By Gaslight

by Steven Price

Blackwell was stooped over a birchwood washstand and he paused now and straightened. Larks, sir?

  William opened the little door and pinched a tiny grey feather from the tangle of grass. Why would anyone take her birds?

  Perhaps they saw something they shouldn’t of, sir.

  The birds?

  I don’t know, sir. Blackwell paused. Either way, it shouldn’t matter.

  Why not?

  They weren’t canaries.

  William stared at him. Are you making a joke, Inspector?

  Shall I put out a description of the jailbirds, sir?

  You can stop any time, Inspector.

  It could be someone just took them on a lark, sir.

  Blackwell. Stop.

  Yes sir, he said. And turned back and pushed aside a brass pot in the cupboard to feel for hidden catches.

  That night he tried to sleep but could not. The bed was warm from the swaddled hot brick laid in by the hotel maid and he got up resignedly into the freezing room. He wrapped himself in a blanket and retrieved Ben Porter’s papers from the cigar drawer for something to do. He was thinking still of Charlotte Reckitt’s body and waiting for his mind to clear. He sat in a wingback chair near the fireplace and rested his elbows on the bullets and then crossing his legs he sifted the papers in his lap. The lamps cast a weak sulphurous light a man with strong vision could just read by and he knew if he did not sleep soon he would be no good to anyone.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  Ben’s reports went back some fourteen years. William read and reread what he could, feeling an irritation growing in him. He had believed Ben Porter to be an occasional informer and operative for his father in cases of criminals fleeing to England but this did not appear to be true. Porter had worked almost exclusively as a detective for his father for more than twenty years and during the last decade of his life worked solely on the peculiar obsession of Edward Shade.

  According to the papers, Porter had begun haunting London’s East End in 1869 when a description of an American thief had surfaced. He had taken work as a deal porter in a riverfront warehouse along the Surrey Docks in order to observe the area but had found no further leads. Then a rumour had emerged that an American by the name of Donald Rolson had taken rooms in Piccadilly and Porter had taken up work as a postal delivery clerk in order to acquaint himself with the neighbourhood. Rolson was rumoured to have set up a gambling den for gentlemen in the West End but Porter could not be certain and no sooner had such a rumour spread than the operation closed and vanished. What emerged gradually in Porter’s reports and in William’s father’s replies was not a sense of the elusive Shade so much as a shadow, an echo of a man who may have never existed: six feet in height, with long arms, and a lean athletic build; or perhaps five and a half feet, with a portly build, and the short arms of a shopkeeper; a man with no facial hair and who kept his brown hair shorn close to the scalp; or perhaps a bald man, with carefully groomed whiskers; a man with catlike grey eyes and a quiet grimness about him; or perhaps a jovial and clumsy companion, who was drawn to the company of his betters; a man with no fear of God or law or country; or a man terrified of himself as well as all else. He might have been Edward Shade, or Donald Rolson, or William Peters Mackenzie. He might have been married, or not. One of the last letters from William’s father suggested two Edward Shades might be working together and that Porter ought to keep an eye out for both of them.

  William thought of his father with his powerful cooper’s shoulders, his Scottish rages and righteous indignation, he remembered the sharp bite of the man’s belt against the backs of his boyhood thighs. He looked again at the handwriting in the margins and at his father’s wild surmising and he shook his head.

  Ridiculous.

  He pushed aside the papers in disgust.

  SIX

  82 Half Moon Street loomed up out of the fog.

  Foole rolled a cold thumb over the head of his walking stick. He felt what he always felt, seeing it, seeing the small brass-plated sign he had screwed into the railing himself all those years ago: Foole’s Rare Goods Emporium. Imports & Exports. By Appointment Only.

  They had come by hired coach direct from the choking fumes of Gower Street station and he had got out exhausted. He stooped now in the walk with one hand on the railing and a yellow mist biting at his ankles, flowing past. He could see the front door standing open, Fludd fumbling in the gloom. A slow hammering of iron on iron started up from the roof across the street and though he turned and peered across he could not see the workmen. The windows in the terraced house opposite were dark and the drapes closed and the brown stucco depressing in the chill. He turned away.

  There were smuts and blacks and flakes of soot adrift in the air around him like an evil snow. He could hear the clop and rattle of a hansom passing, disappearing down the cobblestones. A phantom, blurred in the mist, banged a trunk step by step up the whited stones towards him. That was Molly. Then Fludd brushed past, descended again into the fog where the coach was still unloading. All of it muffled, dreamlike, eerie.

  The shabby main floor of the house was filled to overflowing with artifacts and objects shipped in from the corners of the empire. Ancient Asian vases, looking glasses from Australia, minerals and crystals from the mountains in East Africa, Indian headdresses, a chest of rusted sextants recovered from a wreck in a reef in the Caribbean. Foole loved the shadowy labyrinth of his Emporium. He had few customers. His prices were not listed.

  Four years earlier he had leased this big house in its fashionable district just off Piccadilly and across from Green Park without having seen it and had paid the six months in advance through a land agent operating out of Chelsea. He had insisted on a residence expensively furnished, with tableware provided, with Turkish carpets and a lavatory pan on each floor and horsehair bedding covered in squares of holland under the feather mattresses. He had engaged a housekeeper and her daughter on the recommendation of an associate who had praised them for their discretion and had offered a generous salary. The previous occupants had broken their lease in a hurry when their second child was born dead and there was a sheen of illness to the house even now. Foole had made his way through the damp rooms following at his housekeeper’s heels as she told him what she had gleaned of the place. She regarded that second child’s stillbirth as a moral failure rather than a physical one and pursed her lips whenever the matter was broached.

  Her name was Sykes and her wraithlike daughter’s Hettie and she was a strong, wide-hipped hempen widow of forty. She would gnarl one hand into a fist whenever he called her to him and it was no delicate fist but strained white with knuckle and bone. He liked the hardness he saw in her, the austerity. Molly tolerated her as a cat would have done and that was good enough for Foole. Mrs. Sykes wore an apron stained with grease and blacking when she was not serving and a grim fringed bonnet that held her grey hair in place but there was in her eyes such an angry green intelligence that he wondered if she had talents yet untested.

  Mr. Foole, sir, she said to him now. It’s a fine big house to run, with only my Hettie and hardly a penny to the purse. How long do you mean to stay this time?

  She was standing at the foot of the stairs wiping her hands on her apron among the foyer collection of Chinese vases on their shelves.

  Foole smiled at her. It’s good to see you too.

  Fludd appeared in the doorway and stamped his boots and Foole put out a hand. Mrs. Sykes, this, he said, is my dear friend Mr. Fludd. He’s returning to us after a long while abroad. I thought he could take the east room, across from Molly.

  Ma’am, Fludd said shyly, doffing his hat.

  Japheth Fludd. In the mighty flesh, is it? She gave the giant a strange sly look, as if assessing a shank of meat. O I heard stories about you, sir. I’ll see to the room, Mr. Foole. But he’ll be wantin to change those boots before he goes on up.

  All three studied Fludd’s boots a moment in silence.

  It might have been the bad lighting or the recent exerti
ons but it looked to Foole as if the big man’s face under his beard had reddened. Foole cleared his throat. Japheth, you let Mrs. Sykes know what you need and she’ll see that you get it. She’s been a treasure to me these past years. He was looking at his old housekeeper fondly and wondering how much to tell her and then he could not help himself and he said, smiling, We may have another yet.

  Would that be a lady, sir?

  Why do you say that?

  She winked, raised a finger to her lips. Now. Where’s the wee one? Is she hungry?

  Always, Foole laughed. I’d look for her in the larder.

  Those first days back overwhelmed. There was much to be done in the airing of rooms and establishing of meetings and in the planning and weighing and diagramming of securities. Mrs. Sykes insisted on cataloguing each article or furnishing sold in his absence room by room in a ledger with Foole accompanying to sign off on each, if just to keep the staff honest-like, she explained, while she grumbled at the cost of outfitting a household with coal in the winter months. If you had of only returned to us in the summer, Mr. Foole, she’d scowl, I’d save you six shillings on the ton right easy. Them creditors of ours ain’t like to stretch much further. He liked that use of ours, felt a gratitude well up in him to hear it. The basement buzzer rang constantly with rag-and-bone men, crockery girls, peddlers selling rabbits and pecks of peas and roots and herbs tied up by their ankles and dried. There were watercress girls in the mornings and butcher’s apprentices in the afternoons and cockles-and-mussel men hollering in the streets outside before tea. Foole would work late into the night in a study behind the glass display cases with trunk lids standing open and the long mahogany desk shining in the gaslight and Hettie in her pallid thinness would come and go with a tray of dishes and vessels of hot water for washing. Foole would smile at her and gesture to the corner where Fludd was pencilling his accounts, where Molly was cleaning a satchel of picks and drivers, and he would watch the girl blush shyly to see them.

  On the second morning, Foole came down to find Fludd with his shirt sleeves rolled back scrubbing the fender irons in the drawing room fireplace to a high shine. He clutched in one big hand a strip of dry leather and he paused and leaned back on his heels and ran the back of the hand across his face. Beside him sat a small twist jar of blacklead paste.

  Good god, what is that smell? Foole said in a low voice. Has Mrs. Sykes put you to work already then?

  She says you can’t afford a proper lad. Fludd smiled wearily. Aw, I don’t mind it. Easier work than breakin rocks.

  Where is she?

  Fludd shrugged.

  In the basement kitchen he found his housekeeper with her skirts tied up between her legs hurtling pail after pail of cold water and carbolic across the linoleum. The silver tongue of the water hanging in the air a long instant as it fell. Then the crash and overspill and wash-back and sweep-through with the broom as she scowled and stomped up and down and guided the water through the open door and down the rivering basement step into the alley. A disc of sulphur smouldered on the range.

  Mrs. Sykes, he called from the doorway. Mrs. Sykes!

  She glanced up startled, gave him a look like murder.

  The carving table had been dragged up against the cupboard and the two Windsor chairs upended on it and in the middle of the floor a bed frame had been dismantled and set to steep in a tub of scummy water. Foole’s gaze took all this in and the brown floral wallpaper along the low ceiling where the big beam ran buckling and warping the length of the house and he looked at the meat screen and the iron range between the stairs and the grimy little window and he shook his head.

  It’s the last girl what was here, sir, Mrs. Sykes said. She was asleepin in the kitchen and dirty as bugs herself.

  Foole walked through the water, picked up the tin of Keating’s Powder from the table, turned it in his fingers.

  She’s been gone weeks, he said. Is it bedbugs?

  Aye. But don’t you worry yourself, sir. There ain’t no bug alive what can keep out of my sight.

  Get rid of the bedding, he said abruptly. The frame, the mattress, all of it. Go out and find an iron one. It’s the old wood, Mrs. Sykes, it’ll never get clean.

  She stood in the wet with one hand on the grey broom. No sense in that, sir, it’s a perfectly good bed. I can manage.

  I don’t doubt you can. Talk to Mr. Fludd, he’ll give you the coins. And Mrs. Sykes?

  Sir?

  Your diligence has been noted.

  She reddened and dipped and put a hand to her mussed hair.

  His eye shifted to the larder beyond, the grey of the whitewashed walls there where a dish of ragged chicken bones caught in the light and gleamed.

  Through all this something was building in him, a kind of light-headedness that he recognized from the evening before a job, a tingling ache in his fingertips and his teeth, which he used to feel in his childhood when the thunderclouds broke over Boston. In everything he did, unpacking his papers, sorting through his files, adjusting his suits and collars in their boxes, ringing for Hettie to bring hot water from the boiler and fresh towels for a shave, in everything he did he thought of Charlotte. As if a hook lay scalloped in his skull. Had it been ten years truly? Was he so different a man now? She would be older, yes, wearier, yes, harder perhaps as he himself had come to be. Of the women he had known in his life none could have tempted him to put aside his work, to give up the trade, to turn himself into a man of the sunlit street and the honest hour. None but one. And she would not have asked it.

  He remembered her in that terraced café above the sea in Port Elizabeth. She had told him of the discovery by French adventurers of hundreds of clay tablets in a cave in the Near East and it had seemed to her important, as if she were speaking of something under the words themselves, beneath the language. He remembered the silver light off the waves, remembered lifting a palm to one side to see her face through the glare. The tablets had been written in a language no one had seen before and many had believed them works of poetry, records of history, a chronicle of kings. The wind had lifted the folds of her white dress. The seabirds aloft in the currents of air. When they were deciphered, she told him, it was discovered they were business transactions, shipping records, inventories. There is in every life a shadow of the possible, she said to him. The almost and the might have been. There are the histories that never were. We imagine we are keeping our accounts but what we are really saying is, I was here, I was real, this did happen once. It happened.

  All this he held to himself and did not speak of as those first days clocked down. The house went on in its domestic strangeness. He was standing with Mrs. Sykes at the bend in the basement stairs going through the list of pantry stock when a low throaty singing filled the hall. Both paused. And then Molly sashayed into view, a cinder bucket looped over one wrist, shirttails untucked, her hands on her hips and a sultry swagger to her backside.

  She strutted on past, unseeing. The drawing room door opened, closed.

  Mrs. Sykes cleared her throat.

  Right queer one, that, she muttered, twisting and untwisting the washrag in her fists.

  At noon on the third day a deliveryman rang the tradesman’s bell at the basement door and was ushered by Mrs. Sykes in through the kitchen and up the back stairs to the Emporium. Molly took the small crate from him but she could not hold it and Fludd lurched forward and caught it and helped her set it down between the shelves. A scowl crossed her face and she did not thank him. All this Foole watched without moving from behind his desk. The warped floorboards creaking where Fludd walked.

  There was a low fire burning but it gave off little heat. The crate held a sampling of small ammonite fossils still embedded in limestone blocks shipped privately from Geneva and under the straw packing in a false bottom were a variety of sapphire and ruby pendants taken from a Swiss jeweller. Molly turned each piece in the light of the window looking unimpressed then handed it along to Fludd who passed it to Foole. Molly said she hoped the
ir partners on the Continent had a sharper eye than this. Foole was quiet for a moment and then he told her to have the pendants translated at a cut of seventy per cent by their regular tailor and to handle the transaction herself.

  You mean to let the kid do it? Fludd said abruptly. Do she know the margins?

  Foole blinked. The margins?

  Molly laughed a sharp laugh and shook her head and wiped an exaggerated tear. Margins, she said. No one uses margins no more. We take a cut off the percentages in both directions, Jappy old boy. Margins, she grinned, shaking her head.

  There have been some changes since you were last outside, Foole said. You’ll catch on.

  Aye.

  Margins, Molly chuckled.

  Molly? What’s got into you?

  The girl stopped smiling, looked at him. She put the last fossil back into the crate. Chewed at a nail, leaned over, spat some half moon into the fireplace. Nothin, she said.

  Foole grunted, tugging at his whiskers. Japheth, he said. I’d like you to go over—

  Nothin’s got into me, Molly interrupted loudly. Except Charlotte bloody Reckitt an her weepy bloody letter. She pulled out a creased envelope and withdrew Charlotte’s letter, glaring the while at Foole.

  I won’t ask where you got that, he said.

  My dear Mr. Foole, she began in a quavering high voice. She squinched up one eye like a bat.

  Molly.

  I write you knowing how much time has passed between us—

  He kicked back his chair and stood, his fingertips poised on the desk. That’s enough, Molly.

  —and just what your regard for me must have suffered these past ten years—

  Aw, kid, Fludd said in his low rumble. That ain’t right. And he stretched a long arm over her shoulder and slid the paper from her fingers. Where did you learn letters like that anyway? he asked. You read like a preacher.

  She’s a quick study, Foole said tightly.

  Molly flushed. Did you visit her Mr. Utterson yet? You want to tell us the job?

  Fludd turned from the girl, studied Foole. Utterson? The attorney?