Page 34 of The Ambiguous Enigma of the Hunted Lady
Nash looked it over, knowing full well he couldn't read the words written. Still he liked to maintain the image that he could; it brought him great respect among the street urchins he ran with, as if it were equivalent to pulling off some big score.
“Better I get this over to Riphook.” he muttered, stuffing the note into his waistband. “You see who brought it?”
“One of them doctor fellows.”
“How do you know he was a doctor?” Nash crouched down to stare the boy in his eyes. This was important training for survival on the streets. One needed to know how to classify a mark without coming near to them.
“He had one of them bags, doctor bags, and he had on too many clothes even though it were hot out.”
“Good boy.” Nash ruffled his hair. The answer satisfied him. The boy wasn't ready for street rips just yet, but he would be in a short while. “The next hen is his.”
Nash walked past the excited child and up to Digby.
“Goin' to see Riphook, Boss?”
“Aye, you don't gotta tag along.”
“It's alright, boss, I'll go.”
“Suit yourself.” Nash led them into the old sewers.
Once they had climbed out of the Roman network beneath London, they slipped into shadowy streets. Evening was falling on London, and her emerging smokestacks caused the most glorious red hue to fall over the land.
The duo worked through the bad parts of town; they navigated the warrens and boroughs as if they themselves had designed the haphazardly laid out grid.
They were native to the London slums, and they glided past the brothels and questionable taverns without blinking an eye. Crime of all manner unfolded around them in the streets; those that had a knack for drinking had already begun for the evening, and the rougher ones shouted insults at each other across the road.
Deals of all kinds transpired in alleyways that they dodged past, and they expertly skirted the puddles of human filth thrown from upper stories.
This was home; the sprawling jungle of poverty and crime, neatly shoved into undesirable neighborhoods just out of the view of the upstanding citizens.
The neighborhood they inhabited was called the Rookery, and was home to a predominantly Irish population of poor families and criminals. They were on their way now to The Devil's Acre, where Riphook could reliably be found.
All these London slums rolled right into each other, except when separated by a sudden pop up of new construction. For in a way, the whole of the city was one large slum. It had been growing out of the ruins of Roman greatness for some fourteen-hundred years. In that time, it had been passed from Briton to Saxon to Dane to Saxon to Norman, and a great many more before settling on English.
The city had never built itself back up since the Roman ages, yet it had continued to ooze outward, a crossing ground of global cultures, until it finally arrived at its present state in the early 19thcentury: a conglomerate of shanty towns and merchant families, crowned by occasional displays of extravagance as exemplified by feats of architecture such as St. Paul's Cathedral.
At the time, it was the largest city in the word, housing approximately eight or so percent of England's total population. It was a maze of a metropolis, complete with hundreds of independently lawless boroughs which Nash and Digby skated through as if they were skipping to the bakers.
The Devil's Acre, as it had come to be called, stood beside Tothill Fields Prison. To others, it was known as the Almonry. It stood eerily close to the Palace of Westminster, one could say it even dwelt in a religious shadow.
It was a terrible cluster of buildings, roughly stacked atop each other, and it was neatly wedged between tall, brick chimneyed townhouses in full view of the Abby at Westminster.
There was no mistaking the smell of it. One was struck by the rank odor of raw sewage that lacked proper runoff well before they entered the labyrinth. Looking into its entrance was like staring into a deep pit from which emerging was doubtful. The sounds of dreary misery and squalid living wafted up out of the compound, and Nash caught a bit of a shiver.
“I hate coming here.” Digby grunted. “It is the worst place in all of London.”
“Aye, and that's saying something coming from us.” Nash looked down into The Devil's Acre, already lost to the day's sun, hid out beneath the Abby's mammoth shadow. “That's why Riphook likes it.”
“Because it's the worst?”
“Aye, something like that.”
“Don't make much sense to me.”
“Come on,” Nash led his hulking companion into the darkness. “Let's be done with it.”
As they climbed the shifting stairs to the top story, they passed all manner of untold horror; the population density could only be measured by room instead of square feet, for there were so many people living here atop one another.
