The Ebb Tide Read Free

dead-ended some distance up against a shuttered building. It lead away downwards towards the river, winding around in the direction, roughly speaking, of Billingsgate Market.
    “Gone,” I said out loud. “No sight of him.” And I was just leaning on Tubby’s shoulder to climb back down when I saw a boy come out of an alley down across the way. He stood staring at me, as if trying to classify what species of creature I might turn out to be. To my utter surprise, he headed straight toward me, waving a hand in the air.

Chapter 2
What Happened to the Map
    What’s this now?” I said, and Tubby, still holding steady, said, “Enlighten me,” with a good deal of irony, as if he was miffed that his only useful business was to anchor the table while I took in the view.
    “Begging your pardon, sir,” the boy said, breathing heavily. “There was a man came over this wall. I seen him.”
    “How long back?” I asked.
    “Not ten minutes, sir. I followed him down toward the market, but lost sight of him. I thought at first he’d taken an oars downriver, but then I saw him duck into a gin shop, what they call the Goat and Cabbage.”
    “Send the boy around to the front ,” Frobisher said a little pettishly. “I’m not a damned pi laster.”
    “Right,” I said, and was about to convey the suggestion when the lad took a mad run at the wall, sprang up, latched onto the copings, and heaved himself over, landing on his feet like a cat.
    Tubby shouted and trod back in astonishment, letting go of the table, which toppled sideways, pitching me into the rock roses, thank heaven, and not onto the paving stones. It was the boy who helped me to my feet, dusting off my coat and asking was I injured, which I said I was not, although I gave Tubby a hard look for shirking his duty with the table. The boy might have been twelve or thirteen, and was in need of a haircut and a new pair of trousers a good three inches longer than the pair he wore.
    “Finn Conrad, at your gentlemen’s service,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook heartily enough. I immediately liked the look of the boy, who reminded me a little of myself at that age, but with considerably more gumption.
    “Jack Owlesby,” I told him. “And this is Mr. Frobisher. They called him Pilaster Frobisher out in India, where he spent a great deal of time in the sun. If you’d just lead the way inside, Mr. Frobisher.”
    “It’s a pleasure to meet you, young comet,” Tubby said to the boy, bowing in his portly way and shaking the offered hand before heading in through the open door “I’m speaking to an acrobat, I don’t doubt?”
    “Duffy’s Circus, sir, born and bred. But I ran away two years back, after my old mother died, and I’ve been living hereabouts since, making my living in what way I can. Are these your whacking sticks?” he asked, gesturing, and we said that they were. He collected the leaded cane and shillelagh where they lay atop the workbench, surveyed the bones and skeletons as if they were pretty much what he expected to find under the circumstances, and went on into Merton’s like an old hand.
    Merton wasn’t dead, thank God, but was sitting in a chair now, in that comfortable little browsing parlor he’s got at the front of the shop. He held a glass of brandy and wore a bandage round his forehead. St. Ives and Hasbro sat opposite, and Tubby and I took the two remaining chairs. Through the window I could see London Bridge. Upriver lay the Pool, the masts of the shipping just visible, and faint on the air you could hear bells and whistles and other sorts of nautical noise. “I saw his face clearly,” Merton was saying to St. Ives. “It was a broad face, nose like a fig and small eyes. Not a dwarf, mind you, but a small man. Apelike is the word for him. Quite horrible in appearance.”
    “In a brown coat,” young Finn said, “begging your pardon, sir, and a watch cap. That’s the very man I was telling these gentlemen