Pax Britannia: Human Nature by Jonathan Green Page B

good, sir."
    Ulysses turned his attention back to the boy, who was taking another noisy slurp of gin. Ulysses didn't have any children of his own - at least none that he knew of - but if there were any of his bastard progeny out there, then he hoped that they were growing up with people who loved them and who could care for them, and not scraping a living from the streets - if it could be called a living - like the poor wretch in front of him.
    The boy was small. Under all the dirt and hand-me-down rags he appeared to be about seven or eight years old. He was pale-faced, like so many who lived under the permanent pall of the Smog and thin through obvious malnutrition. The gin probably didn't help, but it was what the boy had wanted.
    He was strong, Ulysses would give him that. There'd been a tussle when the dandy had first seized the young dip-thief. The boy had kicked and screamed and tried to get away, as Nimrod tried to stop the monkey from joining in the fracas, but Ulysses had won in the end, bundling the boy away under one arm, the hand of the other covering his mouth. People in the street had watched the confrontation and resulting abduction with nothing more than passing interest and nobody acted to stop Ulysses or Nimrod. It just went to show that such incidents weren't uncommon in the rougher parts of town. The general consensus of opinion seemed to be that it was best just to avert your gaze and mind your own business. The boy had probably wronged the finely-attired gentleman in some way they figured, or owed him for services paid for but not yet rendered. Best to keep out of it.
    If Ulysses had stopped to consider it for a moment, he might have pondered on what manner of life could crush a person's spirit so much that any sense of compassion for one's fellow man had been crushed along with it.
    "How old are you, Sidney?" Ulysses asked, lowering his voice so that he came across as unthreatening as possible.
    "Eleven years old, sir," the child said proudly. Appearances could be deceiving, Ulysses mused. "At least so's I'm told," he added.
    "How do you mean?" Ulysses asked.
    "That's what they told me at the workhouse where I's was born. Born in the flood of '86, they said, when the Thames burst its banks. Don't send me back there, sir. Don't send me back to the beadles. Please don't."
    "Look, calm down. No one's going anywhere at the moment, Sidney."
    The boy looked at him with wide, watery brown eyes. They appeared large in comparison to the rest of his head, doeishly cute and appealing, thanks to his stunted growth.
    "You're one of the Irregulars, isn't that right?"
    "Irregular what, sir? Don't know whatcha mean." The boy's sudden show of bravado told Ulysses everything he needed to know.
    "Best gang in the East End, I heard."
    The boy eyed him suspiciously, knocking back the last of the rotgut that passed for gin round these parts.
    "Another drink?"
    "Don't mind if I do, guv'nor! Seein' as 'ow you're payin'."
    Once Ulysses had the boy in his grasp and had carried him away from the main thoroughfare of Old Montague Street, he had dropped him in the archwayed entrance to a blind alley. By that point the boy had realised that it was pointless trying to run, at least for the time being, and so had sat and listened as Ulysses had made his claim that he only wanted to ask him a few questions over a drink. The child had certainly had much worse threatened to be done to him, so he had taken the two high-falutin' gents to a drinking den he knew.
    There had been little conversation made over the first round but now the gin was starting to loosen the boy's tongue, as Ulysses had hoped. He did not stop to consider the moral implications of getting the boy drunk so that he might disgorge all that Ulysses' needed to know about the urchin street-gang. If he had done, he might as well have given up on ever solving the case of the missing Whitby Mermaid altogether, and he wasn't prepared to do that, not by a long shot.
    Ulysses