T. Boyle - Water Music

Claude M. Osprey, Jr., offers a reward of £100 for information leading to the apprehension of three men, a one-legged man among them, who committed a heinous act of depravity against God and Nature in the St. Paul’s churchyard on the night of June the eighth. Information held strictly confidential. Great Wood St., Cheapside.

There are thirtyseven respondents. One after another they slouch into the study of the house on Great Wood Street. Bearded, one-eyed, pockmarked, drooling and stinking, each has a story for the young heir. He listens to semicoherent tales of murder, cannibalism, rape, robbery and mayhem. He hears of kidnapping and mutilation, fellatio, buggery, gypsies, blackamoors and Jews. The carpets are soiled and the spitoon full when a rangy man of about forty is led into the room, his biceps as lean as a side of bacon. A beard of three or four days’ growth darkens his chin, and he reaches up to stroke it from time to time with quick nervous fingers. His eyes are bright as bits of blue glass. “My name’s Crump,” he says, his voice flayed and harsh. “I knows the men ye want. Graverobbers.”

Osprey motions for him to sit.

“They’re a vicious lot, in league with the divil. It’s un’oly wot they done. Inyooman.”

Tight-lipped, seductive, Osprey rattles a bag of coins. His eyes hold the other man like pincers. “Where are they?”

“The gimpy one, ‘ee’s Quiddle. Ye’ll find ‘im at St. Bartholomew’s. The other one, the one with the flat ‘ead, they calls ‘im Boyles, Billy Boyles. ‘Ee’s a drunk. Sleeps in sheds and carts and such. But ‘oo you wants is the ringleader, the brains behind it all.” Crump pauses to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. “That’s a hunnert pund yer offerin’, init?”

Osprey rattles the bag, slow and sweet.

“ ‘Is name’s Ned. Ned is all I knows ‘im by. ‘Ee’s a subtle snake, ‘ee is. Slippery. But I’ve watched ‘im and I’ve followed ‘im like a terrier after a rat. I can tell ye where ‘is lodgins is at. In Lime’ouse. Upstairs from the Mermaid Tavern.” Crump pauses to lick his cracked lips. “Go now,” he whispers, “and catch ‘im while it’s light.”

♦ THE HOUND OF EARTH ♦

Experience has taught Ned Rise a good many things — nearly all of them unpleasant. One thing it has taught him is to keep his assets liquid. Another is to wear a life jacket if you’re expecting heavy seas. He has also come to understand that the prudent homme des affaires never removes his shoes, keeps one eye propped open in repose, and never under any circumstances allows himself to enter a room with only one door.

And so, when Osprey and a pair of armed lieutenants burst in upon him entirely unannounced and unexpected, Ned is only partially surprised. Though he is in bed asleep when they kick in the door of the front room, he has vanished by the time they reach the bedroom. As the front door splinters there is a moment of recognition during which the young heir, armed to the teeth, stares directly into the eyes of the bodysnatcher, startled awake in his bed. Not fifteen feet away. Through the doorframe, in the back room, under the bedclothes. Osprey has already begun to smile a wicked vengeful smile when Ned simply turns over in bed and disappears. One minute he is there, flesh and blood, and the next he has been drunk up by the air, trompe l’oeil, like a blacksnake vanishing into a stone wall.

Ned has planned for such contingencies. When he rented the modest apartment from the landlord of the Mermaid, he also took charge of a small room on the floor directly below it — a room no bigger than a closet actually — explaining to the landlord that he was an itinerant merchant and that he needed the extra space to store his wares. The landlord said he didn’t give a great blue damn who he was or what he did with his rooms, so long as there was no destruction done and he paid his rent on time. Ned smiled, and counted out the first week’s rent in advance. Then he appropriated Delp’s bone saw, waited until a fresh boatload of tars and salts began drinking, shouting, breaking glass and howling out sea chanties downstairs, and cut a neat round hole in the floor of his bedroom. The hole communicated directly with the closet on the floor below. It was the work of a minute to slide the bed across the room and conceal his handiwork. Add to this the fact that Ned always slept fully dressed, with his life savings tied up in a sock round his neck, and it is understandable that he was able to elude his would-be captors.

For the time being, at any rate.

For Osprey was not so easily discouraged. He seemed quite willing to let the chamberpot business languish in the hands of underlings while he pursued his present affair to its conclusion. The outrage to his father’s remains would have been reason enough to hunt the perpetrators to the far corners of the earth, but when coupled with the outrage to himself, the very existence of these thieves, kidnappers and crypt gougers was intolerable, rankling, a blot on society, and their extermination took on the nature of a sacred mission. Dogged, indefatigable, he was mad for vengeance, his mouth bitter with the taste of bile, his dreams puddled with blood.

The first to go was Quiddle. He was apprehended at St. Bartholomew’s, imprisoned, tried and eventually hanged. The only evidence against him was a deposition by the junior Osprey. It was enough. Delp, of course, denied everything. He did attend the execution though — seeing that Quiddle had no next of kin. Afterward, in a gesture that touched nearly everyone present, he stepped forward and announced that he himself would take charge of the body.

Boyles was another story altogether. He was none too bright, and dead drunk about three quarters of the time. But where he might be from moment to moment was hard to say. He had no lodgings. No friends. No job. No prospects. He slept in doorways, kitchens, ginshops. Osprey hired a dozen men to roam the alleys and taverns in the neighborhood of the hospital and to keep a watch in Limehouse. But to no avail: Ned Rise found him first. He was down on Hermitage Dock, taking in the sun and watching a swarm of skinny-legged boys dive into the Thames while seabirds dangled from the sky and three-masted schooners ran with the breeze like great white swans. He had a lemon, a potato and a bottle of gin with him, and he was sucking at them in slow succession — first the gin, then the lemon, and finally the potato. When Ned spotted the familiar flat head and tattered overcoat, he felt a rush of relief. Boyles turned his glittery green eyes and long nose to him as he sat down. “Neddy! Wot’s up? Another job?”

“We’re in trouble, Billy.”

Boyles didn’t want to hear it. He looked out over the gray sudsing waves like Napoleon surveying the Channel. “Lookit the way them gulls hangs in the air, like somebody was runnin’ a Punch and Judy show out o’ the sky,” he murmured. There was a fragment of lemon pulp stuffed up his nostril.

“They got Quiddle.”

“Who got ‘im?”

“Osprey.”

There was no change in Boyles’ expression. He looked at Ned blank as a baby.

“The one we dumped two nights back — the chamberpot king.”

Boyles’ face fell. He began to look queasy, as if his recollection of the fire-eyed young heir had suddenly cast him into stormy seas or swamped his potato in stomach acid.

“They’re going to hang him, Billy.”

Boyles absorbed this information with the same half-thoughtful, half-bilious look. His face gradually went white and he reached clumsily for his mouth. Then he vomited potato, lemon and gin all over the dock.

Ned took the bottle from him and flung it into the river. “Come on, Billy,” he said, “get up. We’ve got to go get ourselves lost.”