CHAPTER 24

THE SMITH’S FOLLEY

Hodge, as one of the perquisites of his official job, drove a dog cart. It was a small two-wheeled open carriage painted a dull green with two cross-seats back to back, the rear one cunningly contrived to open up if needed, so as to form a box for the transport of dogs.

Jed being a terrier, and thus proud and of an independent mind, never rode in the box. Instead he always sat beside Hodge on the front seat and watched the horse pull them through the streets with a proprietorial air, quite as if it was he who was driving and not the man who held the reins at his side.

This late at night, and so far east of the city, most people would have kept a careful eye on the figures loitering in the shadows, but Hodge gave them little thought, knowing he had unusually acute reflexes, a stout blackthorn cudgel close to his right hand, not to mention the comfort of the black and tan terrier to his left. The city thinned as they passed through Limehouse to Poplar on their way to the Isle of Dogs, and what lights remained visible through the increasingly grimy windows of the passing houses and drinking dens became dimmer and fewer.

Hodge had ratted across the landscape ahead as a boy when it had still been known as Stepney Marshes, and as an even younger child he had watched the butchers slaughter the marsh-fed cattle on the great field known as The Killing Ground. The Killing Ground was now gone, dug up and filled with water to create the West India Docks. He knew it was fancy, but whenever he passed the black water at night he still smelled the flat tang of blood in the air.

The Isle of Dogs was an unlucky place for him. He had lost his first little terrier Jig there when he was ten, after the bank of the old inlet known as The Gut had collapsed and swallowed the dog and the rathole he had gone down in one heavy slump of mud and gravel. He had dug all night to try and rescue Jig, bloodying his fingers and tearing his nails. He had found the dog in the dawn light, seven feet down, smothered and lifeless, his jaws still locked on a huge rat. None of his friends could understand why he stayed and dug for so long, and one by one they had left him to it. He could not tell them that he knew the dog was alive and where it was trapped because he heard it, because what he was hearing was not audible to the normal ear. What he was hearing, at least for the first few hours, was the dog telling him he was still there and waiting trustingly for rescue. He had wept over the dog, said some fumbled words and then reburied him where he’d fallen. He had sworn to Jig that he’d never lose another dog, and he never had. He had sworn that he would die before he’d let that happen.

He had also never returned to the spot. It was no consolation to Hodge that the docks and the canal had in time swallowed The Gut too as they cut off the neck of the land, turning the marsh into an island in reality as well as name.

The Smith chose to live on the east side of the marsh, below the docks. His house was known as The Folley for reasons lost in time, but it was certainly thought a foolishness to set up a forge on what was still an outof-the-way stretch of wild land overlooking the forbidding waters of Blackwall Reach and the dank Greenwich marshes beyond. Folly it would have been if The Smith had need of trade to justify his workshop, but the truth was that he had a workshop because he was The Smith, not that he was a smith to make a living. It was more than a living: it was his life. It was what he was to the core of his being: a maker. His workshop was also more than a smith’s forge, though it was that too: to the undiscerning eye it looked like the aftermath of a bad explosion in a well-stocked ironmongers, a great muddle of tools of every shape and size slung promiscuously on hooks which covered every available space, garlanding the walls, spilling out of wooden racks and dangling from the roof-trees.

To the discerning eye, it was clear each tool had its place and was arranged according to an idiosyncratic plan. The workshop was set up with a section in which to work metal and a section for woodwork, and it was clear that the tools ranged in age from great antiquity to the most modern mechanical devices: there were dark hammers which had formed hot iron into swords long before the Romans came, and burnishers which had brightened the metal on Saxon shields; there were chisels and block-planes and spoke-shaves and adzes and saws which had built wagons and half-timbered houses; there were pliers and moulds and salamanders which had formed rings of gold and silver for courtiers in Tudor times; and there were screwdrivers and augers and wrenches which had mended Hodge’s own dog cart on at least two occasions in living memory. There was also a flint knife.

The sharpest of the discerning eyes would have enjoyed the symmetry of the fact that the flint knife, perhaps the oldest tool in the workshop, rested on a shelf above the newest tool, a Holtzapffel Rose Engine lathe. The Smith sat in front of it, his foot working the treadle that powered the great cast-iron flywheel which in turn, via a cunning arrangement of pulleys and rope loops, drove a razor-sharp cutter whirring happily as it made shallow geometric cuts in a block of ivory. The ivory was held steady in the jaws of a chuck attached to one of a series of great brass rosettes which slowly moved in a pumping rhythm against a bumper as he turned a crank with his left hand.

He was so rapt in what he was doing that he appeared not to hear Hodge pull up outside, or feel the cold air fan the fire in the forge as he entered. Jed stopped to sniff at some long metal boxes stacked against the wall. They were as tall as a man, and had hinged lids. Hodge looked at them and tapped the metal. It made no sound other than a dull thud.

“What are you making?” he said.

The Smith gave no sign of surprise, just peering even closer at the pattern the whirring blade was cutting into the ivory.

“A five-pointed star. Of a new sort. It’s quite fascinating how it happens, it quite stretches my understanding of geometry from two dimensions into three! I find it most relaxing trying to work out what will occur…”

“Not that,” said Hodge, and rapped the boxes again. “These coffins.”

The Smith turned from the lathe and looked up at him through a pair of half-moon glasses. He was a powerful man with thick, dark eyebrows and long greying hair brushed back from a high forehead. He wore a bushy moustache which had something of the Viking about it in its extravagant length and proud curve. His face had all the dark components of a storm cloud, betrayed by the flash of happy sunlight in his eyes as he turned them on his friend.

“Hodge,” he boomed, his voice deep as rolling thunder.

“Wayland,” said Hodge, his hand still testing the boxes.

“Not coffins, you fool. Chests!” growled The Smith, rising from his seat. The only sound was the crackle from the fire and the declining whirr of the blade as the great flywheel slowed to a halt once he had taken his foot off the treadle.

“Made from lead,” said Hodge. “They do seem coffin-like.”

The Smith stretched and walked over to the chests, pausing to scratch Jed’s head as he passed. Jed had made straight for the heat of the fire and was warming his bones alongside it.

“They can be soldered shut and made watertight. Being so heavy they will sink directly. It is a solution to our problem if we are further reduced in number.”

“I was not sure you would be here,” said Hodge, accusation hovering in the background of his voice.

“I returned yesterday,” said The Smith.

“You returned empty-handed.”

The Smith grimaced and wiped his hands on his apron.

“No new recruits.”

Hodge’s brow creased in incredulity.

“You found no one?”

“I found people. I found plenty of people, several Glints as it happens, some others like Mr Sharp, a couple of families with your gifts with animals and so on. If you know where to look, the strong mixed blood is still out there. There’s no mystery in that. But I found no one who would join us. And there’s the rub: since the Disaster happened The Oversight is far from trusted.”

“But it wasn’t our fault!”

The Smith laid a great hand on Hodge’s shoulder. His fingers were blunt and scarred.

“It was our fault. That it was not you nor I nor Sara nor Cook nor Mr Sharp who made the decision is irrelevant to the others. That those who made the decision did so out of the most admirable intent carries no weight either. They have heard what happened, felt the loss and have no desire to join us.”

“Sharp could persuade them,” said Hodge.

“He could turn their minds, but that is not how we recruit. You know that. You speak out of desperation. Have some warm ale. The nights are damp out here on the Isle.”

He took a tall jug from the sideboard, limping as he walked back to the fire. It was an old limp, something which he clearly didn’t think about, something which had become a part of him. He rested the jug on the edge of the forge as he gave the bellows a couple of hearty squeezes. The red coals paled as they heated up, and he grabbed a rag and pulled a poker from the fire, quenching its hot tip in the jug in a sizzle of steam. The room filled with the scent of warm ale and spices.

“I can’t think how you favour it,” said Hodge. “It truly is a place for ghosts and little else.”

“I have always sat ill in the city, you know that,” rumbled The Smith. “And these marshes are close to, but not of the city. And then again, it is the only island in London, with the Thames on three sides and the old Running Cut and the new docks on the other: there is much to be said for being surrounded by the protection of running water. I am safer here than they are in Wellclose Square, almost as safe as you in the Tower. Why have you come?”

He handed Hodge a pewter tankard, which he filled from the jug.

“A girl was brought to the Safe House this evening.”

“A girl?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“A Glint. Though she knows little of what she is and seems as if her mind has been turned. Sharp found one of the Night Walkers close by…”

The Smith choked on his ale and sat back against the anvil in the centre of the room.

“Sluagh? In the city? But they hate the city. Too much light and iron, too many people, too much flowing water in sewers and culverts, the place must be a maze to them…”

“Sharp has him in the Privy Cells. You can come and see him if you don’t believe us,” said Hodge, holding out his mug for more ale.

As The Smith poured he watched his face.

“They want you to come and see the girl’s ring.”

“Why?”

“They want to know who you made it for.”

The flow of ale jerked and splashed onto the ground. The Smith looked up into Hodge’s face.

“She has one of our rings?”

“So Sharp says. And she doesn’t know a damn thing about us.”

The Smith walked to the back of the workshop and opened the door to a cupboard. The shelves within were lined with books and scrolls. He took a thin green leather-bound book from the top shelf and riffled through the pages. They were full of drawings of rings, all similar in that they contained a bloodstone carved with a lion and a unicorn, but each subtly different in the way the stone was set, the style of the ring and the way the creatures were carved.

“I will bring my book.”

“Come in the morning,” said Hodge. “I have an errand in the city and the girl is sleeping now. You can give them the bad news about your recruiting drive first hand. Don’t see why I should be the bearer of bad tidings.”