A Christmas Odyssey

When Henry Rathbone had gone, Squeaky closed his account books, which were perfectly up-to-date anyway. He locked them back in the cupboard in his office where he kept them, and went to look for Hester.

He found her upstairs. Her long, white apron was blood-spattered, and as usual, her hair poked out where she had pinned it back too tightly and it had worked its way undone. She looked up from the clean surgical instruments she was putting back in their cases.

“Yes, Squeaky? What is it?”

His mind was already made up. She must not have any idea what he intended, or, for that matter, that Henry Rathbone had called to see her. Hester was clever, so he would need to lie very well indeed for her to believe him. In fact it might be better not to hide the fact that he was lying, but just to fool her as to which lie it was.

“I need to go away for a little while, not quite sure how long,” he began.

She looked at him coolly, her blue-gray eyes seeming to bore right into his head.

“Then we shall have to manage without you,” she said calmly. “We are well up-to-date with most things. I’m sure Claudine and I will be able to take care of the money and the shopping between us.”

Squeaky wondered why she did not ask where he was going, and what for. Was it because she had already decided that she knew? Well, she didn’t!

“A friend of mine is in trouble,” he started to explain. “His son has gone missing and he’s afraid he’s in danger.” There now, that was the truth—almost.

A momentary sympathy touched her face, and then vanished.

“Really? I’m sorry.”

She didn’t believe him! That hurt, particularly because Squeaky was doing this just to protect Hester from herself. He knew the kind of place Lucien Wentworth was likely to have ended up in, and that was a part of the underworld that even Hester didn’t imagine, for all her experience. This was all his own fault. He had broken the first rule of successful lying—never answer questions that people hadn’t asked you!

“It’s Christmas,” he said, as if that explained everything.

She smiled with extraordinary sweetness, which made him feel worse.

“Then go and help him, Squeaky. But remember to come back. We should miss you very badly if you didn’t.”

“It’s …” he began. How could he explain it to her without her wanting to help? And she couldn’t. It was a dark world she shouldn’t ever have to know about. Weren’t war and disease enough without her seeing all about depravity as well?

She was waiting.

“It’s my home here,” he said abruptly. “Of course I’ll be back!” Then he turned and walked away, furious with himself for his total incompetence. All this respectability had rotted his brain. He couldn’t even tell an efficient lie anymore.

Downstairs and outside he caught a hansom south toward the river. He begrudged the expense, but there was no time to waste with buses, changing from one to another, and even then not ending up where you really wanted to be.

It might take him some time to find Crow, the man whose help he needed. Crow had intended to be a doctor, but various circumstances, mostly financial but not entirely, had cut short his studies. Squeaky had considered it indelicate to ask what those circumstances were, and he had no need to know. As it was, Crow’s medical knowledge was sufficient for him to practice, unofficially, among the poor and frequently semi-criminal who thronged the docksides both north and south of the river around the Pool of London. He took his payment in whatever form was offered: food, clothes, sometimes services, sometimes a promise both parties knew could not be kept. Crow never referred to such debts again.

It took Squeaky the rest of the afternoon, a conversational supper of pork pie at The Goat and Compasses, and then more walking and questioning, to find Crow in a tenement house just short of the Shadwell Docks. Since he wanted a favor, Squeaky waited until Crow had seen his patient and collected his fee of sixpence—which was insisted upon by the patient’s father—and the two of them were free to walk out onto the road beside the river.

Crow turned up the collar of his long, black coat and pulled it more tightly around himself against the icy wind coming up off the water. He was tall—several inches taller than Squeaky—and at least twenty-five years younger. Today he had a hat jammed over his long straight black hair, but in the lamplight Squeaky saw the same wide smile on his face as usual. He seemed to have too many teeth, fine and strong.

“You must want something very badly,” he remarked, looking sideways at Squeaky. “And it isn’t a doctor. You’ve got plenty of those much nearer Portpool Lane. You look agitated.”

“I am agitated,” Squeaky snapped. He told Crow about Henry Rathbone’s visit to the clinic and his request for help in finding Lucien Wentworth. As they strode in the dark along the narrow street in the ice-flecked bitter wind, the cobbles slick under their feet, he also told him about the sort of indulgence that Lucien Wentworth had apparently sunk into.

Crow shook his head. “You can’t let Hester go looking into that!” he said anxiously. “Don’t even imagine it.”

“I’m not!” Squeaky was disgusted, and hurt. Crow should have known him better than to even have thought such a thing. “Why do you think I’m looking for you, you fool?”

Crow stopped in his tracks. “Me? I don’t know places like that. I’ve treated a few opium addicts, but for other things—slashes, broken bones, not the opium. As far as I know, there isn’t anything you can do for it.”

Squeaky felt a wash of panic rise inside him. He couldn’t do this alone. He knew enough about the underworld of self-indulgence to be aware of its labyrinthine depths and dangers. What on earth had possessed him to begin this? He should have told Henry Rathbone that the whole thing was impossible. For that matter, Rathbone should have told Lucien’s father that in the first place. Squeaky was really losing his grip. Respectability was an idiot’s calling.

“Right!” he said tartly. “I’ll go back and tell Hester I can’t do it.”

“You didn’t tell her anything about it in the first place,” Crow pointed out, but there was no smile in his eyes.

“And how do I tell Mr. Rathbone that I can’t do it?” Squeaky said sarcastically. “Without her knowing, eh? She’s clever, that one. She can read a lie like it was writ on your face. She’ll know, whatever I say.”

Crow thrust his hands into his pockets. His hands always seemed to be bare, whatever the weather. Squeaky looked at him. “Why don’t you get someone to pay you with a pair o’ gloves?” he said pointedly.

Crow ignored the remark. “Are you saying obliquely that you will tell Hester I refused to help?”

“Obliquely? Obliquely? You mean sideways?” Squeaky said crossly. “Why can’t you say it straight out? And no, I’m not saying it sideways, I’m telling you plain that she’ll know, ’cause if she were in my place, you’d be the person she’d ask. Which comes to my point. You want me to tell her you won’t help, or you want to tell her yourself?”

Crow shook his head. “You haven’t lost your touch, Squeaky. You’re a hard man.”

“Thank you,” Squeaky said with unexpected appreciation.

Crow glared at him. “It wasn’t a compliment! What do we know about this Lucien Wentworth, apart from the fact that his father is wealthy and seems to have let him have a lot more money than is good for him?”

Squeaky shrugged and started to walk again, talking half over his shoulder as Crow caught up with him. He repeated what Henry Rathbone had told him about Lucien’s weakness for physical pleasure, his need to feel a sense of power, to feel admired, to feel—as it might appear to his deluded and immature mind—loved.

Behind them a string of barges went downriver with the ebbing tide, their riding lights bright sparks in the wind and darkness. To the south a foghorn sounded mournfully.

Crow’s expression grew grimmer as he tramped beside Squeaky. Finally they turned inland and slightly up the slope, leaving the sounds of the water behind them. The thickening gloom of the winter night lay ahead. Lamps shone one after another along the narrow street, angular beacons toward the busier High Street.

“It’s going to be a long night,” Crow said as they reached the crossroad. They waited for the traffic to clear, and then hurried over, their boots splashing in the gutter and then crunching on the cobbles already slicked with ice. “And we may not find anything.”

Squeaky wanted to tell him to stop complaining, but he knew that Crow was right, so he said nothing for several minutes.

“Let’s have a drink first,” he suggested finally. He thought of offering to pay for both of them, but that was a bad habit to start.