Well. When I says Mr. Crook dug it up, I mean he supervised. A strong back like mine did all the proper work.
“Not there,” Mr. Crook sneered the first time I put spade to earth. “You’re just above his feet, you realize.”
“What difference do it make?”
In truth, I’d started well away from the headstone on purpose. Didn’t I say me first night gave me the shivers something awful? Imagine Lichgate Cemetery as it was ten years back, before the King’s Road cut through. The Potter’s Field were sad and silent, but peaceful. Mostly weeds and the odd marker placed by some stout soul not afraid to publicly grieve. Lichgate’s patch of the respectable dead wasn’t too bad, neither. Row upon row of marbles, the newer ones upright like soldiers, the old ones falling aslant as them they marked were forgotten. But the posh side of Lichgate? Them counterfeit Greek temples, fenced mausoleums and stone-faced angels thicked me blood with chill, as the poets say. Or for them what lack education—left me pissing meself.
“Barrow?” Mr. Crook’s jaw tightened. “You aren’t a coward, are you?”
“Course not.” I stood up straighter.
“Then move up to the headstone, there’s a good fellow. Mr. Dross has made a study of this, you’ll find. Delve till the spade strikes wood. Don’t fret about uncovering the entire coffin. Dig for the head.”
It wasn’t easy work, but not hard, neither, compared to me time in the smithy. I struck the coffin lid quicker than Mr. Crook reckoned. Till then we’d made do with moonlight. Now he lit the lantern, shielding it with one hand as if he hadn’t already bribed the night watchman with a bottle of gin.
“Use this to break into the coffin,” he said, handing me the pickax. “Do not strike too powerfully or the result may prove … distressing.”
As if I hadn’t guessed as much already. By lying beside the hole and dangling me arms into the grave, I pried up one side of the lid, then cracked it with a single blow. Digging me fingers under the loose edge, I tore off the exposed part of the lid and found myself staring into a woman’s face.
Well. She weren’t a woman anymore, precisely. Her gray hair was done in curls as if she was going to a ball, but half her face was coated with shiny green fuzz. Her nose had fallen in like something had been eating it from the inside. As I gaped at her, thanking Providence the dead woman wasn’t staring back, I noticed the black thread weaving in and out of her sunken eyelids.
“Why does Mr. Dross sew their eyes shut?” I called up to Mr. Crook. By then the old woman’s smell had hit me, and me stomach were doing flips.
“For your benefit, Barrow.” Mr. Crook laughed. “My last associate fled when a corpse’s eye came unglued and rolled open. Thought the dead man was winking at him.”
I tried to laugh. I was seventeen, after all, and determined not to be called fearful. But then a long worm came sliding out of the old woman’s ear, its plump segmented body slicked with the same green sprouting from her flesh. It were all I could do not to scream.
Mr. Crook opened his leather bag and withdrew a scrap of paper. Holding it at arm’s length, he read, “Gold necklace with ruby pendant. Opal ring, right hand. Two silver rings, left hand. The gown, watered silk, is unlikely to be salvageable, but her shoes and stockings are particularly fine.”
I could see the pendant, of course, but the rest of the corpse was still in the coffin—and still underground, not to put too fine a point on it. Tossing the pickax on the grass, I reached for the shovel. Mr. Crook cleared his throat.
“Never mind that. Be a good fellow and loop this under her arms,” he said, withdrawing a coiled length of rope from his bag and passing it down. “Not around her neck, mind. That approach has proven flawed.”
It were no treat, getting that cozy with a dead woman, but I did as I was told, concentrating on the coarse rope against me fingers instead of her mottled green face. Her mouth fell open, showing a fat black tongue, and one of her arms gave way with an audible pop. Still, I knotted the rope in place, careful not to touch her bosom any more than I had to. Sure she was dead, but she was still a lady, and I was raised right.
“Secure,” I told Mr. Crook.
He lifted his eyebrows. “Surely you don’t expect me to take over. On your feet, lad. Haul her up.”
And that, me new friend, is how Mr. Crook taught me to ply me new trade without breaking me back three times a night. Dig for the head, crack open the lid, tie a rope under the corpse’s shoulders and pull like Samson. But in them early days, I was a bit too strong and far too eager. When I pulled that first body out of the coffin, her foot caught on the interior and snapped right off. It wouldn’t have mattered, except the foot still had the shoe on it. Didn’t I tell you Mr. Crook weren’t no gentleman? Cursed fit to wake the dead. Threatened to deduct half a crown from me wages, but I didn’t care. As I brought her up, something foul and black leaked from betwixt her legs, staining her silk dress something monstrous. The worms had been at her from within, don’t you know, and that poxy juice was all that was left of her innards. The moment the stench hit me, I started to heave. By the time I finished, Mr. Crook had removed the ruby pendant and rings, tucking them into his coat pocket.
“As I feared, the dress cannot be salvaged,” he said. “If you’re quite finished being sick, put her back in the earth. And for Heaven’s sake, remove the rope first. It cost two bob.”
I got her back in the ground and covered over as quick as a flash, desperate to bury that smell. “Should we say a prayer?”
Mr. Crook only laughed. “Prayer is for righteous men. Come along, Barrow. We’ve one more treasure chest to unearth before the night is out.”
And that was me initiation into the grave robbing business. For the next three years we worked together, taking the train to Basildon or Luten for a bit of variety, or to lie low, as it were, when the Peelers were in force. If the Duke of Bugger All said a rude word in Parliament, that was all the newspapers cared to print. But if the weather were calm and the tall pieces on the chessboard played fair, grave robbing was a favorite headline. Families were placing watchmen over fresh graves; some amateur down Dunstable way got nicked by one and hanged. Bribing night watchmen and skulking around in a black topcoat with soot on me face weren’t enough. We needed a canary for our particular coalmine, if you mark me. I told Mr. Crook I knew just the boy.
“Saw him steal a meat pie off the cart, right under the seller’s nose. Mind you, when the boy tried to lift me own purse, I caught him by the scruff and boxed his ears. That’s the trouble with all these rubbish stories in Bentley’s Miscellany. Every urchin takes the notion he’s the Artful bloody Dodger.”
“Yet I presume you feel this failed pickpocket may yet be of some use?” Mr. Crook looked at me over his half-glasses. Three years of living off the dead had ruined him for tolerating ordinary working men like meself. He’d acquired even finer airs, with a shiny gold pocket watch at his waist and new set of false teeth behind them razor-thin lips. He could have let me to run the nightly business—I could read Mr. Dross’s list as well as any—but Mr. Crook were too suspicious not to collect the baubles himself. If he’d been willing to oversee matters from his snug townhouse in Clerkenwell, he’d still be above ground today, I reckon. But that’s the trouble with thieving. Makes you believe the worst of others, even your fellow thieves.
“Oh, aye, Mr. Crook. The boy’s called Jack and he’ll be just the ticket. Fifteen but small for his age, hardly comes up to me shoulder. Skinny as piano wire but not so high strung.” I paused, waiting for Mr. Crook to crack a smile, but the man were granite. How could a man pretend to be a gentleman, yet refuse to appreciate a well-turned phrase?
“As I was saying.” I cleared me throat. “This boy didn’t let me boxing his ears detract him none. Next day he were stealing from the pie cart again, bold as brass. Saw me eye on him and ducked away. Crept up behind me not five minutes later and whispered, ‘I’ll nick one for you if you buy me a tot of gin.’”
“Young drunkard
s invariably end on the scaffold, Barrow. You know that.”
“Not a drunkard, Mr. Crook, just a boy in search of a wee nip. Gave him a penny to shine me shoes. Next day, another penny to deliver a message. He’s an orphan, keen for work and fit for nothing. Reckon he’ll freeze solid on a street corner, come January, if we don’t train him up.”
“Such sentimentality.” Mr. Crook sighed. “Barrow, we seek an utterly expendable boy to be caught, should the operation go awry, sparing you and I our own appointments with the Black Hat,” he said, meaning the cap what judges don before pronouncing the sentence of death. “I have no notion of establishing a home for wayward boys. Should I consent to engage the services of this Jack, it shall be with a solitary aim—to sacrifice him when necessary. Is that understood?”
“Oh, aye, Mr. Crook.”
Off I went to find Jack and tell him he’d found an apprenticeship at long last. The boy didn’t flinch when I told him all Mr. Crook had said, including the bit about sacrifice.
“This job will keep you fed,” I said. “Keep you warm and dry. Provide you with proper clothes, a cap and boots what fit. But it won’t be safe. Might even be the death of you.”
“Or the making of me.” For such a runt, Jack was a stout fellow, game for his chance no matter how steep the odds. I don’t mean he were hard, exactly, like Mr. Crook were hard, especially since he’d grown so prosperous. I mean Jack were accepting of the world as it was, knowing there was no mercy in it, not in the end. Of course, I expected him to jump at the offer of nightly work, fetching and carrying for Mr. Crook and Mr. Dross between digs. Remember those boys in the brothels, wretched little blighters? Or boys hanged for stealing food. Boys starving in garrets or floating down the stinking Thames, just another waterlogged bit of rubbish. Jack was determined not to end like them.
“Mind you, never forget that time I boxed your ears,” I told Jack that night before letting him sleep on the rug before me fire. “Steal from me again and I’ll beat you bloody. We’re friends now, and friends deal fair, one to another.”
“Friends,” Jack agreed. He did his best to sound bluff and manly, but I suspected it were a put-on. Probably he was thirteen, not fifteen. Still and all, thirteen is a good age for a man to begin earning his daily bread. From that day forward, Jack was one of us, but specially loyal to yours truly.
That autumn, a friend of Mr. Dross, Mr. Pepper by name, shut down his funerary business, intent on living out his final days by the seashore. Until then, he’d avoided the temptation to steal from them he planted, but now that he were leaving London, he wanted to feather his future nest. Lacking the courage or experience to do the job alone, he brought in Mr. Crook and Mr. Dross as partners. After supper they gathered in Mr. Crook’s office, the coal fire almost out, a oil lamp glowing yellow on the table between them. Jack was forbidden, of course, but I were allowed to sit in a corner and listen.
“Her name was Lucy Hale Hammersly. Her remains rest in the Hale family crypt. I placed her there myself, three years back,” Mr. Pepper said. “Her death was a scandal, though her husband and her father paid to keep it out of the papers, except in the vaguest possible terms.”
“Suicide, I’ll warrant,” Mr. Dross said wisely. If you’re ever in need of a gloomy suggestion, Mr. Dross is your man.
“Indeed. Poor girl ate strychnine. Great handfuls, from the look of her corpse.” Glancing around the office as if he might be overheard, Mr. Pepper lowered his voice. “Her father forced her to marry John Hammersly. You may have seen him at the Exchange, haggling over ha’pennies. A thin man, over-proud of his figure. Used to shut Lucy in her room when she ate too much at dinner. After a year of marriage, she went from a buxom, rosy girl to a shade of herself.”
“Shameful.” Mr. Crook sounded bored. “I presume the family buried her lavishly to expiate their guilt?”
“Like Croesus’s tomb,” Mr. Pepper said. “Mr. Hale surrounded his daughter with all the things she’d loved in childhood. Vases, figurines, oil paintings in gilded frames. A proper boudoir for a lady to inhabit whilst she awaits Gideon’s trumpet. But the real treasure was placed in the tomb with her. Ruby ear-bobs. Garnet rings and bracelets. A great faceted ruby pendant on a golden chain. Being in the trade,” Mr. Pepper smiled weakly, “there’s little in this world that unsettles me. But seeing Lucy decked out like an empress, with her lips burned away by strychnine and her hands frozen into claws?” He shook his head. “Still gives me the chills to remember her lying there, grinning.”
“You needn’t look on such unpleasantness a second time,” Mr. Crook said. “Leave it to me and my man Barrow. Sixty percent to me. Twenty to Mr. Dross for the introduction. Twenty to you, Mr. Pepper, for the information. That sounds perfectly fair, does it not?” With the lamplight full on his face, Mr. Crook’s friendliest grin could give any corpse a run for its money. Mr. Pepper didn’t look happy, but he agreed all the same.
That night I dreamt of Lucy Hale Hammersly. She wasn’t dead and rotting, but fresh and lovely as an angel. Dressed all in flowing white, she were, with a gold circlet on her brow like a princess and rings glittering on her fingers. Her tomb was open, the granite slab pushed aside. And the crypt were just like Mr. Pepper said, a perfect lady’s boudoir, with chair and vanity, silver-plated brush and mirror. I could see it all, though I had no candle. White light shimmered on her perfect skin; golden light spilled from her yellow hair.
“Till death do us part. I’ve parted from John,” Lucy said.
“Aye.” It was all I could manage. I’ve always been tongue-tied round pretty girls.
“He wasn’t my choice. So many men in this wide world. Men I’ve never tasted.”
I nodded. Usually it were whores what talked like that, but from Lucy the words sounded like a tinkling music box.
“I’m famished,” Lucy said. “No man shall escape my kiss. Simply famished…”
“Mr. Barrow!”
I sat up in bed, Jack standing over me. He’d shaken me awake.
“You were moaning.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I muttered. First worthwhile dream in a fortnight and the little bugger ruined it.
At midnight, we sent Jack to Lichgate cemetery with a bottle of gin for the night watchman and a crude map of the grounds, the Hale crypt marked with an X. Jack was to go there first, of course, and be nicked if things went wrong. I gave him a meat pie wrapped in wax paper and a word of advice.
“Old Lichgate is posh. Scout the other crypts while you’re about it. Who says you and I might not make a secret visit some night?”
That pricked Jack’s ears up. “Just you and me? Fifty-fifty?”
“If you find a good bet.” In high good humor, I saw the boy off. What can I say? Foresight has never been me strong suit.
Mr. Crook, Mr. Dross, his man Trimble and I passed through Lichgate’s east gate just as the Mr. Crook’s pocket watch chimed one o’clock. Ordinarily Mr. Dross and Trimble, a dour ex-gravedigger, did not accompany us unless the job was of particular interest. But given the amount of portable wealth we expected to uncover, two extra pairs of hands seemed wise. I carried an ax and a lantern; Trimble had a crowbar and half a dozen empty flour sacks.
“Mr. Barrow!” Jack’s whisper carried in the crisp autumn night. His slight figure waved from just outside a tall stone temple’s iron fence. “The map weren’t right. The Hale crypt is here!”
Mr. Crook made a disapproving noise. He’d sketched the map himself during a daytime visit. “Nonsense.” Black coat flapping behind him, he marched to the crypt his map indicated. “I think you’ll find this is the…”
He stopped. Mr. Dross said nothing. Trimble waited, oblivious, but I read the family name, KEARNS, by lamplight.
“Over here!” Jack called again.
Drawing himself up, Mr. Crook went toward the boy. I saw Jack smile, saw HALE inscribed over the crypt’s lintel. Then Mr. Crook struck Jack with his silver-topped walking stick.
“Impertinence! Do you think I
took you on to be corrected by the likes of you?”
“Sorry, sir,” Jack said around a mouthful of blood. He was on his knees, hands up to ward off another blow.
“I was not mistaken! Is a simple map too much for you?”
“Sorry.” Jack kept his hands up.
“Mr. Crook.” I shouldered me way between me employer and Jack as the boy spit out a broken tooth. “Perhaps we ought to get on with the job? Shouting may attract attention. Send us home empty-handed.”
Mr. Crook caught hold of himself. The only thing more powerful than his vanity was his greed. “Fair point. Get us into the crypt, Barrow. Jack—remain here. Keep watch, and meditate on the great virtue of silence.”
With a swing of me ax, I broke the chain wrapped round gate and post. The hinges squealed as I pushed the gate open. If the Hale family ever paid their respects, they did so from outside the iron fence, it seemed.
The crypt door was padlocked, too, in the events of thieves spry enough to climb the spike-tipped fence. It took three tries to break the heavy lock. As it finally dropped, I turned to find Mr. Crook a handbreadth away, lantern raised high. Long as I’d worked for him, he still never took his eyes off me, not once we were close enough to smell the gold.
“After you, sir.”
The door creaked when Mr. Crook pushed against it, opening less than halfway. Something inside the crypt was blocking it—something heavy, I judged, when I put me shoulder against the door and still couldn’t budge it. Still, there was plenty of room for a thin man like Mr. Crook to pass, and barely enough space for me and Trimble, if we each turned sideways. Mr. Dross waited outside, shielding his lantern with a gloved hand.
“Damnation!” Mr. Crook’s cry echoed inside the crypt. “It’s already been sacked!”
I saw what he meant. The oil paintings were slashed to bits. The lady’s vanity was destroyed, legs broken, dusted with the sparkling remnants of delicate figurines and mirrored glass. Even the pouf’s cushions had been ripped apart, stuffing tossed here and there. With every step, another fragment of porcelain, no doubt from broken vases, crunched under me feet. And the tomb had been opened. Just like in me dream, the granite slab were pushed half askew, blocking the door from opening properly.