The Red Plague Affair

Chapter Twenty-Three In Cleaner Places

Clare, shuttered lanthorn held aloft, stood amid the wrack and ruin of Mr Morris’s empire, gazing about with bright sharp interest. Miss Bannon, bless her thoroughgoing heart, had provided him with every address she had been availed of for Morris, and he was slightly gratified to find his faculties were not undimmed and that he was most certainly able to deduce which one to visit first.

“Be careful of the glass,” he murmured again, and Valentinelli cast him a dark look. “It is, after all, what killed the Shield.”

“Really?” Vance, examining a fire-scarred table, very carefully did not remove his hands from his pockets. “Introduction under the skin, I presume. The vestiges left here… hrm.”

It was not a gentle death. “It seems Morris sought to remove evidence, or cleanse this place. Though why he would remains a mystery; it is quite out of character for him.”

“A man’s character may have hidden depths.” Vance turned in a slow circle, his own gaze roving. “We are here, old chap, because…?”

Have patience, sir. All shall be revealed. His fingers found a starched white handkerchief in a convenient pocket, and Clare stepped gingerly, broken glass crunching underfoot. The cloth, wrapped about his hand, was thin insurance, but all he possessed. Traceries of steam rose from their skin – it was a chill night in Bermondsey, and Londinium’s grasping oily fog pressed thick against the walls.

Valentinelli had gone pale, and there was a fire in his close-set eyes that promised trouble. He watched Vance rather as he had been wont to watch Mikal during the first days of Clare’s acquaintance with the sorceress and her staff; Clare spared an internal sigh and scanned the floor, dim lanthorn-glow filtering through raised dust. “Should be here… somewhere. Close.”

He carefully toed aside an anonymous jumble of cloth and splintered wood. Nothing in it should slice the leather of his boots, but still. “Aha.”

The trapdoor had seen heavy use, if the marks around it were any indication. The thick iron ring meant to provide leverage to heft it was rubbed free of rust, polished by gloved hands. “This is what we are here for.”

“Always down.” Valentinelli gave a sigh that would have done an old woman proud. “Why we cannot hunt in cleaner places, mentale? Always down in the shite.”

“Miss Bannon is far more equipped to hunt in Society.” Clare’s amusement did not hold an edge, but it was close. At least, now it is. Her childhood was perhaps entirely otherwise. “And that is as it should be. Whether we like it or not, my assassin, we are more suited to the mire than our fair sorceress.” He wrapped his protected hand about the ring and heaved, and was gratified when the trapdoor lifted, a slice of fœtid darkness underneath dilating. It thudded down, and the draught from below the warehouse was an exhalation of disturbed dust, rot, and the peculiar sourness of earth lain beneath a covering, free of cleansing sunlight, for a very long time.

Rickety wooden stairs under the lanthorn’s gleam; he eased the shutters as wide as they would go since there was little chance of a night-watchman seeing a suspicious glow here. Vance made a small clicking noise with his tongue, and Clare deduced the man was most pleased.

“What have we here?” Vance’s footsteps were cat-soft, but the floor still creaked alarmingly. “Oh, Clare. You are a wonder.”

“It is elementary, sir.” Of a sudden, Clare was exhausted. “I wondered, why here? And I bethought me of the past.”

Valentinelli shouldered him aside, a knife suddenly visible in one calloused hand. “What down here, mentale?”

“Nothing alive,” Clare reassured him. “Everything in this excavation is likely to be mummified as the ancient Ægyptios. But here is where Morris found his prime cause, and no doubt considered himself lucky. The plague was a hardy beast two hundred years ago.” His mouth was dry, and as Valentinelli tested the stairs and Clare followed, debated the advisability of explicitly mentioning that here was most likely the original source of the illness that had killed Eli and Tarshingale’s patients, and decided against it.

There was no profit, as Vance might say, in stating the obvious.

Down, and down, the sour earth crumbling away from the sides of the passage; shovel-marks were still impressed on damp clay soil. Clare’s throat was full of an acid clump, and he restrained himself from coughing and spitting by an act of sheer will.

The earthen strata changed colour, and the first skeletons appeared. Valentinelli crossed himself, and Vance made an amused noise.

“The Dark Plague,” the criminal mentath breathed. “Quite. The damp eats at dead tissue, but lower down no doubt there are bodies preserved by the clay. And in those bodies…”

“The plague. Which Morris set himself to resurrect, to prove the Pathological Theory or merely to show it could be done. I would give much to know…” Clare did not finish the sentence. Anything he wondered now was immaterial.

“Archibald.” For the first time, Francis Vance sounded serious. “If I may address you thus, that is…”

“For the time being, Francis, you may.” Clare lifted the lanthorn, and Valentinelli breathed out through his nose, the only sign of disgust he would allow himself.

“Very good. Archibald, my friend, we are too late. The genie, as it were, has escaped the lamp.”

“You have read Galland, I see. Yes. The dreadful spirit is loose in the world, and our task now is to find a second spirit to oppose it.” Clare could see the marks where samples had been scraped from the earthen walls; Morris had a fondness for femurs, it seemed. Scraps of ancient flesh hung on yellowed bone, a rat’s corpse worked half-free of the wall and stared with a wide-open snarl, other detritus poured into what had been a grave for the many instead of for one.

Even in death, the space a body took up in Londinium was expensive, and obeyed certain laws of supply and rent, as Locke would have it. Smith and Cournot had refined the principle, of course, and Clare suddenly saw the pages of text before him, clear as a bell. It was an effort to bring his attention to the present moment.

I am frightened, he realised, and my faculties seek to inure me to Feeling. Did Vance feel this terror? Was a criminal capable of such dread?

“A cure? Dear man, you are an optimist.” And yet Vance’s amusement might have been a similar shield, for his tone was not quite steady, and he almost tripped on a stair-tread as earth shifted and the rat’s corpse twitched. “Ah. Good heavens, not very stable, down here.”

“No, Dr Vance. I am no optimist.” Clare’s fist was damp, for the handkerchief was collecting sweat in his palm. “I am merely a man who sees what must be done. We shall come to Morris’s working area very soon, Ludovico. When we do, you shall hold the lanthorn.”

And may God and Science both have mercy upon us.