Twelve-year-old Carmen has a secret: she can talk to her cat Grim. But the powerful Brotherhood has banned pets, and the penalty is death.
Ward is the most wanted boy in the world. The only thing standing between him and the hangman's noose is maste...
Once out of sight of the wharf Snapper signalled to stop. The driver grumbled at first, however his manner brightened when Snapper deposited an arg in his hand. Indeed, the coin took such a powerful hold over his attention that he didn't seem to notice the boy who emerged from Snapper's sea chest; nor did he say anything when Snapper propped the boy up on the box seat between them. The arg now stowed away in some recess of his voluminous filthy cloak, the driver gazed off across the Fens to the sea. Ward, sandwiched between the considerable (and foul-smelling) mass of the driver, and the roundness of Snapper, was for all intents and purposes invisible.
They skirted the Wharflands and passed a series of boarded-up shops. The sun rose like a glowering eye in the clouds. Alleys vanished off into the gloom, dim orange lights winking in their depths. The smell of coal soot permeated everything; the pall never lifted.
There were pedestrians moving like ghosts in the gloom now, carts pulled by spectral horses, big coach-and-fours, stray dogs scuttling about like beetles, women in riding boots and calico dresses stained about the hems with mud, and unshaven men with mad blue eyes whispering to each other and glancing about. Filthy children weaved in ones and twos through the melee, meeting and shying away like moths around a lamp; their movements seemed purposeful, though it was unclear what that purpose was.
The road terminated at the river. A fish market stood at the corner, open to the street, topped by a tower in which was set a great tempus. The market bustled with hundreds of people, mostly women carrying baskets filled with fish wrapped in butcher's paper, who clucked and worried and turned about and chattered as the fish moved feebly against each other on the boards. The noise was tremendous. Fishmongers roared. Seagulls cried and wheeled about and dove suddenly.
On the other side of the road lay an empty square surrounded by tiers of stone benches. A raised scaffold stood opposite the benches, a timber gibbet upon the scaffold, a row of archons on the gibbet. A dozen rusty cages, suspended from iron arms, stood on the river bank nearby. There were chains hanging inside each cage, which terminated at shapeless black things bound in ropes. Ward smelled tarsene. Even over the roar of the fish market and the clatter of the chaise and the clop of horse hooves he could hear the ominous squeak as the cages swung back and forth in the breeze. They looked as if they had been there since the dawn of time.
"What's that?" he whispered.
"Derricks," Snapper said.
"Those cages -"
"Look, we're almost here."
They had turned the corner and entered a boggy riverside boulevard which was called, according to the sign on the corner, Flynn Street. The chaise soon stopped outside a public house set below the level of the street. It was accessed by a flight of grimy stairs. An ancient sign hung from the eaves: through a veneer of pigeon droppings Ward could make out a slough leaping over a puffing bellows. Filthy porters appeared from somewhere to wrestle Snapper's luggage off the chaise, but he shooed them away. He whispered instructions to the driver instead, and the man drove off down the riverside with Snapper's luggage still on board..
"Better get inside," Snapper whispered to Ward, glancing up and down the street.
The interior of the Slough and Bellows was a haze of baccus smoke that couldn't conceal the general filth of the place or mask the odour of carpets that smelled as if they had caught fire and been put out with beer. As he crossed the room Snapper put one in mind of a brightly painted egg rolling through a pigpen. Eyes flashed at Ward as he followed: men in hats that may once have been fine but were now misshapen (nobody seemed to remove their hat here) watched from the corners of their eyes. There was a card game going on in a corner under a dull lamp. The men played in grim silence.
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