White Stone Day Read Free Page B

catch the Oxford train.'

    The
Alhambra Baths, Endell Street

    Nobody
is more squeamish about mortality than the man who courts it in his
daily habits.

    Edmund
Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, crosses Gutter Lane with a
scented scarf over his mouth and nose – for London is in the
throes of the public ordeal that will become known as the Great
Stink, when so many citizens have resorted to covering their faces
with their handkerchiefs, the city might be populated by highwaymen.

    Looking
on the bright side, the Great Stink has trumped the lesser stink
emanating from Whitty himself. He has spent another night in a
doss–house on Golden Square, where anyone so foolish as to put
on a night–shirt awakens in the morning with nothing to wear,
his day– clothes having been sold twice over by dawn.

    Like
any professional on his uppers, Whitty torments himself with past
success. Even the putrid air carries memories of a time when the city
rang with the Amateur Clubman's eloquent, if somewhat artificial,
indignation:

    It
is an historical fact that in ancient times, the Thames functioned as
a repository of the dead not unlike the Ganges – a holy
conveyance into which one's mortal remains were consigned for their
journey to Heaven. Now the Thames is not a river of the dead but a
dead river – a boneless, swelling corpse at the heart of
Empire, a malign tumour in the heart of the greatest city in the
world . . .

    The
Ganges reference was pure speculation, and 'ancient times' an
unprovable fiction, yet the piece howled with populist outrage,
putting The Falcon in the forefront of municipal reform. More
important, the piece increased circulation by 10 per cent, providing
a bonus of £i 5 for the outraged scribe.

    Happy
days. Happier than now, at any rate.

    Weighted
with nostalgia (and the suspicion that he has become that
much–to–be–pitied figure among Oxford men, the
'burnt–out case'), Whitty slouches down Tavistock Street past
buildings like monstrous blocks of cured meat.

    He
was on top of the Thames scandal from the beginning. If England were
a meritocracy by this point he would now be serving as an adviser to
Parliament, spreading insight among the highest circles, at
favourable rates.

    Following
the cholera epidemic of 1847, the Commission of Sewers decreed that
all sewage be discharged directly into the drains. Henceforth, the
daily excretions of over three million people fell into the pipes
below, wound through a succession of infested tunnels, then
reconvened in the Thames, from which Londoners drank, washed and
fished.

    A
decade later, the Thames is a boneless, rotting corpse and so is his
career, having failed to generate one saleable narrative in over two
months – not through lack of industry, but because each piece
has been usurped by Alasdair Fraser's most detested rival, the
correspondent for Dodd's.

    To
be scooped, spoiled, ruined by Fraser? The deuce!

    A
trickle of sunlight seeps through the iron skeleton of what will
become the rebuilt Theatre Royal, which could be named the Royal
Tinderbox for its proclivity to go up in flames. Whitty estimates the
hour to be seven – he no longer has a watch. Still, his habit
of early rising endures, unaffected by a pathetic lack of stimulants.
Though he appears as stylishly ravaged as ever, Whitty is a mere husk
of his normal self, having retained the form of decadence but not the
content. Yet it could be worse. It is late summer, and he has not yet
slept on a swarming straw mattress with a half–dozen naked,
diseased strangers. Mind, the doss–house on Golden Square was a
frightful place. Bodily sounds that would make a celibate of anyone.
And vermin? Before retiring, he managed to scrape a small handful of
crab–lice from the bedclothes, and crushed beneath the
candlestick like peppercorns. Surely this degraded state of affairs
cannot owe itself to the skill of Fraser of Dodd's! When a pugilist
suffers defeat at the hands of an opponent, the fault