Pax Britannia: Human Nature by Jonathan Green Page A

the rest of the effluent produced by the city.
    Ulysses paused again. That old familiar feeling that was both reassuring and at the same time unnerving, had returned; his near-prescient sixth sense scratching away at the edges of his conscious mind.
    "Tell me, Nimrod, do you get the feeling that we're being watched?" he said.
    "Indubitably, sir."
    "Then we have their attention."
    "I should say so, sir."
    "Excellent. Then let's be having them, as the Peelers would put it."
    The two men continued on their way up Old Montague Street, navigating the bustling crowds, Ulysses looking like a fop out to find some diverting entertainment for the evening, with his fixer-manservant at hand to keep an eye on him; just the sort of image they wanted to portray, in fact.
    Ulysses had the manner of a hedonistic cad down pat, quite possibly because that was what he himself had once been. The enticements offered by the ladies of night were not totally unknown to him, as the infamous Queen of Hearts herself could vouch.
    But that wasn't what he was looking for tonight as he enjoyed the change of scene from the more conservative streets of Mayfair and Bloomsbury. Whitechapel had a look all of its own, its walls plastered with layer upon layer of bill posters - promoting everything from the Chinese magician Lao Shen's show at the Palace Theatre to the new panacea of the modern age, Dr Feelgood's Tonic Stout - until Ulysses could quite believe that it was these layers of paper and glue that were all that was holding some of these crumbling tenements together.
    And then, the dull throb of his subconscious became a white hot flare of awareness, just as Ulysses felt what might have been someone simply brushing past his coat tails, but wasn't.
    He spun round, fast as a pouncing panther and grabbed the child by the wrist in a grip of iron. The urchin - his clothes rags, his face a smear of soot, the whites of his eyes almost all that was visible beneath the grime, a mop of filthy, lice-ridden hair contained within a cloth cap that was obviously too big for him - squealed like a stuck pig. Meanwhile, a waist-coated monkey, with an ugly, old man's face, jumped up and down on the boy's shoulder shrieking, tugging at the string the boy was still holding fast in his free hand.
    Ulysses bent low, eyes blazing and he looked into the boy's terrified pale face. His devilish gleeful grin only made his aspect all the more terrifying as far as the cowering child was concerned.
    A triumphant laugh escaped Ulysses' lips. "Got you!" he growled.

Chapter Five
     
    The House of Monkeys
     
    "So, Sidney, where do you want to begin?"
    The boy put down his tankard, containing a double measure of gin, but did not relinquish his grip on the handle.
    "Don't send me back to the spike, sir. Please, sir. Not that, sir."
    "No one said anything about the workhouse, did they Nimrod?" Ulysses said calmly, regarding the boy's anxious expression with something somewhere between suspicion and almost paternal concern.
    His manservant muttered something under his breath that obviously wasn't really intended for his master's ears, and continued to nurse his hand. The monkey had bitten him when he had tried to wrest it from the boy's grasp, Ulysses having apprehended the would-be pickpocket. That had been the last straw as far as Nimrod was concerned, and if Ulysses hadn't stopped him he would have throttled the simian with its own leash. The creature now sat hiding behind the boy's head, peering at the older man with a malevolent, gargoyle scowl whilst picking the occasional louse out of Sidney's hair to chew on.
    Ulysses looked to his companion again. "You all right there, old chap?"
    "I've suffered worse, sir." That was true, Ulysses thought. "The whiskey's helping." With that Nimrod dipped his bloodied handkerchief into the glass again and dabbed it onto the bite. He hadn't swallowed a drop of the stuff.
    "Soon as we're done here, we'll see about getting you a tetanus jab."
    "Very