The Last Days (16 page)

‘I’m fine.’ Pyke opened his eyes and smiled.

But Pyke was not fine. He was drunk: drunker than he had been in as long as he could remember. So drunk, all of a sudden, that he could barely sit up straight, let alone speak. The room became a jumble of noise and motion. He felt his mouth dry up, his head spin. He felt himself fall, and the next moment he was on the floor, lying in the sawdust, not knowing and caring how he had got there. It was a peculiar feeling, mellow and soothing in its own way, as though he had been deposited in his own soft cocoon. Hearing someone call Lizzie’s name, he recognised her voice. ‘Pyke, Pyke? ’ He wanted to smile, and suddenly it felt as though he were afloat. Above all, he wanted to be left alone, but the voices persisted. Someone lifted him up, two people perhaps. He heard other voices. Vines, proposing, ‘Take him to the bedroom.’ They dragged him upstairs. His whole body felt limp. He did not put up a struggle but rather felt himself falling. Everything went black.

 

The first thing Pyke heard when he finally awoke from his feverish dreams was the squeals and grunts of petrified livestock being driven through the narrow streets outside the gin palace. Trying to open his eyes, he realised that the effort required to do so was beyond him. His mouth tasted stale and arid. He made another attempt to move but a sharp pain in his head wouldn’t allow it. Remaining still, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Weak shafts of morning light pierced the thin muslin curtains. He stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling and soon realised he was not in his own bed. His eyes opened a little more and he fought the sudden pain that streaked across his forehead. Moving his head a fraction to the left, he recognised Lizzie’s wallpaper, her dressing table.

Gently, Pyke turned a little farther to his side and saw Lizzie’s sleeping form. Though Lizzie’s back was turned to him, from where he was positioned her hair looked oddly dishevelled.

Pyke reached out and touched the back of her neck. As he did so, he tried to remember the last time they had woken up in the same bed.

Moving his body for the first time, something squelched beneath him. He lifted his head from the pillow, felt something damp against the back of his neck and had to fight off a wave of revulsion. His initial reaction was that he had pissed himself. His self-disgust was visceral. More awake now, though not yet clear-headed, it took him a moment to work out that his back, his arms, his legs and his head were all covered in something wet and sticky.

With a sudden movement, he sat upright, driven by a mixture of curiosity and unease. He was still fully clothed and his clothes were covered in the same moist liquid; the smell was sweet and yet overpowering.

Sitting upright and fighting off the dizziness, Pyke ignored the icy temperature, pulled back the blanket and almost fainted. The bed was awash with blood, as though someone had slaughtered a cow. At first, Pyke supposed that he must be cut; that he was delirious from the loss of blood. But he did not feel any pain, at least not apart from the pounding headache which was quickly ebbing away under the onslaught of panic. Rousing himself from the bed, he began to check himself, his back, his clothes, all of them dripping with fresh blood. And it was everywhere: on the bed, the sheets, the blanket, the floor, his clothes, his hands, his fingers, his toes, his genitals, and in his eyes, ears, nose, lips, hair and teeth.

Lizzie, though, was not moving, and it finally struck him what had happened, or at least that the blood was not his own.

Pyke stripped the blanket from her motionless body.

Wearing the dress he had bought her, she was lying half on her back, half on her side. There were two red-ringed stab wounds in the middle of her abdomen. Beneath her was a pool of her own blood. Quickly, he checked for a pulse but didn’t find one. Her body was cold, indicating that she had been dead for a number of hours.

Lizzie had also taken a blow to her head. Pyke fought back the urge to gag.

He stripped naked, pulled down the muslin curtain and wiped off the blood. The cream material quickly turned crimson. Leaving his soiled clothes in a heap, he ignored the freezing temperature and went downstairs to the bar and opened a fresh bottle of gin.

Pyke put the bottle to his lips and did not stop imbibing the fiery liquid until he had to pause for breath.

Outside in the yard, he poured two buckets of icy water into a metal bath tub. As he submerged himself in the water, it felt as though his chest might collapse but, gasping for air, he took a bar of soap in one hand and, splashing icy water over himself with the other, he started to scrub himself: his face, his neck, his armpits, his torso, his hands, his groin, his legs, between his toes. He took another bucket of water and tipped it over himself, rinsing off the suds. He rubbed himself dry with a cloth and, picking up the bottle and putting it again to his lips, took another gulp of gin.

Upstairs he dressed in a dark jacket, plain shirt, trousers and boots and returned to the bedroom. He found the knife, a large hunting knife with a jagged blade, on the floor next to the bed. Having wiped it with the same muslin curtain he’d used to clean himself, he placed it carefully in his pocket.

Later, it struck Pyke that if it had not been market day and the street outside had been empty of livestock, they might have caught him. As it was, one of the constables dispatched to arrest him screamed at someone to clear a path through the street, and Pyke looked out of the upstairs window and saw them through the fog: ten or more men wearing tall hats, forcing their way through a stationary herd of cattle.

Even with these men bearing down on him, Pyke knew that he could not leave George to either perish in his bed or suffer some as yet unknown fate; perhaps a slow, painful death in a lunatic asylum. Ascending the stairs to the old man’s garret three at a time, he could feel some of the horror of what had happened begin to hit home. Lizzie was dead. She had been slaughtered in her own bed, while he lay beside her. Briefly, as he knelt beside his old friend, he imagined trying to rouse him from his slumber to explain what had happened, the pain that news of his daughter’s murder would cause, and he felt momentarily overcome by anger, bitterness and his own grief. But he could not afford to indulge these sentiments: men were coming to arrest him for the murder. He did not have time to wake George and talk to him and he did not need to do so. Pyke already knew what his old friend would ask him to do and without another thought he clamped George’s jaw closed with one hand and pinched his nostrils with the other.

He had planned to count to twenty but did not need to go past ten.

Back in his own room, he collected what little money he could find, tumbled down the stairs, let himself out into the back yard and from there into the alley at the rear of the building. Finding an open cesspool, he wrapped up the knife in the muslin curtain and dropped the whole bundle into the dirty water. He heard shouting as the constables forced their way into the gin palace.

A freezing fog had enveloped the whole of Bartholomew’s Field, the site of Smithfield market, making it all but impossible to tell which direction over the treacherous ground he was heading and, advantageously to him, all but impossible for the ten constables to pursue or even locate him. There were other constables attached to the market, appointed by the Corporation of London to regulate practices, but Pyke was not concerned about them; though it was only seven in the morning, they would be ensconced in one of the taverns that bordered the market enjoying their second or third ‘rum hot’ of the day.

Below him the ground was hard but slippery. The usual ankle-deep mulch of manure, rotten animal flesh and faeces had frozen solid, a boon as far as Pyke was concerned because it lessened the smell, but it meant the ground was not easy to walk across. In such conditions, he had seen people slip under the hoofs of frightened cattle and lose their lives. The slow-witted drovers did whatever they could, beat their animals with sticks and rods, gouged their eyes and squeezed their genitals, but they were rarely able to control beasts that were already well used to their cruel practices. When this happened, all one could do was look away and make out that the screams of terror were those of cattle rather than human beings. Afterwards, if the bodies were not at once attended to, they were snatched by the resurrectionists.

Around him through the fog, Pyke could see that cattle and sheep were pouring into the field from every direction. The bleating and lowing of terrified beasts were matched by the barks issuing from the frothing mouths of the drovers’ dogs. Herds of long-horned cattle jostled for position among mounds of quivering animal flesh with Highland oxen. Visibility was less than ten yards and, perversely, was not helped by the drovers’ hand-held lamps, which did little more than transform the fog into an impenetrable wall of white.

The cattle were arranged into smaller circles and between each circle was a pathway for pedestrians and a wooden handrail. Clutching the rail, Pyke followed the path until he was able to make out the faint silhouette of St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

Surrounded by ramshackle buildings and the many narrow alleys and courtyards that made up the area to the east of the market, Pyke looked behind him to make sure no one had followed. He was still drowsy from the laudanum he had unknowingly imbibed and numb from the gin. Instinctively he knew he would need hard currency, but apart from this his mind was blank. Pyke knew, of course, that he was still in a state of shock, but he didn’t have the time to indulge such feelings. He also knew, despite the fog and the early hour, that he was well known in these parts and if news of the murder spread he wouldn’t last more than a few hours without being spotted and perhaps lynched.

In Field Lane, a steep, poorly ventilated street that backed on to the sewage-ridden Fleet Ditch, he bought a smock frock, some corduroy breeches and an old hat from a street trader for two shillings and changed into his new clothes in a narrow back alley behind the Old Red Lion tavern. Two young girls, carrying a pail of milk between them, hurried past him and giggled to one another.

In the Old Red Lion, he procured a pen and a scrap of paper from one of the pot boys and scribbled a note to Godfrey Bond, instructing his uncle to collect as much hard currency as he could manage, and meet him on the south side of London Bridge at midday.

He didn’t want Godfrey arriving in a thieves’ den like Smithfield or Field Lane carrying a large sum of money. He wanted their meeting place to be public, safe and identifiable, somewhere that even Godfrey would know how to find. And should Godfrey be followed, it was important that Pyke had his route of escape planned. In this scenario, Pyke would see anyone who was following his uncle and would be able to slip off into the labyrinthine streets that surrounded Southwark Cathedral.

Taking a half-crown from his pocket, he placed it into the pot boy’s hand and explained that if he successfully delivered a note to a Mr Godfrey Bond in person, then Bond would give him a whole guinea for his efforts. The boy looked down at the coin in his hand and gave Pyke a toothy grin. Pyke told him Bond could be found at number seventy-two St Paul’s Yard, and if he was not there the boy was to go to the George Inn on Camden Place. If not there, then the Castle in Saffron Hill, or the Blue Boar in Holborn, and if Godfrey was not in either of those places, the boy was to look for him in the New Wheatsheaf at the top of Ludgate Hill or the Privateer on Wellington Mews.

The boy squinted at him and grinned. ‘I take it this friend of yours likes to take a drink.’

 

But stupidly, Pyke had not thought to take into account the fog, which had thickened throughout the rest of the morning, so that by the time he heard the Southwark bells, less than a few hundred yards away, chiming midday, he could barely see his own hands and feet, let alone the towering cathedral. The fog was thick but patchy, and as it swirled around him he caught glimpses of the new bridge, which was being built alongside the old one, wooden scaffolding supporting the giant granite arches, and beyond that, disembodied masks of tall ships bobbed up and down in the choppy waters like ghostly apparitions. It was bitterly cold, and his new clothes had left him desperately exposed to the elements. He dug his hands into his pockets and scanned the faces of those walking towards him across the old bridge for any sign of his uncle. The fog momentarily cleared and he saw Wren’s mighty dome appear in the distance and then vanish, as though by a malevolent act of conjuring.

The bridge itself was, literally, falling down. There were no houses or shops on it, as there once had been - they had long since been demolished - and more recently the cobbled surface had been widened, to accommodate more traffic, but these changes had not made the bridge any more secure. The fact that a new bridge was being constructed was a testament to its decrepitude. The creaking arches, which housed waterwheels and supported the main crossing, had been badly damaged by the last big freeze, when the river had completely iced over.