Crossing the basin was the easy part. All them sessions on the ropes and the swing in Madame Celeste’s attic had prepared me to perform in a cage strung up seventy foot over the heads of the punters. In all the time I was up there I was never scared, except for the night at The Comet when the plaster ceiling failed. And even then, when it was all over, the thing I remember most clear was the way my skin prickled and my head fizzed. I’d never felt so completely alive. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but a part of me was greedy for the thrill of it. I knew now that Joey wasn’t always to be trusted, but something he said to me in the Bedlam rang true.
Even during the most difficult times it was exhilarating. When I felt my heart beat so wildly in my chest that it might burst through my ribs I was glad of the pain.
I think I understood what he meant. It wasn’t pain exactly, but I felt it too. Danger was a reminder that you were flesh and blood and breathing and thinking and moving about in the world. It made everything sharp and fresh as a new box of paints. Perhaps me and my brother were more alike than I cared to admit?
It took me a couple of minutes to haul myself across. I copied Tan Seng, hooking my knees over the cable and pulling myself arm over arm. The rain fell hard on my face, but there was nothing I could do about that. Halfway out I felt the rope pull tight and dip lower to the water as Lok began his own crossing. I paused, clung tight and craned my head to see him ten foot behind and closing fast. He was lithe and nimble as his brother.
I started off again, conscious that the weight of two bodies made the rope sway wider.
‘Lady!’
At Tan Seng’s voice I twisted about and caught sight of one of them great black paddle wheels rising and then plunging again into the water. Of an instant, I thought of poor Dalip, his body jammed and mangled in the slats. It was as if the Golden Calf felt me there. As the boat rose again and bucked to the right, the wheel rode high and a deep, metallic scraping sound, so loud I could hear it above the storm, echoed from the hull. I tightened my hands on the rope and dragged my eyes away.
‘Here, Lady!’
Tan Seng was hunched over the black edge of the boat. In the shadow I couldn’t see his face, but from the faint pricks of light leaching out from a row of tiny glass roundels I’d seen from the quay I could make out where the rope threaded into a hole in the bow about four foot below him.
As I swung there, I tried to work out how to scramble up the steep metal side to join him on deck. I’m still not sure how Tan Seng managed to climb up on board, but I was grateful when he ran another rope down beside me.
Holding tight with one hand I reached out and pulled it to me. I wound my arms around it and carefully unhooked my legs from the cable. I hung there for a second, before spinning about and flattening the soles of my boots against the slippery black sides of the boat.
Once I’d got a purchase, it was easy to clamber up. Tan Seng hauled me over the rail and I scanned the shadowy deck as Lok joined us, dropping light as a moth to the boards. The rattling and whistling of the wind through the ropes of the old-style sail ships jostling around us in the basin was deafening. There was a dismal groaning and thumping too as their timber hulls scraped and bumped against each other.
Tan Seng tapped my shoulder. I turned back and he pointed at a dark crumpled shape lying at an odd angle across the deck a little way off. It was one of the men we’d seen from the quay. I went to crouch down next to him, reaching out to push the sodden collar of his coat away from his face. He was alive, but his breathing was slow. His eyelids flickered as he dreamed. A thin trail of blood ran from a tiny wound on his temple and down the side of his face.
Lok knelt beside me. ‘Sleep long time.’
I peered back down the cluttered deck. I couldn’t make out much beyond the funnel stack. Shadowy piles of barrels and crates lashed together along the boards made it difficult to be sure, but as far as I could tell there was no one moving about now. A platform midway down the deck showed chained double doors leading down to the hold.
A low hut-like structure, the wheelhouse most like, jutted out from the base of the funnel stack. Another slash of lightning, accompanied by an almost immediate crash of thunder, showed up the glass in the windows and an arched doorway. It was a way inside.
Send help.
I thought of the dim lights I’d see along the side of the boat. If Sam was a prisoner here, they’d keep him hidden somewhere below. I thought of his unruly hair, his clever dark eyes and his rangy frame and I tried to muffle the thought of what Matthias Schalk might have done to him.
‘They sleep long time.’ Lok spoke again.
‘Before we do anything else we need to make sure of that.’ He raised his eyebrows doubtfully as I stood up.
I brought a finger to my lips. ‘Keep close and follow me.’ I reached out to steady myself as the boat pitched in the water. The deck was slippery with rain. A person could easily lose their step and end up over the side. One of the paddle wheels clanked and grated again like a warning.
The other men were easy to find. Both of them were slumped on deck, one still had a dead smoke clenched between his fingers. The trickle of blood tracing a path down the bristled cheek of the first and the thick-set neck of the second were silent testimonials to Lok’s skill. Neither of them were Houtman.
I ducked as a sheet of rain smashed across the deck. Any other shipmates on board tonight would be down below. The question was how many of them were there?
I pointed at the arched door and beckoned the brothers close.
‘We need to get inside, but I reckon we won’t be alone.’ My neck prickled beneath the jacket. I pulled at the oilskin. It wasn’t the rain that made my skin crawl.
Lok patted the pouch at his side and made a swift gesture at Tan Seng who slipped across the deck to the wheelhouse. I watched as he crouched low and bent his head against the door beneath the glass pane. After giving it most careful consideration, he stretched up his hand to the round brass handle set into the wood. The door swung open, but Tan Seng caught it deft to stop the wind from throwing it back against the wall.
‘We go in, now, Lady.’ Lok’s voice came over my shoulder. I turned – the bone pipe was ready between his fingers again.
It’s an odd thing, but that wheelhouse seemed larger on the inside than it looked from the deck. As Lok closed the door soundlessly behind us and flattened his little body against the wooden wall it took a moment or two for my eyes to grow sharp in the dark. The wheel was over to the left and there was a stack of papers and charts. Over to the right there was a bundle of cloth and rags folded into a pile that might have served as a mattress.
The stink of oil and coal came strong, and there was something else in the air too, the sour stink of men who didn’t go much on the dainties. I was glad to have a roof over my head again, and not just on account of the shelter. I needn’t have worried about anyone hearing us moving about. The rain was falling so hard it could have been Barney Knuckle up there dancing a jig in his Lancashire clogs.
At first I couldn’t see a way to go below, but after a moment, when I’d grown accustomed, I caught a faint glow coming from the edges of a trap in the boards. There was a loop of rope set in the middle to pull it up. I nudged Lok and pointed to the hatch, but he was already staring at it and turning the pipe in his hands.
Tan Seng padded across the wheelhouse floor and sank to his knees. He bent his head and listened like he did out on deck. He raised his hand twice and followed up with a chopping motion.
‘There are two below us, Lady.’ Lok rolled a couple of them black seeds between his fingertips and pushed them into the end of the pipe. He wiped his hand on his oilskin coat again.
‘My brother will go first.’
They moved fast. As soon as I pulled the hatch open Tan Seng dropped into the room below. A second later Lok bent his head into the gap and took aim. His head jerked and the first pellet caught Houtman smack in the centre of his broad forehead. The captain reached up in surprise to feel the place where it bit into his skin and then he looked at the red on the tips of his fingers. He stood up abrupt from the desk pushed against the curved wall, sending his chair toppling to the boards. The muscles in his ugly jaw worked as he stared down at the old man crouching on the floor of his cabin.
Tan Seng’s plait had worked itself loose again. The way it trailed down his rounded back made him look more than ever like a yard cat out for a scrap.
Houtman clearly didn’t take him for a threat. A grin twisted across the man’s lard-block face.
‘Wat hebben we hier?’ He pushed at his sleeve and came forward, balling his right hand into a fist the size of a butcher’s mallet.
‘No!’
I didn’t mean to call out, but I couldn’t help myself.
Houtman’s bald head shot up. His pale eyes widened as he caught sight of me framed in the open hatchway just behind Lok, but by then it was too late. If he had something to say about it, the words didn’t make it to his lips. Of an instant his eyes rolled in his head. His body crumpled and he toppled forward like all his bones had been curdled to a junket.
As he fell, his head caught the edge of the ladder steps. There was a shout from somewhere deeper in the room below. Lok ducked forward and his head jerked again. A yelp, a rattle of furniture and the thud of boots on wood, then, just like Houtman, a second man tumbled into view. There was a thump as his dark head met the boards just in front of Tan Seng, who turned to look up at us.
He nodded and pushed the head of the man spread out in front of him. He’d fallen flat on his face. There was blood pouring from his nose; the sticky little pool glinted in the dim light of the oil lamp swinging from the ceiling. The only other light in the room came from a small brass lantern on the desk.
Lok reached for the pouch at his belt and slipped the pipe back inside.
‘Lady.’
He bowed his head and moved aside on the ladder steps to let me down first.
The cabin beneath the wheelhouse was about twelve foot long and wide as the boat. Part of it – the end nearest the hatch – was arranged as a sort of office. There were more charts spread over the top of a narrow desk. Houtman had clearly been consulting a tide table with the help of the candle lantern when Tan Seng surprised him. Now the book lay face down on the floor next to the fallen chair. The spine was broken and loose pages slid across the boards with the sway of the boat.
I reckoned I had something else to be grateful to the storm for. The captain wasn’t about to ship out any time soon after all. He was sitting there calculating the next window.
The low space clearly served a double purpose. Rows of wooden bunks were bolted to the curving walls at the other end. The air was thick with the meat smell of unwashed men. Without going a step closer, I knew the scramble of stained yellowing sheets on the bunks had never seen a laundry tub. So far as I could make out they were empty. Then again, now I looked, there might have been a shape curled up there in the shadows of the lowest row. As the lamp swayed I saw there were ropes binding a humped form to the slats.
Sam?
I ran forward.
‘No one else is here, Lady.’
I turned. Tan Seng was standing now. He pushed the plait back beneath his cap and spread his feet wide to steady himself as the Golden Calf pitched. There was a grating sound from outside as the paddle shifted.
‘There’s someone …’ I faltered as the lamp swung again. The puddle of yellow light slicked across the bunks and showed plain that what I’d taken for a man was a roll of old canvas strapped to the slats.
I pulled off my sodden cap and let my own plait of hair roll down my back. If Sam Collins was truly here then where was he? I thought about the double hatches up on deck – perhaps he was down in the hold?
I went back to the ladder. To reach it I had to step over Houtman’s body. He’d fallen at an awkward angle, one leg bent up beneath the other. There was blood seeping from the side of his head too. When he crashed against the steps he must have cracked his skull. I didn’t feel bad about that. I stared at the brown freckles that spread across the back of his bald pink scalp like tea stains on a dish rag.
A red pool, much like a halo on one of Lucca’s saints, bloomed around the top of the captain’s head, lapping round the feet of the ladder steps. There was something else there too.
I bent for a closer look and stretched forward to run my fingers across the boards. I was right, there was another hatch here hidden in the shadow beneath the steps. I followed the edge with my fingers. A small square trap was set flush into the wood, but I couldn’t see nor feel a way to pull it open. As the lamp overhead moved again, I caught the glint of something small and gold.
There was no handle, but there was a brass lock.
I straightened up, stepped over Houtman’s body again and went to the desk. I searched through the papers, throwing them to the floor when I couldn’t find what I needed, and then I pulled open the drawers, emptying the contents onto the boards.
Where was it? Where would he keep it?
Of an instant, I knew. That day at the quay – it wasn’t coins he was jangling. It was keys. I knelt down beside Houtman and pulled his jacket open. He moaned.
I glanced up at Lok. ‘How long does it last?’
He pushed Houtman’s head with his foot and stared down at him. The man grunted and his eyelids flickered like those of his shipmate lying out on deck in the rain. Now I saw the deep gash on his left temple where he’d caught the stairs. He murmured again and his right arm twitched, the fingers of the hand bunching and knotting themselves together in a way that didn’t look natural.
‘How long?’ I asked again.
‘Long enough, Lady.’ Lok blinked. ‘He will sleep long enough.’
I dipped my hand into Houtman’s breeches pocket and felt coins. I pushed deeper and my fingers closed around a metal ring. I drew it out sharp and the keys jangled together.
One of them was small and brass.
I let go of the rope and stared up at the square of light overhead. I took a breath, but the fug stoppered my lungs. The hot, stale air had the tarry reek of a coal hole – one where something had died. Tan Seng moved in the hatch overhead and the shadow of his body fell across me. For a moment the dark was so dense I could feel it huddling up against me.
Seconds later a glow bobbed about above my head as he passed the candle lantern from the desk down on another rope. I’d insisted on going down first; as soon as we opened up that second trap I knew the gaping black hole was the last place we’d find any more of Houtman’s shipmates.
Tell truth, I wondered about finding Sam too.
I reached for the lantern and freed it from the rope, then I turned and raised it high to show up the space. I stepped back in surprise. A great black wheel rose across the floor not six foot in front of me, half of it disappearing into a space below. Almost three times my height, the wheel was set with hundreds of little metal teeth, each one buttered thick with gobbets of oil. An array of other cogs and chains of varying size connected to it along with two metal shafts that stretched to reach each side of the boat. It put me in mind of the workings of a timepiece – one belonging to a giant from one of Nanny Peck’s stories.
As the boat rocked, all that metal grated together and a hollow moan echoed off the riveted walls. I knew what it was straight off – the engine that ran the paddles. It was sleeping now, but when it was awake this place was the beating black heart of the Golden Calf.
There was a thump as Lok swung down from the hatch to land beside me. We’d agreed that Tan Seng should wait up top, while we went below. There was a scrape and the greenish flare of a Lucifer as he lit a stub of a candle. Arching shadows cast by the mechanism flickered on the curved walls around us. They swayed and moved in a way that minded me that we were below the level of the water down here.
I pushed the thought from my mind and held the lantern out. It didn’t help, all I could see was that the blackness continued beyond the wheel. I turned. There was a wooden slatted wall behind us, with an opening to one side.
It was a struggle to draw breath down here, my lungs hung like lead weights in my chest. I tried to swallow enough air to fill them and something sour that wasn’t coal clawed the back of my throat. I looked up. The hatch was still open but I couldn’t see Tan Seng.
Even if I knew the men up top were set to sleep a fortnight I wouldn’t feel easy. There was something … dark about the Golden Calf. I’d felt it that first time at the quay and the sense of it was coming so strong now it was like an itch. One I couldn’t scratch.
Nanny Peck would have called it a presentiment. There was a time when I would have laughed at that and called it something else. I wasn’t so sure now. The sooner we found Sam and got off this bleedin’ boat the better.
‘You go that way, Lok.’
I swung my lantern towards the gap in the wooden wall, the light slipping across the oily floor to show where I meant.
‘I’ll take the other side.’ I pointed to the shadows beyond the mechanism.
‘What if …’ Lok frowned. He sniffed and started again. ‘If he is not here, Mr Collins, what then, Lady?’
I didn’t answer. If I did it might make it a truth.
I swung my lantern towards the gap in the slatted wall again.
‘That way. If you find Sa … Mr Collins, call out. I’ll do the same.’
I watched him disappear through the gap with his candle and then I turned to the wheel. I ducked beneath one of the metal arms that drove the paddles and stepped across the gap in the boards. Ahead of me now I could see another thin wooden wall, like the one Lok had just gone through. There was a dark gap over to the right.
The boat rocked and I reached out to steady myself on the wooden edge of the doorway. Behind me the workings of the wheel clanked and groaned with the movement. I held the lantern high. There was a sort of corridor ahead, a narrow passage lined with wooden partitions. The look of it put me in mind of the stalls you might find in a stable yard, but half the size. I moved forward and peered into the first of them. The light bounced off a mound of glittering coal heaped up against the bowed wall. There was a shovel buried in the pile. I carried on, but the next two stalls were filled with coal, same as the first. The stink of something left to rot was stronger here.
As I swung my lantern back to the passage there was a huge clap of thunder and the boat swayed about so violent I fell against the wall. The lantern dropped to the floor and rolled away from me, the flame dancing madly up the walls.
‘No!’
I couldn’t bear the thought of losing the light. I tried to catch it, but the boat rolled again and I stumbled to my knees. The lantern bounced and came to an upright halt against the edge of one of the stalls ahead. The flame inside the glass flickered and dimmed to a pin prick and I thought it would surely die, but then it gathered itself together and grew bright again.
For a moment I reckoned the light had disturbed a rats’ nest on account of the scratching that started up. I paused expecting something on bony little feet to scuttle past me in the gloom, but then I heard shuffling, followed close by the rattle of metal and a scraping sound. Someone coughed in the stall now lit by the lantern.
‘Sam!’ I darted forward, catching the edge of the stall to steady myself. ‘Sam! I’m here – it’s me, Kitty.’
I snatched up the lantern and raised it high. A mound of rags trembled in the corner of the stall. I had to cover my mouth and nose as I recognised the source of the stench of shit and piss that fouled the air. A bloody hand emerged from the folds and reached out to me. He was alive! I could feel the thud of my heart in my throat.
‘Sam, what have they done to you?’
I ran to kneel beside him and took his hand in mine. ‘I’m here now. I saw the message you left for me. It was a clever thing to do.’
Of an instant, his hand gripped mine so tight I almost cried out. He started to cough again, his body jerking beneath those soiled wrappings.
‘I’ll take you out of here, Sam Collins, but first, let’s get you some air.’ I reached forward to push the rags away from his head. As it came free he bent forward to cough again and I saw the dark hair matted to his scalp.
He looked up.
‘No!’ I brought my hand to my mouth. ‘Christ, no!’