Half an hour later I stood at the foot of a squalid little pier on the Thames, my nose wrinkled against stench, looking for -- for Cecily Alistair? Here? It was a place even more wretched than the bleak streets where I had last found her. Down along the black water swarmed filthy beggar children, "mudlarks," scavenging bits of bone, wood, or metal from the muck. Tattooed men swaggered in and out of hulking brick buildings marked "Trawlers Ltd" or "Siam, Burma, Orient Line" or "Launches for Hire."

Steamships and tall-masted sailing ships and innumerable smaller vessels crowded the straitened river whilst a hulking mechanism called a "dredger" loomed over everything, giving forth a deep roar punctuated by the curses of sailors, the shrieks of mudlarks, and the yawps of seagulls wheeling overhead. Trying to take it all in, I felt my heart sink.

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