“Thank you,” he managed to gasp. “I couldn’t have… kept afloat… sixty more seconds.”
“My husband saved your life,” said a potato-faced old woman sternly, leaning into his field of vision.
“Now, Meg, he’s as aware of that as you are, and I’m certain his gratitude will be handsomely expressed. Now let me get us moving again, we’re drifting in toward the bank,” He sat down on the center thwart and Doyle heard the oarlocks rattle as he took up the oars. “I’ll have to set to rowing with a passion to make up for the time we’ve lost, Meg,” he said, more loudly than necessary. “And we’ll still probably be too late to get our usual spot at Billingsgate.” He paused a moment, and then the boat shuddered, and surged forward, as he leaned into the work.
The girl Sheila leaned curiously over Doyle. “Gentlemanly nice, those clothes was, before they got spoiled,” she remarked.
Doyle nodded. “Put ‘em on for the first time tonight,” he said hoarsely.
“Who was it tied you up and threw you in the creek?”
Having regained his breath and some of his strength, Doyle sat up dizzily. “Gypsies,” he answered. “They, uh, robbed me, too. Didn’t leave me a cent—I mean a sixpence.”
“Oh God, Chris,” the old woman interrupted, “he says he hasn’t got any money. And he sounds like some kind of foreigner.”
The rhythmic clacking of the oars ceased. “Where do you hail from, sir?” Chris asked.
“Calif—uh, America.” The breeze on his soaked clothes had set him shivering, and he clamped his teeth to keep them from chattering.
“Well then, Meg, he’s got money for travelling, hasn’t he? Stands to reason. Where’s your hotel, sir?”
“Actually, I—damn, it’s cold, have you got anything I could wrap up in?—actually, I had just arrived. They took everything: all my money, my luggage, my, uh, passport… “
“In other words, he’s a shivering pauper,” stated Meg. She turned a righteous stare on Doyle. “And just how do you expect to repay our kindness in saving your life?”
Doyle was getting angry. “Why didn’t you tell me your rates before you pulled me out of the river? I could have told you then that I can’t afford them, and you could have gone on and looked for a more affluent person to rescue. I guess I never read the last part of that parable—the part where the Thrifty Samaritan serves the poor devil with an itemized bill.”
“Meg,” said Chris, “the poor man’s right, and we wouldn’t accept money from him even if he had any. I know he’ll be happy to work off the debt—for that’s what it is, you know, sir, in the eyes of man and God—by helping us set up at the market, and carrying the baskets when Sheila goes the rounds with her bunts.” He eyed Doyle’s coat and boots. “And now fetch him a blanket to change out of his wet clothes under. We can let him have a suit of Patrick’s old work things in exchange for his ruined clothes, which we’ll have to try to sell as rags.”
Doyle was tossed a blanket that reeked of onions, and from some sort of locker in the bow Meg dug out a heavy coat and a pair of pants, both of worn and much-mended dark corduroy, a once-white shirt, and a pair of old boots that looked like they might have graced old Chris’ feet when he was Doyle’s age. “Ah!” she exclaimed, producing last a dirty white scarf. “Patrick’s third-best kingsman.”
The chill made Doyle eager to change into these wretched but dry clothes, and when he’d kicked his wet things out from under the blanket Meg gathered them all and stowed them so carefully that he knew they hoped to get a good price for them.
He scrubbed his hair fairly dry with the blanket, then, feeling warm and restored, moved to the end of the thwart away from the puddle he’d been sitting in. He wished he had a pipe or cigar, or even a cigarette. The boat, he noticed, was filled with lidded wooden tubs and lumpy burlap sacks. “I smell onions and… ?”
“Pea soup,” said young Sheila. “The fishermen and fishmongers get so cold at Billingsgate that they’ll fork out tuppence for a plate of it. Thruppence in winter.”
“Onions… is the main enterprise,” panted Chris. “The soup’s just… a courtesy, like… we scarcely get for it… what it costs us to make.”
I’ll bet, thought Doyle sourly.
The moon was low on the horizon, looking big and gold and blurry, and its faery radiance on the trees and fields and creek ripples wasn’t dimmed when Meg leaned out to unhook the bow lantern, flint-scratch it alight, and replace it on its hook. The watercourse widened out, and Chris heeled the boat around to port.
“On the Thames now, we are,” he said quietly. A couple of other boats, tethered together, were visible out on the broad expanse of the river; they were ponderous, low-riding things, each with a huge cubical canvas-covered burden visible under the tangles of rigging.
“Hay boats,” said Sheila, crouched beside Doyle. “We saw one burning out there once, and men on fire were jumping from the top of the bale down into the water. That was a show—better than the penny gaffs, and free.”
“I hope the… performers enjoyed it,” said Doyle. He reflected that this little voyage would make an interesting story to tell over brandy at the Boodles or White’s club some day, once he’d made his fortune. For he wasn’t in any doubt about that. The first few days would certainly be difficult, but the advantage of all his twentieth century knowledge couldn’t help but turn the scales in his favor. Hell, he could get a job for a while on a newspaper, and maybe make some startling predictions about the outcome of the war, and current literary trends; and Ashbless was due to arrive in London in only about a week, and he could easily strike up a friendship with him; and in two years Byron would be returning to England, and he could get an introduction before Childe Harold made him a superstar. Why, he thought, and I could invent things—the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, latakia tobacco, flush toilets… no, better not do anything to change the course of recorded history—any such tampering might cancel the trip I got here by, or even the circumstances under which my mother and father met. I’ll have to be careful… but I guess I could give Farraday and Lister and Pasteur and the gang a few smug suggestions. Ho ho.
He remembered asking the portrait of William Ashbless whether the girls, scotch and cigars had been better in his day. Well, I’m by God going to find out, he told himself. He yawned and leaned back against a sack of onions. “Wake me up when we get to the city,” he said, and let the boat rock him to sleep.
CHAPTER 3
“Shamefast he was to come to Towne, But meet with no one save a Clowne.”
Though the actual fish market of Billingsgate was the big shed on the river side of Lower Thames Street, the carts of costermongers, heaped with turnips and cabbage and carrots and onions, were jammed wheel hub to wheel hub along the length of Thames Street from the Tower Stairs in the east, by the white medieval castle with flags flying from its four towers, west past the Grecian facade of the Customs House, past the eight crowded quays to Billingsgate Market, and past that to just west of London Bridge; and the clamorous, milling commerce filled the entire street, from the alleys in the north face of Thames Street to where the pavement dropped away to the river ten feet below, and the ranked oyster boats moored to the timbered wharf, with planks laid across their jostling gunwales, formed a narrow, bobbing lane the costermongers called Oyster Street.