“Stop!” Barris cried again. Suddenly the detective had a small silver revolver in his hand. I had no idea then—nor to this day—why he would want to detain these feral creatures.
Two of the boys had pulled themselves up into a high drain that seemed too small to allow access even to these improbably thin and starving wraiths, but with a burst of wriggling, they disappeared. One almost expected the pop of a champagne cork as the second boy’s pale, bare soles wriggled and thrashed out of sight. The third boy crouched low and slithered headfirst into yet another pipe on the opposite side.
The fourth boy reached elbow-deep into the stream he stood in and hurled two handfuls of muck at our approaching boat. The detective with the bullseye ducked and shouted an oath. I heard filth splatter across the thwart where I sat and saw some strike Reginald Barris on the lapels of his heavy wool coat.
I laughed.
Barris fired the pistol twice. The report in the narrow brick tunnel was so loud and startling that I threw my hands over my ears.
The Wild Boy pitched face forward into the water.
The punt floated past the man’s maggot-writhed corpse until we reached the boy. The detective with the pole reached down and turned the boy over, pulled him half into the boat. Filthy, reeking water dripped from the boy’s rags and open mouth into our punt.
He was no older than ten or eleven. One of Barris’s bullets had gone through his throat, severing the jugular. Blood still pumped from that wound, although very weakly. The other bullet had entered his cheek just below the boy’s eye, which remained wide open and staring, as if in reproof. His eyes were blue.
Our man with the pole let the corpse slide back into the black water.
I got to my feet and grabbed Barris by his broad shoulders. “You’ve killed a child!”
“There are no children in Undertown,” was Barris’s cool, unconcerned reply. “Only vermin.”
I remember attacking him then. Only profound exertions by the detective with the pole and by the one in the stern using the tiller as a balancing staff kept the wobbling punt from turning over, adding our four bodies to the stream holding the maggot-ridden man and the murdered boy.
I remember making sounds as I attacked Barris, but not forming words—mere grunts and half-stifled screams, garbled syllables without meaning. I did not attack the detective with my fists, as a man might, but with fingers raking like claws and fingernails clawing for his eyes, the way a madwoman might.
I half-remember Barris holding me off with one hand until it became apparent that I would not desist and was going to knock us all into the black water. I half-remember my screaming becoming more intense and my saliva spattering the young detective’s handsome face and him saying something to the man in the stern behind me and then the silver pistol coming up, its barrel short but heavy and flashing in the bobbing bullseye lantern light.
And then—blessedly—I remember nothing but darkness with no dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Iawoke to find myself in my own bed in daylight, in my own nightshirt, in great pain and with Caroline hovering—and frowning—over me. My skull was pounding in a greater agony than I had hitherto experienced and every muscle, sinew, bone, and cell in my body was grinding against its neighbour in an off-key chorus of pain-filled physical despair. I felt as if days or weeks had passed since I had taken any of my medicinal laudanum.
“Who is Martha?” demanded Caroline.
“What?” I could barely speak. My lips were dried and cracked, my tongue swollen.
“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline. Her voice was as flat and unsympathetic as a pistol shot.
Of all the various sorts of panic I had experienced during the past two years, including awakening blind in an underground crypt, none was as terrible as this. I felt like a man sitting fat and secure in his comfortable carriage only to feel it suddenly lurch off a cliff.
“Martha?” I managed to say. “Caroline… my dear… what are you talking about?”
“You’ve been saying… repeating… ‘Martha’ in your sleep for two days and nights,” said Caroline, neither her expression nor her tone softening. “Who is Martha?”
“Two days and nights! How long have I been unconscious? How did I get here? Why is this bandage on my head?”
“Who is Martha?” repeated Caroline.
“Martha… is Dickens’s character from David Copperfield,” I said, touching the thick bandage wrapped around my skull and feigning disinterest in the conversation. “You know… the girl of the streets who walks by the filthy, corrupted Thames. I think I was dreaming about the river.”
Caroline crossed her arms over her chest and blinked.
Never underestimate, Dear Reader, the resourcefulness of a novelist in an untenable situation, even when he is in such a dire condition as I was that day.
“How long have I been sleeping?” I asked again.
“It’s Wednesday afternoon,” Caroline said at last. “We heard knocking at the door on Sunday mid-day and found you unconscious on the stoop. Where had you been, Wilkie? Charley—he and Kate have been here twice; he reports your mother is about the same—said Mrs Wells reported that you left your mother’s without a word of explanation late on Saturday night. Where did you go? Why did your clothes—we had to burn them—stink of smoke and… of something worse? What happened to your head? Frank Beard has been here three times to look at you and was quite worried about the gash on your temple and the possible concussion to your brain. He was afraid you were in a coma. He was afraid that you might never awaken. Where have you been? Why in God’s name are you dreaming about a Dickens character named Martha?”
“In a minute,” I said, leaning over the side of the bed but deciding that I would not be able to stand, or, if I did manage to stand, be capable of walking. “I shall answer your questions in a minute, but first have the girl bring in a basin. Quickly. I am going to be sick.”
DEAR READER FROM my distant future, it seems quite possible—even probable—that in your Far Country a hundred years and more hence, all disease has been conquered, all pain banished, all the mortal afflictions so common to men of my time become no more than a distant hint of an echo of history’s rumour. But in my century, Dear Reader, despite our inevitable hubris as we compared ourselves to more primitive cultures, in truth we had little knowledge with which to battle disease or injury and few effective chemists’ potions to utilise in our pathetic attempts to ameliorate mankind’s oldest enemy—pain.
My friend Frank Beard was better than most practitioners of his dubious trade. He did not bleed me. He did not apply leeches to my belly or bring out his arsenal of ugly steel instruments with which to trepan or trephine me (that nineteenth-century surgeon’s habit of casually and obscenely boring a hole in the patient’s aching skull as if coring an apple with a carpenter’s bit-and-brace, popping the circle of white bone out as easy as popping the cork on a bottle of wine, all the while acting as though it were the most normal thing in the world to do). No, Frank Beard visited frequently, fretted and brooded honestly, checked the gash and bruise at my hairline, changed dressings, queried me anxiously about my ongoing and worsening pain, advised rest and a milk diet, gave quiet instructions to Caroline, tut-tutted to me about my laudanum intake but did not order me to stop it, and—in the end—honoured the true spirit of Hippocrates by first doing no harm. Just as with his more famous patient and friend—Charles Dickens—Frank Beard the physician worried about me without being able to help me.
So I remained in agony.