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Will Thomas: To Kingdom Come

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Will Thomas To Kingdom Come

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It didn’t help my concentration that we faced the back of the house. On the other side of the door, there was a well-appointed kitchen with a pantry, which at that moment contained an apple pie with cognac and caramelized sugar, prepared by one of London’s premier chefs, Etienne Dummolard. Etienne came in most mornings from his Soho restaurant, Le Toison d’Or, with enough freshly prepared food to last us through the day, like so much manna from heaven.

After the pie, I promised myself, I would sit down with a book in the library. Barker was an inveterate book collector, and being a Scot, he had a complete set of the Waverly novels. I had been working my way through them and was now up to The Heart of Midlothian.

“One more time, lad, and we’re through for the night,” Barker said.

I sighed and raised my protesting arms again. It was then that we heard the boom. We both knew instantly that something had happened. If we hadn’t, Harm had. He began barking hysterically. It was his clarion cry, his alarm for us mortals too dull to appreciate that something significant had occurred. In answer, we heard dozens of responses from other canine sentinels across London.

We needed no other warning. Barker and I sprinted across the lawn toward the back door. Once inside, we skidded across the polished floor and climbed the first staircase. Running past my room, we mounted the stairs to Barker’s aerie. My employer seized a small box I’d never noticed before from one of the tables and tripped its latch. Inside was a brass telescope, a relic of his sailing days, I presumed. He flicked open the telescope and scanned the horizon to the west from one of the dormer windows.

“Anything?” I asked. “Anything?”

“Nothing appears to be on fire, but there is a haze on the far side of the river,” Barker responded.

I took the telescope eagerly and looked myself but saw only what my employer had said, a whitish haze over the river where our offices stood.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“I suppose we should go and see if anything is amiss.”

The latter seemed as sensible a decision as any. I left him and went down to the first floor for my jacket. When I came downstairs a few minutes later, knotting my tie, Barker’s butler, Jacob Maccabee, was waiting in the hall with a look of concern on his face.

“It could have been a factory accident, I suppose,” he said, straightening my knot. “Could you hear which direction it came from?”

“You know the garden,” I answered. “It’s like sitting in a soup bowl, with those high brick walls. The Guv looked toward the west.”

I hoped Mac was right, and our going out would be for naught. A factory accident would be preferable to the other possibility, a bomb. Since the previous year, a radical group calling itself the Irish Republican Brotherhood had been leading a dynamiting campaign against the city in an attempt to force a bill for Home Rule. Several bombs had been located safely by the authorities, and one had exploded harmlessly in the baggage room of Victoria Station, but the fact that the attempts had been unsuccessful was not a comfort to most Londoners. The Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard hastily formed a new section, the Special Irish Branch, to safeguard the public and the Royal Family. Despite their efforts, neither Mac nor I was surprised at the thought that the I.R.B. might strike again.

Finally, Barker came down the stairs. He was soberly dressed in a black cutaway coat, his maroon tie thrust up under a wing collar and held with a pearl stickpin. He stepped between us and reached for a stick from the hall stand before opening the door. I naturally followed. The pie and Midlothian would have to wait.

Our hansom cab, which Barker had acquired during our last investigation two months before, was quartered just a half mile away to the east. I assumed my employer would send me to rouse the stable boy, something I’d prefer not to do after a full day’s work and those dratted exercises. As it turned out, that would have been preferable to what Barker had in mind.

“Right, then,” he stated. “Let’s hop it, lad.”

“Hop it, sir?”

“Aye. We’ll walk. You can use the exercise.”

He didn’t waste breath on conversation, but set off northwest along London Road, his stick swinging dangerously back and forth. At an inch or two over six feet in height, he was a head taller than I. Consequently, I had to double his footsteps in order to keep up.

Most of the streets on the south side of London were empty, the shops locked and dark. The residents, enjoying their well-deserved evening of rest, seemed unconcerned by the noise that had brought us out on this quiet evening. A chorus of crickets chirped in the vestiges of Lambeth Marsh south of us, accompanied by the low croak of the frogs that fed on them. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel as if I were back in the country at my childhood home in Wales.

Barker suddenly dodged off Waterloo Road, and had I not been trying to stay close, I would have shot past the lane he ducked into. For the next several minutes I felt as if I were in a maze, following my employer from street to passage to alleyway. Before I knew it, we’d come up along some railroad sleepers, and then we were on a bridge. Not Waterloo, nor Westminster, but a smaller bridge between the two.

“What bridge is this?” I asked, peering over the side at the Thames, which looked as thin and black as India ink.

“The Charing Cross Railway and Footbridge,” he called back, over his shoulder.

“Where does it fetch up?”

“On the Embankment behind Scotland Yard.”

“Wait,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “You mean there’s been a footbridge right by our offices all this time, and you didn’t tell me?”

“If I told you everything, Llewelyn, how ever would you learn anything for yourself?”

I noticed an immediate difference on the west side of the river. There was a chalky grit in the air. The gaslights were balls of light on stalks, as if a globe of frosted glass had been fitted over each one. The haze grew thicker as we approached, and as I watched, wraithlike figures began to come forward out of the gloom. I’d have taken them for ghosts, if I believed in such things, but as we passed among them, they seemed tangible enough; normal citizens, covered in brick dust from head to toe, all staring with dazed expressions out of red-rimmed eyes. Barker and I reached for our pocket handkerchiefs and pushed ourselves through the foglike haze and the crowd of shocked and bedraggled residents. In Whitehall Place, we had to pick our way around piles of fallen bricks. It was only when we crossed Whitehall Street and looked back that we could see the full devastation.

“My word,” I murmured. It was the thirtieth of May 1884, and someone had just blown up Scotland Yard.

2

The entire northeastern corner of the Criminal Investigation Department had been blown out, revealing a jumbled interior and carpeting the area in brick and rubble. In the gaping hole that exposed several floors, the denizens moved about like ants, already beginning to repair their hill. From where I stood, I could see the splintered wooden floor of the gymnasium in which Barker trained constables in physical culture. Our minds registered the fact that we would not be practicing there for some time to come.

“We must lend a hand, Thomas,” Barker said in my ear.

He joined a ring of men around a dying cab horse whose cries were setting my nerves on edge. I stepped back, and found myself standing outside the Rising Sun, a public house in which Barker and I had just eaten lunch a few hours before. The pub looked desolate and open without its glass, but there was activity inside. Surely, they could not be open for business, as if nothing had happened, I thought, as I stepped through the open door.

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