The Tyburn River gave its name to the area of Tyburn, an original manor of Marylebone, which was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086. The river began in Hampstead, at Shepard’s Well, which was alleged to be crystal clear drinking water. By the time it wound its way along Scholars’ Pond Sewer through South Hampstead and then became a proper aboveground river in Regent’s Park, however, it developed an unmistakable pungency. From its aboveground presence in the park, it dropped down a tunnel and into a culvert on a stealthy course that took it beneath the garden of Grayson House. It then continued south, under St. James’s Park, until finally trickling to an ignoble end in the Thames River at Pimlico.
Jess and I entered the Tyburn River tunnel in Regent’s Park just after sunset with the intention of finding the right power-generating circumstances at a location into which I could wire electricity. Ideally the place would have a back garden for a generator, with enough water volume running beneath it to install a small hydro-electric turbine. I wore tall boots, and Charlie had loaned Jess a pair of hers with extra socks to fill the gaps. The boots would probably have to be thrown away after the excursion, but at least our feet were protected from the objectionable and repulsive things that no doubt lurked under the water.
We each carried a lantern and a tall stick, and I had tucked extra candles into my pockets in case the oil ran low. I hoped we wouldn’t be underground for long, because I didn’t care to think about losing my way in the pitch black tunnels that twisted and turned under London.
There was a river grate in the corner of our walled garden that allowed for ventilation of the underground river channels. I had dropped a long rope down and tied it off so I could locate our house from beneath. Jess and I began at the park and followed the river into the tunnel as it wound a predictable path toward that grate. Within a hundred yards I’d found the rope.
I tied my lantern to it so the light dangled above my head and illuminated that portion of the river tunnel. It was about ten feet wide, and according to the depth notches on my stick, the water was about three feet deep. It moved at a fair pace through the tunnel, though I thought I could make it move faster.
It also hadn’t picked up a lot of the sewage I knew would pour into it later down the line, so the stench was more of the organic, animal variety than that of human origin. I used my stick to take measurements, then untied the lantern and continued down the tunnel along the brick ledge that acted as a walkway.
“Have you ever spent the night underground?” I whispered to Jess.
“Once,” she said with a shudder. “And I won’t do it again if I can ‘elp it. I go a bit mad in the dark if I’m there too long.”
“I knew a bloke once, a long time ago. He was twelve, and he spent a month hiding in a priest hole. He came out a bit off his head, and I’m not sure he ever truly recovered from it. I’ve never been able to find out what happened to him in the end.” Mostly because ‘a long time ago’ meant three hundred years, and the records that survived from Tudor England didn’t include the fate of the younger brothers of traitors who had to hide their identities to survive.
“Why did ‘e ‘ave to ‘ide for a month?”
“His brother had plotted against the queen, so they hunted the whole family.” I didn’t bother to explain that the queen in question was not Victoria, but Mary Tudor, though I doubted the discrepancy would be noted.
Jess was silent a long time, and the only sound was the clap of our boots along the old bricks. “Ye know things ye shouldn’t,” she finally said solemnly.
“Probably.” I tried not to let my surprise show, but the girl was remarkably astute.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been places, and seen things. And because I’m always reading, and asking questions, and looking for answers.”
She grunted unhappily. “Ye’re tellin’ me nothin’ I can sink my teeth into.”
“What answers would you like to hear?” My silence on nearly everything was an ingrained habit, born of a need to hide what I knew about the past and the future.
“Ye mean to bring electric lights to yer ‘ouse, yet ye shouldn’t know ‘ow to do a thing like that when no one else does. Ye say ye grew up a thief on the street, and ye live in a fine ‘ouse, with a library bigger than any I’ve ever seen, full of books ye’ve read. And ye’re barely a man grown, yet old men listen to ye despite themselves. Ye’ve taken us in, and I catch ye lookin’ at us like you’re not sure why we’re there. I catch ye lookin’ at yer missus that way too sometimes, like ye can’t quite understand how she came to be married to ye. And to top all that off, I can’t understand why I just said all those things to ye when we’re underground and ye could just walk off with the light and leave me ‘ere to find my way out.” She scoffed at herself and then went silent beside me.
We followed a sharp bend in the tunnel, and it suddenly narrowed dangerously. The ledge where we walked was still wide enough to follow in single file, but I worried we’d soon find ourselves with no easy path.
“Do you have friends, Jess?” I finally asked.
“Ye know I do. They’re all asleep in beds in yer ‘ouse.”
“How well do they know you?”
“Same as I know meself,” she said confidently. “We’ve ‘ad the same life, more or less, and the same stories.”
“What about people who don’t have your stories? Do you think you could ever share as much of yourself with them as you do with your friends?” I asked quietly.
Jess didn’t hesitate. “They wouldn’t understand.”
“That’s how it is with me. I have stories most people wouldn’t understand, and the friends that do know me live very far away. Charlie knows me, and maybe what you see when I look at her is that I can’t believe how lucky I am that she loves me anyway.”
She was quiet a long time after that. The rats skittered around corners ahead of us, and the tunnel made another sharp turn. It narrowed again on the straightaway, and I stuck my stick into the water. It was nearly six feet deep and the force of the current nearly pulled the stick out of my hand. This was the spot.
I held the lantern up high to look for landmarks. I had a general sense of the river’s path under the city, but it seemed simpler to work backwards from river access to physical address. This was why I moved forward along the ledge carefully, searching for any sign of an opening to the street above. Ahead of us was another grate, and a small ladder of metal rungs set into the bricks rose up from the ledge. I handed Jess my lantern and began to climb.
The rungs were firmly set into the brickwork, and I realized the Tyburn had likely only been bricked over here in the past fifty years. I reached the top in a matter of seconds, held onto the grate with one hand and pushed with the other. The metal didn’t move, so I peered through the grate from every angle. There was no sound of horse hooves or wheels, or even people talking above the grate. When my face was positioned in the far left corner, though, I could see the cornice at the top of a building. The moon was only just bright enough to illuminate dental moulding and a rosette. I hoped it was enough to find from the street.
Just then a dog barked above me, and a cold, wet nose sniffed my fingers as they gripped the metal. I almost lost my footing in my surprise as I jerked my hand back, but at the whimper above me, I looked up. A floppy-eared beagle looked down at me with a mournful gaze.
“Hi, pup,” I whispered to it.
He whined again and then pawed at the grate.
“It’s late for you to be outside, isn’t it?” I said quietly. I put my open hand against the grate and the beagle sniffed my palm before trying unsuccessfully to lick it.
“I’ll bring you a treat when I come to find you, alright?” I said, as I backed down the ladder.
The dog whined again and stood watching me until I was down on the ledge.
Jess still held the lantern, and in the light that bathed the tunnel, the beagle at the grate was invisible above us. “Can ye find yer way there from the street?” she asked, as we started back the way we came.
“Maybe. I need to borrow one of Gryf’s bones first, though.”
It only took about an hour of searching before we found the right building in the section of Marylebone I’d marked as the likely location for that second, accessible grate. Then it was just a matter of finding a building with a back garden that housed a beagle that I hoped hadn’t been put away for the night.
And in fact, his owners were properly negligent, because the poor dog was still outside and was lying on top of the grate as if waiting for me to return. I hopped over the wall, and he came careening across the dirt yard to bump into my legs with happy whimpers of greeting.
Jess crouched on top of the wall and watched me wrestle with the beagle for a few minutes before I gave him a final scratch and handed him the bone. She surveyed the yard skeptically.
“It’s full of junk,” she whispered in disgusted fascination.
We’d come down the back alley, so I wasn’t sure if the building was residential or commercial, but I knew I wanted it. The garden, full of bits of metal and scraps of building materials though it was, would be perfect for housing a small electrical generator, powered by the force of the culverted Tyburn River.
“Let’s go see what we’re up against,” I whispered back.
I jumped up onto the back wall, and we slipped down the alley to the nearest cross street, then back out to Baker Street. I counted five buildings down, and then looked up to double check the dental moulding and corner rosettes. It appeared to be a duplex, with unit A on the ground floor, and unit B upstairs. If I meant to electrify one floor, I’d have to do them both, so I made note of the house number and resolved to send an estate agent around to the owner with an offer.
It wasn’t until later, after a long bath, as I lay in our bed recounting the adventure in the Tyburn tunnel, that I groaned out loud at the remarkable coincidence I’d just realized.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, her eyes meeting mine with concern.
“The address of the building I want us to buy.”
“Yes?” she asked.
I shuddered to think of my next luncheon with Conan Doyle. “It’s 221 Baker Street.”
Charlie’s laughter resulted in a fit of the hiccups, about which I was profoundly unsympathetic.