A Christmas Odyssey Read online

  Of course: He must be Sir Oliver’s father. That was the resemblance. Now why would he be here to see Miss Hester? Squeaky regarded him more closely. He had a mild, agreeable face, but there was nothing passive about those blue eyes. A very clever man, Squeaky judged, possibly very clever indeed, but—at the moment—also a worried man. Before he let him in to see Hester, Squeaky would like very much to know what he wanted so urgently that he came all the way from wherever he lived to a place like Portpool Lane.

  “She’s helpin’ patients right now,” he replied. “We had a bad night. Big catfight down Drury Lane, knives an’ all.” He saw the gentleman’s look of pity with satisfaction. “Mebbe I can help? In the meantime, like.”

  Rathbone hesitated, then seemed to come to some decision. “It is advice I need, and I believe Mrs. Monk may be able to guide me toward someone who can give it to me. When might she be free?”

  “Is it urgent?” Squeaky persisted.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  Squeaky studied the man even more closely. His clothes were of excellent quality, but not new. This suggested that he cared more for substance than appearance. He was sure enough of himself not to have any hunger to impress. Squeaky looked into the clear blue eyes and felt a twinge of unease. He might be as gentle as he seemed, but he would not be easy to fool, nor would he be put off by lies. He would not have come to Hester for medical help; he would most certainly have his own physician. Therefore it was help of some other sort that he wanted: perhaps connected with the clinic, and the kind of people who came there.

  “Mebbe I can take a message to her?” Squeaky suggested. “While she’s stitching and bandaging, like. Is it about the kind o’ folk what come here?” It was a guess, but he knew immediately that he had struck the mark.

  “Yes, it is,” Henry Rathbone admitted. “The son of a friend of mine has sunk into a most dissolute life, more so than is known to any of my own acquaintances, even in their least-attractive pursuits. I want to find this young man, and attempt to reconcile him with his father.” He looked a little self-conscious, perhaps aware of how slender his chances were. “I have given my word, but I do not know where to begin. I was hoping that Hester might know at least the areas where I could start. He is apparently concerned with a deeper level of vice than mere gambling, drinking, or the use of prostitutes.”

  Squeaky felt a sharp stab of alarm. This sounded like a story of grief that Hester would get caught up in much too much. Next thing you know, she’d be helping him, making inquiries herself. What really worried Squeaky was not just the harm she could come to, but the ugly things about his own past that she might learn. As it was, she might guess, but there was a great deal about himself that he had managed to keep from her, in fact to even pretty well wipe out of his own memory.

  “I can help you,” he said quietly, his heart thumping in his chest so violently he feared it made his body shake. “I’d be the one she’d ask anyway. I know that kind o’ thing. Some things a lady doesn’t need to find out about, even if she has nursed soldiers an’ the like.”

  Henry Rathbone smiled very slightly. “That would be good of you, sir. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

  “Robinson. Most folks call me Squeaky.” He felt faintly embarrassed explaining it, but no one ever used his given name. He had practically forgotten the sound of it himself, nor did he care for it. “I’d be happy to oblige. Tell me what you need, an’ I’ll make a few inquiries as to where you can begin.”

  When Henry Rathbone had gone, Squeaky closed his account books, which were perfectly up-to-date anyway. He locked them back in the cupboard in his office where he kept them, and went to look for Hester.

  He found her upstairs. Her long, white apron was blood-spattered, and as usual, her hair poked out where she had pinned it back too tightly and it had worked its way undone. She looked up from the clean surgical instruments she was putting back in their cases.

  “Yes, Squeaky? What is it?”

  His mind was already made up. She must not have any idea what he intended, or, for that matter, that Henry Rathbone had called to see her. Hester was clever, so he would need to lie very well indeed for her to believe him. In fact it might be better not to hide the fact that he was lying, but just to fool her as to which lie it was.

  “I need to go away for a little while, not quite sure how long,” he began.

  She looked at him coolly, her blue-gray eyes seeming to bore right into his head.

  “Then we shall have to manage without you,” she said calmly. “We are well up-to-date with most things. I’m sure Claudine and I will be able to take care of the money and the shopping between us.”

  Squeaky wondered why she did not ask where he was going, and what for. Was it because she had already decided that she knew? Well, she didn’t!

  “A friend of mine is in trouble,” he started to explain. “His son has gone missing and he’s afraid he’s in danger.” There now, that was the truth—almost.

  A momentary sympathy touched her face, and then vanished.

  “Really? I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t believe him! That hurt, particularly because Squeaky was doing this just to protect Hester from herself. He knew the kind of place Lucien Wentworth was likely to have ended up in, and that was a part of the underworld that even Hester didn’t imagine, for all her experience. This was all his own fault. He had broken the first rule of successful lying—never answer questions that people hadn’t asked you!

  “It’s Christmas,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  She smiled with extraordinary sweetness, which made him feel worse.

  “Then go and help him, Squeaky. But remember to come back. We should miss you very badly if you didn’t.”

  “It’s …” he began. How could he explain it to her without her wanting to help? And she couldn’t. It was a dark world she shouldn’t ever have to know about. Weren’t war and disease enough without her seeing all about depravity as well?

  She was waiting.

  “It’s my home here,” he said abruptly. “Of course I’ll be back!” Then he turned and walked away, furious with himself for his total incompetence. All this respectability had rotted his brain. He couldn’t even tell an efficient lie anymore.

  Downstairs and outside he caught a hansom south toward the river. He begrudged the expense, but there was no time to waste with buses, changing from one to another, and even then not ending up where you really wanted to be.

  It might take him some time to find Crow, the man whose help he needed. Crow had intended to be a doctor, but various circumstances, mostly financial but not entirely, had cut short his studies. Squeaky had considered it indelicate to ask what those circumstances were, and he had no need to know. As it was, Crow’s medical knowledge was sufficient for him to practice, unofficially, among the poor and frequently semi-criminal who thronged the docksides both north and south of the river around the Pool of London. He took his payment in whatever form was offered: food, clothes, sometimes services, sometimes a promise both parties knew could not be kept. Crow never referred to such debts again.

  It took Squeaky the rest of the afternoon, a conversational supper of pork pie at The Goat and Compasses, and then more walking and questioning, to find Crow in a tenement house just short of the Shadwell Docks. Since he wanted a favor, Squeaky waited until Crow had seen his patient and collected his fee of sixpence—which was insisted upon by the patient’s father—and the two of them were free to walk out onto the road beside the river.

  Crow turned up the collar of his long, black coat and pulled it more tightly around himself against the icy wind coming up off the water. He was tall—several inches taller than Squeaky—and at least twenty-five years younger. Today he had a hat jammed over his long straight black hair, but in the lamplight Squeaky saw the same wide smile on his face as usual. He seemed to have too many teeth, fine and strong.

  “You must want something very badly,” he remarked, looking
sideways at Squeaky. “And it isn’t a doctor. You’ve got plenty of those much nearer Portpool Lane. You look agitated.”

  “I am agitated,” Squeaky snapped. He told Crow about Henry Rathbone’s visit to the clinic and his request for help in finding Lucien Wentworth. As they strode in the dark along the narrow street in the ice-flecked bitter wind, the cobbles slick under their feet, he also told him about the sort of indulgence that Lucien Wentworth had apparently sunk into.

  Crow shook his head. “You can’t let Hester go looking into that!” he said anxiously. “Don’t even imagine it.”

  “I’m not!” Squeaky was disgusted, and hurt. Crow should have known him better than to even have thought such a thing. “Why do you think I’m looking for you, you fool?”

  Crow stopped in his tracks. “Me? I don’t know places like that. I’ve treated a few opium addicts, but for other things—slashes, broken bones, not the opium. As far as I know, there isn’t anything you can do for it.”

  Squeaky felt a wash of panic rise inside him. He couldn’t do this alone. He knew enough about the underworld of self-indulgence to be aware of its labyrinthine depths and dangers. What on earth had possessed him to begin this? He should have told Henry Rathbone that the whole thing was impossible. For that matter, Rathbone should have told Lucien’s father that in the first place. Squeaky was really losing his grip. Respectability was an idiot’s calling.

  “Right!” he said tartly. “I’ll go back and tell Hester I can’t do it.”

  “You didn’t tell her anything about it in the first place,” Crow pointed out, but there was no smile in his eyes.

  “And how do I tell Mr. Rathbone that I can’t do it?” Squeaky said sarcastically. “Without her knowing, eh? She’s clever, that one. She can read a lie like it was writ on your face. She’ll know, whatever I say.”

  Crow thrust his hands into his pockets. His hands always seemed to be bare, whatever the weather. Squeaky looked at him. “Why don’t you get someone to pay you with a pair o’ gloves?” he said pointedly.

  Crow ignored the remark. “Are you saying obliquely that you will tell Hester I refused to help?”

  “Obliquely? Obliquely? You mean sideways?” Squeaky said crossly. “Why can’t you say it straight out? And no, I’m not saying it sideways, I’m telling you plain that she’ll know, ’cause if she were in my place, you’d be the person she’d ask. Which comes to my point. You want me to tell her you won’t help, or you want to tell her yourself?”

  Crow shook his head. “You haven’t lost your touch, Squeaky. You’re a hard man.”

  “Thank you,” Squeaky said with unexpected appreciation.

  Crow glared at him. “It wasn’t a compliment! What do we know about this Lucien Wentworth, apart from the fact that his father is wealthy and seems to have let him have a lot more money than is good for him?”

  Squeaky shrugged and started to walk again, talking half over his shoulder as Crow caught up with him. He repeated what Henry Rathbone had told him about Lucien’s weakness for physical pleasure, his need to feel a sense of power, to feel admired, to feel—as it might appear to his deluded and immature mind—loved.

  Behind them a string of barges went downriver with the ebbing tide, their riding lights bright sparks in the wind and darkness. To the south a foghorn sounded mournfully.

  Crow’s expression grew grimmer as he tramped beside Squeaky. Finally they turned inland and slightly up the slope, leaving the sounds of the water behind them. The thickening gloom of the winter night lay ahead. Lamps shone one after another along the narrow street, angular beacons toward the busier High Street.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” Crow said as they reached the crossroad. They waited for the traffic to clear, and then hurried over, their boots splashing in the gutter and then crunching on the cobbles already slicked with ice. “And we may not find anything.”

  Squeaky wanted to tell him to stop complaining, but he knew that Crow was right, so he said nothing for several minutes.

  “Let’s have a drink first,” he suggested finally. He thought of offering to pay for both of them, but that was a bad habit to start.

  It was, as Crow had said, a very long night. They began with extremely discreet inquiries in the Haymarket. The area was notorious for the prostitutes who patrolled its pavements so openly that no decent woman went there, even if accompanied by her husband. However well-dressed she was, she would be likely to be taken for a lady of the night. In this area such women might be indistinguishable from ladies of society, especially those whose taste was a little daring.

  “I don’t know what we’ll learn here,” Crow said, watching a couple of young women quite openly sidle up to a group of theatergoers.

  “Do you know which theaters are fashionable right now for tastes a bit sharper than usual?” Squeaky asked challengingly.

  “My patients don’t come up this way,” Crow admitted. “East End music halls are more their line, if they’ve a few pence to spare.”

  “Then shut up, and watch,” Squeaky retorted. “And follow me.”

  They tried to find places selling more than alcohol, entertainment, and the chance to pick up a prostitute.

  Their first three attempts were abortive, but the fourth led them to a very small theater off Piccadilly where the drama on stage was overshadowed by the exchanges in the many private boxes and on the narrow stairs. The lighting was yellow and very dim, making most of the people look sallow and a little sinister. Heaven only knew what they looked like in daylight.

  Squeaky watched and waited. He did not know the names of the current young dandies who indulged themselves. Their dull eyes were half-focused, lids drooping. Opium, he thought to himself.

  He studied one young man closely, and, brushing past him, felt the quality of the cloth in his jacket sleeve. Yes, definitely money there. He hoped he had not lost his childhood art of picking pockets. There was often very good information to be had from the contents of a gentleman’s pocket—his name and address from his card, if nothing else.

  Squeaky knew that moving unnoticed in places such as these would require a little money, and he had no intention whatsoever of financing it himself. His money was earned with proper work these days, and deserved to be spent respectably. Better to pick pockets without Crow’s noticing, though. You never knew what his peculiar aversions might be. There was no accounting for taste, or superstition.

  From that theater they learned of others, more daring. The first cost them even to gain entrance. From the outside it looked like a perfectly ordinary public house.

  “Don’t look worth the trouble,” Squeaky said disparagingly, regarding the chipped pillars and peeling plaster with distaste.

  “An affectation, perhaps?” Crow suggested. Then he hurried over to explain. “A suggestion to the eye of the more sordid appetites catered to within?”

  Squeaky was amused, not so much by the idea as by the wording Crow chose. He shrugged and paid for their entry.

  “Ye’re right,” he said generously as soon as they were through the archway and down the steps into the main room. It was crowded with people, all of them with glasses or goblets in their hands, except the two almost-naked women who were practicing the most extraordinary and vulgar contortions on a makeshift stage, to the hoots and jeers of the onlookers.

  “They’ll be needing me professionally,” Crow observed, wincing at a particularly unnatural-looking move.

  Squeaky made no comment. He began to methodically talk to one person after another, asking questions, learning little.

  It took them over an hour to learn that Lucien was known here, but had not been seen in more than a month.

  They moved on to another place where they learned nothing, and then a farther tavern that at first seemed very helpful. However, in the end the man they found there turned out not to be Lucien, merely some other lost youth bent on finding oblivion.

  By four in the morning Squeaky was tired and cold. His head ached. And his fe
et were sore. He realized all the reasons he had been willing to give up the pursuit of temporary pleasure in favor of a warm bed in the Portpool Lane clinic, and only the very occasional night awake chasing around after other people’s needs. Even then, his time was not spent outside in the rain and the freezing wind, with his feet wet and water sliding down his neck from the rain. Being inside a low-ceilinged room and among the confusion of loud voices was not much better. He had forgotten how he disliked stupid laughter and the crush of bodies in narrow spaces, the smell of stale smoke and drink. Even the music had less appeal than it used to.

  They entered a cellar deep below a tavern. The yellow gaslight made the stone walls look even more pitted and stained. They did at least serve good brandy. Apart from warming Squeaky’s body a bit, the drink encouraged him to think that this was the kind of place that might attract a man like Lucien Wentworth, who was raised to know the quality of brandy and partook only of the best.

  It was actually Crow who began the conversation with a nearby stranger that finally yielded the first scent of Lucien.

  “Clever,” Crow observed amiably to the man nearest him. They were both looking at a provocatively dressed young woman who was miming an obscene joke to the delight of onlookers.

  “Cost yer,” the young man remarked. “But they all do.”

  “I prefer something a bit …” Crow hesitated. “Unusual.”

  The young man looked him up and down as if assessing his taste. “You’da liked Sadie.” He sighed wistfully. He was so slight as to be almost emaciated. The bones of his wrists looked fragile when his shirtsleeves slid back. “She was beautiful.”

  “Really …” Crow had difficulty pretending interest. Squeaky realized he had no idea what kind of woman Crow liked. The subject had never arisen.

  “Face pale as a lily,” the young man went on dreamily. “Hair like black silk. And sea-blue eyes, bright as deep water in the sun.”

  Squeaky let his mind wander. This was all a waste of time.