Chapter 5 - The Red Lion Cellar
The air in the cellar beneath the Red Lion gin palace did not move. It stayed there month after month, growing thicker with the grease of the tallow vats, the sour rot of leaked molasses, and the damp, chalky smell of the river-mud that seeped through the foundation stones whenever the tide rose above the custom-house mark.
Julian—whom they called Toby—sat on his straw pallet in the corner of the vault, his knees tucked under his chin, his torn grey wool trousers held together at the waist by a piece of tarred hemp rope. His left shoulder was purple where Silas’s thumb had dug into the bone, but he didn't feel the bruise. He was staring at the small, greasy square of paper he had hidden inside the lining of his boot.
It was a wrapper from the beef sandwich Clara had given him. It still smelled faintly of mustard and fresh lard, but it was the print on the paper that his fingers kept tracing over and over in the dark—the small, elegant crest of the Avenue Hotel Restaurant, London.
"Toby," a voice whispered from the wooden partition that separated the straw beds from the coal-bunkers.
It was Martha, the girl who washed the glasses in the taproom upstairs. She was fourteen, her face scarred by the smallpox she had caught in the workhouse, her fingers red and raw from the caustic lye she used for the pewter pots. She reached through the broken slat of the partition, her hand holding a cold mutton bone with a few scraps of grey fat left on the joint.
"Silas is drinking with the horse-coupers from Smithfield," she whispered, her eyes shifting toward the ladder that led to the street-trap.
"He’s got a gentleman in a black coat with him in the back parlor—the one with the silver-headed cane. I heard them talking through the floor-cracks, Toby. The gentleman’s giving Silas twenty gold sovereigns to put you on the coal-barge for Newcastle tonight. He says you're to go under the name of 'Billy' and you ain't never to come back to the pool of London."
Julian didn't take the mutton bone. His fingers froze on the greasy paper wrapper. "The gentleman with the cane?" he asked, his voice cracking from the smoke of the cellar lamp. "The one who came into the alley with the lady?"
"Not the lady," Martha said, her voice dropping into an urgent hiss. "The other one. The one who stayed by the carriage door. The one with the long black coat and the small white teeth. Silas called him 'Mr. Vance.' He told him the boy would be five miles downriver before the morning watch could turn out."
Julian felt a cold, oily wave of memory break through the grey fog that had filled his brain since the night of the accident. He remembered that name. Vance. It wasn't a word he had learned in the cellar or on the river-stairs. It was a word that belonged to the room with the green carpet, the room where the small silver horses stood on the mantelpiece, the room where a man with long, white fingers used to draw ships for him on the backs of old Admiralty circulars.
"He’s my uncle," Julian whispered, his blue eyes widening in the dark. "The one who gave me the wooden boat with the white sails. Why does he want to send me to the coal-barges, Martha?"
"Because you're worth gold to him dead, you silly little fool," Martha said, grabbing him by the arm through the broken partition and shaking him until his teeth clicked together.
May you like
"Get up. Silas is down three pints of gin, but he’ll be back for the rope before the clock strikes ten. The coal-barge is moored at the custom-house quay. If you're on it when the tide turns, you'll be choking on the sea-coal before Sunday."
Julian didn't hesitate. He thrust the sandwich wrapper into his boot, grabbed his torn grey cap from the straw, and scrambled up the coal-bunker toward the small iron coal-shoot that opened into the lane behind the malt-houses. The iron grate was heavy, rusted solid by twenty winters of river mist, but he was small, his fingers thin as wire, and he knew the exact spot where the brickwork had decayed enough to let a child’s shoulder slip through into the rain.
