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loitering by the doorway with a small dog-end hanging off his bottom lip. “Got a shipment lined up for you already,” he said and led them out onto the docks where a vessel from Ceylon was moored.
    They were put to work with another couple of workers, shifting crates of tea from the ship’s derrick. The work was hard and fast and Lazarus soon felt the need to remove his cap and roll his shirtsleeves up. He was sticky with sweat and within two hours had developed a new sense of respect for the stamina of dockworkers. Mr. Clumps carried on, taking crate after crate on his own, without breaking his stride or even removing his coat, much to the admiration of their new colleagues. Lazarus decided he would have to have a word with him about appearances.
    “Your mate’s a quiet one,” Tappy said during a quick tea break. They were sitting on some empty crates in the sun. Mr. Clumps had his back to them as he looked out over Shadwell Basin. “Strong, though. I can’t complain.”
    “Shy, honest sort,” Lazarus replied, wiping the sweat from his brow with his cap. “Known him a couple of months and he hasn’t said much else to me but ‘good morning’. Still, I never could stand a chatterbox.”
    He watched Mr. Clumps staring at the flat body of water, his massive cigar slowly glowing away while he puffed out clouds of scented steam. He still had on his coat. Lazarus gulped down the lukewarm tea. How they were going to get away with all this was beyond his comprehension.
    The days trickled by. Lazarus grew immensely frustrated at the time it was taking to find anything out. His colleagues were likeable enough, if a little rough. Many were foreigners; Poles, Germans, Irish. They had a coarse humor and several of them were clearly heavy drinkers. One or two petty crooks. But none were the hardened revolutionists wanting to overthrow the social order that he was looking for. Most of them could barely read, and he imagined that they wouldn’t know Karl Marx from Lottie Collins.
    On top of it all he was so tired from lifting, carrying and hauling things about that his very bones ached. He had hacked his way through jungles, trailed across the blazing desert with an empty canteen and fought the Ashanti warriors tooth and nail on strict rations, but even he found the daily grind of a dockside worker almost too much. Every night he would crash down on the cot in their lodgings in Limehouse and sleep like an old drunk, snoring away while Mr. Clumps sat in the only chair in the room, his mechanite furnace slowly ticking over and the glowing end of his cigar going up and down as he exhaled through the night—not sleeping, but watching and waiting.
    Lazarus was responsible for keeping Mr. Clumps up and running. The bureau had supplied him with a quantity of mechanite which he kept wrapped in an oilskin beneath a loose floorboard in their room. It seemed absurd to keep such a valuable trove in such an unassuming and seedy location with only a flimsy wooden door and his own British Bulldog pocket revolver to defend it. But nobody was looking for it, and even if some lowlife managed to prize it from his possession they likely wouldn’t know it from a few chunks of schist.
    Lazarus had not given up his private concerns, and in the slow wait for information on the socialist groups that may or may not have infested the warehouses of Shadwell Docks, he had time to pursue them, even if he was dog tired. One Sunday afternoon he decided that it was time to pay the old lime oast Mansfield had mentioned a visit.
    Rows upon rows of tiny worker’s cottages lined the canals of one of London’s worst slums. Dilapidated barges rested upon the mud, awaiting the evening tide. Public houses and opium dens were common, and shabby-looking children played with mangy dogs in the streets. Rising up above all of this were the conical lime oasts that lent the district its name. Several were still in use, but a great many were empty shells with broken