Pax Britannia: Human Nature (8 page)

He was strong, Ulysses would give him that. There'd been a tussle when the dandy had first seized the young dip-thief. The boy had kicked and screamed and tried to get away, as Nimrod tried to stop the monkey from joining in the fracas, but Ulysses had won in the end, bundling the boy away under one arm, the hand of the other covering his mouth. People in the street had watched the confrontation and resulting abduction with nothing more than passing interest and nobody acted to stop Ulysses or Nimrod. It just went to show that such incidents weren't uncommon in the rougher parts of town. The general consensus of opinion seemed to be that it was best just to avert your gaze and mind your own business. The boy had probably wronged the finely-attired gentleman in some way they figured, or owed him for services paid for but not yet rendered. Best to keep out of it.

If Ulysses had stopped to consider it for a moment, he might have pondered on what manner of life could crush a person's spirit so much that any sense of compassion for one's fellow man had been crushed along with it.

"How old are you, Sidney?" Ulysses asked, lowering his voice so that he came across as unthreatening as possible.

"Eleven years old, sir," the child said proudly. Appearances could be deceiving, Ulysses mused. "At least so's I'm told," he added.

"How do you mean?" Ulysses asked.

"That's what they told me at the workhouse where I's was born. Born in the flood of '86, they said, when the Thames burst its banks. Don't send me back there, sir. Don't send me back to the beadles. Please don't."

"Look, calm down. No one's going anywhere at the moment, Sidney."

The boy looked at him with wide, watery brown eyes. They appeared large in comparison to the rest of his head, doeishly cute and appealing, thanks to his stunted growth.

"You're one of the Irregulars, isn't that right?"

"Irregular what, sir? Don't know whatcha mean." The boy's sudden show of bravado told Ulysses everything he needed to know.

"Best gang in the East End, I heard."

The boy eyed him suspiciously, knocking back the last of the rotgut that passed for gin round these parts.

"Another drink?"

"Don't mind if I do, guv'nor! Seein' as 'ow you're payin'."

Once Ulysses had the boy in his grasp and had carried him away from the main thoroughfare of Old Montague Street, he had dropped him in the archwayed entrance to a blind alley. By that point the boy had realised that it was pointless trying to run, at least for the time being, and so had sat and listened as Ulysses had made his claim that he only wanted to ask him a few questions over a drink. The child had certainly had much worse threatened to be done to him, so he had taken the two high-falutin' gents to a drinking den he knew.

There had been little conversation made over the first round but now the gin was starting to loosen the boy's tongue, as Ulysses had hoped. He did not stop to consider the moral implications of getting the boy drunk so that he might disgorge all that Ulysses' needed to know about the urchin street-gang. If he had done, he might as well have given up on ever solving the case of the missing Whitby Mermaid altogether, and he wasn't prepared to do that, not by a long shot.

Ulysses watched his aide's progress at the bar, through the blue fug of tobacco smoke. The barkeep gave Nimrod what could only be called 'a look' but didn't refuse him his drinks. His money was good and money was all that mattered here. This was Victorian England after all and what rich gentlemen got up to with young waifs and strays wasn't anyone's business but their own. There was always the possibility that the man was a philanthropist who would rescue the boy from poverty and take him away to a better life somewhere else. At least that was what the barkeep tried to tell himself as he looked away from their table again.

"So," Ulysses went on, when the refreshed tankard of gin had been placed in front of the boy, "you were telling me about the Whitechapel Irregulars."

"Was I?" the boy asked, innocently, raising the pewter to his lips.

Ulysses' reply was an arching eyebrow, pregnant with meaning. The monkey glared at him before starting to nuzzle the boy's ear, chattering and chirruping in its shrill simian voice.

And then, seemingly under the influence of the eyebrow, Sidney relented at last. He might have little or no education to speak of, but he wasn't stupid; he knew when he was beaten.

"Like I said, best gang in the East End." Ulysses said.

"Then you 'eard wrong. Best gang in the whole of London more like."

Ulysses smiled in the face of the boy's indefatigable bravado. "Been running with them long?"

"Four years, give or take," Sidney announced proudly, "ever since I hopped spike."

"And how exactly did you get away from there?"

"Got meself taken out with the rest of the shit when the night soil collectors did their round, along with Nobby Clark, didn't I?"

"Very resourceful," was all Ulysses could think to say. He had thought the boy smelt bad before, but now the aroma of unwashed bodies and the street suddenly seemed that much worse.

"Yeah, bin one of thieving Magpie's boys ever since."

Ulysses' ears pricked up at the mention of a name at last - at least at the mention of what was as close to a real name as he felt he was going to get.

"Who's Magpie?"

"That's
Mr
Magpie to you, if you don't mind," the boy said curtly, his former anxiety regarding the workhouse having apparently evaporated.

"So, who is he?"

"You've not heard of the Magpie?" the boy mocked, as if he was as well-known as Queen Victoria herself.

"Humour me," Ulysses continued in the same calm manner but with an edge of steel to his voice now; the same tone in which he had addressed the informant known as Rat.

"Well that's why he's the master, ain't it! He's so good he don't get caught." Sidney took another swig from the tankard in his hands. "I doubt Scotland Yard even knows 'e exists, but 'e's got fingers in all sorts of pies." He was beginning to noticeably slur his words. "But if they ever found out about the thieving Magpie, if they ever
did
catch 'im, they'd probably be able to solve an 'undred cases in one go. Not that they will ever catch 'im though!" The boy suddenly riled, real venom in his voice.

Whatever hold this Magpie had over the boys in his - to put it loosely - employ, it produced a powerful sense of loyalty among the Whitechapel Irregulars. If the rest of the urchins were like Sidney, Ulysses wouldn't be surprised if they would in fact be loyal to their master - the one who had 'rescued' them from the streets, taken them in, given them a home - even unto death. That thought sent a shiver down his spine. The way Sidney spoke, Ulysses could well believe that the Magpie was like some Messianic figure to his boys.

"'Is boys 'e calls us; 'is bonny darlin's. Princes of the street, that's what 'e calls us. 'Is lovely boys." Sidney's mouth was starting to run away with him.

Sidney suddenly looked anxious, a look that suggested that he had only just realised what Ulysses and Nimrod already knew, that he had said too much.

"But they won't catch 'im, will they? Not the Magpie."

"Who won't?"

"The Peelers, Scotland Yard, them robo-Bobbies in blue," Sidney pressed, the anxiety clear in his voice now. "They won't find out about 'im will they?" The boy started to scan the snug nervously, shooting darting glances into the shadows of booths and unlit corners. "You won't tell them, will you, sir. I'll be brown bread if you do!"

Sidney was nothing more than a scared child again. Who was this man, this Magpie, Ulysses wondered that he could instil a religious fervour in one of his 'lovely boys' one minute and have him fearing for his wretched excuse for a life the next?

"Your Mr Magpie... Do you know if he had anything to do with a certain missing mermaid?"

"I wouldn't know, sir," Sidney said in a small voice, apparently unphased by the mention of an aquatic impossibility. "'E sends us out on all sorts of errands. It's 'ard to keep track sometimes; so many jobs on the go. Like I said, fingers in lots of pies."

The boy was now distractedly rubbing at his ribs, the sparse flesh covering them hidden beneath his ill-fitting attire, a distant look in his watery eyes, as if he were remembering past punishments. But were they ones received at the hands of the beadles or his new messiah?

"But what if the Magpie were to, fly the nest, shall we say? He couldn't hurt you then, could he?" Ulysses stated calmly, letting the implications of what he had said sink in, watching the boy's face intently as he processed what the dandy was suggesting.

The monkey had been watching the exchange with its own intense simian scrutiny. As Sidney considered Ulysses' words, the ape started shrieking and jumping up and down on the boy's shoulder again, attracting the attention of a number of nearby drinkers.

Nimrod glared at the monkey, raising his handkerchief-bound hand, as if he was about to slap the primate from its perch.

The monkey abruptly stopped its screeching and settled down beside the boy's ear and returned to foraging within his messy mop of hair, looking for any choice, wriggling morsels that might be hidden there.

Ulysses watched the creature for a moment as the monkey chattered into the boy's ear. If he hadn't of known better he might have said that it was actually talking to the young scallywag.

"I could take you to 'im," the boy suddenly announced, his whole face lighting up under its coating of grime. "I could lead you to 'is lair. 'E's cocky, 'e is, the Magpie. 'E'd never suspect anyone 'e didn't want snooping around could find 'is way into the rookeries." Sidney boasted, his face aglow.

"You'd do that for us, Sidney?"

"Well, you know 'ow it goes. You scratch my back... Deal?" The boy wiped a filthy hand on his even filthier trouser leg and then, hawking a gobbet of phlegm into the back of his throat spat on it noisily, and held it out to Ulysses.

The finely-turned out dandy looked at the boy's palm with obvious discomfort but after only a moment's pause, he took hold of it in a solid grasp.

"We have a deal."

The boy led them through the labyrinthine side-streets and half hidden, built-over alleyways of Whitechapel's slum rookeries. After countless twists and turns, double blinds, cul-de-sacs and doubling back through cellars and under arch-spans, Ulysses didn't know where he was or how far they had actually travelled. He had lost all sense of direction, the sky and its pall of ever-present choking cloud was no longer visible, hidden as it was beyond a roof of timbers and brick archways.

They came at last to an enclosed octagonal space between the crumbling ruins of a huddle of tenement housing. The structures could have been there since the 18
^th
century Ulysses supposed, looking at them, only they were so rundown now that there were no discerning features by which to date the basic architecture of the place. A forest of bamboo scaffolding had been raised before the facades of the buildings, strung with rope and timber walkways, ladders leading ever upwards towards the canvas awnings that formed a roof over this place.

These were the rookeries; there could be no doubt. The crumbling square smelt of damp, mould, rotting wood and ammonia. A stream gurgled under the planking at their feet, a steady flow of piss and effluent sloshing its way along the boarded-over drain emptying out of the seemingly lifeless slum around them - an indication that there must be some life here, despite initial appearances - on its way to join the Thames or one of the capital's lost waterways, like the Fleet, or the Effra or the Wallbrook. Ulysses might have had an idea as to which if he had had a better notion of where the boy had led them.

The boy stopped beside a dusty tarpaulin, abandoned on the ground and covered in a dusting of broken plaster. He looked back at Ulysses and Nimrod, who looked the most uncomfortable, picking his way through the dust, filth and wreckage. Ulysses knew, however, that he had put up with much worse in his time.

Perched on the boy's shoulder, the monkey scratched its arse and then nibbled at something it found there. Sidney watched the progress of the other two with a look akin to delight on his face.

"At the risk of sounding trite, are we there yet?" Ulysses asked, suddenly conscious of how loud his voice sounded in the muffled near silence of the octagon. You wouldn't have known you were at the heart of the largest metropolis on Earth, not here.

The quiet unnerved him. There was the steady
drip-drip-drip
of a pipe overflowing somewhere, or a tear in an awning letting in overspill from the Upper City way overhead. There was the distant, inescapable rattle and clatter of the Overground system. There was the creak and groan of the awnings as they were pulled by unseen breezes and changes in air pressure. But the presence of any sound to suggest that anything lived here - even pigeons or rats - was absent.

And yet, even here, there was another of those cheerful advertisements for the latest restorative drink - Dr Feelgood's Tonic Stout.

Ulysses suddenly felt very exposed. This was hardly the way to go about creeping up on such a supposedly elusive criminal mastermind.

"We're nearly there now," Sidney said, pointing through a broken doorway, a network of smashed timbers just about visible in the shadows beyond. "We'll need to be quiet from 'ere on in. We're not exactly goin' in the front door, if you know what I mean - it's not even the tradesmen entrance - but 'e's got eyes and ears everywhere."