The Devil's Ribbon (2 page)
Roumande didn’t answer, because Professor Hatton had been this way
for a while now – that is to say, peevish and irritable. Ever since their last proper case, which hadn’t gone well. Roumande cursed the day that dandified policeman, Inspector Jeremiah Grey, had arrived at The Yard. And if Roumande closed his eyes, he could still hear the Inspector’s Welsh squeal ricocheting off the panelled walls of the Old Bailey and see his friend, Professor Hatton, head bowed in the witness stand, as the judge shouted, ‘Order in Court! Order in Court! I will have order in Court …’ While Inspector Grey was a spit away, screaming like a girl, ‘But you’re our expert witness. So say it, damn you! Say it! Say they are indeed the victim’s digits in the biscuit tin, or step down, Professor Hatton.’
But Hatton was a man who understood Truth and could never testify to evidence he suspected had been planted, even if that meant a murderer walked free. After the case was dismissed and the accused found ‘not guilty’, Grey had waited for them just outside the Court and seethed, ‘That’s right, Hatton. Walk away, just as that murderer’s done. You should have spoken up, you should have been definitive, you should have said something,
anything
– not stood there like a lemon. And tell me, Professor, what is all this forensics
for
if not to help me?’
Hatton had turned to face him, trying to remain calm. ‘That was the first time I’d seen those fingers, and it appears your evidence came out of nowhere. Mr Tescalini
found them
? Simply stumbled upon them? I really don’t think so, and please, Inspector, don’t ever put me on the spot again like that. It’s extremely unprofessional.’
Grey was wrestling with a sweet wrapper, shoving a bonbon into his mouth, as if his life depended on it, as he said, ‘Cast dispersions on our methods if you like, but we found the tin, hidden in a bedpan and …’
Hatton shook his head, ‘Inspector, with respect, I checked that room …’
‘I’m a policeman and my job is a simple one – to send the guilty down and get results for my superiors, any way I can. Not be left with egg on my face by a supercilious prig like you.’
Hatton had shaken his head with disgust and then whistled down a carriage, ignoring the Inspector’s last remarks; he, in turn, had ignored Professor Hatton for these last six months.
It had been a bad day; a long, bad day for St Bart’s.
But work must carry on and so Roumande sighed and, turning back to Patrice, said, ‘My fingers grow thicker with each year and the Professor has no time for sketching any more. When it comes to the most important of our tasks, we need young blood. So come.’
Albert Roumande led the boy down a short passageway, to a room no bigger than a cell, whose walls were papered with a variety of anatomical sketches, and on a wooden table, a collection of pencils, quills, inks, and other sketching material plus a number of organs, displayed provocatively on white china plates. The ‘gallery’, as Roumande liked to call it, was lit by a single oil lamp. There was a scent of mould and old blood, masked by the sharper cut of turpentine.
Roumande pointed to a freshly cut lump; claret jelly in the morgue half-light. ‘The Professor is keen to capture any unusual aspects to the alimentary canal and the sphincter muscle. You’ve heard of the theory of miasma, of course?’
The apprentice nodded, because frankly, who hadn’t? That diseases like cholera were caused by the foul air of London and the great stink rising off the river.
‘Well, that’s one line of thought, but it’s our belief that cholera is, in fact, waterborne. The body count this summer is no epidemic, but
it could easily become so. The Professor’s work is to gather statistical data in relation to how cholera travels, anatomically speaking. But tell me, because I’m curious. Before you came here, what did you know of the human body? You seem to have a certain talent.’
The youth smiled. ‘Thank you, monsieur. Coming from you, that’s high praise indeed. Your reputation on the Continent is second to none, which is partly why I came here. To learn from you, monsieur.’
Roumande was not without a modicum of vanity. Despite himself, he puffed his chest out a little as he said, ‘I strive to be the best, of course,’ then quickly added, ‘but only for the sake of the cadavers. One must always remember, these corpses were once somebody’s child. Never forget that.’
‘I won’t, monsieur.’
‘I’ve lived in Spitalfields for over twenty years and there was revolution in the air when I left in ’32, as you well know. But I’ve honed my skills here, in London, because the Metropolis is a sick city, Patrice, the sickest city on earth. And a violent one, too.’
The apprentice nodded. ‘I knew only a little of the dead, before I came here, monsieur. In Paris, I worked as a body collector, and before that, when I lived in Marseille, I had a job in the Jesuit hospital of St Jean’s, where I became accustomed to cadavers, but I was nothing as grand as a diener.’
‘So you’re from the South, then? I thought as much,’ said Roumande, enjoying the opportunity for a lighthearted chat for once, and reminiscing about the old country. ‘My great-great-grandfather was the first diener in Paris, who learnt his trade at the steps of the guillotine. We’ve had assistants in the past, but they’ve been butchers. A few Irish, a couple of English, even the odd Negro, but none has had the artistry which we require. The apprenticeship is ten long years for a reason. The skill of a diener
must be learnt, honed, perfected. And you are how old, did you say?’
Patrice pulled his shoulders back. ‘I am almost eighteen,’ he said proudly.
‘Eighteen, eh?’ Roumande looked at Patrice as if he was surveying a horse at a country fair, weighing up the value of him. His dark curls and good looks were what Roumande’s wife might call Byronic. A certain kind of male beauty, which at eighteen was fetching enough, but by forty or so would be long gone, turned to swarthy as Roumande had become.
‘You’ll be nearly thirty by the time you qualify. But you’re still quite happy to wait?’
‘I believe patience is a virtue, monsieur.’
‘It is.’ Roumande put his arm around the lad and drew him closer. ‘But in this trade, so is passion, dedication, and a flexibility of mind, which doesn’t care what polite Society thinks. If you stay with us, you’ll need to grow accustomed to taunts, because they call us scoundrels, body snatchers, the devil’s magicians. And when they’re not insulting us, the living would rather ignore us, as if we didn’t exist at all.’
He paused, as the murky chasm of the morgue closed in on them. ‘But beneath the cobbled streets, down each bend and turn of an alley, from unmarked graves come ghostly whispers from the dead. Close your eyes and listen. Well? Can you hear them whispering your name? Can you hear them calling you?’
The apprentice, his eyes closed, answered,
‘Yes, monsieur.
Je peux les entendre
.’
Roumande, satisfied, said, ‘As I can. And it’s our work, and the work of Professor Hatton with his new science of forensics, to give the dead a voice that all the world can hear, by seeing everything, by missing nothing. So, open your eyes, Patrice, and draw.’
One hour till dawn and the lamps in The Flask were dimmed, the tallow candles burnt to nothing. Two men and a boy sat in a huddle in a corner, hunched over dirty pints of what looked like porter but could have been gin; it was too dark to make out the difference. John O’Rourke, an Irish hack, looked at his watch then growled like a bad-tempered dog, ‘Where the devil is O’Brian? We take huge risks showing our faces, even here. That priest treats us all as if we are nothing.’
Jasper Tooley, a cripple child, slugged back a gulp of his drink, saying that he needed to be off soon, or his pa would surely miss him and then there’d be hell to pay. Meanwhile, the third in the group – a young man, smartly dressed, with a tumble of red curls and a freckled complexion, said, ‘Calm yourself, for we know where he is. Father
O’Brian is tending to the sick in the rookeries. Cholera grips our people. Five more dead were found tonight and word is the bodies were treated like animals. Snatched, they said, and taken to St Bart’s to be hacked to pieces, all in the name of science.’
‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.’
‘Yes, but we’re fighting back this time.’ Damien McCarthy had a quill and a map spread out in front of him, and had circled an area in green ink which said ‘Piccadilly’. ‘It’ll be the English cut to ribbons when the time comes, John, and it’s fast approaching.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said O’Rourke. ‘Our people are starving again in the home country. We should strike now. Parliament’s in recess and the Lords are off in the country to fuck dogs and sodomise their women. And they call
us
savages.’
At the mention of the word
sodomise
, the boy blessed himself and looked to Heaven, which was a mouldy spot on the ceiling.
‘You think I’m joking?’ John O’Rourke eyeballed the lad. ‘They’re a filthy nation of perverts and liars. Sure, doesn’t your father like to call himself British when it suits him, though? When he has a contract to win, am I right?’ The boy was ashamed of his pa but said nothing, only looked into the dregs of his drink, as O’Rourke continued, ‘Still, you might yet redeem your family’s name and die an Irish martyr, eh?’
The poor boy’s eyes grew wide with terror, but Damien added in a gentler voice, ‘Take no notice of Mr O’Rourke. None of us are going to die and he’s a foul-speaking gentleman at the best of times. Isn’t it the nature of these pen pushers? Am I right, John? Isn’t it in the heart of you to be rather too free with your powers of description?’
O’Rourke sucked on a small clay pipe. ‘But I wrote a fine piece
yesterday. Did you read it, Damien? It was on the latest developments in Westminster, and as usual I mentioned your wonderful brother.’
‘Ah, yes. The Appeaser of Highgate? But you’ve no need to worry about Gabriel. There’s no love of Union politics any more. I was in Ireland only a month ago and the tide’s moving towards our way of thinking. Towards a single, free, and liberated Ireland. The time is coming, John. I know it.’
And the time was coming. There was revolution in the air. Irish prisoners transported to Australia were rising up in the goldfields of Ballarat, and in America, roaming in gangs, arming themselves, and here in the slums of London, discontent was simmering and John O’Rourke could feel the lust for change, he could cut it with a knife. Irish liberty would rise out of the ashes of the famine and their draconian masters, the British, would pay for what they’d done. A thousand years of oppression – The Tara Hill rebellion, the Battle of the Boyne, the Three Rocks, Ovidstown, and the bloodletting of Ballinamuck.
As God was his witness, O’Rourke knew the facts, all right. He wrote about them every day of his life. The words rattled around in his brain, grew in his heart like a malodorous cancer – by the end of 1848, after the deadly spores of the potato blight, one million lay dead, another million banished to the far corners of the earth, to live in squalor, to languish under the heat of a foreign sun, to be exiled from their own land, to be laughed at, spat at, mocked.
O’Rourke narrowed his eyes. ‘A guinea says Gabriel McCarthy MP will get his comeuppance for his liberal sensibilities. His speeches about perseverance and waiting for liberty make me retch. Waiting for what? Waiting till the English wipe us out completely? It’s hard to believe
sometimes that you’re brothers. He sits in The Commons, like his father before him, preaching to our people about achieving repeal, not through the blood of martyrs but,’ he cleared his throat and did his best Donegal accent, ‘
tru legil and constitutional means and lickin’ the hairy Inglish arse, yer honour
…’
‘To my eternal shame, my brother is his father’s son,’ replied Damien with a smile. ‘Whereas, I …’
‘Jesus, Damien, I’ve heard it all before.
The little babby of the McCarthy clan, livin’ in the corner of yer brother’s house but free to have opinions of yer own?
Well, aren’t you the lucky one?’
‘Some say it might be the making of me, John. That I’m a free spirit.’
O’Rourke laughed and sat back in his chair. ‘Oh, and let me guess who’s been putting those romantic notions in your head. She’s married to him, you know. He’d cut your throat if he knew your thoughts, brother or no brother. You know the rules. Till death do they part.’
Damien dipped his quill in the ink. ‘I’ll not discuss Mrs McCarthy in this low company. Times were such, she had no choice but to marry my brother. Anyway, pay attention. We’ll need the device placed round about here’ – he stabbed the map with his quill and smiled.
The crooked boy blessed himself again, and John O’Rourke went to clip his ears, but the boy looked back with such contempt that the sometime editor of
An Glor
and regular contributor to the marginally more respectable
The Nation
decided not to antagonise this puppy any further. The Flask had long since been a place for secret meetings of the Irish political variety, but they needed to be mindful. Spies were everywhere. Even here in St Giles, which was an underworld, a law unto itself. Thousands of Irish lived here, the poorest of the poor, in
what was termed the rookeries. A labyrinth of squalid boardinghouses, a little north of Soho, its pavers heaving with rubbish, screaming children, half-dressed costermongers, and prostitutes, but all proud to be speaking their own language, following their own religion.
But being poor meant two things in John O’Rourke’s book – easily radicalised but also easily bought. And, thought O’Rourke, there was something about this boy which wasn’t quite there. There was definitely something missing. He wasn’t entirely
reliable
. These were dangerous times to put your trust in a twelve-year-old bookbinder’s son. Still, if the boy turned out to be as useful as Father O’Brian promised he’d be, then O’Rourke was willing to take the risk, for the time being at least.
The journalist pointed at the map. ‘And this jeweller’s shop? How well do you know it?’
‘Well enough,’ answered Damien. ‘Why only last week I accompanied Mrs McCarthy there. Gabriel, as ever, was far too busy for her, but we walked arm in arm quite nicely, and I helped her pick a diamond brooch. Very becoming, it looked, too.’
O’Rourke laughed, a scoffing sort of laugh, as Damien wrote ‘Burlington Arcade’ on a separate piece of paper and drew an impression of arches.
O’Rourke lit his pipe. ‘Did O’Brian say when the device might be ready?’
‘There are still one or two mechanisms which needed adjusting, and I left him to it. He only went off with it in his pocket after mass this morning!’
O’Rourke could feel his sense of humour slipping. ‘Well, he needs to hurry himself. The anniversary of Drogheda is July 12th, which is just
three days from now. Anniversaries work best. Sends the message home where it hurts. Just get the package back from his saintly hands, and I’ll deliver it myself. It’s time.’
‘Amen to that, Mr O’Rourke. But I’d love to see how far you’d get without me.’
The men swung around to a low voice that rolled across the darkened tavern like thunder. The priest was standing by the door, his hands covered in dirt.
‘Jesus, Father, don’t go sneaking up on us like that,’ said O’Rourke. ‘Why didn’t you announce yourself?’
The priest threw his head back and laughed. ‘Sure, I only wanted to listen to the washerwomen, for that’s what you sounded like. You need to mind yourselves. As far as I remember, the punishment for sedition in this godless country is death by hanging.’
The priest pulled up a chair. He was a tall man and found it difficult to get comfortable. He stuck his legs out, making the others pull back, putting a black leather pouch gently on the table, and John O’Rourke instinctively reached out, but the priest was quicker. ‘Jesus. I wouldn’t go touching that, John, unless you want to blow your own head off. It’s a finely tuned device. And I for one think the anniversary of Drogheda is a grand idea.’ His voice grew louder and he seemed afraid of no one, as he stood up in the middle of the tavern and seemed to fill the very air, the very space around him. He’d been a soldier once with his ramrod back, his massive chest, his hands the size of shovels and feet the size of boats. ‘I’ll not stand dissention in the ranks, do you understand me? Does anyone have issues with that?’ He looked directly at the journalist. ‘Well, John?’
John O’Rourke cast his eyes to the ground. ‘Whatever you say, Father.’
‘And what about you, Damien?’
‘You know I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth, if it wins our people liberty.’
‘And you, lad, what do you say?’
But the cripple boy’s attention had been taken by a moth that had settled on the table ledge. The moth was perfect, fresh burst from its chrysalis, its armoured body like a wasp. A luminous wasp.
‘It’s a death’s head moth, Father,’ said the boy, looking up from the fluttering creature, slightly lost to the world. ‘It makes its home in the rotting trees up in Finchley Fields. It’s a rare beauty to find in the middle of the city, Father.’
As quick as a flash, the priest grabbed a glass and with a sharp twist, severed the moth’s head from its body. He smashed it underfoot, saying, ‘Forget about the moth and repeat after me –
Clan Shan Van Vocht
… if you are in favour, say aye.’
The men stood up to join their chief, but the boy stayed sitting on his chair, bereft, till he was grabbed by the collar by the priest who glowered, ‘Pay attention, child. I’m in no mood for any more nonsense. Sure, just look at my hands …’ His palms were thick with dirt. ‘I’ve just been burying a pauper girl who died of the cholera. She was left outside the Sacred Heart, with a note addressed to me, begging for God’s Mercy. Too late for that, I’d say, but I buried her anyway. It’s not mercy she needs now, but sweet fucking vengeance. So, repeat after me, if you are in favour …’
‘Aye!’ The men thumped the table, fist on fist.
‘The twelfth of July, then,’ said the priest. ‘Motion carried.’