Ned has planned for such contingencies. When he rented the modest apartment from the landlord of the Mermaid, he also took charge of a small room on the floor directly below it — a room no bigger than a closet actually — explaining to the landlord that he was an itinerant merchant and that he needed the extra space to store his wares. The landlord said he didn’t give a great blue damn who he was or what he did with his rooms, so long as there was no destruction done and he paid his rent on time. Ned smiled, and counted out the first week’s rent in advance. Then he appropriated Delp’s bone saw, waited until a fresh boatload of tars and salts began drinking, shouting, breaking glass and howling out sea chanties downstairs, and cut a neat round hole in the floor of his bedroom. The hole communicated directly with the closet on the floor below. It was the work of a minute to slide the bed across the room and conceal his handiwork. Add to this the fact that Ned always slept fully dressed, with his life savings tied up in a sock round his neck, and it is understandable that he was able to elude his would-be captors.
For the time being, at any rate.
For Osprey was not so easily discouraged. He seemed quite willing to let the chamberpot business languish in the hands of underlings while he pursued his present affair to its conclusion. The outrage to his father’s remains would have been reason enough to hunt the perpetrators to the far corners of the earth, but when coupled with the outrage to himself, the very existence of these thieves, kidnappers and crypt gougers was intolerable, rankling, a blot on society, and their extermination took on the nature of a sacred mission. Dogged, indefatigable, he was mad for vengeance, his mouth bitter with the taste of bile, his dreams puddled with blood.
The first to go was Quiddle. He was apprehended at St. Bartholomew’s, imprisoned, tried and eventually hanged. The only evidence against him was a deposition by the junior Osprey. It was enough. Delp, of course, denied everything. He did attend the execution though — seeing that Quiddle had no next of kin. Afterward, in a gesture that touched nearly everyone present, he stepped forward and announced that he himself would take charge of the body.
Boyles was another story altogether. He was none too bright, and dead drunk about three quarters of the time. But where he might be from moment to moment was hard to say. He had no lodgings. No friends. No job. No prospects. He slept in doorways, kitchens, ginshops. Osprey hired a dozen men to roam the alleys and taverns in the neighborhood of the hospital and to keep a watch in Limehouse. But to no avaiclass="underline" Ned Rise found him first. He was down on Hermitage Dock, taking in the sun and watching a swarm of skinny-legged boys dive into the Thames while seabirds dangled from the sky and three-masted schooners ran with the breeze like great white swans. He had a lemon, a potato and a bottle of gin with him, and he was sucking at them in slow succession — first the gin, then the lemon, and finally the potato. When Ned spotted the familiar flat head and tattered overcoat, he felt a rush of relief. Boyles turned his glittery green eyes and long nose to him as he sat down. “Neddy! Wot’s up? Another job?”
“We’re in trouble, Billy.”
Boyles didn’t want to hear it. He looked out over the gray sudsing waves like Napoleon surveying the Channel. “Lookit the way them gulls hangs in the air, like somebody was runnin’ a Punch and Judy show out o’ the sky,” he murmured. There was a fragment of lemon pulp stuffed up his nostril.
“They got Quiddle.”
“Who got ‘im?”
“Osprey.”
There was no change in Boyles’ expression. He looked at Ned blank as a baby.
“The one we dumped two nights back — the chamberpot king.”
Boyles’ face fell. He began to look queasy, as if his recollection of the fire-eyed young heir had suddenly cast him into stormy seas or swamped his potato in stomach acid.
“They’re going to hang him, Billy.”
Boyles absorbed this information with the same half-thoughtful, half-bilious look. His face gradually went white and he reached clumsily for his mouth. Then he vomited potato, lemon and gin all over the dock.
Ned took the bottle from him and flung it into the river. “Come on, Billy,” he said, “get up. We’ve got to go get ourselves lost.”
♦ ♦ ♦
That was in the summer, when days were long and nights as soft as a mother’s breast.
Now, with two months of winter and the New Year behind them, things are getting rough. For one thing, they are out of money. Boyles had all of six shillings on him when they decided to melt into the shadows, and Ned’s seventy-four pounds (an amount accruing in large part from the sale of the elder Osprey’s remains on the open market and the appropriation of the junior Osprey’s wallet and other effects) has been exhausted by the demands of lodging by the night in order to keep on the move. For another thing, the weather has turned against them. A cold wave is sweeping in off the North Sea with a frightening intensity, cracking foundations, smoothing over the Thames, spreading ague, pneumonia and influenza in its wake. While pigeons fall from the sky like stones and workhorses stiffen and die in their stalls, Rise and Boyles have had to make do with cold porridge and a bed in the straw. Still worse, Osprey has refused to give up the chase, sniffing them out of every hole they manage to crawl into, setting up a fierce bloodthirsty baying at their backs, ruining their digestion, assailing their peace of mind, hiding a bogey in every bush and making a gibbet of every streetlamp.
Currently they are huddled over a fire beneath the Blackfriars Bridge, muffled and miserable, noses plugged with mucus, feet numb, stomachs growling. They sit there for nearly half an hour, hugging their sides and staring into the flames, before Ned turns to his companion and whispers in his ear. Ten other vagrants are shivering round the fire. None even bothers to look up. Out on the river the shifting ice groans like a chorus of drowned men.
“There’s a woman buried tonight up at St. Paul’s,” Ned says.
“Wot, with the ground froze?”
Ned grins. “That makes it all the easier for us, don’t you see? She’ll be just lying there atop the grave for a few days till the gravedigger can open it up for her.”
Boyles’ nose is running. His eyes have sunk deep in their sockets, like two feverish little creatures retreating into their burrows. His voice is reproachful. “You got me into this, Neddy.”
“Crump did.”
Boyles turns back to the fire, carefully clears each nostril, and lets the idea drift through the gin-impaired circuits of his brain for a minute or two. “I could sure use a cup of negus and maybe some hot soup,” he sniffs. “And I wouldn’t mind passin’ the night on a bench in a inn someplace neither.” He pauses to cough up a clot of white serum. “But can we risk it?”
“Shit. We’ll freeze to death if we don’t.”
♦ ♦ ♦
It is past three in the morning when they slip into the cemetery. The night sky is a cauldron of clouds, white, black, a hundred shades of gray. There is wind, and that numbing, headaching cold that penetrates every cell and whispers death in your ears. Ned is in a hurry. Trembling with the cold, thinking only to snatch the corpse, stash it someplace and find a ginshop where they can sleep on the floor for a farthing, already envisioning Bluestone the surgeon counting the notes out in his hand and the bed and supper they’ll have by this time tomorrow. Osprey? He tries not to think of him, need rationalizing fear — how could anyone, even the devil himself, carry a grudge so far as to keep watch in a cemetery on a deathly cold night eight months after the fact? No, if he were Osprey he’d be in bed now, with a woman to keep him warm and a fire that lit the room like Guy Fawkes Day. .