Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘I need the man you were, you rascal, the man you still can be. I need an ironclad Protection Board bastard by my side. Not some sot two drinks from the grave.’

‘Then I hope your u-boat can travel in time as well as in water,’ said Dick, ‘because that man ain’t here anymore. Just me. That’s who you’ve got. And that man’s going to take a cosy cottage on the cliffs above the sea just as soon as it becomes available and leave the great game to someone else. The board’s officers can find another cow to milk for their successes and bugger the lot of them.’

‘Well, there’s one consolation for you,’ said the commodore, thumping him on the back. ‘Poor old Blacky won’t be around to say I told you so.’

When Jethro Daunt entered the wardroom, the only other occupant was the rat-like informant. Barnabas Sadly was standing over a table riveted to the floor, leaning on his cane, a large sea chart spread out across the table.

‘Can you interpret a navigation course, Mister Sadly?’

‘Lords-a’larkey, not the likes of I. But it makes me feel a little better, knowing that someone on this tub has an idea of how to sail through all of that out there. Have you glanced out the porthole? Valleys and mountains and forests of seaweed and fish like birds in the sky. Just the sight of it set my stomach off into a right queasy turn.’

‘No,’ said Daunt. ‘There can’t have been many lessons on matters nautical in your poorhouse classes.’

‘Poorhouse?’ said Sadly, a tone of indignation creeping into his voice. ‘I’m no poorhouse foundling. My father was a cobbler along Velvet Street.’ He tapped his boot with his cane. ‘Couldn’t take over the trade, could I? Customers would come in and take one look at my bad foot and say, well, that one don’t know anything about making a good pair of shoes. We’ll move our business down the lane.’

‘Of course,’ said Daunt. ‘My mistake. There must be nearly fifty cobblers’ shops and stalls along Velvet Street.’

‘But customers still needs to eat, and them that come into an ordinary don’t care much about the person serving them, as long as the beer ain’t stale and the meat overcooked like dry old shoe soles.’

Daunt nodded. Blackening the meat was a favourite trick when it came to disguising rancid cheaper cuts. ‘I hope you don’t lose too much custom back home while you’re on board the Purity Queen.’

‘Mister Tull won’t have thought about that,’ said Sadly. ‘Not once. Any more than his masters at the board gave it a thought when they sent the dustmen over to my place to cut my liver out for what I might have told Mister Tull. I’m useful to the board, they toss me a few bones, but when it suits-’ he drew a finger across his throat, ‘-that’s the way it is with the little people. Nobody thinks about us, nobody cares if that which we’ve built is trampled underfoot by the grand schemes of the quality and the carriage folk.’

‘All of life is flow, Mister Sadly,’ said Daunt. ‘You can only find serenity when you accept the course of the river, rather than trying to build a home of sticks in the centre of the flow and worrying that it will one day be swept away.’

‘It’s true then,’ said Sadly. ‘You’re a churchman as well as a thieftaker.’

‘Unfortunately, the church does not permit parsons in the Circlist order to believe in gods.’ Daunt held up his hands. ‘Defrocked. They are sticklers in such matters. Abandoned, but still occasionally useful to the inquisition. Perhaps that makes both of us little people.’

‘Not you, says I,’ Sadly insisted, his voice lowering in awe. ‘Your name’s whispered in fear among the bad sorts back in the city. When Jethro Daunt is engaged, the villain of the piece had better scarper for the hills, for if they don’t, they’ll end up dangling in the noose outside Bonegate jail. Don’t even think of nobbling him, or that metal ogre of his will drop you off a building with your skull crushed in.’

Daunt ran a finger across the contour lines of the chart. Feared by the underworld, abandoned by the church. Is this what my life has come to? The increasingly faint stimulation of pitting his wits against the most vicious and devious masterminds in the slums of Middlesteel. Crime spread like algae in the stagnant pools of the poor. As soon as one case was solved, there was always another. Their clients, mostly the outraged rich who could afford to pay Daunt and Boxiron’s bills; commercial lords affronted by the down and desperates’ efforts to relieve the rich of some of their wealth. Was it any wonder that Boxiron was growing suicidal with his life, crippled and crammed inside his malfunctioning frame? Any wonder the steamman felt that way when even Daunt — hale and healthy — worried that they chased ever-greater risks in the cases they accepted, just to feel the tingle of being alive. To distract them both from the truth: that for neither of them, was this the appropriate channel their short time in the world had been destined to flow down. What would Daunt’s father have thought of him now, if his bones hadn’t been long buried? His father had been disappointed enough that his son had turned his talents and intelligence towards the seminary, rather than following him into the law. But the life of an articled clerk in the middle court, even rising to be a judge — his father’s dream, never his — had held little appeal. No, it never did to dwell on the might-have-beens. If Jethro Daunt had been stuck in his father’s dusty office, stamping legal summons and reviewing court proceedings, then he would never have been able to rescue Boxiron from his previous life as an enforcer for the lords of the underworld. How many murderers would’ve gone free to kill more innocents?

And if I weren’t here, who would minister to Damson Shades? Certainly not the drunken sop who passed for a surgeon on the Purity Queen. Dose her up with laudanum and reach for the bone saw to carve off a mangled limb. Such methods won’t keep the poor girl alive. To doubt is human, but I need a clear mind and a focused soul if I’m to get to the heart of this matter. I fear the blood of many thousands will be on my hands, should I fail.

Daunt was reaching for the comforting round sphere of a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop when the commodore entered the room. ‘With me, lad! The girl’s fever has taken a turn for the worst!’

The commodore stepped out of the way while Daunt felt Charlotte Shades’ forehead and then took her pulse. Her skin was soaked with sweat while her possessed ramblings had dropped away to a faint murmur. ‘Her fever is not getting worse, Jared. Quite the contrary, it is breaking. She is on the mend.’

‘Are you sure, lad?’ He allowed himself a burst of relief.

The consulting detective nodded. ‘I know my previous occupation concerned itself with the state of my parishioners’ minds and souls first and foremost, but the third component of the natural trinity is the body. And I’m happy to say that young Charlotte Shades’ flesh is returning to balance.’

Seeing Charlotte stretched out on the cot in front of him put Jared Black in mind of another woman, another time. The commodore sighed. One of the strange things about surviving long enough to see your own death swimming up in the water towards you was that the events of your early life often seemed more real and immediate than the occurrences that had happened just the day before. Maybe the brain preferred to remember the body as it had been, hale and fit and with a whole life of possibilities stretched out in front of it, denuded of disappointments. Not crumbling, a casual victim of entropy — eroded by the natural course of life and its sicknesses. Ah, it’s a tricksy thing, a man’s mind. There had been many women, of course, wives who had died and borne him children, but the first love was always the fondest remembered. Maeva, are you still alive? Still out here with the nomads of the sea? He had been in love with her from the first moment he had seen her. And who wouldn’t be? So full of fire. Calling you in like a moth to her light. What he’d felt for Maeva wasn’t just a function of the fact that she had saved his life. Pulling him from the wreckage of a broken u-boat like a fisherman levered winkles from the rocks of the shoreline. There were tales of mermaids who did that, who rescued drowning submariners, but Maeva had been entirely human. And like all the finest women, she had made him feel more human too. After the royalist-in-exiles’ hidden island base had finally been located and destroyed by parliament, Maeva had given Jared Black the thing he had needed most: a reason to go on living.