At Greenland Dock, the rain is the least of the boy’s concerns: here he is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of mood, which lies as heavy as a foot across his windpipe. Oh! What is it? It is like a mist; hangs heavy over the buildings and the ships, puts tears in the eyes and a sob in the throat. The boy, whose mother lies coughing and white in their cellar lodgings, is near-blinded by his own anguish. He wants nothing more than to run home to her, but in the rain and mist and sorrow loses his bearings, and circuits the squat dark buildings once, then twice, in the stink of murdered whales and the looming sight of tall ships. It is a labourer who seizes this boy by the shoulders and points him homeward, and who eventually delivers that crumpled paper to Mr Hancock’s shack.
The merchant leans so studiously that his nose almost touches the water. The mermaid trembles and glitters within, and her largeness has become a fume that escapes from its surface and intoxicates him. Mr Hancock has himself never seen the sea, but at the mermaid’s side he feels it: vast and boisterous, freezing and impassive.
When this message is brought to his elbow, he is not surprised by its contents.
Even so, ‘Why was I not told of this?’ he demands of the labourer who stands at his elbow.
‘You were told.’
‘So where am I to keep my goods?’ He grips the rim of the vat in panic.
‘It don’t signify. But we are bound to pull down this place come Wednesday. If it does not tumble down of its own accord.’ He puts his hand upon a beam, and the whole building rattles and lurches in a most satisfying demonstration of its own dereliction. A great nest of old rushes and one decayed mouse rattle to the dirt floor.
Mr Hancock begins to sweat. He gazes again into the water. What is to be done? ‘I need more time,’ he says.
‘There is no more time.’
‘I can pay you.’
‘No.’ The labourer twists his chafed fingers together and looks embarrassed. ‘If you want the truth, we are all agreed that this place must go. ’Tis haunted; everybody feels it lately. The ghastly sadness as comes off it, and can be felt within it.’
‘No, no,’ says Mr Hancock in some panic.
‘You must feel it. I know you do.’ He clears his throat and leans nearer. ‘Mr Wattle, the overseer – he lost his little girl two weeks ago. Drowned –’ he jerks his head yonder – ‘in the river not a hundred feet from here. Nobody’s fault; she must have wandered in her play. But that sadness – such grief, we all feel it, a loss like that does tend to touch every body – has grown ever stronger since. We are all agreed; we shall burn the place. There’s no price will change our minds, sir.’
Since the men of Greenland Dock have formed their own convictions as to the source of the strange miasma, Mr Hancock feels entitled to ape outrage. ‘And so I must remove my stock?’ he demands.
‘Aye.’
‘Then I need –’ he thinks, rests his hand on the rim of the vat – ‘I need to move this.’
The labourer snorts. ‘’Tis not my job.’ He glances curiously at the vat of dirty water. ‘That?’
‘What of it?’
‘Why, ’tis just a filthy discarded thing. Why you should want it—’
‘It was doing no harm here until you determined to pull this building down,’ Mr Hancock says aggrievedly. He digs in his pockets and draws out a wad of clean notes. ‘Here. How much would it cost you? I want it done at night.’ He is thinking quickly. Where to move the thing? Are there other likely outbuildings? Can it be concealed somewhere about his offices? ‘I need it brought to Blackheath,’ he says with decision. ‘To Blackheath, and then no more need be said about it.’
‘I do not understand,’ says the labourer.
From the vat, a gasp; a sigh; a leap of liquid into the air.
And thus it is done, very swiftly and under cover of darkness. Mr Hancock seals the rendering vat with a discarded piece of mainsail and sees it loaded onto castors and thence a raft by four bleary workmen kept from their beds to do they-know-not-what for the promise of a purse of money apiece; thus it is transported by raft along the river to Greenwich, while he sits with his back against it, rocking gently upon the black water. Thence he and the vat are taken up the hill to the heath by bullock cart. It is dark beyond darkness: not a light on the road, just empty nothing before them and the whistling of the dry grass in the wind. He is alert to footsteps, and flinches at the heard swoop of some night bird passing near, mistaking the sigh of its feathers for a blade unsheathed. Surely he is glad to see the gable of his own empty house come into view; he feels no guilt that, before his wife sleeps her first night there, he has already concealed a secret within it. The grass hisses.
‘Good to be in the clean air,’ says one of the men Mr Hancock’s labourer friend has hired.
‘Aye,’ says another, tight-lipped. He is afraid of the contents of the vat; wanted nothing of it. ‘You’re to help,’ Mr Hancock snapped at him. ‘You want to see the thing gone, do you not?’ He sits now hugging his own shoulders, chin tucked into his collar.
The third man hesitates. ‘But the queerest thing,’ he says, ‘I still do feel sad.’
‘Ghosts are tenacious,’ squeaks the labourer.
‘Aye, that’s so.’ His mate shrugs, shivering off a shaft of sudden chill. ‘My wife’s mother, God rest her, followed us to three different lodgings when first we were married. We knew she was there by the smell of burnt porridge. What fools! It took us seven years to perceive that she was attached to the hearth brush all along, and after we gave it a Christian burial she troubled us no more.’
They pass along the drive, skirting the stables, and draw the cart to a stop at the edge of the lawn. ‘It is to go in the folly,’ says Mr Hancock, gesturing to its shadow at the far end of the garden. ‘I want no wheel marks on the grass.’
‘What, and we are to carry it down the hill?’ says the labourer’s mate, leaping down from his seat.
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ says the first, backing away. ‘Oh no. I’ll not touch it.’
‘Say, what’s your trouble? Are you averse to hard work now?’ But the second workman is apprehensive himself, a peculiar dread taking up the space of his heart. Something is amiss, although he cannot say what.
‘Bring it down,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘I shall help you.’
The five men stagger with the vat through the enclosing trees. The moon being slender, there is little to be seen, but something peculiar to be heard. A tapping from within the metal, as if tiny bubbles were popping against it, a sweeping sound as if flesh brushed against it; and once a long, sonorous note of metal struck, which trembles through the vat and through again. At this the first labourer nearly bursts out weeping.
‘Hush you,’ says his mate, unwilling to express the perturbation he feels. ‘You are entertaining demons.’
It takes some hours to manoeuvre its dead weight and fearful splosh down the staircase. The copper sides of the barrel scrape against the mussel shells and the canvas covering rucks up. Cobwebs and birds’ bones spin on the surface of the water and then are gulped out of sight.
Dawn is coming in by the time they have heaved and panted the thing into the furthest chamber of the grotto. ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ says Mr Hancock as he leads them back into the light. ‘You have done me a great service.’
‘Sir,’ says the more ebullient of the labourers, most grave now, for he has had his ear pressed to the copper for hours, and heard the weird stirrings within, and felt the tug of something most unnatural, ‘what did we deliver you?’
‘’Tis of no concern to you.’
‘I judge that it is,’ he retorts, but his companion gives him a jab in the ribs.
‘No, no,’ he whispers. ‘Let us not enquire. Let us leave this place and never return.’
‘Call it contraband,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘Call it rum, if you wish.’
‘But still I should like to …’ The labourer peers over Mr Hancock’s shoulder. ‘I have not had a proper look.’ He moves forward, but Mr Hancock holds him at arm’s length and stares him down.
‘Go,’ he says. The first of the men is already pacing away. From up the hill comes the peaceful sound of the oxen cropping the long black grass.