“It will be mainly … indoors. And she’s alive! Put your coat back on.”
Crawford tried to yell very quietly as he looked around the room and thought of his bed and the oblivion of sleep waiting for him upstairs.
His wife and younger son were dead, and Girard was … something like and unlike dead.
But this Johanna was, apparently, still alive.
He drained the whisky and, with huge reluctance, picked up his coat.
MCKEE WHISPERED, “YOU KNOW the Spotted Dog, on the next street?”
She and Crawford were standing in the recessed doorway of his house with the closed door at their backs. The night air was colder than ever, and her little birdcage was wrapped in a cloth in her handbag.
Crawford was hugging his coat around himself and shivering. “Of course.”
“Meet me there. I’ll walk west, around the old Inn of Chancery, and you go east, as we did this morning.” He saw a quick smile on her face in the shadows, and she softly sang a couple of lines from a popular song: “‘Meet me by moonlight alone, / And then I will tell you a tale.’”
And something-something at the end of the vale, thought Crawford, remembering the vapid lyrics. And was it, he thought forlornly, only this morning that this woman and I walked down to the Strand and got in an old hackney cab with that clerk? And the day’s not done yet.
She had tapped down the steps and was hurrying away to his right, quickly disappearing in the shadows of the old overhanging houses that were now mostly used-clothing shops.
Crawford touched the lump under his coat that was the little bottle of crushed garlic, then sighed and descended the steps and set off to the east.
This end of the street was brighter, for the windows of the Angel public house glowed amber in the fog ahead of him, and, when he had rounded both corners of the place, he could see the blurry lights of the bookshops that had driven the old-clothes business into the next street — though the gigantic masks over the vacated costume warehouse still grimaced down from the murky shadows overhead as he passed by.
The Spotted Dog was at the far end of Holywell Street, almost to Newcastle Street, and Crawford, his gloved hands deep in his overcoat pockets, peered in at the shop windows he passed. Three-volume novels, newspapers, pamphlets denouncing Darwin … he wondered if the young authoress of the Lunar Encomium was represented by any published books. On the whole, he hoped not.
CHAPTER SIX
“Nay now, of the dead what can you say,
Little brother?”
(O Mother, Mary Mother,
What of the dead, between Hell and Heaven?)
MCKEE HAD ARRIVED at their rendezvous before he did and pulled the door open for him.
“We’ll have to buy two tickets,” she said, “even though we’re only going downstairs.” She had four pennies in her hand, and she pushed the big brown coins across the counter of a little window set into the wooden wall of the entry hall; and a moment later she turned and handed Crawford a dented tin card, keeping another in her gloved hand.
She gestured toward the open doorway beyond the counter, and Crawford shrugged and stepped through into what proved to be a vast kitchen lit by gas jets between the beams of the ceiling, with at least twenty people standing around on the flagstone floor or sitting on a bench that ran like a continuous shelf around the whole room. A big black iron stove stood in a far corner, and something was cooking that involved bacon and onions. Some people were lining up with plates.
Crawford looked hopefully at McKee, but she shook her head. “Downstairs,” she said, nodding toward a doorway in the back wall, which was papered with posters announcing various music-hall performers.
Crawford followed her across the room, promising himself a good supper when he got back home.
A couple of the men on the bench called, “Addie!” and another said, “Back in trade, girl?”
“Don’t you just wish, Joey,” she said to him, not pausing.
Beyond the doorway was a dark hall and a flight of wooden stairs leading down. A cold draft welled up from below, smelling of wet clay and wood smoke.
McKee paused at the top of the stairs to shed her coat and bonnet and hang them on a couple of hooks in the wall. “Leave your hat and coat here,” she said. “And take off your gloves. You’ll want to be able to feel the walls.”
Crawford sighed and carefully hung his coat and hat on another hook and stuffed the gloves in his trousers pocket.
The stairs were unlit, and as McKee and Crawford descended below the level of the floor, he held the banister rail and felt for each step with his boot.
He was holding the little tin card in his left hand. “Will we need to show these to anybody?” he whispered. “The tickets.”
“Those are for bed check,” came her voice from the darkness below him. “We’re not going to be sleeping here.”
“No,” he agreed, tucking the thing in his pocket on top of his gloves. He peered uselessly upward, wondering what sort of beds the Spotted Dog offered. “Shouldn’t we have brought lanterns?”
“It’s considered arrogant. There’ll be light after a while, farther down.”
Considered arrogant by whom? he wondered. “Shouldn’t we be talking in whispers?”
“Not yet. This is still the Spotted Dog basement, really.”
The banister ended in a splintery stump, and as they descended farther he had to press his right palm against rough bricks.
Crawford cleared his throat and spoke a little more loudly. “You’ve been here before?”
“A couple of times. But there are ways down all over the City.”
“Are we … going into the sewers?” Crawford had heard stories about feral rats and pigs that lived in the London sewers. “What I mean to say is — I’m not going into the sewers.” Her definition of downstairs was proving to be more far-reaching than he had expected.
“Old sewers,” she said in what was apparently meant to be a reassuring tone. “Ones that have been cut out of the system by newer ones. Just damp tunnels now, except when it rains. Right below us was a regular Phlegethon a couple of years ago, but the new interceptory Piccadilly Branch drained it.”
“Phlegethon,” said Crawford, largely to gauge the volume of the unseen space they were in by the way his voice rang in the dark. “Plato’s flaming river to the underworld, in Phaedrus. You’re well-read.”
“This one caught fire too, sometimes. Oil and decaying ghosts on the water igniting — smoke coming up out of street gratings — you probably noticed it. I’ve always been one for having the nose in a book, and at Carpace’s there was plenty of spare time for reading.” He heard her pause below him. “Steps ending here, flat floor for a while. Not level, but flat.”
“I,” said Crawford carefully, “killed her. Carpace.”
The sound of her steps changed from clumping on wood to tapping on stone, and he stepped carefully down onto the sloping floor.
“If you had not,” McKee said, “she would have killed me.” He heard her sigh. “I suppose I parade it, sometimes. Quoting things. So people at least won’t assume I’m a typical ex-whore and Hail Mary dealer.”
So much for Carpace, Crawford thought. “Not just one more of that lot,” he agreed, and she laughed quietly.