Chapter 35
Alderman James’s carriage pulled up on Francis Street, and he got out and looked at the large house he was about to enter. He knew it well enough from the outside, but he had never been inside before, and he wondered what horrors he might find in there. That morning, he had received a note from Mr. Edwards to come to the Hellfire Club building at midday. It was just that now, and James knocked on the door.
For a while, no one answered, and then he repeated his knock. Still nothing; he listened at the wood and heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and then the door was unlocked from within by Edwards himself.
“Sorry, Alderman, but our doormen are under orders to only answer to a secret knock that changes every day.”
James stepped inside, shaking Edwards’s hand and with his other hand waving off his worries about being left outside. On first inspection, it was not as he had expected. There were no lewd paintings or satanic images anywhere to be seen, and the sculptures on display were of more Greek inspiration than Satanic. The place was fitted out like the best of the gentlemen’s clubs and taverns in the city. In a strange sense, James felt disappointed that it was not the devil’s lair he’d thought it would be.
“You have something to show me?” James said without chitchat.
“I do. Follow me, Alderman.”
They walked up the wide and magnificent stairs. Plush carpet ran up the centre, and the wooden steps on either side were so polished and well maintained that they could have been stone. The bannisters were wide and smooth and the handrail thick; he imagined the men who frequented here could quite possibly have polished this by sliding down it. (He doubted they had any horses in this place to smash it up.) When they got to the top of the stairs, James could hear voices coming from a room to the left whose door was closed; there was something boisterous and possibly illegal or immoral going on in there, but Edwards took him the opposite direction, along a small, dark corridor, where they came to a panelled wooden door with engravings that he couldn’t make out in the poor light.
“Prepare yourself, Alderman,” Edwards said as he opened the door.
In the centre of the room, on a huge mahogany table, there lay something massive: an animal of some kind, covered in black, bristling hair. It was enormous, and James looked at Edwards, who was smiling at his reaction.
“What is it?” James asked, though he thought he knew what the other would say.
“Go in and take a look. It’s quite dead.”
James walked in and around the table. Two huge, serrated tusks protruded from the jaws of a boar, the largest specimen of which he had ever seen or even heard of. It must have been six feet long and at least three feet high; its powerful shoulder and leg muscles seemed bulging and rock hard.
“The Dolocher?” James asked, stupefied. All this time, he’d been so sure that it was a man.
“I think so,” Edwards said.
No matter what he had heard to the contrary, James had never thought an animal was responsible. He had seen a human hand in every killing. How had he not seen the possibility of something like this monster being in existence?
“So it was an animal after all,” he said, his downcast eyes finding the thick hoof of one foot, and he imagined the power that must have been behind it.
“The tusks are not smooth, as you may have noticed, and that is what caused the jagged marks on the victims that looked like teeth tearing at them,” Edwards said in the vein of a university professor.
James felt the tusks, and he was surprised at how sharp and hard they were—very much capable of great damage indeed. “How did it come to be here?” he asked, still looking over it.
“One of my ‘eyes’ brought it to my attention. It was lying dead by the canal bank late last night.”
“Who killed it?”
“No idea how it died, actually. There are no marks on it that I can see.”
“By the canal?”
“Well, the Poddle near the Coombe, but only lesser men could call that stream a river.”
James walked all the way around the table and looked at the boar from every angle. He couldn’t get over the size of it. He had been on boar hunts before, had seen big ones skinned and spread on spits, but nothing like this animal. “What do you intend to do with it?”
“I intend to eat it, but I thought you might like to display it for the masses first?”
“This is not what the people want to see…”
“This is what the people want to see, Alderman. It is not what you want to see,” Edwards interrupted. “This is a bit of a letdown for both of us, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t see how the ending of a murderous rampage by a wild animal should be disappointing to anyone,” James said.
“Let’s be truthful here, Alderman. You wanted to either catch or slay this beast yourself and get the credit for it with these people. I have to say I had harboured nice fantasies myself of being the one who brought it in—mine was for my own amusement, however.” Edwards smiled.
“It’s over, Mr. Edwards,” James said. “That is what really matters.”
Edwards nodded ruefully, and he looked over the boar himself. “There is still a way for you to get what you want from this,” he said after a pause.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, only a couple of people know this is here right now, and they would be discreet if asked.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Say you and I bring this dirty fellow to one of the back alleys tonight after dark. You cut it up a bit and leave your sword in its throat and then raise the alarm. People will flock to see the hero who has slain the Dolocher.” Edwards was smiling, but the smile had an edge to it that James didn’t quite understand.
He would be lying to himself if he didn’t find this idea enticing, at least at the moment it was mentioned, but he couldn’t do something like that.
“No, thank you for your concern, but it is myself that I need to appease and not the people of this city.”
“So how would you like to announce this?” Edwards asked.
“Perhaps we should bring it to Cornmarket and show it there. That is, after all, where everyone assumes is the starting point to all this. Why not end it there as well?”
“Why not indeed. I’ll get it down there in a covered cart for, say, three o’clock?”
“Yes, that sounds fine.”
“Please though, Alderman, try to keep the people under control. I am really looking forward to getting stuck into this at dinner tonight.” This time Edwards’s smile was broad and malevolent, and James could almost sense an anger that this beast had died at a hand other than Edwards’s or that it was no longer going to be around to entertain him.
At the appointed hour, the cart pulled up outside Newgate Prison, and the alderman stood up on the back of it and called out to the crowd to gather round. There had already been something of a gathering as news spread that the military presence had grown since midday around the prison. Now more came out from shops and other businesses and formed a half moon around the cart at the gates of the Black Dog.
“I have some great news for Dublin today,” the alderman began, and at once there were ripples of talk in the crowd. “The Dolocher is no more!” He pulled the white sheet covering from the boar with a flourish and stood back as the collected gasp of the crowd came at him.
They rushed forward to the edge of the cart, pushing the cordon of soldiers back against it and rocking it violently enough that James almost lost his balance. There was no menace in the crowd; the soldiers understood this and gently jostled them back by a foot or two.
“Be orderly, you will all get to see,” James called out as he got better footing in the cart.
“Who killed it?” someone called out.
“We don’t know. It was found dead on the banks of the Poddle,” James said. Slowly, as the people looked with wonder on this porcine phenomenon, a sense of relief and celebration began to sweep thro
ugh the crowd. Even the most doubtful of them looked at this savage animal with its huge bulk and vicious tusks, and it all fit. The rumours were of a huge black pig—this was a huge black pig. Boars were known by everyone to be dangerous at the best of times. The crowd began cheering with laughter, as though it were some festival they were at.
“Good riddance!”
“Hooray for the death of the Dolocher!”
“Hooray for the Alderman!”
“Hooray for the dirty water in the Poddle!” The crowd was calling out many things, but they all laughed at this last one.
As James enjoyed the festivities, he became aware of the crowd parting and gathering again around a girl who was making her way towards the cart. The people she passed fell silent, and they watched as she limped towards the beast. As she got closer, James saw that this was Mary Sommers, the girl who had been badly attacked by the monster and still showed the scars of her ordeal.
“Let her through,” he said to the soldiers in front of the cart.
He watched as she came trembling up to the side of the cart and looked along the flank of the animal.
“Would you like to come up here to see it?” he asked, and she nodded yes. “Lift her there,” he ordered, and a soldier on each side took her by an arm and lifted her easily onto the bed of the cart. She looked afraid, but James beckoned her to come to his side of the cart and see the creature better. She was trembling as she did, all the while staring at the serrated tusks.
“Don’t worry, Miss. He is quite dead, I can assure you.”
She stepped to his side and looked down at the boar, seeming to satisfy herself that it was dead. Then she bent down and, to the alderman’s shock, she began to feel the tusks. Even more bizarrely, she lifted the lifeless eyelid of the creature and looked at the glassy eye beneath. She stood back up and then whispered to the alderman: “This is not the Dolocher.”
James could feel the blood drain from his face.
“What do you mean?” he asked, trying not to let the crowd hear what he had said.
“Those are not the eyes I saw when I was attacked, and those are not the teeth that tore me up,” she said, almost in tears now.
“There, there dear,” James said, taking her into his arms and then whispering, “Don’t say a word to these people, please. I will talk to you later.” Mary looked at him and nodded and then made to move away. “Let her down, men,” he called to the soldiers. “I will come to your house in one hour,” he said to her quietly as she was lifted down and away from him.
Mary dropped back into the crowd and went back through the people the way she had come. He could see the men and women she passed look at her with pity, and some patted her on the back as she went by, but then the crowd was swelling, and the tide was being pushed forwards towards the cart, and he lost sight of her. He didn’t think she had said anything to the people she passed on the way, and for this he was thankful.
The cart rocked with the force of the people craning to get a better view, and James got down to the ground and began to extricate himself from the fray. He couldn’t suppress it, but there was a strange sense of gladness in him that this creature was not the Dolocher and that it was indeed a man he was looking for. There was a still a chance for him to be seen differently in the eyes of the populace.
As he climbed into his carriage, he looked out over the people, as was his habit, and looked for those eyes. The eyes that Mary Sommers had seen.