♦ ♦ ♦
“You know,” the cousin sniffs, “I recognized you the instant you stepped through the door.”
Ned emits a mournful whimper or two, then blows his nose and looks up at her out of grief-stricken eyes. “Oh? How was that?”
“You. . you. .” here she falls into his arms again, blubbering like a drowning dog, “you look so much like him.”
The rest is easy. A few ponderous aunts, quaking uncles, sour in-laws, cousins thrice removed, a suspicious old nursemaid. No widow, thank god. (Ned can’t be sure, but thinks he recalls snatching a Mrs. Tillie Marsh Osprey from a churchyard in the West End nearly two years back.) Meanwhile, expressions of sympathy fall around him like brick buildings collapsing in an earthquake. Someone proposes a toast. And then another. More tears, back-patting, the reek of perfume and alcohol, a kiss and a squeeze, and then they’re out in the street, wrapped in black capes, torches held high, treading with stately tread behind the massive horse-drawn hearse. Over the cobbles and down the street, around a corner and into the churchyard. The glittering weasel eyes of the parson, dust to dust. And then Ned flinging himself on the coffin, biting at the ankles of the gravediggers, inconsolable, fighting off a host of soothers and sympathizers in the pure fierce outflowing of his grief. He grovels, he whines, out-Hamlets Hamlet. And finally, tearfully, begs them to leave him with his sorrow and his burning compulsion to bury this great and noble man, his father, with his own caring hands.
Ten minutes later the cemetery is deserted as the sleek phaeton draws up at the gate, Quiddle at the reins. A thin, flat-headed figure slips out and joins Ned beside the grave. There is a movement in the dark, a grunt or groan perhaps, some brief hint of nefarious activity. Then the carriage moves off and the final torch is snuffed in the cemetery.
♦ ALL THINGS THAT RISE
MUST CONTAIN YEAST ♦
As dawn stretches her rosy fingers over the rooftops of London, a harelipped match girl stumbles upon the writhing form of Claude M. Osprey, Jr. The heir to the Osprey fortune, bound hand and foot, is methodically inching his way up a soot-blackened alley, dragging a small ridge of detritus along with him. His face is a grid of scratches thin as cut hair, and a dirty cravat has been stuffed in his mouth. “Mmmff,” he says. “Mmmmmmmmff!” The girl cocks her head and looks at him alertly, like a setter responding to its master’s cluck, then bends to sift through his pockets. Half an hour later a butcher’s boy happens by, does a double take, and then slouches up to hang over the young heir as if the appearance of a bound and gagged man in a back alley presented a dilemma of Aristotelian proportions. Osprey’s eyes widen above the gag in rage and exasperation. The boy’s mouth drops open. He starts up the alley, ducks his head, turns and comes back again. Finally he squats down and cautiously removes the cravat from Osprey’s mouth.
The bound man works his jaw as if it were a newly created part of his anatomy. “Cut me loose,” he demands.
The boy tucks the cravat away in his pockets. He digs a sliver of wax from his ear and then examines it thoughtfully at the edge of a blackened fingernail. “Wot’s in it for me?”
“Half a crown.”
“Make it a crown and yer on.”
“A crown then. Cut the cords.”
“Ten shillings.”
“Help!” Osprey shouts. “Murder! Help!”
“All royt, all royt.” In a single practiced motion the knife appears from the boy’s ragged sleeve and the hemp cords fall to the ground.
Osprey sits up and frees his ankles, then reaches up a hand for support. The boy helps him to his feet. “Idiot!” the young heir hisses, and slaps the boy against the wall. Then he’s out of the alley and running for a hackney cab.
♦ ♦ ♦
They are stunned in Cheapside. Bowled over. “But, but — why would anyone want to do such a thing?” the uncle stammers.
“The grave!” shouts Osprey.
The authorities are called in. The parson. The cousin with her eyes of pitch. The aunts and uncles. The in-laws. When the earth is turned back from the grave and the casket revealed, they breathe a sigh of relief. “Open it!” shouts the heir. “Open it!” he insists, over a murmur of protest. The gravedigger pries open the lid. The casket is empty. Some gasp. Others faint. That afternoon the following handbill is distributed throughout the city:
Claude M. Osprey, Jr., offers a reward of £100 for information leading to the apprehension of three men, a one-legged man among them, who committed a heinous act of depravity against God and Nature in the St. Paul’s churchyard on the night of June the eighth. Information held strictly confidential. Great Wood St., Cheapside.
There are thirtyseven respondents. One after another they slouch into the study of the house on Great Wood Street. Bearded, one-eyed, pockmarked, drooling and stinking, each has a story for the young heir. He listens to semicoherent tales of murder, cannibalism, rape, robbery and mayhem. He hears of kidnapping and mutilation, fellatio, buggery, gypsies, blackamoors and Jews. The carpets are soiled and the spitoon full when a rangy man of about forty is led into the room, his biceps as lean as a side of bacon. A beard of three or four days’ growth darkens his chin, and he reaches up to stroke it from time to time with quick nervous fingers. His eyes are bright as bits of blue glass. “My name’s Crump,” he says, his voice flayed and harsh. “I knows the men ye want. Graverobbers.”
Osprey motions for him to sit.
“They’re a vicious lot, in league with the divil. It’s un’oly wot they done. Inyooman.”
Tight-lipped, seductive, Osprey rattles a bag of coins. His eyes hold the other man like pincers. “Where are they?”
“The gimpy one, ‘ee’s Quiddle. Ye’ll find ‘im at St. Bartholomew’s. The other one, the one with the flat ‘ead, they calls ‘im Boyles, Billy Boyles. ‘Ee’s a drunk. Sleeps in sheds and carts and such. But ‘oo you wants is the ringleader, the brains behind it all.” Crump pauses to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. “That’s a hunnert pund yer offerin’, init?”
Osprey rattles the bag, slow and sweet.
“ ‘Is name’s Ned. Ned is all I knows ‘im by. ‘Ee’s a subtle snake, ‘ee is. Slippery. But I’ve watched ‘im and I’ve followed ‘im like a terrier after a rat. I can tell ye where ‘is lodgins is at. In Lime’ouse. Upstairs from the Mermaid Tavern.” Crump pauses to lick his cracked lips. “Go now,” he whispers, “and catch ‘im while it’s light.”
♦ THE HOUND OF EARTH ♦
Experience has taught Ned Rise a good many things — nearly all of them unpleasant. One thing it has taught him is to keep his assets liquid. Another is to wear a life jacket if you’re expecting heavy seas. He has also come to understand that the prudent homme des affaires never removes his shoes, keeps one eye propped open in repose, and never under any circumstances allows himself to enter a room with only one door.
And so, when Osprey and a pair of armed lieutenants burst in upon him entirely unannounced and unexpected, Ned is only partially surprised. Though he is in bed asleep when they kick in the door of the front room, he has vanished by the time they reach the bedroom. As the front door splinters there is a moment of recognition during which the young heir, armed to the teeth, stares directly into the eyes of the bodysnatcher, startled awake in his bed. Not fifteen feet away. Through the doorframe, in the back room, under the bedclothes. Osprey has already begun to smile a wicked vengeful smile when Ned simply turns over in bed and disappears. One minute he is there, flesh and blood, and the next he has been drunk up by the air, trompe l’oeil, like a blacksnake vanishing into a stone wall.