A Christmas Odyssey Read Free Page A

in, and that was a part of the underworld that even Hester didn’t imagine, for all her experience. This was all his own fault. He had broken the first rule of successful lying—never answer questions that people hadn’t asked you!
    “It’s Christmas,” he said, as if that explained everything.
    She smiled with extraordinary sweetness, which made him feel worse.
    “Then go and help him, Squeaky. But remember to come back. We should miss you very badly if you didn’t.”
    “It’s …” he began. How could he explain it to her without her wanting to help? And she couldn’t. It was a dark world she shouldn’t ever have to know about. Weren’t war and disease enough without her seeing all about depravity as well?
    She was waiting.
    “It’s my home here,” he said abruptly. “Of course I’ll be back!” Then he turned and walked away, furious with himself for his total incompetence. All this respectability had rotted his brain. He couldn’t even tell an efficient lie anymore.
    Downstairs and outside he caught a hansom south toward the river. He begrudged the expense, but there was no time to waste with buses, changing from one to another, and even then not ending up where you really wanted to be.
    It might take him some time to find Crow, the man whose help he needed. Crow had intended to be a doctor, but various circumstances, mostly financial but not entirely, had cut short his studies. Squeaky had considered it indelicate to ask what those circumstances were, and he had no need to know. As it was, Crow’s medical knowledge was sufficient for him to practice, unofficially, among the poor and frequently semi-criminal who thronged the docksides both north and south ofthe river around the Pool of London. He took his payment in whatever form was offered: food, clothes, sometimes services, sometimes a promise both parties knew could not be kept. Crow never referred to such debts again.
    It took Squeaky the rest of the afternoon, a conversational supper of pork pie at The Goat and Compasses, and then more walking and questioning, to find Crow in a tenement house just short of the Shadwell Docks. Since he wanted a favor, Squeaky waited until Crow had seen his patient and collected his fee of sixpence—which was insisted upon by the patient’s father—and the two of them were free to walk out onto the road beside the river.
    Crow turned up the collar of his long, black coat and pulled it more tightly around himself against the icy wind coming up off the water. He was tall—several inches taller than Squeaky—and at least twenty-five years younger. Today he had a hat jammed over his long straight black hair, but in the lamplight Squeaky saw the same wide smile on his face as usual. He seemed to have too many teeth, fine and strong.
    “You must want something very badly,” he remarked, looking sideways at Squeaky. “And itisn’t a doctor. You’ve got plenty of those much nearer Portpool Lane. You look agitated.”
    “I
am
agitated,” Squeaky snapped. He told Crow about Henry Rathbone’s visit to the clinic and his request for help in finding Lucien Wentworth. As they strode in the dark along the narrow street in the ice-flecked bitter wind, the cobbles slick under their feet, he also told him about the sort of indulgence that Lucien Wentworth had apparently sunk into.
    Crow shook his head. “You can’t let Hester go looking into that!” he said anxiously. “Don’t even imagine it.”
    “I’m not!” Squeaky was disgusted, and hurt. Crow should have known him better than to even have thought such a thing. “Why do you think I’m looking for you, you fool?”
    Crow stopped in his tracks. “Me? I don’t know places like that. I’ve treated a few opium addicts, but for other things—slashes, broken bones, not the opium. As far as I know, there isn’t anything you can do for it.”
    Squeaky felt a wash of panic rise inside him. He couldn’t do this alone. He knew enough about the underworld of