Fog
Author's Notes: This is only tangentially a Sherlock Holmes story. It was more of an excuse for an atmospheric, descriptive piece. It's inspired by H.V Morton's little book of essays, The Heart of London, first published in the mid-1920s.
It was a classic pea-souper. The fog invaded the narrowest alleys, licked the tiniest crevices in the slum streets, prickled at the eyes, and tainted the tongue. Gaslight streetlamps, if any had been present in Whitechapel, would have been helpless against the thick yellow mist. Coal dust, and street dirt mingled with chimney smoke and the smell of horse dung, forcing their damp way down the throat where it could corrode the lungs of those unfortunate enough to be outside. It was midday, but it looked like five o'clock on a winter afternoon.
Whitechapel: Jews and immigrants, prostitutes and peddlers; Urchins, ragamuffins, waifs. Just one of the many swathes of urban London inhabited by the poor, overcrowded by the unwanted, uncared-for dregs of humanity. A few charities were brave enough to try to assuage the suffering caused by chronic unemployment, malnourishment, and poor hygiene, but the relief was always temporary, the percentage of the population helped minimal.
A tall, lean figure swept through the alleys. He moved slowly, investigating his surroundings, but in the swirling fog, his dark clothes gave him the appearance of a swifter shadow. The sunlight, already blocked by the tenement buildings, filtered through diffusely, barely illuminating the dark corners in a bluish hue. The whores weren't out yet, the thieves were still sleeping off the drink, and the only ones he encountered were street children. They played games in the spaces between buildings: violent, sometimes cruel games, as befitted the feral spawn of the city.
These weren't the children he usually made use of. There were always boys to be had in Baker Street, but they had homes to go to at night. Yes, they had access to the underbelly of the city by virtue of their youth, but they could just as easily loiter in the elite streets of Mayfair. These children, though… They slept in abandoned spaces, creating tribes and gangs for protection. There was something vicious and missing in their hollow eyes, a lost natural warmth that had cooled a little more each time their dirty bodies huddled in archways and warehouses.
They were mostly boys, of course. The girls stayed while the presence of older siblings could offer them protection from the crude advances of the preternaturally mature boys, until they either found occupations in one of the myriad piecework busy-work trades that kept the poor occupied, but didn't require skill. Some just became doxies, relying only on their bodies for income, and not having the option to supplement that with legitimate work.
The Irregulars were boys, too. Their sisters had long ago been sold as skivvies, laundresses, flower girls, or match sellers. But they were useful, too, if in an indirect way. They were like spies stationed in households. There was an extended network of these servant girls, who by word-of-mouth delivered information to their brothers, and then back to Baker Street. But those children weren't like these ones. They were not like these property-less classes, drifting from alley to alley, from dark corner to dingy doorway, clinging to shadows of the city like London's fogs: sometimes invisible, sometimes transparent, but always present.