“We think so.”
“Give me your lantern, Richard.”
Burton reached into his pocket and pulled out his clockwork lantern. He shook it open and wound it, then handed it over to his assistant.
Swinburne removed his topper and laid it on the coffee table, then ducked down, stepped into the fireplace, and raised the light into the chimney.
“I'm going up,” he said, and, bracing his legs against either side of the opening, he began to climb.
“Be careful, lad!” Trounce cautioned.
“Don't worry,” Burton said. “Vincent Sneed trained him well.”
“Don't mention that cad!” came Swinburne's hollow voice. “I say! There's a sort of niche up here and a little stash of food. There are more bloodstains, too. I'm going to go all the way up to the roof.”
Little showers of soot fell into the hearth, but less than Burton would have expected; evidently the poet was correct, and the chimney was fairly clean.
Five minutes passed, then scrapes and trickles of black dust and an occasional grunt indicated that Swinburne was on his way back down. His feet appeared, then the poet in his entirety, his clothes and skin blackened, his green eyes sparkling from his sooty face.
“My guess is that a chimney sweep was hired to clean the chimney then came back later to steal food from the house,” he said. “It's not uncommon. Most of the boys are half-starved and those that lodge with master sweeps are often so brutalised that they occasionally seek refuge for a night in suitable chimneys.”
“Suitable chimneys?” Trounce asked. “What constitutes a suitable chimney?”
Swinburne turned off the lantern and handed it back to Burton. “One like this, with a niche in it and a shelf wide enough for the nipper to sleep on.”
“And the blood?” Burton asked.
“They shot him.”
“What?”
“Halfway up there's a furrow in the brickwork with a bullet lodged at the end of it. That shot obviously missed. Another one didn't. There's blood smeared all the way to the top and a lot of it on the roof tiles. The lad got away by the looks of it, but I doubt he survived for long, the poor little blighter.”
The three men were silent for a moment, then Swinburne said quietly: “And now I hate that Prussian swine even more.”
They made a final search of the house in case they'd missed anything then turned off the lights, stepped out, and closed the front door behind them.
“I'll report to the Yard and will have a couple of constables sent over to keep watch on the place,” Trounce said as they proceeded down the path.
“We have no choice but to leave the investigation in the hands of your colleagues now,” Burton said, “which means even if they catch the wretch, we won't hear about it for some considerable time. There is, however, one last thing I can do.”
“What?”
The king's agent pulled open the gate and they crossed to where their velocipedes were parked.
“I can visit the Beetle. He may know something about the injured sweep.”
They started the penny-farthings' engines, mounted, and set off. As they turned back into Cranbrook Road and began to chug down the hill, Burton called, “We'll split up when we get to Mile End. I'll head off to Limehouse. Algy, you go home, get packed, and have a good night's sleep. Stay off the alcohol. Trounce, do what you have to do at the Yard then get yourself home to your wife. We'll reconvene at the Orpheustomorrow morning.”
This arrangement was followed, and just under an hour later, Burton was striding through the stifling fog along the banks of Limehouse Cut canal. The factories that lined it had finished production for the day, and the thousands of workers who toiled within them had dispersed, returning to their lodgings in the loathsome slum that was London's East End-or “the Cauldron” as it was more commonly known.
Burton had left his velocipede in the charge of a constable back on the High Road. It wouldn't do to bring such an expensive vehicle into this district. He'd left his top hat with the policeman, too. The men in this area were most often bare-headed or wore flat caps. Best not to stand out.
The king's agent did, however, carry his sword cane-with its silver panther-head handle-held in such a manner so as to be able to quickly unsheathe the blade should it become necessary.
He arrived at a towering factory that, unlike the others, stood derelict. Nearly every one of its windows was cracked or broken, and its doors were boarded up. He circled around it until he came to a narrow dock at the side of the canal. In a niche in the building's wall, he found iron rungs set into the brickwork. He climbed them.
The edifice was seven storeys high, and by the time Burton reached the roof, he was breathing heavily. Hauling himself over the parapet, he sat and rested a moment.
There were two skylights set into the flat roof with eight chimneys rising around them. The third one from the eastern edge had rungs set into its side, and, after the king's agent had got his breath back, he began to ascend it. Halfway up, he stopped to rest again, then pressed on until he came to the top of the structure. He swung himself onto the lip of the chimney and sat with one leg to either side of it. He'd picked up a number of stones on his way here, and now he retrieved three of them from his pocket and dropped them one by one into the flue. This signal would summon the Beetle.
Burton had never actually seen the strange leader of the League of Chimney Sweeps. All he knew about him was that he was a boy, he lived in this chimney, and he had a voracious appetite for books. The Beetle had been of significant help during the strange affair of Spring Heeled Jack, when he'd arranged for Swinburne to pose as a sweep-a move that led directly to the exposure of Darwin and his cronies-and since then Burton had visited regularly, always bringing with him a supply of literature and poetry. The Beetle was especially desirous of anything written by Swinburne, whose talent he practically worshipped.
Burton wrapped his scarf around the lower half of his face and waited.
From this height there was usually a stunning view across London but today the king's agent could barely see his own hand in front of his face. The fog was dense and cold, and the “blacks” were falling-coal dust that coalesced with ice at a higher altitude and drifted down like dark snow.
He frowned. The Beetle should have responded by now.
“Hi!” he called into the flue. “Are you there, lad? It's Burton!”
There was no answer. He dropped three more stones into the darkness and sat patiently. The minutes ticked by and there was still no sound of movement, no whispery voice from the shadows.
Burton called again, waited a little longer, then gave up.
Where was the Beetle?
Half an hour later, after retrieving his vehicle and headwear, Burton continued homeward. For a few minutes he thought a hansom was following him, but when he reached the main thoroughfares, he became so ensnarled in traffic that he lost sight of it.
Central London had ground to a complete halt, the streets jammed solid with a bizarre mishmash of technologies. There were horses pulling carts and carriages; prodigious drays harnessed to huge pantechnicons; steam-horse-drawn hansoms and growlers; velocipedes; and adapted arachnids and insects, such as harvestmen and Folks' Wagon Beetles, silverfish racers and omnipedes. Burton even saw a farmer trying to drive a herd of goats through the streets to Covent Garden Market.
It seemed to the king's agent that the past, present, and future had all been compressed into the capital's streets, as if the structure of time itself was deteriorating.
None of the vehicles or pedestrians was making any progress, being more engaged in battling one another than in moving forward. The horses were whinnying and shying away from the insects, the insects were getting tangled up in each other's legs and mounting the pavements in an attempt to pass one another, and among them all, cloaked in fog and steam, crowds of people were shouting and cursing and shaking their fists in fury.
Slowly, with many a diversion down dark and narrow side streets and alleyways, Burton made his way out of Cheapside, past the Bank of England, and along Holborn Road. Here, at the junction with Red Lion Street, he collided with another velocipede-whose driver had lost control after his vehicle's boiler burst and knocked the gyroscope out of kilter-and was almost forced into an enormously deep and wide hole in the road. Clutching at the barrier around the pit so as not to topple from his penny-farthing, Burton cursed vehemently, then reached down and turned off his engine. The other man, who'd fallen onto the cobbles, picked himself up and kicked his machine. “Stupid bloody thing!” he cried out, then looked up at the king's agent. “Bless me, sir, you almost came a cropper! Pray forgive me!”