The Penny Dreadful Curse (2 page)

Well, here was
a turnaround! They paused outside the door to the Mousehole and
gazed dubiously at the dilapidated Tudor dwelling before going
inside. But what would they make of the poky parlour and the gloomy
panelling and how soon before they would beat a hasty retreat for
something more commodious? Mr Corbie waited and waited, then he
waited some more, but the couple did not emerge. Gaslights went on
upstairs in the bedrooms on the first and second floors and two
candles flickered in the attic, most likely for the Bolsheviks. The
man and woman must have been brother and sister, not a married
couple, that would explain why they had not walked bras d’ssus-bras
d’ssous, but were still able to keep up an easy natural pace with
each other, and why they took separate bedrooms on separate
floors.

What was this!
An army of lackeys marching forth, carting trunks and portmanteaux
and more hat boxes by the score! All the lads who loitered in the
Snickelways had been commandeered to the task by the looks of
things. That was a bit risky! Perhaps the mysterious couple was
opening up a fashionable dress shop at the end of the lane where
the spinster seamstress, Miss Linnet, had died of brain fever last
summer when she washed her Rapunzel mane and sat by an open window,
not thinking about the chill that comes from living in a
wind-tunnel. The shop had been vacant for months. He had paid her a
visit once and taken her a little book of Shakespeare’s sonnets
that had been irreparably water-damaged when a roof tile cracked
during a storm and rain flooded in behind one of the shelves.
That’s how he knew about Paletots and what was considered chic and
stylish among the ladies of the beau monde.

Mr Hiboux
would be required to put on supper for his paying guests. His
family was descended from Huguenot weavers and he knew how to
concoct a decent pot à feu. What the man could do with a chicken,
an onion, a handful of wild herbs and a splash of cheap red wine
was extraordinary. Mr Corbie’s mouth watered at the thought of a
steaming hot chicken in a pot and his stomach played a discordant,
depressing, all too familiar tune. Magwitch stirred and stretched
and arched his back and looked at him with hopeful eyes but it
would be potluck fishbone stew for him and a morceau of bread and
dripping followed by a cup of black tea for the master of the
house. Beggars could not be choosers.

Magwitch and
Mr Corbie ate their meagre repasts, chewing slowly, and went back
to the same spots they had occupied beforehand; Magwitch in the bow
window and Mr Corbie at his dusty desk. Magwitch was a scruffy old
stray who had been through the wars and had the battle scars to
prove it; chunks taken out of both ears in the fight for tomcat
territory. He was too old to fight now and had retired to the
window, safe behind the diamond glass.

Mr Corbie lit
a stumpy candle, used his grimy sleeve to wipe the smudges off his
pince-nez, making the lenses even greasier, and studied his ledger
of incomings and outgoings. There was infinitely more of the
latter. The bills were piling up and his creditors would soon lose
sympathy. Weary with worry, he blew out the candle and let his head
fall into his hands as he slumped forward with his forehead on the
mountain of bills and eventually dozed off, lulled to sleep by a
symphony of soporific purrs. It was the tinkle of the bell above
the door that woke him. It jangled whenever anyone walked in or
out. He had forgotten to lock up. In the doorway stood Patch, the
local chimneysweep, a boy of about fifteen, but small for his age
and narrow shouldered, probably malnourished during his early years
in that grim orphanage that abutted the lunatic asylum. The growth
spurt that most boys have at that age had never caught up to Patch.
Nevertheless his days as a chimneysweep would soon be numbered.
Small as he was, he was getting too big for the neck of most
chimneys.

“Good evening
to you, Mr Corbie,” he said respectfully, doffing his cloth
cap.

He was a
polite boy with good manners and came in once a month, regular as
clockwork, to buy ten dreadfuls. He was probably teaching himself
to read. For the lower classes who toiled in manufactories and in
the fields, the paperbacks were a godsend; but what annoyed Mr
Corbie was that the upper classes preferred them too. The educated
world as he knew it was going backwards in more ways than one.

“Hello Patch,
how are you doing this fine evening?”

“I’m good, Mr
Corbie, er, I mean I’m well, thank you for asking. Did you see the
gent and the young lady that went into the Mousehole earlier? Cor!
She was a looker, weren’t she? All the lads whistled when she
stepped out the fancy carriage at the end of the lane. I reckon
they will come in here and buy some of your books, Mr Corbie.”

Yes! That was
a good observation. Perhaps they would. He’d wager they never read
dreadfuls. The man would read Rousseau or Carlyle and the lady
would prefer Jane Austin to the Bronte sisters.

Mr Corbie
re-lit the stump of wax, stood up and dusted some bread crumbs from
his threadbare sleeve and gave a tug to his fraying cuff. “Some
penny dreadfuls for you as usual, Patch?”

“Have you got
some new ones?” the boy said eagerly.

“A new batch
arrived the day before yesterday. They’re still wrapped in brown
paper. I haven’t even cut the string.”

Coal black
eyes sparked up. “Do you think there might be
Varney the
Vampire
?”

“Oh, no
doubt,” he said with a forced smile, suppressing his distaste for
all things Transylvanian. Bram Stoker had a lot to answer for! “Go
and have a look. You know where to find them. Take the candle with
you. You’ll find some scissors on the kitchen dresser.”

“Would you
like me to put the books on the shelf for you? I can do it in
alphabet order now. Miss Carterett wrote the alphabet out for me
and I’ve been learning myself, er, I mean teaching myself all
month. I washed my hands and face before I came. I won’t smudge any
of the pages. I promise.”

“Thank you,
Patch. That will save my arthritic bones a lot of toing and froing
and bending down and reaching up. I will go and make us some hot
cocoa in the meantime. You’ll stay for a cup of cocoa? It will be
mostly hot water and just a little milk. The lass from the dairy
forgot to stop by this week and Magwitch does insist on his saucer
of warm milk.”

“Thank you
kindly, Mr Corbie. Some hot cocoa will go down a treat. I’ll have
the new books on the shelf for you in no time.”

“Just enough
time to select the ten you want to take with you!” teased Mr
Corbie.

Patch let rip
an unbridled laugh that echoed up to the blackened rafters and
shook the cobwebs. “Too right!”

Twenty minutes
later the old bookseller and the avid young reader were sharing a
hot beverage that was more water and less cocoa with barely a drop
of milk but it was the warmth they appreciated. Mr Corbie had never
married and last Christmas he had realized with a sudden wrenching
pang that he had turned into a lonely old man with thinning grey
hair that needed to be tied back in a ponytail to disguise just how
sparse it was, a grey complexion, fading grey eyesight and
arthritis in both hands that caused the knuckles to swell. It had
never bothered him in the past to be sans famille. The shop had
kept him busy and the customers were like family but over the years
they had dwindled away. Some of the regulars had died and the
others had gradually stopped coming. They had probably stopped
reading too.

“Where do you
store all your books, Patch? You must have a hundred or more by
now?”

He imagined
the boy’s lodgings to be cramped. A tiny room in a freezing cold
attic or a windowless box room no bigger than a broom closet.

“Oh, I don’t
need to store too many, sir, I borrow them out to the other lads
who cannot afford the penny but can afford a halfpenny. I keep a
list of names and if the lads don’t return them after one month I
charge extra.”

Mr Corbie’s
shaggy grey brows lifted for two reasons. First, he had never
pictured Patch as a businessman. Second, that the working class
lads could be so honest. He wished his customers were half as
honest. How many times had he agreed to allow someone he considered
trustworthy and respectable to take a book on loan and then never
seen it again!

“Do many of
the books go astray?”

“None have
gone astray. The lads know that if they don’t return them they will
be struck off the list. And they would rather cut off their right
arm than not have any more stories about Varney the Vampire or Jack
Black the Highwayman.”

Mr Corbie
thought that perhaps he was in the wrong business and dealing with
the wrong sort of clientele. He should go into renting books and
charging for them, that way he would get paid over and over for the
same book instead of selling it just the once.

“Can all the
boys read?”

“Just about
most, yes, now that they can get their hands on some dreadfuls. It
makes the school lessons worth sticking at and some of the older
lads who never learned their ABC when they shouldov have lessons
with Miss Carterett on Tuesdays and Thursdays when she is not at
the home for girls-up-the-duff.”

“Miss
Carterett sounds like she has her work cut out for her,” he said
dryly.

“She’s a
smashing sort. All the lads think the sun shines out of her, no
disrespect! She learns them their ABC and she doesn’t even use the
strap to make it sink in, er, I mean teaches.”

Mr Corbie
smiled at the boy’s keenness to better himself. Patch, he thought,
was a lad who would go far in life. “I wonder if some of your
customers might one day come to me?”

“Well, sir,
they are put off.”

“Put off?”

“They think
the books you have in here are too high brow and they are terrified
of making fools of themselves.”

“Really?”

Mr Corbie had
never thought of himself as intimidating. He had a ready smile for
every customer who stepped over his threshold and a helpful nature,
keen to match the right book to the right reader.

“The lads are
dead scared to set foot in here. That’s why I come in for the ten
dreadfuls every month. And if you don’t mind me saying, sir, no
offence, but I’ve been thinking for a while that you should change
your sign,”

“Change my
sign?”

“It puts folks
off.”

“Too high
brow? Is that what you mean?”

Patch bit his
lip and nodded. “I think you would have a lot more customers
through the door if you changed it some.”

Mr Corbie was
curious. “In what way?”

“Well, the
gold letters look fancy but the wording is all wrong.”

Now he was
intrigued. “Wording? Wrong?”

“Ye Olde
Bookshoppe makes the books sound old; like no one wants them. The
lads don’t understand satire or irony.”

“You know
about irony?”

“Sure thing!
It’s when something comes back to bite you on the bum.”

“Indeed.”

“The spelling
is all wrong too. Now that the lads can read they think it’s, well,
someone havin’ a laugh but they don’t get the joke. Why take all
that trouble to learn to spell and then spell wrong – especially if
you is, er, are in the job of selling books with lots of words in
them. It vexes them, you see.”

Mr Corbie
scratched his head. “Mmm, yes, I see.”

“The rest of
the sign needs changing too. It should say: Aquarian books and
penny dreadfuls.”

“You mean I
should advertise the fact I sell penny dreadfuls? And it is
antiquarian not aquarian.”

“Antiquarian,”
repeated Patch, proving he was a quick learner and not afraid of
being corrected, “that means old?”

“Old and
valuable as opposed to old and worthless,” pointed out Mr Corbie a
touch pedantically – an occupational hazard.

“Oh, there
goes Miss Carterett!” exclaimed Patch. “She must have finished at
the home for girls-up-the-duff and is heading home for her supper.
I might catch up to her and walk with her to the end of the
Whip-ma-whop-ma-gate. Thanks for the cocoa.” He bounced to his feet
and stuffed his ten dreadfuls into a small hessian sack and threw
it over his shoulder like a sack of baby beets. When he reached the
door, he paused and turned back, speaking quickly. “Oh, I almost
forgot. Here is the ten pence I owe and I don’t know if you heard
it from one of your customers but a body was fished out of the
river this morning. It was a writer that was killed.”

“Which
one?”

“The
Ouse.”

“I meant which
writer, and when you are referring to a person you say
who
not
that
.”

“It was the
one
who
pens them dreadfuls on pirates – Robbie
Redbeard.”

Mr Corbie
smiled mirthlessly as the bell tinkled and he blew out the candle
and stood alone in the quiet dark. For a brief moment he had
allowed himself to imagine it might have been Conan le Coq,
anonymous author of plotless dirge where the ghosts and ghouls had
more life in them than the lifeless protagonist
that
hunted
them down!

Now, if
someone were to murder Conan le Coq…

“Are you quite
certain your Aunt Zoya did not own a house in York?” Dr Watson
pitched for the third time, running a dubious eye over the narrow
dimensions of the half-timbered dwelling with the teetering
overhang creaking in the wind. “A sturdy country seat in the west
riding? A Georgian terrace near Gillygate? She owned a house
everywhere else,” he finished facetiously, wincing at the
ludicrously quaint spelling.

“Oh, do stop
quibbling,” returned Countess Volodymyrovna tetchily as the wind
played merry with the ruffles of her petticoats. “It is becoming
tedious. You know very well that the York Mystery Pageant Plays
mean that most of the better hotels have been booked months in
advance. Besides, we will be right in the heart of things. How much
closer can we get to the heart of York than the Shambles? And we
won’t need to hire a carriage every time we step out the door.”