The Dream Thief Read online

  It was a house big enough for a well-ordered family of four and their servants, or - almost - an overcrowded family of eight, with theirs.

  That was what it should have been.

  However, truth be told, it was absolutely and entirely too small for its current inhabitants, their experiments, their bickering and their dog. The dog in question, as much a mismatch of accidental things as his owner, was now sitting, chin resting on his paws, ears trailing out like maypole ribbons on either side of his long head, watching the nightly debate between his two pet humans.

  One said, ‘I am not—’

  One said, ‘Please please please please please pretty please?’

  ‘Polite young lady-persons—’

  ‘Oh, but please pleasepleasepleaseplease . . .’

  The first human to have spoken raised his hands in despair and exclaimed, ‘Discipline! Duty! Patriarchal . . . things!’

  There was a pause while both parties to this debate considered their own potent and powerful arguments. The second human, roughly half the first human’s height and a third his age, looked up through a tangle of what a romantic would have called thick black curls, and what the man perched on the end of the bed called, ‘that disreputable mess’ and said, very carefully and thoughtfully, ‘What’s a patri-ack?’

  ‘A patriarch,’ proclaimed the man, wagging a finger the effect of which seemed so profound that his whole body quivered with the indignation of it, ‘is the master of his own house! He is the fath—the dominant force within the domestic situation, the chief male, the leader, spiritual guide, moral centre, the . . . the . . . Look, he is not the kind of man who goes all the way downstairs to re-kindle a stove to boil a kettle to make a young lady perfectly capable of doing all this herself a cup of hot milk for bedtime!’

  The girl, whose name was, according to the parish register, Teresa Hatch, considered this for a very long while. Then she said, ‘An’ what’s he gotta do with us, Mister Lyle?’

  Mister Lyle seemed to sag. ‘You know,’ he sighed, ‘I have no idea.’

  Poison poison poison poison poison oh god oh god oh god don’t wanna don’t wanna not poison please please not poison not poison slow too slow too young too young ain’t seen nothin’ didn’t mean nothin’ oh please not not not so scared don’t wanna don’t wanna don’t wanna please . . .

  Do you understand what’s happening here, Sissy Smith?

  Probably not. Probably not the part that’s thinking about it with every gabbled terrified thought that scuttles across the mind’s ear. Doesn’t understand, and that’s what makes it so frightening. Say sorry to God - pick a god, any god - just be sure to say sorry, and hope that a vicar finds the body and sees it gets a proper burial, a trip on the train to the necropolis in the north, a decent seat in the carriage with all the pauper corpses heading for a ditch where a man in robes will say sorry for you, just in case it slipped your mind. It would make sense, if you’d other things occupying you at the time.

  Sissy Smith?

  Are you listening?

  Say sorry before it’s too late . . .

  . . . or keep on running . . .

  . . . it’s entirely up to you.

  A street. As London streets go, a quiet street, in that there are only a few dozen beggars, tracters and painted ladies loitering in the gloomy puddles of darkness between the sloshes of yellow-green gaslight.

  A door. A very boring door, painted black to disguise the dirt.

  A door knocker. Also very boring, hammered in by someone who understood the practical applications, but couldn’t be bothered to consider any further than that.

  The knocker isn’t quite the right height for a child to reach it.

  Besides, who was to know when the world is going black? Think of it as nothing more than an extended, deep sleep without the need for a privy on a cold winter night.

  . . . knock knock . . .

  . . . can’t reach . . .

  Good night, Sissy Smith. Sweet dreams.

  Horatio Lyle - scientist, inventor, special constable, and, through no fault of his own, unofficial guardian and protector of the unknown orphan by the name of Teresa Hatch, marched up a flight of cold grey stairs.

  His hair was sandy-red, as if it couldn’t quite decide on one colour or the other, his eyes a grey that shifted to the edges of green or blue depending on the time of year; and his accent, when he spoke, instantly placed him as being - Not One of Us. Close - but Not One of Us, regardless of whoever ‘We’ happened to be.

  His clothes were, in principle, fine, being as they were neither eaten by rats nor blurry with fleas, but neglected chemical stains had turned the once-white of his cuffs to an off-beige smudge, that matched the discolorations across his fingers and nails. In his right hand, he was carrying a metal beaker. In the metal beaker, swishing happily to itself, was half a pint of hot milk. As he walked up the stairs, Lyle muttered to himself. ‘Bloody patriarch bloody discipline head of the bloody house . . .’

  As he passed through the hallway and towards the next upward flight of stairs, he half imagined he heard a sound from the front door and, glancing towards it, hesitated. But it didn’t come again, and there were a hundred reasons, only some of them malign, to explain a little bump in the night. As he climbed the stairs, the dog - a creature only called a dog because no other species would claim him for their own - waddled past him downstairs. The dog’s name was Tate, and, like most things in his life, Lyle could never quite work out how he’d come to be such a feature of his home, or how, with four paws and a long belly, Tate had learnt to swagger.

  At the top of the stairs, Lyle nudged open a bedroom door with the end of his toe and pronounced, ‘This is the last bloody time that I bloody get you a bloody—’

  Downstairs, there was the sound of barking. The scowl on Lyle’s face, which had already been trying to eat the corners of his ears, deepened. On the end of her bed, large enough to sleep ten of her and still have room to kick, Teresa Hatch did her best to look angelic. The resulting wideness of her eyes and puffiness of her cheeks resembled a suffocating hamster more than a human child. But Lyle told himself it was good that she was trying, and his scowl began to fade.

  ‘Next time . . .’ he began, slightly more meekly.

  Downstairs, Tate’s barking grew more urgent.

  ‘. . . you can . . .’

  Tess took the beaker from Lyle’s hands.

  ‘. . . fetch your own . . .’

  How a dog with such little room for lung and less room for brain could produce so much sound, Lyle resolved to one day know, even - possibly especially - if it involved scalpels.

  ‘. . . your own bloody mil—What the hell is the matter with the dog?’

  Tess shrugged, unwilling to answer in case, by doing so, Lyle noticed her existence and returned to his previous anti-hot-milk theme. Lyle stalked to the door, pushed it open and stared down the stairs into the hall. Tate was sitting, nose two inches from the front door, tail straight out behind him, barking. As Lyle started down the stairs, Tate stopped for a moment and half turned. A pair of huge brown eyes that seemed to droop at their lowest corners gave Lyle a look that made it clear just how tiresome it was having to wait for humans and their little brains. But for a few unkind twists of nature, proclaimed Tate’s face, I’d be taking you for a twice daily walk and don’t you forget it.

  Lyle hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. To make his point, Tate turned back to the door and started barking again, then paused to scratch one great long ear while his master edged closer, then barked a little bit more.

  Lyle said, ‘Don’t you start either.’

  Tate snuffled indignantly, and, as it came within reach, started to chew on Lyle’s left trouser leg.

  ‘Thank you, oh faithful friend.’ Lyle sighed.

  And then, because . . . because it was a big house, and a dark night, and because Tate rarely barked and, well . . . if you believed that dogs had animal instinct then it made sense that humans had one too, and
while it may not be able to rationalise a top-heavy fraction, it still managed to bang the rocks together, yes? . . . and Tate did so rarely bark, since it required too much effort on his part . . .

  . . . Horatio Lyle opened his front door.

  And that is how really it all began . . .

  Once upon a time . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  Thomas

  Dawn crept through the alleys and lopsided streets of London with the sideways slide of a thing scared of being mugged. It rolled over the creaking ships of the eastern quays, through the warehouses of Wapping, tangled in the locomotives’ steam at Liverpool Street, stretched the shadows of the early morning flower sellers shouting for business in Covent Garden. It crawled round the high, gaudy music halls of Leicester Square, and slithered through the broken bricks of St Giles’. The dirt-stained thin grass of Hyde Park shimmered at its touch, the flaps creaked across the scaffolding in Kensington, shrouding the imperious new buildings built by the Queen in memory of her dead husband until, eventually, the thin grey light of dawn slunk into the suburb of Hammersmith.

  ‘Suburb’ was a new word, and an unwelcome one. It was, the inhabitants of Hammersmith felt, a word that was entirely a result of the new railways. Their village, whose grand old country villas used to be surrounded with nothing but fields and the winding muddy banks of the Thames, now had to share space with new people. Busy people. Scuttling city people, who every day - and here was a new and disquieting word - commuted to their places of work and conducted . . . business. Crude, messy, paper-heavy, ink-stained, number-weighed business.

  Of course, the more polite inhabitants of Hammersmith didn’t complain. Not in public. But in the high-ceilinged rooms of mansions inhabited by such as the Elwick family, there was no doubt about it - times were changing. Too fast.

  Lord Henry Edward Elwick (Order of the Meretricious Rose, Knight of the White Lily, and possessor of possibly the finest pair of whiskers in west London) had seen more of these changes than he liked to admit. Dammit, his father had died invading France with Wellington, and been buried with due honours. His own two sisters were long since married to appropriately ranked members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, but it was damned lucky, damned lucky, that one of them hadn’t lost everything in that whole dreadful 1848 business - which just proved his point. Rebellion! Rabble rousing! A loss of respect! That was the problem today and heaven help him if his son wasn’t enjoying the fact, if his son wasn’t aiming to study the very things that were causing all this trouble to begin with.

  The thin grey sunlight stretched the mighty shadow of Lord Elwick across the breakfast table of his fine mansion in Hammersmith.

  No one dared build on the land round Lord Elwick’s mansion, but even that, even the esteemed name of Henry Edward Elwick - how long could it last?

  The tall grand brass clock ticked down the hours. The sunlight stretched, taking a heavy fistful of time with it.

  At the breakfast table, sat a woman with pale hair and washed-white skin, wearing a neatly starched, high-buttoned stiff dress. Opposite her sat a boy. He had pale eyes set in a pale face still young enough, perhaps, to be innocent, but heading already towards being the face of a man. The clothes he wore would suit him in time, but maybe not for thirty years.

  He was reading a book.

  Lord Elwick frowned, a pair of mighty grey eyebrows sagged over his wrinkled face like a bridge about to collapse.

  It was a book about science.

  Lord Elwick cleared his throat. This was a rare occurrence at the Elwick Family Breakfast. Even the four servants arrayed along the far wall stiffened in brief surprise.

  He said, ‘What are you reading, boy?’

  Thomas Edward Elwick looked up from his book, the surprise barely hidden on his face. ‘Um . . .’ he mumbled, ears starting to flush bright red. Across the table, Lady Elwick’s fine eyebrows almost collided with her scalp. The men in her life were talking - albeit, each word was like the agonised hatching of a chick from a particularly thick eggshell. Nevertheless, this was almost the beginning of a . . . family conversation.

  ‘Your book, boy, your book!’ flummoxed Lord Elwick.

  ‘Uh . . . I’ve been reading a theoretical assessment of pressure dynamics and its possible application to chemical change in the absence of appropriately exothermically excitable sources.’

  There was the sound of Lady Elwick’s knife carefully smearing marmalade across a thick slice of toast.

  The clock ticked.

  The servants radiated immaculate disinterest. Below stairs would talk about this for weeks.

  ‘Ah.’ The word came from Lord Elwick’s throat like a swallowed fly making an escape. ‘And is that . . . interesting?’

  ‘Very, sir! You see, the author suggests that we can only produce thermal reactions of so much intensity based on the chemical substances we have available, but with appropriate gearing we can exert almost any pressure you care to name upon a substance, and that with the application of pressure on a fixed volume, we can obtain extraordinary—’

  ‘Does he really?’ As he struggled to acknowledge the details of what his son was saying, Lord Elwick’s face almost matched the colour of the tomatoes on his plate.

  ‘Erm . . . yes,’ replied Thomas. ‘He does.’

  Silence.

  A servant refilled Lord Elwick’s coffee cup. Another removed an ornate silver dish from which all the bacon had been consumed.

  ‘So,’ said Lord Elwick at last, ‘is it . . . I mean, do you . . . I think what I wish to know is . . . is . . . is it actually of any damn use to man or does it have more . . . I mean more . . . you know . . .’

  Thankfully no one ever found out what Lord Elwick wished to know. Cartiledge, the new butler, saved the Family Breakfast by his on-the-dot delivery of the morning post, laid out on a silver tray.

  Lady Elwick let out a barely concealed sigh of relief.

  Lord Elwick took the escape that the letters offered.

  Thomas tried to think about calculus.

  The door closed with an almost imperceptible click behind Cartiledge on his way out.

  The clock kept on ticking.

  The morning post - first of almost nine deliveries made daily to the doors of Hammersmith - was deposited, as usual, next to Lord Elwick for his scrutiny. Normally, and things were always strictly normal in the Elwick house, there were four letters. This morning there were five.

  One of them was to Thomas.

  It was the Note.

  Lord Elwick had learnt to come to dread the Note. He could recognise it immediately by the big capital letters on the front, written by a hand that wanted so very much to become a messy scrawl but, by a conscious effort of will, had stopped itself on the edge of slurring. He could recognise it by the faint odour of chemicals, by the suspicious blotches on the edge of the paper, by the Blackfriars mark on the penny stamp. For a moment, the part of Lord Elwick that had always resented having to run for Parliament, instead of inheriting his seat as his predecessors had in the good old days, considered rebellion. Just for a morning, just this morning, he could not tell his son. Then he looked up, and saw . . .

  . . . a pair of hopeful grey eyes, watching him. He knew what they were hoping for.

  He said, whiskers trembling round his face, ‘For you. That Lyle fella, by the look of it,’ and without being able to look Thomas in the eye, passed his son the Note.

  It was short and to the point.

  Dear Thomas,

  To tell a story in brief - I opened the door, a child fell through it, and Tess says she knows her. The child has been poisoned. Whatever you planned to do today, this is more important.

  Best wishes,

  Horatio Lyle

  Below, another hand had added: