“That was what we call blather,” said Figary. “Very useful for distracting a body so that someone else can brain him.”
“Why could you not simply shoot the cove?” said Riley.
Figary passed over the gun. “Shoot him? Oh no. Missus Figary’s boy abhors committing violent acts.”
“But you are not averse to watching them?” Riley pointed out.
“Indeed not. In this particular case, the advantages are twofold. Firstly, my own life is saved, and thank you very much, sir. And secondly, the sin is not on my conscience, so it isn’t.”
Riley thought he should change the subject of discussion before Figary disappeared down a theological rabbit hole.
“What news of the Rams?” he asked. “Did you see your guardian angel?”
Figary’s face fell as he thought on the girl he had abandoned to her fate.
“We should wake the commodore,” he said.
I often think I should just abandon the whole thing. I really do. Time travel could be a gift to humanity. Whoever controls it could do some real good for mankind. But you have to ask yourself, with humanity’s track record, is that likely?
—Professor Charles Smart
It is a universally accepted maxim that making water in the area where a person drinks water is generally a bad idea, as the waters get muddled, and that person could end up drinking the water he prepared earlier, which is never good for the health. Just ask the tens of thousands of Londoners wiped out by cholera.
Until the late 1860s, London sewers fed directly into the Thames, which also provided the city’s clouded drinking water, a fact that accounted for more fatalities over the years than war or fire. But there were worse things than being dead, as the rhyme went:
I took a stroll through London town
The smell it near to knocked me down
There ain’t no pill nor tot to drink
Can help escape the world’s great stink
The Great Stink was how the entire world referred to the London stench that floated up from the sewers and hung in a cloud over the city.
Eventually Queen Vic cried foul and commanded her engineers to fix the blooming stinkpipes, or words to that effect, and so three hundred million bricks were baked to build over eighty miles of tunnels to intercept the effluvium rushing into the Thames.
LONDON SEWERS, 1899
“Efficient sewers was good for the population in general, my little Ramlet,” said Otto Malarkey to Riley. “But it was bad news for those of us on the toshing budge.”
Riley was impressed by his regent. “You was a tosher, King Otto?”
“Indeed I was, my boy,” said Malarkey. “Times were hard in the Malarkey family, so my brothers and I put together a three-man team and down we went into the great underworld. Time was, a man could walk into the tunnels from the Thames’s bank, but with the new sewers came new securities, huge gates over the tunnel mouths. If a man was caught in a flush without a handy manhole, he would be flattened like a Shrove Tuesday pancake up against those gates.”
They were skirting Regent’s Park toward a particular manhole through which Malarkey was certain the colonel’s own hidey-hole could be accessed.
“There’s money in manure,” said Malarkey, quoting the tosher’s maxim. “Folks throw away the queerest things, or lose ’em. Either way, they ends up buried in filth, waiting for some tosher to wash ’em off. My brothers and I ran a nice little business, carved out a network for ourselves in central London, where the fattest pickings lie. I found a silver candelabrum once, and I have often wondered how that fit down a flush toilet. Perhaps it was a murder weapon, eh?”
Riley forced himself to listen to Malarkey’s tale as an effort to distract his mind from Chevie’s predicament. His dear mate was in the clutches of this Colonel Box cove who was in lavender in the sepulchral catacombs below Camden, like some class of subterranean Professor Moriarty. Figary had filled them in on Farley’s speech to the Rams, so they knew how time sensitive their mission was. Box had to be stopped today, and Chevie rescued, if she was still…
No. I will not even think it.
It was a stroke of amazing fortune that Otto had worked the Camden sewers years previously as a tosher, also known as a stinkpipe magpie. Malarkey knew only too well how those particular sewers flooded regularly and had always overflowed into the railway catacombs until an American colonel had bought them outright and built a waterproof wall that could withstand the regular floodings and the massive flushes.
And if a cove could demolish that wall at the exact time a flush is due, Malarkey had told Riley and Figary, then Colonel Box and his fine soldiers would find themselves chest-high in floaters and rats.
It was a loose plan at best, with a million what-ifs floating around it, but it meant that Chevie could possibly be rescued in the chaos, and for that reason alone, Riley’s heart and soul were behind it.
What about me? Figary had asked. I too wish to serve, so I do.
Stay here, Malarkey told him. When the deed is done, I will send for
you. You are my eyes in London town, Michael. And I will need to know how our sabotage has been received by the Rams.
They found their manhole and lingered in the environs all innocent and such until the path was clear of all those taking their daily constitutional. Malarkey pulled a strange tool from his satchel that put Riley in mind of a metal animal claw.
“One time in the Bailey, the justice says, he says that my brother was soft in the noggin,” said Malarkey, inserting the tool’s prongs in corresponding holes in the manhole. “And yet he made up this manhole jemmy from a few old cutoffs. I’ve never seen the better of it for popping biscuits.”
Malarkey put his weight on the handle, and up swung the manhole like a clamshell.
“Down you go, lad,” said Malarkey.
Riley had endured many trials and survived many tribulations, and yet he felt a crippling fear now at the thought of descending into the Stygian darkness, into the embrace of damp and reeking fingers. The terror sat like a deadweight on his shoulders. A chain-mail cloak of fear.
“Me? I should go first?”
Malarkey spoke through gritted teeth. “Look sharp, lad. This biscuit ain’t holding itself open.”
I should be off with myself. What care I for kings and kingdoms? thought Riley, and he was ashamed of his own survival instincts. Chevie needs me to squirrel down this hole. If I don’t, then the whole entire plan is doomed.
Riley gathered his courage and swung his legs into the manhole. His toes found a slick rung and wiggled full onto it.
“Cripes alive, kiddo,” said Malarkey, his voice shaking slightly with strain. “Shift yerself. There ain’t nothing to fear in darkness.”
This, Riley knew, was patently untrue. Albert Garrick waited for him inside the folds of a shadow, and someday Riley would voluntarily wander into the wrong one. It was simply a matter of when.
Not today. Please not today.
Down he climbed, inch by inch, clanking as he went, fingers wrapped in death grips on the sweating, bubbled metal rungs, shoulders scraping the brickwork.