The Dream Thief Read online

  Lyle’s voice trailed off.

  Silence at the breakfast table, except for the low struggling gurgle of Tate’s stomach.

  Milly coughed. ‘You know, I could do with some help round the house today.’

  Tess looked up sharply. ‘We gotta go back to the circus!’

  Milly looked at Lyle.

  Lyle looked at the floor. He found it largely inhabited by Tate, who merely returned his look with the expression of an animal which, if it could lament operatically, would already be into the second aria of its woes.

  Lyle muttered, ‘Thomas, Tess, there’s—’

  ‘No,’ snapped Tess, and her voice was suddenly older, harder, a thing that surprised everyone to hear. ‘Don’t try an’ pull this whole deductin’ thin’ on me. It’s the circus. That’s where it’s at, whatever it is.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘An’ I know where this is goin’. You say “There’s danger’ an’ I say “Don’t care, goin’ with you” an’ you say “But you is just a child” an’ I say - I can’t remember what I usually says, but it ain’t important. Sissy Smith were my mate, an’ it was me what was s’posed to look after her. That’s just how it is, see?’

  Lyle looked up to meet two pairs of bright, determined eyes. ‘Very well,’ he groaned, ‘you can both come to the bloo—’

  ‘Horatio!’

  ‘To the . . . the crimson-coloured, biologically-important liquid substance which bears scarcely a passing metaphorical relevance. You can come back to the circus. But this time no messing with elephants!’

  There was a general shuffling round the table, as of three people whose mission, sadly yet urgently, required them to stop eating their oats and make a hasty departure.

  ‘Before you go,’ said Milly, ‘there’s one thing you - all of you - should know.’

  Lyle and the children looked up, questioning.

  ‘The child, Sissy Smith - is not waking up,’ said Milly flatly. ‘She’s barely eating, hardly drinking, doesn’t seem consciously capable of either, and responds like a sleepwalker if at all. I do know of a hospital where they may be able to help in such a case. I sometimes donate to it, and the woman who runs it is, well, an old family friend. But you can’t wait much longer to find out what happened to Sissy. That’s the simple way of it.’

  Lyle said, ‘Which hospital?’

  Mrs Hobbs, of Stoke Newington parish, was a banker’s wife. The wife of a banker. It was the sum of her definition, the totality of what people thought. The baker would ask the butcher: ‘Do you know Mrs Hobbs?’ And the answer would always come back: ‘Oh, yes, she’s the banker’s wife.’ She had no other title, no other description, no other definition, no other merit. And that was exactly how she wanted it. It made what needed to be done so much easier to do.

  Which might have been why, that same overcast cool morning in London, when Lyle was seeking help for Sissy Smith from a hospital, Mrs Hobbs walked into the offices of Messrs Scroop and Blunt, bankers to the not especially privileged but well-enough-to-do to need a bank, with a stolen ledger under her arm and a guileless look upon her face, and said, ‘I would like to talk to a man about a fund for the well-being of the children.’

  Horatio Lyle was lucky to have an acquaintance like Mrs Hobbs.

  On the edge of Marylebone, the city-builders of London had been busy: new terraced buildings and freshly cobbled roads; old canals covered with new bridges; and on the edge of it all, a new high-domed station, sending new, steam-venting trains to new, smoky cities, sat like a great red beetle trying to take wing. Nearby, to complete the picture, was a brand shining new and utterly unpleasant little hospital. The precepts of its foundation were as simple as its flat grey floors and high dark walls, as clean as its regular tall windows and orderly as its white-turned beds: this was a hospital for disadvantaged children, who, being disadvantaged, would naturally be grateful for any kind of hospital at all and didn’t care too much about the presentation.

  Not just any disadvantaged children, of course. Announce on the streets of London that there’s anywhere outside the prison or workhouse which will give free bed and board to any creature under four foot five inches tall, and not only would the bricks burst from the inside out from the pressure of invading street rats, but said bricks would swiftly be pinched and flogged for a ha’penny a go. The hospital had to have standards. In this case, each sick child admitted had to be sponsored and vouched for by an upstanding member of the community -either a parish warden, a vicar or simply a lady or gentleman of good repute and standing - who would certify that the diseased creature in question had not, in fact, eaten a bar of soap and rubbed their skins with old wet oats to create the appearance of disease in order to nab a quick pad for the night.

  There was one ward, just one, where a special exception was made.

  She was the Matron.

  There was no question that when addressed, it was as ‘Matron’, and you’d better pronounce the capital letters or else.

  Lyle tried to imagine Matron wearing anything other than her Matron’s uniform, but couldn’t bend his usually flexible brain to the challenge.

  Thomas tried to imagine Matron wearing anything other than a disapproving frown. In vain.

  Tess tried to imagine Matron being somewhere else, and likewise failed. Matron was reality at its square-shouldered, unadjustable starkest.

  What Tate imagined, as his stomach growled from a cruel morning without breakfast, was a secret no human would ever have the power to explore.

  Matron looked at Lyle, then at Tess, then at Thomas and finally proclaimed, ‘None of these children are sick. What do you want?’

  ‘There’s a child - sick - in the cab,’ explained Lyle, bracing himself in the face of this woman, not a molecule of whose being didn’t loom like an ancient castle-crowned cliff. ‘She’s been poisoned. She’s sleeping. She won’t wake up.’

  Lyle said all this, expecting little more than a haughty twitch of disbelief. Instead, Matron almost sighed. ‘Oh,’ she muttered, waving a broad-fingered hand in the direction of the street outside, ‘another one.’

  This is the place where the patients go to sleep.

  They are not dead - not really, not quite.

  Nor can it be said that they are really alive.

  Except, just perhaps, when in a moment of sleepy distraction, someone whispers . . .

  . . . something like . . .

  . . . once upon a time . . .

  There are many of them.

  And they are all children.

  Lyle stood in the doorway of the ward and stared.

  Neat white beds, dozens of them, lined every wall, sheets tidily tucked into their metal frames.

  On the walls someone had hung a few neat white embroidered samplers offering sentiments like: I AM THE LORD THY GOD or BLESSED ARE THE MEEK or OH SAVE ME FOR THY MERCY’S SAKE, each neatly edged with a sparse garland of cross-stitched flowers. Long faint slants of daylight illuminated the ward, at whose far end - the most distant, furthest end - a nurse in a stiff white cap mopped the floor, while another pushed a trolley containing bowls of water and fresh towels with which she would clean the faces of the . . . things . . . sitting each in their bed.

  They were children.

  Were, thought Lyle, in the strictly biological sense, all children, the oldest no more than twelve years old, the youngest barely six or seven. Each sat, one to a bed, propped up against white pillows, staring at nothing. There were toys on the floor: little red soldiers carved from wood; little railway engines on pieces of string; a rocking horse in one corner, silent and still, white pony hair sewn into its mane. But if these interested - if anything interested - the children in their beds, they showed no sign of it, but sat utterly still, staring one at the other only by the accident of where their beds were placed.

  Tess went up to one, a boy her own age, said, ‘Hello!’ and waved her hands in front of his open eyes, but the child just blinked and made no reply. Thomas walked over to another c
hild and looked into her face, wondering if he was supposed to wear the judicious expression of an educated man who knew what to look for in a case this strange. Lyle made his way down the middle of the ward, Tate at his heels, ears trailing on the ground, while behind them Matron gave orders and nurses obeyed, slipping Sissy Smith into an empty bed, already made as if she were expected.

  Silent faces and empty eyes stared because that was all they knew how to do. It reminded Lyle of the old grey beggars on the docks, the ones who were drowning in drink and opium and who had realised that at the bottom of these, there was still no God waiting to offer redemption. It was the same hollow void, that could no longer feel anything to justify its human shape.

  And it was in the children.

  Lyle thought of circus strong men, smothering pillows, of Sissy Smith fallen at the door, her blistered and bloody feet, of Tess and . . .

  Not of Tess!

  Tess and Thomas empty shells sitting in a . . .

  No!

  Of Milly Lyle’s mince pies and Harry Lyle’s old armchair, of Tess and Thomas and . . .

  And . . .

  Oh, God . . .

  ‘There are so many,’ he breathed. ‘How long have they been here?’

  ‘The longest, maybe four months,’ replied Matron, turning from her work of laying the mute Sissy Smith into her bed. ‘The latest - excluding this new child - two days.’

  ‘Her name is Sissy,’ replied Lyle sharply. ‘Not the “new child”. Where do they come from?’

  ‘They just appear. Sometimes they’re wandering the streets; sometimes the police bring them here, for want of somewhere better. They can eat, but only if you spoon-feed them. Sometimes they are found too late. Children often die in this city, Mister Lyle. I am sure you understand the way of it.’

  ‘Is there no remedy?’ asked Lyle incredulously. ‘Is there no cure for this?’

  ‘None that we know of. Some doctors have tried: drugs, cold, heat, smell, taste, electricity.’

  ‘On the children?’

  ‘You asked if there was a remedy,’ chided Matron. ‘I’m merely informing you of our attempts to find one.’

  ‘And what about their parents?’

  ‘None have made themselves known.’

  ‘Not one parent for all these children? Has no one come to ask?’

  ‘Not under my supervision,’ replied Matron. ‘And, as I supervise everything - no, not one.’

  ‘And that doesn’t strike you as strange?’

  ‘Mister Lyle,’ Matron brought herself up to her fullest width and height, ‘I have seen parents pay ten pounds for the removal of an unwanted child to women who are as clearly tricksters as ever a thief who was born. The streets are rife with such feral offspring. So permit me to say, I am not surprised that no parents have come looking for these vacant creatures. They are not children, Mister Lyle. They are flesh with eyes. Nothing more. Forgive me for being so blunt. But I see some of this condition in the child you have brought here. The sooner you can resign yourself to the truth of this the easier it will be for you and your children.’

  ‘They’re not—’ began Lyle, then cut himself short. ‘Thomas has a mother, and a father, who would damn well invade Russia if it would save their son. Because that’s how thick-headed, ignorant and caring they bloody well are. Tess has me, and while I’m not about to start a land war for her sake, I would burn all Moscow to the ground if it kept her safe. Sissy Smith has nothing, except perhaps the memory of Tess and the workhouse. So for that reason alone, she can have me. I want to know everything about these children: who they are, what happened, how long, why, who, where, when - everything. Can you help me?’

  Matron folded her hands in front of her and cast her gaze downward. ‘Not I,’ she said finally, ‘but there is someone who could.’

  And a voice from the end of the ward exclaimed, in surprise and wonder and . . .

  . . . and just a little bit of something else . . .

  ‘Horatio?!’

  Milly Lyle had said: ‘a vicar’s daughter, kind and loyal’. But if she’d ever considered Miss Chaste as more than a neighbour to her son, she had probably not done so with much hope. True, in terms of age and gentle upbringing, Lyle and Mercy Victoria Chaste (the ‘Victoria’ added hastily at the font as it became evident who the new monarch was likely to be) were theoretically a perfect match. But Milly Lyle had always known, from the first outbreak of needlework in Mercy Chaste’s parlour to her exclamation of ‘Calculus, how dull!’ that this was not destined to be more than a cordial friendship. Miss Chaste had tried, so had her parents, and all had reflected that were this a more seemly time, as described in the works of Miss Chaste’s beloved Jane Austen (‘Far more appropriate than those crude Brontë creatures!’), Mercy Chaste and Horatio Lyle would have married, had children and lived ever after in well-meant respectability.

  All this would have been news to Lyle, who didn’t merely regard marriage as a distraction, but managed most of the time not to consider it at all. But to Mercy Chaste, whose sisters were all suitably wed, Lyle would always be the man she’d never had a chance to mould, with her mothering ways, into a suitable husband.

  ‘Horatio!’

  Surprise, wonder, delight, perhaps, and . . .

  . . . and what else was in her voice, at the shrill tip of the climbing top note as Mercy Chaste, in a nurse’s stiff, starched white, billowed down the ward? That something else that made Tate curl up behind Lyle’s legs and Tess’s eyes narrow in suspicion?

  ‘Horatio, what are you doing here?’

  A voice as contrary as the woman who owned it. Her skin was almost the colour of melting snow, her hair pale-washed blonde, her eyes a faded blue. She looked like a clownish ghost, and her voice was high and shrill to match her appearance. Then again, no ghost could muster such a pair of well-worked hands as Miss Chaste or such hard-walked feet. Nor did it seem likely to Horatio Lyle that any ghost could produce so much sound from such a little pale throat.

  ‘Well,’ he began, as Tate whimpered and pawed at his ankle.

  Tess, as Miss Chaste approached, first leant forward in surprise, then back in dismay, then tried to duck behind the nearest bed, hissing, ‘Oi! Bigwig! I ain’t ’ere!’

  ‘But,’ ventured Thomas, trying to understand a great and taxing problem, ‘you are here, Miss Teresa.’

  ‘She were this mark what I were gonna filch when I first met Lyle!’ hissed Tess, while Thomas sweated with the effort of translation. ‘Don’t look at me, just smile, bigwig-like!’

  To the relief of them both, Mercy Chaste’s full attention was fixed on Horatio Lyle, with a bright smile on her face and something more than brightness shining from her eyes. ‘Are you, at last, Horatio, doing your Christian duty for the needy?’

  ‘Uh, I suppose you could say that,’ replied Lyle.

  ‘I always knew you would! Are you here to donate money or to work?’

  ‘What? No, the reason I’m here is—’

  ‘He’s been asking about the children,’ interjected Matron. ‘He found a child, brought it here.’

  ‘Ah - the children.’ Mercy Chaste’s eyes fell, but her face still seemed to glow with the contemplative brightness of any church icon. ‘Naturally, we tend them as best we may. Where did you find yours?’

  ‘Her name is Sissy Smith,’ said Lyle. ‘She came looking for Tess.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You do? She’s been poisoned, Miss Chaste. Someone tried to poison her. And all this!’ He gestured at the silent children in their silent beds on the silent ward, his voice echoing off the cold white walls. ‘Look! How many have been hurt?’

  ‘They’re not in pain, Horatio,’ said Miss Chaste softly. ‘I know how all this must appear to you. But if you work here long enough . . . The children are peaceful, in their way.’

  ‘Peaceful?! They are empty! Look what’s been done to them!’

  ‘They do not go hungry, or thirsty, or cold. Their feet aren’t bloody, their lives aren
’t lived in fear. No parents have come looking for them, no family. They have nothing. But here at least they are safe.’

  Lyle’s face hardened. ‘I’m not going to accept that. I’m sorry, Mercy, but if you had ch—Where’s the latest child who was brought here?’

  ‘A boy,’ answered Miss Chaste. ‘Brought here two days ago. He was found at Paddington Station, just watching the trains, not moving.’