Infernal Devices - KW Jeter [35]
I caught Fexton's wrist, holding the stick aloft. The animal's misery, compounded of pain and suffering loyalty to its cruel master, angered me. "Stop that," I ordered. "Have you no decency? Abusing a poor beast in such a manner."
"Yes, yes; of course…" He cringed disgustingly, as if expecting me to turn the stick on his bowed back. "But you don't know; you don't know–" His eyes turned towards the dog as it whined in suppressed excitement, eager attention turned back to the window.
"I came here with a few simple questions, hoping to find equally, simple answers." By now I was sick of the cramped, foul-smelling room and its noxious occupant. "If you can assist me, and wish to receive the appropriate recompense, then say so; if not–"
"But there's no time! Not now!" He scrabbled about in a corner, drawing a ragged coat over his trembling limbs. "I must go – very urgent; you don't know how much so." A partially unravelled muffler was wrapped around his scrawny throat. "Come back – yes! Come back later, and I'll tell you anything you want to know. But not now!"
He darted past me towards the door, the sadly faithful dog following at his heel. From the landing I shouted down at him as he rushed down the clattering stairs: "When?"
"After – after midnight!" The dog's renewed barking mingled with his reply. "Yes – then!"
I soon heard through the window the tap of his stick on the courtyard stones. The oppressive atmosphere of the room soon drove me out, away from the building and into the cleaner night air.
The street beyond the alley entrance was deserted now, the people of remarkable aspect having hurried along to their destination. Taking careful note of the doors I passed and the turns I made, so that I would be able to retrace my steps, I quit the district. The lights of a small public house drew me towards it; I could wait there in relative comfort until the hour of my appointment with the so-far uncommunicative Fexton. When I first looked around the public house's door, I was greatly relieved to see that this had not been the point to which the residents of Wetwick had been headed; the drinkers and layabouts inside were of no more than average ugliness, wondering with a sodden surliness about the appearance of a gentleman in their midst, but at least not staring at me with the round popping eyes I had found in the district I had just left. I must admit, that as I sat at one of the more removed tables, maintaining a careful sobriety through the judicious nursing of a small ale, my heart was beating fast and high up in my throat. The great adventure on which I had launched myself was turning out to be a capital amusement: mysterious denizens of a London previously unknown to me; the colourful squalor of poverty and vice, generally reported to people of my respectable ilk only in the columns of Mayhew's excellent reportage in the Morning Chronicle: a rendez-vous to be kept with an actual transgressor of the law and apparent prison habitué – at that moment it seemed as if I had completely broken the shackles of my old mundane existence and stepped into some wilder, free life.
At the designated hour I hastened back to Fexton's abode. The street was still deserted, but that was to be expected, given the lateness.
Once again I mounted the precarious steps and stood on the landing outside Fexton's door. I rapped upon it and called his name, but no answer came. But, leaning close, I could hear an anxious-sounding whine from the small dog within. Perhaps its master, returned from the secretive errand on which they had embarked, had fallen asleep.
I pushed open the door and peered within. The candle on the table had burned level with the cracked dish that held it, the flame guttering in the pool of wax. By the flickering illumination I could see, not the coiner, but only the dog scratching at what I took to be an elongated bundle of old rags upon the floor. It renewed its whining, prodding with its sharp