The Angel of Highgate

30 DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD

Thraxton’s brougham clopped down foggy streets that grew darker, narrower, bumpier and meaner the closer they approached to the Seven Dials. Thraxton, Algernon and Mister Greenley peered out the carriage windows at the shabby, darkened houses around. No one had spoken since they left Thraxton’s house. Each knew the danger and difficulty of the enterprise they were about to undertake. Most of all, each tried to avoid thinking about the fate of Aurelia.

None too soon, the carriage shook to a halt and Algernon and Thraxton clambered out.

Harold, reigns and whip in hand, peered down from the driver’s seat at his master. “Are you sure about this, sir? It looks very dodgy about here.”

Thraxton threw a quick look around. The gas lamps were all dark as every glass pane had been shattered — vandalized by the wild children of the rookery. “It is very dodgy, Harold. Keep your whip handy. If anyone challenges you — man, woman, or child — use the whip on them and then on the horses.”

Thraxton turned to Aurelia’s father. “Sir, I’d prefer it if you stayed in the carriage.”

“What?” Greenley roared. “This is my daughter who has been kidnapped!” He barged out of the carriage, shouldering aside the two friends.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Algernon said. “You’re hardly in any condition—”

“Condition? Condition?” Greenley blustered. “In my day I’ve knocked down some of the hardest men in London.” He raised a scarred and calloused fist the size of a sledgehammer head and shook it angrily. “I’ll show these bastards what my condition is!” But then his knees buckled and he had to hang on to the carriage for support.

Thraxton put a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Mister Greenley, we appreciate your bravery and your skill at fisticuffs. That is precisely why we need you to stay with Harold. He is just a young lad. We need your powers to help protect the brougham. When Algy and I return with Aurelia, we must have the carriage ready to make good our escape.”

Greenley’s fists fell to his sides, his head drooped. “Yes, very well…” he muttered in an exhausted voice.

Thraxton patted his shoulder. “Stout fellow.”

He looked at his friend. “Come on, Algy, we’ve not a moment to spare.”

The two men left the safety of the brougham and entered a narrow alley plunged in a darkness so unfathomable they had to feel their way by dragging one hand along a cinderous, loose-bricked wall. Finally they emerged at a junction of alleyways lit by the diffuse light of the moon, orange and swollen as a rotten pumpkin. As they walked along the narrow lane, they passed huddled forms slumped in doorways which proved to be the homeless poor sleeping rough on the streets.

“How will we ever find our way?” Algernon asked.

“The police sergeant mentioned a wooden bridge that marks the entrance to the rookery proper.”

Sure enough, they soon came upon a small arched wooden bridge. Someone had dumped a bundle of rags in front of it. When they approached, the bundle of rags sat up — a beggar. A small chalkboard dangled from a string around the man’s neck and was scrawled with a single word: BLIND.

“Who approaches?” the man shouted, hearing their footsteps.

“We’re looking for Mordecai Fowler,” Thraxton said.

“To cross the bridge you must pay a toll.” The man held out a hand to beg. When he lifted his head they could see only empty black sockets where eyes should have been. Algernon handed the man two shillings. He took the coins, pressed them into his empty eye sockets and looked up at them, giggling inanely. “Ah, now I see you. Oh, and there is a third who walks with you… Death!”

“Come, Algy.” They brushed past the gibbering blind man and clomped across the bridge, which shivered and swayed beneath their feet.

“God, the stench!”

“An open sewer!’”

Both Thraxton and Algernon quickly produced handkerchiefs and clamped them over their faces.

On the far side of the bridge they entered an intractable maze of blind alleyways and narrow ginnels — everywhere a study in entropy. Buildings leaned as if wearied by the weight of their own masonry, spilling their guts, brick by brick onto the roadway. Some had bulging walls propped up by huge beams; others were missing walls and had roofs that had collapsed, opening rooms to the elements.

Someone threw open an upstairs window, shouted “gardyloo” and emptied a full chamber pot out the window. Thraxton and Algernon dodged as filth splattered across the cobbles at their feet and trickled into the gutter that ran down the middle of the narrow street. Suddenly a door banged open and a gang of boys charged out: ten, fifteen, twenty, they seemed to keep coming forever, all shrieking and whooping at the top of their lungs. The boys surged in a mob around Thraxton and Algernon, tugging at their coat sleeves, slapping them on the back, pinching their legs, so that in the confused melee, neither man noticed small, quick hands dipping into their pockets. The mob of boys dispersed as rapidly as it appeared, laughing and cat-calling as they dashed away and were swallowed by the darkness. Only one remained visible: a diminutive tyke who lagged behind his compatriots.

“You there, boy!” Thraxton called. “What’s your name?”

“They calls me Titch, ’cause I’m small for me age.”

“How’d you like to earn a nice, shiny sixpence, Titch?”

The boy turned to look back, a silhouette at the far end of the alley. “Wot I need a poxy sixpence for when I got me a purseful of sovs?” Titch tossed a purse in his hand.

Thraxton’s hands reflexively went to his pockets, only to find that his money had been lifted. “He’s got my sovereigns!”

Algernon batted at his pockets and found that he had also been robbed.

“And mine!”

“Quickly, after him!”

Thraxton and Algernon sprinted after the boy who seemed always to remain just beyond their reach and then suddenly vanished. The two men stopped to catch their breath.

“It’s useless,” Algernon said, panting hard. “We’ll never catch him.”

“I have a feeling they were merely sent to delay us. No doubt Mister Fowler already knows we are about.”

With no illumination save for the moonlight oozing through bilious clouds of fog, they stumbled down blind alleyways that forced them to turn back time and again, until their minds had become as knotted as the streets and they lost all sense of direction.

“You were right, Algy. Truly we have entered a labyrinth.”

But in their slow, stumbling progress, the two friends were being watched. Shadowy figures looked down from rooftops whistling to alert one another of the invaders’ progress. Titch, the boy who had lifted the purse of sovereigns, had also scaled to the rooftops. He tossed the bag he held and caught it just to hear the pile of sovs chink, and laughed as he watched the two gentlemen’s bumbling progress. He put two fingers to his mouth and let out a long and low whistle.

Thraxton heard it, looked up and saw the glitter of eyes among the tiles.

“We’re being watched.”

They passed another courtyard, overgrown with waist-high weeds and strewn with rubbish. Suddenly a pack of ferocious dogs burst from the shadows, barking madly as they galloped straight toward them.

Thraxton and Algernon took to their heels, but the snarling pack quickly overtook them as they ran, the fastest dogs leaping up and snapping at their legs, trying to bring them down. They saw a partly collapsed house up ahead with the front door cracked slightly. Without a word they threw themselves at the door, barging it open then kicking it shut after them. The door resounded to the thud of dogs throwing themselves against it. Thankfully, the door still retained its bolt and Algernon quickly threw it, locking the dogs out. “It appears we are trapped,” he said, looking around. They were in a small, bare, windowless room.

The dogs continued to growl and hurl themselves at the door with such ferocity that the screws holding the bolt to the door frame began to tear loose. Thraxton rushed to the far wall and rapped it with his knuckles. As he suspected, the building lacked even the illusion of solidity: the wall was little more than a skimming of plaster over thin wooden laths. His foot burst through with the first kick. He and Algernon took turns and soon kicked a hole large enough to crawl through.

The hovel they emerged into on the other side of the wall was inhabited by a family of sorts — five children of varied ages, dressed in rags, the youngest, a boy of two, playing naked on the dirt floor. The other children huddled together, shivering under old sacking. On a tattered mattress stained with every kind of filth a skeletally thin woman with a huge mop of frizzy gray hair held the top of her dress down as she nursed a baby.

The woman looked up at the men distractedly, not in the least perturbed by their crashing entry through the wall.

“Have you a ha’penny for a pound of praties, sir?” the woman asked in a thick Irish accent. “Only we ain’t eaten this week. Me paps have dried and the babby will na take suck.”

It was the most abject scene of hopelessness either man had ever witnessed. The woman’s enormous, vacant eyes rolled over them as she rocked back and forth clutching the child.

“We must help the poor creature. I have nothing left, Algy. Do you?”

Algernon rummaged in his pockets and found a single coin: a silver sixpence.

“It’s only a sixpence, I’m afraid.” The woman took the coin from him and stared at it blankly. She stopped her rocking and held the baby up for Algernon to see. He leant forward to look only to recoil in horror at the stench of corruption. The baby was dead and had swollen obscenely, its skin a bruised purple color.

“Dear God!” Algernon gasped. “The baby has been dead for a week!”

“The poor woman is quite deranged,” Thraxton said. “I never would have believed such things could happen in England.”

Something crashed in the room they had just left. Dogs howled and whined. The door had finally burst open.

“We can’t help these poor souls, Algy. The dogs have our scent. We must away, before we bring them in here.”

Thraxton and Algernon slipped out the front door only to find themselves in another blind alley. But framed at the end of the alley was a large building of many stories.

“It looks like an old factory or warehouse,” Algernon said.

“Yes,” Thraxton agreed. “The largest and tallest building in the rookery with the highest vantage point. I’ll wager that’s where we’ll find Mordecai Fowler.”

Aurelia lay on the bare floorboards of the snug, a tiny windowless room high in the rafters of the old factory. Her arms were lashed to the legs of a table. She looked up in fear at the rattle of a key turning in a lock. The door opened and Mordecai Fowler squeezed inside followed by Fanny, a disheveled slattern. The two tromped across the bare floorboards to where Aurelia lay and stood eyeing her critically.

“Well, well,” Fanny said. “You ’ave found a proper little darlin’ ain’t ya, Mordecai?”

Mordecai grinned as he scratched the matted beard under his chin. “’Ow much do ya reckon, then?”

The woman crouched over Aurelia, groping her thighs and buttocks like she was appraising a sheep at auction. Aurelia squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away, but Fanny grabbed her chin and twisted her face toward the light of the greasy candle. “She’s no girl, but she’s fresh, this one is. If she’s not been diddled, I hear tell of private clubs where rich gents will tip up as much as two to three hundred pounds for a nice, tight quim.”

“Well, we best find out if she’s still a virgin then, ain’t we?”

“Hold her legs,” Fanny said.

Fowler grabbed one booted foot while his slattern grabbed the other. Aurelia screamed as they lifted her skirts and began to spread her legs. “No, please, I beg you!”

“Shaddup!” Fanny shouted, back-handing Aurelia across the face. Aurelia continued to kick and squirm, but Fanny finally caught hold of her foot and pushed her legs wide.

They were interrupted when a trap door opened in the ceiling, a pair of legs dangled, then Titch dropped onto the table beneath and sprang to the floor.

“What do you bleedin’ well want?” Fowler yelled.

“Mister Fowler, look wot I got!” Titch handed Fowler the bag of coins he’d lifted. Fowler opened the purse and spilled golden sovereigns into his hand.

“Bleedin’ hell! There must be fifty sovs in here. Wheredja gettit?”

“Coupla toffs. We lifted it from ’em easy as you like.”

“Pair of toffs? Here in Seven Dials?”

Fowler’s eyes flickered over Aurelia, putting it all together. “They come for you, ain’t they, my little dolly-mop?”

Aurelia trembled, her face flushed with hope. Fowler shot a penetrating look at Titch.

“Two toffs, you said?”

“That’s right, Mister Fowler.”

“And they had fifty sovereigns between ’em?”

“Yeah.”

“Then how come there’s only one purse?”

Titch’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Seems more likely they had two purses, each with fifty sovs in it. I know you got sticky fingers, Titch. You sure there wasn’t no more?”

“No, straight up there wasn’t, Mordecai!”

Fowler’s face twisted in a sick parody of a smile. He patted Titch on the head with a filthy hand. “There’s a good, honest lad.” But then the hand tightened, gripping a handful of Titch’s hair and Fowler dragged him closer. He thrust his free hand down the front of the boy’s trousers and pulled out the second leather purse. “What’s this, eh?” Fowler bellowed in Titch’s face. “What the bleedin’ hell is this?”

“I was gonna tip that up to you, Mistah Fowler, honest I was!”

Fowler tossed the bag of sovereigns to Fanny, then clamped a huge hand around the boy’s throat and squeezed until his mouth gaped and his eyes bulged.

“Nobody steals from me! Nobody!”

“Mordecai, he’s just a nipper. Let him go!” Fanny rushed forward and tried to pull Mordecai’s hand free, but received a punch in the side of the head that knocked her to the floor howling in pain.

Fowler slammed Titch against the wall and drew Mister Pierce from its leather scabbard.

“Dear God!” Aurelia cried. “Please no. He is just a child!”

But the bloodlust was surging through Fowler’s brain and now there was no preventing what was about to happen. “Mister Pierce don’t like you, Titch. He says you been a very bad boy. A very, very bad boy!”

Fowler drove the spike into Titch’s stomach and wrenched upward. Titch’s eyes widened, his mouth gaped in shock. He coughed once, spraying droplets of blood. His face spasmed and then relaxed. Fowler let go and Titch slid down the wall until he sat slumped in a widening pool of blood, his eyes dead and staring.

Aurelia turned her face away and squeezed her eyes shut. Surely she had been captured by devils and dragged down to the lowest level of hell.