The Street Philosopher - By Matthew Plampin Page 0,137
the piercing shrieks of children, racing wildly across the lawns. On the other side of the lake, a score of musicians were leaving a large oriental-style pavilion and filing across the open-air dancing boards before it. As Cracknell watched, they took their places on a raised orchestra stand, frosted with ornamental metalwork. Rich single notes and rapid flurried scales drifted across the Belle Vue as they prepared to play, slowly drawing an audience from the surrounding verdure.
‘Now where would they be?’ he wondered aloud, touching a flame to the end of a cigarette. ‘Where are you, Thomas, you faint-hearted goose?’
Cracknell knew that it was unlikely that Kitson and his lady of the furnaces would be lingering anywhere too public. Keeping his eyes peeled all the while, the Tomahawk thus embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the Belle Vue’s zoological exhibits. He studied shabby, disgruntled eagles crouched on boulder-piles with chains fastened around their ankles, like so many feathery convicts. He stopped briefly at a paddock containing some decidedly obstreperous llamas, chortling to himself as they spat at some overcurious children. He spent ten minutes in the monkey house, watching the dolorous beasts within swing listlessly from one side of their gloomy cage to the other. Kitson, however, was nowhere to be seen. Abandoning the animal enclosures, he took a stroll through a couple of the larger greenhouses. Forced to remove his top hat in the sweltering climate, he gazed blankly at a few tubs of leafy, sprouting things, surveyed the decidedly Kitson-less crowd, and made for the exit.
The sun, now starting to set, was largely obscured behind the miasma of smoke and dirt that rose continuously from the city beyond the Belle Vue’s walls. The shadows of the gardens had grown so long that they had begun to join, reaching out to one another across paths and lawns as if conspiring to end the day. A team of gas-men was hard at work across the lake, igniting the spherical glass lamps that were mounted on fluted iron pillars around the dancing boards. The orchestra stand was already lit up like a vast Chinese lantern, its reflection shimmering brightly on the water. Several dozen couples moved gently around the boards before it, to the parping strains of a popular tune Cracknell could not identify.
Seeing that evening was setting in, he steamed away towards the rear wall of the gardens, his cigarette puffing like a miniature funnel. Only one more corner of the grounds had to be explored before he could devote his attention to the pavilion and the dancing boards. It had yet to receive the attentions of the gas-men, and was growing a little murky, but there was still ample light by which to see and safely perambulate–and spot those who needed to be spotted. This last remaining area was dominated by a sizeable maze, fashioned from thick privet a good deal taller than Cracknell himself. A fingerpost informed him that at its centre lay the hermit’s cave. Sounds of celebration were drifting over from the lake, but all before him seemed still and silent. Flicking away his cigarette, he entered.
It took him but a couple of minutes to fathom the layout of the maze. ‘Hardly Daedalian,’ he murmured with sly satisfaction. ‘No match for the Tomahawk.’
Taking care to stay quiet, he was about to reach the cave at its heart when he heard voices close by, in the outer paths of the maze itself. His first thought was that it must be gas-men, come to light a lamp or two above the hedges. But then they drew closer, and he realised that they were nothing of the sort.
‘Honestly, Freddie,’ said one, ‘you can be such a flat sister at times. These boys are extremely keen to meet you. They’re from Bailey’s place. Porters from the look of them, but well dressed–and rather muscular, I must say. And thoroughly capable and inventive chaps, by all accounts.’
‘By their own account, you mean,’ said his companion ill-temperedly. ‘You will have to excuse me, Bill, if the thought of squiring some counter-jumpers you’ve found lurking in the blasted hermit’s cave at the blasted Belle Vue Gardens does not have me pissing my britches with glee. Our entire future, if you remember, is cast in deathly shadow.’
A devious grin spread across Cracknell’s face. It was none other than William Norton, accompanied by his close friend and partner in unnatural vice, Alfred Keane. During his time in the Cottonopolis, Cracknell had heard a good deal