From the stage door of the Victoria theatre and down Lambeth’s crowded New Cut, the Great Elusivo – a.k.a. Luis Ramon Valienté, a.k.a. the Hon. Reginald Blythe, and a.k.a. a variety of other pseudonyms depending on circumstances – followed his mysterious interrogator, Oswald Hackett, towards the promised oyster-house.
The pavements of the New Cut, banks of a river of horse-drawn traffic, swarmed with people and their multifarious business. Of course they did at this time of a Saturday evening, in March of the year 1848, when the Surrey-side theatres opened their doors to let out the posh folk from the boxes, and the young costermongers swarmed out of the threepenny stalls. The shops were all open, the keepers in their doorways, the windows full of furniture or tools or second-hand clothes, or heaps of vegetables or cheese or eggs. But there was as much business being done from the stalls that crowded the street itself. The repetitive cries of the stall vendors or their boys rose up over the clatter of horses’ hooves: ‘Chestnuts, penny a scoop!’ and ‘Pies all ’ot!’ and ‘Yarmouth herrings three a penny!’ Many of these voices were Irish; the destitute folk of that country had come to the city fleeing the famine, and were looked down on even by the poorest of the indigenous folk. More elaborate sermons came from the cheap Johns selling Sheffield-steel cutlery in their thick Yorkshire accents, and the patterers talking up their gaudy literature of gruesome crimes. Luis had to sidestep an old woman seated on a low stool, smoking a pipe, selling framed engravings of Queen Victoria, her Consort and her children from an upturned umbrella. The street entertainers were everywhere too, the ballad singers and the sword swallowers and fire eaters, an old blind woman playing a hurdy-gurdy, and one man with a tabletop display of mechanical figures from Austria, a princess dancing the polka, a trumpeting elephant, which held the attention of rapt street children …
Amid all this clamour, Luis kept his eye on the mysterious Hackett.
Luis was a quick study. Oswald Hackett was a powerfully built man in his thirties, some years older than Luis, dressed richly but soberly in a handsome-looking surtout, and walking with an expensive cane. In the light of the lamp by the stage door Luis had noticed that the skin of the hand holding that cane bore marks, scars made by chemicals perhaps. Was the fellow some kind of scholar, a scientist – a chemist? And educated by the sound of it; he had the slight bray, the elongated vowels, that Luis associated with a history shaped by Harrow and Oxford.
Right now the man looked somewhat sickened: pale, breathing hard as he marched along. But this March day was unseasonably warm, and the London air was a touch less sulphurous than usual – the reaction must be due to after-effects of the man’s own disappearing act rather than to the climate. Still, Hackett kept pushing through the crowd, by an apparent effort of will.
‘Further than I remembered to this oyster-house,’ he said now, panting. ‘Not used to these crowds; forgive my lack of breath. What a swarm this is – eh? As if London is one great decaying tree trunk through which the maggots and the weevils chew their way, selling bits of bark to each other for farthings … Ah, but I imagine you feel more at home than I do, Elusivo? After all it was on streets like this that you once scrambled to survive, did you not? Chewing your quid and watching out for the bobbies …’
Luis watched sweeper boys at a corner, competing to clean the path of grander folk passing to and from the theatres, some of them somersaulting or handstanding in hope of a tossed penny. He had the uncomfortable feeling that this Hackett knew far too much about him – about a life he would prefer to remain his own secret.
It was a sorry affair after all: his father a shopkeeper who had died poor, of consumption, his mother marrying again before dying herself in childbirth – and a stepfather who had never treated Luis with anything more than contempt, and had eventually thrown him out on the street. Luis was nine years old. Well, he had joined Hackett’s ‘maggots and weevils’ of London to survive, at first sweeping the streets just like these boys he saw before him now, and using his unusual talent to get him out of scrapes – and, yes, away from the bobbies when he needed it. But then, aiming higher, he had developed a street act based on his disappearing tricks: popping out of existence behind a barrel, only to emerge from a doorway across the street. And that had got him noticed, and a job in the warmth of the Surrey-side theatres in variety shows or as an interval turn. All the while he had kept his secret: that his magic tricks weren’t tricks at all – though if they weren’t magic he wasn’t sure what they were.
And now, it seemed, he had been noticed again.