Chapter 58

“Just leave him there. The position is perfect. Now, everyone, just a reminder, this is the stairwell to the upper floor. Quale and I will be there in case something goes wrong. It is also where you make your entrances and exits. Now, places, everyone.”

Forster and Quale went up the stairs. The scantily clad ladies squeezed into a corner in the front of the room where they would not be seen by someone coming through the door. I too stood near the front of the room where I could also see the street. Blathers stood near the open door, revolver in hand. The noon bell sounded.

Two men crossed the street, heading for the steps to the house. A smaller man loitered across from the gin shop near the parked coach.

At the end of the road, Barbary’s second cousin was parking his cab, full of half intoxicated newspapermen and Charles Dickens. I saw Dickens speak and imagined he said, “Steady now, lads. I have promised you the story of the decade. You had best be able to remember what has happened. This way.”

On the road at the other end of the alley, Barbary and his first cousin were discharging their passengers. Barbary drove the clergymen. His first cousin carried the buxom ladies of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice. As they stepped on the unpaved road, the ladies all held perfumed hankies to their noses and looked about with disgust and disbelief at the squalor.

The clergymen, all but Father John, also appeared to be amazed that such terrible living conditions existed within a short drive of their own parishes. Father John pointed toward the house, and they all followed him.

As they neared, I heard one of the fat ladies yell, “Hallelujah!”

Meanwhile the thugs kicked the mud from their boots on the first of the stone steps and climbed to the door. Tope tried the door, found it unlocked, and slowly pushed it open. He stuck his head in, and Blathers fired his pistol. The bullet hit the wall above the door. Tope jumped backward and knocked down his partner. They both regained their composure as Percy Wesley, the Queen’s Minister of Public Safety, sprinted across the muddy street and up the stone steps. “Out of my way, you fools.” He pushed his two henchmen aside and, with a pistol in each hand, kicked open the door.