‘Did we kill him?’ gasped Joe, as they squeezed back through the narrow wall opening into the old cellar, and shakily went up the stairs. ‘Will he die down there?’
‘I don’t know. But I don’t care.’ Daisy knew it was wicked and monstrous and evil to want somebody – anybody – to die, but she did wish it.
Harlequin Court, when they stepped out into it, was quiet and the streetlamp threw gentle shadows on the old bricks and the ground. It was familiar and it almost felt safe – although Daisy was not sure if anything would ever feel really safe ever again.
But she said, as firmly as she could, ‘We’ll go along the alley and find a hansom cab.’
‘No money for a cab.’
‘Don’t matter. Madame’ll pay when we get to her house.’
‘Long as she’s there,’ said Joe, worriedly. ‘She might not be home yet.’
‘If she’s not there, I’ll take money from her box in her bedroom.’
‘All right.’ He paused, then said uncertainly, ‘Have we got to tell her what happened?’
‘Yes,’ said Daisy, after a moment. ‘We’ve got to tell her. It’ll be all right, though. In any case, we’re covered in mud and filth and stinking to high heaven.’
Madame was at home. Wearing nothing but a silk robe and flimsy velvet slippers, she ran out to pay the disgruntled hackney driver Daisy and Joe had managed to find, presenting him with a guinea so he could have the cab’s interior cleaned after all the weed and silt Daisy and Joe had trailed into it.
Once they were inside the flat and the doors bolted against what was left of the night, Madame said, ‘Explanations later – hot water and brandy in warm milk for you both first.’
She boiled kettles and brought towels, and filled basins for them to wash off the dust and the dirt of the tunnels. When Daisy tried to help, Madame wanted to know if Daisy thought Madame was so posh nowadays that she had forgotten how to heat up a drop of milk? As for Joe being too young to drink brandy, if you could not swig down a measure of brandy for shock and cold, the world was a sad place.
The fire in the big sitting room was stirred into life, and they sat in front of it. Madame listened, without interrupting, to the story of what had happened. When Daisy told how she had struggled to pull free of the clutching hands, and how, at one point, she had been held against her attacker, Madame shuddered, and reached out to clasp Daisy’s hand briefly.
Daisy said, ‘We think he ran along to the grid at the other end of the tunnel while we were still down there.’
‘And climbed down and waited for you?’
‘Yes. St Martin’s Lane or somewhere nearby, Joe thinks it’d be, that grid.’
‘We can have a look by daylight, but it doesn’t tell us anything even if we find half a dozen grids,’ said Madame.
‘He said he knew all the … the dark places of the City,’ offered Joe. ‘And how cabbies were always glad to earn an extra shilling to get you across London fast.’
‘And it’s not very far from Harlequin Court to St Martin’s Lane anyway,’ said Madame, thoughtfully. ‘He could even have walked there if he was quick.’
‘He said he knew about Linklighters and the old ditch,’ added Daisy. ‘But please …’ She leaned forward and grasped Madame’s hand again. ‘Please – we don’t want no one told about this. Not the peelers, no one.’
She had no idea what she would say if Madame said that of course they must tell the peelers, but Madame did not. She said, slowly, ‘I think you’re right. I don’t think we can tell anyone about this.’
‘See, if they find him – if he’s dead – we could be branded as murderers.’
‘They could find out it was us,’ put in Joe. ‘We’re both part of Linklighters.’
‘And never mind it’s the Ripper, we’d be hanged.’
‘Yes. Yes, I think you could be right,’ said Madame, thoughtfully.
A shiver went through Joe, and Daisy put her arms round him and hugged him hard.
‘Except I ain’t letting that happen,’ she said.
‘Nor am I,’ said Madame, at once. She thought for a moment, then said, ‘Will you let me tell Rhun about this? He’ll be entirely trustworthy.’
Daisy and Joe looked at one another, then nodded.
Rhun, listening to the story the following afternoon, talked to Daisy and Joe very seriously. They were to do their best to put the entire thing from their minds, he said. They had done nothing wrong – they had defended themselves, as anyone was allowed to do. As for wondering whether that warped monster might die down there – well, to Rhun’s mind, if he did, it would be doing the world a service.
Daisy said, ‘But if he died, wouldn’t he be found? The – um – the body, I mean?’
‘It might,’ said Rhun. ‘But I don’t think it would be for a very long time. I think men do go down there – officials of some kind – to make sure everything’s working as it should. Maintenance,’ said Rhun, in the vague voice of one who has no real idea of how such things work.
‘There was the ladder from the grid in the street,’ said Daisy. ‘That’d be for men to get to the tunnel from the street.’
‘It would indeed. But believe me, Daisy, bodies will sometimes be found in those tunnels, and it’s a fair bet that nobody thinks much about it. Death by accident, it’ll be. The bodies they find are usually vagrants – people who’ve somehow got themselves into such places and become trapped. Very sad, but there it is.’
‘And,’ said Madame, ‘any bodies they do find would simply be brought up and given a pauper’s burial?’
‘Indeed they would. No, Daisy, I’m not trying to make you feel better, that’s what will happen.’
Daisy thought: so if Jack the Ripper died down there, he might end up buried in a pauper’s grave, unnamed, and no one will ever know.
It was a few weeks after that night that Madame said, ‘Daisy, I’ve got some unexpected news.’
‘Yes?’ It would be some ridiculously extravagant and unnecessary purchase, or a wonderful booking at one of the big theatres. Or it might be more serious. Through Daisy’s mind darted the knowledge of the secrets she and Madame had shared. Things that only the two of them knew about.
But it was not an extravagant purchase or a booking, and it was not anything to do with any of those dark secrets.
With a light in her eyes that Daisy had never seen before, Madame said, ‘Daisy, your good friend Rhun the Rhymer has proved himself to be a very capable lover. Not only capable, but effective.’ She saw Daisy’s puzzlement, and started to laugh.
‘I always thought I was clever enough to avoid it,’ she said. ‘But it’s caught me out at last.’ The light was still in her eyes, but in a more serious voice than Daisy had ever heard her use, she said, ‘Daisy, I’m going to have a child.’
Rhun was at first disbelieving, then astonished, and finally ecstatic at the prospect of being a father. It had not been intended, he said, but there you were, you got carried away at times. He bought champagne for everyone he knew, and made elaborate marriage proposals every other day – all of which Madame refused.
Then he said, almost humbly, that he would be able to contribute towards the child’s upbringing. His poems were doing surprisingly well; there was to be a book including a number of them, and he had recently been elected to a rather prestigious society for writers and poets. As a result of that, he was being asked to give talks and readings and lectures, all of which commanded surprisingly generous fees.
‘You certainly will contribute to the upbringing,’ Madame said. ‘There’ll be a decent education, as well. I’m not having a child of mine growing up uneducated.’
Daisy thought Madame never did things by halves, and knew that the appearance of the unexpected, unintended child in their lives would not be done by halves either.
She was right.
‘Twins!’ said Madame, delightedly, reclining in the big bed, a baby cradled in each arm, a froth of lace and silk pillows propping them all up. ‘Isn’t that wonderful, Daisy? Boy and girl. A complete family in one go. I wonder if we might have to move to a bigger flat, because … Nonsense, of course we can afford it.’
Rhun was overcome with emotion and delight at the birth of the twins. He said they were the most beautiful children ever to enter the world; he would write reams of poetry to them, and he would like them to have names from his family. His mother had been Morwenna, his grandfather Mervyn. Good Welsh names, he said, hopefully.
Madame said, consideringly, ‘Morwenna and Mervyn. The names go well together, don’t they? And they’re sufficiently unusual to be noticeable, which is important. Yes, let’s call them that.’
So Morwenna and Mervyn the twins became.
Rhun wrote what he said was a lyric ballad in praise of the twins, using what he called the ancient method of cynghanedd. It had more in common with music than traditional poetry, did the cynghanedd, said Rhun, and he insisted on reading several verses to them that same night. Daisy, collecting their glasses and supper plates, was quite unable to understand any of it, and although Madame said it was marvellous and Rhun was a genius, Daisy didn’t think Madame had understood any of it, either. It was likely that the birth of the twins had gone to Rhun’s head a bit.
Later, he wrote what he said was a final banishing of the darkness. It was what Rhun termed a satirical poem about Jack prowling the old ghost rivers, looking for prey. Daisy did not know the word ‘satirical’, but when Rhun showed her the poem she understood. The poem told how it was better to stay in your own bed – or the bed of someone you knew – rather than go to the beds of one of the lost rivers – the ghost rivers – and be chopped up and have your guts left in a tangle. It even named some of the rivers, but in a comic way, so you had to read the lines a couple of times to be sure what they meant. Rhun said he would probably not do anything with the verses, but you never knew – one day somebody might find them, and speculate as to what the meaning was, and even whether there had been a mysterious murder that had never been solved.
With all this, and with the lively twins in the flat, Daisy was starting to dare to think the darkness really might have been banished. She was able to think that it might be possible to forget the sight of the sluice gate descending, and those hands clawing frantically out from under it.