The Incendiary's Trail (22 page)

‘I believe he has never had carnal experience of any woman, save the Virgin perhaps—’

‘I’ll thank you not to blaspheme in my presence, Mr Dyson. So, we must certainly visit the performers once again before they scatter. I do not know what is to become of them now that
their “protector” is dead. They may be in imminent danger.’

At that moment, there was a knock at the door and a clerk entered with a letter. He handed it to Sergeant Williamson and left without a word. The detective looked at his name and the Whitehall
address written on the front.

‘Boyle?’ asked Noah.

Mr Williamson opened the letter with care and quickly read through its contents. His jaw set with determination and he handed the letter to Noah, who passed his eyes fervidly across the
copperplate writing.

‘I will make the arrangements,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘In the meantime, we must go to the house where Mr Coggins’s performers are currently residing. I have insisted that
they stay in the city until this case is solved. All of us will meet there.’

‘What of the clergyman? He may also be in danger.’

‘Yes. We must attempt to find him again and inform him. Now, let us go.’

‘The crowds outside have increased since we arrived. Are we to drag them with us to the house?’

‘No. I will leave first and speak briefly to the newspapermen. Wait for an hour and make your own way there, preferably unseen. You know the address.’

And with that, Mr Williamson exited the room.

Noah rose and walked to the window. He could see a group of people – journalists, gossip-mongers, avid readers of broadsheets and newspapers – too impatient to wait
for the printed news. Indeed, I was one of them – there to gather news. Had I looked up, I would have seen him looking down at me and we might have exchanged gazes. Instead, Sergeant
Williamson appeared at the door and we clamoured around him, oblivious to the man above us.

Somewhere out there across the roofs and the chimneys, Noah’s quarry was hiding. He saw those smoky eyes again, staring at him over the bared heads of the execution crowd. The moment was
frozen as a painting in his mind: a paralysing shock of recognition, undimmed by the years they had spent apart.

Naturally, he remembered Boyle as the boy. The man was broader and more muscular, taller and more weathered. But there was a familiarity of movement and demeanour which meant that Noah would
have recognized that gait had he seen Boyle from the rear walking down a street. It was the boy’s face that he had carried with him all those years as a
totem
of revenge, and the adult
enemy was an unexpected image. In truth, he wondered if he had ever really expected to find his betrayer. Boyle had been, for so long, merely an idea: an origin towards which Noah was perpetually
returning in order to begin again.

Now they had met again. Boyle had become everything his character as a boy had promised: amoral, fiery, deranged, homicidal . . . almost a myth. Noah extracted the dagger from inside his coat
and tested the edge against his thumb. It scraped razor-sharp against the tiny swirls of skin.

The reader must have been wondering about the past of Noah Dyson. The police would never know. Only I know. It would be impertinent to ask how, but I have my methods and my
sources. I pull at them gently and they emerge from darkness like the endless roots of a plant tapering off beneath our feet. Shall we look together at the rhizotomous past of the man, that we
might understand him better?

His father had been a sailor plying the Northern and Southern Oceans, sometimes beneath the red and white pennant of the convict ships to New South Wales, sometimes on a reeking American whaler,
sometimes carrying pungent spices from India. The baby Noah, dandled on the paternal knee, had delighted in tracing the tattooed lines across his father’s arms and chest, following an
imagined map of those travels through valleys of scars and lines etched by rope and salt – travels that he would one day make himself. Regrettably, that father was seldom in London, and
seldom sober when he was. One day, he never returned, no doubt lost to a saline tomb or a navy brig’s overzealous disciplinarian.

His mother was the poor daughter of an unsuccessful printer, with the one mitigating result that the young man was never short of reading matter. Indeed, among his kind, he was considered
something of a prodigy for his reading ability and knowledge of foreign parts. To his peers, Achilles or Troy might well have been characters from the Bible, had they ever seen a bible. Before he
had friends, he had a cast of hundreds in his head and a world spanning eons in which to play. Then, in his eleventh year, the maternal care that had so tenuously kept him from running with the
shoeless boys of his district was taken by the cholera. Her family could not afford to keep him.

Extinction beckoned, but he – as so many of our orphaned boys – chose freedom and crime. He became a street Arab, sleeping in doorways and living from nimble-fingered pilferings.
Wherever a back was turned to enter a carriage, wherever a wallet was carelessly opened, wherever there was a soft heart to be gulled with an artificial snivel, young Noah was there –
surviving.

And he became a leader among the boys on account of his patter. With the gentlemen, he could flatter with classical titbits and Latin puns. With the ladies he could wring tears even from the
bitterest and most desiccated widow with his earnestly delivered passages of scripture. Had the charitable organizations known of him, he may have been directed into schooling by some benefactor.
Instead, he met Lucius Boyle.

Lucius was indeed an odd name for a child of the streets. The man himself had no idea that his parents had been well-born residents of Park-lane, whose horror at his birth defect was sufficient
to banish the baby boy from their lives forever. He was sent – as many children of that class are – to a nursemaid and was simply never returned. A steady (if small) supply of money
found its way to his surrogate mother, most of which went directly to the manufacturers and purveyors of brandy. It ceased once his parents’ guilt had been sufficiently assuaged.

He grew: undernourished, effectively orphaned and cruelly marked by fate. Some cursed him as the Devil’s spawn; others treated him as one would a street dog. Indeed, his only salvation was
that the fine stock of his birth had blessed him with a quick wit. As soon as he could escape the spirit-addled woman who had negligently ‘raised’ him, he fled to the streets, where he
learned the universal law of nature: that the most vicious, most cunning creature usually survives.

Every ‘head boy’ meets a rival on the streets. Fiefdoms cross and reputations are bandied by followers. ‘Dyson earned a sovvy by speaking Roman to a toff!’ boasts one
tribal member. ‘
Did
he?’ ripostes a rival. ‘Well, Boyle stole a ten-guinea watch from a gent up Haymarket – didn’t even feel it!’ Fights ensue over whose
leader is superior. Domination is hard won, the loser being cast into shameful obscurity.

Boyle and Dyson met finally near Southwark-bridge. They gauged each other against their exaggerated reputations, neither one as tall nor as fierce as the gossip implied – both still
children. Noah was a wiry youth, fast rather than strong. Other boys might hit harder, but he was seldom in the space where the fist had been aimed. Lucius was more of a physical presence, his
lower face disfigured quite terrifyingly by an enflamed purple birthmark that seemed to trace his jawline almost exactly, bubbling angrily at his cheeks and neck like port or venous blood. To his
followers, it was a supernatural thing, at once intimidating and fascinating. It gave him a look of perpetual wrath.

‘Achilles and Odysseus fought on the same side,’ said Noah.

‘I don’t know no Romans, but a good fighting dog knows when to attack and when to bide his time,’ said Boyle. ‘We are doubled together and halved apart – that is
simple ’rithmatic.’

Both smiled. They spat in their grubby palms and shook. An empire was born. They called themselves ‘the Generals’, the Napoleons of London. What Boyle lacked in learning at that
time, he compensated for in a cunning born of a lifetime on the streets. What Noah lacked in callousness, he made up for with intelligence. Together, they became legends among the urchins,
mudlarks, chimney boys, street-sweepers and boot-blackers. Not for them the adult kidsman who orchestrates a horde of child thieves – they were their own masters. They knew the best places
and the best ‘lays’. It was Smithfield at dusk for a gristly chop, Billingsgate at midday for a turning fish, closing time at the Whitechapel bakers for a stale crust. With Noah’s
patter and Boyle’s slyness, their boys were the lords of juvenile crime.

Alas, boys grow. They become men and they become proud. It is often their baser instincts that grow unchecked. Boyle’s native cruelty fermented in his growing vessel, while Noah began to
argue for the more honest living he knew his intelligence could easily procure. Boyle sought criminal means; Noah looked to commerce. Any historian knows that force and deception always overcome
rationality and truth.

The
coup d’état
came as they were conducting a ‘campaign’ on the Surrey side. Boyle had received intelligence of how a certain brewery could be accessed after
dark, and their boys had a taste for beer. Prepared with bags, they entered a store and began to remove the bottles, acting silently because Boyle had thought to fill each bag with straw to muffle
the glassy clinks.

In the musty dimness of those vaults, the two head boys held oil lamps to guide their troops. Only one man knows whether it was accident or intention that caused Boyle’s lamp to crash into
a nest of tinder-dry straw, striking the fatal spark that would bring the brewery crashing down in a raging inferno later that night. Only two men know for certain that it was perfidy that closed
the sole means of safe egress while Noah was still trapped inside at the mercy of the already intractable flames.

To the alarm raised by Noah’s loyal followers outside, Boyle offered only a chilling sentence: ‘There was only one Napoleon, boys . . .’

Despite his best and frantic efforts, young Noah was unable to escape from that place until the door was battered in by a constable attending the attempts to extinguish the flames. On finding
the boy there, the policeman immediately concluded that he had discovered the thief and incendiary in the act. A particularly violent arrest was effected and, omitting the predictable legal
proceedings, Noah found himself gaoled at the tender age of thirteen.

His articulacy could not save him now. Boys of a similar age were routinely being transported for as slight a crime as taking a loaf of bread. He expected no clemency from the magistrate, and
received none: the sentence was transportation to New South Wales, to be carried out as soon as the next transport ships left London. In the meantime, he would be incarcerated at the hulks in
Woolwich.

I need hardly inform the reader of the conditions he must have experienced there. Even today, there are regular deaths from cholera, influenza and countless other brutalities. The pestilential
atmosphere of those rotting hulls, the scuttle of rats, the stink of men, the bilge miasma and the ever-present threat of violence make them unbearable for an adult; for a child, they must have
seemed Hell.

Young Noah was expected to fulfil his work duty at the arsenal until the transports set sail: back-breaking work that would prepare him for the slavery of his destination. And, each day, people
would come to watch the prisoners work as if they were animals reduced to inhuman labour. How he felt the burning shame of their eyes upon his humiliation! Throughout his many weeks there, the only
thing that sustained him – excepting the wormy beef and sprouting potatoes – was the futile hope that his boys would come and rescue him. That, and the burning desire for revenge
against his enemy Lucius Boyle. Every outrage at the hands of his fellow prisoners, every bruise and knock stoked his hatred of the boy who had betrayed him. Unable to escape and unlikely to be
rescued, he survived each day with thoughts of revenge.

The many months at sea did nothing to diminish his passion. As people died around him, he drew strength from the hope that he would soon return to London. A passage to the Antipodes is
punishment enough for many crimes, and through roaring tempests, thirst and the briny swill of vomit in overheated lower decks, another man might have forgotten. But Noah’s bestial treatment
at the hands of fellow prisoners reminded him daily of the injustice of his punishment. True, he had stolen from the brewery, but the fire (and the betrayal) was Boyle’s crime. Boyle should
have been the one locked in that verminous hull. Boyle should have been the one with iron chafing at his bones and the suffocating nausea blocking his senses. It was the motivation that kept Noah
alive.

SEVENTEEN

Mr Hardy lowered the newspaper from which he had been reading aloud to the gathered ‘performers’ and folded it neatly into his lap. Though his feet did not reach
the ground in the adult-sized chair, and though the opened newspaper had stretched his arms to their limit, he maintained an air of dignity and authority that was much needed under the
circumstances.