Fleetwood grinned. He was a pleasant young man, not handsome, but of a countenance that spoke of abundant good nature.
“Bounce you around a bit, did it? Never mind, good for the digestion.”
“Wasn’t thinking of the digestion,” Carlisle replied with a smile. “Or the bruises. Rather more of the balance of the thing. A well-balanced carriage is a lot easier on the horses, takes the corners better, and is less likely to overturn if you get some idiot run into you. And of course if you do get an excitable animal, less likely for the whole thing to get away with you.”
“Damn, but you’re right!” Fleetwood said cheerfully. “Sorry I misjudged you. Sold you short a bit. I’ll have to get it seen to. Must have it right.”
“I know a chap in the Devil’s Acre who can spring a carriage to balance like a bird in flight,” Carlisle offered with a casual air as if it were of no interest to him, merely a graceful gesture after an early morning’s companionship.
“The Devil’s Acre?” Fleetwood said incredulously. “Where the deuce is that?”
“Around Westminster.” Carlisle threw it away. Dominic watched him with admiration. If he could have been so light, perhaps he could have interested Fleetwood. He had been too earnest, too full of urgency and the horror of it. No one but a ghoul wanted horror, least of all with breakfast!
“Around Westminster?” Fleetwood repeated. “You mean that awful slum area? Is that what they call it?”
“Appropriate, I would have thought.” Carlisle’s peaked eyebrows went up. “Filthy place.”
“What took you there?” Fleetwood handed the horse over to the groom, and the three of them went together toward the public house where breakfast and a steaming drink awaited them.
“Oh, this and that.” Carlisle dismissed it with a wave of his arm, as though it were gentleman’s business that any other gentleman would understand and be too discreet to mention further.
“It’s slums,” Fleetwood said again when they were inside and well started on a rich and excellent meal. “How would anyone there know about balancing and springing a carriage? There isn’t room to drive one, let alone race it.”
Carlisle finished his mouthful and swallowed. “Used to be an ostler,” he said easily. “Stole from his master, or anyway was accused of it, fell on hard times. Simple.”
Fleetwood loved and understood horses. He felt a comradeship with those who tended them and were obliged to make a living. He had spent many a companionable hour swapping opinions and tales with his own grooms.
“Poor beggar,” he said with feeling. “Maybe he’d be glad of a job, a few shillings for seeing what he can do to improve that carriage of mine.”
“I should think so,” Carlisle agreed. “Always try him, if you like. Moves around a bit, have to catch him soon.”
“Good idea, if you’d dome the kindness. Appreciate it. Where do I find him?”
Carlisle smiled broadly. “In the Devil’s Acre? You’d never find him alone this side of doomsday. I’ll take you.”
“I’d be obliged. Sounds an insalubrious spot.”
“Oh, it is,” Carlisle agreed. “It is, indeed. But skill is often to be found best where it grows the hardest. There is something in Mr. Darwin’s idea of survival of the fittest, you know; as long as you count cleverest, strongest, and most cunning as the fittest and don’t tangle it up with any moral ideas. Fittest needs to mean fittest to survive, not most virtuous, most patient, most charitable, or of most benefit to the rest of mankind.”
Dominic kicked him abruptly under the table and saw his face tweak with pain. He was terrified he would spoil the whole issue by moralizing and lose Fleetwood even now.
“You’re saying that the race does go to the swift and the battle to the strong, after all?” Fleetwood took himself another helping of kedgeree.
“No.” Carlisle refrained from rubbing his ankle with difficulty, but he did not look at Dominic. “Only that places like the Devil’s Acre breed peculiar skills, because without them the poor do not survive. The fortunate can be any kind of a fool and get by, but the unfortunate have to have a use to someone, or they assuredly perish.”
Fleetwood screwed up his face. “That seems a little cynical, if I may say so. Still, I would like to see this fellow of yours; you’ve convinced me he knows what he’s doing.”
Carlisle smiled, his face suddenly alight with warmth. Fleetwood responded like a flower opening to the sun. He smiled back, and Dominic found himself included in the blithe good fellowship. He felt a little guilty because he knew what Fleetwood had in front of him, but he refused to think of it now. It was a good cause, a necessary one. He smiled back with equal charm and an almost straight eye.
The Devil’s Acre was horrific. In the pall of smoke and fog the great towers of the minster hung over them, their Gothic glory lost in wraiths of vapor. All the bracing air of the Park was stilled and dampened to a chill stagnancy that sat like dead water from the shadows of the towers in the sky, past the pillared and porticoed homes of the rich and business houses, down to the modest dwellings of traders and clerks. Below them was a separate world of its own, a world of creaking, rat-ridden tenements with teeming alleys, of walls that were forever wet and crumbling, of air that was soured by rimed mold. Idlers, beggars, and drunks littered the way.
Carlisle strode through it as though it were nothing to remark.
“Oh, God!” Fleetwood clutched his nose and darted a desperate glance at Dominic, but Carlisle was not waiting. If they were not to lose him they must follow closely— heaven forbid they should become lost in such a hellhole as this!
Carlisle appeared to know where he was going. He picked his way over sleeping drunks under a pile of newspapers, kicked an empty bottle out of the way, and climbed up a flight of rickety stairs. They swayed under his weight, and Fleetwood looked alarmed as Dominic hastened him onto them also.
“Do you think they’ll hold?” he asked, knocking his hat askew on the beam above.
“God knows,” Dominic replied, stepping past him and going up. A good deal of his mind sympathized with Fleetwood, recalling his own feelings in Seven Dials, which had been less fearful than this. But there was also a strong tide in him that enjoyed it, tasting what Carlisle knew, the passion to alter this world, to force the innocent, the unknowing to look at it, to see and taste all of it, and to care. The emotion inside him was fierce, almost volcanic. He went up the stairs two by two and dived after Carlisle into a fetid mass of rooms where families of tens and dozens sat in the sickly light, carving, polishing, sewing, weaving, or gluing together to make all manner of articles to be sold for a few pence. Children as small as three or four years old sat tied to their mothers by string so they did not wander from work. Every time one of them stopped his labor or fell asleep, the mother would clout him over the head to wake him up and remind him that idle hands made for empty stomachs.
The smell was fearful, a mixture of wet mold, smoke and coal fumes, sewage, and unwashed bodies.
At the far end of the particular tenement they emerged into a dank courtyard that must once have been a mews, and Carlisle stopped and knocked on a cutaway door.
Dominic looked at Fleetwood. His face was pale, and his eyes looked deep and frightened. Dominic guessed he would long ago have run away had he had even the faintest idea which way to go or how to get back to the world he knew. He must have seen things even his nightmares had not conjured up.
The door opened, and a lean, bent little man peered out. He seemed to be lop-shouldered, as if one side of him were longer than the other. It was a moment before he recognized Carlisle.
“Oh, it’s you, is it? What do you want this time?”
“A little of your skill, Timothy,” Carlisle said with a smile. “For a consideration, naturally.”
“What kind of skill?” Timothy demanded, looking suspiciously over Carlisle’s shoulder at Dominic and Fleetwood. “Not rozzers, are they?”