It felt very good to be back in London again, but I must state that I didn’t care for the Seven Dials, the area which, along with St. Giles, formed that part of town facetiously called the “Holy Land.” “Unholy” would have been more appropriate. Prostitutes and thieves had staked out their territories along the streets, idly waiting like spiders for flies to fall into their traps. When I saw the faded and sooty sign for the Crook and Harp, my spirits flagged. This would be where I lived and worked for the next few days. If I wasn’t careful, they might be my last.
The cabman charged us extra for having to come into this area, and we had to spring from the moving cab, for he wouldn’t stop. As he passed us, we saw a couple of street arabs already clinging to the cab under the driver’s very seat. We too kept moving, rather than risk standing in our drawers, though I’d like to see them dare try it if Barker were in his regular clothes.
The Dials were where seven streets all came together. It looked as if a three-layer cake had been cut into slices and separated; but if so, it was a most unwholesome one, reminding me of Mrs. Havisham’s wedding cake in Great Expectations, and yet the Dials were within a dozen streets of our respectable offices in Whitehall. It was all one with Barker, who would walk into the vilest warren in Whitechapel the same as into Buckingham Palace.
Barker brushed past a brutish-looking clerk with a splinter of wood stuck in his teeth, and went up some dilapidated stairs. He led me down a hall, and I saw what he meant by the Crooked Harp being made from several buildings. There was a hall going twenty feet, then a step and a floor leaning toward the right, then two steps down and another hall with a leftish slant.
My employer retrieved a key from his pocket and unlocked a door on our left. Inside was an antique cabinet bed, the kind that was all the rage in about 1811. There was a circular table decorated with knife marks and water rings, with a quartet of mismatched and spindly chairs around it, and another bed that had last been aired when Nelson drew breath.
“Couldn’t you have gotten a better room?” I asked.
“This is the best room in the house,” Barker stated. “Would you prefer a garret in Islington?” The latter was a reference to the room I’d been living in when he’d hired me-or, rather, not living, since I’d stolen out without paying the rent. In his tactful way, Barker was telling me not to be so particular.
“It’s fine, sir.” I’d seen worse. Or at least just as bad.
There was a knock at the door, and O’Casey and McKeller came strolling in, as if we were still back at the O’Casey house. The fact that we would soon be blowing up whole sections of London seemed to have affected them not at all. Fergus McKeller even had his hands in his pockets, and he sat down and put his feet up on another chair.
“Good day to you, Mr. van Rhyn,” O’Casey said. “When did you last hear from Mr. Dunleavy?”
“Yesterday. We shared some schnapps at Claridge’s.”
I marveled at the way he could slip into a German accent so easily.
“Cart’s downstairs, to get the parcels from Victoria,” McKeller said, a trifle bored. “We’d better leave soon before everything’s stolen but the shadow.”
“I’d like to show Mr. Penrith the laboratory first,” Barker stated.
“Wouldn’t want to mix the wrong chemicals and surprise St. Peter a few decades early,” O’Casey said. “Lead the way, Mr. van Rhyn.”
The room was in the very highest and farthest corner of the inn, a garret room, empty except for a few tables. It had a large skylight and several west-facing windows which someone had even gone to the trouble of wiping down. It was better than I would have expected.
“This is very satisfactory,” Barker said. “A man could definitely build bombs here. Penrith, why don’t you go along with these gentlemen to the station and collect the packages. We have a lot of work ahead, and I’m sure you are as anxious to get started as I. Later, we shall all go to the public house below and have a meal and drink, if you gentlemen are agreeable.”
“Oh, we’re very agreeable,” McKeller put in. “You’re in luck, Penrith. They have Guinness!”
I’d had enough of trying to keep up with McKeller where drinking is concerned. By then, I was beginning to feel as if my entire circulatory system had been emptied of blood and replaced with the national drink of Ireland. At best, I offered a halfhearted reply.
We rode in the cart to Victoria Station, with McKeller driving. I wondered how my London friends, Ira and Israel, would react if they saw me in the back of a dogcart with a group of Irish ne’erdo-wells. In Liverpool I’d somehow felt I’d be safer once I was in London again. Now, I felt less safe than ever.
The parcels were all waiting to be claimed in the goods shed. I presented my identity papers, all fake from top to bottom, and signed the stack of forms that formally exchanged the responsibility for the parcels from the railway company to me. I wondered if a keen fellow in the railway’s employ could have looked on the cumulative list of materials and figured out what we were up to. If there was such a one, apparently he wasn’t working there that day. The two Irishmen helped me load up the cart and we left without incident.
“You know what I’m thinking, boys?” McKeller asked as we were returning.
“You’re thinking you’ve worked too hard, and you’d like a drink right about now,” O’Casey said with an air of disapproval.
“That’s the problem with having friends,” McKeller said. “Takes all the mystery out of everything.”
“You can have a drink when we get back.”
“I’ll perish by then,” the big Irishman complained. “First pub I find, I’m stopping.”
“But we have a cart full of supplies,” I pointed out.
“This is Charing bleedin’ Cross. Nobody’ll steal nothin’ here. There’s one right now, on our right. Whoa!” He pulled the cart up in front of a pub called the Admiralty Arms.
“We really shouldn’t stop, McKeller,” I urged.
“Just a pint. I’ll drink it fast. Eamon, we’re near the Thames if you’re thirsty.”
O’Casey gave me a look which said I can do nothing with him, and we reluctantly followed him through the blue-and-gold doors. It was mid-afternoon, and the owner was setting out a side of beef on the bar. The smell made me hungry. I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to have a sandwich and a pint of bitters.
“Two pints, publican,” McKeller ordered, as we set our feet on the rail, and our elbows on the polished mahogany. “And bring my teetotal friend some whather.”
The proprietor leaned forward and spoke to us in low tones. “Here, now, clear off, you lot. I don’t want any trouble.”
“Trouble” Mckeller asked. “We don’t want trouble. We only wanted beer. We have money.”
“I don’t want your damned money, Paddy. I want you out of here.
I don’t serve Irish vermin here.”
“Perhaps we’d better leave,” O’Casey said, being the most coolheaded.
“Let’s go, McKeller,” I said, taking his arm, but he shook it off and uttered a string of obscenities. The Irish have a natural poetic gift for obscenities, and in a few dozen words, McKeller had insulted the publican, his bar, and most of his ancestors. The heavily mustached proprietor reached under the bar and hefted a large axe.
“You can go out on your own pins,” the man said, “or you can be carried out.”
Neither McKeller nor O’Casey had brought their bata sticks, and that was probably a good thing or the public house would have been torn apart and the three of us thrown in jail. It didn’t seem fair, I’ll admit, but tempers were running high in London at the moment, and those two men were the actual cause of it.