Dust and Shadow (19 page)

It was not a long journey down Commercial Road from Whitechapel to the tiny dockside realm of Limehouse, but the latter’s total dependence upon all things nautical made it a vastly different topography. Here the carmen were replaced by sailors, the market porters became dockside labourers, and the races as we approached the river grew ever more diverse. As the sun began to set over the lumbering Thames, I glimpsed from the window Welsh dockworkers, African stevedores, and Indian porters, all drifting in the general direction of hearth and home with a stop at the pub and two or three glasses of gin to sustain them on their way.

We turned abruptly onto a street, and all around us Chinese men and women, dressed immaculately in the British style, ducked in and out of shops marked only with the delicate slashes which served as writing in their native land. One young fellow, his pigtail tucked under a neat cloth cap and his fingerless gloves affording slight protection in the chill wind, pushed a child about in a tea leaf box which had been fitted with two front wheels, a back prop, and sanded handles.

Holmes rapped the ceiling of the cab with his stick, and the driver halted before a storefront identifying itself only by a crude picture of a steaming bowl. My friend leapt down with agile enthusiasm, tilting his head to our left toward the dampest, most soot-encrusted archway
I’d ever laid eyes on. The businesses on either side, whose commerce I could not even hazard a guess at, boasted broken windowpanes patched with greasy brown paper.

“It’s just this way. Thank you, driver. And now, Watson, we would do best to keep our wits about us.”

Under the arch, we came upon a flight of mossy stone steps which led steeply down, under wooden slats and walls of grim brick, to a grotesque courtyard some three stories below the street at the level of the river. Seven houses sat in a semicircle, all constructed of rotting grey timber. My friend approached the sagging doorframe belonging to one of these and rapped three times.

When the door opened, a stoop-shouldered Chinese man with tufted silver brows and a peculiarly detached expression made a polite bow.

“I wonder, is this the establishment known as the Three Cobras?” Holmes ventured deferentially.

The proprietor, or so I assumed him to be, nodded his head. “There are several berths if you wish to smoke, sirs,” he said in near-perfect English.

“What a stroke of luck,” Holmes smiled.

“I am Mr. Li. Please step this way.”

The outer door opened into a hallway, which after a flight of three steep steps became a narrow passage with beds built into the walls like berths on a ship, six pallets arranged in a rectangular formation on each side of the corridor. One old woman, with eyes set deep as wells and a long braid of lead-grey hair, looked to have just enough life in her to continue smoking the vile substance.

“Holmes, how on earth did you come to know of this pit?” I murmured.

“I make it my business to acquaint myself with a great many particulars,” he whispered.

Mr. Li waved us onward, for the corridor ballooned at its far end into a larger common room with a bed pushed against the wall and
grass mats lining the floors. Gauzy hanging strips of tattered cloth, which had no doubt once contributed to an air of mysticism, now hung slick with smoke like the mud-soaked sails of a shipwrecked vessel. I could see other Englishmen in this chamber—two soldiers, lounging with elongated pipes dangling from their limp fingers, and a slack-jawed naval officer, whose hand traced lazy patterns in the thick air above him.

Mr. Li waved us over to a pair of grass pallets cloaked by the decrepit drapery. Holmes indicated we had time only for a four-penny smoke, and Mr. Li retreated to the stove, where a great mound of shredded opium simmered in a sieve set over a pot of shallow water.

“My dear Holmes, assure me that we have no intention of actually smoking this dross,” I mouthed as softly as I could.

“Never fear, Watson,” he returned equally quietly but with a mischievous grin. “You know my taste in self-poisoning to run quite in another direction.”

When Mr. Li had toasted two tiny portions of resinlike amber material and loaded it into pipes, he handed them to us and vanished. Holmes, to my dismay, placed the pipe between his teeth, but I soon saw he merely sought to free his hands and unfasten his watch chain. A gold sovereign dangled from the end of it, a relic of an earlier adventure,
*
and in a trice he had scooped the smouldering lump out of his pipe, dropped it to the floor, returned the stem to his mouth, and held a hand out for my own. This process he repeated with my pipe, and then he pulled out his pocket handkerchief and methodically restored the Queen’s golden visage to her former spotlessness. Finally, he picked up the cooled pieces with his handkerchief and deposited them in his pocket.

“I fancy that will do the trick. Care for another pipe, Doctor, or shall we call an end to this reconnaissance?”

“The latter, if you have seen all you need.”

“Then let us be on our way. Ah, here is the man I want. May I have a brief word with you?” Holmes asked Mr. Li, heavy-lidded and reserved.

Our host nodded, and we followed him to a side room off the entrance chamber where books and ledgers scribbled with cryptic characters covered the single small table.

“You see, sir,” Holmes began languidly, “our friend can hardly stop praising your business, and his words were more than justified. You do quite a commerce with soldiers, do you not, Mr. Li?”

“As you saw.”

Holmes placed a five-pound note on a yellowed ledger page. “In fact, while we settle up with you, I wished expressly to mention that our friend is being pursued by some very unsavoury characters—moneylenders, you understand—and is in hiding. I would like very much to help him if only I knew where he was. I wonder if, when he next drops in, you might find a moment to notify me? You would be rewarded, of course, for your time and trouble.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Basil. I was once a shipping captain, but I now own a small fleet,” Holmes said as he jotted down his address on a scrap of paper.

“And who is your friend?”

Holmes described Blackstone in detail, failing to mention any name.

Mr. Li scratched more notes upon his sheet, then straightened with a sigh. “Your friend does come here from time to time. Always alone. Always very popular once he arrives. Captain Basil, I make a great effort to help my customers. I make one request only, and that is truth. This business with your soldier friend—there is a possibility of violence?”

“That possibility exists,” Holmes assented, smiling briefly.

“I see.” He made another note. “In that case, Captain Basil, I must warn you that any violence occurring upon my property makes you liable to me.” He smiled at my friend in return. “I do not think you wish to be liable to me.”

I had not gone many paces up the dripping stairs to the street when Holmes remarked, “You dislike our new associate.”

“If you must know, I think the whole business proved him to be cunning and mercenary.”

“Oh, to the uninitiated, of course. However, I know that whole discussion of violence to have been entirely genuine. He is quite an eccentric character, Mr. Li. I have had dealings with him, though never in person, several times. He is a philanthropist, an opium purveyor, a Buddhist, and a tenacious enemy. The man was a renowned scholar in Peking. There was a little girl killed in this area not four years ago; Mr. Li found the culprit, a member of the Limehouse Forty Thieves gang, and I don’t like to tell you what became of him. He has done more in five years to relieve the area of gangs than Scotland Yard could do in twenty.”

“He is an ally, then? Why the absurd rigmarole with the pipes?”

“Business, my dear Watson, business! I’d never met the fellow in the flesh. There is a great deal of brotherly feeling amongst followers of that particular vice. If I am a client, I am on even footing with Blackstone. Otherwise, I am merely a swell or a plainclothesman. In any event, I wished a glimpse of the patrons.”

We reached the street just as the lamps were being lit, though I noted distressingly few in that locale.

“We had better trudge back to that portion of London populated by hansoms,” Holmes said. “I ought to have paid that fellow to wait. Your leg can manage it?”

“Certainly.”

“Then quick march, my dear fellow, spurred on by home, hearth, and the taste of future victory.”

The detective’s infallible sense of direction soon led into territory which, though unfamiliar, boasted English characters upon the sides of buildings. Holmes, deep in thought, strode forward with his
aquiline profile straying neither to the left nor to the right, but I, as a man will do when he is in unknown terrain, looked about with curiosity at the deserted warehouses, which soon gave way to ramshackle tenements and the smells of a hundred suppers being prepared behind boarded windows.

I must have been so preoccupied with the scene that the first weary news vendor, hawking the last of his wares in a hoarse shout, failed to impress himself upon my consciousness. However, the second fellow, a taciturn youth with the face of a bulldog, held the front page up so determinedly that I glanced at the headline. With a cry of astonishment, I halted and fumbled through my pockets for a coin as Holmes broke from his reverie and returned to see what had startled me.

“Curse the scoundrel!” Holmes exclaimed, folding the poisonous print out of sight. “What a tortuous argument, to be sure! A delusive pressman gives rise to a police investigation, then cites a police investigation as a further cause for alarm.”

“But how could he know that you attended the funerals?”

“If Stephen Dunlevy had a hand in this, so help me, I will wring the truth out of his miserable neck.”

He set off again down the street, his pace redoubled.

“What are we to do, Holmes?”

“We are going to get inside as quickly as possible.”

I realized with a quick stab of apprehension what he meant; every day we read news of mob activity in the East-end, directed with barren fury against any handy immigrant or meandering pedestrian. There had been multiple reports of near lynchings. If any suspicious-minded citizenry identified Holmes abroad by night in Whitechapel, I dared not imagine the consequences.

“This is Tavistock’s doing, I trust?”

“Whose else?”

“Oh, if I had him here!” I cried. “I would make him regret he’d ever set foot in a news office!”

“The wretch prints what is true in such an inverted fashion that every fact stands on its head,” Holmes growled. Suddenly he stopped. “Look here, my boy, odd as it may sound, the danger at the moment is in crowds.”

He turned into a pathway which must officially have been termed an alley and I would have better characterized as a crevice. The only
beings we encountered at first were vermin and half-crazed dogs who stared at us with baleful hunger in their yellow eyes.

“Holmes, what do you intend to do?”

“Your idea of expressing ourselves with our fists was attractive but sadly untenable. We must determine where the insolent wretch is getting his information.”

We had gone halfway down a block marred everywhere with eroding stone when I realized that the clatter of trains to our left had mingled with another sound; footsteps now echoed our own. I knew better than to look behind me, but a glance at Holmes told me that he too had heard our shadowy companion.

My friend ducked into a side street, changing our direction, but still the curious trudge followed us in the gloom.

“We are walking north on Mansel Street, and any second should pass the railway depot,” he murmured. “We have to take Aldgate High Street, and in a moment we’ll be in the City.”

“I’d prefer Westminster.”

“Baker Street is but a cab fare away from us.”

As we emerged onto Aldgate High Street very near the place where it became Whitechapel High Street, it seemed for a moment as if our troubles were over. Then the man behind us began to make his presence more keenly felt.

“Is that Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” he cried out.

The better-lit, better-populated expanse of road seemed at once a hostile landscape, for every head within hearing distance swiveled round to confront my friend’s justly famous countenance.

“Here now!” the man yelled. “That’s Sherlock Holmes, it is! Strolling down dark alleys wi’out a care in the world!”

A few bystanders, men with surly faces and no better occupation, joined our unwelcome associate and marched along behind.

“Hey! You! You’ve a great deal to answer for in these parts!”