The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Read online

  Also by E. S. Thomson

  Beloved Poison

  Dark Asylum

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Constable

  Copyright © E. S. Thomson, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-659-7

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  For Guy and Carlo

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note/Bibliography

  They say that life on the river depends on the direction of the wind. Every day those who live by the waterside turn their faces, bright with hope, towards the sunrise, nostrils flaring, hoping to catch the briny scent of money. If the wind blows from the east it will bring with it the riches of seven continents. Ships – hundreds of them – sent into the heart of the city by a single sigh.

  The poor thrive along the river, amongst the wealth-filled warehouses. Brown as rats they sift through its mud for treasures of their own – a lump of coal, a bone, an old shoe. They paddle back and forth across its pestilent waters, and breathe its vapours. They crowd the streets that run down to its shores, toiling amongst the ever-changing city of sails and decks that lines its banks, the dark water present only in the heave and swell beneath their feet.

  Anything is for sale here: spices, tea, cotton, labour – men’s and women’s, bodies, or souls, for a shilling. Anyone might hide here, in the cheap lodging houses, the damp cellars, the dark spaces between buildings. In these streets no one stands out. No one is noticed.

  What wickedness might walk amongst us here, hidden in plain sight, concealed by the urgent press of bodies, the scramble for money, for life?

  I will tell you.

  Chapter One

  The first time I saw the waterfront I was eight years old. My father took me. He had been in a good humour that day – one of the many reasons why I remember it so clearly. He was taking me to the Seaman’s Dispensary, which occupied cramped premises on the shore not far from the Seaman’s Floating Hospital. Before us, on the riverside, a crowd had gathered – sailors, dock workers, stokers, fishwives.

  ‘What is it?’ I said, peeping between their legs and catching a glimpse of wet, silvery flesh. I thought immediately of the booths and penny shows I had seen at the fair, at Cremorne and Vauxhall Gardens. ‘It’s a mermaid, isn’t it? A real one, pulled from the Thames!’ My father tried to turn me away, but I would not be persuaded, and I broke from him to push through legs and skirts.

  The smell should have told me what to expect. Soon to be an apprentice apothecary, I had accompanied my father about St Saviour’s Infirmary on countless occasions and I knew the smell of death well enough. But here the sweetness of decay was tainted with something else, something new and different. It was a curious, moist smell, damp and dark; a smell that spoke of the ooze and slap of water, of gurgling wet spaces and the sticky, yielding mud of low-tide.

  I saw straight away that I would find no silvered scales here, no long glittering fish-tail or slender, webbed fingers. Her flesh was pale and mottled, as white and grey as the belly of an eel, but bloated from long immersion. It was streaked with mud, and blotched with bruises, her hair dark and plastered to her skull like a layer of brown weed. The side of her head had been crushed, and a ragged blue-lipped gash against her cheek told where a clumsy boathook had gouged.

  I remember Dr Graves, St Saviour’s most revered anatomist, appearing from a shadowy thoroughfare between two soot-smothered buildings, as black as a crow in his flapping frock coat and tall hat, a half dozen students in his wake.

  How had he known to come here? But Mrs Speedicut, the matron, always said that the man could smell a cadaver from a mile away. Perhaps she was right. I looked back at the corpse he had come for – the mouth a slack, gaping tear; the eyes two dark, wet holes – and the ground beneath me seemed to rise and fall like the deck of a ship.

  When I came to I was lying in a place scarcely less fearful than the one I had just left, for my father had carried me to the mortuary which was just beside the quay. The day was warm, and he had laid me out on one of the cold marble slabs until I regained consciousness. I opened my eyes to see the body of a dead sailor on the slab next to mine; the tattoos upon his forearm proclaiming his occupation. His head and neck were tanned and leathery, his legs and body as white and soft-looking as curds. A doctor from another medical school was standing guard over him jealously.

  I heard footsteps outside, and the sound of gasping and retching. The door burst open and in marched four men with their neckerchiefs over their noses, the mermaid wrapped in an old tarpaulin slung between them. Dr Graves followed, grumbling.

  ‘These river cases are the worst,’ he said. ‘But we must do what we can, gentlemen, and there is much to learn about the miracle of decay.’ His students followed, their faces pale and appalled.

  My father bundled me onto my feet and dragged me outside. ‘What happened to her?’ I asked, trying to look back over my shoulder as the canvas shroud was peeled back. ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘The corpses of men find their way into the river by accident,’ he answered. ‘Women’s arrive there by design.’

  He was correct, as he so often was, and I heard later that the dead girl had been beaten to death by her husband, a vicious man who was known to abuse her and had set her to work on the streets. He had thrown her battered, half-clothed body into the water, bricks and stones in the pockets of her dress to weigh her down. But the river is a capricious ally for murderers, and he had not reckoned on the flimsiness of her clothing, and buoyancy afforded by the gas of putrefaction.

  Hers was the first body I saw that had been in the river; the first body I saw that had been murdered. It was not to be my last of either – nor was it the first time that I would wonder at the cheapness of a woman’s life, and the violence they endured at the hands of men.

  Over the following years I had little reason to return to the wa
terfront. My work at St Saviour’s Infirmary had meant that I was confined largely to the hospital’s precincts and its neighbouring streets, though I became acquainted with the apothecary who worked at the Floating Hospital – a man named John Aberlady, with whom I had taken my licentiate examination at Apothecaries’ Hall. He and I paid each other visits occasionally, though as my commitments were greater than his it was more usual for him to appear at our door.

  ‘Nothing but syphilis and the ague, Jem,’ he used to say, dropping into the chair before the apothecary stove and closing his eyes. I knew there was more to his work at the Floating Hospital than he admitted, though he often seemed glad to be away from the place – given the cramped conditions on board I was not surprised. Despite the tribulations that I had endured in recent years, however – incarceration in Newgate, my father’s execution, the murders at Angel Meadow Asylum – I had heard nothing from him for a long time, and I had been too busy and too preoccupied to seek him out myself.

  I had not thought about the river, nor about John Aberlady, for quite some time, when two occurrences brought both to the front of my mind. The first of these was a letter from Aberlady himself, asking me to come to the Floating Hospital as a matter of urgency. The second was my friend Will’s return from the offices of Prentice and Hall, the firm of architects he worked for, bearing news of his next commission.

  ‘It’s on the river,’ he said. ‘A new warehouse. The site is currently occupied by an old villa, and a stretch of water called Tulip’s Basin. D’you know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Is it a pleasant situation?’

  ‘Pleasant?’ I smiled as I pulled on my coat.

  Will was my dearest friend, a man to whom I owed my life, and upon whom I would depend for anything, and yet sometimes his naivety – and his optimism – amazed me. He had been in London for more than two years, long enough to be accustomed to its dirt and squalor, but not long enough, so it appeared, to have lost the hope that nature and beauty might still find a home here. He would be thinking of a field of crimson goblet-shaped flowers, nodding in the breeze as the river flowed by, I was sure.

  ‘I’m afraid the place is a notorious slum, Will. The “old villa” you speak of is boarded up to keep out the whores and beggars; Tulip was an old rogue who ran a boatyard and drank himself to death, and Tulip’s Basin – his “stretch of water” – is a foul ditch filled with effluent, known more colloquially as “Deadman’s Basin” on account of the fact that no one found Dick Tulip dead in his bed for nigh on two weeks.’

  ‘Oh.’ Will’s face had fallen. ‘I should have guessed.’

  ‘It was a long time ago now, though I can’t imagine the place has improved much. Didn’t they tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps we should go and see it,’ I said. Then, taking pity on him, added, ‘It might not be quite so bad after all.’ ‘I’m sure it’s considerably worse.’

  ‘I’ll come with you. I’m going that way anyway.’ I passed him his hat.

  He nodded to the workbench, where a batch of pokeroot ointment was half-made, and three score milk thistle pills were awaiting their sugar coats. ‘Can you spare the time? Perhaps I might help you with those pills instead?’

  My apprentice, Gabriel Locke, was working the pump, filling the sink with water so that he might wash the retorts I had used that morning to create a tincture of clove for the toothache. He looked over his shoulder at me, his expression revealing his alarm at my evident preparations for departure. ‘What about those prescriptions,’ he said. ‘Mr Jem, you can’t just leave me—’

  I turned away. I had lots to do, it was true, and yet, as much as I loved my apothecary, I had to admit that I did not find serving cough drops and rose water to chattering customers quite as satisfying as I’d thought I would when I first opened the place. I had once been the apothecary at one of the city’s busiest hospitals. I did not regret that St Saviour’s had been pulled down, but there were times when my new life as the owner of a small apothecary shop seemed very dull in comparison to my old life on the wards. Besides, there was also Aberlady’s note, which had arrived only minutes before Will came home, and was still clutched in my fingers.

  Come quickly, it said. God help me, Jem, for if you cannot then only He can. Come quickly, or all is lost.

  It was a ragged, anxious scrawl, not the neat measured hand I was familiar with, though there was enough in the slope of the ‘t’ and the length of the ‘s’ to convince me that it was written by my friend. It had been sent to St Saviour’s Infirmary, which had long since moved south of the river, so that by the time it had found its way to my premises on Fishbait Lane almost a week had passed. The urgent matter John Aberlady had written of would either be resolved, I thought, or irredeemable.

  ‘Three bottles of iron tonic, one tincture of cleavers and burdock, and a plantain and calendula salve,’ I said, snatching up my hat. ‘You can manage that easily enough, Gabriel.’ The bell danced on its spring as the door slammed behind us.

  We walked east along Fishbait Lane, before plunging south between two rows of tall soot-covered houses. We passed down ever-narrowing thoroughfares, through seedy courts, and past lodging houses festooned with grubby washing. There were people everywhere, though as we drew closer to the water the costers and cabmen, shopkeepers and street sellers gave way to more unusual people and faces. To our left I saw a Chinaman, a thick white scar across his forehead; to our right a Lascar with one eye, and beside him a tall black man with a Dutch sailor’s cap on his head and a cage of small green birds in his arms. A group of blue-faced men passed by, their skin stained with the indigo they unloaded all day; the hands and faces of others glowed yellow from hours spent amongst saffron and spices.

  ‘You fit in perfectly,’ said Will.

  I grinned. I knew he was referring to the port-wine birthmark that covered my eyes and nose. As a child I had hated it. I had not grown to love it – I could never do that – though I had, in time, grown used to it. Always it had set me apart – that and the fact that I hid my woman’s body beneath a man’s apparel. But it had made me what I was. It had given me the confidence to accept the stares of strangers, and its ugly mask had helped to conceal my identity, allowing me to achieve freedoms and liberties beyond the compass of most women’s lives. I was grateful to it for that, at least. And yet now that we had neared the Thames, now that we were surrounded by all manner of different coloured skins, the birthmark that always marked me out had grown less singular. Will was right; no one looked at me here.

  ‘So, who is this Aberlady fellow?’ he said. ‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’

  ‘We sat our examinations together, though he is a few years older than I. I’ve not seen him for some time. There was no address to the note he sent so I can only assume he’s still working on the Blood.’

  ‘The Blood?’

  ‘The Seaman’s Floating Hospital. It’s named the Golden Fleece, though it’s known more colloquially as the Blood and Fleas. The place has certainly seen plenty of both.’

  ‘Is there an infirmary in this city that is not both bloody and pestilent?’ Will took the note from me. ‘“Come quickly or all is lost.” You don’t know what worries him?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And as I know him to be a confirmed atheist I’m troubled all the more by his choice of words.’

  ‘The paper is of the cheapest kind,’ said Will, rubbing the letter distastefully between his finger and thumb. ‘It has no watermark or distinguishing features. And what’s this stuff here?’ There was a scattering of dry specks, yellow and rust-brown in colour, caught in the letter’s folds. Will tipped them carefully into his hand. ‘Sawdust?’

  I nodded. ‘I think he wrote this in the operating theatre. I presume on board the Blood.’

  ‘Why not write it at his desk?’

  ‘Precisely. Even worse, the force of his handwriting and the angle of the pen suggests—’ I plucked the letter from Will’s fingers and h
eld it close to my eye, ‘—suggests to me that he was kneeling on the floor.’

  ‘You think he was ill? Or wounded?’

  ‘He makes no mention of it—’

  ‘Drunk, perhaps?’

  ‘He only ever drank tea.’

  ‘Then what?’

  I shrugged. ‘Crouched out of sight? Hiding? I’m hoping we’ll soon find out.’ I said no more. Those desperate words, that fearful hand, the bloody sawdust clinging to the rough nap of such cheap paper – all troubled me. But most unsettling of all was the final sentence, scrawled across the page above a signature I hardly recognised as the mark of a rational and lucid man: ‘Come now, Jem, but come ready to face the Devil.’

  We emerged onto the waterfront from a narrow stinking thoroughfare known as Cat’s Hole. To the west were the London Docks, warehouses and wharves, and Tulip’s Basin. To the east not one hundred yards away were the Seaman’s Dispensary and the waterfront mortuary. On the river opposite, at the edge of the stretch of water known as the Pool of London, was the Seaman’s Floating Hospital. She lay out on the Thames, at the very heart of the city of ships that crowded the riverside from London Bridge to Limehouse Reach, her smoking chimneys just visible through the thicket of masts and rigging. I had always been of the opinion that there was not a more dilapidated hospital than St Saviour’s Infirmary in the whole city – with the exception of the Blood and Fleas. As a former naval frigate her decks had once been loaded with cannons. Thirty years ago these had been replaced by hospital beds, so that she rode high in the water, her sides black and sticky-looking, bellying out like the bloated carcass of a great drowned beast. Here and there bits of her tarry paint had fallen away, allowing the rank weeds of the riverside to colonise the softening timbers. Her gun-ports had been transformed into windows – the apertures of which might be closed off with wooden shutters, though many of these were propped open, revealing the murky glass beneath. Some of the windows were standing ajar, though nothing but blackness was visible within. We looked up as a trap door opened in the bow and a stream of lumpy brown liquid was discharged into the river.