6

6

While Quincy and his crew offloaded their cargo of blood, Kate and more than a dozen girls from rival gangs worked their way up the canal opening locks. The idea was to open all the locks from St. Pancras to Limehouse. If both were successful and they met up somewhere along the system, they could abandon the canal while the increased flood flushed the floaters down to the basin where Will and the others would, with the help of whatever gods there be, destroy them.

So far, they’d been lucky. The Commercial Road Lock at the mouth of the canal where it poured into the basin was open, as were the Solomon Lane Lock and Johnson’s Locke above. They met slight resistance at Solomon Lane, shoving two floaters into the lock until the lower gates were open. The surge of falling water swept the creatures downstream.

Seldom more than seven feet wide, the towpath wound along one side of the dark waterway. A long wall of leaning board fences separated the cindered yards of tenements on their right. On the opposite side loomed the hulks of wharves and warehouses. Ahead, the canal narrowed where it passed under Gunmakers Arms Bridge. Leaning telegraph poles rose out of the gloom on Bridge Street above. With London afire and its citizens fleeing, the lamplighters had given up on lighting its streets. However, the darkness was not absolute; even from three miles away, the fires in central London, reflecting off the underbellies of the lowering clouds, illuminated the path in shifting garish light.

They were nearing the Mile End Lock when the attack came.

All of them, even Queen Jane, were dressed for business—to wit, they wore the common working-class male attire of ‘costers, vanboys and ‘prentices: waistcoats, corduroy trousers and hobnailed boots. Dirty Deidre of the notoriously violent Wandsworth Scuttlers and her lumbering, sour-faced cohort, Mags Goody, brandished the added lethalness of rib-smashing steel toe caps on their boots. Razor Lil, obviously rethinking the practicality of using her trademark straight razor on the undead, and her girls, Maud and Pru, hefted railway spike mauls, their ash hafts shortened to make two-handed “wood chopping” swings more practical at close quarters.

With so many simmering grudges and unsettled accounts, Kate expected some quarreling but, despite the need for silence, bickering had plagued their journey from the start, Dirty Deidre being the chief offender. The big woman clanked her steel-tipped boots down inches from Midge Tibbet’s heels, not making an effort to keep quiet but breathing down the Limehouse Reaper’s neck even as she kept up a running banter.

“Tibbet here’s got eyes for yer Small Tom,” Deidre said to her gang mate. Though Mags walked beside her, Deirdre raised her voice for the group’s benefit. “Whaddaya think of that Mags?”

True to his name, Small Tom stood no higher than Mags’ breasts, his diminutive size useful for fanlight-jumping. Regularly seen hanging around Mags like an inadequate shadow, the wiry burglar doted on the bigger woman. Make no mistake, for crib-cracking a tall girl and a petite fellow were every bit the equal, or even superior, of any two regular guys. In addition to which Tom was an excellent featherweight, proficient with the gloves in the square ring and even more adept at head-butting and jaw-cracking in the raw. With Mags for muscle and Small Tom for window-entering, the couple made a profitable pair.

“Does she now?” Mags growled, equally loud.

Deidre, still riding the rush of shoving a floater into the canal, was naturally wild and made wilder by her appetite for cocaine. Her eyes were round, her face twisted with a savage grin as she baited the female Reaper. “She does indeed!”

Kate knew what Deidre was doing. As the Scuttlers hailed from South London, miles from the Reapers’ East London home, Deidre’s taunting wasn’t about territory but with establishing bull goose rights. While not the most dominant North London gang, the Reapers were certainly well-known for the violence of their attacks, often employing railway spikes tied to chains instead of belts in their skirmishes. Even now said spikes dangled from chains as the Reapers strode ahead of the Scuttlers. So far, Midge was showing surprising restraint.

“You got eyes for my Tom?” Mags poked Midge in the back.

“I’ll thank’e to keep yer bleedin’ paws to yerself, ya lumberin’ golem!” Midge hissed and let out a length of chain, dropping the railway spike dangling at her side a foot in preparation for battle. The edge to her voice sent a chill up Kate’s spine.

City Road’s Winnie Tuttle sniggered. Deidre silenced her with a withering glance.

“Why don’t you both shut yer gobs before you draw the whole canal down on us!” Peg Dyer said, equally loud.

“Who’re you talking to?” Mags’ fingers curled into fists. Mags might be dimwitted, but she was brutal.

Kate’s grip tightened on the five-foot-long railway pry bar she carried. This prattling had to stop. They had work to do and no time to draw unwanted attention. She was about to shush them all when she saw it was too late.

From the murk beneath the bridge, a hulking silhouette stepped into the path.

And behind it another. And another.

Bloated disfigured monstrosities that took on hideous features as they stepped into the garish light.

Kate froze, as did the girls around her, not from fear—though cold sluiced through her veins raising goosebumps and chilling her bones—but to assess the enemy.

How many? she wondered, squinting into the underpass, trying to make out the shapes emerging behind the first three.

“Maybe we should go back.” Forty Elephants’ Claire Alden voiced the general feeling.

“We can’t,” Dove Row’s Annie Dawes said. “We have to open the lower locks for the plan to work.”

“We could go around them. Use the streets,” Lambeth’s Ruby Morton said beside Kate.

“We can’t.” New Cut’s Arlene Myers was looking behind them.

Kate followed her gaze.

They’d been making so much noise they hadn’t heard the tread of wet footfalls on the cinder path or seen the shambling shapes blocking their retreat.

Cut off. Nowhere to run. Ahead, behind, equally dangerous.

In that frozen moment, a wet arm slapped over the edge of the towpath and, streaming water, a bedraggled head and shoulders rose from the canal.

***

The Regent’s Canal Dock connected the Regent’s Canal with the River Thames at Limehouse. Originally the basin between the canal and river was small with an island in the middle where canal craft could tie up to await the tide before passing through the lock and so shuttle cargo back and forth between sea-going ships and canal barges. Eventually, grander ideas and Parliamentary funding prevailed and a basin large enough to admit sea-going vessels was constructed. Steam colliers could now enter the basin, transfer their coal to lighters for onward transit to the new canal-side gas works, and timber from the Baltics and North and South America could be off-loaded onto timber yards to be transported to Shoreditch furniture makers.

Two locks connected the basin with the river: a larger one for colliers and sailing ships and a smaller one for lighters and other small craft. The Ship Lock with its swing bridge was too large for their purposes, so Will and his crew concentrated on the smaller barge lock. It would be touch and go and much depended on George Fish and Dirk Bogart’s arrival coinciding with high water.

From his vantage standing on the Narrow Street swing bridge over the Ship Lock, Will could look out onto the deserted River Thames and at the activity behind him in the Limehouse Basin. Beside him, Police Constable Foley held a spyglass to his eye. While it was dark out on the river where the only signs of activity were bats darting near the shore, the dock was lit by glaring arc lamps mounted on eighty-foot-tall posts spaced along the middle of the quays. The garish light illuminated the wharves and decks of ships with a light brighter than the full moon and while Foley’s back was washed in its colorless radiance, his front remained in shadow.

“Any sign?” Will asked.

Foley lowered the spyglass, shook his head. “Not yet. We’ve got time.”

Foley was referring to the tide: the river outside the bottom lock gate was still lower than the basin above.

The boiling clouds in the west glowed a deep, malignant red, as if the fire had spread to the sky. Columns of black smoke rose in the distance over the roofs and chimneys of warehouses and offices. The city was burning, its citizenry fleeing. Will wondered how much would be left after tonight. Would life ever be the same after this epidemic? And if they failed . . .

Will squinted back at the warehouses and granaries and timber yards that surrounded the basin. A forest of masts rose over the Regent Canal jetties. Below the great sailing ships, smaller lighters and barges clustered like terriers around stallions. Unlike the river, the dock was anything but silent. The shouts of men readying for the assault vied with the steady pounding from the engine house that powered the hydraulic cranes on the north-west and south-west quays. The cranes were used for unloading and loading coal and oil barrels. One wharf housed thirty-five free-standing tanks for oil and turpentine of various capacities up to 100 tons each. The tanks were filled by hydraulic pumps from a corrugated-iron shed containing sump-tanks fed by troughs into which barrels, unloaded from barges by crane, were emptied. A similar shed, containing three 1,500-gallon and two 450-gallon tanks, was used for barrel-filling. Will was pleased to see the makeshift system of pipes redirecting the oil into the basin was nearing completion.

Several stevedores and a number of sailors remained at the dock when Will and his crew arrived. When they learned of the cargo Fish and Bogart were bringing, many high-tailed it out of the basin; some stayed to help. Will was grateful for the assistance. The men would be needed. They knew how to operate the dock’s equipment and where supplies were stored. And the two professional crane operators were a godsend.

“Will.”

Working over in his mind the sequence of what had to happen to destroy the floaters, Will was so engrossed he hadn’t noticed Chauncey Bellows approach. Despite his broken wrist which was done up very prettily in a linen sling, Chauncey had insisted on helping. As there was nothing wrong with his legs, Will had assigned him as runner.

“Chaunce?”

“Stoat asked for you to come down to the freezer.”

***

The tunnel was a half-circle of hell.

On an average day—or even night—it was an annoyance. There was no towpath and for those engineless crafts that, even in these modern times, were towed by horse, a crew member had to lead the beast through the streets and meet you at the mooring on the other side. But even if you had a steam engine and a dozen lanterns, the passage seemed endless and you felt the weight of the city crushing down . . . until you were back out into the open air and you could breathe again.

Sometimes it was even fun—when you had a little grog in you and, running through the tunnel, you and your mates tried to outdo each other shouting vulgarities or you belted a bawdy ballad at the top of your lungs and the close walls amplified and redoubled your voice as echoes bounced off the bricks.

But tonight, it wasn’t just the dark or the long half-circle stretching to a vanishing point with no end of the tunnel in sight or the ponderous sense of roads and houses and factories and churches ready to break through the arch just above your head. There was the subliminal terror of being in the dark with an unutterable horror that bit and tore but left its victims neither dead nor alive.

The slow chug of the engine echoed off the moist bricks. The sound of the lads tapping their staffs against the walls making minor adjustments to save him from oversteering was amplified till it sounded like some peg-legged sailor stumping his way along a wharf. Everyone’s ears were cocked for the slightest sound. Anything that was out of place, that didn’t belong, that told them they were not alone.

It happened in the blink of an eye. They were halfway through when something yanked Jimmy Dawe’s pole and he pitched overboard. Quincy heard a loud smack that must have been Dawe’s head cracking against the brick wall followed by a splash. Then nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

There was a stunned moment when Roger and Newt Whipple raised their poles to strike in case something tried to board, all of them frantically scanning the water for a sign of Dawes, as Quincy eased off the throttle, torn between searching for the Dove Row boy and making a run for it.

Nothing but the quiet chug of the idling engine and the plash of water lapping against their hull.

Quincy laid on the throttle and got them through the tunnel.