Dust and Shadow

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Narrow Escape

It was not a long journey down Commercial Road from Whitechapel to the tiny dockside realm of Limehouse, but the latter’s total dependence upon all things nautical made it a vastly different topography. Here the carmen were replaced by sailors, the market porters became dockside labourers, and the races as we approached the river grew ever more diverse. As the sun began to set over the lumbering Thames, I glimpsed from the window Welsh dockworkers, African stevedores, and Indian porters, all drifting in the general direction of hearth and home with a stop at the pub and two or three glasses of gin to sustain them on their way.

We turned abruptly onto a street, and all around us Chinese men and women, dressed immaculately in the British style, ducked in and out of shops marked only with the delicate slashes which served as writing in their native land. One young fellow, his pigtail tucked under a neat cloth cap and his fingerless gloves affording slight protection in the chill wind, pushed a child about in a tea leaf box which had been fitted with two front wheels, a back prop, and sanded handles.

Holmes rapped the ceiling of the cab with his stick, and the driver halted before a storefront identifying itself only by a crude picture of a steaming bowl. My friend leapt down with agile enthusiasm, tilting his head to our left toward the dampest, most soot-encrusted archway I’d ever laid eyes on. The businesses on either side, whose commerce I could not even hazard a guess at, boasted broken windowpanes patched with greasy brown paper.

“It’s just this way. Thank you, driver. And now, Watson, we would do best to keep our wits about us.”

Under the arch, we came upon a flight of mossy stone steps which led steeply down, under wooden slats and walls of grim brick, to a grotesque courtyard some three stories below the street at the level of the river. Seven houses sat in a semicircle, all constructed of rotting grey timber. My friend approached the sagging doorframe belonging to one of these and rapped three times.

When the door opened, a stoop-shouldered Chinese man with tufted silver brows and a peculiarly detached expression made a polite bow.

“I wonder, is this the establishment known as the Three Cobras?” Holmes ventured deferentially.

The proprietor, or so I assumed him to be, nodded his head. “There are several berths if you wish to smoke, sirs,” he said in near-perfect English.

“What a stroke of luck,” Holmes smiled.

“I am Mr. Li. Please step this way.”

The outer door opened into a hallway, which after a flight of three steep steps became a narrow passage with beds built into the walls like berths on a ship, six pallets arranged in a rectangular formation on each side of the corridor. One old woman, with eyes set deep as wells and a long braid of lead-grey hair, looked to have just enough life in her to continue smoking the vile substance.

“Holmes, how on earth did you come to know of this pit?” I murmured.

“I make it my business to acquaint myself with a great many particulars,” he whispered.

Mr. Li waved us onward, for the corridor ballooned at its far end into a larger common room with a bed pushed against the wall and grass mats lining the floors. Gauzy hanging strips of tattered cloth, which had no doubt once contributed to an air of mysticism, now hung slick with smoke like the mud-soaked sails of a shipwrecked vessel. I could see other Englishmen in this chamber—two soldiers, lounging with elongated pipes dangling from their limp fingers, and a slack-jawed naval officer, whose hand traced lazy patterns in the thick air above him.

Mr. Li waved us over to a pair of grass pallets cloaked by the decrepit drapery. Holmes indicated we had time only for a four-penny smoke, and Mr. Li retreated to the stove, where a great mound of shredded opium simmered in a sieve set over a pot of shallow water.

“My dear Holmes, assure me that we have no intention of actually smoking this dross,” I mouthed as softly as I could.

“Never fear, Watson,” he returned equally quietly but with a mischievous grin. “You know my taste in self-poisoning to run quite in another direction.”

When Mr. Li had toasted two tiny portions of resinlike amber material and loaded it into pipes, he handed them to us and vanished. Holmes, to my dismay, placed the pipe between his teeth, but I soon saw he merely sought to free his hands and unfasten his watch chain. A gold sovereign dangled from the end of it, a relic of an earlier adventure,* and in a trice he had scooped the smouldering lump out of his pipe, dropped it to the floor, returned the stem to his mouth, and held a hand out for my own. This process he repeated with my pipe, and then he pulled out his pocket handkerchief and methodically restored the Queen’s golden visage to her former spotlessness. Finally, he picked up the cooled pieces with his handkerchief and deposited them in his pocket.

“I fancy that will do the trick. Care for another pipe, Doctor, or shall we call an end to this reconnaissance?”

“The latter, if you have seen all you need.”

“Then let us be on our way. Ah, here is the man I want. May I have a brief word with you?” Holmes asked Mr. Li, heavy-lidded and reserved.

Our host nodded, and we followed him to a side room off the entrance chamber where books and ledgers scribbled with cryptic characters covered the single small table.

“You see, sir,” Holmes began languidly, “our friend can hardly stop praising your business, and his words were more than justified. You do quite a commerce with soldiers, do you not, Mr. Li?”

“As you saw.”

Holmes placed a five-pound note on a yellowed ledger page. “In fact, while we settle up with you, I wished expressly to mention that our friend is being pursued by some very unsavoury characters—moneylenders, you understand—and is in hiding. I would like very much to help him if only I knew where he was. I wonder if, when he next drops in, you might find a moment to notify me? You would be rewarded, of course, for your time and trouble.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Basil. I was once a shipping captain, but I now own a small fleet,” Holmes said as he jotted down his address on a scrap of paper.

“And who is your friend?”

Holmes described Blackstone in detail, failing to mention any name.

Mr. Li scratched more notes upon his sheet, then straightened with a sigh. “Your friend does come here from time to time. Always alone. Always very popular once he arrives. Captain Basil, I make a great effort to help my customers. I make one request only, and that is truth. This business with your soldier friend—there is a possibility of violence?”

“That possibility exists,” Holmes assented, smiling briefly.

“I see.” He made another note. “In that case, Captain Basil, I must warn you that any violence occurring upon my property makes you liable to me.” He smiled at my friend in return. “I do not think you wish to be liable to me.”

I had not gone many paces up the dripping stairs to the street when Holmes remarked, “You dislike our new associate.”

“If you must know, I think the whole business proved him to be cunning and mercenary.”

“Oh, to the uninitiated, of course. However, I know that whole discussion of violence to have been entirely genuine. He is quite an eccentric character, Mr. Li. I have had dealings with him, though never in person, several times. He is a philanthropist, an opium purveyor, a Buddhist, and a tenacious enemy. The man was a renowned scholar in Peking. There was a little girl killed in this area not four years ago; Mr. Li found the culprit, a member of the Limehouse Forty Thieves gang, and I don’t like to tell you what became of him. He has done more in five years to relieve the area of gangs than Scotland Yard could do in twenty.”

“He is an ally, then? Why the absurd rigmarole with the pipes?”

“Business, my dear Watson, business! I’d never met the fellow in the flesh. There is a great deal of brotherly feeling amongst followers of that particular vice. If I am a client, I am on even footing with Blackstone. Otherwise, I am merely a swell or a plainclothesman. In any event, I wished a glimpse of the patrons.”

We reached the street just as the lamps were being lit, though I noted distressingly few in that locale.

“We had better trudge back to that portion of London populated by hansoms,” Holmes said. “I ought to have paid that fellow to wait. Your leg can manage it?”

“Certainly.”

“Then quick march, my dear fellow, spurred on by home, hearth, and the taste of future victory.”

The detective’s infallible sense of direction soon led into territory which, though unfamiliar, boasted English characters upon the sides of buildings. Holmes, deep in thought, strode forward with his aquiline profile straying neither to the left nor to the right, but I, as a man will do when he is in unknown terrain, looked about with curiosity at the deserted warehouses, which soon gave way to ramshackle tenements and the smells of a hundred suppers being prepared behind boarded windows.

I must have been so preoccupied with the scene that the first weary news vendor, hawking the last of his wares in a hoarse shout, failed to impress himself upon my consciousness. However, the second fellow, a taciturn youth with the face of a bulldog, held the front page up so determinedly that I glanced at the headline. With a cry of astonishment, I halted and fumbled through my pockets for a coin as Holmes broke from his reverie and returned to see what had startled me.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AT LARGE

While the police force in the district of Whitechapel has more than doubled since the discovery of Jack the Ripper’s grisly “double event,” it is regrettably still possible to fault the Metropolitan Police on one glaring miscarriage of public safety. As shocking as the citizenry will no doubt find it, the foremost suspect (and indeed, the only likely perpetrator identified thus far), the self-professed “consulting detective” Mr. Sherlock Holmes, is still at large and all too frequently to be found in the East-end. The reader ought not to feel guilty of a suspicious nature when he considers that Mr. Holmes attended the funerals of both the deceased, and is the subject of an active Scotland Yard investigation into his whereabouts on the night in question. These circumstantial matters appear black indeed when taken in conjunction with the discovery of a seemingly unrelated knife a few streets away from the depraved Eddowes murder. It is well known that Mr. Holmes was wounded in some manner on that night, and the discarded knife—clearly not the killer’s own, as it could not have inflicted her gruesome injuries—gives rise to the suspicion that Eddowes may well have concealed a weapon on her own person and was able to strike a blow to her assailant before finally succumbing to his evil designs. While no doubt the police are handling the inquiry around Mr. Holmes with due diligence, one cannot help but feel that the streets would be safer if his freedoms were more stringently curtailed.

“Curse the scoundrel!” Holmes exclaimed, folding the poisonous print out of sight. “What a tortuous argument, to be sure! A delusive pressman gives rise to a police investigation, then cites a police investigation as a further cause for alarm.”

“But how could he know that you attended the funerals?”

“If Stephen Dunlevy had a hand in this, so help me, I will wring the truth out of his miserable neck.”

He set off again down the street, his pace redoubled.

“What are we to do, Holmes?”

“We are going to get inside as quickly as possible.”

I realized with a quick stab of apprehension what he meant; every day we read news of mob activity in the East-end, directed with barren fury against any handy immigrant or meandering pedestrian. There had been multiple reports of near lynchings. If any suspicious-minded citizenry identified Holmes abroad by night in Whitechapel, I dared not imagine the consequences.

“This is Tavistock’s doing, I trust?”

“Whose else?”

“Oh, if I had him here!” I cried. “I would make him regret he’d ever set foot in a news office!”

“The wretch prints what is true in such an inverted fashion that every fact stands on its head,” Holmes growled. Suddenly he stopped. “Look here, my boy, odd as it may sound, the danger at the moment is in crowds.”

He turned into a pathway which must officially have been termed an alley and I would have better characterized as a crevice. The only beings we encountered at first were vermin and half-crazed dogs who stared at us with baleful hunger in their yellow eyes.

“Holmes, what do you intend to do?”

“Your idea of expressing ourselves with our fists was attractive but sadly untenable. We must determine where the insolent wretch is getting his information.”

We had gone halfway down a block marred everywhere with eroding stone when I realized that the clatter of trains to our left had mingled with another sound; footsteps now echoed our own. I knew better than to look behind me, but a glance at Holmes told me that he too had heard our shadowy companion.

My friend ducked into a side street, changing our direction, but still the curious trudge followed us in the gloom.

“We are walking north on Mansel Street, and any second should pass the railway depot,” he murmured. “We have to take Aldgate High Street, and in a moment we’ll be in the City.”

“I’d prefer Westminster.”

“Baker Street is but a cab fare away from us.”

As we emerged onto Aldgate High Street very near the place where it became Whitechapel High Street, it seemed for a moment as if our troubles were over. Then the man behind us began to make his presence more keenly felt.

“Is that Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” he cried out.

The better-lit, better-populated expanse of road seemed at once a hostile landscape, for every head within hearing distance swiveled round to confront my friend’s justly famous countenance.

“Here now!” the man yelled. “That’s Sherlock Holmes, it is! Strolling down dark alleys wi’out a care in the world!”

A few bystanders, men with surly faces and no better occupation, joined our unwelcome associate and marched along behind.

“Hey! You! You’ve a great deal to answer for in these parts!”

An inauspicious grumble of assent erupted from the gathering crowd.

“Turn around and tell us all what the devil you think you’re doing in the Chapel, you bleeding pig!”

Holmes rolled his eyes at this equation of him with a Scotland Yard detective but otherwise made no sign.

“You think,” screamed the fellow, whose voice I was beginning heartily to loathe, “that you’ll get away with it? Knifing all those beauties, you think there’s no one of us with a knife for you?”

“Watson, if you happen to lay eyes on an officer before I do, just signal him, will you?” Holmes remarked, his right hand in his pocket and the other tightening its grip on his weighted stick.

“So help us, we protect our own, don’t we, lads?” cried our antagonist.

“How is your arm?”

“Good for a blow or two at best. I would welcome your revolver.”

“You’ll have to make do with my fists.” Though my eyes searched the streets for police, by a great stroke of misfortune I could see none.

“We are close enough to the Aldgate underground stop,” Holmes noted.

“What are our chances at running?”

“Poor, with your leg to consider. We’ve already walked—”

“Holmes, they don’t want me.”

“If I knew that to be true, I might take to my heels. As matters stand, you’ll have to endure my company a while longer.”

Just when we reached a crossroads, several of the gang behind us burst forward and encircled us from the front. I turned slowly round. To my dismay, nearly thirty men had joined the preposterous procession, and ten more lined up to prevent our progress.

“I don’t suppose we could have a word with them?” I asked in as easy a tone as I could manage.

“We’ll serve them as they served Catherine Eddowes!” shouted the odious little devil.

Holmes at last turned with a look of deadly resolve in his iron-grey eyes. “It is not a scheme which is likely to work, you realize.”

“Still, for lack of a better one…” I hissed.

“Gentlemen,” Holmes announced, “I have no notion of what you are pursuing, but as it appears to mean a great deal to you, I am prepared to offer my wholehearted assistance!”

This remark did not soothe the mob, but it had the distinct virtue of puzzling it. One or two people chuckled morbidly, and others raised their fists.

“You know what we’re after right enough, or you’d ha’ been walking a good deal slower, you bloody ’tec.”

“It appears that you are pursuing me,” Holmes replied pleasantly. “But I can think of no reason for doing so unless you meant to procure my help. I am known for my skills in the art of detection. I will say this once, and once only: I have been seen in the vicinity of the Ripper because I have been striving with all my might to rid your neighbourhood of him.”

Several members of the crowd regarded Holmes with fresh interest at this defiant declaration, but their sympathy proved to be short-lived.

“You were seen!” mocked a club-wielding ruffian, starting forward. “What good is the word of a cold-blooded killer?”

“You, sir, are from West Yorkshire, I observe.”

The brute stopped in his tracks. “Here now! How in hell d’ye know that?”

“You have hunted rabbits in your time, I suppose?”

“So what if I have done,” he scowled.

“You were very near them when you did so. Have you ever been mistaken for one?”

The metaphor, apt as it was, drew laughter from several patches of the assembly while others, sensing an oblique insult, tightened their grips on their makeshift weapons and advanced spitting curses at the pair of us.

“Perhaps something a shade more conciliatory,” I suggested.

“You truly imagined I could argue our way out of this?” Holmes demanded, sidestepping so that we were back to back.

“No,” I replied quietly, turning my head, “but they have now allowed a slight gap. I am going to tackle that pockmarked lad with the shovel. When I’ve knocked him down, I fully expect you to run like the devil.”

We pivoted slowly, our eyes fixed on the hostile circle. “You are mad,” Holmes hissed, “if you think I am—” Then all at once, arresting both his speech and his movement suddenly, he caught me by the sleeve and inexplicably smiled in delight.

“Man Jack!” he cried. “What possessed you to join this misguided lot?”

I stared in astonishment. A man with an enormous frame and a livid scar running straight from his temple down across his nose and deep into his cheek stepped forward through the crowd.

“Now, I know for a fact,” he said in rumbling baritone, “that this is no night for Sherlock Holmes to be abroad in the Chapel.”

“Man Jack, I am overjoyed to see you.”

“I can’t say as I feel the same, Mr. Holmes.”

“The papers say he’s the Knife!” bellowed a surly youth.

“We’ll send him to hell this very night!”

“And what say you, Man Jack?” my friend asked. “It’s quite a little work of fiction.”

“You know as well as I do it’s the boy as can read,” he growled dismissively. “Now, be off. Or I won’t spend so long talking the next time.”

“There he is safe as a lamb,” called the villain who had started it all. “We’ve jawed long enough. I’ve a knife here, will serve him!”

“And I!” cried another.

“You’re none of you fit for proper policing,” Man Jack said calmly, but his voice reverberated through buildings. “You there! Let these fellows pass. Be off, now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. They obey me when they’ve a mind, but when they don’t, God help the man they take a grudge against.”

“My thanks. This way, Watson.”

Though their faces were scowling, and a few, including the burly Yorkshireman, ventured to spit in our direction, our opponents parted as if a curtain had been drawn.

“Who in God’s name was that fellow?” I asked in amazement.

“Man Jack? He is a prizefighter.”

“You know him from the ring, then, I suppose?”

“No indeed, my dear fellow. You’re sporting man enough to know my weight class and his ought not to intermingle.”

“He saved us from a terrible brawl for no reason I can see.”

“That is because you do not know his full name. Man Jack Hawkins has a family member in my immediate employ. I must confess, my dear fellow, when I amassed the Irregular force all those years ago, I never imagined that any of their parents would be called upon to vouch for my good name. Though God knows few enough of them have any parents.” Holmes sighed, as a wave of exhaustion seemed to pass over him. “Little Hawkins has just earned another sizeable bonus. There is a cab, my dear fellow, and if we make a dash at him, I think he shall just see us.”