The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Read online

  A hay wagon loomed to the right and our horse shied.

  ‘Frebbin’ dungface,’ our cabby yelled. We came to a halt. ‘I don’t like this, pal.’

  ‘First, I am not your pal,’ Mr G retorted. ‘If ever I acquire a friend – which I hope not to – he or she will certainly not be you. Second – and rather more urgently – this is a crossroads and, if you stay here long enough, we will become embroiled in a vehicular collision with concomitant jeopardy to our collective morbidity and mortality.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘If you do not move we shall die,’ I explained anxiously.

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Straight on and for goodness’ sake keep a lookout,’ my guardian urged.

  ‘Can’t look awt for what I can’t see,’ the driver reasoned, but his whip cracked flabbily and we inched forwards again.

  A dark shape hurtled from above and burst into our compartment.

  ‘Mein Gott!’ Sidney Grice cried as a pigeon, fluttering in confusion, crashed into my shoulder. Mr G raised his hands across his face and shrank back in his seat while I shooed it away. ‘Vile, odious, pestilent creature.’

  It flapped up and out and was one with the vapour.

  ‘Why do birds upset you so much?’ I asked, ever astonished that so brave a man could be so easily terrified.

  ‘They are ugly,’ he cupped his eye, ‘in ways that you cannot imagine and I shall not describe.’

  Mr G pushed his fears downwards with the flat of his hands.

  ‘But some—’

  My fog-drowned world shot up and my guardian’s collapsed and all at once I was above him, catapulted into the air. I dropped sprawling across his knees, my head banging on the side of the cabin.

  ‘Blimmit!’ I yelped.

  ‘Kindly return that speech to the sewer from which it emerged.’ Sidney Grice pushed me off him, crushing my hat more in the process than our collision had managed to do.

  Our world tipped a few degrees more, paused for what felt like an age, and came crashing down.

  ‘What on earth?’ I disentangled myself.

  ‘We have run over something or someone.’ Mr G retrieved his eye from a rip in the upholstery.

  ‘It’s a woman,’ the driver yelled in alarm. ‘I can see ’er frock.’

  ‘Open the flaps,’ I shouted.

  ‘’Twasn’t my fault. Can’t see the ’airs on me snout I can’t.’ The catch clicked back and I pushed the double doors open, but my guardian was out before me, running back and crouching over a shape clad in dark velvet.

  ‘Maeve Birchall,’ he declared.

  I drew close and saw that he was cradling a head, long silver hair streaming over his crooked arm.

  I bobbed. ‘Is she dead?’ I hardly needed to ask. Maeve Birchall’s forehead had been crushed almost flat by the wheel and her eyes stared dully.

  ‘Most assuredly.’ Sidney Grice picked an ear from the ground. ‘She went to the gallows thirty-six years ago, but is largely forgotten now. I assume this waxwork was on its way to storage.’

  I breathed in relief. ‘I suppose it fell from a cart in all this confusion,’

  ‘Only in some of the confusion.’ Mr G floated up.

  ‘Oh fank gawd.’ The cabby cracked his fingers as he joined us. ‘I don’t fink the beak would’ve taken kindly to me killing two ladies in a week.’

  An arm dropped off as our driver rolled Maeve Birchall aside. He rolled the figure into the gutter and climbed back on top.

  ‘Drive on.’ Sidney Grice drew out a voluminous white handkerchief.

  ‘Gawd.’ The driver double-clicked his tongue and urged his horse forward.

  ‘Keep straight.’ Mr G wiped his hands, held the handkerchief at arm’s length between his thumb and third finger, and let it fall as if to start a duel. It hung, then was whisked away and immediately became one with the fog.

  ‘I shall not forget this in a hurry,’ a disembodied man’s voice threatened almost in my ear, and further away a woman screeched, ‘Mind you don’t, for I won’t, not ever.’

  We trundled on and I began to worry if this journey would ever end.

  Mr G closed his eyes. ‘Left again, Driver.’

  ‘You sure, guv?’

  ‘This is my city,’ Sidney Grice proclaimed. ‘I am where I say I am and, whilst you have the delight of my company, so are you.’

  The cab swung cautiously round.

  ‘I do not believe the fog changed direction that time,’ I said.

  ‘Not in any navigationally helpful way,’ he agreed, ‘but there are forty-seven potholes and three unlevelled mounds along that stretch of road before Marchmont Street.’

  ‘I shall count them on the way back,’ I warned.

  He slipped the flask, still corked and hardly sampled, into his satchel. ‘Please do, though you will find there are only thirty-four potholes on that side, partly because the Tavistock Hotel paid for repairs outside their frontage last year. And this is Burton Crescent. There is a Jews’ Deaf and Dumb Home over there… and a temperance hotel that way.’ Sidney Grice waved a woollen glove vaguely. ‘Number 45 is the headquarters of the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children, whilst 49 tends to deserted mothers. Goodness, where does it end?’ He rubbed his shoulder. ‘Midwives, pharmacies, clergymen, doctors. I know of at least two prominent social reformers who have established their lairs here. Left again.’

  ‘I knows,’ the driver said peevishly.

  ‘What a concentration of good works,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Mr G shuddered. ‘It is possibly the most pernicious distillation of philanthropy in the world.’

  A breeze was getting up now and the fog thinning slightly.

  ‘You cannot object to all good works,’ I protested.

  ‘Can I not?’ He pondered my statement. ‘I believe I can.’

  I looked sideways at his dripping face.

  ‘You are exceptionally ill-humoured today,’ I told him.

  ‘I hate fog,’ he admitted. ‘It deadens the senses and without my senses I have only my superlative intelligence, inordinate wealth and fine breeding to elevate me from the snuffling masses.’

  I could just make out a concave row of buildings to my left as we worked our way along.

  ‘This house,’ Sidney Grice returned his attention to our itinerary, ‘once belonged to a Mr Harold Pin, who had the distinction of being the first – but one hopes not the last – Scottish bank manager to be digested by cannibals.’ He banged with his stick again. ‘And very shortly,’ he told me, ‘we shall—’ his voice rose – ‘stop.’

  A hunched shadow hurried by – a man in a top hat, barking, doubled up in his efforts to breathe.

  ‘The morgues will be busy tonight,’ Mr G forecast grimly as he rose to pass his payment up through the hatch.

  ‘Don’t fink I can find my way back,’ the cabby confessed.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Mr G reassured him. ‘If you wait here an hour or two I shall guide your return.’

  ‘Fanks for nuffink.’

  ‘Nothing is a strange thing for which to express gratitude.’ Mr G pinched the crown of his soft felt hat. The flaps clicked open and we clambered out. ‘But it is always something I am happy to give.’

  The driver spat but he must have decided to risk finding his own way back, for he flicked his reins and the horse edged reluctantly forward.

  I turned round and the outlines of the houses rose before me, the brick façades almost grey in the sickly light. But, at the end of the curve, a massive edifice arose, set about three feet back from the building line and out of parallel with it, behind a street sign proclaiming Gaslight Lane, which was screwed to a stone post.

  ‘But where is it?’ I strained to see a road leading off.

  ‘This is it.’ Sidney Grice held out his arms expansively. ‘The original road ran up the side of the house just to the left of that path. But James Burton built numbers 28 and 29 across it and other developers followed suit behind and
obliterated it, though you might argue that Sawtree Mews, where it opens into Brigadier Road, was the end of it. Until the speculators set to work, this was a country lane with a dairy halfway down. The old Boulton Gasworks still operates sporadically. That is one of their meters.’ Not for the first time I wondered if my guardian had a telescope built into his right eye, for I could only just make out a blob on the wall of the north wing. ‘But this occupied part of the house is supplied by the London Gas Company now.’

  The path that he had referred to ran between the house and its unwelcome neighbours to the left, and must have led into the back garden once. But now it was blocked just behind the coal-hole by a fixed grille across it, rising maybe thirty feet and topped, I could just make out, by vicious spikes.

  ‘There was a privet hedge here once.’ He dug at a bit of root that was trying to sprout greenery. ‘Note,’ his arm hinged up like a railway stop signal, ‘if you can, the water mains repair alongside the neighbouring abodes.’

  ‘Half of London seems to be dug up at the moment.’ I glanced over.

  ‘How can a city seem to be excavated?’ Sidney Grice wandered towards a trench in the road. ‘Like income tax, it either is or it is not. And,’ his arm fell to the clear position, ‘the proportion at any given time is unlikely to be greater than one-hundredth.’

  I moved closer to the house and could not help but be struck by its grandeur, a huge old structure set beside and at odds with the late Georgian-style terrace adjoining it to the south, on the left-hand side. Nathan Mortlock’s old home rose four lofty storeys and stretched the width of a good half dozen of its neighbours. The north and south wings of the house were separated by a towering block, jutting some ten feet or more forward of them and pierced on its front face by a Gothic arch in which was set a tall, broad oak door.

  ‘Gethsemane,’ I read from a brass plate on the wall. ‘It looks like a prison.’

  The dwelling itself had also been fortified with heavy ironwork guarding the long sash windows, most of which were bricked up and, judging by the soot deposits, not recently.

  ‘Most of the residences here have bars on the lower floors,’ Mr G informed me. ‘There are rookeries round the back which a platoon of guards would be terrified to enter.’

  ‘What are rookeries?’

  ‘Slums,’ Mr G said, ‘over slums piled upon slums beneath slums under slums; derelict odious heaps of stinking wrecks; rubble and rubbish shored with worm-holed timber and awash with effluent; street urchins lying with pigs under rags for warmth; and the greatest concentration of vicious criminals outside of the Bank of England.’

  ‘Such poverty beside such wealth,’ I lamented. ‘Something must be done.’

  ‘I quite agree.’ Mr G paced through the clouds. ‘They must all be swept away.’

  ‘The best way to be rid of the poor is to make them prosperous,’ I said. But he was more interested in that front door and the metal straps running across it.

  He dabbed a pyramidal stud as if it were hot. ‘The servants must have to use the same entrance and egress as their master.’ Mr G pulled his overcoat around his neck. ‘A practice that reeks of communardism and will choke the life from our city more effectively than this foetid air.’

  I tapped the guard over a narrow basement window. ‘Nathan Mortlock must have been a very frightened man,’ I commented.

  ‘And with good grounds as it turned out.’ Sidney Grice marched up the steps.

  I looked behind us. ‘Is that a central garden I can see?’

  ‘Fenced and locked,’ he concurred, ‘against all but the grimly generous residents.’

  ‘The straight side of Burton Crescent is failing already.’ His voice was curiously thin through the fumes. ‘An admiral once lived in number 6 and there were two professors further up, but some of the larger ones have been divided into apartments and many of the houses take in lodgers now.’

  ‘As did Mrs Samuels at number 4,’ I remembered as he yanked on the doorbell. I heard it clang.

  ‘Indeed.’ Sidney Grice chipped at the short path to the gate with his heel. ‘The brickwork is uneven.’

  ‘Could somebody lift them to get into the cellar?’ I asked, but knew as I spoke that he would answer, ‘No.’

  The door opened.

  ‘Mr Grice,’ a footman declared. ‘We have been expecting you, sir.’

  *

  I see him in the shadows of Gethsemane, looking up at the tower where once he saw the curtain flutter, steeling himself for what he must do. He hesitates, makes up his mind and runs four paces away, but something pulls him back. Love made bitter and the need, the biting need, and the fear that is greater than fear.

  He is going into the house.

  *

  And the footman stood aside to admit us.

  16

  ✥

  The Vertex of Vacuity and the Sleeping Journeyman

  THE FOOTMAN WAS a fresh-faced man with sandy hair. He was dressed in livery with a splendid gold-buttoned and trimmed red coat, a sandy waistcoat and breeches. Only his black neckerchief and armband gave any indication that there had been a death in the household.

  ‘And you must be Miss Middleton.’ His eyes were blue and glittered in the dull light.

  ‘Since when does a servant introduce callers to themselves?’ Mr G demanded.

  ‘Hi am sorry, sir.’ The footman was chastened. ‘But Hi am quite new to this job and forgot myself in all the hexcitement.’

  ‘Is that all it is to you,’ my guardian glowered, ‘a vulgar titillation?’

  ‘Hi meant no disrespect, sir.’ The footman’s face fell further.

  ‘Then do not show any.’ Mr G scowled. ‘Why is your arm encased in gypsum?’

  It was only then that I noticed the footman’s left sleeve was bulging with a plaster cast from which only the ends of his fingers projected.

  ‘Hi fell downstairs—’ the footman blushed – ‘after a few drinks on Christmas night and broke it.’

  ‘Are you right- or left-handed?’ I asked.

  ‘Left, miss. Hi put it out to save myself.’ He held up his right hand, bent back with hooked fingers. ‘And this is not much use to me since Hi got it tangled in the spokes of a homnibus two years ago.’

  ‘Do not imagine that being a bungling fool incapable of committing the murder relieves you of any suspicion,’ Sidney Grice lectured him, though I rather thought it might. ‘I shall interview your doctor later.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  It was a long hallway, wider than ours in Gower Street, but thinned by a disproportionally broad ascending staircase to the left.

  ‘Yorkshire, miss – Hilkley – like hin the song.’ He was in his late twenties, I judged, though he wore no spectacles for me to apply Mr G’s rule of thumb.

  ‘Ilkley Moor baht ’at,’ I quoted and my guardian looked aghast.

  ‘And I thought my maid had scaled the vertex of vacuity.’ He flicked through the coat rack with his cane. ‘Tell me your name and age, if you know it.’

  The footman straightened and stuck out his chest like a private on parade. ‘Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter, aged thirty- two, sir.’

  ‘I am sorry—’ I stifled a laugh. ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘Yes, miss,’ he told me, ‘though everybody calls me Easterly. Hi have two brothers, Westerly and Northerly, and ha sister called Southerly.’

  The floor was laid with a maroon oilcloth embossed with the Garstangs’ lamb and cross symbol.

  ‘Was your father a seafarer?’ I inquired.

  ‘No, miss, but he wanted to be.’

  Mr G rolled his eye. ‘Discourse upon your previous employment. Details of what, when and where will suffice for now.’

  ‘Hi was a coachman, sir, for Mr Garstang and Hi used to help in the house ha lot, but when Mr Mortlock came he did not keep his own horses and so Hi went to Dr Crispin Holland hov Highgate West Hill, until five months ago when Hi applied for the position hov footman here.’
r />   I quailed at the mention of Highgate – I had seen a man die horribly there, his head split by the axe in my hand – but Mr G’s expression did not change.

  ‘And was your last employer murdered?’ Sidney Grice clipped on his pince-nez and leaned forward until his nose almost touched the footman’s.

  Easterly Nutter flinched. ‘As far has Hi know, Dr Holland is still in good health for a man hov his advanced age.’

  Mr G pulled away and let his pince-nez drop to hang on a blue string from his top buttonhole.

  ‘Did you have to change jobs because of your hand?’ I asked as my guardian worked his way through the umbrella stand, running a finger through the folds of a blue parasol.

  ‘Hi did manage for a bit.’ Easterly relaxed a little. ‘But, truth be told, miss, Hi don’t like horses and they don’t care for me, and hi don’t like the outside. Hi just wanted the uniform. Young ladies – present company hexcepted – like a man hin uniform.’

  I did not tell him that I had once loved a man in uniform, though it was that of a cavalry officer who, unlike Easterly, adored horses almost as much – I used to tease him – as he cared for me.

  Sidney Grice tilted an ornate brass wall mirror to check behind it.

  ‘So you got yourself an indoor job where you could still dress smartly?’ I concluded.

  Easterly tipped forward. ‘Hexactly, miss.’ He scratched around the edge of his plaster.

  Mr G turned his attention to the door, sliding the bolts across and rattling the handle. ‘Two locks,’ he commented. ‘Who has the keys?’

  ‘Mr Hesketh, the valet, is in charge hov them now, sir. There’s only one other complete set and Mr Mortlock used to keep them in his room at night.’

  ‘Explain,’ Sidney Grice placed his cane on the hall table, ‘exactly what you mean by complete.’

  Easterly blinked rapidly. ‘Hi mean full, sir.’ And, seeing that his response was not satisfactory, he added, ‘There was also a single key so that a servant might come and go during the day.’