The Angel of Highgate (28 page)

“We must help the poor creature. I have nothing left, Algy. Do you?”

Algernon rummaged in his pockets and found a single coin: a silver sixpence.

“It’s only a sixpence, I’m afraid.” The woman took the coin from him and stared at it blankly. She stopped her rocking and held the baby up for Algernon to see. He leant forward to look only to recoil in horror at the stench of corruption. The baby was dead and had swollen obscenely, its skin a bruised purple color.

“Dear God!” Algernon gasped. “The baby has been dead for a week!”

“The poor woman is quite deranged,” Thraxton said. “I never would have believed such things could happen in England.”

Something crashed in the room they had just left. Dogs howled and whined. The door had finally burst open.

“We can’t help these poor souls, Algy. The dogs have our scent. We must away, before we bring them in here.”

Thraxton and Algernon slipped out the front door only to find themselves in another blind alley. But framed at the end of the alley was a large building of many stories.

“It looks like an old factory or warehouse,” Algernon said.

“Yes,” Thraxton agreed. “The largest and tallest building in the rookery with the highest vantage point. I’ll wager that’s where we’ll find Mordecai Fowler.”

* * *

Aurelia lay on the bare floorboards of the snug, a tiny windowless room high in the rafters of the old factory. Her arms were lashed to the legs of a table. She looked up in fear at the rattle of a key turning in a lock. The door opened and Mordecai Fowler squeezed inside followed by Fanny, a disheveled slattern. The two tromped across the bare floorboards to where Aurelia lay and stood eyeing her critically.

“Well, well,” Fanny said. “You ’ave found a proper little darlin’ ain’t ya, Mordecai?”

Mordecai grinned as he scratched the matted beard under his chin. “’Ow much do ya reckon, then?”

The woman crouched over Aurelia, groping her thighs and buttocks like she was appraising a sheep at auction. Aurelia squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away, but Fanny grabbed her chin and twisted her face toward the light of the greasy candle. “She’s no girl, but she’s fresh, this one is. If she’s not been diddled, I hear tell of private clubs where rich gents will tip up as much as two to three hundred pounds for a nice, tight quim.”

“Well, we best find out if she’s still a virgin then, ain’t we?”

“Hold her legs,” Fanny said.

Fowler grabbed one booted foot while his slattern grabbed the other. Aurelia screamed as they lifted her skirts and began to spread her legs. “No, please, I beg you!”

“Shaddup!” Fanny shouted, back-handing Aurelia across the face. Aurelia continued to kick and squirm, but Fanny finally caught hold of her foot and pushed her legs wide.

They were interrupted when a trap door opened in the ceiling, a pair of legs dangled, then Titch dropped onto the table beneath and sprang to the floor.

“What do you bleedin’ well want?” Fowler yelled.

“Mister Fowler, look wot I got!” Titch handed Fowler the bag of coins he’d lifted. Fowler opened the purse and spilled golden sovereigns into his hand.

“Bleedin’ hell! There must be fifty sovs in here. Wheredja gettit?”

“Coupla toffs. We lifted it from ’em easy as you like.”

“Pair of toffs? Here in Seven Dials?”

Fowler’s eyes flickered over Aurelia, putting it all together. “They come for you, ain’t they, my little dolly-mop?”

Aurelia trembled, her face flushed with hope. Fowler shot a penetrating look at Titch.

“Two toffs, you said?”

“That’s right, Mister Fowler.”

“And they had fifty sovereigns between ’em?”

“Yeah.”

“Then how come there’s only one purse?”

Titch’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Seems more likely they had two purses, each with fifty sovs in it. I know you got sticky fingers, Titch. You sure there wasn’t no more?”

“No, straight up there wasn’t, Mordecai!”

Fowler’s face twisted in a sick parody of a smile. He patted Titch on the head with a filthy hand. “There’s a good, honest lad.” But then the hand tightened, gripping a handful of Titch’s hair and Fowler dragged him closer. He thrust his free hand down the front of the boy’s trousers and pulled out the second leather purse. “What’s this, eh?” Fowler bellowed in Titch’s face. “What the bleedin’ hell is this?”

“I was gonna tip that up to you, Mistah Fowler, honest I was!”

Fowler tossed the bag of sovereigns to Fanny, then clamped a huge hand around the boy’s throat and squeezed until his mouth gaped and his eyes bulged.

“Nobody steals from me! Nobody!”

“Mordecai, he’s just a nipper. Let him go!” Fanny rushed forward and tried to pull Mordecai’s hand free, but received a punch in the side of the head that knocked her to the floor howling in pain.

Fowler slammed Titch against the wall and drew Mister Pierce from its leather scabbard.

“Dear God!” Aurelia cried. “Please no. He is just a child!”

But the bloodlust was surging through Fowler’s brain and now there was no preventing what was about to happen. “Mister Pierce don’t like you, Titch. He says you been a very bad boy. A very, very bad boy!”

Fowler drove the spike into Titch’s stomach and wrenched upward. Titch’s eyes widened, his mouth gaped in shock. He coughed once, spraying droplets of blood. His face spasmed and then relaxed. Fowler let go and Titch slid down the wall until he sat slumped in a widening pool of blood, his eyes dead and staring.

Aurelia turned her face away and squeezed her eyes shut. Surely she had been captured by devils and dragged down to the lowest level of hell.

T
hraxton and Algernon stood looking up at a giant red devil, ten feet tall. Next to the painted devil faded white lettering spelled out “Lucifer Matches.” The building had once been a match factory, but times had changed and the foul-smelling Lucifers were beginning to fall from favor. Congreve matches, which used white phosphorus and had no smell, were now the choice of many.

Running alongside the factory was the foul Lethe known as Filthy Ditch. In their peripatetic wandering, Thraxton and Algernon had scribed a ragged circle and now found themselves back at the same narrow canal they had crossed over to enter the rookery.

The two friends studied the façade of the hulking brick building. “How do we get in?” Algernon whispered.

Thraxton nodded. Up ahead an open doorway gaped blackly. The two men ducked inside. No sooner had they entered than a long, low whistle sounded. At the signal, men stepped from shadowed doorways and quietly dropped over walls until a small army of around thirty stealthily converged outside the door the two gents had just entered.

Inside the match factory, most everything of value had long since been pilfered, stripped and hauled away. They found themselves in the echoing first floor, a large space empty apart from a stout ladder that passed vertically through a hatch in the ceiling. They both stared up at the ominous black opening.

“Should we go up?” Algernon whispered. “Someone could be waiting for us.”

Before Thraxton could answer both men heard a sharp whistle and suddenly the door banged open as a horde of mobsmen armed with cudgels and clubs poured in.

“Yes!” Thraxton shouted. “We should go up!”

Algernon scrambled up the ladder as fast as he could. His friend followed close behind and was almost through the hatch when a mobsman seized his leg. Thraxton back-heeled him in the face, sending him tumbling back down the ladder, knocking other mobsmen with him. The second floor was also empty but had a second ladder nearby that ascended through another hatch in the ceiling. The two friends sprinted to it and began to climb just as the first mobsmen reached the second floor.

“They’re goin up!” one of the mobsmen yelled. “Stop ’em, Charlie!”

But both men had already reached the third floor. Holes gaped in the roof through which moonlight streamed, dimly illumining the room. A few wooden barrels stood here and there, labeled “tar” and “sulfur.”

“Algy,” Thraxton shouted. “Keep them at bay!”

As the mobsmen surged up the ladder, Algernon held them off, flailing wildly with his walking stick, beating the heads and shoulders of mobsmen who tried to surge out of the open hatchway and stamping on the hands that gripped the ladder rungs. Thraxton spun the barrel over to the opening, pried the wooden top loose with the tusks of his snarling boar’s head walking stick, and then tipped it over. Thick black pitch poured out, deluging the mobsmen clinging to the ladder. Angry curses and shouts came from below. Blinded and coated with slippery tar, men toppled from the ladder onto those below.

“Algy. Let’s tip it up!”

Both men grabbed the bottom of the barrel and upended it so that it dropped into the open hatchway like a cork in a bottle, sealing the opening. Thraxton heaved his weight onto the barrel to firmly wedge it into place.

“They won’t be coming up that way, soon,” Thraxton said.

“Yes, but there’s probably other ways up here.”

Thraxton drew the dueling pistol from his belt. “We’ll need these, now.”

The two men ran through a succession of empty rooms. The match factory seemed empty and deserted and Thraxton began to wonder if it really was Fowler’s lair. They reached a final darkened doorway and exchanged glances.

“I wish we’d brought lanterns,” Algernon whispered.

“Could be a trap. Keep your pistol ready.” Thraxton cocked his pistol and Algernon followed suit. Cautiously, they eased through the doorway into darkness, eyes wide, straining to make anything out.

“Nothing… I don’t think—” Thraxton started to say, but then a vertical panel slammed down behind them, sealing off the doorway they had just come through and blocking their retreat. Blinding light flared as the two men found themselves caught in the convergence of several lantern beams.

“Well, if it ain’t the toffs!” a voice boomed.

Thraxton and Algernon pointed their pistols this way and that. They knew immediately who the voice belonged to and now he stepped forward from behind the glare, a surprisingly short, fat, bestial man: Mordecai Fowler. Both men trained their pistols on him, but he showed no concern, taking another step forward.

“Thought I’d have a little party for you, so I rounded up all the lads.”

“You know what I’ve come for,” Thraxton said.

“Yeah,” Fowler hissed, the simian face smirking. “Your little dolly-mop. Tells me you’re a lord and how you’re gonna come and get her. That you ain’t feared of nuthin’. She don’t half moan when you’re giving her the old in-and-out,” Fowler preened, thrusting his hips obscenely. “Especially wiv this.” He drew out Mister Pierce and showed it to Thraxton. The polished tip shone silver in the lantern glare.

Thraxton’s jaw clenched. A horrible sickness roiled in the pit of his stomach. “If you have so much as touched her, Fowler…” Thraxton said in a trembling voice.

“That’s Mistah Fowler, Esquire, to you, Your Lordship. You is a lord, isn’t ya? Well, Lord Toff, you’re on my patch now. And here I’m more than a lord—I’m the king. I decide who lives… and who don’t live.”

“We have money,” Algernon said. “We are willing to pay—”

“
Had
money,” Fowler corrected. He drew one of the sacks of sovereigns from his coat and shook it before their eyes. “Mine now.” Fowler nodded and one of his men stepped forward from behind the Bullseye lantern beams, dragging something which he dumped at Fowler’s feet. A body. Fowler rolled it over with a kick. Titch’s dead face stared up at the ceiling. “Poor little Titch. He tried to steal from me. He won’t do that no more, will he?”

Fowler nodded to one of his men. “Get rid of him, before he starts to stink up the place.”

The darkness resounded with the twin
thwacks
of deadbolts being shot and then two wooden doors swung open onto the night, spilling in a swirl of smoky air. Beyond the doors, a short loading balcony jutted out onto a precipitous drop. Dangling above, the jib of a crane used to winch goods up to this third-floor room from the ground below. In the hazy distance glimmered the gas lights of London.

Two burly men stepped forward and dragged away Titch’s corpse. When they reached the open loading doors, they hefted the small corpse between them, gave a one-two-heave-ho and launched the body into the darkness. Seconds later, a splash resounded as the tiny corpse cleared the cobblestone loading dock below and plunged into Filthy Ditch.

Fowler laughed darkly. “We comes from the filth and we goes back to the filth. That’s how things are in the Seven Dials.” The High Mobsman tossed the purse and caught it, reveling in the chink of sovereigns. “I consider this a payment for me allowin’ you to make it this far alive. But now I’ll be askin’ for them fine pistols you and your mate have been wavin’ about.”

Thraxton answered by leveling the pistol directly at Fowler’s nightmarish face. “The only thing you’ll get from me is a pistol ball in the brain.”

Fowler grinned in response. “Oh, I think you’ll be well happy to give us them pistols, Lord Toff. And in return I’ll give ya this here rope what Snudge is holdin’.” He nodded to his men and the lanterns swiveled around, illuminating the room they stood in. Standing beside the open loading doors was Barnabus Snudge, who held tight to Aurelia, a gag in her mouth, wrists bound together. At the sight of his beloved, still alive, Thraxton’s heart soared then sank. But then Fowler gave a nod and Aurelia was swung out onto the jib and left dangling by her wrists, high above the cobblestones.