“Jacky,” said Doyle helplessly, baffled by the impossible story but recognizing genuine suffering. “You couldn’t have known.”
London Bridge was less than half a mile ahead, and Doyle could see the hulks of grounded coal barges on the Surrey-side shore to his right. Jacky began angling in that direction. “There was a gun,” Jacky went on in a flat voice, “a flintlock pistol—that’s it there, by your foot—it was on the mantle, and when this furry thing came rushing into the house, I leaped up, grabbed the pistol and fired right into its chest. The thing dropped, bleeding all over the place. I went and stood over it, not too close, and it… looked at me for a moment before it sort of shuddered a few times and went limp. There was a mess. But when it looked at me I recognized him—I knew it was Colin. The color of the eyes was different, of course, but I recognized the… not expression, exactly… I recognized him in there.” Past the easternmost of the barges was a pier below a lighted house, and Jacky seemed to be heading for it. The glow from the narrow windows glittered warm gold on the oily black water. “After that I just slept through two weeks. Nobody else could—day and night I was screaming, throwing food and jabbering obscenities so foul that my innocent mother didn’t even understand most of them… but I was asleep. And after I came out of it I set out to kill Dog-Face Joe with the same gun that killed—with which I killed—Colin.” Jacky grinned sourly. “Follow all that?”
“Yes.” Doyle wondered how much of this Lovecraftian fantasy could be true—perhaps one of the mysterious Dancing Ape creatures had broken into Jacky’s house at roughly the same time that Lepovre decided to hit the road—and he wondered too whether he was correct in suspecting that this was more than grief for the death of a close friend. Could his first suspicions about Jacky have been correct? “It’s trite to say, Jacky, but I mean it—I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” Jacky had been slowing the canoe by dragging the oar in the water, and now it slid, hardly moving at all, alongside the pier, and Jacky stopped it by grabbing a rope dangling between the pilings and hanging onto it when the canoe’s weight came onto her arm. “Pull your end around there, Doyle—there’s a ladder that starts about four feet over your head.”
When they’d both climbed up to the narrow pier, Jacky said, “Now we’ve got to figure out what to do with you. You can’t come back to Copenhagen Jack’s house—Horrabin will have a dozen spies there watching for you.” They were walking slowly toward the building, which seemed to be some kind of riverfront inn, and Jacky, feet bare, was picking her way carefully over the ragged old timbers. “When does this friend of yours arrive in town? What’s his name, Ashbin?”
“Ashbless. I’ll meet him this Tuesday.”
“Well, the innkeeper here, old Kusiak, has a stable off to the side, and he’s always needing help. Can you shovel horse dung?”
“If there are people who can’t, I’d hate to think I was one of them.”
Jacky pulled open the inn’s dockside door and they stepped into a small room with a fireplace, and Doyle hurried over to it. A girl in an apron appeared, and her welcoming smile faltered a little when she noticed that both guests had evidently fallen into the river, and one was still dripping wet.
“It’s all right, miss,” Jacky said, “we won’t sit on the chairs. Would you tell Kusiak, please, that it’s Jacky from across the river, and a friend, and we’d like two hot baths—in individual private rooms—”
Doyle grinned. Modest little chap, this Jacky.
“—And some clean dry clothes, it doesn’t much matter what sort,” Jacky went on. “And after that two pots of your excellent fish chowder in the dining room. Oh, and some hot coffee with rum in it while we wait.”
The girl nodded and hurried away to check all this with the innkeeper.
Jacky squatted down beside Doyle at the fireplace. “You’re pretty sure this Ashbin character will get you set up in some decent sort of position?”
Doyle wasn’t sure, and was trying to convince himself more than Jacky when he said, a little defensively, “He’s not hurting for money, I believe. And I do know him pretty damn well.”
And he’s got friends and influence, Doyle added to himself, and he might just be able to get me an audience—in enforced immunity!—with old Romany, in which we could bargain on my terms: I’ll let him have certain harmless bits of information—or even outright lies; yes, that would be safer—in exchange for a gap location. If I could have the right sort of friends waiting outside the tent he wouldn’t dare do any more things like his cigar in the eye trick. And it would take me months, or years, to build up that kind of influence unaided, and Darrow said the gaps decrease in frequency after 1802, and in any case I don’t think I have months—this cough was already killing me before tonight’s swim. It may now choose to develop into real pneumonia. I’ve got to get back, soon, to where there are hospitals.
Also, Doyle wanted to interview Ashbless in detail about his early years and then stash the information somewhere where it wouldn’t be disturbed until he could “discover” it when he got back to 1983. Schliemann and Troy, he thought fatuously, George Smith and Gilgamesh, Doyle and the Ashbless Documents.
“Well, good luck with him,” said Jacky. “Maybe next month at this time you’ll have a job at the Exchange and rooms in St. James. And you’ll hardly remember your days as a beggar and a stablehand—” She smiled. “Oh yes, and your morning as a less than successful costermonger… what else have you done?”
The rum-laced coffee arrived then; and the girl’s smile, and her assurances that their baths were being drawn even now, showed that Kusiak had acknowledged Jacky as a good credit risk. Doyle sipped his coffee gratefully. “Nothing much,” he answered.
The structure known throughout the St. Giles rookery as Rat’s Castle had been constructed on the foundations and around the remains of a hospital built in the twelfth century; the hospital’s bell-tower still survived, but over the centuries the various owners of the site had, largely for warehousing purposes, steadily added new floors and walls around it, until now its arched Norman windows looked, instead of out across the city, into narrow rooms fronted right up against them and moored to the ancient stone; the cap of the tower was the only bit of the structure still exposed to the open air, and it would have been hard to find in the rooftop wilderness of chimney pots, airshafts and wildly uneven architecture.
The bellropes had rotted away centuries ago, and the pulleys plummeted to the floor to be carted away as scrap metal, but the ancient cross timbers still spanned the shaft, and new ropes had been looped over these in order to hoist Horrabin and Doctor Romany some fifty feet off the floor, roughly three-quarters of the way up the enclosed tower. Since it allowed them to converse at a comfortable distance from the ground, it was their preferred conference chamber. Oil lamps had been set on the sills of the old stone windows at the very top, and Damnable Richard attended this evening’s council, sitting on the sill of a window one level down from the lamps, which put him only a foot or two above the heads of the dangling chiefs.