“A guess,” said Dickens. Within minutes we had come to a three-tunnel branching of the sewer. Luckily the channel was narrower there and Dickens hopped across, using his stick to keep his balance. He cut three marks on the corner of the centre channel and made room for me to hop after him.
“Why this channel?” I asked when we were twenty or thirty yards in.
“It seemed wider,” said Dickens. We came to another parting of tunnels. He chose the one to the right and marked his three stripes on the brick.
A hundred yards into this lesser channel and he stopped. I saw on the wall opposite—there was no walkway on that side—a metal candle reflector held up on a spade, its handle buried in the muck, with some sort of round wood-and-wire screen propped against the wall beneath it. A quarter of an inch of tallow candle remained in the reflector.
“What on earth could that be?” I whispered. “To what purpose here?”
“The property of a sewer-hunter,” Dickens replied in conversational tones. “Haven’t you read your Mayhew?”
I had not. Staring at the filth-rimmed pan obviously made for screening, I said, “What in Christ’s name could they be sifting and hunting for in this muck?”
“All those things that we lose into the sewers sooner or later,” said Dickens. “Rings. Coins. Even bones can have their value to those who own nothing.” He poked at the spade and circular sieve with his stick. “Richard Beard illustrated just such an apparatus in Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor,” he said. “You really must read it, my dear Wilkie.”
“As soon as we get out of here,” I whispered. It was a promise I planned to honour in the breach.
We moved on, sometimes having to scuttle forward in an almost crouching position as the vaulted ceiling grew lower. For a moment I felt panic when I thought of Hatchery’s little bullseye running out of fuel, but then I remembered the heavy stub of catacomb candle in my left pocket.
“Do you think these are part of Bazalgette’s new sewer system?” I asked sometime later. The only good news in our progress was that the overwhelming power of the stench had all but numbed my sense of smell. I realised that I would have to burn my clothes; a misfortune, since I particularly prized the jacket and waistcoat.
I may have mentioned earlier that Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Board of Works, had proposed a complex system of new sewers to drain off sewage from the Thames and to embank the mudflats along its shores. The passage of the plan had been expedited by the Great Stink of June 1858, when the work of the House of Commons had been disrupted as the members fled the city. The Main Drainage Works at Crossness had been opened just the previous year, but dozens of miles of main and ancillary sewer projects were proceeding across and beneath the city. The Embankment part of the works was scheduled to be opened just five years hence.
“New?” said Dickens. “I doubt it very much. There are hundreds of ancient attempts at sewers under our city, Wilkie… some going back to the Romans… many of the passages all but forgotten by the Board of Works.”
“But remembered by the sewer-hunters,” I said.
“Precisely.”
Suddenly we emerged into a taller, wider, drier space. Dickens stood still and shone the bullseye in all directions. The walls were stone here and the vaulted brick roof was supported by multiple pillars. Along the drier sides of this bowl lay sleeping mats of every description, some of rough rope, others of expensive wool. Heavy lamps hung by chains and the ceiling was darkened by smoke. A square cast-iron stove stood at the highest point on an island in the middle of this concavity and I could see a sort of stovepipe which—rather than rising through the stone ceiling—extended downward into one of four adjacent sewers that radiated from this place. Rough planks on boxes served as a table and I could see dishes and dirty utensils stowed in the boxes themselves, alongside smaller boxes that might hold provisions.
“I don’t believe it,” gasped Dickens. He turned to me with eyes alight and a huge grin on his face. “Do you know what this reminds one of, Wilkie?”
“The Wild Boys!” I cried. “I cannot believe that you are reading those particular advanced editions, Dickens!”
“Of course,” laughed the most famous author of our day. “Everyone literary I know is reading it, Wilkie! And none of us admitting such to the others for fear of censure and ridicule.”
He was talking about advanced copies of The Wild Boys of London; or, The Children of the Night—A Story of the Present Day. It was a dreadful series currently circulating in galley form but soon to be published for the general public, if the authorities did not suppress it completely on grounds of obscenity.
I have to admit that there was little obscene about the turgid tale of wild boys living like pitiable animals in the sewers beneath the city, although I do remember a particularly gruesome and suggestive illustration of several of the boys finding a mostly nude body of a woman in their sewer searches. In another scene, mercifully not illustrated, a boy new to the Wild Boys group comes across the corpse of a man being consumed by rats. So perhaps it was obscene after all.
But who was to imagine that such a fantastical tale, indifferently told, was based on the truth?
Dickens laughed—the sound echoing down different dark channels—and said, “This place is not so different from my favourite London club, Wilkie.”
“Except that King Lazaree warned us that some of these diners are cannibals,” I said.
As if in response to our witticisms, there came the squeak and scuttle of rats from one of the openings, although it was impossible to tell which. Perhaps from all.
“Do we turn back now?” I asked, perhaps a shade plaintively. “Now that we have discovered the heart of the mystery of Undertown?”
Dickens looked sharply at me. “Oh, I doubt very much that this is the heart of the mystery. Nor even the liver or lights of same. Come, this channel looks the widest.”
Fifteen minutes and five turnings and scratchings on the wall later, we emerged into a space that made the Wild Boys’ living area look like a minor loculus.
This tunnel was a major thoroughfare compared to the low and mean sewers through which we had already passed: at least twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet high, the centre a river of quickly moving water—albeit a sludge-thick sorry excuse for water—rather than the mere oozes of mud and filth we had been scuttling past. The walls and brick path before us now, as well as the high vaulted arches, were built of gleaming new brick.
“This must be part of Bazalgette’s new works,” said Dickens, his voice sounding awed for the first time, the weakening beam of his bullseye playing across the wide thoroughfare and ceilings. “Although perhaps not officially opened yet.”
I could only shake my head, as much in weariness as in astonishment. “Which way now, Dickens?”
“No way from here, I believe,” he said softly. “Unless we swim.”
I blinked and realised what he meant. This brick walkway was wide—five feet wide at least, as clean and spotless as a new city sidewalk above—but it only extended fifteen feet or so in each direction from our tunnel opening.
“Do we retrace our steps?” I asked. The idea of entering one of those tiny pipes again made my skin crawl.
Dickens turned his light on a post two yards or so to our left. It was made of wood and held a small ship’s bell on it. “I think not,” he said. Before I could protest, he had rung the bell four times. The brash sound echoed up and down the broad bricked thoroughfare above the quickly flowing waters.
Dickens found an abandoned pole at the end of this strange brick dock we were on and he thrust it down into the current. “Seven feet deep at least,” he said. “Perhaps deeper. Did you know, Wilkie, that the French are preparing boat tours of their sewers? They are to be spotlit—women in the boats, men walking alongside for parts of the tour. A sort of bicycle apparatus will propel the flat-bottomed vessels while searchlights within the boat and others carried by égoutiers alongside will illuminate features of interest along the way.”