5
Fire and plague. Certainly no strangers to London Town. But now fire consumes the docklands on both sides of the river, and the plague, newly risen from the Thames, threatens to put the Great Leviathan down once and for all. Fleeing citizens, their wagons and carts piled high with their worldly possessions, clog the thoroughfares, jam the bridges. No one takes to the river. The cry is away—away to the country, away to the north and west, away from the river and canals from which legions pour ravening for blood. Packed to bursting, citizens clinging to the roofs of the cars, trains depart the London stations—the Great Northern, The Great Western, the London and Northwestern, The Great Central—carrying their passengers to safety. They do not return.
As the army of the dead advances, those who fall beneath their bite rise and swell their ranks, consumed by an unspeakable hunger. In the City of London, the Lord Mayor has blocks of houses pulled down and torched in an effort to slow the advancing hoard. With some success: on Upper Thames Street, funneled between rows of blazing shops and dwellings, the dead are stopped when a mountain of wagons and crates and household furniture is set ablaze. Snarling, red glare dancing in their eyes, glittering off their teeth, the creatures find their retreat cut off by a second blaze and so perishes hundreds of the river’s damned. But the unrelenting contagion spreads.
While the dead seek only blood, another army takes advantage of the chaos. Boiling out of their warrens of poverty and rookeries of crime, the rabble of Whitechapel, Seven Dials, Shoreditch, Spitalfields, St. Giles, Limehouse and Clerkenwell swarm through London’s affluent neighborhoods and shopping districts looting and burning. The Queen’s Guard and Household Cavalry defend Buckingham Palace and St. James. At the Tower, the Yeoman Warders stand ready. The 9th Regiment of Foot flank the Bank of England and Royal Exchange. Ten thousand hastily recruited special constables bolster the police force. By moonshine from a distance, the city appears a hellscape of black and red.
***
Despite the new steam-powered conveyances, London is still a horse-driven town. Relied on for economy and transportation, over 300,000 horses live and work in London’s precincts. Twenty-two thousand horses pull omnibuses every day. Private haulage maintains stables housing thousands of horses, one company stabling 2,000 horses at twenty depots strategically placed around the metropolis. Coal horses haul an average of thirty tons a week. Milkmen, the fire brigade, police, street cleaners, night-soil men all depend on the venerable breed.
When these horses grow too old or ill for haulage or slip and fall and are unable to rise again, even then are they useful.
Seven horse slaughtering depots in strategical locations round London are ever ready with clean carts to hasten, like fire engines, to the scene of a downed steed. Once delivered to the yard, the animal is slaughtered, skinned, and deboned in less than an hour. Skin and hooves go to the glue-maker. Bones to the button-maker. Tails and manes stuff sofas and are twisted into fishing-line. Hides are converted into carriage roofs and whips to lash other steeds. Boiled in huge copper kettles the meat is turned into food for London’s prodigious population of cats and dogs. Even the shoes are recycled, sent to the farrier’s to be welded and hammered to shod younger hooves and so back on the street within a matter of days.
The largest of these yards is in Wandsworth, South London. All that day, as London burned and the dead slaughtered the living and looters pillaged, slaughterhouse apprentices—the sons and nephews of the owners: the horse-knackering trade being mostly a family business—and a coterie of South London hooligans transported barrels of the new wine to a waiting barge. And as a glowering sunset joined the sporadic fires to paint a hellish skyline, a steam tug left Lambeth hauling the barge downriver.
Dirk Bogart tapped his shillelagh idly against his leg as he oversaw rival gang members—the Battersea Velvet Caps, the Wandsworth Scuttlers, some of his New Cut Boys and a contingent of Lambeth Lads: hooligans who, under normal circumstances would sooner trade blows than give the time of day—dump buckets of horses’ blood into the river in an effort to lure the dead into following them.
And the floaters came.
In the gathering dark, the bodies looked like heaps of rags or squalid mounds of garbage. There was no stroke of arms, no flutter of feet churning the muckish water. They did not so much swim as preternaturally glide like some disgusting parody of merfolk as they drifted cross-current, defying the laws of nature. But then their very existence defied nature. Though he kept his mouth set in a grim frown, his gaze narrowed (it wouldn’t do to let the lads see fear) Dirk’s thick skin crawled at the sight.
The minister’s boy, scrawny Lyle Trilling, his black-velvet cap immaculate while his arms were red to his rolled-up sleeves, shouted to him. “Do you think they’ll board us?”
Impressively, the youngster appeared fearless, even excited, as if this was the greatest adventure of his young life. As it probably was. This would be a story that could buy a man a lifetime of drinks. If he lived to tell it.
“Patience, Trilling. Time for your bluster later. Back to work.”
The last of the daylight was draining, but the city fires were lurid against the purpling sky. Bogart walked to the shoreward side of the barge, saw a floater surface not two dozen yards away and drift toward the craft. The blood was drawing them. They were less than an hour from their destination.
You might just get your wish, Trilling, he thought. You just might.
He turned and looked ahead at the steam tug hauling the barge. Squinting through the soot-filled smoke that belched from its tall black stack, he made out figures in the tug’s stern. One of them, gangly Jeb Wilkes, whom he trusted like a brother, waved. He’d made certain a couple of his lads were on the tug and some Elephant and Castle men were on the barge in case George Fish decided, if things got iffy, to cut the barge loose. He didn’t trust the ascot-wearing, daisy-smelling son-of-a-bitch further than he could throw him. And though standing on the barge breathing in smoke and cinders was no worse than riding in a railway car with the windows open, it galled him to think of George Fish up there in the wheelhouse keeping his fuckin’ ascot and bowler fresh. Thinking he’d like nothing better than to stave the dandy fucker’s head in when this was over, he smacked the shillelagh against his leg.
***
From the tug’s wheelhouse, George Fish watched the city burn. Flames licked from waterfront roofs, spread block to block, warehouse to warehouse, the smoke boiling up to meet the low-hanging clouds. Through the alternating ribbons of darkness and glare, the river cut a serpentine path. The scene was biblical, and with the dead rising from the water and swarming the dry land, apocalyptic.
“Hell of a sight,” tug Captain Ernst Heppel observed.
The captain was as old as Methuselah—or at least looked it. With both hands on the oak wheel, feet planted on the varnished floor in a seaman’s stance that rolled with the tide, his unkempt hair protruding from his soiled cap, and his grizzled chin curtain as grey and gnarled as the rope beard adorning the tug’s bow, the man certainly struck an image of venerable antiquity.
George grunted agreement.
“This is what comes of man pursuing mammon and turning his back on God,” the captain continued in a voice raspy from gin that nevertheless resonated with conviction and experience, as if he’d lived through famine and plague and knew a thing or two about calamity and human weakness. His watery blue eyes, set in the permanent squint of men who make their living on the water, twinkled, letting the younger man know he wasn’t entirely serious.
“Behold,” he said, “with a great plague will the Lord smite thy people, and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods and a catastrophe that could strike a city. The sword is without, and the pestilence and the famine within!”
“You should’ve been a preacher, old man,” George said.
Heppel sneered. “And trade the river for a pulpit? Not to mention all the handshaking at the door!” He twisted his lips as if he were about to spit and raised his shoulders in a mock shudder. “Heaven forbid!”
The Mary Belle’s captain was certainly no bible-thumping, hymn-singing evangelist. His litanies tended to sea chanties, and none too pious at that.
Heppel pulled a short-stemmed pipe from his pocket and loaded it from a leather pouch. George inwardly groaned even before the old man struck a Lucifer and started puffing. The captain knew the river and George was grateful for his agreeing to haul them to Limehouse on the promise of generous pay at a later date, but his taste in tobacco was abominable. George, who purchased his special blend at Dellaport’s near the Elephant, was a connoisseur of the leaf and Heppel’s was offensive.
“Do you have to smoke seaweed?”
“I reckon I’ll smoke what I like. It’s my tug, innit?”
Fish shrugged. “Have it your way, Gramps.”
“And don’t call me ‘Gramps’! Sink me if you’re kin of mine!”
“Just get us to Limehouse in time. If we don’t get there by high water, this is for nothing.”
Heppel’s brows gathered like storm clouds over his watery eyes. “I’ve been sailing this river since your pappy was a gutter rat with shite running down his leg, so don’t you go telling me about tides. We’ll get there.”
George hoped so. The water at Limehouse was level with the Thames only at high water. At low tide, the river was lower than the basin, and with the locks open, water would fall out of the basin into the river. For their plan to work, the locks had to be open and the dead had to be drawn into the basin.
He considered himself a rational man, certainly not one given to superstitious nonsense. He had a healthy respect for ghosts: he kept to his side of the street and they kept to theirs. But these river creatures were another matter. He’d seen violence, degradation, and the effects of poverty, but this was different. These things’ existence was inexplicable: you couldn’t blame their presence on poverty.
Was it as Heppel said? God’s retribution for man’s sin? A new type of plague visited on humankind? He hadn’t thought much on God since his boyhood. Hadn’t been inside a church in years. One thing he knew for certain though: If this was God’s punishment for man’s sin, the end times were upon them, because from what he’d observed of human nature, people didn’t change and sin was the way of the world. For most people, sinning came more natural than praying.
A knock at the door interrupted his thoughts, and his Elephant and Castle mate, Ned Meadows, stuck his head in the wheelhouse.
“Georgie, the barge! It’s been boarded!”
George stepped to the rear window. Below, men crowded the stern rail. Some yards off at the end of the tow line, a desperate struggle was taking place on the barge. From this distance in the darkness, it was difficult to tell the living from the dead, but he could just make out the knot of men holding off twice as many attackers.
As he watched, more floaters boarded, hauling themselves like lizards over the sides.
***
While the Thames barge lured floaters downriver in its bloody wake, a steam barge, hauling six lads and a dozen barrels of horse blood, did the same on the Regent’s Canal. At 14-feet wide and 70 long, the narrowboat was the maximum length that would fit in the Regent’s locks. Ornately painted blue and white with yellow trim, the canal boat was commonly used for hauling goods to and from the canal’s many wharves, timber yards, sawmills, coal yards, furniture factories, gutta percha works and coach manufactories. Sometimes it carried casks of wine. Tonight, the claret, still warm from the knacker’s yard, was of a very different vintage. The hot tang of horses’ blood hung in the air as two muscular lads ladled it out over the gunnels by the bucketsful while three others stood ready with long poles to ward off any floater that might try to board. They’d have to be quick as the dead were surprisingly fast and liable to pop up anywhere.
Quincy Bird, leader of the City Road Gang, manned the stern, the thick beam of the extended tiller in his hand as he gazed over the small cabin that housed the steam engine and guided the boat between the banks as it chugged past warehouses and lumberyards and sawmills and ironworks and gasworks and factories followed by stretches of brick houses followed by more industries around bends and under bridges and railway trestles, cutting a torturous path through the heart of London.
The streets on either side of the canal were dark and eerily silent, the backs of the homes, factories and warehouses they passed shuttered and deserted. Terror of what dwelt in the city’s waterways had driven the populace further inland. The lamplighters had abandoned their duty. South beyond the gasworks and factories and houses, the city was burning. Though they couldn’t see the fires raging in the heart of the city and along the Thames, the rising columns of smoke and the lowering clouds glowed with a ruddy light.
They’d been lucky so far. Setting out from St. Pancras Basin, they’d avoided having to go farther upstream into affluent Kentish Town where they’d likely be shot for brigands. Most of the attacks reported came from downstream anyway, especially below Acton’s Lock from Victoria Park to Limehouse. Starting farther down the canal also gave them the advantage of having fewer locks to navigate. The locks were the most dangerous part of their task in luring the bogles to Limehouse Basin. The Regent’s Canal fell over a thousand feet from Camden Town to Limehouse Basin, requiring them to stop at each lock, where someone had to get out and open the paddles by fitting the L-shaped windlass into the locking mechanism and cranking the paddles up allowing canal water to fill the lock. When the water level equalized, your shore crew muscled the gate open by pushing the balance beam, you steered in, your lock crew closed the gate and paddle behind you, then opened the paddle and gate at the far end. It was proper etiquette observed by all that upon exiting the lock, you closed the paddle and gate. But that consumed time in which you were vulnerable to attack. Tonight, they were leaving all gates open to increase the water flow down to the basin.
Quincy set his not inconsiderable jaw and scowled past the stack that rose from the flat roof belching smoke and cinders in their wake. It wouldn’t do to let the boys see the worry that gnawed his liver.
Stripped down to his undershirt, blond, broad-shouldered, muscular Dewey Haines looked like a Viking as he tirelessly heaved buckets of blood over the gunnel. The lad never seemed to get cold. Even in winter he could be seen hatless with his jacket open as he took long strides down the frozen street. On the starboard side, Patsy Kennedy of the Dove Row squids, as swarthy as Dewey was pale and as ugly as a bulldog’s ass, a head shorter than Dewey and four stone lighter, dipped his bucket and flung its contents overboard with as much determination and vigor as the bigger man. Quincy’s own City Road compatriot, Roger Ascombe, was hard at work removing barrel heads. You can’t dip a bucket in a bung hole, so Roger was removing head and quarter hoops with a cooper’s hammer and hoop driver. It would be faster to smash in the heads with a hatchet, but barrels were worth a pretty penny and he and Roger figured to reassemble and sell them when this was over. Dove Row’s Jimmy Dawes and Haines’ Golden Lane mate, skinny albino Newt Whipple, kept watch on either side, ready with long poles that doubled as quarterstaffs to push off any floater that tried to board.
They were all from North London and normally any meeting ended in blows. Old rivalries, matters of territory and pride, like traditions, had to be kept up. So it was amazing to see them working side by side—in unison as if they were members of the same gang and had drilled at this for weeks.
No doubt when this was over, they’d be back at each other’s throats—he looked forward to the day, in fact—but for now, they had to cooperate.
“Coming up to the tunnel,” Roger called. The wiry greyhound of a youth didn’t sound happy about the prospect.
And there it was. At the sight of the black maw beneath the brick arch, Quincy suppressed a shudder. The Angel Tunnel ran 960 yards beneath the streets and houses of Islington. Nine hundred sixty yards of claustrophobic blackness and no light save the boat’s single lantern.
“Steady boys,” he called, forcing his voice to keep low and calm as worry bit deeper into his liver.
Dewey and Patsy put down their buckets. Jimmy Dawes and Newt Whipple readied their poles to push against the tunnel walls should Quincy veer to either side.
As they slipped into darkness.
