Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [64]
‘I was Isis,’ said Isis. ‘As you well know.’
‘So I boldly stepped up and marked her card for every dance,’ said Oxley.
‘Which was a cheek and an effrontery,’ said Isis.
‘I saved you from the left feet of many a swain,’ said Oxley.
She put her hand on his cheek. ‘Which I cannot deny.’
‘The thing you have to remember about a masquerade is that at the end of the night the masks have to come off,’ said Oxley. ‘At least in polite company, but I had been thinking …’
‘Always a worrying development,’ said Isis.
‘Why did the masquerade have to end?’ said Oxley. ‘And as the son follows the father, I let action follow thought and seized my darling Isis, threw her over my shoulder and was away across the fields towards Chertsey.’
‘Oxley,’ said Isis. ‘The poor boy is an officer of the law. You can’t be telling him you kidnapped me. He’d be honour bound to arrest you.’ She looked at me. ‘It was entirely voluntary, I can assure you,’ she said. ‘I was twice married and a mother, and I’d always known my own mind.’
‘It is certain that she proved to be an experienced woman,’ he said and, much to my embarrassment, winked at me.
‘You wouldn’t think he was once a man of the cloth,’ said Isis.
‘I was a terrible monk,’ he said. ‘But that was a different life.’ He rapped the table. ‘Now that we’ve fed, watered and bored you senseless, why don’t we talk some business? What is it that the Big Lady wants?’
‘You understand that I’m strictly the go-between in this,’ I said. We actually did a course on conflict resolution at Hendon, and the trick is always to stress your neutrality while allowing both parties to think you’re secretly on their side. There were role-playing exercises and everything – it was one of the few things I was better at than Lesley. ‘Mama Thames feels that you may be looking to move downstream of Teddington Lock.’
‘It’s all one river,’ said Oxley. ‘And he’s the Old Man of the River.’
‘She claims he abandoned the tideway in 1858,’ I said. More precisely during the Great Stink – note the capitals – when the Thames became so thick with sewage that London was overwhelmed with a stench so terrible that Parliament considered relocating to Oxford.
‘Nobody stayed in London that summer who could move away,’ said Oxley. ‘It wasn’t fit for man or beast.’
‘She says he never came back,’ I said. ‘Is that true?’
‘That is true,’ said Oxley. ‘And in truth, the Old Man has never loved the city, not since it killed his sons.’
‘Which sons were these?’
‘Oh, you know who they are,’ said Oxley. ‘There was Ty and Fleet and Effra. All drowned in a flood of muck and filth and finally put out of their misery by that clever bastard Bazalgette. Him that made the sewers. I met him, you know, very grand man with the finest set of chops this side of William Gladstone. Knocked him on his arse for the murdering bastard that he was.’
‘You think he killed the rivers?’
‘No,’ said Oxley. ‘But he was their undertaker. I’ve got to hand it to the daughters of the Big Lady, for they certainly must be hardier than my brothers.’
‘If he doesn’t want the city, why is he pushing downstream?’ I asked.
‘Some of us still have a hankering for the bright lights,’ said Oxley, and smiled at his wife.
‘I dare say it would be nice to attend the theatre again,’ she said.
Oxley refilled my cup. A crackly voice on a tannoy somewhere behind me yelled, ‘Let’s get this party started.’ James Brown was still feeling nice, sugar and spice now.
‘And you want to fight Mama Thames’s daughters for the privilege?’
‘You think they’re too fearsome for us?’ asked Oxley.
‘I don’t think you want it badly enough,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m sure arrangements could be made.’
‘An excursion by coach, perhaps?’ asked Oxley. ‘Will we need passports?’
Despite what you think you know, most people don’t want to fight,