Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

His fingers closed around the coin. "There's an alley on the left halfway between Church-street and George-street: cut up there and you'll find it."

But his eyes darted towards a knot of drinkers spilling from an alehouse. It was enough to put me on my guard and I hurried away, swinging my stick and looking as sour and formidable as I could. Philanthropy is a luxury. You do not find it in the Rookeries, where even the indulgence of a charitable impulse may exact a price.

I reached the entrance to the alley. The way was unpaved, no more than four feet wide, and its surface was thickly covered with a tide of mud and excrement, human and animal, part moist, part frozen. The passage was densely populated with sleeping, drinking and talking figures. Two little girls sat in the filth, nursing bundles of rags and making patties from dirt. Scarcely a yard away, a man and a woman groaned and grunted in an act of copulation that seemed to bring more pain than pleasure.

With my stick held menacingly before me, I waded through the crowd. From the fog-filled court at the end of the alley came a slow dancing melody, "St Patrick's Day", played on a fiddle. I had heard that tune before, when we were quartered next to an Irish regiment. They called the Rookeries the Holy Land or Little Dublin because of the destitute Irish who drained into it from the rest of the city, and the rest of the kingdom.

I reached the gloomy little court at the end of the alley. The building on the right bore a crudely executed signboard showing a fountain. I pushed open the door and, stepping over yet another crawling infant, entered what appeared to be the taproom. It was low and dark, no more than twelve-foot square, and it must have contained at least thirty people. I pushed my way through the press until I came across a woman built like a guardsman with a great leather belt round her waist from which depended a leather pouch and a bunch of keys. I swept off my hat and executed, as best I could in the confined space, a courtly bow.

"Madam," I said, "perhaps you could help me. I am looking for Mr Poe the screever."

She took a long swallow from a tankard in her hand and set it down on a nearby shelf. Turning back towards me, she wiped the foam from her moustache and said, "I am afraid you are come too late." Her eyelids fluttered over small brown eyes like specks of dried fruit in a pudding. "A gentleman with a wonderful fund of poetry. Such recitations we had of an evening. And such a gentlemanly hand, too, he was never short of work. A petition here, a letter of advice and admonition to a beloved child there, a plea to an aged parent beyond the seas." She took another swallow from her tankard. "Mr Poe has a style for each eventuality."

"But he is no longer with you, madam?"

"Alas, no, though he had the bed by the window in my second-floor front for so long he was like one of the family. 'Maria, my love,' he'd say to me, 'you treat me like a king; you are my queen and this room is our palace.'"

She brought her face close to mine and grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of pink, swollen gums. I smelled the sour tang of spirits and the rich, dark odour of rotting meat.

"Why, I could show you the room, if you liked, sir. 'Such a comfortable bed,' Mr Poe used to say, and he had no need to share it, not unless he wished to, if you take my meaning. Well? Should you like to see it with me?"

"You're too kind, madam. Unfortunately, I have pressing business with Mr Poe-"

"There's pressing and pressing, I always say," Maria said, nudging me with her great bosom. "Not so pressing, I hope, that you may not take a glass of something warm to keep out the chill? Once this fog gets in the lungs, it can do for a man in a matter of days. My first husband was consumptive, and my third."

I recognised the force of the inevitable, and requested that she might do me the honour of taking a glass of spirits with me. She relieved me of a shilling, opened a hatch above her shelf and produced tumblers of gin and water.

Shortly afterwards, my hostess became indisposed. First she leaned back against the wall and, grasping my shoulders with a pair of muscular hands, informed me that I was a fine figure of a man. She attempted to kiss me, then drank some more gin and wept a little for her third husband, who she said had touched her heart more than the others.

"Mr Poe's direction, madam," I broke in. "You were so kind as to say you would let me have it."

"Mr Poe," she wailed, trying without success to throw her apron over her head. "My Mr Poe has forsaken his little love bird. He has flown our happy nest."

"Yes, madam – but where?"

"Seven Dials." She sniffed, and suddenly she might have been as sober as a nun. "Got himself a job clerking for a gent, he said, needed to move nearer his new place of employment. Truth was, Fountain-court wasn't good enough for him no more."

"Where in Seven Dials?"

"He lodges in a house in Queen-street." As she spoke, her legs gave way and she slithered slowly down the wall, with her knees rising like mountains until they touched the jutting precipices of her bosom. "There's a man tells fortunes in the house. Ever so genteel. He has a parrot that talks French. Mr Poe said he looked at him – the man did, not the parrot – and told him he saw beautiful women at his feet, and riches beyond the dreams of avarice."

By the time I left the Fountain, the fog had grown even worse. My eyes stung and watered. My nose streamed. I swam through the coughing, spluttering crowds down to Seven Dials. On the way, I passed through St Giles's churchyard. The church itself loomed like a great, smoke-stained whale on the ocean floor. It was as though I were travelling through a city at the bottom of the ocean, a drowned world.

The fancy had barely formed in my mind when I recalled that St Giles was indeed a place where people drowned. A few years before, within a stone's throw of the church, an enormous vat had exploded at the Horseshoe Brewery. Thousands of gallons of beer washed like a tidal wave through the parish, sweeping away stalls, carts, sheds, animals and people. In this locality, many people live in cellars. The beer flooded into these underground homes, and eight people were drowned in ale.

The thought of this vengeful wave sliding through the streets and lanes lent weight to a growing suspicion that I was pursued. The sensation crept upon me by imperceptible degrees, gradually more palpable like a hint of damp in one's sheets. Though I turned and looked over my shoulder again and again, the fog made it difficult for me to identify individuals in the mass of humanity that pressed immediately upon my heels.

I stopped at a street corner to get my bearings, and a set of footsteps behind me also seemed to stop. I turned right into New Compton-street, away from Seven Dials. By now I had convinced myself that someone truly was following me. I continued in a westerly direction, and then swung down and round into Lower Earl-street, and so towards Seven Dials. My conviction wavered. I could hear so many footsteps around me that I could not identify the ones that I thought had been following me.

I crossed Seven Dials and walked slowly up Queen-street, keeping to the left-hand side and peering into each establishment I passed. Roughly halfway down, I found a little shop with a parrot's cage discernible on the other side of its grimy window. I pushed open the door and went inside. The parrot squawked, a strange harsh call with three syllables, instantly repeated. In another instant the squawk became words and acquired meaning.

"Ayez peur," cried the bird. "Ayez peur."

The room was no more than eight feet square, and it stank of coal fumes and drains. For all that, it was a sweeter-smelling place than the street and certainly a warmer one. A man sat hunched over a stove at the back of the shop. He wore a coat that trailed to the ground, a muffler and a greasy skullcap of black velvet. A blanket covered his legs to shield him from the draughts. He turned to greet me, and I saw a clean-shaven face with fleshy features beneath a lined but lofty brow.