Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

He was straddling her, his fingers clamped around her throat, his expression sheer madness now. An image of her father on the tree and the gleefully insane mob came to me. I was not confident of overpowering him, but knew I had no choice but to try. Before I reached them, however, Miss Appleby’s hand closed around a slate shard. She swung this at his head. He gasped: a strange sound, like a cough almost. Tumbling off her, he pressed his hand to his forehead, blood seeping through his fingers, which he then attempted to wipe from his eyes with a sleeve.

We left him sitting there muttering to himself then took the doctor’s horses and rode fast down the hill. At the house, the servant informed us that the doctor had been incarcerated in the gaol for his role in the graveyard affair. Miss Appleby wrote a brief account of her discoveries and handed this, along with the scarf as evidence, to the servant. We borrowed the horses once again and galloped for the station.

In an office adjoining the waiting room, she was visibly relieved to see the strongbox safe and unmolested.

Still, we did not relax until the luggage was loaded on the train and we were able to stare out of the carriage window at the retreating station.

“Congratulations,” I said smiling. “It looks like you have saved a life.”

She shook her head. “Crane is a difficult opponent, and there is still much work to be done to free Tobias. Nothing is certain. Those who deserve to stand on the gallows — the Cranes of this world, the industrialists, the slave merchants and warmongers — never do. But sometimes it’s possible to thwart their perverse idea of justice. I have contributed all I can. I just hope the doctor is strong enough to see it through. And there is your article, Mr. Creswell. I trust that you will do all in your power.”

“Of course. I’ll do my best.”

Instinctively, I reached across and clasped her hands. For a moment, she seemed to respond to my excitable display of affection. I looked into her eyes and saw a yearning there. But only for a second or two. Quickly, almost as an afterthought, she pulled her hands free and turned to face the window. Her cheeks were flushed, her breathing irregular.

My editor liked the headline — INNOCENT BOY TO HANG! — but his expression changed the more he read.

“Absurd, Creswell! Do you honestly expect anyone to believe this mumbo-jumbo? Damn it, man, this is a serious newspaper!”

Needless to say, he did not proceed with the story. I did manage to place it, however, except the magazine was somewhat sensational, and my article was sandwiched between two tales of supernatural fiction. Miss Appleby was not pleased, and she refused to talk to me afterwards. I discovered later that Dr. Mortlock had been released without charge after spending only a day in gaol, courtesy of Mr. Crane. The boy Tobias was less fortunate. He was hanged two weeks later.

I sent a telegram to the doctor offering my condolences. I also wrote to Miss Appleby saying that she should be proud of what she had done, and that I would like to see her again because I had grown very fond of her.

She did not reply.

The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.

It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies, it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.

Nobody drinks it, neither the rain water nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies then come up again, spout the river water, shiver, and hold up their coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.

The woman does not appear to care about the rain.

She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships, as they bob at anchor. She must do something, to keep body and soul from dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.

You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first, for she is statue-still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far side of the Thames has vanished.

And then she sees you. She sees you and she begins to talk, not to you, oh no, but to the grey water that falls from the grey sky into the grey river. She says, “My son wanted to be a sailor,” and you do not know what to reply or how to reply. You would have to shout to make yourself heard over the roar of the rain, but she talks, and you listen. You discover yourself craning and straining to catch her words.

“My son wanted to be a sailor.

“I told him not to go to sea. I’m your mother, I said. The sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel. But he said, Oh Mother, I need to see the world. I need to see the sun rise in the tropics, and watch the Northern Lights dance in the Arctic sky, and most of all I need to make my fortune and then, when it’s made, I will come back to you and build you a house, and you will have servants, and we will dance, mother, oh how we will dance …

“And what would I do in a fancy house? I told him. You’re a fool with your fine talk. I told him of his father, who never came back from the sea — some said he was dead and lost overboard, while some swore blind they’d seen him running a whore-house in Amsterdam.

“It’s all the same. The sea took him.

“When he was twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores, they told me.

“There’s ships of ill-omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.

“Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes shipment of blankets and becomes a plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich …

“My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages — for he was too young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father — that the storm hit.

“He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.

“They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.

“They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.

“Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.

“They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate — who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told — he kept a bone, as a keepsake.