The Unbelievers

by Alastair Sim

  What would I write? he thought, as much to distract his mind from his cramping body as anything else. He wished he could think of something faithful and comforting, but it was some lines from a poem which Josephine had given him that stuck in his mind as he looked towards the great grey abyss of non-being:

  Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

  The other powerless to be born,

  With nowhere yet to rest my head.

  One last message caught his attention, scratched in a wavering hand.

  ‘Hope springs eternal. John Anderson, 24 April 1865’.

  Arthur looked again at the date. By God, he thought, that’s the man who was being hanged when I was having my coffee in the Governor’s parlour a week ago. He felt a sudden sweat leaching into his prison suit. So much for hope.

  He looked up as keys jangled in the cell door. Surely not yet, he thought. It’s too soon. You’re surely meant to be warned before they take you away?

  “Visitor for you,” said the warder.

  “Thank you. Who is it?”

  “A lady.”

  He caught a breath of fragrance before Josephine entered. That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever smelt, he thought. It means I’m not going to die alone.

  As she entered she glanced around, evidently looking for somewhere to sit, but there was no seat and she remained standing. She turned to the warder and smiled sweetly at him.

  “Would you be so kind as to leave us alone for a few minutes, please?”

  “Can’t do that madam. He’s a dangerous criminal. It’s not safe.”

  She reached into her black silk purse and took out a sovereign.

  “I’d be very much obliged, warder. I’ll alert you if I need to.”

  He took the coin and saluted.

  “Very well, madam, but I must remove you if the prisoner shows any sign of trouble.”

  The door was closed but not locked. Josephine stood in front of it. Arthur looked her up and down, marvelling at how mourning dress could be cut so elegantly to cleave to her wonderful womanly figure.

  “Arthur,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry. How are you?”

  “All right.” He felt he had to tell an edifying lie lest he disturb the comfort of her simple faith. “I have great joy in knowing I will soon behold my Saviour’s face.”

  “Oh Arthur, you’re so brave.”

  “There’s nothing else for it, is there?”

  “Please, Arthur. Don’t give up hope yet. I’ve written to Her Majesty’s Secretary for Scotland – Jamie Dunsyre. He knows you – he’s bound to see that there’s been a ghastly mistake and get the case re-opened. He could even get you a Royal Pardon.”

  Arthur sighed. He’d like to clutch at this frail straw of hope, but feared it would be no more effective than her promised intervention with the Chief Constable.

  “I’m grateful, Josephine. Truly. But I don’t think I can escape my fate.”

  “Arthur, for my sake, please try to hope.”

  She looked round at the door and glanced into the eyehole before kneeling, with a rustling of jet-black taffeta, in front of him. She took his hands in hers and looked up at him, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Arthur, my heart is breaking at the prospect of life without you. You must let me hope.”

  As the warmth of her small hands permeated his own he felt as if his entire body was being embraced by her. He felt his own eyes moisten as he thought of the loneliness this beautiful, wounded creature would face without him. He wished devoutly that he could live, as much for her as for himself.

  Josephine continued.

  “Would you forgive me if I spoke improperly?”

  “Of course.”

  She hesitated, swallowing back her tears.

  “Arthur, it isn’t my place to say this, but in these ghastly circumstances I must throw aside all constraints.”

  “What is it, Josephine?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  He felt himself plunged back into the bizarre unreality in which he had heard his sentence pronounced.

  “What?”

  “I know, Arthur, it’s positively indecent of me, a woman in mourning, to propose. But I’ve realised over these terrible weeks how insupportable my life would be without you. If – when – this awful business is over we must be each others’ partners in our journey through life. And should, God forbidding, the worst happen, it would be a great comfort to me. If Our Lord is right, we would surely be re-united in another, better, life.”

  “But how…?”

  “The prison chaplain can marry us. He only needs our word.”

  “But Josephine, are you sure?”

  “As certain as I am of God’s truth. Please, Arthur, you still have the power to give me this greatest happiness.”

  He looked at her gentle face, in which tears and a sad, slight smile combined. It felt so strange that the moment he’d thought would never come, the event he’d thought was a mere fantasy, had arrived at last, and that it had come by Josephine’s decision and in this chill cell as he waited to die. But there was only one answer to her proposal of the one thing he had most wanted in his entire life. He steadied his rapid breathing before replying.

  “Yes. Yes, Josephine, it will me my joy and privilege to marry you.”

  “Oh, thank you Arthur, you cannot know how happy that makes me.”

  She stood, and leant over him. He was conscious of glancing at her magnificently-corseted bosom before looking up at her face.

  She leant her face towards him and touched his lips with hers. She pressed them more firmly, and he was astonished to feel her tongue moistly parting his lips. He felt instincts which had for so long been dormant rush through his body as he put his arms around her, pulled her more tightly towards him, and let his own tongue do sweet battle with hers to taste the warm sweetness of her mouth.

  Truly, he thought, hope does spring eternal after all.

  Chapter 34

  Six.

  Allerdyce had heard every tinny chime of the clock of St Stephen’s church, barely quarter of a mile away, since midnight. Margaret groaned gently and turned over in her sleep while the baby, in the cot at the end of the bed, gave a little chirruping cry then fell silent again.

  Surely he had no good reason for sleeplessness. Arthur Bothwell-Scott would be hanged soon after dawn, but he’d been convicted by the due process of the law and it was daft to feel guilty about that. The Chief Constable had decided that there would be no further charges over the deaths of Arthur’s elder brothers William and Frederick since the trial had all but established Arthur’s guilt and he was going to be hanged anyway. Sergeant McGillivray had been released and reinstated to duty, and the taint of suspicion had been lifted from Antonia. By all rational calculations, Allerdyce thought, he should be sleeping the deep sleep of the saved, justice done and his friends safe.

  So why was it that every time he shut his eyes he saw Arthur kicking and choking at the end of his rope, or imagined Antonia’s mother writhing and dying, blood frothing at her lips, on the kitchen floor at Bavelaw?

  As he lay there, the sheets damp with sweat despite the coolness of the room, he tried to batter the images away. He must have slept slightly for a few minutes, because he remembered pushing Antonia, her face raging and her eyes red, away from him and waking, gasping for breath, to find his fists striking the air in front of him.

  Take them away, he shouted silently to the darkness. Take these horrors away and for God’s sake let me sleep.

  He stared towards the curtains. Maybe it was his imagination, or maybe there was the faintest hint of light starting to seep past the edges. The birds would be singing soon, and by then he might as well just abandon all thought of sleep.

  What would Arthur Bothwell-Scott be doing? Would he be able to see the darkness turn to indigo and then turquoise as his last sunrise crept above the horizon? No – he’d be sitting in the glaring gaslight of the condemned cell waiting for his final moments. Poor
bastard.

  Margaret turned over again, then he felt the bedclothes pulled away from him as she sat up.

  “Archie!” Her voice had a shrill edge.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I just had a horrible dream.”

  “I’m sorry. What was it?”

  “That minister you were investigating. The one who killed his brothers. I saw him in front of me, as if he was right here in this room. He was shining like an angel and reached out towards me, then he was jerked backwards into the darkness and I couldn’t see him any more.”

  “Don’t worry, Margaret. Try and go back to sleep.”

  “I’ll try. But Archie, it felt as if he was trying to tell me he was innocent.”

  “It’s just your imagination, Margaret. It’s probably because of the newspaper articles about him.”

  “Do you think he did it, Archie?”

  Allerdyce paused. The lightening around the curtains was slight but unmistakeable now.

  “I don’t know, Margaret.”

  And I’ve got about an hour to find out.

  Night and day were indistinguishable here. He’d been moved to a different cell to wait for morning. A warder sat beside him, and another sat opposite at the far side of the plain wooden table. The harsh gaslight reflected against the bright whitewashed walls – there were no messages carved here, and presumably no prisoner had ever sat here without the supervision of the deathwatch warders.

  There was no clock in the cell, and his watch had been taken away when he was given his prison clothes. He’d gone through the motions of prayer with the prison chaplain just before he’d been moved here. No-one had told him what would happen next – he imagined that the chaplain and the governor would come when it was time. The warders refused to tell him anything, even what time it was, or to engage him in conversation. All he could do was keep drinking from the pitcher of rough gin in front of him and try pray to the God who had abandoned him.

  As he drank more, though, it wasn’t prayer that came to mind. I’m a married man, he thought. The ten minutes of muttered responses which Josephine and I were allowed has made us husband and wife. One flesh. It’s my right – it’s my duty – to lie with her and make her truly mine. He found his right hand creeping into his inner thigh. Normally he’d have fought against the secret vice, but there seemed no point now. He was a married man and he shouldn’t have to deny himself.

  As he touched his stiffening member through the serge the warder opposite caught his eye. He pulled his hand away and quickly reached for the pitcher of gin, re-filling his tin mug.

  Damn them, he thought. Damn them all. I’m going to die a virgin and it’s a crime.

  Allerdyce ran up the gaslit hill of Dundas Street, sweating and panting from the exertion. A night-soil cart rumbled past him, down the cobbled slope.

  I have to get to Rock House, he thought. I have to get there before the sun comes up. I have to know what happened.

  I should have remembered it before. The spirit camera.

  George Bothwell-Scott had mentioned it when Allerdyce and the sergeant had first visited him. The camera that sat in the darkroom, its lens always open but its photographic plate unmarked by the dim red light in which the dead advocate had developed his photographs. George had said he’d set it up to capture the phosphorescence of the spirits which visited him. Allerdyce had seen it as further evidence of the man’s madness, but maybe the camera had captured something more fatal than the appearance of a ghost.

  As he rushed up the steps to Rock House the birds were in full song to greet the approaching dawn, though the dark bulk of the Calton Jail blocked his view towards the eastern horizon. The crisp crunch of his heels on the garden gravel was almost drowned by the chorus of songthrush, blackbird and chaffinch.

  The windows of the house were all dark. He didn’t know whether any of the dead man’s servants were still living there or whether it was completely vacant, but in any case if he was careful no-one would hear him.

  He worked his way round the building to the French windows of the studio. He tried the handle, fearing to rattle the door too hard in case of discovery, but it was locked. He took his penknife out of his pocket and prised its four-inch blade between the doors. Years spent among the housebreakers of Edinburgh gave him confidence and as he levered backwards and forwards he heard the brittle wood start to crack. With a final twist of the wrist and a crack no louder than a snapping twig the lock broke away from the door and he was in the studio.

  Enough light was now permeating the studio by the windows and the skylight that he could see that some busybody of a servant had tidied all the cameras and lenses away from the table and put them back on their shelves, as if George Bothwell-Scott could return at any time and berate whatever butler or maid had failed to keep the place in good order. He prayed that, whatever they’d done, they hadn’t decided to flood the darkroom with light and tidy it up.

  He opened the door of the darkroom and saw, thank heavens, that the black curtain in front of the developing bench was drawn closed. Closing the door behind him, he lit the feeble red-shaded lamp before opening the curtain to reveal the bench, developing basins and shelves of bottled chemicals. The clotheslines still hung there with the developed images, now dry and curled, of views, still lives, and the unidentified woman who had posed, back towards the camera, for the dead photographer. Only the incriminating image of Arthur Bothwell-Scott’s handwriting, taken and used in evidence, was missing.

  He looked up to a shelf above the hanging photographs. A brass lens gleamed in the red glow. He reached up and took the heavy camera off its shelf and placed it beside the developing trays. He looked up at the row of glass bottles and read the labels. He’d never developed a photograph before in his life, but he remembered the dead owner of the house telling him that the plate had to be placed in a bath of silver nitrate to bring out an image. Looking up, the bottle in front was labelled as silver nitrate, and he poured the clear liquid into the tray. I don’t even know, he thought, whether I’m meant to develop the picture in this fluid as it comes out of the bottle, or whether I’m meant to dilute it.

  He unhooked the back of the camera and carefully lifted the glass plate out. Sliding it into the developing fluid he wondered whether he was making some elementary mistake which would destroy whatever image had burnt itself onto the plate. It was probably stupid even to think that there might be some image which would disclose anything about the moment of George Bothwell-Scott’s death. Nonetheless, his hands were shaking and he felt a nausea which he knew he couldn’t blame on the photographic chemicals.

  He watched as the plate lay under the developing fluid. Nothing was happening. All he could see was the clear glass underneath the stillness of the transparent liquid.

  I might as well leave, he thought. There’s nothing here. Even if there was any evidence here before it’s been destroyed by whoever tidied up the scene of the crime, or by my own ineptitude in developing this plate. There’s nothing more I can do to know whether Arthur Bothwell-Scott killed his brother. Guilty or not, he won’t see much more of this new day.

  He turned to leave. As he pulled the darkroom curtain aside, though, he knew he needed one last look. If there was no image on the plate now he’d go, but he couldn’t do that until he’d made a final check.

  He looked back into the developing tray, the red light making the clear fluid look like dilute blood. As he looked, a faint darkening seemed to creep over the glass plate. He blinked, thinking it must just be the strain on his eyes in the semi-darkness, but the change consolidated and grew. He held his breath, watching the painfully slow appearance of the image as he thought of Arthur’s life entering its final minutes. Come on, he thought, come on.

  Finally, in the bizarre reversal of a photographic negative, he could distinguish an image. What should have been light was dark, what should have been dark was light. The flash of the gunshot which had killed George Bothwell-Scott spilt a thick blackness over the centre o
f the picture. But behind it – indistinct but unmistakable – was the image of the person who had stood behind the gun.

  Allerdyce peered closer. The face was blurred but the overall figure was clear.

  It was a woman.

  Even without a watch or a window Arthur could detect signs that his time was coming. The warders, each of whom had dropped off briefly at various stages of the night, were more alert now, and the one opposite kept glancing towards the cell door. There were distant sounds of the life of the prison re-awakening – the far-off clanging of doors and shouting of orders. Even his own mind seemed fresher, as if readying itself for a day’s work.

  What a waste. Arthur ran his hand round his neck and felt the blood pulsing and his rapid breaths. How bizarre it was that everything in his body was continuing to function as if, at the deep level of blood, nerve and sinew, it had no idea of its own imminent extinction.

  As he tried to picture what might happen next, though, he felt a sudden hot fever. He imagined these warders seizing him and dragging him away towards the scaffold. He felt the abrasion of the rope’s knot being tightened round his neck and the rough pinioning of his arms behind his back. He imagined a pause, then a searing burn and a jerk as his body fell through the trapdoor followed by a last struggle for breath, his eyes popping and his tongue swelling. As he thought about it he felt his bowels liquefying.

  And then what? Still part of his mind – habit, he supposed – was praying for God’s forgiveness of his sins (pathetic and few though they seemed in balance with his fate) and his reception into a kingdom where all would be just and compassionate and where, soon enough, Josephine would join him for an eternity of joy. But a stronger voice was telling him that the brutal, industrial efficiency of execution would render him as dead as the animals despatched in their hundreds every day in the city’s abattoir. All that would be left of him would be a carcass dissolving in its quicklime grave.