Free Death at Hungerford Stairs by J C Briggs Page B

struck the half hour. Scrap crept out through the hole in the broken door and waited, crouching like a cat in the darkness. He could see a light upstairs in the house, a candle that flickered. Someone was at the window. Scrap froze, holding his breath. A door banged shut and footsteps came through the yard. Scrap squeezed back through his hole. The dogs barked and when the figure came through the door in the wall, the noise was stilled. Scrap waited.
    The sound of the footsteps in the alley died away, and the silence settled once more. Scrap inched his way out and crouched again, listening. He darted across the alley and flattened himself against the blistered door of the yard. Through a crack in the door, he whispered, ‘Poll, Poll.’ A short yap. She had heard him. ‘Poll, quiet, now. I’ll come fer yer.’ He heard footsteps. Voices whispering. A spurt of laughter. Someone was coming down the alley.
    Scrap fled. Away from the footsteps. He did not look round. He turned right at the end of the alley, knowing that he could work his way back to the front of the abandoned house. He kept close to the wall, his head down, just a boy – no one, really. He slid into the house, through the empty rooms to the shed in the overgrown garden where he pulled his sack over him, and slept. Cloud covered the bruised moon which dimmed to a hazy glimmer. The rain came, drumming on the roof of the shed, and on the metal roof of the cages, but Scrap slept on. Poll stayed awake, her head on her paws, and her black eyes staring into the night. He would come.

8
THE SEA CAPTAIN
    It had rained all night. In the morning, Dickens looked out on his garden where the trees and bushes dripped disconsolately. An air of melancholy pervaded the scene; even the raindrops on the window fell listlessly, pausing and halting as they slid down the window. How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Dickens thought. November, a dreary month, unforgiving in its gloom when night was always at odds with morning. Even the air looked sodden like a wet rag that needed squeezing. Too early for news.
    He turned back to his desk. It was as it always was: the goose quill pens, the blue ink, the bronze image of two toads duelling which always made him laugh, a paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit upon it, the blue slips on which he would write his monthly numbers, and, his eye fell on it, another bronze image, this time of a dog fancier with the puppies and dogs swarming all over him. How all occasions do inform against me. He thought of Georgie Taylor, that insinuating little man who might or might not bring back Poll.
    He stood pensively, gazing at the desk. With that capacity he had for standing outside himself, he wondered if, when he was gone, the desk would be there waiting for the author to come back to the empty chair and pick up his pen. The deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished occupation, all images of death; he had written that. Where would his chair be? He loved his house in Devonshire Terrace – he did not know now that it would be his favourite of all the houses he would live in. He loved his iron staircase leading to the garden – not today, though, when he could hear the drip, drip of the rain on the railings. He loved his garden where on sunny days – if there were ever to be any – he would lie on the grass with a handkerchief over his face, and he loved this room with its bookcases, and the round mahogany table with its secret drawers where he kept his secret keys. But it was only leased, and he had the anxiety of finding another house in a couple of years.
    He was worried about Catherine. His wife was never really well, suffering from headaches, nervousness for no accountable reason, faintness and sometimes confusion. He could not reach her somehow; it was as if a space had opened up between them which he could only fill with little kindnesses, talk about the children, plans for a holiday or a stay with friends although Catherine was