Chapter Two
Londoners have crossed the River Thames by way of man-made bridge for nearly two thousand years.
History suggests that Romans built the first London Bridge in 55 AD, but a Scotsman called Rennie and his two sons designed and built the newest iteration, a stately, five-arched affair known as“New London Bridge,”in 1831.
Stretching from the City of London to Southwark, New London Bridge is a spare, clean overpass for wagons and pedestrians (some three hundred vehicles and five hundred people a day), devoid of the homes, shops, and public latrines that lined earlier bridges on the same site.
Open to the public day and night, densest crowds in early morning and late afternoon.
—fromA Noble Guide to Londonby Sabine Noble
Sabine covered her nose with a handkerchief, blotting out the stink of the River Thames. Today had been a day of terrible smells. The makeshift morgue on theDreadnoughtexceeded expectations in terms of airlessness and rancidity, and now the crush of vehicles on London Bridge trapped their open wagon over the smoldering river, stewing in the afternoon sun.
Sabine shaded her eyes with her hand and looked down at the unconscious body in the bed of the wagon. Could a gravely ill man become sicker from a terrible odor alone?
She took up a broom from the bed of the wagon and nudged him with the handle. He groaned, and Sabine retracted the broom. She frowned down, her head spinning with questions.
Why, for example, had doctors heaped a not-dead man in a cold, airless room filled with dead corpses?
What condition had rendered the not-dead man so very nearly dead—unconscious, cold, with only the faintest of breath—but not fully deceased?
How had a capable sea captain, and one of the most successful men in England, wound up in a floating charity hospital, surrounded by impoverished sailors?
And finally, most important: Was the man really, actually, truly who he appeared to be: her estranged husband, Jon Stoker, a man she barely knew and had not seen in more than a year?
Well, to this, at least, she knew the answer. Of course the not-dead man was Jon Stoker. She would not have screamed when she’d seen him; she would not have run frantic through the ship for help—she would not have abandoned her own fact-finding mission, her first solid lead in weeks—if she hadn’t been certain it was him.
Perhaps she did not know much about the man she married, but she knew he had a distinctive tattoo of a sea serpent on his right arm. She had recognized it immediately, the very thing that had caught her attention as she hurried through a narrow passage in the ship’s hull. On closer inspection, she’d recognized his face. He was a pale, thin, sunken-cheeked version of himself, but it was Jon Stoker, there had been no doubt.
As for what she would do with him, the answer was unavoidable; she should maintain his not-dead condition (also known as his life) until she could hand him over to someone who could properly revive him, assuming, God willing, a revival was in his future.
“Can you not maneuveraroundthe ox cart?” Sabine asked the driver. She’d hired a wagon to transport them from theDreadnoughtto her cellar apartment in Belgravia. The crush of vehicles jamming London Bridge had slowed to a lurching crawl. A warm breeze mixed the rank smell of the Thames with the odor of standing livestock.
“And go where, missus?” asked the driver. “There’s a carriage and a mail coach ahead of the cart.”
Sabine frowned and looked again at Jon Stoker. Should she affect some manner of canopy to shield his face from the sun? It was a warm August day, no threat of rain, and she’d not brought a parasol. She looked around. She saw only her drafting kit, the fresh hay, and two barrels of an unnamed liquid that sloshed with each lurch of the wagon.
She sighed and pulled her dog into her lap. “He may have been better off in the morgue, Bridget.”
Nursemaiding was an occupation about which Sabine knew virtually nothing—lack of skill combined with lack of interest with a dash of repulsion.Not a natural caregiver, her dear mother had always said, and this was a generous view.
Skill or no, it was common sense to protect one’s face from the bright sun... unless sun was just what he needed after having been stashed in the dark, airless hull of a ship for God knew how long.
This same common sense had, for better or worse, caused Sabine to dismiss the doctors who hurried to the ship’s morgue when she discovered his familiar tattoo and familiar face.
But we must examine him,the doctors had implored her.He should not be moved. He could be contagious.
This last exaltation had been the only remark to give her pause. She absolutely did not want to contract whatever condition rendered him so very nearly dead that he passed for a corpse.
But Sabine was proud to a fault, and she had already challenged their competency and humanity. She could hardly back down.
She’d arrived in Greenwich in a Hansom cab, but it wasn’t feasible to depart in the same way, stuffing her husband’s limp body beside her on the cramped seat. Luckily, the hospital provided wagon service for discharged patients who were too sick (or too dead) to ride or walk away. Sabine agreed to hire the wagon, and Jon Stoker’s unconscious form had been loaded into the straw-lined bed of the vehicle by a shaken and repentant staff.
And now here she was, riding beside the very same unconscious form in the wagon, going to the only place she knew to take him, which was her own apartment in Belgravia, a suite of rooms she had taken with her two friends when she left her uncle and moved to London.
She had been a new bride then—a new bride who had spent all of one afternoon with her new husband.
By her request, Stoker had not even come inside the Belgravia house; how ironic that he would go there now.
