Whitechapel Gods (8 page)

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.”

Oliver longed to see Hews’ face, but the smog rendered him ghostly and insubstantial.

“Let’s get on,” he said. “The cloaks are already moving against us, and we’re a long way from Shadwell.”

They called it Sherwood Forest.

The tenement took that name from the branchlike protrusions of steel that poked out of the walls at odd angles. The building had been constructed around a central set of two spiraling beams that roughly resembled a trunk, the floors having been constructed at uneven intervals conducive to the use of the trunk’s branches. Missy agreed that it did look rather more like a tree house than a proper dwelling for human beings. Parts of it even hung over the edge of the Underbelly, perched with a preposterous slant above a twenty-storey fall. Oliver had purchased it some years ago, with money gathered through the ill-conceived thefts of his earlier years.

Oliver Sumner, respectable landowner.
One half of her giggled at such silliness. The other half tallied this as a point in his favour. She had always fancied tall men. And if that tall man had wealth, youth, other men in his employ, and connections…well, that made him attractive indeed.

Now if only it weren’t for this distracting rebellion, and I could work on him a little harder…

She pursed her lips and chafed inwardly at that sentiment.

Yes, my dear, you are a heartless, calculating shrew, as I made you.

She hiked her skirts just up to the ankles and held them to the right as she climbed the grime-coated concrete steps to the door. An endless battle raged between organic and mechanical spiders in the brick door frame, sometimes spilling out of its many holes to harass unwary solicitors. She gently pushed away some fresh webs and twisted the door handle first left, then right, then left three turns. The lock clicked. The door opened.

Heckler’s traps lay dormant on the left and right sides of the inner arch. She did not care to muse on how they worked or their intended result, and brushed past them into the foyer, where the stair twisted around the steel trunk, and an uneven mezzanine ringed the room on the second floor.

Sherwood Forest had a kitchen, a dining hall, a lounge, a smoking parlour and eight apartments. Oliver had offered her one of them once and she’d nearly slapped him for it. An unmarried woman living under a roof with four unmarried men? She knew exactly what people would say about that.

Rumours are vicious little things. What does a lady have if not her reputation?
One of Matron Gisella’s lectures.

In honesty, she had simply been terrified of the thought of men having uncontrolled access to her bedroom. Missy had taken her own one-room flat down the street, one with sturdy locks and a fat, scatterbrained landlady.

She sat for a moment on one of the foyer’s worn benches and fished her cigarette case from her handbag.

Unladylike, those accursed things,
the matron had always complained.

Funny how all the girls smoked them anyway, behind your back, you old shrew.

Now, now. Some respect is due. After all, did I not feed you and clothe you and instruct you in all the fineries of etiquette?

You sold us for two guineas a night, you black-hearted villainess!

The match lit on the first strike and she drew. The acrid smoke that stung its way down her lungs was really no worse than the air outside; nor was it any more pleasurable.
Why smoke them at all, then?
She left the question unanswered.

She found the occupants upstairs, gathered at a small table in the parlour. Thomas, Phineas, and Heckler lounged in moth-bitten high-backed chairs, drinks in their hands, cigars in a tray on a small side table made of battered tin. Moderate sums of money were spread on the table, as were several piles of cards from Heckler’s star-backed fifty-two-piece deck. Portraits of stern-looking, haggard people of both sexes hung around the perimeter of the room; they had been there at the time of purchase and were now silent companions to the dwelling’s new occupants.

Thomas wore a beige wool shirt a tad tight on his large frame, revealing the irregularities of his structure, particularly his metal arm. Missy had never seen him clean shaven, and yet never with a beard; he seemed to have perpetual stubble. Thomas stared at Heckler with squinted eyes and sweat beading on his brow.

Heckler was dressed in a crisp and clean white cotton shirt with tweed slacks and suspenders, looking dapper as always. Missy secretly suspected he made a point of dressing well to hide his sunken chest and bony shoulders. His face drooped in that lifeless way he referred to as his “poker face.” Phineas sat slumped, nestled down in the same filthy black ulster he always wore, with an oversized, crushed top hat sitting low on his head—like a leprechaun down on his luck. He also wore a thick blindfold across his eyes.

Slowly, and with no hint of a smile, Heckler laid his cards solemnly on the tabletop.

“Codswallop!” Tom said. He slapped his cards down as Heckler smugly swept the central pile of coins to his edge of the table. “Some Yankee trick, that was. I’ll bet those bloody cards are marked.”

Heckler stroked back the corners of his handsome moustache and smiled serenely.

“Bad luck’s the heritage of mankind,” he said, his American accent drawn and smooth like stretched linen. “You know Ah might have up and shot you, you gone accusin’ me of cheatin’ back home.”

“Cards ain’t marked,” Phin said through teeth clenched on the stub of his cigar. “Bastard’s just better’n we are.”

Tom downed the remainder of his whiskey. “And how would you know that, you hunchbacked codger? Not peeking, I hope.”

Phineas spat the cigar onto the silver tray along with a sizable trail of saliva, where it all landed exactly in one corner. “I inspected the deck during the first shuffle. You think I trust this Yankee—or you, you pile of rust?”

Tommy smiled, warming to the moment. “So you were looking at the deck after all, you limp waddler. Why would one who stinks like a gull-eaten trout think he can one-up me dressed like a Shoreditch beggar?”

“Ah, you’re one to talk, you chamber-pot reject. Probably spit rust out yer pecker. By the bye, there’s a lady present.”

Missy smiled innocently as Thomas and Heckler shot out of their seats, faces reddening. They struggled to hide drinks and extinguish cigars.

“Why,
thank you,
Phineas,” Missy said, swaying her hips as she stepped into the room. “I was beginning to wonder if these men had
any
manners at
all
.”

Phineas grunted, and lit another cigar.

“Beggin’ pardon, miss,” Heckler said. He smoothed out his felt vest and tugged his shirtsleeves back level with his wrists. “Was quite improper of us.”

“Smoking and drinking
and
gambling?” Missy said. She sucked daintily on her own cigarette and waltzed to the table, where she lifted Phineas’ drink right from his hand. “Positively vile activities, the lot. You gentlemen should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Heckler blanched, then shifted his feet in place like a boy of seventeen. Thomas held a serious expression on his face for all of two seconds, then exploded into laughter.

Phineas just shook his head and stole Tom’s drink.

Heckler strutted around the table. “Mademoiselle Plantaget,” he said, gracefully sweeping up Missy’s hand. Missy held his gaze as he lifted her hand to give it a kiss.

His nose came within an inch of the cigarette before he noticed. He coughed and withdrew, retrieving his handkerchief and stuffing it against his nose as if he could wipe the smoke out. This time both Thomas and Phineas laughed.

“Poor dear. Lost in my eyes, I suppose.”

Heckler faked a chuckle through his obvious shock.

“Ah, lass,” said Phineas, “stop punishing the pup for being a gentleman. You’ll ruin him for other Englishwomen.”

“He will develop a taste for it,” Missy said. “I’m certain he left those Colonial homestead girls behind for a reason.” She raised the glass to her lips and drew the whiskey across her tongue. It slid down her throat like melted chocolate.

Heckler looked as if he was about to say something, then sat down and began to total his winnings as if that had been his intention the entire time.

Tom gave him a friendly and devastating slap on the shoulder that nearly threw him into the table. “You’ll get used to it, chum.”

Heckler gasped in his lost breath, his neck turning red above the starched collar. “Certain Ah will, suh.”

“He’s a duck, isn’t he?” Missy said. She settled into the table’s fourth chair, an oak and velvet masterpiece of comfort that had seen better days. Heckler jumped as if he’d been seized around the neck.

“Beggin’ pardon, m’lady, but that there’s Mr. Sumner’s chair.”

“Oh?” She fixed him with a slow blink and a stare, as an elder matriarch might use to silence her disrespectful grandchildren.

Heckler flushed fully up to his hairline and squeaked out a response: “He’s real particular about it.”

“God Almighty, let up on him, lass,” Phineas said, refilling his glass from the bottle.