The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock Read Free Book Online Page B

in front of me. Apart from the gypsies, the Brookgate and Holborn dairies’ nags and the occasional policeman’s mount, I had never seen a horse in the Fleet Street area. Even more astonishing to me, a couple of fat, red-combed white chickens were pecking at the dung. They were dispersed, clucking and flapping, as a woman in a long, nondescript skirt, wearing a grubby cap on her dirty hair, came running from the house with a shovel and bucket, to scoop the stuff up. I remembered my Uncle Fred doing this when he followed the milkman’s cart down Leather Lane during the war, bent on getting the manure for the little rose-and-vegetable garden he tended behind our house in Fox Street.
    An early autumn afternoon fog was darkening a day not yet lit by gas. Behind some of the thickly glazed windowpanes yellow light began to flicker and bloom. Their blinds and curtains drawn, a number of windows were patched with oiled paper. Most others had green-tinged ‘bottle-glass’ panes. Maybe they had been blown out in the Blitz and not yet replaced? This was still austerity Britain emerging from that long, grey, hand-me-down period. Some parts of London, too, had either resisted government improvements or been overlooked. The yellow glow grew warmer, steadier, either from candles or oil lamps and not gas, as I’d originally guessed. I began to wonder how on earth I had failed to discover this quaint bit of London as a boy. It was extraordinary. The smell alone, being so much like one of the big London markets, was acrid, sweet, musty, ancient, intense, impossible to identify. Why did I feel uneasy?
    From hidden alleys came shouts, the occasional cry of a child, coarse grunts and elaborate curses. I was reminded of the old public slum courts and Peabody estates that still survived around Brookgate, where our narrow lanes wound through to Grays Inn Road. I tended to avoid those blocks of flats in case I was challenged by one of the ‘court cliques’ which metamorphosed into the 1950s Ted gangs. Luckily they fought mostly among themselves from echoing court to echoing court. They barely bothered you if you were an obvious neutral.
    I couldn’t see any gangs in the Sanctuary. A lot of people crowded together here but no more than in, say, Leather Lane market on a Friday. They could belong to some religious sect, judging by their old-fashioned clothes. I saw them strolling, gossiping, chatting on cobbled corners, seated at open windows. We passed a massive coaching inn, with servants’ or guests’ rooms built out above the central stone-and-red-brick archway. Overlooked by balconies, there was space in the inn’s cobbled yard for a full-sized express coach and team, or three modern buses. The odd picture on its sign was explained by the tavern’s name: The Swan With Two Necks. What I could see of the stables looked new enough but logically had not been used in half a century at least. Dull brass, black leather, dark green paint, black beams and whitewashed walls, almost fresh. I could even see some tack. Recently dressed up for something. The coronation, probably. Around the time Queen Elizabeth II had been crowned, there had been a lot of ‘New Elizabethan’ nostalgia for the glorious days of Good Queen Bess. Days that never really were, of course. New myths for a new age. Above was a gallery of leaded glass behind which someone moved swiftly, lighting candles. The entrance’s signboard showed the mythical swan encountering three happy greybeards seated in a row on a bench with huge two-pint ‘shant’ tankards on their knees. It might have been painted by Tom Browne or Phil May, those master-draughtsmen of Edwardian London. I was surprised I had never heard of the place. From it came a smell of strong beer, shag tobacco, frying chops.
    I heard a shout from nearby and looked back. From around the corner, ducking beneath the tavern’s low overhang, straight from a Dick