The Great Trouble Read online

  Florrie’s older brother, Danny, opened the door to my knocking.

  “I thought you was the coffin man,” he said in a strange, rough voice. “Mum’s gone. We’re just waitin’ for them to take ’er away.”

  I stood, a shock of fear running through me. “I’m so sorry, Danny. But … what about Florrie? She’s all right, isn’t she?”

  There was a long silence. Danny swallowed hard. “She took sick last night, Eel. We thought it was all over, this epidemic. But I guess not. Poor girl, she don’t even know that Mum didn’t make it. She nursed Mum all day yesterday and then …”

  So that was why I hadn’t seen Florrie out on the streets yesterday. I should have come sooner, I thought.

  “Can I see her?”

  Danny shook his head. “She wouldn’t want it right now,” he said. “She’s off ’er ’ead part of the time, talking nonsense, slippin’ in and out. I heard ’er say your name, Eel.”

  A sound came from inside.

  “I got to go,” Danny said. Then he shut the door.

  I don’t know how long I stood there. Not Florrie. Florrie couldn’t have the cholera. I thought of the bucket of water in the corner when she was nursing Bernie. That water had come from the Broad Street pump.

  I was still standing on Florrie’s doorstep when I saw Gus, the lad we’d met at the Broad Street pump last week. I’d suspected he was sweet on Florrie. I was sure of it now, for he carried a small bouquet of drooping violets.

  “How is she, Eel?” Gus wanted to know. “I come by early this morning and Danny told me what happened.”

  “Not good.”

  “Do you think … it would be all right to knock?”

  I shook my head and glanced down at the flowers in his hand. He followed my gaze.

  “I know. Pretty sorry-looking,” he said ruefully. “I had to buy ’em off a flower seller. I could’ve picked them meself in Hampstead any day when I took the cart to the Widow Eley’s house. But that was before. I don’t guess I’ll be bringing jugs of water out there anymore. The widow died on Saturday.”

  I was only half listening to his words at first. And then they hit me. “You mean, you’ve been taking water from the Broad Street pump out to Hampstead regular-like?”

  Gus nodded. “Several times a week at least. Thursday was the last.

  “Mrs. Eley’s sons at the factory are … well, they were … that devoted to her,” Gus went on. “Wanted their mum to have the water she liked, from when she used to live on Broad Street. So that’s part of my job. Or it was, anyhow.”

  I must have been staring at him with my mouth open, because he came close and peered into my face. “You all right, then, Eel?”

  I nodded. “I have a question for you. Just where in Hampstead is the Widow Eley’s house?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Widow Eley

  It was several miles to Hampstead. I’d never been so far from home, and I was glad to have Dilly’s company. At first I’d been torn about setting out—a part of me wanted to stay near Florrie. But I knew she’d want me to go.

  It felt strange to leave the chimneys and coal-dusted buildings behind. Out here, the air had a sweet, earthy scent. It reminded me of wagons on their way to Covent Garden. Whenever they pass by, the stench of the city falls away and you’re surrounded by the fresh, fragrant smells of apples, pears, and vegetables.

  Only now the smells weren’t just from a wagon but from everything around me: sweet, fresh hay in the fields and hedgerows dotted with wild roses. If the blue death was caused by miasma, the way folks believed, I didn’t see how anyone in Hampstead could get it.

  There were more trees too, with bright green leaves that sparkled in the sunlight. I passed meadows where, like Gus, I might’ve stopped to pick flowers for Florrie. For every ten steps I took, Dilly ran a hundred—circling back and forth, sniffing under every tree and rock, and now and again chasing a squirrel.

  “Maybe you were born some place like this, Dilly,” I told her. “If you hadn’t gotten lost in Piccadilly Circus when you were a pup, you might be here still.”

  It wasn’t hard to find the right house. I asked a farmer on his way back from bringing produce to town. He pointed it out, saying, “May she rest in peace, poor lady.”

  Mrs. Susannah Eley had lived in a pretty white cottage, surrounded by a neat fence and a garden bursting with color. I recognized hollyhocks and daisies from seeing them at Covent Garden Market, but there were lots more besides. Bees buzzed everywhere.

  I went around to the back and waited till I saw a young housemaid come out with a bucket. She headed to a pump in the backyard. I frowned. Why would Mrs. Eley get water from the Broad Street pump when she had this well? Then I remembered what Gus had said: she had liked the taste of the water from Broad Street best of all.

  I knew I couldn’t introduce myself as an assistant to Dr. Snow. Any maid who heard that would laugh in my face and scoff, “A great London doctor wouldn’t give an urchin like you the time of day.”

  No, helping the doctor on Broad Street, where folks knew me, was one thing. Here in the country, it was quite another. I’d have to discover what I wanted to know some other way. “Pardon me, miss,” I called, taking off my cap. “I’m on my way to my grandpa’s house in the center of London. I’m wondering if you could spare a cup of milk.”

  I smiled and waited for Dilly to charm her. Dilly didn’t disappoint. She plopped herself down in front of the little maid, grinned broadly, and swept her tail back and forth on the grass.

  “Well, ain’t she a sweetie,” said the maid. She went inside and brought me out a small tin cup of milk. Then she went back to drawing water.

  “Get good water here, do you?” I asked as casually as I could, sipping the milk.

  “Well, I’ve always thought so. But the mistress was partial to the water in her old neighborhood,” the maid told me. “Liked it so much her sons had a cart come out every few days with some big jugs of it. I never touched it myself.”

  “Your mistress, I think, is the Widow Eley, whose sons own a factory on Broad Street?”

  “Was. My mistress that was. Poor lady,” sighed the maid. “She got awful sick last week and died on Saturday. Her niece that was visiting from Islington got struck down too.”

  The girl paused and wiped her face with her apron. She beckoned and I went a little closer. “They say it was the blue death,” she whispered. “I had to burn the sheets.”

  “Have many other folks died of the cholera around here?”

  “Oh, no. None whatsoever.” The girl looked shocked at the idea. “Just Mrs. Eley and her niece.”

  “That’s very sad,” I said. “I expect the two ladies often dined together, with wine and everything?”

  “Mrs. Eley never touched wine,” she said. “No, I served the two of them water with their dinner on Thursday night. Mrs. Eley always said water was the best thing for a healthy skin and constitution.”

  Now came the most important question. “And Mrs. Eley’s niece … she liked the Broad Street water too?”

  “Oh, yes! I just left the pitcher on the table, and by the end of dinner it was empty.”

  So there it was: Mrs. Eley and her niece had both drunk water from the Broad Street pump.

  Suddenly the maid began to sniffle. “It’s an awful tragedy. The mistress was ever so kind to me. And now … I don’t know what will happen. I’m just staying on to clean out the house till the family decides.”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” I said. And I was. I knew what it was like to lose a situation. “I can see that you’re a hard worker. I’m sure you’ll do well wherever you go.”

  The girl patted Dilly’s head. “Thank you, lad. I hope I shan’t have to leave Hampstead. The boy who delivers the water, Gus is his name, tells me such stories about how crowded and dirty a place the center of London is. No, you can keep that.”

  We talked for a while longer. The maid told me her name was Polly. She was fifteen, just two years older t
han me. I thought Florrie would like working in a house like this one, with a kind mistress and flowers all about.

  If only Florrie could fight off the blue death.

  “Dilly,” I said on the road heading back, “I think we’ve found the right clue at last.”

  For it seemed clear that Gus had brought Mrs. Susannah Eley water from the Broad Street pump several times last week. I’d seen him myself on Monday, the day I’d found Queenie. And now Mrs. Eley and her niece were dead of the cholera.

  Polly, who had not drunk the Broad Street water, was perfectly fine. There were no other cases of cholera in the neighborhood. To everyone else, it was a mystery why poor Mrs. Eley got the cholera out here in Hampstead.

  But not to me.

  Today was Wednesday. If tomorrow night Dr. Snow could stand up and tell the committee that Mrs. Susannah Eley—far away in a leafy part of Hampstead—had died on Saturday from drinking water from the Broad Street pump, surely they would listen.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Dr. Snow what I’d found. More than anything, I hoped Florrie would be well enough to hear it too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Something Else Unexpected

  “Let’s go, Dilly.” I called her back from a meadow. With a swift bark and a grin, Dilly loped after me.

  As we walked along, I suddenly made a decision: I needed to track down one last clue. I’d learned that no one who lived near Mrs. Eley had gotten sick. But what about her niece? I should find out if anyone else in her neighborhood had been struck with the cholera. It would be, I thought, a final proof.

  It was only an extra couple of miles out of my way to Islington. That wasn’t much for me. I’d grown up walking across London. Except for the time we took Pa to the burial ground, I’d never ridden in a hansom cab or one of those new horse-drawn omnibuses. (When we buried Mum, we walked, Henry being older then and Fisheye Bill being too stingy to pay for a cab.)

  “We’ll go,” I told Dilly. “And after that we’ll stop to see Henry for a few minutes. Henry was so lonely the other day. Besides, he’s never met you. You’d better be on your best behavior for Mrs. Miggle. She’s like Mrs. Weatherburn—only worse.”

  I could still do all this and be back at Berwick Street before dark to check on Florrie. And I’d have a lot to tell her—and thank her for too.

  For, in a way, it was Florrie who’d led me to the proof we needed. If Gus hadn’t come by to visit her that morning, I might never have discovered the unexpected case.

  Even without my knowing her name, it didn’t take me long to track down Mrs. Eley’s niece. All I had to say was “I’m looking for a lady that died of the cholera last week.” The second person I asked sent me to a street where one house had a laurel wreath on the door tied up in black crepe and the window shades drawn.

  I went to the back and knocked. A sturdy woman dressed in mourning black opened the door.

  “Excuse me, but today I saw Polly, who works in Mrs. Eley’s house,” I began, pulling off my cap. “She mentioned your recent trouble. I thought you might have some messages to be run.”

  “You’re too late, lad,” the servant answered. “The mistress was buried yesterday. We sent the funeral notices out by post, though we could have used help to deliver some by hand.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I replied. “Did your mistress get struck down the same as Mrs. Eley, then?”

  She nodded. “And I don’t mind telling you that the rest of us in the household feared for our lives. Mistress went away on Thursday night to take dinner with her aunt, as healthy as could be. She come back Friday and took sick.”

  She sniffed noisily. “By Saturday afternoon, bless her sweet soul, she was lying in a coffin. She leaves two boys, younger than you.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. I took a breath. Now for the question that mattered. “Can you tell me, has the cholera afflicted anyone else in this neighborhood?”

  I waited for her answer, my heart beating hard. But I wasn’t surprised when I heard it.

  “Oh, dear, no. This is a healthy part of Islington. Why, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of the cholera being in these streets, at least in my time,” she replied, dabbing her cheeks with her handkerchief.

  She stopped to blow her nose. “No, it is a tragic mystery indeed that both aunt and niece were carried off in this way. I don’t suppose we will ever know why.”

  I thanked her and left. The woman was wrong, I thought. We know exactly why they died. They both drank water from the Broad Street pump.

  I walked quickly toward Mrs. Miggle’s lodging house, which sat on the edge of a crowded neighborhood. I’d given Henry strict instructions to always walk straight home from school and not wander around.

  “Make yourself invisible,” I’d told him many times. “Fisheye Bill Tyler favors workin’ in the Borough or the Seven Dials, and criminals like to keep to their own territories. So I don’t expect him to be snooping around here. Still, you can’t be too careful.”

  But forgetting that was exactly the mistake I made that sunny afternoon. I was eager to boast to my little brother about my new job helping a great doctor. I was already thinking ahead to telling Florrie about solving the mystery.

  In short, I was so full of myself I forgot to be cautious. I forgot about Fisheye Bill. But he hadn’t forgotten me. He was like an octopus, his long tentacles reaching out over the hidden nooks and crannies of London.

  When I heard the clop of hooves stop close behind me, I didn’t turn around. There were cabs everywhere on the streets. Then came the sound of footsteps behind me. But I didn’t notice in time.

  Instead I was deep into imagining the moment of triumph Dr. Snow and I would have before the committee. Would he, I wondered, call on me to give the evidence I’d found today? No, that would be too much to ask. But he might at least turn and smile at me. That would be enough.

  One minute the hazy yellow sky was ahead of me. The next I was clawing at my face, trying to breathe under a foul-smelling hand. I bit down hard and kicked and flailed. But I was picked up and carried back to the cab, then thrown inside like a sack of onions.

  Suddenly I realized I knew the smell that enveloped me. It was the smell of fish.

  And that was the last thought I had before something knocked into my head so hard everything went black.

  I awoke to a rocky to-and-fro motion that made my stomach lurch. It took me a minute to piece together fragments of what I was feeling—a pounding in my head, the rocking motion of a horse, a cord digging into my wrists, a kerchief over my eyes—and, most of all, the smell.

  Slowly my brain linked one sensation to the next and then the next. It was a bit like a piecework quilt I’d once watched my mum put together. The pattern didn’t make sense right away, not until you could see all the pieces.

  Finally I figured it out: I was in a hansom cab, pulled by a single horse clop-clopping over the cobblestones, on my way to who knew where. I had been spotted and grabbed the one time when my guard was down.

  I had been kidnapped by my stepfather.

  How had this happened? Fisheye Bill couldn’t have been following me. It was just a horrible coincidence. I cursed my bad luck. At least I could be grateful that he’d picked me up before I’d gotten to Mrs. Miggle’s lodging house.

  Though what Fisheye Bill was doing riding in a cab like a swell was beyond me. He must’ve just done a job, I thought. Housebreaking, perhaps, in some nice Islington neighborhood. And then, all out of the blue, he’d been given a present: me.

  Now, as we bumped along, I tried to get my bearings. It would help to know where he was taking me. I concentrated hard, hoping to catch a familiar sound—a church bell, a boat on the Thames, the crush of traffic at Piccadilly Circus.

  Then I remembered Dilly. She must be wandering alone, scared and confused. This city was a cruel place for a dog. Dilly, like so many of my friends on Broad Street this past week, was probably lost for good.

  After a while the cab stopped and
the door opened.

  “Don’t play dead, boy,” came Fisheye’s voice out of the thick heat. “I can tell you’re awake. Now look sharp. We have some catching up to do. Get down.”

  I didn’t move. Suddenly I felt a sharp kick in my ribs. “Ow!”

  Fisheye pulled me down from the cab and dragged me along for a few steps. I heard a door open and he pushed me forward.

  “Walk up them stairs,” he ordered. “I ain’t carrying you.” I stumbled up, best I could. The stairwell smelled like a sewer.

  At the top he pushed me into a dank room and threw me into a chair. “Don’t move.”

  He reached around and took the blindfold off.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  Fisheye just laughed. “You’re home, Eel. Home with your daddy.”

  I frowned. This dirty room could be anywhere.

  I should have been able to tell if the cab had crossed into Southwark over the Thames. I would’ve smelled the oily brown river when we passed over. I would’ve heard the boats. Or had that happened when I was knocked out cold? I didn’t know.

  I felt dizzy, and like I might be sick. But I couldn’t let that stop me. I had to pay more attention now. No matter what happened or how much my head hurt.

  “I won’t tell you anything,” I said. “Why can’t you just leave me alone? I’m nothing to you.”

  “Oh, my dear boy, you surprise me,” said Fisheye. “What kind of stepfather would I be to leave two young boys to fend for themselves in London, crawlin’ as it is with criminals and thieves?”

  “I’m just trouble to you,” I pointed out. “I won’t steal for you. I’ll just run away again. Or worse, I’ll turn you in.”

  He laughed. “I doubt that. But you see, lad, it’s not you I want.”

  I clenched my fists and half rose in the chair.

  “Yes, you know exactly what I mean, don’t you?” Fisheye smirked. “I want your little brother. Because what brings in more tin than a small, delicate boy with great, round eyes?