Chapter Fifteen
The Rookery of St Giles was worse than anything Phoebe could ever have imagined, even after having listened to Gabriel’s descriptions.
The dark, decaying buildings couldn’t have been described as houses.
Teetering, tumbledown hovels, several stories high, leaned out over the narrow, filthy streets where there might perhaps have once been cobbles beneath the layers of mud, excrement, and rotting vegetables.
She shivered at the thought that dead animals might be responsible for the odd crunch under her booted feet.
The stench was unbearable and like nothing Phoebe had ever smelled before.
It made her gag and she had to put a hand to her mouth and nose to try to keep the stink out and the possibility of embarrassing vomit in.
They’d walked up Crown Street, in itself not the most salubrious of roads, but gone past the entrance to Denmark Street, a road that had now taken on the proportions of a safe haven in Phoebe’s mind.
If only Gabriel were taking her to the orphanage instead of into a hell even his most lurid descriptions hadn’t done justice to.
At the end of the road, where Oxford Street entered from the left, Gabriel hurried Phoebe across what he said was the junction between St Giles High Street and the Tottenham Court Road.
Not that either of those road names meant anything to her, a girl who’d only ever lived on a country estate and in Mayfair.
That crossing, noisy, thick with horse-drawn traffic and people on foot, had been the lull before the storm, had she but known it.
For things were only going to get worse.
Bainbridge Street, which they entered on the far side of the High Street, proved to be narrower, darker and dingier than anything that had gone before, even though it was not long after noon.
The buildings that seemed to be threatening to butt heads with each other across the street looked as though they’d been cobbled together haphazardly out of the shoddiest materials, but only after those materials had reached an advanced state of rot.
From side to side above their heads, gray, shapeless washing hung on ropes, lank and motionless in the fetid air.
It did not look as if it had ever been clean.
Gabriel pointed to a sign over an archway proclaiming The Horse Shoe Brewery.
“See that? Just over a year ago, one of the huge vats in there burst and spilled thousands of gallons of beer into the rookery. You’d imagine the people would like that, wouldn’t you?
And some did. But, unfortunately, there are countless cellars with families living in them, and these filled up with the beer and eight people drowned. Some of them young children.”
Phoebe would have stared, but he was hastening past the entrance now and she was towed along with him. People who had to live in cellars? She’d think about that later.
Despite the state of the street, it was far more crowded than any street she’d ever seen, although the people seemed to mill about without any motivation, as though they possessed no purpose in life other than to idly wander, shouting to one another in loud, coarse voices.
This was truly hell on Earth.
Phoebe hung on tightly to Gabriel’s coat, the fear that they might become separated in this throng of unfriendly, unwashed people enormous.
She’d never seen people like this in any of the streets she knew.
If you could even call what they were struggling up a street, for she was walking in mud up to her ankles.
The shoddy boots Cecilia had furnished her with clearly had a leak in them for her toes were getting wet.
A further shiver of horror ran through her as half a dozen rats the size of cats raced from one side of the street to the other, seeming to skim lightly across the surface of the mud. So inured were her fellows to such a sight, no one but her seemed to have noticed.
Yes, the roads about Aunt Fanny’s house were busy during daylight hours, and even after dark, but this was something different.
Did these people not have houses to go to?
Or work of some sort? She hadn’t quite believed Gabriel when he’d said no one would employ them, but now she’d seen them for herself…
Men in tatty, frayed coats, and boots far worse than her own, lounged on corners drinking what must have been gin and arguing with each other.
Women in filthy, low-cut dresses did the same, many clutching half-empty, green-tinted bottles to their bosoms. And the women were shouting not just insults at the men, but enticements, pulling back the necks of their gowns to expose their grubby, scrawny breasts.
Where had Gabriel brought her to? Indignation at him boiled within her.
This was nothing at all like Denmark Street.
Yes, he’d said it would be worse. But he should have made it clearer just how much worse.
He should have warned her what to expect.
He should have given her more choice in the matter.
But would she have believed him? Probably not.
If she asked herself to be honest, she’d thought him guilty of exaggeration to shock her, but in truth, if anything, he’d underplayed the depravity of this place.
And now she was here, she was stuck. He represented the only way out, as well as the way in. If she let go of his coat tails, she might be lost here forever, and that thought terrified her.
She hung on even tighter.
Then she saw the children, by far a worse sight than the adults.
Dirty faced, their lank greasy hair in rat’s tails, hardly any clothes and no shoes, feet bare in the oozing mud, they lurked in the shadows like little, lost ghosts of what a child should be.
Their naked limbs were like sticks, eyes huge in narrow faces but furtive, as though constantly searching for something.
“Don’t go near the children,” Gabriel muttered. “They’ll stick you with a knife just as soon as their parents would, or pick your pockets. More than half of them are in the employ of gangs that send them out on the dip in return for a place to sleep and a bite of food.”
“On the dip?”
“Picking pockets.”
But they drew her gaze, nevertheless. Although the unpleasant thought that they, and the adults too, must be alive with vermin arose.
However, there was nothing she could do about how close anyone came to her.
She couldn’t move without having to shoulder past someone, who, if she pushed too hard, rounded on her with an angry leer and a gust of stinking breath that sent her scuttling even closer to Gabriel.
Gabriel pointed to their right where another street, even narrower and more crowded than this one, lay. “Down here,” he said, keeping his voice low. “This is Church Street, not that you’d know it as it’s not got a church in it.”
Surely this street couldn’t be worse than the last one?
But it was. She had to turn her eyes away from the sight of a half-naked old man almost lying in the gutter while a group of small, jeering urchins hurled lumps of filth at him.
A pack of dogs was digging frantically in the dirt against a ramshackle wall as though some quarry had gone to ground.
She averted her gaze. Hopefully a rat, but it could just as easily have been a cat, or even a child.
It only got worse.
Ahead, Gabriel turned left into a slightly wider street and Phoebe did her best not to look at anything but him as she followed him down it. If she didn’t look, it wasn’t there. If she didn’t look, she wouldn’t be as horrified. But she could still smell it.
Two more turns and she found herself in the vilest street so far, barely more than an alleyway, and outside a building that boasted a rotten sign swinging from a metal stanchion. This declared that they were at the Rat’s Castle. Whatever that was, it didn’t sound good.
This establishment possessed a door…of sorts, that might once have been painted blue but now hung lopsided and paintless on rusty hinges. Gabriel pushed it open and they went inside.
*
The Rat’s Castle was the beating heart of the Rookery of St Giles, if it could be said to have one.
It was where every criminal, of which there were many, came to do his business.
If you wanted something done, or obtained for you, you came to the Rat’s Castle for it.
If you wanted information, you came here for that too.
It was where Gabriel fenced his stolen gems.
He could hardly do it on the streets of Mayfair in his own persona.
No, he’d decided right at the start that he needed an alter ego to go into the very place the law wouldn’t dare to look for the Mayfair Highwayman.
He’d needed Joe Booth, cocky, streetwise young burglar and jack-the-lad, to swagger his way into the rookery and make himself at home in this den of thieves.
Of course, he’d not gone barging in with a pocket full of gems to begin with.
Oh no. He’d built up to that gradually, over time building the character of the fellow thief he wanted them to see him as.
So when the first time he’d needed a fence had come, he’d had Joe Booth’s established persona to slip into.
And right now he was ready to fence the jewels Phoebe had given him only a few short days ago.
The interior of the Rat’s Castle was, if anything, more densely packed than the streets outside.
Men stood shoulder to shoulder or crowded round dirty trestle tables downing ale from flagons or gin from small, grubby shot glasses.
Several scarred and ferocious looking dogs lay in front of the sluggish hearth fire, and more than a few people slumped against the walls, snoring as they slept off the excesses of last night, or perhaps this morning.
Business as usual. He’d never seen it any different, no matter what time of day he went there.