Despite our intent to drift on to other topics, we have too much booky stuff yet to cover – so here’s a quick mention of two brand new things old greydog has edited. But for relief, we do also have the next three parts of  Alan M Clark‘s short novella, which we’re serialising.

Two buses turned up at once yesterday – the latest issue of Occult Detective Magazine (#7), edited by John Linwood Grant & Dave Brzeski (Cathaven Press, 2020), and the first volume of Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, edited by JLG (Belanger Books, 2020).

Utilising our slick patter and proven promotional techniques, we suggest that, uhh, you have a look and buy them if you fancy them. A compelling argument, we think.

Occult Detective Magazine #7 is packed with brand new stories, reviews, articles and art – we have horror from Guyanese folklore, and the tale of a sangoma in Southern Africa; a Mayan investigator, a Japanese priest, and a half-Punjabi psychic, plus Aleister Crowley in London and horror in the United States. In print now on Amazon UK and US, Kindle to follow.

Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives Volume 1 offers you Van Helsing hunting the Whitechapel Murder, and a mystery for Mary Morstan. Irene Adler’s daughter asks for help; a dark community is discovered in the Welsh hills; there is Russian murder and espionage, and Holmes debates with Dr John Silence. 350 pages of period mysteries, puzzles and horrors. Print and Kindle on Amazon UK and Amazon US, Volume Two to follow.

Right, on to more of Alan’s spooky period novella…

N.B. For segments 3,4 & 5, see http://greydogtales.com/blog/mudlarks-part-two/

or  see the full story unfolding daily here:

https://ifdpublishing.com/blog/f/mudlarks-and-the-silent-highwayman

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 6

“If Papa were here—” With the thought of his father, anger welled up in Albert, cutting off his words.

The strain lifted from Mum’s features for a moment. “He would give me that smile of his,” she said in a wistful, dreaming voice. “Oh, how he could grin.”

Papa had used his winning smile on her every time she caught him in a lie or he failed to do his part and disappointed her.

Albert Gladwick senior had been a good father before he went off to the war. Young Albert recalled that on his seventh birthday he and Papa had made a climb into a church tower to get above the incessant coal smoke haze and view the stars. His father had carried him most of the way up on his shoulders. On that magical night, they’d seen green wisps of the northern lights. “Rare, that is,” Papa had said with a warm smile, “a gift given only to good boys.”

At present, Albert remembered that event as the happiest moment of his life.

Because watermen had many of the skills required to crew ships—knowledge of piloting among currents, anticipating tides, and dealing with changes in weather—the Royal Navy had pressed many of them into service during the Anglo-Egyptian war, Albert Senior among them.

If Papa had died in Egypt, Albert thought, at least I’d have the memory of who he’d been. He made that all a lie.

Missing a leg, mustered out of the Royal Navy with no pension, and tormented by experiences of which he spoke only cryptically, Papa had become a bitter, broken man, good for nothing. He could not go back to work on the river. Young Albert had done for him while Albert senior drank away the household funds. In addition to the charring work she did by day, Mum had taken to selling matches, flowers, and pencils on the street at night to help keep the family fed. Some nights she’d be out until dawn, trying to earn.

“Common tail, you’ve become,” Papa said one morning when she came home. “I know how you earn. Don’t try to tell me different.”

He raised a hand to strike her and young Albert grabbed his wrist. Albert senior wrenched the hand loose and backhanded him with it. The boy fell, struck his head on the bed rail, and began to cry.

“If you were my son,” Papa said, his sweating, unkempt face a fright to look upon, “you wouldn’t weep so easily.”

Albert ceased to cry, and stared at his father’s crazed features, not understanding.

Papa had a brief look of shame, said sadly, “You’d be better off if I crossed the river.” Then he’d fled the room.

That had been over a year ago. Papa had never come back.

Albert didn’t look for his father in South London. He didn’t think the Thames was the river he’d meant.

If Papa still lived, having but one leg, his prospects were poor. If he’d been whole, Albert could have imagined all sorts of reasons for his disappearance. Men went missing from London all the time. No, if Papa had not died, he’d become lost on the streets or somewhere in the relief system.

Albert’s sadness for the loss of his father had slowly turned to anger.

What had he meant to say to Mum about Papa? “If he were here, willing to do his part…,” Albert began anew.

“The illness will pass,” Mum said with a stern look.

He knew that if Albert Gladwick senior stood before them in that moment, she would defend him and his worst deeds, still smitten as she was with his smile.

In his disgust at the thought, Albert nearly walked out to return to the wherry.

But then Mum looked him in the eye, said, “I have you, and you’re a good boy. You have done your best to look after me, better than I’ve done for you.”

With her words and the warmth in her eyes, he felt like a grown man, capable and honorable, a good feeling in the hard world in which he found himself.

No, he could not leave his Mum in her time of need.

Near dusk, Albert realized he’d lost an entire day that could have been used to salvage from the wherry. He fought with himself, finding his unwillingness to abandon his mother unreasonable. Still, he could think of no falsehood that would give him the time he needed to do the work at the river. Even though making his salvage from the wherry would help Mum too, he couldn’t bring himself to admit to her that he’d been lying about how he made his earnings. On his third trip that day from their lodgings to the public pump to fetch a bucket of water, he almost abandoned the errand to go to the river. Darkness had crept up on him, and he decided as he had before that the light necessary to work at the wherry would only bring unwelcome attention to the wreck in the night.

Returning to the dimly-lit interior of their room, he nearly tripped over the heavy porcelain chamber pot resting in the middle of the thin walkway between the bed and the table. The pot, rather full, needed dumping again. Tiny flecks of white swirled about in the colorless waste within.

His mother had returned to bed.

Albert placed his bucket on the open central shelf of the corner hutch, dipped water from it into a cup for Mum, and set the cup on the bedstead. Lifting the brimming chamber pot, he carefully took the vessel out and poured the fluid into the privy vault. He’d already performed the chore six times that day.

Returning to the room, he found Mum inclined in the bed, drinking from the cup he’d filled for her. Much of the liquid spilled down her stained nightshirt. Although constantly thirsty, she’d had no appetite since falling ill. Her retching produced little but a clear liquid.

“I’m hungry, Mum,” Albert said, hoping she’d send him out for food. If she did, he’d have the excuse to visit the wherry, perhaps cut a few rushes from elsewhere along the foreshore to throw atop the vessel to help keep it hidden. If he ran the whole way there and back, she might not miss him. He might even have time to stop in the marine store to sell the linen cloth.

“Bit of toke,” Mum said, her words gummy from lack of spittle. She gestured toward the upper cabinet of the hutch where she stored the edibles.

Resentfully—he felt little hunger, despite his protestation—Albert found and ate the crust that remained of a loaf of bread, the last bit of food in their room.

Not long after dark, he began to suffer a severe loosening of the bowels, with a thin, watery discharge. He tried not to think that he would soon find himself in the same condition as his mother. During a lull in the seemingly endless evacuation, he donned his nightshirt, got in the bed on the side next to the wall, and lay down beside Mum.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 7

Albert found a fitful slumber. He tossed and turned through much of the night. During a dream of scavenging the wreck of the wherry, he knew himself to be partly awake. In that half-dream, he found beautiful porcelain, and a shilling amidst the silt near the boat’s prow. He seized upon that vision of discovery, reliving it several times in an effort to give substance to the hope it seemed represent. Each time the discovery was a little different; the porcelain became table silver; the single shilling became two, then the coins became gold sovereigns.

A rumbling gut and a memory of something Papa had said about gold brought him fully awake for a moment. Albert turned to face the wall as he remembered. His father had been drunk and ranting angrily. “Gold has no worth but what the fancy of men give it. Those in the upper classes, though they have the advantage, they are not truly our betters.”

What an odd notion, Albert had thought at the time. Must be the drink—everyone knows gold is valuable.

Returning to his half-dream, he saw George Hardly approaching the wreck. Albert crouched down among the rushes, fearing he might have been seen. He scooped up a handful of mud to throw at Hardly if necessary, and held his breath, watching silently. The older boy seemed unwilling to look directly toward the area of the white lead works drain. He gave it a wide berth and moved on along the curve of the muddy foreshore.

Albert plucked the coins— now three gold sovereigns—out of the silt near the prow of the wherry, placed them in the hidden pocket inside the buttoned waistband of his breeches, and hurried away.

Half awake, he knew the vision to be pure fancy. Still, the sense of hope it gave allowed him to ignore the misery of his situation.

Since his mother no longer made an effort to keep from fouling the bed, Albert also allowed himself to let go his bowels as he lay there. He would help Mum clean the mattress ticking and stuff it with fresh straw later. For a short time, he found deeper slumber.

~ ~ ~

Fully awake at last as morning light entered the sooty window of their lodgings, Albert rocked in the damp, chilly bedclothes, unable to gather the will to rise. Finally, the wetness beneath him and the malodorous night air in the bed drove him to his feet. Although he felt worse than he had the night before—truly wrung out—Albert had to find his strength. With Mum down with illness, providing the daily victuals fell to him.

Again, he thought resentfully of his father.

Even if he were about, he’d be no help. Good riddance.

Mum remained asleep, lying on her back. She slept so peacefully, even her usual soft snoring had ceased. Her lower left leg hung over the edge of the mattress. Albert lifted the stiff gray limb and placed it back in the bed. Her skin felt cold to his touch. Trying not to disturb her for fear that she’d keep him from leaving, he pulled the untidy bed clothes over her, tucking them up around her shoulders and down around her dry feet.

A hollow ache in his gut told him to eat, but they had nothing left. Just as well—he had to make his salvage, sell what he could, hopefully earn enough to buy some meat or fish. He would eat later.

His muscles moving with reluctance, Albert removed his sodden nightshirt and dressed himself for the day. Fluid ran down his legs and into his shoes as he opened the door. Thinking of the embarrassment he would experience if anyone saw he’d wet his breeches gave him little pause. He stepped from the lodgings and staggered along Narrow Street, then south on Bridge Road.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 8

The Thames had made Albert ill again. Even as he struggle to return to the water’s edge, he bore the shame of having brought the sickness from the river to Mum as well.

Common wisdom said that illness came from bad smells, those of the river and the night air of privies and the countless other places of rot and decay. Some said that illnesses didn’t come from bad odors and instead from creatures in the water so small they couldn’t be seen. Albert’s few attempts to imagine such beings, were not frightening enough to be believable.

He might have blamed the grundylows, but had somehow decided they were pure make-believe.

No, the sickness is the Silent Highwayman’s doings, he thought, trying unsuccessfully to cast aside his feeling of guilt.

A few who saw him struggling along the street gave concerned looks, yet nobody stopped to ask after his welfare. He didn’t expect any attention or help. So many children wandered the streets, ragged, ill, neglected, and unwanted. At least he had his Mum.

Albert passed the Limehouse Basin, crossed over two locks, took a right into Cuba Street, headed for the West India Docks Pier.

With little distance to go before reaching the path that led down to the water’s edge, he heard, “Little boy!”

The voice came from behind him. He twisted his stiff neck around to see George Hardly emerging from between two warehouses about a hundred yards away.

Albert hurried forward, his throat clenching on dryness as he tried to swallow, the pulse in his throat suddenly rapid, his head clearing even as he felt a separation from his body.

“Where are you going?” Hardly shouted. “Stop, or you’ll be sorry.”

The sound of rapid footsteps came from behind.

Having taken that trek so many times in recent days, Albert was able to move in an unthinking manner, somehow keeping his frantic feet under him. He dreaded the twenty-foot climb down the steep embankment beside the pier almost as much as he feared George Hardly catching up. If he got to the water, he might hide among the stumps of old pilings beneath the pier.

A group of laborers parted to allow Albert to stumble past on the footway. Shortly after, Hardly’s rapid steps ended abruptly and with a short outburst, as if bodies had collided.

“You want to take more care,” someone said in anger.

“Out of my way,” came Hardly’s voice.

“He’s got a knife!” came another voice.

“Yeah, but it’s such a little one,” came a third, with a scoffing chuckle.

Albert didn’t look back. Where the cobblestones of Cuba Street ran out, he dodged to the left around the iron pier, slowed, and started down the eroded bank seam.

“Let me by,” Hardly shouted, then came the sounds of a scuffle and a sharp cry.

Albert tried to take more care with his steps. Some of the loose granite cobbles of the road had tumbled partway down the steep incline and become wedged in the seam long ago, providing footholds. Albert put his weight on one and it gave way. He rolled sideways, hit the rough dirt to his left, and tumbled forward ten feet through the air.

Landing headfirst on the dense sand at the river’s edge, he heard a loud crack in his neck and shoulder, and the world around him lost some of its color, everything going gray as he became still.

The full Mudlarks book itself, illustrated throughout by Alan, is available now on Amazon, and directly from the publisher through the links below:

mudlark ebook – ifd publishing

mudlark paperback – ifd publishing

Did you know that until recently, you were still able to get a ‘mudlarks’ permit for the Thames? £85 a year for an adult, no digging deeper than three inches. True!

Anyone searching the tidal Thames foreshore from Teddington to the Thames Barrier – in any way for any reason – must hold a current foreshore permit from the Port of London Authority. This includes all searching, metal detecting, ‘beachcombing’, scraping and digging.

Port of London Authority

And why do we tell you this? Because now we continue our serialisation of Alan M Clark‘s short illustrated novella Mudlarks And The Silent Highwayman, with three new segments today.

For segments 1 & 2, see http://greydogtales.com/blog/mudlarks-and-the-silent-highwayman/

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 3

Albert couldn’t go home until his clothes had dried some or his mum would know he’d been in the river.

He slipped the cloth inside his shirt for safekeeping, and made his way along the foreshore. Finding himself headed south on the western edge of the Isle of Dogs, he decided to risk a quick exploration among the rushes growing near the drain for the white lead works, a good spot to check since most of the scavengers avoided the area. While much of the foreshore of the Thames offered a firm gravel or sand surface at low tide, the stretch he presently walked held pockets of deep, thick mud that made progress difficult.

Approaching the structure that supported the drain, he saw an unusual dark shape among the oversized grasses, one that he told himself was likely mere shadow. As he got close enough to see between the foliage, the doubt protecting him from unreasonable hope began to fall away. Indeed, the shape held true form and mass—he’d found the wreck of a clinker-built wherry, much like the one his father had once piloted to carry fares up and down, to and fro, along the Thames when he was a waterman.

Pushing the long leaves out of his way, Albert made out the shapes of several crates, a metal chest, and a firkin, all held fast in the mud within the boat.

Though he wanted to shout for joy, he knew better than to draw attention to the find. Instead, he stood holding his head, his heart thumping giddily in his chest. Plainly, the boat had sat unnoticed for a while, lying on its side, half-buried in the silt among the rushes. He imagined the vessel got free during recent wind storms, possibly at night while no one was watching. In his mind’s eye, he saw it wander down-stream beneath dim, flickering stars until it fetched up on the foreshore beside him.

How might he present the possible treasure trove to his mother without her knowing where it came from?

That he did not have her permission to work the river had always rankled. “It’s too dangerous,” she’d said the first time he’d brought it up. “The grundylows don’t just spread disease—they like to pull children down. You want to be the next to go missing, turn up drowned?”

Albert had told Turvey what his mother said. He’d laughed. “They’re not grundylows! They’re grindylows. The mums of all scavengers tell that tall tale to keep their children from the water’s edge.” Turvey shook his head, giggling. “You are a gulpy one.”

“I didn’t say I believed!”

“You needn’t have done. I’ve seen the way you look at the water.”

That forced Albert to reason it out. If there were such creatures drowning mudlarks, Turvey would have gone missing long ago. Albert had never seen anyone so willing to venture out into the river.

With all that, he still imagined the creatures just beneath the glare on the rippling surface whenever he dangled his legs close to the water, or while wading out into it.

Despite the childish fears, Albert was simply drawn to the water and scavenging. The possibility of finding unexpected reward held his interest like nothing else had in his short life. And ever since his father had run off, a year past, Albert had thought he should make decisions for himself about how to earn. After all, he would soon be a man.

Knowing how much Papa’s departure had hurt her, Albert didn’t want to challenge his mum or bring further grief by disappointing her, so he’d kept his activities at the river a secret.

He knew what she’d say: “You’ll be charged as a thief!”

Yet here he’d made a real find, at long last—valuable goods, gold, jewels perhaps!

Albert pried at the crates trying to get them open.

The landlord hasn’t been paid in almost a month. She knows we must take every chance to earn. Yet I must know what I’ve found before I say anything, or she’ll become cross with me. If it’s worth enough, if it’s wonderful, Mum’ll have a change of heart.

The lids to the crates were nailed down tight.

“Bloody butt and six toes,” he cursed aloud. Then, fearing that someone might have heard, he calmed himself and looked up and down the foreshore. Though he saw no one nearby, he crouched lower amidst the rushes and felt himself sink further into the mud.

He abandoned the crates in favor of the metal chest. That, he decided, was the most promising container. The thing was a foot square and half a foot deep. Trying unsuccessfully to open it, he found a keyhole and decided it was locked. That meant it indeed held something valuable. He wiped some of the grit and mud from its surface. Seeing that where exposed, the metal gleamed brightly, he stopped.

How might he keep it concealed while carrying it? He thought that heaping more mud on the chest would help disguise the shape, but anyone seeing him would know he carried a large object. Though he’d be able to lift the heavy box, he couldn’t run with it if spotted.

Likewise the crates and firkin would be heavy and stand out if he tried to carry them away. Too bad he’d lost his heavy canvas sack in the fight with the tree limb. He needed to get the containers open and find a new sack to put things in, one he could dirty up and throw over his shoulder. A shapeless thing like that—no one would suspect he carried anything of value. The only other sack he had big enough hung on a hook back at the lodgings.

With the shadows grown long, Albert knew the hour had become late. He didn’t have what he needed to open the containers and reveal his treasure, let alone haul it all away with him.

He sat back and surveyed the scene again. Resting high on the foreshore beside the drain, surrounded with dense orange rushes, and hidden within the deepening shadows, the wherry wasn’t easy to spot. With the unusual color of the plants, and a fear that the drain exhausted poisons into the river, most of the scavengers, including George Hardly, avoided the area.

The coming high tide wasn’t likely to dislodge any of the find from the mud’s tight grip, yet Albert had small hope that the wherry would remain hidden for long. Eventually, even if Hardly didn’t find it, someone on nearby Hutching’s Wharf would see the wreck and investigate, or another river scavenger unconcerned about the drain would stumble upon the site. Albert would return with a lantern to aid his salvage in the dark, but feared that would only draw attention to the find.

No, he had to go home. Mum would be in their lodgings in Narrow Street, preparing a meal with what little they had. The salvage would have to wait until morning. Hopefully, no one would stumbled upon it in the night.

Albert pulled his feet from the sucking mud. Placing them on the firmest patches of the foreshore, he made his way north toward home. One misplaced step found his left leg penetrating the muck half-way to the buttoned knee of his breeches. He wriggled and tugged it loose, and kept moving.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 4

Filthy and panting heavily in the chill autumn air, Albert arrived at the shadows under the West India Docks Pier. He was relieved to find his shoes, socks, and jacket still in the spot where he’d hidden them; a hole beneath a collapsed stone stairway that began at the base of the eroded embankment. Though his shoes had become hopelessly ragged—holes in their soles and the right one missing its heel—another scavenger would gladly take them. The leather alone could be sold to makers of Prussian-blue pigment.

Mr. Halpert, the marine store dealer, would buy almost any common item found along the river, if only for a tiny sum. He’d take anything made of metal, any type of bone, any spun or woven materials, as long as the items weren’t too rotten. Those who made fertilizer would buy items of paper, wood, or small dead animals.

Albert took the easiest route back to street-level, a steep erosion seam, worn into the crumbling bank by weather and the passage of countless others like him.

Seeing Thomas Conway standing near the cast iron bridge of the pier, Albert hid behind a stack of containers. Not wanting the bother of talking to the boy, he would wait for him to turn and look away before crossing the road.

The tow-headed child, a year younger than Albert, stood about five feet from the where the bridge met the river bank at the end of Cuba Street. Thomas craned his neck as if looking for someone. He seemed unaware that he was in the way, as a group of merchants moved around him. One of the gentlemen smacked him on the back of the head as he went by. Thomas stumbled under the blow and ran into a laborer carrying a heavy coil of cable. The man shoved the boy to one side, nearly knocking him down. The lad took the rough treatment without complaint.

New to the river banks and green, the younger boy was a nuisance. His clothing—gray woolen jacket, blue cotton shirt, brown woolen breeches, and gray socks—though worn and patched many times over, didn’t look ragged. His brown shoes had been carefully repaired with pieces of black leather. Someone looked out for the boy.

“Where’s the best place to search for valuables,” Thomas had asked on the day they’d met.

“Salvage turns up most anywhere along the river,” Albert said, with an indefinite wave toward the water. “The thing is to be the first to find it. Take care not to anger the others with prying questions.”

The advice did little good. The younger boy tried to befriend and question all the other scavengers in a similar way. He had purple bruises and a black eye after approaching George Hardly. Then, Thomas’s father, a frightening Irishman who earned writing gallows ballads, came to the river and set the scavengers straight on how his son should be treated.

Thereafter, none of the boys, nor the few girls who scavenged the river, would talk to Thomas. All, that is, except for Albert, and he made certain no one saw him speak to the lad.

When Thomas finally turned and looked away, Albert slipped from behind the containers and hurried into Cuba Street, mixing with those walking beside the warehouse to his right. He thought he’d got by unnoticed.

No such luck. “Albert!” Thomas cried. Something about his tone suggested he’d found the one he sought.

Albert stopped, looked around, saw no one of any concern watching. He walked back around to the western wall of the warehouse and faced the river as the boy approached.

Thomas held a single leaf torn from a newspaper or a magazine between two of his grubby fingers, as if he didn’t want to hold the page tightly. A breeze tried to snatch the paper away. With a grimace of reluctance, he added more fingers to his grip.

“My mother give me this. It’s from Punch. It’s old, but she says he’s still on the river, looking to nail children, and take them to the underworld.”

Albert looked at the illustration on the yellowing, wrinkled page. The engraving depicted a phantom in the form of a cloaked skeleton, rowing a boat on the river. Dead animals bobbed on the nearby surface of the water. “Looks a bit like Hardly, does he?”

“You don’t think…?” Thomas asked, his eyes wide with fear.

“No,” Albert chuckled to hear the boy take the suggestion seriously. “What are the words beneath the picture,” he asked, embarrassed to reveal he couldn’t read.

“‘The Silent Highwayman: Your Money or your Life.’” Thomas’s dirt-smudged brow furrowed with concern.

“He the ghost of a waterman?” Albert thought about his father, presumed dead.

“No, he’s not like us—never lived among us—an evil on the water, is all. Mother says he puts the bad smells in the river, the ones what make illness. Then he harvests the children as die, takes them away with him.”

That sounded something like what Mum had said about illnesses.

Albert’s father, Albert Senior or just Papa, had talked about a ferryman of the dead, named Charon. Papa’s mother, whose family had come from Greece, had filled him full of ancient Greek tales that he shared with young Albert. “Belief in Charon is very old,” he’d said. “My mum thought him mere fancy. But serving in the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, I met some who still believe we cross over a river to reach the afterlife. Told one fellow I’d been a waterman and he looked at me like he were seeing a ghost, had no more to do with me after that.”

With his father’s dread description of the gaunt Charon, Albert had found a fear of one day meeting up with the ferryman. Since his father had abandoned the family, Albert tried not to think about the things he’d said.

Thomas’s picture of the Silent Highwayman, had resurrected the foreboding, and Albert got a chill.

Since beginning his work of mucking about in the river, he’d become ill numerous times, mostly ailments of the gut, yet he’d also had sore eyes and skin, strange rashes, and cuts on his feet, legs, and hands that had swelled with corruption and given him fevers before slowly healing. He’d succeeded in hiding most of that from Mum.

Albert looked out on the water for the Silent Highwayman, glanced around the vicinity of the pier again to make certain they weren’t watched. George Hardly stood out in the water two hundred yards away, poking around the weed and refuse caught up on the stump of a rotten dolphin.

Turning back to Thomas, Albert saw the boy’s eyes brimmed, tears glistening, ready to fall.

Is he truly so fearful?

“She doesn’t want me to work the river,” Thomas said. “I-I don’t want to believe her.”

Thomas’s mother didn’t want him working the foreshore no doubt for the same reasons Mum didn’t want Albert doing it: the risks of disease and accidents. And Thomas’s mother was trying to dissuade her son with fear, much the way Mum had tried to scare Albert. Mum knew nothing of the dangers of the likes of Hardly. Albert had told her he worked as a pure finder, collecting dog shit from the streets for the Rouel Tannery in Bermondsey.

“Do you believe he’s on the river?” Thomas asked, waving the illustration in his hand. He gave an impression he might not want the answer. “Have you heard anyone say?”

Albert wanted to point to Hardly—still poking around the rotten dolphin—and say, He’s the one you should worry about. Instead, he decided he should try having a hard heart. Thomas’s fear of the phantom might keep him off the river. “A word or two…”

Thomas’s look of concern deepened and his eyes grew wide. He let go the magazine page. The paper flipped over and lifted on the breeze, floating around the corner of the warehouse.

The younger boy turned the corner too, and ran away from the river along Cuba Street.

The page danced upward through the hazy air, flying northward. Though Albert had a chuckle watching the boy run, he didn’t like encouraging Thomas’s fear.

Mum had done the same to him, putting the grundylows in his head. Whether the fears were well-founded or pure fancy, Albert did have a feeling that something more terrible than George Hardly made sinister mischief along the river.

Occupied with his dark thoughts, he sat, donned his tattered socks and raggedy shoes, and trudged home.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 5

Mum was up and down in the night many times to use the chamber pot. Trying to sleep in the bed next to her, while full of excitement over the hope of the salvage, Albert got little rest.

In the morning, to his frustration, he found himself attending Mum in her illness.

“I am expected to deliver my collection to the Tannery’s man this morning,” he told her.

“Before you go, fetch water for me,” she said.

Seeing that they were indeed out of fresh water, Albert winced, but dutifully picked up the bucket and went out. The closest public pump was in the passage to White’s Rents. He ran there, about a quarter mile, then wobbled his way back home along the stone streets as fast as possible, trying not to spill.

Mum drank deeply of the water upon his return. “You must steady me to the privy and wait to aid my return,” she said. “I’ve become light in the head, and fear a fall.”

She remained in the crooked wooden privy behind their lodgings long enough that he might have run to the wreck of the wherry and returned. Not that that would have given him the time he needed, but the thought fed his frustration. Just as he considered making his excuses and leaving her to fend for herself, she stepped out and grasped his steadying arm.

Over the next few hours, he found no reasonable excuse to leave her without admitting his goal and revealing that he scavenged the river.

Mum was in a desperate state. He continued to fetch and tote for her through the afternoon, as she had little strength to do for herself. She moaned and writhed, complained of muscle cramps, and retched to no effect in the basin several times. When she lay back on the bed, to his alarm, he saw a rapid pulsing of the vessels in her neck.

“Shall I get someone to help?” he asked, “Aunt Gert is on my way to meet the man what pays for my findings. I could tell her to come help you.” If he got away from his mother, he might look in on his find. Aunt Gertrude lived in a room in Tooke Street on the Isle of Dogs, very close to the wrecked wherry. At the least, he could go to the marine store—not nearly as far away—and sell his half of the linen cloth he and Turvey had found.

“Your findings will not go bad. The tannery can wait. Aunt Gertrude has her own problems, and I need you.”

Albert felt ashamed of himself for trying so hard to deceive his mother.

Although he had seen Mum looking rough when ill before, he’d never feared her beauty would not return as he did presently. Her rich auburn hair was plastered to her head with perspiration, dark circles grew under her beautiful eyes, and her soft skin looked increasingly pale and gray. Albert didn’t know what to do for her. He grudgingly accepted her need to have him nearby.

Segments 6 & 7 follow in a couple of days. You can also see the full story unfolding daily here:

https://ifdpublishing.com/blog/f/mudlarks-and-the-silent-highwayman

The Mudlarks book itself, illustrated throughout by Alan, is available now on Amazon, and directly from the publisher through the links below:

mudlark ebook – ifd publishing

mudlark paperback – ifd publishing

In which I provide sundry reflections on being a writer and getting published which turn out to be quite irrelevant to your own situation, and we all laugh merrily…

Let’s start with the cheerful stuff. It’s a harsh game, writing; an unreliable ‘you may get lucky, you may not’ sort of business. It doesn’t generally pay well, nor is it a reliable income when crisis looms. And don’t be fooled – no one really needs your work, even if a few might occasionally want it – ‘occasionally’ being the key word there, and ‘want’ being rather relative.

Despite your inspiration, your commitment or your craftsmanship, the finished product will frequently not achieve the quality level you yourself set when you started. Fine ideas on envelopes turn out to make pedestrian short stories and aimless novels. Those tales of yours that you do like are too literary, or too pulp, or too ‘not what we’re looking for at the moment’. Oh, and they’re also too short, or too long, or too in the middle – whatever isn’t required right now.

As for publishing deals, editors may make unreasonable demands, and contracts may be bizarre or unfair. Agents won’t reply, or will send you a form email ‘no thanks’. Smaller presses will fold, go on hiatus or implode; larger presses will go off you and abandon the third book of your trilogy. Everything will take far longer than you’d hoped, and sometimes it won’t even pay in the end anyway.

Someone popular with the literary critics and the media influencers will receive far more headlines for less skilful work than yours. Productive authors will use the same idea/theme/character as you came up with, but they’ll be in print before you got round to even picking up your pencil; most people will never know your best work exists anyway, so won’t be able to buy it or comment.

Decent targeted marketing will be too expensive, random marketing will achieve nothing, and most of your review requests and press releases will be ignored. Your friends and family won’t read much if any of your work, despite what they say on the phone. They’re already bored listening to you rattle on, and it’s probably not their sort of thing…

I, greydog, am nobody. A minor constructor of weird fiction and period supernatural stories, plus the odd pastiche – and an awful lot of nonsense and parody for amusement (mostly my own). An ephemeral fish in an ill-defined pond… but here I am, on the fourth anniversary of getting into print in the weird/supernatural field.

And I feel fine.

Because this is not a Council of Despair. It’s the Call of Reality. Part of the reason I feel fine is precisely because I know all the stuff I just mentioned. I live alongside it, rather than beating my head or my fists to a pulp against the nearest wall. After all, I’m the one who would have to mend and clean the wall afterwards. I’m not a very good stoic, but I do like me a bit of Seneca:

No man has been shattered by the blows of Fortuna unless he was first deceived by her favours. Those who loved her gifts as if they were their own for ever, who wanted to be admired on account of them, are laid low and grieve when the false and transient pleasures desert their vain and childish minds, ignorant of every stable pleasure. But the man who is not puffed up in good times does not collapse either when they change. His fortitude is already tested and he maintains a mind unconquered in the face of either condition: for in the midst of prosperity he has tried his own strength against adversity.

I was fifty eight years old when my first weird tale first published, in 2016. I must have had some forty or fifty paid stories published since then, almost all of them substantial pieces, plus a novel and a novella. I’ve also edited four anthologies, and seven issues of Occult Detective Magazine. Which means that if you are twenty eight, thirty eight or forty eight years old, and still relatively healthy, but believe it’s too late to get anywhere, shut up (I mean this fairly politely, of course). You don’t know. You can’t know. You could abandon writing completely for a decade or more, and then find yourself in my position. You darn kids…

As for meticulous planning, my first sale was the first story I submitted, a YA horror story, to a Texan press I’d never heard of, for $25. I had no intention of writing YA horror – it was an opportunity, and I had a suitable idea. It wasn’t a bad story. I followed that with a Lovecraftian weird tale set in Alaska, and a 28,000 word Last Edwardian novella set mostly in Yorkshire. I knew right from the start that it was a Good Idea to get paid for being seen, rather than working for the old ‘exposure’.

Speaking of knowing things, if you’re a white male, don’t piddle on about there being no markets, all your chances being wrecked by inclusiveness, political correctness and so on, also shut up (not so polite). I may have a somewhat quirky and colourful approach to life, but if an unknown Yorkshireman the colour of an uncooked pork chop who was almost sixty could get published, that bit probably isn’t the issue.

But whatever I say about getting a load of stuff published, those two or three stories of yours which someone else reads, and genuinely gets, may be the ones which matter. Despite the fact that I write for money, there are personal messages or comments I’ve had which encouraged me more than a hundred sales. After all, there are tripe and trite pot-boilers on Amazon which have multitudes of high star reviews; that status may be good for awareness or income, but it’s not a quality mark in itself.

I’m fairly sure that I was lucky – and I was there at the right time, and flexible. I really am no authority on being a writer (this isn’t that sort of article), but if you play the game at all, you should know what you need to do already:

1. Read lots of decent prose, plays and verse by other people, especially not in the field in which you write;
2. Observe and/or interact with real human beings rather than relying on media portrayals and stereotypes;
3. Learn at least basic grammar and punctuation;
4. Sit down and write;
5. Pause, think, then go back and do it properly this time;
6. Send it to a market that might want it, in the format they want, by the due date.

Those six not-so-stunning secrets are likely to get something of yours into print, somewhere. Eventually. They’ll give you at least the two or three stories that someone out there appreciates. Whatever else you do – writing groups, creative writing courses, panel attendance – is extra, and up to you. Useful for some, less relevant for others. Oh, and buying extra software packages won’t solve your problems if you can’t manage the above.

We live with images of writers – scraggy drink-and-drug-riddled recluses in attics; tiresome literary sorts sharing their latest manuscript with Jocasta, their charming wife, in their airy home; disaffected householders slamming out twenty novels a year and gaming the review systems… whatever. You are the sort of writer you make yourself.

I’m pretty much the sort of writer I was four years ago, but more aware of the potential disasters, the flaws in the system, the cruelty of the game – and better for it. And should you meet with Fortuna, and be briefly blessed by her, I shall be there to borrow a fiver before she changes her mind…

The seventh secret of getting published, by the way is: Don’t be an arsehole.

Veteran author Tim Waggoner has many, rather more useful comments on being a writer, and writing in general, on his blog, such as this one here: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/2019/11/let-it-go.html

John Linwood Grant is a pro writer/editor from Yorkshire, UK, with some fifty short stories published in a wide range of magazines/anthologies over the last few years, including Lackington’s Magazine, Vastarien, Weirdbook, and Space & Time. He writes disquieting dark fiction, particularly Edwardian supernatural tales. ‘His Heart Shall Speak No More’ was picked for Best New Horror #29, and his novel ‘13 Miller’s Court’ (with Alan M Clark) won the 2019 Ripperology Books award. He is the editor of Occult Detective Magazine (with Dave Brzeski) and various anthologies. He is fanatical about lurchers, and owns his own beard.

Something different now, O best beloved – Victorian life by the Thames, and those who searched the riverbanks to make a living, looking for discarded or abandoned items. With a distinct touch of the supernatural, of course. For it’s our pleasure  over the next couple of weeks to take part in the serialisation of Alan M Clark‘s short novella Mudlarks And The Silent Highwayman.

We’ll be posting two segments every two or three days, along with Alan’s extensive range of interior illustrations, created specially for the project – plus the occasional bits of trivia and historical notes.

A HARD LIFE BY THE THAMES

In 1884 London, 12-year-old Albert Gladwyck must decide whether to follow his generous heart or learn to harden it in the harsh world in which he lives. As a River Thames scavenger, he has made the find of a lifetime, a wrecked boat full of goods, washed up on the Isle of Dogs and hidden from view. To save himself and his Mum from severe poverty, he must try to make salvage from the wreck before the other mudlarks find it, before the bully, George Hardly, catches up to him, before illness and death from the poisonous river have a say in the matter.

This lavishly illustrated novelette gives a glimpse into a time when the pauper child was ubiquitous in the city. It is the fanciful tale about the choices a desperate child might make in such an environment to survive.

TRIVIA: Some may already know the term ‘mudlark’ from the 1950 British film The Mudlark (which was actually based on a novel written by an American, Theodore Bonnet).

“A young street urchin (Andrew Ray), half-starved and homeless, finds a cameo containing the likeness of Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne). Not recognizing her, he is told that she is the “mother of all England”. Taking the remark literally, he journeys to Windsor Castle to see her.

“When he is caught by the palace guards, the boy is mistakenly thought to be part of an assassination plot against the Queen. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Alec Guinness) realises that the boy is innocent and pleads for him in Parliament, delivering a speech that indirectly criticizes the Queen for withdrawing from public life. The Queen is infuriated by the speech, but she is genuinely moved upon meeting the boy for the first time, and once again enters public life.”

“Alan M. Clark has a remarkable ability to evoke the past as a tangible, breathing thing, immersing the reader in times long gone – and thankfully long gone, for most. In this novella, he combines his keen eye for period with a sense of menace and melancholy which yet bears a glimmer of hope. A moving read.”

—John Linwood Grant, author of A Persistence of Geraniums & The Assassin’s Coin

“Dirty Father Thames” Cartoon from Punch Magazine October, 1848

Here’s the poem which accompanied the cartoon:

Filthy river, filthy river,
Foul from London to the Nore,
What art thou but one vast gutter,
One tremendous common shore?

All beside thy sludgy waters,
All beside thy reeking ooze,
Christian folks inhale mephitis,
Which thy bubbly bosom brews.

All her foul abominations
Into thee the City throws;
These pollutions, ever churning,
To and fro thy current flows.

And from thee is brewed our porter –
Thee, thou gully, puddle, sink!
Thou, vile cesspool, art the liquor
Whence is made the beer we drink!

Thou too hast a conservator,
He who fills the civic chair;
Well does he conserve thee, truly,
Does he not, my good Lord Mayor?

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 1

Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs

October 30, 1884

Half-submerged in the murky River Thames, twelve-year-old Albert Gladwick struggled to keep the fallen tree limb from getting away. His new friend, Turvey, worked to free a long, torn length of blue linen from the branch’s twiggy clutches. If they could free it, they’d earn perhaps three pence selling the fabric. Hugging the limb under his right arm and leaning forward, digging his toes into the mud and grit of the river bottom, Albert fought the current that was trying to drag the heavy branch downstream. Though he did his best to ignore his imagination, he couldn’t help thinking that unseen creatures moved through the water surrounding him.

Turvey leapt again and again to break the twigs holding the cloth, his splashing about so vigorous the foul water’s faint odor of slops rose up around them. Alberts mother, Chelsey, called that smell a pong. “It’s the foul breath of the grundylows, what live in the water,” she’d told him. “Bubbles rising from the river, that’s their breath. It’s how most illness comes into the world. You see that, move swiftly to get away.”

The insistent current pulled Albert upright, then backwards until he lost his footing on the river bottom. Feeling something brush along his right hip, he cried out and let go.

Holding onto the fabric, Turvey leaned back, bracing himself to hang on. Albert twisted around and sloshed forward to lend a hand. He hoped the action took him away from whatever might be after him. Before he could assist his friend, the last few twigs holding the cloth broke away and the limb continued moving downstream.

The water calmer, Albert saw nothing but green-brown light twisting in the current. I don’t believe in Grundylows, he told himself, and turned to the other boy. “You saved us a mad scramble through the water.”

Turvey reeled in the sodden linen. His bad eye bulged from its socket as he grinned.

Albert became aware that the weight of the large canvas sack he routinely carried over his shoulder was missing. Its makeshift strap had been loose. Empty but for a piece of roofing lead he’d found earlier, the sack had surely gone downriver with the branch. Albert cursed his damnable bad luck, then quickly turned away from the thought.

“A good thing one of us can hold fast,” Turvey said with a scoffing laugh.

Though they’d known each other a mere two days, Albert had got used to his friend’s jeering remarks. “Right, I can’t keep a grip on much today—lost my sack in the fight.”

“Serves you right.”

Albert swallowed the insults that collected on his tongue—none of them had been clever enough. A rather earnest child, he wasn’t practiced at the good-natured jibes his friend enjoyed. He’d work on that. In the meantime, all he could do was to take the abuse in stride.

“Badly stained,” Turvey said, “but not much rot.” He shook water from the blue fabric, folded it roughly, and placed it in his own collection sack, which was more of a leather bucket with small holes punched in it to allow liquid to flow out.

The boys slogged their way back to the bank where they’d been sitting when they first spied the cloth in the branch floating by.

MUDLARKS AND THE SILENT HIGHWAYMAN

SEGMENT 2

“Since we both spotted the cloth about the same time,” Albert said, “it’s only fair we share what it earns.”

“You did your best, I suppose,” Turvey said with a smirk.

Despite the loss of the canvas sack, Albert had enjoyed having the help and the companionship, something he rarely had in scavenging. “What if we got the others—all of us scavengers—to search the river together, then shared the profits of what we found? We’d do better than we each do alone, guarding our secrets.”

Turvey screwed up his face, glared at Albert with his one good eye. “Start with that and you’ll see Hardly’s family taking charge,” he said. “Our freedom will be gone. There’ll be those seeking favor and we’ll end up with quotas hard to meet. That’s what the guttersnipes as run with kidsmen suffer. You want to go up against George Hardly, or worse, each day?”

George Hardly caused no end of trouble along the north bank near Limehouse. He was tall for his thirteen years, skeletally thin, yet strong; a cruel boy with a burn scar making a knotty burl out of the cheek on the right side of his face. Stories went about that his father, a tosher and bone grubber, regularly beat him with a leather strap, and had disfigured the boy’s face while in a drunken rage.

A week earlier, Hardly had snuck up on Albert, swept his legs out from under him, kicked him in the gut, and taken a modest find: the half-rotten remains of a mongrel. Unable to get up, Albert had writhed in pain in the sand and gravel. Hardly leaned over him, put his scowling, scarred face too close to Albert’s. “Won’t be long,” he growled, “you want to search this part of the river, you’ll all be working for me. I’ll get a piece of everything you and the others find.”

Albert kept a wary eye out to avoid further contact with the bully boy. Just the day before, he’d experienced a withering feeling in his gut—an echo of the pain the older boy had inflicted—as Hardly’s eyes found him from some distance away along the foreshore. Engaged in threatening another boy at the time, the bully hadn’t followed as Albert fled, climbing the bank toward the street.

Hardly did not own that part of the river yet, but it seemed only a matter of time before he did. He had older brothers who plundered barges in the night and sold the stolen goods through local family people.

“No,” Turvey continued, “we’re better off going our separate ways so the Hardly’s can’t keep up.” He pulled the blue linen cloth from his leather bucket, spread it out, and folded it in half more carefully.

Albert could see what he meant, and nodded his agreement, yet that must not have been enough.

“You have some foolish notions,” Turvey said, pulling out a clasp knife.

Albert stepped back, thinking he’d lost his share of the cloth and his new friend.

“Goodwill is fine for the well-to-do,” Turvey said. “I need a mate what’s hard enough to defend his own.” He cut the cloth with the knife along the fold, handed one half to Albert, then turned and walked off with the other.

Dumbfounded, yet relieved their disagreement hadn’t come to blows or worse, Albert watched him go. Then outrage made him call out, “We’d’ve got more selling it in one piece.”

Turvey didn’t respond.

I’d have done better to insult him more.

Friends and loyalties were difficult on the banks of the Thames. Mostly boys between the ages of seven and fifteen, the Mudlarks were secretive creatures protecting territories, each a solitary sort of child. Like Albert, they were from families one step away from destitution. All the children he knew did some sort of work to contribute income to their family households. Even the children fortunate enough to go to the Ragged Schools did some sort of piecework at night. Among such poor children on the river banks, the competition, good-natured or otherwise, was to be expected.

I should harden my heart if I want more friends, he thought. The idea seemed to go against an effort to find and keep companions, but he decided he’d have to consider it even so.

Albert expected he wouldn’t be speaking or spending time with Turvey again for a long while. Already within the year, he’d lost two good friends to fever. A familiar loneliness grew in his breast.

Segments 3 and 4 follow in a couple of days. You can also see the story unfold daily here:

https://ifdpublishing.com/blog/f/mudlarks-and-the-silent-highwayman

The entire book, illustrated throughout by Alan, is available now on Amazon, and directly from the publisher through the links below:

mudlark ebook – ifd publishing

mudlark paperback – ifd publishing

Should you care for more than just a touch of the unnatural in the same period, John Linwood Grant’s novel The Assassin’s Coin, featuring the fearful Mr Dry and the psychic Catherine Weatherhead, unfolds between 1886 and 1888. Alongside Alan Clark’s The Prostitute’s Price, on the life of Mary Kelly, it tells of the final days of the Whitechapel Murders.  The two novels have also been interleaved by the authors to create 13 Miller’s Court. All are available in paperback and ebook.