By Gaslight by Steven Price

Author:Steven Price [Price Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

TWENTY-ONE

The scarred, vicious face of Muck Annie haunted William in the days following. He had left Foole at the sewer entrance two nights earlier on the understanding that they would meet again, this night, at a public house on the edge of Shadwell. He had stooped in under the crooked timber door frame and peered about at the dejected in their cups feeling a sudden uneasiness and then turned and gone back out. But ten minutes later Foole had approached, whistling softly under his breath, and together they started down into the crowded East End. The streets were lit only by old-fashioned lanterns creaking from hooks that had been nailed into the lintels of public houses in the murderous days of George III and there were no lights else but for the flare and sheen reflecting off the puddles and rivers of muck in the streets.

St. George’s Street. Whatever else it was not England. Bearded Jews with their ringlets and prayer shawls wading powerfully through the crowds like some ancient warning from the East, their shoulders wide-set, their necks bullish. Walking five abreast and wringing empty sacks in their fists. Peddlers with stacks of stained silk hats tottering on their lice-ridden heads, tiny pickpockets running barefoot through the sludge. Once the crowds parted like a sea and out of the throng William saw emerge a very short Turk in a tall white headdress and in his fist was a rope and at the end of that rope a brindled cow. Drunk Swedes with faces painted like acrobats shouted out some mournful song over the heads of the crowd. Laughing at their own misery as if it were some joke. Pigs ran loose underfoot. At the corner of Cannon Street Road William met the dark Asiatic stare of a woman selling Bibles from an overturned crate and he looked quickly past her. Just beyond, like a pale horror rising from the blackness, the limestone tower of St. George-in-the-East. Foole mingled, Foole did not slow. The air was cold. They passed two ladies in fur collars leading a monkey on a leash north towards Shadwell station and William looked at it and understood it would be dead within the week. They walked downwind from Jamrach’s Menagerie, the reek of offal and shit and animal fear shouldering past them, they passed the walled rose garden of the old Wesleyan graves. At a pie stand he saw a thin man wrapped in rags exhibiting a bucket of turtles to a gaggle of urchins. Cloth caps folded into little fists, eyes agog. The man swung the turtles in an elegant dance and he saw the man’s milky stare and he knew that the wretch was blind.

Then they were turning north into Victoria Street and all around them came the spice from cooking fires and he saw in the crowds the grim faces of Chinese and Indians and Malays. He could smell hashish and opium, cinnamon and oranges. He felt dizzy with the noise. Squalid figures

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