Ratcatcher

There was a long silence during which the Admiral regarded James Read gravely. “That’s quite a story,” he said, finally. “And yet you’re telling us you have faith in this Hawkwood fellow? I would remind you this is more than a mere criminal matter. We are concerned with nothing less than the defence of the realm.”

“I have the utmost confidence in Officer Hawkwood,” Read said firmly. “He’s my best thief-taker. His contacts within the criminal fraternity are considerable. If anyone can track the villains to their lair, it is he.”

There followed several moments of reflection while the First Sea Lord exchanged exasperated glances with Blomefield and Dalryde. Finally, he sighed heavily. “Very well, Read. It seems we’ve little choice but to accept your recommendation. Let’s see what the fellow can do. However, I’ll require you to keep the Board informed on a daily basis. Is that understood?”

Read inclined his head. “As you wish.”

Whereupon the First Sea Lord pointed a blunt finger towards James Read’s chest. “But you had better be right, sir. Because God help you if your man lets us down. In fact,” he added with emphasis, “God help us all.”

The girl couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, but the look in her eyes was as old as time. She had gazed up at him, a sly expression on her grubby face, before running her tongue suggestively between parted lips. Then she’d said simply, “Jago sent me.”

She walked beside Hawkwood, a barefoot waif in a threadbare dress. Hawkwood was conscious of the looks the pair of them were attracting, the knowing grins, the nudges and winks. The girl was aware of them, too. She’d have to be blind not to be. But she seemed unconcerned. It was, no doubt, something she’d grown used to.

Along Great Earl Street, through the squalor of Seven Dials, towards the church of St Giles; she was leading him on a merry dance through the back alleyways. Hawkwood presumed this was in case they were being followed. It was a precaution he’d expected.

At the corner of the street, in the shadow of the church tower, she had taken hold of his sleeve and in a thin voice had said, “Stay close.”

It had been a warning, not an invitation.

Nearly a full day had passed before he had been contacted. He had been prepared for that and had used the intervening time to track down the officer commanding the horse patrol that had interrupted the coach robbery and put the two highwaymen to flight.

Lomax, the officer in charge of the patrol, was an ex-major of dragoons. Meeting the man for the first time, Hawkwood had been unprepared for the sight that met his gaze. He knew that revulsion must have shown momentarily on his face but, having received no prior warning, there was nothing he could have done to prevent it.

Almost the entire right side of Lomax’s face, from brow to throat, was a mass of scar tissue. It was as if half of the major’s face had been turned inside out. The eye had gone. The socket was a crater of ragged flesh while the lower jaw, from cheek to jowl, was as fissured and pitted as if it had been scourged with a branding fork.

Hawkwood, trying hard not to avert his eyes, had steeled himself and listened to the major’s description of events.

It had been luck rather than judgement that had found the horse patrol on the heath at the same time that the robbery was taking place. If the mail coach hadn’t been delayed by the storm, Lomax and his riders might have missed the incident altogether. Lomax explained how he had directed two men to remain with the coach while he and the rest of his patrol had given chase. They had managed to track the robbers for a mile or so before conceding defeat. They hadn’t been able to compete with the driving rain, which had, to all intents and purposes, rendered the fleeing highwaymen completely invisible.

About the only information Lomax had been able to reveal was that their quarry was last seen in the Bermondsey area, heading north towards the city. Which meant they could have taken any one of a dozen routes. Suppressing his disappointment, Hawkwood had thanked Lomax for his time. In truth it was as much as he had expected.

It had been at the moment of parting that Lomax had said, hesitantly, “There’s something I’d like you to know. I was at Talavera with the 23rd, under Anson. I … that is … we …” Lomax took a deep breath. “What I mean is … the Delancey boy was a poor officer, not much liked by all accounts, and it was a damned fool thing he did; a waste of too many brave men. You said what had to be said and you did what had to be done. There were those of us who thought you deserved better.” The words had come out in a rush. Lomax had shrugged awkwardly. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know.”

At which point the ex-dragoon had fallen silent, his good eye cast down at the ground, as if embarrassed by his own frankness.

So, that was how he had come by the dreadful disfigurement, Hawkwood realized, remembering the terrible aftermath of the battle.

Many soldiers had died at Talavera, on both sides, not all of them by feat of arms. Another enemy had been present that day, an enemy common to both sides, a pitiless enemy that had attacked without mercy, laying waste all that stood before it.

Fire.

Perhaps it had been a stray spark from a musket or the heat from a cannonball that had ignited the tinder-dry grass, no man knew for certain. Whatever the cause, the result had been terrible to behold. The flames, fanned by the midsummer breeze, had spread with extraordinary speed and fury, consuming all in their path. Men had been engulfed where they lay, the wounded as well as the dead. The screams of the burning men had been clearly heard over the crackle of the flames. The sights and sounds and the smell of roasting flesh had lived with Hawkwood for months afterwards.

Lomax must have been one of those trapped on the field. By some miracle he had survived, but at an appalling cost.

“I was wounded and trapped under my horse,” Lomax said, as if reading Hawkwood’s thoughts. “Couldn’t move, y’see.” The major’s good eye glistened as he remembered. “Damnedest thing, but it was a Frog officer who pulled me free. Heard me yelling. My horse was charcoal by the time he dragged me out. Which is what I would have been if he hadn’t got to me in time.” Lomax shook his head at the memory. “A bloody Frenchie! Who’d have thought it?”

As the major recounted the story, Hawkwood looked down and saw for the first time the full extent of Lomax’s injuries. He tried to imagine the man’s pain, what he must have gone through.

“Couldn’t carry on, of course,” Lomax said. “Could still ride a horse, but a cavalryman ain’t much use if he can’t swing a weapon at the same time.” He held up his right hand, which didn’t resemble a hand so much as a blackened claw. “Can just about pick my bloody nose, if I put my mind to it.” Lomax’s ruined mouth split into a travesty of a smile.

It must have taken a great deal of effort, Hawkwood knew, for the man to say what he had. Even before the fire, the 23rd Light Dragoons had faced their own demons during the battle. Through mistake and misfortune, less than half the regiment had returned from the fight.

But for all Lomax’s well-intentioned words, the past could not be rewritten. Hawkwood had left that life behind. Now he marched to a different drum. On this occasion, it was leading him along a path he did not relish taking. A pilgrimage to a place whose very name was a mockery. A crawling cesspit known as the Holy Land.

The St Giles Rookery was a world within a world. Bounded by Great Russell Street to the north, Oxford Street in the west and Broad Street to the south, and occupying nearly ten acres, it was a festering sore deep in the heart of the city.

Built on a foundation of poverty and vice, its impregnability lay in the sheer congestion of its dilapidated buildings, narrow alleyways, yards and sewers. The wretched tenements with their soot-blackened tiles made the Widow Gant’s miserable lodging house appear a palace in comparison. Between them ran dark passages, some so low and narrow it was impossible for two people to walk abreast. Entry into this rat-run could be gained from a hundred directions by way of the dives and alleys around Leicester Square and the Haymarket and from the dank tunnels leading off Regent Street. To the east lay a timber yard, beneath which, it was rumoured, there existed a passage that ran all the way to High Holborn.

It had been christened the Holy Land by its inhabitants: Irish Catholic immigrants for the most part, though over the years outcasts of a different kind had found sanctuary within its stinking slums. Murderers, deserters, beggars and whores, along with the poor and the hungry, had all sought to establish some kind of haven for themselves away from the prying eyes and unwelcome attention of the Parish Officers and the police. Free from the constraints of conventional society, the inhabitants of the Holy Land had set up their own kingdom, their own laws, their own courts, their own form of justice and punishment. Any representatives of officialdom who chose to venture into the St Giles Rookery did so at their peril.

The girl’s name was Jenny. She had no mother or father, at least not that she could remember. She was just one of the thousands of children who lived on the streets and who scratched a living by their wits or, as in Jenny’s case, by selling their bodies.

Hawkwood could feel the eyes on him as he and the girl picked their way along the overflowing gutter that was the entry point into the rookery. The watchers hovered in worme-eaten doorways and hid behind windows draped with rags, their lifeless faces as grey as brick dust, eyes dark with distrust. Everywhere there were signs of deprivation; mounds of rotting waste, human and animal; dampness and decay.

Somewhere, a woman screamed, the sound rising in a wavering note of terror from a bleak alley, before ending abruptly. Another voice, male, bawled an obscenity. There followed a crash and a squeal. The girl clutched Hawkwood’s sleeve. As the scream was cut off, Hawkwood felt the girl’s grip tighten. For all her brashness, she was still a child, susceptible to fear and dread.

A figure slouched in an open doorway, eyeing their approach. It was only as they drew closer that Hawkwood saw the apparition was female. As they passed, the woman pulled aside her shawl and lifted her tattered skirt to reveal her nakedness. Her breasts and legs were the colour of fish scales and covered in welts. She threw back her head and laughed loudly. “Come on, darlin’! Let the nipper go an’ Molly’ll show yer what a real woman can do!”

As they walked on, the girl pressed against Hawkwood’s side, the whore’s raucous laughter following them up the alley.

By now, they were deep inside the rookery and Hawkwood was well and truly lost. The girl had made certain of that by leading him in all directions, sometimes recrossing their path or by doubling back the way they had come. Hawkwood was beginning to doubt he’d ever find his way back to civilization, or at least what passed for it.

The houses were becoming even more closely packed, the streets narrower, the smell much worse. And it was getting darker. He noted there didn’t seem to be too many people around. It was as if they had been swallowed up by the encroaching shadows. He wondered how much this was due to his own presence.

Without warning, the girl tugged him sideways. He found himself ducking under a low archway. A flight of stone steps led downwards. A heavy wooden door barred their way. Beyond the door, Hawkwood could hear voices. There were other noises, too, guttural and indistinct, and what sounded like the rasping strains of a fiddle. As the girl knocked on the door, Hawkwood felt the short hairs on the back of his neck begin to prickle. The door opened. The girl pulled him through and Hawkwood was plunged into darkness.

5 (#ulink_965309a5-84cc-5911-a802-27963dae7796)

It took several seconds for Hawkwood’s eyes to adjust, finally allowing him to take stock of his surroundings. The cellar was huge with dung-coloured walls, flagstone floor, low arched roof. At the far end of the room, just discernible through the press of bodies and a swirling fog of pungent tobacco fumes, a short flight of wooden stairs led up to a second level, separated from the rest of the cellar by a wooden rail. A crude counter constructed from empty barrels and bare boards stood along one wall.

The drinkers lounged around rough wooden tables or stood at the counter, bottles and mugs in their hands. The women were as rough-complexioned as the men. Without exception, all were poorly clothed, faces gaunt with hunger or ravaged by drink. A fiddle player was seated in the corner. Several male customers were singing in bawdy chorus, coarse voices slurred with drink.

The rest of the clientele, a score or more, were gathered around the dog pit.

There were at least half a dozen dogs in evidence. Bull terriers, squat, broad, powerful beasts, weighing in at a good forty pounds apiece, bodies crisscrossed with scars, and ear flaps removed to make it more difficult for an opponent to get a grip. A couple of the animals, Hawkwood saw, were taste dogs upon which the fighting dogs served their apprenticeship. They’d had the more vulnerable parts of their anatomy shaved so that the trainee dogs learned to attack specific areas of flesh. At the side of the pit stood barrels of flour, used to separate the dogs during fights. It blocked the nasal passages, forcing the animals to relax their grip in order to breathe, allowing their owners to prise them apart.

The place reeked of tobacco smoke, sawdust, spilt liquor, stale bodies, vomit, and piss.

At Hawkwood’s entrance, conversation petered out. The silence, when it came, was so acute it was as if every person in the place was holding his or her breath. Hawkwood felt his skin crawl.

The girl released her grip on his coat. A scrape of a boot from behind made Hawkwood turn. Two men moved to the door, blocking his exit. Each man carried a thick wooden stave. Their gaze was malevolent. Several of the dogs, sensing a stranger and tension in the air, growled menacingly.

“Well now, and what have we got here? Reckon you’ve taken the wrong turning, squire.”

Hawkwood stood perfectly still.

“Christ!” A second voice broke the spell. “I knows ‘im. ‘E’s a bleedin’ Runner!”