In the morning Finn was already up and working when St. Ives, Hasbro, and I returned. Tubby had domestic duties and hadn’t come along, which turned out to be to our advantage, given what happened later, although I’m getting ahead of myself. Finn had shelved the fallen books, made an orderly stack of the papers, swept the place out, and was soaking the blood out of Merton’s lab coat, which, he said, wanted cold water and not hot so as not to “set the stain,” which was something else he had learned during his years in the circus, where he had put in his time in the laundry. “All shipshape,” he told us.
We breakfasted along Thames Street on kippers and eggs and beans, and then set out with Finn walking far on ahead, which was Hasbro’s idea. No one would associate the boy with us, you see, when we were in the neighborhood of the Goat and Cabbage, and I was reminded once again that there might be some danger in our undertaking. To tell you the truth, it had begun to seem more like a holiday to me.
CHAPTER 3
The Goat and Cabbage
Lower Thames Street from the Pool to the Tower is busy night and day, with cargo coming off the ships and going onto them, and shops open, and fishmongers hauling carts and pushing hand barrows of whiting and oysters and plaice and whelks toward Billingsgate Market, which smelled of brine and seaweed and, of course, fish. All manner of trade goods and all manner of people crept up and down, jostling in and out of coffeehouses and shops, intent on doing business or on getting in the way of other people doing theirs. I was knocked sideways by a grimacing man with an unlikely large and wet bag of oysters over his shoulder, and knocked back again by a donkey hauling a cart of herring barrels, but nobody meant any harm and it struck me as rather agreeable than otherwise to be out and about on a busy spring morning, last night’s blustery cold having given up and gone back to whence it came.
In all that seething crowd we lost sight of Finn, but then saw him again, lounging against a store front, eating something out of his hand, giving the last of it to a mongrel dog and setting out again without so much as a look in our direction, the dog at his heels. Half a block farther along, I smelled a waft of pipe tobacco, Sobranie again. The tobacco isn’t all that rare, but it naturally put me in mind of the tall workman in Lambert Court last night. Then I thought of the small man who had been with him earlier in the evening, and then of Merton’s description of his apelike assailant and of the tall man from the pub in Poulton-le-Sands, and suddenly, like a bonk on the conk, it didn’t feel like a holiday any longer as the truth rushed in upon me. The two men in Lambert Court yesterday evening weren’t the navvies they had appeared to be. One had evidently stayed behind to keep an eye on us, and the other had gone down to the embankment to beat poor Merton over the head with a pipe. Hasbro’s untimely entrance must have complicated things for them, and yet they had managed to remain one step ahead of us.
Abruptly I wished I had taken along the leaded cane, and I looked around, trying to catch sight of the pipe smoker while I was revealing all this to St. Ives, who narrowed his eyes and nodded at me. But I saw no one who might be our man, or our men. Soon we drew abreast of a narrow alley that angled away toward the river. Finn was just then buying a bag of hot chestnuts from a man with a kettle on wheels, and he nodded discreetly up the alley, where there hung a weather-battered sign depicting the head of a goat wearing a cabbage leaf cap.
There was nothing for it but to push through the door into the fug of the gin shop, which was busy enough for that hour of the morning. A man was singing “Pretty Mary Tumblehome” in a voice like a broken cartwheel, and there was a good deal of low talk, which staggered just a little when walked in. It evened out again when we three trespassers had navigated the tavern and found calmer water in a corridor beyond.
There were a couple of straw pallets along the near wall of the first room off the corridor, and a chamber pot, and boxes of destitute old junk that you might see for sale in a two penny stall in Monmouth Street. Against the far wall stood a heavy oaken wardrobe with a broad, high door, considerably scarred and black with age — nothing that interested us in the least. We jibbed without a word, angling back out into the dark corridor, sailing past other dead-end rooms and none the wiser for any of it. Evidently we had come on a fool’s errand.
“They’ll no doubt find us soon enough,” St. Ives said, shrugging, and he turned back down the corridor with us following, anxious to gain the street — or at least I was. But Hasbro stopped outside the room with the wooden wardrobe, cocking his head as if listening to something.
“Commodious wardrobe,” he said in a low voice.
“Just so,” St. Ives said. “Just so.” He darted a glance up and down the corridor. “Jacky, watch the door,” he whispered. “Give us a whistle if anyone appears.”
But there was no need to whistle, because no one, apparently, was interested in us, a fact that had begun to seem peculiar to me. The entire mob had been aware of our entering the place. Someone, you’d suppose, would begin to wonder what we were about. I looked back to see Hasbro fiddling at the lock with a piece of wire and St. Ives endeavoring to see behind the wardrobe, which appeared to be pressed tightly against the wall, perhaps affixed to it. I wondered why the wardrobe would be locked at all, but just as the question came into my mind, the door swung open to reveal that it was utterly empty.
“Interior lock,” Hasbro said, indicating an iron latch that was attached to the inside of the door, identical to and directly behind the outside latch. There was a key in it, which Hasbro removed and slipped into his pocket.
St. Ives reached in and pushed on the panel at the back of the wardrobe, fiddling with the mouldings, and very shortly the panel slid sideways to reveal a dark passageway beyond. Without an instant’s hesitation St. Ives stepped through the door and ducked into the passage, waving at us to follow. I was quick enough to comply, half of my mind worrying that someone from the tavern would look in to see what we were up to, the other half worrying that they hadn’t already done so.
I glimpsed a precipice ahead — stairs leading downward beyond a small landing, more or less in the direction of the river. St. Ives was already descending along a rusty iron railing. Hasbro followed behind me, swinging the wardrobe door closed, the passage instantly disappearing into utter darkness. I heard him step out onto the landing, and then the panel in the wall at his back slid into place with a clicking sound.
“Steady-on,” St. Ives said from somewhere below.
There was a cool updraft, and a wet, musty smell that might have been the river itself. I heard what sounded like the roar and hiss of a boiler letting out steam. “Can you find your way, sir?” Hasbro whispered into my ear in a disembodied sort of voice.
I told him I could, and I stepped off, one foot in front of the other, gripping the railing with one hand and feeling my way along the wall like a blind man with the other, hoping that no rotten stair tread would catapult me into the abyss. Soon, however, I found that I could see tolerably well. There was light somewhere below, which brightened as we descended.
A vast room — more a cavern than a room — opened out, and we paused for a moment to take in the sight below us. The floor lay at a depth that must have been beneath or near the level of the river. On that floor lay two strange undersea craft set on stocks, one of them evidently half built. Roundabout them lay a litter of metal panels, casks of rivets, and heavy glass sheets in wooden racks. One of the ships was the length of a yacht, and might have been completely built for all I could see in that dim light, with a shape that reminded one of an oceangoing prehistoric monster — finny appendages and convex, eyelike portholes. The other vessel was smaller, just a shell, really, of a similar craft. Some distance away stood a third craft, exceedingly strange and unlikely, a sort of elongated orb standing on bent iron legs — apparently an underwater diving chamber. It had nothing of the diving bell about it, but was altogether more delicate, built of what appeared to be copper and glass, and probably capable of independent movement, if the jointed, stork-like legs and feet were any indication.