By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  The dead do not come back, sister.

  Is that not so, child?

  Both lifting their faces as one and searching with their milky eyes in the gloom.

  Child?

  Birdie?

  Is it not so?

  Into the afternoon of the next day he slept. He dreamed an eyelash of light hovered beside his daybed and then it turned and lengthened and grew and when it bent over him he saw that it was a child. It bore wings of a burning light but its face was shadowed and he feared to look into it. What is it? he asked but the child only lifted one hand and pointed at his heart.

  He awoke with his heart hammering. His shirt was damp on his chest and his left arm numb where he had rolled onto it and he got up still shaken. He splashed his face with cold water at the basin and dried himself and studied his eyes in the pier glass. He did not know them. Then he changed his collar and fetched his frock coat and went down the stairs to the Emporium. He found Fludd bowed over the rolltop desk beside the window working at some correspondence and he had the man go out into the weather and hail a hansom. He leaned into the fog as he descended the front steps to the street and as he stepped up into the cab it shuddered under his weight and he reached around and banged on the roof and called out his destination. They rode smoothly through the fog and it seemed to Foole as they went that the fog had no end.

  At the door of the mortuary an assistant with a stutter met him and led him inside. His pinched mouth, black gums, the dirt in the wrinkles around his red eyes. They passed down a narrow corridor and through a heavy door into the underground itself without speaking and when the man leaned in close to hold the door open Foole could smell the gin in his apron. The assistant handed him a bull’s-eye lantern with the shutter half closed and gestured him deeper.

  Then the man vanished back the way they had come.

  There were bodies laid out on metal tables along either wall and Foole went past them without a glance. Shapes rose up and disappeared in the shadows. He went quietly. It was not his first time among the dead.

  At the far end against a brick wall weeping in the cold he found a row of cabinets. He set the lantern rattling upon a stained table and approached the tallest of the cabinets. He could hear the rasp of his shoes on the stone floor, the rustle of his coat.

  The cabinet was not locked. The metal doors shivered and banged loudly as he unlatched them and the sound ricocheted off into the gloom. The upper shelf was filled with files loose in their boxes and the second and third shelves with jars of varying sizes their shadowed contents adrift within like deformed castings from Tussaud’s waxworks and then on the lowest shelf he saw what he had come for.

  It was a big tank, too heavy for him to move, filled with a coalescing darkness as if some horror floated just out of sight. He did not know at first what he was looking at. And then he saw it, pale, hooded, like a thing dredged from the ocean depths rubbery and reeking and unidentifiable, its wounds puckered and gilling in the formalin like tiny reefed mouths. A woman’s torso, umbrageous and adrift.

  He stood a long time there and at last reached down and lifted a smaller jar out and set it on the table beside the lantern. He unshuttered the lantern’s eye and a cold light poured through its glass walls. He leaned in. A label had been affixed to one curve of the jar with several numbers and letters identifying the remains within. This meant nothing to him. As he turned the glass to see past the adhesive a kind of silt stirred in a slow cyclone in the foggy liquid lit as it was by that lantern and he understood that these were pieces of her that had come off in the formalin. And then slowly, languidly, the head drifted its face towards him.

  He did not know her. She was slack, the cheeks belling upward in their floating, her eyes milky and smooth. The head was angled slightly backward from the weight of the brainpan as if to stare at the heavy threaded lid when it had closed and then one temple bumped the edge of the jar as it turned and he watched it, feeling nothing he could put a name to.

  They had been two days out from Boston when New Year’s Eve overtook the Aurania and he remembered standing in the icy night air of the saloon deck and staring through the blazing windows at the passengers laughing and drinking there. The piano hammering out some tune about a sailor and his paddle all of it vaguely suggestive and ugly. The oblong cuts of light sliding slantwise across the deck from the big windows. The blur of evening suits and women in their silks and shawls and elaborate twists of hair in the French fashion. He had thought how they all must appear to any eye lurking out there in that frigid black sea, last and only survivors of some catastrophe perhaps, how they sailed onward singing and drinking in a light of their own making while all around them darkness held them and not a one looked out into it and saw it for what it was. He remembered peering in through the fogged glass as if through the wall of some aquarium and catching a glimpse of Molly where she stood beside a brass globe of the earth with a stem of crystal clutched in one hand and her face downturned and how the music had warpled and thickened in his ears when she lifted her head. He had raised his hand but she did not respond and then he had understood. She could see only her watery self reflected in the glass. How small we are, how blind. How little we see and how much we are seen.

  The head drifted slowly past in its murky yellow keeping.

  Charlotte, he whispered. Oh. Charlotte.

  And closed his eyes.

  TWELVE

  William opened his eyes.

  His head hurt. It was already noon. The bedding had come loose as he slept and had folded up around his skull like a shroud and he pulled it off and threw it aside in disgust. He could see the smudged soot where his hair had stained it in the night. He rose and dressed and stood by the window a long while, smoking, knowing he would have to return to Sally Porter’s tenement though he did not want to go. The fog was thick in the street outside and the day grim and the gaslights had been turned on by the hotel maid before he awoke and then turned off again for the glass was still warm. His thoughts turned to the giant who had accosted him two days earlier and then to the man’s growled hint about the ghosted Edward Shade and William frowned and clenched his teeth around the stem of his pipe.

  At the narrow writing desk he sat and withdrew a sheet of hotel stationery and unstoppered a bottle of ink and wrote out the following:

  Male mid-forties, accent of indeterminate origin. England? Australia? Brown eyes so dark as to look black, black hair black beard. 6’5” approx. 250 lbs approx. Claims employment through a Mr. Fool (any record in files of?), most likely an alias. V. threatening. Speaks rough. Identifying marks several: long scar at throat as if once garrotted. Top of left ear missing. Scars on backs of hands, knuckles: incl a circular burn on left wrist (hot poker? branding iron?). Scar above right eye shape of a star. Has air and look of a career criminal. Likely has served time. Cross-reference with Rogues’ Gallery and misc. Identify. Send everything.

  He blew on the paper to dry it and read it slowly back to himself and then folded it and sealed it and addressed the envelope to the Pinkerton offices in Chicago. He double-checked the hour and then withdrew a second blank sheet and dipped the pen into the ink and sat with the nib poised over the paper. Then he began a second, more halting letter. My dear Margaret, he wrote.

  Yes the days here are cold it is the fog I do not care for. You would find it beautiful I think. It is like the paintings you admired so much when we were in New York last spring. Tell the girls the ponies in England are not so fine as what we have back in Chicago it is the bad air and no countryside that stunts them. It looks now like this business will be finished with shortly. All that remains is closing the file and you know how that can go well or ill there is no predicting. I saw Sally Porter last week she is quite ill. Benjamin Porter died before the new year. You will remember Benjamin from my father’s stories they were fallen on hard times. I guess it is not easy. Write me when you can. I do not go to sleep without you and the girls beside me. Margaret if I

  Here he stoppe
d and wiped the nib dry with a cloth and studied the letter as it dried. It did not say what he wanted to say. It did not ever manage to. There were men with the gift for writing their mind but he would not ever be of their number. He stoppered the ink.

  He was thinking of Isabelle his eldest and the long sickness she had suffered that autumn and how he and Margaret had feared for her. She would be eighteen this year. She had been sickly her entire life and the skeletal shift of her wrist bones through her skin left him fearful for her even now. He could remember the green smell of her sickroom and the condensation running down the panes of the glass in the morning light and how he would stand amid her kicked-off blankets and gaze down at her. How helpless he’d felt.

  He wanted to write this but could not think how to start. After a moment he crossed out the last of the letter and wrote instead:

  You were right. I should not have come.

  Then he sat back and stared out the window then folded the letter in distaste and slid it into an envelope but did not seal it. He opened the lowest drawer of the desk. Dropped it in.

  Within lay a stack of similar letters addressed and unsealed and all unmailed.

  Margaret had come upstairs to his study one night last November after the girls were asleep. William had been seated with the lights off and one big hand open on his desk when she came in. The sycamore outside the window, its naked white branches upraised and the moon in cold profile burning beyond.

  What do you aim to do? Margaret had asked him from the doorway.

  She was carrying a candle in its saucer and its soft waxy light pulled him back to himself. She came in, set the candle on the edge of his desk among the opened files. Sifted languidly through the papers, the testimony of Charlotte Reckitt, the time sheets and official reports of his father’s operatives. She picked up the rogues’ gallery photograph.

  Is this her? she asked softly.

  He nodded. Charlotte Reckitt, he said. My father was certain she could lead him to Shade.

  She’s pretty.

  He felt the blood rise to his cheeks. She’s as crooked as my second finger, he said.

  And she’s in London.

  Apparently.

  They were silent then and William studied the slim outline of his wife. She was still a beautiful woman. There were owls that hunted from the fence posts of their yard but they were silent now and in the stillness William felt some part of him breaking. He had spoken of Charlotte Reckitt and his father’s interest in Edward Shade and Margaret had listened in patience in the months since his father’s death but he understood there were limits to compassion. He watched her turn in her nightdress and drift quietly back towards the hall taking the light with her. In the doorway she stopped.

  You mean to go to her, Margaret murmured. It was not quite a question. When he said nothing she added, Because your father would have wanted it.

  He shrugged uneasily in the candlelight. A sliver of shadow had cast itself knifelike under Margaret’s nose and across her lips, giving her a ferocious aspect. He could not make out her eyes.

  The hell with your father, she said from the doorway.

  It was already late in the day and he knew that he would need to make his way to Snow Fields across the Thames to talk to Sally Porter. He wanted to tell her Shore’s account of Edward Shade dying in the war and to hear her explain it. There was little enough sense in it he knew but he did not know what else to do with himself. He should not have slept as late as he had.

  He locked his door carefully and made his way down the hall and punched the buzzer for the elevator. He carried his Colt Navy in the pocket of his overcoat. He liked very little about the modern world but he did like its firearms and its railroads and its elevators with their plush benches and fine mahogany detailing. As the cage rattled shut he nodded to the operator and set his hands into his pockets. The operator he noticed was a different young man, one he had not seen before. They did not speak.

  In the lobby a familiar figure was lounging under the palm fronds.

  Afternoon, Inspector, he said.

  Blackwell turned with a start. Mr. Pinkerton, sir, he said. You’re awake.

  In body at least.

  Blackwell nodded. He appeared agitated and shifted his hat from one hand to the other.

  What is it? Has John arranged it already?

  I beg your pardon, sir?

  Don’t beg, it’s unbecoming. Has Mr. Shore instructed you to take me to Millbank?

  Millbank, sir?

  William studied him. Blackwell. Why are you here?

  It’s the legs, sir. They’ve found them in a sack near Southwark Park. In Bermondsey.

  Both of them?

  Even as he said it the question disturbed him and he ran a hand along his jaw.

  Yes sir, Blackwell said. Both of them.

  They went out through the glass doors into the grey afternoon. It felt quiet, dull, eerily empty for the hour and though it was Saturday William wondered suddenly where all of the traffic had got to. After a moment Blackwell returned in a hansom and offered his hand and William climbed grimly aboard.

  They travelled across Westminster Bridge, through the toll booths, into the foul warren of Bermondsey. Soap scum frothing in the ditches. Crumbling wooden piles rising out of the green waters. The reeking tannery pits where men in rags stirred with long poles the drenched hides. The warehouses on their creaking wharves, the shabbily dressed children trotting alongside them.

  William strangled a yawn, glanced at the man beside him. No jokes today, Blackwell?

  No sir. Not today.

  How about, Something’s afoot?

  Blackwell nodded unhappily. Very good, sir.

  This will help us to get a leg up? Soon we’ll have this in the bag?

  Blackwell looked away.

  The cruelty in his tone surprised him and he fell silent. The stink had soured in the days since he had last come through here and he watched the low slouching shopfronts and warehouses with a sadness. He thought of Sally Porter in her little room and felt all at once a pain in his abdomen and he winced and pressed a handkerchief to his mouth. He understood Sally had worked for his father almost her entire free life and that she would hold many of his father’s secrets in trust and it was churlish of him to resent her for it. William told himself it was not her lack of forthrightness which bothered him so much as the concealing of it but this he knew was not true. The white lead paint on the sills of the buildings had blackened to a tar in the toxic air. There were ditches festering under the slat-board walks and slow mephitic bubbles oozing in the muck and he could see the frozen bodies of dogs twisted and strangled in the weeds. At times the fog would thin and he would glimpse ditches boiling red with the dyes and then the fog would close in again. He imagined Sally sitting very still in her shabby room listening to his footsteps recede down the hall and thinking of young Edward Shade in the war. A figment. A ghost. They turned up Jamaica Road and then up Drummond and they clattered past the huge chimneyed factory of Peek, Frean and Co., an awful sweetness pouring from its ovens into the streets.

  The residents call it Biscuit Town, sir, Blackwell muttered.

  The pain in his voice baffled William and he said nothing.

  The hansom stopped outside an overgrown lot across from a factory with broken windows and a crumbling chimney and William at first thought the place deserted. Then he saw the pale faces in the upper windows gathered there and he studied their merciless curiosity with an interest of his own.

  A constable was standing at the corner of the square with his truncheon loose in his fist though the onlookers kept warily off the street. Shopkeepers stood in their doorways with their aprons on and their shirt sleeves rolled each peering out from his respective darkness. The air was close, thick, reeking. The fog was dense. William could make out the skeletal figure of Breck crouching, straightening, moving about in the grey.

  Well it’s in the afternoon editions, Shore murmured as they approached. His eyes had a bri
ttle shine to them. Police Deny Knowledge of Head Found in Thames.

  Let me see.

  Shore had been banging the rolled newspaper against his thigh with a soft dull thwap. You’re in it too.

  I hate these things. Too much appears in them that never appears out of them. But he took the paper and unrolled it and scanned the columns as the fog curled between their boots, seethed over the wet earth. SCOTLAND YARD IS ASSISTED IN THESE INVESTIGATIONS BY WILLIAM PINKERTON, CURRENT HEAD OF THE PINKERTON DEFECTIVE AGENCY, OF CHICAGO AND NEW YORK. He looked up. Defective?

  Aye.

  Don’t you have copy editors over here?

  Shore smiled a smile of small brown teeth.

  Robert will be livid.

  Your brother has a temper does he?

  William trudged past the chief inspector to the sacking half hidden in the long weeds of the ditch. A temper, yes. It’s what makes him such an excellent defective. Anyone touched this yet?

  Aye. Dr. Breck, some of the lads when they first arrived.

  William kneeled beside the sack and pulled off his gloves and lifted the opening cautiously wide. The legs had been stuffed feet first into the sack and he could see the pale split bone splintering out from the stumps. Something about it was more terrible in its wrongness than what he had so far witnessed. He had been to the slaughter yards in Chicago often in his work and he thought now of the twisting shanks of meat rattling on their chains in the cold storage and of the quiet chill he felt whenever he went through. The echo of violence and pain almost like a sound in those sober warehouses. He closed the bag. The sacking was dry and crusted with blood and it crumpled roughly under his fingers.

  Through the drifting fog he could see the figures of constables working their way over the rutted ground.

  He thought of the open sky of the Midwest and the simple bullet-riddled corpses of the bandits on display in their coffins on the boardwalks there and of the good clean work of it all.

  Well? Shore said. What about it?

  William got to his feet, said nothing.