CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Vice is always attended with misery.”
Private Education: A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies.
Elizabeth Appleton. 1815.
Achurning fog rose from the dark cobbles as though it were a phantom from the grave set with mischief. The day had been milder than most but with the onset of dusk, a profound cold had descended to settle in one’s bones.
Hugh shivered as he walked down a dockside street known as Wapping Wall, and not just because his ragged once-red army jacket failed to keep out the cold.
A decade ago, with the enlargement of the London Docks, this side of town had been transformed into a modern centre of commerce – wine, brandy, spices and rice stored in endless warehouses while the new wharfs, connected to the Thames, could hold nigh four hundred ships. Foul alleys and crumbling houses had been cleared, oil streetlamps stood upon corners, smuggling…kept an eye on, and yet by night…
A malevolence lingered.
Ghosts of yore whispered.
For Execution Dock lay not a stone’s throw from here.
Piracy was a dying trade, in more ways than one, but it was there that criminals of the sea were still hanged as the admiralty’s jurisdiction only began where the tidal waters of the Thames splashed the banks. Thus far this year, four men had seen their grisly end, the tradition still maintained of leaving them in place until three tides had washed over their corpses.
A huddle of sailors lurched past him, their faces abruptly lit in the cloying glow of a corner streetlamp, before they were consumed by the night once more.
Pausing beside a lightless passage that led to wooden-staired access to the Thames, Hugh listened.
Though muffled by fog, water slapped and men called from their boats, for many a waterman used this passage, plying the river for trade. The Pelican Stairs – so named for the bird whom legend told fed her young on her own blood – held a strange allure that beguiled one to step into their shadows, to discover the murk high waters of Father Thames or, at low tide, the swallowing mud.
Hugh glanced up at the tavern that formed one side of the passage.
Yellow bricked and with three storeys, The Prospect of Whitby appeared from the outside to be a benign establishment, yet years ago, before a fire had burned its depravities to the ground, it’d been known as the Devil’s Tavern, frequented by smugglers, pirates, thieves and cutthroats.
Many a man had never returned from an ale taken here – a knife to the guts or a sack over the head from the roaming press-gangs, and that was if the stench of the river failed to overwhelm.
The rebuilt Prospect of Whitby was now more winsomely named after a collier boat moored here, but Hugh wasn’t fooled…
Your prospects were low if you frequented this place too often.
Threat still held sway over these streets, just in another guise – thieves awaited the night to plunder warehouses, doxies swung skirts on lamplit corners to lure the sailors, and footpads lingered in alleys to rob the next drunken cull.
But for tonight, these were Hugh’s streets, his lone path to follow till Ross Thornton had been vindicated and Phoebe had a father to be proud of.
As a rule, he was stoic on a mission such as this, as to whether he’d survive to watch dawn rise in her blush finery, yet of late it felt more imperative: a need to return home to Miss Amelia Lambert’s amber eyes and Phoebe’s warm hugs.
This afternoon, Amelia had shut herself in his downstairs study to read the reports on the Brotherhood of Ravens, and he hoped those keen eyes would see something he had not.
Hugh paced to the tavern door, a rush of smoke assailing him as he swaggered in and surveyed the interior.
Aside the rear windows that overlooked the Thames, a few sailors slouched, clay pipes clamped to mouths; a table held a couple of gossiping crones; a long bench by the stairs was occupied by watermen; and at the bar, a short grubby lad in sailor’s slops and with cap pulled low perched on a stool, aimlessly swinging his leg.
Quiet.
But it was still early.
The upper floor had rooms for bare-knuckle boxing and cock fighting, and one of these was to be used for the Ravens’ meeting.
After sliding over a penny for an ale that tasted thrice baptised in the Thames, he settled himself on a vacant bench.
The door opened and Hugh’s gaze lifted but ’twas merely another bent crone who, after flapping a hand at the other two,shuffled to the bar. The short grubby lad flinched and rose from his stool as the crone garbled for gin, skirts dusting the floor.
