Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (14 page)

“Blow up the Houses of Parliament?”

He grimaced. “Leave treason and plots to the history books. You can pass your days sweating if you like, imagining all sorts of fearful crimes. That’s not our work, though. There’s nowt to be done till there’s something needs done. Keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground, son, but get some sleep. You look ruined.”

He bought me a platform ticket and himself a ticket home to Windsor. I wondered if I should suggest that we share a pitcher of ale in the station saloon bar. But his patience had worn thin and I was loath to aggravate him further.

We stood waiting for his train. “How long is it,” he said, “that you’ve been in the police?”

“A year, sir, all but.”

“Give it one year more and your imagination will stop running away with you. Too many bloody thrupenny novels, that’s what I reckon. Though I’ll confess,” he said, his tone softening on a sudden, “there was a paper I liked as a lad. The
Terrific Register
, it were called. We’d each put in a penny, buy one copy between us. Most outlandish stories. I’ll never forget them. Folks buried alive; trapped in tunnels; rivers of fire under the earth. Pure fiction, of course, though it were dressed up as fact. Good, if you get a thrill from that sort of thing, like all lads do. Do you think they keep that in the British Museum Library?”

“They say,” I smiled, “they have everything ever published.”

“Do they really? That’s what our taxes pay for, is it?” He sniffed and looked on down the line. “How old are you, son, twenty-three, twenty-four? Your day’ll come soon enough. I had a big success round that age. There was six children, all their throats slit, and their mother, a wet nurse, hurt too. Mary Ann Brough was her name. The papers were shocked. Everybody clamouring for justice to be done. I took the time to talk to the woman. Nobody’d thought to do it. She told me plain enough. Killed them herself.”

“Killed her own children, sir?”

“Six of them. Told me why she did it. Couldn’t get any peace. She were shattered and they wouldn’t give her no rest. Nobody believed it at first, but she confessed it, clear and simple, come the trial.” His train rolled up to the buffers beside us. “Since then my star’s been in the ascendant. There’s no hurry, see, not for a bright lad like you. Bide your time. Put in the hours. Don’t throw good time after bad. You’ll learn soon enough. It’s not like the papers.”

As the train pulled out, I turned away, surprised to find myself dejected and tired. I walked off to find a bus home. Passing the cheap hotels of Paddington, with their cargo of cheap women, I felt all of a sudden lonely. In the dim lamplight, I pulled out the book Miss Villiers had lent me:
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
. Wardle was right. I mustn’t let my fancy run away with me. He had checked things. He knew what he was doing. He had better connections than I ever would. If there was a conspiracy or a cover-up, he would have found it. The case was closed, and he was right: I ought to drop it.

Message from the British Museum Library, delivered to the Yard by the Professor:

FOR THE ATTENTION OF SERGEANT LAWLESS OF SCOTLAND YARD

Dear Sergeant Lawless,

Found it, after countless hours fiddle-faddling through filing cards. A catholic taste in books the chap has too. Of course, I do not even know what he has done. I hope I am not consigning the poor fellow to the gallows.

I trust that no Caledonian custom of illiteracy shall be allowed to grip your soul and you will deign to grace our sturdy desks with your formidable shadow once again. That is, if I cannot prevail upon you to invite me to the Singing Mouse.

Good luck and God speed. Do, please, let me know what transpires, if you pity a poor librarian her interest in affairs none of her business.

Yours,

Miss Ruth Villiers

POST SCRIPTUM

Will I receive a reward? Or do you keep that for yourself?

POST POST SCRIPTUM

Have I have quite forgot myself? Forgive me. This little ginger mop who styles himself the Professor is in rather a hurry. Before you are quite burnt up by curiosity and impatience, I will tell all.

His address is 42 Red Lion Street, which I believe to be by the Victoria Road in Clerkenwell. His name is Berwick Skelton.

THE THIRD PERIOD

(EARLY 1861)

THE BUGLE – COMEDY ROUTINE & POPULAR SONG
PASSAGES MARKED IN PERIODICALS – THE SKELETON THEFTS
THE ROSE & CROWN – A NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY – LORD’S
THE FAMILY MARX – THE HAYMARKET HOOFER
THE ELOCUTION TEACHER

EUSTON EVENING?BUGLE

20th April, 1861

WHAT A RIOT

The height of fashion this spring is not fine French clothes, nor a fully accoutred carriage. The clamour is neither for railway shares nor the debut ball of yet another European princess. Infidelity with an actress is passé; royal parties a bore; likewise throwing down the gauntlet to popular novelists in the Garrick Club. This season, to become the talk of the town, one simply must be burgled.

Is it the old highwayman fever, society swooning over some latter-day Dick Turpin? Not so. Today’s thieves have abandoned the old melodrama in favour of a terribly modern mysteriousness. They enter in the dead of night, armed with a single bone to pacify the dog, and make off with the household’s most elegant item – a footstool here, a decanter there – leaving the police baffled. No doors have been forced, nor windows broken; nobody hurt; nobody seen. The city’s finest houses are on tenterhooks. Hostesses faint; lords offer rewards; youngsters miss school from staying up late to catch them red-handed.

Bravo to the chivalrous culprits. You have set society aflame.

In this topsy-turvy modern world, not only do the rich pray to be robbed, but convicts disdain their victuals. Prisoners in the Cold Bath Fields House of Correction caused panic yesterday when, in protest at their provender, they rioted. The
Bugle
secured an interview with one inmate. “The slop is filthy,” declared Josiah Bent, “and the portions minuscule.” The
Bugle
refrained from suggesting that, if Josiah wished to be the master of his mealtimes, he had better have stayed outside the walls of such an institution.

The warden of the prison remained sanguine. “Our inmates are perfectly well provisioned. Trumped-up ideas those Reformists inculcate into the lower classes, making people ungrateful for the mercies shown them. Well-meaning amateurs they are, deluding the poor with expectations of grandeur, and lamentably, for it leads only to dissatisfaction. They should acknowledge such nonsense for the tripe it is and keep their mouths shut.”

***

Comedy Routine & Popular Song performed by the Great Mackay at Evans Music hall, Covent Garden:

(
Enter Great Mackay dressed as a toff. Upstage, weeping, sits Little Mackay, mostly undressed, as the lady of the house.
)

GREAT MACKAY: Ladles and jellybubbles, good eventide and God bless ye. What pleasure it is to receive ye—

LITTLE MACKAY: Boo-hoo-hoo.

GREAT MACKAY: Cough, cough. As I was saying, to receive ye at—

LITTLE MACKAY: Boo-hoo-hoo.

GREAT MACKAY: For the love of God, Mrs Mackay, what have you got your bloomers in a twist about tonight?

LITTLE MACKAY: Oh, Mr Mackay.

GREAT MACKAY: What is it, my petal? What ails my sweet?

LITTLE MACKAY: I’m so ashamed.

GREAT MACKAY: (
to audience
) Do you perceive her meaning? I don’t!

LITTLE MACKAY: (
weeps and hides her face
)

GREAT MACKAY: What should I do, sirs and madams?

VOICE FROM AUDIENCE: Give her some nice flowers, Mr Mackay!

GREAT MACKAY: Good idea. My darling!

(
He produces from under his hat a bunch of cloth begonias. She bursts out crying. Great Mackay stuffs them back into his hat.
)

GREAT MACKAY: Look what you done, clever clogs.

2nd AUDIENCE VOICE: She wants pearls, Mackay!

GREAT MACKAY: Good idea. My darling!

(
He pulls from her bosom an enormous string of oyster shells and presents them to her. Little Mackay redoubles her weeping.
)

3rd AUDIENCE VOICE: Give her a Crapper!

GREAT MACKAY: Good idea. (
from the flies descends a picture of a Water Closet
). A certain flush with every pull, my darling! (
sound effect
) Airtight seal to prevent noxious aromas, and gas receptacle for combustible ends.

(
Little Mackay walks melodramatically downstage and looks up to the gods. Mackay follows. Upstage appears a shadowy figure.
)

LITTLE MACKAY: I have flowers in the garden. I have pearls coming out of my ears. I have chamber pots wherever I turn. But, my darling, everybody I know has been— (
she holds back the tears
)

GREAT MACKAY: To Brighton?

LITTLE MACKAY: No. Everybody but us has been—

GREAT MACKAY: To the Queen’s garden party?

LITTLE MACKAY: No! (
wails
)

GREAT MACKAY: My darling, what can it be?

(
As he steps forward to comfort her, the shadowy figure creeps centre stage. We now see it is a skeleton figure. It picks up the pearls.
)

LITTLE MACKAY: Everybody but us has been robbed!

(
Skeleton figure whips the hat off Great Mackay’s head. Makes a run for it, banging his leg against the chair. He hops off.
)

GREAT MACKAY: Lor’ lummy, what was that?

(
He runs back centre-stage and picks up the skeleton’s shin bone.
)

LITTLE MACKAY: Oh, my darling, you do love me after all!

(
She shows the bone to the audience, and swoons away. Enter hoofers. Music and skeleton tap dance.
)

GREAT MACKAY: (
sings
)

Who’s that slipping through the fence

When the gardener’s asleep?

Who’s that lifting your sixpence

When you are counting sheep?

It could be highwaymen,

It could be a monkey.

It could be a bywayman.

Could be a flunky.

They’ll speedily remove from your stately old home

Your most stylish possession, leaving just that old bone.

With all their stealthy coming and going,

It’s a fabulous Skeleton Theft.

Oh, let me tell you,

It’s that scandalous Skeleton Theft.

You’ve been the victim of the

Fabulous … Skeleton Theft.

Oh yes.

***

Passages marked in periodicals by Reader 1381, British Museum Library
:

“The proletarian question is the one that will cause a terrible explosion in present day society if society and governments fail to fathom and resolve it.”—Alphonse Lamartine, poet and leading figure in Paris Commune of 1848

“Monopoly and the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands... carry in their own enormity the seeds of cure... Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence and no magistrate disperse.”—John Thelwell,
The Rights of Nature
, 1796

“It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity… It produces intelligence—but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.”—Karl Marx,
Manuscripts
, 1844

“Let it come twice again, severely,—the people advancing all the while in the knowledge that, humanly speaking, it is, like Typhus Fever in the mass, a preventable disease—and you will see such a shake in this country as was never seen on Earth since Samson pulled the Temple down upon his head.”—Charles Dickens, writing about cholera,
Household Words
, 1854

THE SKELETON?THEFTS

Wardle turned away from the gaggle of newsmen outside Sir Joseph Paxton’s house and climbed into the cab where I sat shivering.

“Bloody papers these days,” he growled. “Barely asked about the crime. Full of nonsense about this blasted fever sweeping the country again.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Cholera, sir?”