by Steven Price
No?
No.
As you say.
It’s ridiculous. Why would he?
Utterson shrugged. But she was frightened of him, sir. She said his behaviour was becoming erratic, threatening. I believe she feared violence from him. She told me that he knew more about her than she could account for, old associates, details of past projects, something about her stay in Philadelphia last fall. Some of it went back years. She believed someone had been feeding it to him. Who could have done this to her, sir? I haven’t any notion. If anyone has the idea of it, it is William Pinkerton. But then, Utterson added ruefully, we are neither of us so foolish as to inquire of him directly.
What did he want from her? Why is Pinkerton here?
Mr. Foole—
But he did not continue and Foole set his drink down and clasped his hands on his knees and sat with his back straight not understanding the man’s reply. After a long silence he said, Charlotte gave you instructions for me.
They are of no consequence now.
What were you to have told me?
Utterson cleared his throat. He picked at some invisible thread on the underside of his sleeve and pursed his lips and belled his tongue in one cheek as if considering. She meant to break her uncle from Millbank, he murmured. That was the intent. I do not know the details. But when she was seeking advice on a crew I suggested you might be a useful addition. Naturally she thought you might not wish to be a part of it. Given your history together, and your history with Mr. Reckitt.
Naturally.
I assured her otherwise.
Foole nodded slowly.
The Tench is closing, Mr. Foole. It is emptying its cells. Mr. Reckitt is to be transported south to the prison hulks in March. My understanding is that some confederate on the inside had been working with Miss Reckitt to arrange a miscount during the transport. Utterson wet his lips. There would be no, ah, remuneration for such a project, of course. Not financially, that is. Which is one of the reasons she was anxious about finding a crew. I told her—
Rose couldn’t have told me this yesterday? Foole said abruptly.
The lawyer was silent a moment. Then he glanced about him, shuffled the documents on his desk as if to some purpose. He said, These are not Rose’s secrets to divulge, sir. Miss Reckitt left a message for you in my care. She instructed me to give you her address, of course. But she also wanted you to know that her uncle told her the truth of what happened in Brindisi. She said he feels remorse about it and wants to make amends. She herself was angry and then she was relieved. I believe, sir, she thought some future might be possible between you. Utterson looked as if he might say more and then he did not and then he must have changed his mind for he lifted his thorny eyebrows and said, gently, When did you see her last, Mr. Foole?
When did you?
The night she disappeared, sir. She was, as I say, frightened.
Foole ran his tongue along his teeth, remembering. I haven’t seen her since the Royal Albert, he said. You were with me.
I remember.
She looked like she’d seen a ghost.
You didn’t speak then, though.
No.
Charlotte was, ah, rather changed. In recent years, I mean. Perhaps she was no longer the person you remember. I imagine your feelings for her have not abated?
We’re all of us changed, Gabriel.
But you would not be seated here, sir, if you had changed quite so much as that.
Foole said nothing.
When Mr. Reckitt was arrested, Charlotte became distant, colder. She disbanded her usual working associates and for a time I believed she had put the flash world behind her. I know she was living in Stratford, as a widow, for a while. And I know she eventually went abroad to the Continent, to Switzerland I believe. That was five years ago. When she reached out last August I could see how she had aged. I do not mean in her face, sir. I mean in her eyes. There was something about her that unsettled a person. As if she had been hollowed out and filled up instead with some uglier thing.
Foole did not know what to say. Her letter had betrayed none of that. He thought about how her uncle’s arrest must have haunted her and then he looked up in surprise. Does he know? he said. Has Martin heard?
I imagine the Yard has been to see him. Or intends to. They will be making inquiries.
But you haven’t seen him.
What occasion would I have? He is incarcerated, sir, with no hope of release.
Foole laid his walking stick across his knees. You should speak with him. Tell him yourself. He deserves to hear it from a friend.
Utterson’s thin lips curled upward. A friend.
I am in earnest.
The two men’s eyes met over the lawyer’s big desk.
I find your interest in Mr. Reckitt’s welfare surprising, sir. Utterson ran a hand along the rumpled curve of his waistcoat, considering the thing. Perhaps you should go to him yourself.
Foole watched the bad light glisten on the lawyer’s face, his oily and pitted skin. He thought of Fludd’s dislike of the man.
May I ask, sir, the nature of your concern?
You know the answer.
Ah, yes, he saved your life in Brindisi. You take that debt rather more seriously now than you once did. I recall a time when you felt he had ruined it. Utterson watched him with hard flat eyes. The minutes passed. You would do better to pay your respects to Miss Reckitt herself. Her remains are being held at Pitchcott’s, I understand.
Foole looked up. Pitchcott’s.
The mortuary. On Frith Street. I know a man there, I can arrange for a viewing if you’d like. Certainly the attendant has done favours for me in the past. Although I imagine it will be a rather explicit experience, perhaps, and not one for the faint—
Frith Street, Foole said, not quite taking it in.
She is in a better place, sir.
Did Rose’s spirits tell you that? he said sharply. He had not intended to mention spiritualism and he was surprised at his own venom.
Utterson’s green eyes burned as he looked up. He appeared to be searching for words. I was not a believer at first either, Mr. Foole. But it is not what you imagine. Death is not something to fear. His fingers flattened on the desk before him. There are some that pass over to the lowest sphere at once, he said. Others do not realize they have gone to spirit and it takes them some time to be at peace with it. But they are in no pain. It is as the Bible teaches, sir. There is nothing unchristian in it.
Foole got to his feet.
You will have heard our mother was removed to spirit two years ago, Utterson continued. It has been a comfort to us both, to hear that she is at peace. Grief touches all of us, sir. It is not a thing we were meant to struggle against.
Foole said nothing.
No, sir, Utterson went on. We must think of grief as a kindness. It is how we know we have loved.
A kindness, Foole thought in despair, knowing no such thing. She had been brought back pale and trembling into the world by an uncle she had not known and was given his name from the first. Come, child, he had called to her through the locked gate, a shimmering silhouette in the winter sun. Under his silk hat his face was double-wrapped in a scarf so that only the eyes were visible. She had stood trembling as he removed a glove and reached through the iron curlicues of that workhouse fence and set what seemed to her an enormous soft perfumed hand to her cheek. Then the matron had unlocked the gates with a clang and hauled the heavy black horse gate inward and cursed her for her laggardliness all the while. He had been so tall, so thin and elegant, so very old, she had whispered to Foole in the early morning light. He had been living at that time in a grand house south of Piccadilly and she had not dared speak the first two days of her stay for fear of the mistake that had been made. On the third day her uncle had called her to his study and told her a debt had been owed her mother and that he had not realized she had died or he would have paid it sooner. There was a sadness in him, a slowness in his eyes, as if a
ll he looked at he would linger over lest it leave his sight forever. Was there love? There was love, yes. She learned her letters, her sums, she studied geography and history and classics under an Irish governess until she bore no resemblance to other girls her age. He dressed her well, he took her to the theatre, he took her to the parks and the exhibitions. Once a month he would descend into Whitechapel with her and they would walk through the grime and filth that she not forget the world that was real, and hidden, and hers by right. And on her sixteenth birthday he told her the truth of his vocation and the ambitions he held for her as a grifter and a thief. There is nothing possessed by any other that might not be yours, he told her. Take everything. From that night her true apprenticeship began. Despite appearances she was a creature of the uncivilized world and she owed no debt to any save her uncle and for him there was no law on earth she would not have broken.
I should have died in there, she said, biting at her lip. But for him, I should have died in that place.
You don’t know that, Foole frowned.
He thought of it now and of her and felt many things but most of all he felt shame. He had been so young. They had been so young. A lifetime had seemed so long.
When he left Utterson’s offices it was after midnight and he walked the empty side streets with his stick scraping the cobblestones and he saw no one. A darker night began to burn up out of the river and creep through the city and the coal fogs lifted, thinned to a watery grey, drifting web-like and eerie and serene. He had forgotten his hat and gloves on Utterson’s sofa and walked now with his head bare and the cold running through his hair. A hurt was rising in him and he knew it had little to do with Gabriel or his sister but it was there all the same. When he reached the Strand he did not seek out a cab stand and instead cut north again and crossed a small unlit park and continued west. At a cobbled square he slowed and stopped and leaned casually against a stone balustrade and lifted his eyes. Across the street stood the Grand Metropolitan, brightly lit, palatial.
William Pinkerton would be asleep somewhere within. Foole set his hands flat on the cold pigeon-stained granite and studied the unlit windows, the marble columns vanishing up into the night. No part of him believed the man had thrown Charlotte from the bridge. Pinkerton was not that man whatever he was, whatever his acquaintance with violence. All around Foole stirred the sleeping figures of the ragged poor, shifting, coughing, and for a long time he stood among them like a visitant lost to shadow. After a time he heard a faint whistling, the scrape of shoes on the frosted cobblestones. Out of the mists came three men, dissolute in evening clothes, silk hats dangerously askew. Arm in arm with walking sticks folded up under their elbows and a stink of gin in their clothes. One would swing out his stick and strike the soles of the beggars in their sleep as he went and the taller of the three tipped his hat and winked at Foole as he passed.
Foole watched them go, his breath steaming. Then he detached himself from the darkness and turned and walked quietly away.
TEN
So Shade was real, had lived.
William stared trembling at the fog in Great Scotland Yard, thinking this. A fury was rising in him. If Sally Porter had known Shade in the war, had driven him in a creaking waggon through the backwoods of Virginia, then she had lied boldly and decisively. She had called Shade a figment, a madness. Perhaps, he thought, she wished only to save him from an inherited delusion. Perhaps she protected yet some secret his father had kept. William waited as the carts and omnibuses passed in the wet then crossed the road and continued on his way. No. His father had once believed Shade dead and whatever had changed his mind Sally was likely privy to. All at once William slowed and stopped and stood very still in his chesterfield with his fists bare and he stared at his shoes, remembering. In that first Christmas after the Confederate defeat his father had stood at the head of the table while the turkey cooled on their plates and he had raised his glass and drunk a toast. The great mahogany table gleaming, the dishes shining in the candlelight, his mother’s round sad face upturned. It was the first time William saw his father drink wine. His father dabbing a napkin to his moustaches sombrely.
The toast had been to the fallen in the war. A long list. William had sat feeling his leg throb, watching his father. He had not known most of the names, recognized only a few. Mr. Lincoln, of course. Pryce Lewis. The spy Timothy Webster.
And the last in that litany, William recalled suddenly, watching a carriage creep through the fog, its side lanterns swaying, had been a boy named Edward.
He made his way along Haymarket in the rain to a scruffy Indian dining-house above a tailor’s shop. He stood in the wet and peered up the stairwell at the crooked risers and old wormy wood handrail and then he wiped at his face and made his slow way up. It was a place he had found in his second week in London and he took a seat by the window and ordered a curry, a pint of bitter. On the table stood an ancient oil lamp that looked to have not been cleaned in decades. From somewhere came a clatter of dishes and when he lifted his face he saw the brass rail of the bar, shining, he saw a slice of afternoon light shivering in a drained glass smudged by greasy fingers. He looked away.
He was thinking of that autumn night in his twelfth year when he had first seen Sally Porter. The lantern casting its eerie crooked light across the kitchen, his mother unwinding slow roll by roll the stained cotton bandaging Sally’s face. She had caught her face on a thorn of barbed wire twelve days out while fleeing a pack of dogs and opened the flesh in a ragged draw across her forehead and down her cheek. William remembered the low crooning of his mother as she worked in the gloom. He had been standing at the window with two fingers at the drapes to keep them shut. On a kitchen chair, the brown bandages in their coils like onionskin. The calmness in Sally’s eyes. That steady gaze. While his father moved stealthily through the house collecting blankets for the others hiding in the barn.
He rubbed a wrist against his lips in distaste. So Sally had said nothing of the real Edward Shade, the man who had died in the war. If Shore were to be believed, then it was a thing she must have kept from him deliberately. He knew she owed him nothing and whatever debt she had owed his father she and Ben had paid back tenfold. Yet he had always believed both Porters friends to his father and he believed this still. He wondered what sort of anger must be in her and then he changed his mind and decided it was not anger. If Sally had told him his father had hunted a ghost, the reason for it would be rooted in kindness. Or is that just what you want to believe? he heard Margaret’s sly voice in his head. In the street below he saw a man in a frock coat and bowler emerge out of the weak fog, walking fast in the drizzle. It was this which drew his attention. Walking fast, then halting, glancing about with a keen unsettled air, then walking on.
As he rounded the corner the man passed a slender woman with the fur collar of her cloak wrapped tight and William paused, leaned forward, rubbed the cuff of his jacket against the filthy pane. She was standing very still at the corner with her head down and her gloved fingers interlaced before her and the wide blue sculptural flora of her hat obscuring her face. Through the glass he watched her lift one pale hand to tuck a strand of dark hair under her hat and then she raised her face and stared directly at him in the window and even at that distance he knew her.
Son of a bitch, he whispered.
It was Charlotte Reckitt.
She held his gaze a long impossible moment. Then turned and slipped away around the corner and was gone. He could feel the blood loud in his ears and he blinked his eyes in confusion. He did not understand how it could be so and he frowned and absently rubbed his palm where the dirt of the city had seamed it black and then he turned his hand and saw the backside of it nigrescent with soot and he stopped. He thought about it. He had been sleeping badly. She might have been a ghost. But he got up from the table all the same and dumped a fistful of coppers down and banged his way back down the stairs and out into the cold.
She had been walking north up Haymarket and he went g
rimly in that direction but he did not see her where the thoroughfare met Jermyn Street. A costermonger arranging a bucket of wizened apples at his stall gaped when William materialized out of the fog.
He took the man’s arm in a hard grip. A woman in a cloak, he said. Wearing a blue hat. Which way did she go?
The costermonger pulled back out of his grip, confused.
William had passed the mouth of an alley some twenty paces earlier and he turned, ran back. A beggar woman crouched just within in a squaddle of rags and William flashed tuppence to her between two knuckles.
A woman in a blue hat, he said, breathing hard.
She eyed the coin with a haunted gaze, nodded. Muck dripped from a water pipe to the left of her head.
Cor, she muttered. A jill what walks queer? Inky hair?
He gave her the coin and it vanished into her clawed fist, into her rags. She nodded a sharp chin down the alley where it disappeared around a crooked joining. Crowds of children huddled on the back stairs of the tenements barefoot and coughing.
Faces turned to watch him as he went. The alley twisted at the cutthroat’s curve and doubled back and as he passed a gated courtyard on his left a rust-coloured mongrel hurled itself at the bars, barking. The alley opened out onto Panton Street and William stood a moment in the fog then saw a young crossing sweeper huddled in the cold with his straw broom tucked up under him. The child was shoeless and had wrapped old newspapers around his feet and tied them off with string at the ankles. He took the penny William offered and pointed across the street to a second alley.
Where does that come out? William asked.
Coventry Street, sir.
Where on Coventry?
The boy coughed a wet cough, his eyes glassy with the cold. Next the sweet shop, sir, he said.
William dug into his pocket and handed down a pound. The boy stared at it in astonishment.
He stepped out into the street and hailed a passing cab and told the driver to take him around the block to the sweet shop on Coventry Street.