'She must have gorn 'ome!' Bridget called over several times. Two of the barmaids who had been clearing up the kitchen had meanwhile been consulted, but both confessed they had not seen Sperm Whale Sally leave.
'It be half a mile to Wapping,' Ikey pointed out. 'She can't walk 'alf a mile home and it takes four people to lift her into a carriage, my dear.' Ikey was irritated at their apparent lack of concern. 'You would have seen her go if she'd been picked up by Dick Smith, besides, he always stops in for a pint before they leaves, don't he?'
Bridget was too tired to respond with any further sympathy and simply shrugged. 'She'll be back, I expects.' Ikey rose from the chair and, slinging his tobacco basket over his arm, asked Bridget for one of the lanterns which hung from the wall behind her.
'I'm going to take a look,' he announced.
'We'll be closing in half an hour,' Bridget said as she unhooked a lantern and handed it to Ikey. 'You be sure and bring it back, Ikey Solomon! Leave it at the back door. Mister O'Flaherty will dock me pay if it don't come back, 'e be most strict about not taking down no lamps from the wall!'
Ikey only grunted, upset that they did not share his concern for Sperm Whale Sally. He stepped gingerly through the pile of putrid sawdust at the door and walked out into the last vestiges of the night. It was half past four of the clock, with the sunrise less than an hour away.
The late spring night was cool, as it always is an hour before dawn, and a chill breeze blew in from the hills across the Derwent River. Ikey searched the dark corners and alleys along the waterfront, and checked under the hulls of two fishing boats pulled up onto a slip for scraping. Then he moved towards the small, dark beach where the doxies took sailors for 'sixpenny quick times' and which Sperm Whale Sally herself used for the consummation of a Blue Sally.
The beach was deserted. Ikey's boots squeaked as he trudged along the sand towards a wooden fisherman's jetty which ran some distance out into the river. Even when the tide was in, a small ramp built over a pipeline directly below the jetty provided a dry platform where drunks would sometimes take shelter from the rain. It was not a good place to sleep as the pipelines carried the entrails, fish heads and scales from a public fish market into the cove, and was notorious for the bravery of the rats who infested it at night when the tide was out. Many a sailor or hapless drunkard, falling into a stupor, had woken in the morning to find half an ear or nose missing, or his toes a gory, bloody mess where the rats had chewed through his leather boots.
Ikey stopped just short of the jetty and placed his basket on the sand. Then he climbed up onto the dark platform, which stank of rotting fish. The lantern cast only a small circle of light and he could hear the rats squeaking and see their darting black shadows as they scurried from the lighted perimeter back into the darkness.
Ikey was not repulsed by the stench or the rats. Rats were not only an integral part of the gaming ring, but an everyday occurrence in Ikey's life. In the rookeries of London rats and foul smells were a given, hardly to be remarked upon.
He moved deeper into the darkest part of the jetty so that the light from his lantern cast a wider glow. What he saw almost made his heart stop beating. A dozen rats sat on the giant shape of Sperm Whale Sally, who lay grotesquely huge and still upon the platform. Ikey let out a terrible moan, for he knew instantly that she was dead.
The rats scuttled away as Ikey plunged forward, missing his footing to land on his knees beside the giant shape of Sperm Whale Sally. Overcome with grief, he laid his head on Marybelle Firkin's cold breast and started to wail.
'Wake up!' he called desperately time and time again, shaking Sperm Whale Sally's massive shoulder. 'Wake up please, my dear!' Ikey sobbed wildly, the intensity of his grief totally unfamiliar to him. After a long while, he gradually became possessed of his wits again and he slowly recited the words of the Jewish prayer for the dead, even though he knew his friend was not of the Jewish faith.
Not since the departure of Billygonequeer had Ikey felt such a terrible loss and now he lay panting on the sand, too weak even to resolve to rise to his knees. People are people through other people; we constantly seek confirmation of our own existence by how we relate to others. In losing Sperm Whale Sally, Ikey was losing a part of both his present and his past. Only two people in his life had neither judged him nor made demands on him: Billygonequeer and Marybelle Firkin. They had accepted him for what he was and in doing so they had defined a softer, more vulnerable Ikey no one else knew. Both had given his life meaning beyond sheer greed and survival, and now both were gone. Ikey had lost more than two friends, he had lost himself; the Prince of Fences was finally dead.
Only Mary Abacus remained. Yet Mary, with her thriving business and her ambition, was growing more and more impatient with him. Ikey knew she now thought him an old man who argued too much and who had little of value to offer her.
The death of Marybelle Firkin filled Ikey with a terrible fear. He thought of himself dying, quite alone, with no one to mourn him and not even a minyan of ten good Jews to lay him properly to rest.
It was at this moment of his own extreme anxiety that he heard the mewling cry of an infant. At first he thought it to be the rats grown bold and moving closer, or some creature crying out in the night. But soon it came again, faint, muffled, but close at hand. Ikey rose unsteadily and held the lantern above the body of Sperm Whale Sally. One side of her bodice had been pulled away so that a great breast lay exposed. It was as if she had been in pain and had ripped at her bodice in some sudden agony. Above the surprisingly small areola of her pink nipple Ikey saw the tattoo of the Indian chief' s head and the word Tomahawk crossed through with the blue X, which Svensen of the Sturmvogel had tattooed to cancel its potency as the symbol of the Merryweather.
Ikey now saw that her dress was soaked in blood, and that the pathetic whimpering sounds came from below her blood-stained skirt.
He quickly sought the hem of her skirt and petticoat and gingerly pulled them over her thighs. Something was moving beneath the sodden cloth and, expecting rats, he jerked the material upwards. What an astonished Ikey saw squirming between the gigantic thighs, were two newborn infants. He gasped, reeling back in shock, and it took a moment for him to recover sufficiently to take a closer look. The tiny bodies were sticky with blood, but he saw that one was the reddish white of any newborn child, while the other was black as the devil himself.
Ikey's heart commenced to beat rapidly, thumping in his chest as though it might jump entirely from his person, for he could see that both infants were alive, their tiny fists tightly clenched and their little legs kicking at the stinking air about them. Each was still attached to the umbilical cord, and from the black one's mouth popped tiny bubbles of spittle. Ikey reached inside his coat and pulled out a length of twine and a small knife he used for cutting plugs of tobacco for his customers. He cut the twine into two pieces about six inches long, tied off the umbilical cord at the base of each tiny navel aperture and then, some six inches higher, severed each of the bloody cords with the sharp blade. He had witnessed this procedure in a hundred netherkens in the rookeries of London where birth was often enough a public occurrence, and onlookers were charged a halfpenny for the privilege of attendance. But he was nevertheless surprised at how well he was coping with this startling emergency.
With this messy task completed, Ikey walked to the water's edge and washed the blood from his hands and from the blade of his knife, then retrieved the basket from where he had left it on the beach. He hastily emptied it by stuffing what remained of the contents into a dozen or so of the pockets in the lining of his coat.