The Ruby in the Smoke

  So while Adelaide became more confident with those two, she was ill at ease with Sally, and fell silent when they were alone together. Sally would have been hurt by this if Rosa had let her, but the older girl took care to include her in every conversation and to consult her about Adelaide's future.

  "Do you know, she's got no idea of anything?" Rosa said to her on Sunday evening. "She doesn't know the names of any parts of London except Wapping and Shadwell - she didn't even know the name of the Queen! Sally, why don't you teach her to read and write and so forth?"

  "I don't think I could..."

  "Of course you could. You'd be perfect."

  "She's frightened of me."

  "She's worried about you, because of what Mrs Holland said. And because of her gentleman. She's been up to see him a dozen times, you know. She just sits and holds his hand, and then comes away again..."

  Matthew Bedwell had not woken until Sunday morning, and it had been Adelaide who had woken him. But he was so disorientated that he could not take in where he was or what had happened. Sally went up to see him when he had drunk some tea, but he would not speak to her. "Dunno," he would say, or "I forget," or "My memory's gone;" and despite all Sally's efforts to prompt him with her father's name, and that of the company, and the ship, and the company's agent Mr van Eeden, he remained mute. Only the phrase "The Seven Blessings" provoked a response, and that was not encouraging; what little colour there was in his face drained at once, and he broke into a sweat and began to tremble. Frederick advised her to leave it for a day or so.

  On Saturday afternoon she went out to meet Jim at their rendezvous and told him about where she was living, and why. When he heard about the rescue of Bedwell and Adelaide, he nearly wept with frustration that he'd missed it. He swore he'd be round as soon as he could, to check that these new friends of hers were all right. "You don't know who you can trust," he said.

  He seemed to be on the point of saying something else too. Two or three times he began, and then broke off, shaking his head and saying it would keep. Finally she said, "Jim, what is it? Have you found something out? For heaven's sake, tell me!"

  But he wouldn't. "It'll keep," he said. "No harm in waiting."

  That weekend, too, the first artistic and dramatic stereographs were taken. Taking a stereograph was much easier than Sally had imagined. A stereo camera was just like an ordinary one, except that it had two lenses as far apart as a person's eyes, each taking a separate image. When the two images were printed side by side and viewed through a stereoscope, which was only a device with two lenses set at the right angle to blend the images into one, the viewer saw a picture in three dimensions. The effect was almost magical.

  Frederick set up some comic pictures first, to see separately. One was called "A Horrid Discovery in the Kitchen", and featured Rosa as a fainting wife, with Trembler as her shocked husband. They were reacting to what Sally, as a kitchenmaid, was showing them - a cupboard from which were crawling a dozen black beetles, each the size of a goose. Adelaide had cut the beetles from brown paper, and inked them black. Trembler wanted a photograph of Adelaide too, so they dressed him up, sat her on his knee, and took a picture to illustrate a sentimental song. "Very fetching," said Frederick.

  And so their weekend passed.

  Elsewhere in London, things were not so peaceful.

  Mr Berry, for instance, was having a rough time. Mrs Holland made him clear up the mess that had been made of the hall, and repair the broken banisters, and when he ventured to complain, she let him know what she thought of him.

  "A big strong man like you," she said, "to let yourself be knocked about by a little whipper-snapper like him? And him half-sodden with opium, too! My word, I'd hate to see you tackle anything fierce, like a cockroach."

  "Oh, give over, Mrs Holland," moaned the big man nervously, nailing a batten across a broken door. "He must have bin a perfessional. It's no disgrace to be beat scientific. He's fought with the best, that one."

  "Well, now he's fought with the worst, and all. Even little Adelaide would've put up more of a scrap. Ooh, Mr Berry, you got a lot to make up for, you have. Get on and finish that door. There's a pile o' potatoes to peel out the back."

  Mr Berry muttered to himself, but quietly. He had not dared tell her about what he had allowed to happen in the kitchen. As far as she knew, Adelaide had just vanished; but the sudden appearance of the photographer from Swaleness had reminded her of Sally again. So she had an interest in Bedwell too, had she? And then there was what Mrs Holland took to be Sally's cunning in substituting a piece of nonsense for the plain instructions to where the Ruby was hidden. Sally had the Ruby now - she must have. Well, Mrs Holland would find her. And where she was, there would be the photographer, and Bedwell, and a fortune.

  Her discontent mounted, and so did the tasks she piled on Mr Berry. His weekend became distinctly uncomfortable.

  But perhaps the most uneasy man in London that weekend was Samuel Selby. Having parted with fifty pounds, and having received in exchange Mrs Holland's promise that she would be back soon to do further business, he was mortified too.

  Accordingly, he growled at his wife and daughter, snapped at the servants, kicked the cat and retired early on Saturday evening to the billiard room at Laburnum Lodge, his house in Dalston. There he donned a crimson velvet smoking jacket, poured himself a large glass of brandy, and potted a few balls while he tried to work out how to thwart his blackmailer.

  But try as he would, he couldn't work out how she had come by her knowledge.

  Nor could he guess how much she knew. The loss of the Lavinia, and the fraudulent insurance claim, were bad enough; but the other business, the centre of it all, the business Lockhart had been on the point of discovering - she hadn't mentioned that.

  Could it be that she didn't know?

  Fifty pounds was a paltry sum, after all, compared to the amounts that were involved...

  Or was she saving it up for another visit?

  Or was her informant keeping it back for some purpose of his own?

  Devil take it!

  He plunged the cue at a white ball, missed, ripped the cloth, and broke the cue savagely over his knee before flinging himself into an armchair.

  The girl? Lockhart's daughter - did she have anything to do with it?

  Impossible to say.

  The office-boy? The porter? No, absurd. The only man in the office who knew about it was Higgs, and Higgs -

  Higgs had died. While the Lockhart girl was speaking to him. Died of fright, according to the chief clerk, who'd overheard the doctor. She must have said something to startle Higgs - something her father had passed on to her; and Higgs, instead of bluffing it out, had chosen to die.

  Mr Selby snorted with contempt. But it was an interesting speculation; and maybe, after all, Mrs Holland was not his main enemy.

  Maybe he would be better to enlist her than to fight her. Repellent as she was, she had a certain style, and Mr Selby knew a tough chicken when he saw one.

  Yes! The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He rubbed his hands together and bit off the end of a Cuban cigar; and then donned a tasselled smoking-cap, to keep the smell of the tobacco from his hair, before lighting the cigar and settling back to compose a letter to Mrs Holland.

  There was one person whose weekend went according to plan - according to the plans of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, no less. This was a certain passenger on board the Drummond Castle, from Hankow. It had been rough in the Bay of Biscay, but the passenger had not suffered. He seemed impervious to most discomforts, and as the ship steamed up the Channel at a steady ten knots, he could be found on the boat deck, in the place he had made his own since Singapore, reading the works of Thomas De Quincey.

  The cold wind and the drizzle concerned him not a bit. In fact, as the air became chillier and the sky greyer, the passenger's spirits seemed to rise. He ate and drank the more heartily as the ship plunged the more sickeningly in the Channel
swell, and puffed constantly at a series of pungent black cheroots. On the Sunday evening the vessel rounded the North Foreland, and began the final stretch of her journey into the Thames Estuary. She moved slowly in these congested waters, and as the day faded, the passenger moved to the rail and gazed with close attention at the lights of the Kent coast to the left, steady and soft and warm; at the ghostly creaming foam thrown up by the bows of the ship; and at the myriad winking lights from buoys and lighthouses that guided innocent travellers like himself through the shoals and hazards of the sea.

  And as this thought struck him, the passenger suddenly laughed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  LIGHTS BELOW THE WATER

  The office in Cheapside had the decorators in. Buckets of whitewash and distemper stood in the hall, and brushes and ladders obstructed the corridors. The place was on the point of closing on Monday evening when the porter rang for Jim.

  "What d'yer want?" Jim demanded, and noticed a messenger boy standing by the porter's fire. Jim eyed him unfavourably, paying particular attention to his pill-box hat.

  "Letter for Mr Selby," said the porter. "Take it up, and look smart."

  "What's he waiting for?" said Jim, indicating the messenger boy. "Waiting for his master, with the barrel-organ, is he?"

  "None o' your business," said the messenger boy.

  "That's right," said the porter. "This is a smart lad, this one. He'll go a long way."

  "Well, why don't he start now?"

  " 'Cause he's waiting for an answer, that's why."

  The messenger boy smirked, and Jim left, scowling.

  "He wants an answer, Mr Selby," he said in the front office. "He's waiting down there now."

  "Is he," said Mr Selby, ripping open the envelope. His cheeks were highly coloured today, and his eyes were bloodshot; Jim observed this with interest, wondering whether Mr Selby was likely to expire from apoplexy. Then, as he watched, the phenomenon altered, and Mr Selby's countenance suffered a sea-change: the high tide of his colour went out all at once, leaving a grey-white expanse fringed with ginger whiskers. Their owner sat down suddenly.

  "Here," he said in a hoarse voice. "Who's downstairs? The man hisself?"

  "A messenger boy, Mr Selby."

  "Oh. Here - nip over to that window smartish and have a look outside."

  Jim did so. The street was dark, and the lights in the office windows and on the front of the carriages and omnibuses shone warmly in the gloom.

  "Can you see a feller - clean-shaven - fair hair - sunburnt complexion - stoutish?"

  "There's hundreds of people about, Mr Selby. What might he be wearing?"

  "I don't know what he'd be bloody wearing, boy! Is there anyone standing about, waiting?"

  "No one like that."

  "H'mm. Well, I'd better write an answer, I suppose."

  He hastily scribbled something and thrust it into an envelope.

  "Give this to him," he said.

  "Ain't you going to write the address, Mr Selby?"

  "What for? The boy knows where to take it."

  "In case he drops down dead in the street. He's a sickly-looking blighter. I shouldn't be surprised if he was to sling his hook before the week's out--"

  "Oh, get out of it!"

  Thus prevented from discovering the name of the man who was making Mr Selby so anxious, Jim tried another tack with the messenger boy.

  "Here," he said ingratiatingly, "I wonder as if you'd have any use for this? You're welcome to it if you'd like it."

  He held out a tattered copy of The Skeleton Crew, or Wildfire Ned. The messenger boy cast a cold eye on it, and took it without a word, tucking it into his bum-freezer.

  "Where's the answer what I was waiting for?" he said.

  "Oh, yes, how silly of me," said Jim. "Here it is. Only Mr Selby's forgot to write the gentleman's name on the envelope. I'll do it for yer, just tell me what it is," he offered, dipping a pen in the porter's inkwell.

  "Get stuffed," said the messenger boy. "Give us it here. I knows where to take it."

  "Well, o' course you do," said Jim, handing it over. "I only thought as it'd be more businesslike."

  "Bollocks to that," said the messenger boy, and left the fireside. Jim was opening the door for him; there seemed to be some obstruction in the way, and he bent to clear it. The porter was complimenting the messenger boy on his smart uniform.

  "Yes, well, there's an art in wearing clothes, I always say," said the visitor. "You keep yerself smart, and you'll get on."

  "Yus, there's a lot in that," said the porter. "You listenin', Jim? Here's a young lad with an 'ead on his shoulders."

  "Yes, Mr Buxton," said Jim respectfully. "I shall remember that. Here - I'll show you out."

  With a friendly hand on the other boy's back, Jim opened the door and showed him into the street. The messenger boy stalked off without a word, but before he had gone five yards, Jim called out:

  "Oy! Ain't you forgotten something?"

  "What?" said the boy, turning.

  "This," said Jim, and released a pellet heavily charged with ink from his india-rubber band. It hit the messenger boy right between the eyes, splashing its load all over his nose and cheeks and forehead, and making him howl with rage. Jim stood on the step shaking his head.

  "Dear, dear," he said. "You didn't ought to use language like that. What would your muvver say? You better stop, else I shall blush."

  The messenger boy ground his teeth and clenched his fists, but the sight of Jim's bright eyes and tense form, balanced and waiting for him, made him consider that dignity was the better part of vengeance; and he turned and walked away without a word. Jim watched with great satisfaction as the smart maroon jacket, with its new-imprinted hand-shape in sticky whitewash, disappeared into the crowd.

  "The Warwick Hotel," said Jim to Sally two hours later. "He had it on his hat, silly bugger. And on all his buttons. I wouldn't half like to see what happens when he goes in the hotel with ink and whitewash all over him. Here, Adelaide," he went on. "I been down Wapping."

  "Did yer see Mrs Holland?" said the child.

  "Just once. She's got that big bloke with her, and he's doing all your chores. Here! This is a good 'un!"

  They were in the kitchen at Burton Street, and he was looking at the freshly printed stereographs.

  "Which one's that?" said Sally, interested to see which one found most favour.

  "These bloody great beetles. That's a laugh, that is. You oughter do murders. You oughter do Sweeney Todd - or the Red Barn."

  "We will," said Sally.

  "Or Spring-Heeled Jack flying through the air."

  "Who?" said Frederick.

  "Here," said Jim, offering a copy of Boys of England. Frederick put his feet on the coal-scuffle and settled back comfortably to read it.

  "But what about your bloke upstairs?" Jim went on. "How's he doing?"

  "He's hardly spoken," said Sally.

  "What's the matter with him? Is he frightened o' something? You'd think he was safe enough here."

  "Perhaps he just needs to recover from the opium. Or perhaps we ought to give him some more," said Sally, who was very conscious of the little brown ball of resin in the kitchen cupboard. For her Nightmare was imprisoned in it like a genie in a lamp, and needed only the application of a match for its release. "What do you think the man in the Warwick Hotel wants?" she said, to change the subject.

  "Old Selby's dead jumpy these days. I thought he was going to keel over when he read the letter this afternoon. He's double-crossing 'em, and they've twigged it; that's all it is."

  "What can they be doing, though? Frederick, what can a firm of shipping agents do that breaks the law? What crimes can they commit?"

  "Smuggling," he said. "How's that?"

  "Could be," said Jim. "Then there's fraud. Sinking ships, and claiming on the insurance."

  "No," said Sally. "The firm only had the one ship. They're not ship-owners, they're shipping agents. And that sort of thing
's too easy to spot, surely?"

  "It happens all the time," said Jim.

  "You think it was sunk on purpose?" said Frederick.

  "Course it was."

  "What for?"

  "I can tell you," said the voice of Matthew Bedwell.

  He stood in the kitchen doorway, pale and trembling. Adelaide gasped, and Frederick jumped up at once and helped him to a chair by the fire.

  "Where am I?" he said. "How long have I been under?"

  "You're in Bloomsbury," said Frederick. "Your brother brought you here three days ago. We're all friends - you're quite safe."

  Bedwell looked at Adelaide, who said nothing.

  "Adelaide ran away," said Sally. "Mr Garland is letting us stay here because we've got nowhere else to go. Apart from Jim, that is."

  The sailor's eyes moved painfully from one to another of them.

  "You were saying something about the Lavinia," he said. "That's right, isn't it?"

  "Yes," said Sally. "What can you tell us about it?"

  He focused on her. "Are you Mr Lockhart's girl?"

  She nodded.

  "He asked - he asked me to bring you a message. I'm afraid he's - I'm afraid they... What I mean to say is, he's dead, miss. I'm sorry. I guess you knew."

  She nodded again, and found herself unable to speak.

  Bedwell looked at Frederick. "Is my brother here?"

  "He's in Oxford. He's waiting for you to get better. He'll be coming here on Wednesday, but perhaps you'll be able to go there before then."

  Bedwell leant back and closed his eyes. "Maybe," he said.

  "Are you hungry?" said Sally. "You haven't eaten for days."

  "If you've such a thing as a tot of brandy in the house, I'll be mighty obliged to you. But I couldn't eat at the moment. Not even your soup, Adelaide."

  "It ain't mine," said the child vehemently.

  Frederick poured a small glass of brandy.

  "Your good health," said Bedwell, and swallowed half. "Yes," he said, "the Lavinia... I'll tell you what I know about her."

  "What about the message?" said Sally.

  "That's part of it. I'll start at Singapore, where your father joined the ship."

  "I was the second mate of the Lavinia," he began. "Not much of a berth, since she was only a shabby little tramp - all kinds of goods between Yokohama and Calcutta, and pretty well anywhere else on the way. But I'd had a bit of bad luck; and there was the Lavinia in need of a second mate, and myself in need of a job... I was with her for two months before she sank.