The Angel of Bishopsgate

Chapter 1 London. Midnight - November 20th 1848 The East End stench caught on Arthur's clothes. In a gentleman's frock coat and shiny black shoes, he stood broad and square as a working man. He was waiting, an unsettled rage dancing in his pale blue eyes. From the abattoir, a sour wind blew hard as moonlight singed the canal waters with ripples of gold and silver. He rolled his large knuckles as a barge moved out of the fog. The strapping man on board wound the anchor rope to the side, his dark skin glistening in the light rain. "A man'll lose his wits in this bleedin' stink, Castor." Arthur's gruff cockney accent rolled out, all the more notable in his elegant and groomed attire. “Hurry about it." Castor spoke politely, though his dress too did not match that of a lighterman. "The Wapping lads were circling. I had to wait and you needed to see this for yourself." Arthur crouched by the canal edge, scratching his sandy sideburns and goatee, as Castor hoisted his athletic frame across the barge, dragging a long wooden crate from beneath a tarp. "He came with the shipment from Dublin. She sent him back to us..." Castor continued. "Who came back?" "He did." He nodded towards the crate. "Open it then. Go on, man." Leaning down, Castor cracked the lid and slid it to the side. A bloated corpse stared back at them with greying flesh, flushed with purples and blues. It was the face of a man distorted with moisture, his eyes bulging, ogling them in horror. The foul air blew up at them in a putrid cloud so that Castor took a step back for air, as Arthur leaned towards it. "Who is it?" Arthur's voice lowered an octave. "It's Smithfield. You know, with the eye." "A man who was all blow and no hard. The liquor? The tea?" "She filled the bottles with piss. And the tea was gone. Who knows where that ended up." Arthur locked his jaw, staring down at the man in the box with slitted eyes. "She's out of her bloody mind." "She's gone too far, Artie. We have to respond now.” Castor spoke with confidence and familiarity as Arthur stood back, considering his response. "This is about her bloody cut." "She wants more,” Castor agreed. “She'll always want more." "She thinks she deserves more is the thick of it, and she don't. If I want the route to go north of her, then it goes north. If I want to use another dock, then I use another dock." Arthur turned his attention to the bloated corpse, a sizeable letter A scorched into the man’s forearm, still distinguishable in the decaying flesh. "And he let them do this?" He looked down in disgust. "He bloody begged me for a chance. Let me go, sir, I'll take care of it, sir," he mocked. "And he right f****d it up didn't he?" Arthur lifted his leg and stomped his foot against the dead man's face, ramming the heel of his boot into the skull again and again, until the cracking sound turned to mush and his anger exhausted. Extracting his leg from the pulpy mess, he shook it over the canal waters. Passing Castor his top hat as he propped his foot on the barge, he leant with his handkerchief to clean his boot. "More promises than he had good bleedin' eyes. That shoulda been the warning right there. What a waste. Get rid of him.” He held out the dirty handkerchief to Castor in exchange for his hat and straightened his coat as he leapt back off the barge onto the bank. "I want to see Moses first thing, you hear?" "I'll get him." Castor nodded. "What are we going to do?" Arthur strode back to his carriage. "We'll take care of it. Like we always do."