of him. Soot-stained walls and greasy windows passed by on both sides. The heavy air suppressed all ambient sound, until all Oliver could hear was his own breathing and footsteps.

  Hews paused on a landing to catch his breath. Oliver stumbled up beside him.

  “Does it worry you that we haven’t seen another living soul this whole time?” he asked.

  Hews panted, and spoke with a scratch in his voice. “All staying inside, slothful buggers. Some buildings here are connected by tunnels, where the air isn’t so bad.”

  “Then why are we out here?”

  “So no one can bloody see us. This is a secret meeting, in case you’d missed that.”

  The aforementioned twenty minutes passed and Oliver had to admit that he was hopelessly lost. After a few more landings, Hews led them to a pitted oak door and into a lit parlour.

  The air within was almost as smoky as that without. Heat pushed its way past Oliver as he entered, filling his nostrils with the smells of opium and human sweat.

  “Even in Whitechapel you can’t escape these damnable places,” Hews muttered.

  A single oil lamp with an Oriental paper shade hung from a hook in the ceiling. Its wan light illuminated a dozen or more men lying about the room on couches and carpets, twitching in their rumpled clothes. No one moved. No one spoke. Only a moaning from an area on the left, cordoned off by hanging curtains, dared break the silence.

  Stepping carefully over the still forms on the floor, Oliver followed Hews to the back. Hews rapped on the door there, to the rhythm of “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.” It opened, revealing a squat, hair-lipped Chinese woman of considerable age.

  Hews doffed his hat. “Mrs. Flower, a pleasure, as always.”

  She greeted him with a wrinkled smile and some words in a singsong dialect, and ushered them both inside. She led them through a tiny back room equipped with several short tables and stools and a potbellied stove. A skeletal Chinese girl laboured over the stove, grating cake opium into a sieve that sat over a pot of boiling water. Mrs. Flower led them to a stained curtain against the back wall and drew it aside.

  “Here’s one more.” It was Bailey’s rough voice. “Is anyone with you, Lewis?”

  “Only Mr. Sumner,” Hews replied. “Where are the others?”

  The Chinese woman gestured for Oliver to follow.

  Oliver turned his attention to the room, to find it lit only by a half-dozen thick candles in the centre of the room’s circular table. Spots of smoke and grease blackened the plaster walls. Bailey, Sims, and two gentlemen Oliver had never seen before occupied the table.

  One of the unknown men, a red-faced gentleman with precisely cut moustache and sideburns, replied, “We can only hope for them.”

  “Just hurry and seat yourselves,” Bailey barked. “We haven’t a lot of time.”

  Hews settled into the last empty chair. Oliver stood at a loss for a moment, feeling more and more the impatience of those assembled, and finally elected to fetch a stool from the previous room. He seated himself on it and tried not to look as ridiculous as he felt, a head shorter than all the rest with his knees pulled up to his chest.

  “Thank you,” Bailey said to Oliver, with edged sarcasm. He sucked a moment on his cigar and then addressed the table. “I see four missing.”

  One of the two unknowns, a bald man in an expensive suit and pince-nez spectacles replied, “We got the word through. Perhaps they are simply tardy.”

  “A fanciful hope,” Bailey said. “The canaries have been assaulting our hides since dawn, even my own. Until they knock at the door, we will assume the others have met their fate, so it falls to us to tackle the task at hand.”

&n
bsp; “The task at hand is escape,” said the unknown moustachioed man. “Grandfather Clock and Baron Hume won’t soon forget about us, and with everything Aaron knew we’d best vacate the city and get the Crown to send someone else.”

  Bailey’s heavy brows dropped low. His cheeks creased around the edges of his moustache in a scowl. “Our task is to retrieve the ticker tape that was Aaron’s objective. According to our source in Scared’s organisation, one of Aaron’s crew fell from Aldgate with it in his possession. John Scared is certainly already looking for it, and perhaps the baron, too. We must move with all possible haste if we are to discover it first.”

  “Why is it important?” Oliver asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Bailey glared at him as he might a child who had spoken out of turn. Only the bald, bespectacled man spoke up.

  “Yes, out with it,” the man said. “You’ve kept us all too far in the dark on this. Since Grandfather Clock and his pet baron almost certainly know by now, your compatriots aught to.”

  Sims and the other unknown nodded their heads.

  Bailey’s glare lingered on Oliver for a moment, cigar smoke curling up his cheeks.

  “Then I will start at the beginning.” He addressed the table again. “Our conundrum has been this, gentlemen. With careful planning, we could probably assassinate the baron, and with enough men, we could probably defeat the cloaks, but such acts do us no service as long as the Lord and Lady survive. Ultimately, we require a method to slay them in order to ensure their influence is gone from England, but bodiless as they are, we’ve encountered no lack of difficulty with this. Aaron has been, for some years, working on a way to kill Grandfather Clock and Mama Engine.”

  “And he found such a method?” the bald man asked, leaning forward.

  “No. He told me from the start that the task was beyond him. It was John Scared who found a way.”

  Low muttering passed across the table. Oliver reeled a bit on his tiny stool. John Scared was the baron’s lapdog, his eyes and ears on the Whitechapel streets. Could this be dissention in the enemy ranks?

  Bailey continued. “Scared placed the calculations for this method on a coded ticker tape. Aaron insisted on leading a team to steal it.”

  It was the bald man’s turn to reel back. “And you let him? God, with how much he knew…”

  “He argued that John Scared would have set out traps too devious to deal with without his…special talents. From what our source has told me of Scared’s lair, I had no reason to doubt this.”

  “But the risks, man!”

  “The rewards more than outweighed them, sir,” Bailey said, overpowering the smaller man. “At last a way to free Whitechapel from these God-cursed machines! What risk isn’t worth that? And the opportunity is still there. Our task, gentlemen, is to retrieve that tape, implement whatever strategy it contains, and get it into the Stack to do its work.”

  Hews rubbed his muttonchops. “No small order.”

  “I don’t anticipate any one of us keeping his freedom very much longer,” Bailey replied. “So we must abandon the dark lantern shenanigans we’ve been playing at, anonymity included, since it is likely the baron already knows our identities. Joyce, get your engineering crew ready for anything that tape may contain.” The moustachioed man nodded. “Lewis, you and Lawrence will need to pull in your connections in the Stack. We may need access to the Chimney or the Work Chamber.”

  Oliver visibly cringed at the mention of the dead man’s name. He inhaled and mentally plucked up his courage. Now it would come out that Lawrence had met his end at the hands of a comrade, and Bailey would sack him. Well, then, Oliver would simply run a rebellion on his own again, nervous as that made him feel.

  Hews just nodded. “We’ll get it done,” he said.

  “Good,” said Bailey. He turned to give orders to Sims and the other man.

  Hews had lied straight to Bailey’s face. A lie of omission. Oliver was aghast. It wasn’t just for his sake, surely? But why else would Hews do such a thing?

  “Sumner.”

  Oliver snapped to attention to find Bailey glaring at him from behind his thick moustache.

  “Do you have Lawrence’s manual?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. With luck, it will contain a key to decode Scared’s tape.”

  Oliver raised his eyebrows.

  Hews leaned over and muttered an explanation: “Lawrence was in contact with Scared through intermediaries. He’d been compiling this for some time.”

  “We will be using the Shadwell Underbelly to gain access to the downstreets,” said Bailey. “I want your people to loiter in the lift station and on the main street and to monitor the activity of cloaks and Boiler Men. Distract them or assault them as necessary, but keep them away from our point of egress so we can be certain of a clear path back. When we have obtained the tape, we will pass it into your hands, and you must see it safely to Joyce’s workshop since we are unable to move freely on the streets now that our faces are known. If the Boiler Men arrive at Shadwell in force, you are to give us fair warning and perhaps a distraction while we escape to the Docks Tower.”

  Oliver spoke before he’d thought it through: “Watchmen? Is that all, sir? My crew is capable of handling much more.”

  Bailey bristled. He gestured sharply with his cigar. “Oh? I was remiss, then, in not clearing our plans with you first. You and your crew—I am placing you where I need you. If you have some problem being necessary, we can review that at your leisure at a later date. This afternoon you will be watchmen and nothing more.”

  Uncomfortable foot shuffling and the quiet clearing of throats followed. Oliver felt heat creeping up his neck. His hands had at some point balled themselves and now shook with barely contained energy. Oliver was seized with the sudden urge to leap across the table and throttle the man. Damn the consequences, damn your rebellion, and damn that old, fat queen of yours.

  He caught Hews glancing sidelong at him. Oliver unrolled his fingers, forced a calm, slow exhalation.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bailey nodded.

  The next twenty minutes covered logistics and timing. Bailey’s crew were to leave for the downstreets within the hour by the “rusted stair” below Shadwell. The crew of the bespectacled man were to set explosives in Cathedral Tower with the intention of drawing cloaks and Boiler Men out of the Stack if necessary. Oliver clarified the location of Joyce’s workshop, which turned out to be in Montague Tower, the tiny ten-dwelling stem growing from the Stack’s base. Talking in specific details about the assignment settled his nerves a bit.

  “Never forget Scared,” Bailey said to the table. “He’s likely to have sent a team already, and will be watching Shadwell. The man employs children, and if our source is accurate, has pull and clout with both the golds and the blacks. He’s likely to discover our presence no matter our level of caution.”

  The table murmured acknowledgement.

  “Bow your heads.”

  The men complied, most with genuine reverence, Oliver as a matter of course.

  “Lord, you have set these trials before us and we are grateful for the opportunity to do your work,” Bailey said. “We thank you for all the assistance you have rendered us in the years past and ask that you aid us today in our battles. With your blessing, we will soon wipe these devils from the face of your good Earth. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  The table murmured assent. Bailey then looked at them each in turn, as if appraising them, their worth perhaps, their dedication. At length, Bailey nodded, apparently satisfied.

  “Praise to England,” he said. “God save the queen.”

  The sentiment was echoed all around, and the men dispersed. The others left one by one, spacing their exits to intervals of five minutes, as measured by an odd, water-powered clock that hung in the small kitchen of Mrs. Flower’s establishment. Oliver loathed clocks. The thought of Grandfather Clock staring out at one’s family or one’s personal affairs kept the majority of homes timeless
places, and the majority of pockets empty of watches. He mentioned as much to Hews, but Hews only shrugged.

  “That clock was built in the East somewhere. Grandfather Clock has no influence on it, or so Aaron seemed to think.”

  Another few minutes’ wait brought them their turn at the door, and they tied their kerchiefs over their faces and braved the exterior once again. Impossibly, the air had grown thicker since they’d last breathed it. The only things now visible were a two-yard stretch of warped wooden platform all around them and the dull glow of the Stack, huge and omnipresent, in the sky to the south, and even these were little more than phantoms in the smog.

  When they’d gone some distance and Oliver determined that they were thoroughly lost, he decided a few words had to be said.

  “Thank you,” he began, “for your silence in there. I thought I was going to be sacked for certain.”

  “No thanks is necessary, lad,” Hews replied. “It’s a rare opportunity nowadays that I have a chance to do you a good turn. And in any case, Bailey didn’t need the headache right then and neither did we.”

  “But won’t Bailey discover it when Lawrence doesn’t report?”

  “Lawrence was a member of my crew. Bailey doesn’t know him by face, and so won’t really miss him, assuming I can hold up my end.”

  Hews’ crew. Oliver suddenly felt ten inches tall as the realisation rushed into his consciousness. They’d killed a man, a good man with friends like Hews and possibly family.

  “Er…was he a married man, Hews?”

  Hews nodded.

  Oliver could only close his eyes and halt. He steadied himself on the railing. Images played in his mind, of a mother at home, pacing, fretting, images of children sitting silently at a breakfast table, casting nervous glances at their mother, porridge untouched.

  “You coming, lad?”

  Oliver swallowed hard past the lump in his throat.

  “Hews…God forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

  “I know, lad” was the reply. “You can say as much to his widow when there’s time.”