“So here’s my play, friend. Worth a shilling. Would you know of a gal who’s got a room? You could visit her there, be all safe and tidy and away from Jack’s ways with the blade. I’d pay the tariff, knowing it’s more than the thruppence standard. The safety would be worth it.”
“Hmm,” he said, scrunching up an eye.
Then business called, and he tended some others, paused for a time to josh two men who looked like barristers slumming, poured three gins for a gal in the trade who wound her way back to a table where she sat with two friends, lit a fellow’s cheroot, then drifted back. The shilling was on the bar, under my hand.
He came close, I released, he snatched and pocketed. “All right, chum, you didn’t hear this from Brian Murphy, now.”
“Got it.”
“Fellow named Joe Barnett, lives with a gal off and on. Now I hear it’s off. She lets her friends double up when it’s cold out and they can’t make doss. He don’t like that, as the room is small. So off he goes, all the girls is talking about the poor thing. She’s a pretty thing, too, though somewhat gone to flab. Says she worked in a high-class house once. She ain’t in here now, but she’s on the streets most nights; believe me, she ain’t at choir practice.”
I laughed.
“Little heavyset, blond, though, like an angel you’d see in some old painting. Rosy-cheeked, bosom all aquiver, you’d enjoy a romp with her. Name’s Mary Jane Kelly, any of the girls knows Mary Jane, they does, and she lives just down the avenue in McCarthy’s Rents.”
“McCarthy’s Rents?”
“Fellow named McCarthy owns it. It’s really called Miller’s Court. Rank little place, one of them hole-in-the-walls, you go in a passageway, it’s all little rooms back there. She’s in thirteen, if I recall.”
“Mary Jane Kelly.”
“She was in earlier tonight. She’s in a lot. Or at the Britannia, drinking it up as fast as she earns it. Got the gin bug bad, poor thing, and when she’s all hooched up, she likes to sing. I cuts her a break now and then, slipping her a free one. But she’d be the one for you, friend.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jeb’s Memoir
Major Pullham lived in a smart house on Hoxton Square in Hackney, perhaps a mile and a half north of Whitechapel. It was all gentry, the best sort of tidy, prosperous, upper-bourgeois London, the ideal toward which all Englishmen were instructed to strive. His—actually, Lady Meachum’s—house stood on a street of grace in a state of grace, happily a peer of its cohort, stately, refined, well kept, an ample recompense for a dashing cavalryman shot at ten thousand times in his career for the crown. Too bad he wasn’t satisfied with it alone, but then that’s the nature of the beast.
I arrived at eleven P.M. Indeed, the quarter-moon now and then shone through the rushing clouds and a brisk wind sent the branches of the abundant trees clackity-clacking. It was really late autumn, and they had changed color and wore scarlet and russet threaded through their crowns, and the leaves, upon achieving the perfection of dry death, fell in swirls to earth and clotted gutters and lawns. The suggestion of rain was heavy in the air, and I felt it would fall before dawn. I had accordingly worn an ancient, used-to-be-father’s mackintosh over my brown suit, and a plaid scarf around my neck and my crumpled felt hat, pulled low over my ears. I wasn’t going to let rain stand between myself and Jack.
I found Professor Dare exactly where we’d planned, at a bench in Hoxton Square a good hundred meters from the major’s dwelling, but with a plain view of it. The major could not leave without our knowledge, as the back-of-yards formed a nice parkground but held no exit, being buttressed on all sides by houses such as his.
“Is he there?” I asked.
“Indeed. He and Lady Meachum returned at ten from some sort of social gathering. They were all topped up in silks and diamonds, so perhaps it involved the Mayfair set or some other golden collection. The hansom dropped them off, they let the last servant return to quarter, and now they are in the bedroom. Perhaps he’s atop her now, shouting ‘Onward, old girl, let me into the breech!’ and that’s that for the evening.”
“I believe we’d hear her scream in bliss,” I said. “It would overcome even the rush of the wind.”
We both laughed. Over our adventure, an enjoyable comradery had sprung up, which was perhaps why I reacted so angrily to Harry Dam’s calumny. Dare was every bit as ironical as I, every bit as radical, every bit as aware of the pomp and circumstance of empire and the core of rot it concealed, but a little bit more cold-blooded. He never grew angry at the ugliness of what hid in plain sight before much of London’s sleepy eyes; he only enjoyed a dark chuckle now and then. He was truly the Holmesian ideal.
“Here,” he said, “you may as well take this now. It’s quite cumbersome.”
With that, he opened his cape, did some dipping and unbuckling, and passed something over to me. It was quite heavy, an object in a leather pouch, the leather pouch in a nest of strapping. I felt it deposited on my lap and was astounded that its weight appeared far more than its size indicated. I bent, peeled through the leather strapping, got to the object concealed in the pouch, and while at first it made no sense to me in the low light of a far-off gas lamp, it gradually resolved itself into more or less known forms.
“Good heavens,” I said, genuinely shocked, “a gun.”
“Yes, it is. Damned big one, too, I’m told.”
I saw that it had a kind of curved wooden hand grip, and by that, I pulled it partly out of its sheathing and realized it had double hammers over double barrels. It was only a foot long or so, and thus its messages were contradictory. The part I’d pulled had a rifle quality, or perhaps shotgun, as there was a hinge and latch by means of which one could break it and insert shells; but there was no stock, only the thick, curled wooden grip. It had no barrel length, either, which disqualified it further from the rifle or shotgun category.
“Howdah . . . you do?” the professor said merrily.
“Er, I don’t—”
“It’s called a Howdah pistol,” he said. “Evidently I had an uncle who spent his life and fortune accumulating heads to hang in a hall in his home. Pointless, if you ask me, unless the heads were human, but alas, none was. He died, perhaps under wildebeest hooves, and it came to my father, and when he died, it came to me along with other knickknacks of dubious usefulness. I’ve had it in an upstairs room for years.”
“Is it a hunting gun?”
“After a fashion. It’s not for when you are hunting them, however, but when they are hunting you.”
I said nothing, not following.
“In India, they hunt tiger from little compartments cinched about an elephant’s back. Sahib need not walk in brushy, punishing jungle as he draws near his quarry. He rides in comfort, as befits the raj. But the tiger is smart. Sometimes he climbs a tree and, knowing he’s hunted, will wait concealed in the branches until the elephant passes by. He’s not stupid. He knows he has no quarrel with the elephant. He knows who his enemy is, so he leaps into the compartment up top and readies for lunch. In those closed circumstances, the rifle is too clumsy to maneuver. Sahib pulls his Howdah pistol from its scabbard, cocks both hammers, and, as the tiger lunges, fires two immense bullets down its throat. Sahib and Memsahib live to eat mango chutney another night and have many tales to tell.”
“It’s a last-ditch sort of thing,” I said, finally grasping the concept through the irony.
“Indeed. And what better to have along if, by chance, we jump Jack and he jumps back. I doubt we can argue him into dropping his knife, brilliant though we may be, so it’s on you to cock and fire. The caliber is something called 5-7-7 Kynoch, whatever that means, but the size of it will certainly dissuade Jack from further fuss.”