He slept.
He awoke with a strange taste in his mouth, metallic, like iron. The candle had burned low, was guttering dangerously. Someone had put a knife in his ribs while he’d slept. It was sticking out. There was blood dried on his arms, his shirt. When he breathed, the knife handle wobbled back and forth. He peered down at it in surprise, then around at the shadowy cistern. It was empty. Where did everyone go? He gripped the handle with both hands and pulled and the knife came slowly out and then he staggered to his feet and saw the bodies. There were maybe ten, twelve of them. All piled bonelessly in their rags in a corner of the cistern. It looked like their eyes had been removed. The floor, striped with gore where they’d been dragged. Walter stared around in confusion.
He went out into the lightless sewer. Slowly, uncertainly. Retracing his steps. His head was thick and he wasn’t thinking clearly. It was night outside, a thick fog had descended. He stood in the darkness, peering out across the river at the weird yellow lights haloing in the murk. Then he was climbing steep stone stairs up to the embankment. Then he was standing in front of a lighted window, staring at a shopkeeper’s dummy behind the glass. He was so cold. Why couldn’t he ever get warm?
Later he stood in the court where his rented room should have been. All was in ruined silhouette. The building had collapsed. There were charred timbers sticking out of the rubble and he ran a hand over his smooth scalp, hairless as a catamite, and stared helplessly out at the fog and the darkness and then, his bare feet sliding over the sharp rubble, he went back out into the night.
The boy. He could almost smell the boy, a sharp metallic scent in the thick of the city. He turned and turned, sniffing at the air.
* * *
For a long time after the litch plunged into the river, Charlie just sat hunched in pain, in the middle of Blackfriars Bridge, the night rain drumming against him, pattering on the stone railing and the dark setts and the puddles shining weirdly in the darkness. He couldn’t stop shaking. His chest and arms were on fire. There was something wrong with his head, too, and he kept closing his eyes and waking up, not knowing where he was. The rain slowed, the rain stopped, a thin gray daylight filtered grittily over the wet. Then there were hansoms and coaches clattering across the bridge, and then clerks in dark suits and bowlers were trudging past, stepping over him, paying him no mind. Sometime later a constable tapped his knee with a truncheon.
“Walk it off, blackie,” the constable said. “Less you want a night in the stone jug, like.”
He got woozily to his feet.
The constable glanced, bored, out over the railing. “London Docks is that way,” he said. He gestured off downriver with the truncheon.
Charlie stumbled away, feverish, retracing his steps, trying to. The sky was lightening. It would be morning soon. All around him stretched a maze of crooked lanes and dark alleys and streetsweepers in rags and horses shitting on the stones and a god-awful stink of sewage wafting up out of the gutters. The vastness of it all made him stagger.
He slept for a time in a rotting doorway and woke to find a monstrous rat crawling over his foot. He stole a meat pie from a wagon on a street corner, stumbling out into the traffic of horses and iron-wheeled cabs muscling past, narrowly avoiding collision. His arms and chest looked wrong, swollen, the skin soft and painful to the touch. He should have been healing by now. There was something in the litch’s claws, some poison maybe, that went deep. He slept in a puddle in an alley somewhere near the river, soaked, and he awoke it was morning again. There was a girl in rags, crouched beside him, barefoot. A second, smaller girl stood behind.
“Ere, you,” said the first softly. “You got to get up, like. Ere.”
She dragged him up by his throbbing arm. He cried out, shivering, and got to his hands and knees, then stood unsteadily.
“There.” She grinned up at him. She was half-black, like him. But so small. Maybe six, seven years old at most. Her hair was filthy, her face streaked with pale grime. The other girl was younger even, with long tousled brown hair, like a mouse, and she worked a knuckle into one nostril, rooting around, sizing him up, but said nothing.
“Me name’s Gilly,” said the older one, finally, and grinned. “This ere is Jooj. An you can quit yer gawpin, you look a bloody sight worsern us.”
His head felt gluey, hot. He tried to say something but only swayed.
They led him by the hands, one holding to each, drawing him forward like a reluctant goer at a fair. Into the gloom and damp shadows of Wapping. The river, reeking, was somewhere near. Gilly and Jooj would stop sometimes to let him rest, gasping up against a slimy wall, and they’d peer up at him in interest, those two small girls, or else sometimes they’d stop to pick a bit of metal or a button out of the open gutters, wiping it on their shirtfronts to clean it, pocketing it someplace in their rags.
At a peeling warehouse, its walls leaning unsteadily and creaking in the fog, he was ushered inside, and up a rickety staircase, and on the upper floor beneath a wall of broken windows he saw a small crowd of children turn to look him over.
“Bleedin hell, Gilly,” a tall boy said. He got up, came over. He was younger than Charlie but nearly of a height. “What’s he, now? Ye can’t just drag any damn cockle in off the stones, like. What’s Mr. Plumb to say?”
Gilly grinned up. “I got Plumb in me pocket.”
“Sure ye do,” said the boy.
“But, Millard,” said Jooj, the littler one, in a tiny high-pitched voice. “You’s always sayin we needs a lookout. He’s right perfect.”
The tall boy got close to Charlie, looking him over like a cut of meat. “Do he got a name?”
“Aye,” said Gilly. “Rupert.”
“He ain’t no Rupert. Is you name Rupert?”
Charlie, clutching his pained chest, sank down to the floor. He grimaced.
“What’s a matter with him? S’e cut up, like?”
“Aw, Rupert’s just a bit faint, he is. Needs some pottage.”
“Jesus almighty he ain’t a Rupert, Gilly. Lookit him. Aw. E’s bleedin.”
Charlie clenched his teeth, glared in pain up at the squabbling kids. “Charlie,” he whispered. “My name … is Charlie.”
Millard grinned at the two girls. He was missing all his front teeth. “Told youse,” he said.
“Hullo, Charlie,” said Gilly, crouching down. “Don’t pay Millard no mind, he’s just a bitta worrier, he is. He’ll come around.”
A moment later Jooj appeared at his elbow, holding a battered tin bowl. Inside was a cold lump of porridge, a spoon sticking out of it.
“Go on, eat,” said Gilly, taking it from the little one. “It ain’t poisoned.”
He ate, and slept again, and woke feeling somewhat better. The sharp pain in his chest and arms was subsiding. The warehouse was darker, the cracked panes glinting like frost. Millard was sitting beside him, holding his knees to his chest.
“I thought maybe you was dead.” He grinned. “Ere. Eat this. It’s like to help.”
He gave Charlie a greasy waxed paper and inside it were three pale balls of dough, still warm. They tasted sweet; Charlie chewed them slowly, turning them from cheek to cheek, swallowing with difficulty. Gradually he felt more clearheaded, sharper, wakeful.
“There ye go,” said the boy. “Ye thirsty?”
He had a tin cup he passed across and Charlie drank it and was surprised to see it was stout. Bitter, thick, filling. He ran a hand over his mouth.
“We got a job what needs doin,” said Millard. “Ere’s your opportunity to make a right use of yourself. Come on, then.”
He led Charlie back down the ruined steps to the warehouse below. The child thieves were gathered there, four dim bull’s-eye lanterns bobbing among them. Gilly came up, studying his face, nodding at whatever it was she saw there.