The Dream Thief (Horatio Lyle) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1 - Stories

  CHAPTER 2 - Thomas

  CHAPTER 3 - Workhouse

  CHAPTER 4 - Information

  CHAPTER 5 - Money

  CHAPTER 6 - Circus

  CHAPTER 7 - Pudding

  CHAPTER 8 - Domesticity

  CHAPTER 9 - Break-In

  CHAPTER 10 - Ether

  CHAPTER 11 - Clowns

  CHAPTER 12 - Hospital

  CHAPTER 13 - Circus

  CHAPTER 14 - Unravelling

  CHAPTER 15 - Mystics

  CHAPTER 16 - Poisoned

  CHAPTER 17 - Accounts

  CHAPTER 18 - Charity

  CHAPTER 19 - Mercy

  CHAPTER 20 - Paddington

  CHAPTER 21 - Lyle

  CHAPTER 22 - Greybags

  CHAPTER 23 - Dreams

  THE DREAM THIEF

  ‘Children being hurt, sir. A little girl who won’t wake up, children going missing, sir . . . Don’t mistake me, the police would be perfectly happy to beat you to a pulp and throw your body into the river if they ever even thought you were protecting someone who hurts children, Mr Majestic, sir. Do you have any children, sir?’

  The ringmaster gave a cry. He raised his head to the sky and his hands to his face, and his whole body seemed to wrench and shiver with an uncontrollable rage. Yet Lyle couldn’t help but notice, as Mr Majestic swung the long dark end of his cane with all his strength into the side of Lyle’s head, that even as his body twisted in fury, all that came from his lips was a little child-like giggle.

  Even if nothing else was real, the cane felt solid enough where it smacked into Lyle’s skull. And as his mother always said - you know you’re onto something if they’re trying to kill you.

  The thought gave him little comfort, as the sky turned topsyturvy, clowning with the earth, and then went out entirely.

  By Catherine Webb

  Mirror Dreams

  Mirror Wakes

  Waywalkers

  Timekeepers

  The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures

  of Horatio Lyle

  The Obsidian Dagger:

  Being the Further Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle

  The Doomsday Machine:

  Another Astounding Adventure of Horatio Lyle

  The Dream Thief:

  An Extraordinary Horatio Lyle Mystery

  The Dream Thief

  CATHERINE WEBB

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  Copyright © Catherine Webb 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those

  clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without

  the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 1592 1

  This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catherine Webb is one of the most talented and exciting young writers in the UK. She published her extraordinary debut, Mirror Dreams, at the age of 14, garnering comparisons with Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman. Subsequent books have brought Carnegie Medal longlistings, a Guardian Children’s Book of the Week, a BBC television appearance and praise from the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, amongst many others. Catherine lives in London without a cat but plans to remedy that, soon.

  CHAPTER 1

  Stories

  Let me tell you a story:

  Once upon a time . . .

  (All the best stories begin like this.)

  . . . there was a princess locked in a tower by an evil witch until, one day, the handsome prince came to save her and called out, ‘Fairest one, I shall pluck you down from these harsh stones!’ or words to that effect. And while being saved from a witch’s tower may not have been a sound basis for a prudent relationship, the princess concluded that the chances of her encountering a man of appropriate class, chivalry and, most importantly, dragon-proof armour were probably remote, and so she was plucked off her feet and whisked away to live happily ever after.

  And once upon a time there was an evil dragon . . .

  . . . that was slain . . .

  . . . and an evil wizard . . .

  . . . who drowned in his own bubbling cauldron . . .

  . . . and a monster of a thousand, thousand teeth that reared its ugly head from the sea to devour the ships that passed above, as the green lightning fell and the waves crashed, and it was mighty and eternal . . .

  . . . and was eventually killed . . .

  . . . and all things concluded, everyone who had ever been wronged by the darkness that waits just outside the bedroom window. . .

  . . . lived happily ever after.

  Once upon a time.

  That was then.

  This is now.

  Run, Sissy Smith!

  Hadn’t meant to see hadn’t meant to hadn’t meant to maybe just a peek, just a peek, just to see, hadn’t meant to see what she had seen, hadn’t meant, hadn’t meant, please, she hadn’t meant nothin’! Wouldn’t tell no one, promise, honest, wouldn’t tell no one please please please . . .

  . . . too late . . .

  . . . now run!

  Once upon a time there was a marsh by a river with not much to recommend it except that it was there and so were they and because no one in the vicinity was actively trying to kill them at the time. Then it became a village, made of wood and spit and a good deal of optimism; then a town that burnt down as quickly as it could be built; then what at the time passed for a city. And with the city came the cathedral and the palace and the stone walls with the gates closed against the night, and watchmen and fire buckets and bridges and the occasional cobbled road. Among the inhabitants grew a general attitude: ‘What do you mean . . . elsewhere?’ and things were generally good and happy (apart from the odd tedious outbreak of plague and rioting) and the people who lived there concluded that, really, they were onto a very good thing after all and it was only ignorance that meant the rest of the country couldn’t see it. And they called their city London for reasons known only to a select handful of dead scholars, and it thrived and prospered and felt fairly pleased with itself.

  And as prosperity does, it brought its friends to the party, and within a relatively short time the city of London found itself heaving under the weight of coppers, mudlarks, costermongers, lawyers, snipes, beggars, thieves, physicians, surgeons, tramps, sailors, tinkers, tailors, colliers, farriers, sweepers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, hat-makers, glove-makers, rope-makers, sail-makers, mill workers, organ-grinders, tattlers, rattlers, tracters, priests, vicars, wardens, dustmen, postmen, politicians, printers, writers, painters, actors, carpenters, bricklayers, masons, rabbis, Moo
rs from the south, Hindoos from the east, vagrants, penny-a-day labour, cheap-johns, missionaries, secretaries, clerks, officers, soldiers, jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, match girls, flower-makers, flower sellers, rat-catchers, bird tamers, snake sellers, and . . . so on.

  So that pretty soon the inhabitants of London were hammering on the doors of their local parish council and demanding to know just why the price of plum pudding had risen so high, and just why the queues to the union ward stretched round the corner of the building, and who had decided to put the privy house by the water pump, and why the police had beaten the strikers who had smashed the machines that had taken their jobs and, for goodness sake, where was Blackwall anyway and why were they supposed to live there when they’d lived eight to a room in Holborn since Grandpa’s time?

  And it all could have ended in another Peterloo, or with more of that damn Chartist nonsense, until some bright spark, watching the smoke rise from the chimneys of London and the once-white stones turn black with the stain of coal, raised his hand and pronounced the one magic word: progress.

  Somehow, that made it all a little bit better.

  Once upon a time . . .

  He said, ‘Once upon a time . . .’

  She replied, ‘Borin’!’

  ‘Once upon a time . . .’

  ‘Borin’!’

  ‘Listen! Once upon a time, a long time ago, there lived a young man who didn’t know his destiny . . .’

  ‘Urgh,’ sighed the girl. Candlelight flickered at the force of her disdain, spilling yellow shadows up the four wide walls of the untidy bedroom. ‘Borin’ borin’ borin’! I bet as how this young man what you’re talkin’ ’bout goes an’ finds his destiny an’ he’s got a magic sword an’ there’s this wizard what tells him what he’s gotta go an’ do, an’ it’s all nice, an’ it ends all happy ever after an’ - borin’.’

  ‘Not at all! It’s a . . . it’s a . . .’ There’s a fluttering of pages, a pursing of lips. A silence. ‘All right,’ said the man at last. ‘So there are certain salient literary traits you might have put your finger on here.’

  ‘See! Borin’!’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to read? This was your idea!’

  The girl thought about it. ‘Penny dreadful?’ she asked at last.

  ‘I am not—’

  ‘Pirate story!’

  ‘I hardly think it’s approp—’

  ‘Ohohohohoh, one of them stories ’bout them Americans in the big boots what shoot people! Then you can do the silly voice what makes you sound like there’s a poker shoved up your nos—’

  ‘No! Miss Chaste says that all children’s reading material must have a moral and educational—’

  ‘Borin’!’

  The man sitting on the edge of the girl’s bed gave its occupant a long, hard look. ‘Tess,’ he said at last, like a man grappling with a difficult and tiring problem. ‘Tess . . .’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’ Sugar-coated caramel couldn’t have been sweeter than the angelic expression on the girl’s face.

  ‘Tess, remind me why I look after you?’

  ‘Who said it were you what did the lookin’ after, Mister Lyle?’

  By the rules of the storyteller, the sentiment would be . . .

  Meanwhile . . .

  She thought perhaps she’d managed to lose them, down by Tyburn, where the new white stones of Marble Arch were already turning grey from the chimneys all around. Respectable gentlemen on the way to their respectable homes mingled here with street traders hoping to make a few pennies on their pies, stockings and steaming mugs of rum. In between darted the busy travellers hurrying south to Victoria Station and thieves from the eastern darknesses of St Giles and Soho to see that, while the travellers might make it to their train, their purses never did. The crowds made it easier; no one was going to notice a girl with bleeding feet stained black with mud - no one wanted to see. So she staggered and crawled towards the east, her knees stained with dust and soot, while her head pounded and the blood in her veins turned to slow burning sludge.

  Poison.

  She only knew the name of one poison - arsenic - and only then because of the rats. Knowing didn’t make anything better, not without knowing a cure as well.

  Marble Arch met with the dignified terraces of Mayfair; then Mayfair’s grand houses collided with Soho, whose busy, blackened streets melted into crooked walls and ruinous houses. Roads lost all meaning. She ran through basements knee-thick in mud and floating red slime, crawled up a flight of stairs containing two planks to each gaping void, scuttled for a few yards down a half-cobbled, wretched space that might once have been wide enough for carts, tumbled through an open doorway and across a floor where eight people slept in the space for two, crawled out of the broken wall on the other side to a square where the black iron pump had long since lost its handle and old grey shirts dripped muddy brown stains onto the churned-up ground. She should have lost them here - of all places - not even the coppers entered the rookeries without a guide, and every thief paid another a shilling for protection. She should have lost them! A ladder onto a balcony that skirted unevenly into the heaving guts of an old brewery, where ladies with empty eyes slumbered in corners held up with rope and hope, and not much of either. Down a rotting plank, scaring off the one-legged pigeon hobbling at its end, past the brewery stinking of hot yeast, down the long wall of the stained black church with its broken tombstones, under the twisted metal bridge that used to lead to the textile factory, before the supports began to snow orange rust into the street. Hot steam crawled and wormed its angry way out from between the shuttered windows of the mill, smoke twisted into the air and, from somewhere not so far off, the thud of fat new pistons mixed with the solemn tread of the costermonger’s thin donkey on its way home for the night.

  Anyone else would have given up by now. Just another child lost in the streets; who’d believe her anyway? But she knew - Sissy Smith knew - that, after what she’d seen, they weren’t going to stop.

  And if this were a fairytale, the word would be . . .

  Elsewhere . . .

  The woman wore a white apron, and a white hat so crisp and bright, the air seemed to move out of its way when she turned her head. Her voice, when she spoke, wanted to be firm, commanding, authoritative, but sounded like a nag, just two dribbles short of a whine.

  She said, ‘Another one?’

  ‘I were hungry.’

  He is a child in an adult’s grey coat. He is chewing the sleeve.

  That’s all that really matters, for now.

  She says, ‘Yes, but that’s two in—’

  ‘I were hungry. I get hungry.’

  ‘Well - very well. I suppose there’s still space on the ward. What about this girl? You’re sure she saw?’

  ‘She ran.’

  ‘Can you . . .?’

  ‘She’s scared. Not proper scared - not fun scared. She’s so scared it makes her feel sick. She’ll sleep, an’ then she won’t be scared no more.’

  And for just a moment, the woman looks at this child in a grey coat, and she is disgusted.

  Turn a page.

  Look down.

  Deeper.

  A picture of a house in Blackfriars.

  Identical to hundreds of houses in dozens of terraces thrown up in so many streets and fields across and around London. Its bricks had, once upon a time, been pale yellowish, but it had only taken a few months for the furry black soot from the city’s smoke and fog to turn the walls dark grey. The front door and area railings were painted black to disguise how thick the dirt lay upon them; the sash windows were grimy, though the chimneys were clean; the front steps had never been swept.

  Look deeper.

  This house doesn’t belong. Among the other tall, narrow buildings on a street making its crooked way down towards the river, this house was an interloper, being scarcely older than the man who lived here, and all in all it looked . . .

  . . . not quite One of Us, but certainly not One of Them.r />
  Just like its owner.

  Deeper. See it yet?

  Fresh stucco lay over much of the walls, disguising, somewhere beneath, pockets of wire thick as a man’s wrist, running from top to bottom, along with iron pipes that only occasionally carried water. The new indoor privy, a thing of technological wonder, sat in a cupboard that should have been twice the size, the remaining space being taken up by a tangle of cables, pipes and pistons that hummed and sang when the wind was high. If the drawing room had once possessed a floor, it was now visible only as thin patches of stained carpet under a mountainous growth of stacked-up books; if the kitchen was intended for cooking, any chef had to be careful to choose the mustard and not the sulphur which sat coyly nearby in the same lopsided cupboard. The basement, where servants should have slept according to the expectations of society, contained tables of twisted glass hiccups, of strange stands, bottles and boxes, labelled sometimes in a careful crooked hand as ‘DANJERUS’, or by a scrawled grinning skull and crossbones with a fake moustache and a pirate’s hat. In the loft, where more servants should have slumbered in little cots between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., were the remnants of old, forgotten projects whose combined, if entirely incidental, firepower would almost certainly be enough to blast a hole in the Great Wall of China.