By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  That’s right.

  This here, and the clerk riffled through the papers until he had found the sheet he sought, this is the branch line that runs down towards the Thames below Blackfriars Bridge. You can see the outflow chambers, sir. This one, and this one. I know for a fact that this tunnel was never built. It should show two parallel tunnels, quarter-sized, that snake along from here, to here.

  You know for a fact? You’ve been down in the tunnels?

  Two years ago. He half opened his mouth, sawed his tongue along a row of crooked teeth. I was in Works before transferring here, we were conducting a safety survey. Terrible places, those tunnels. I don’t know how men do it, go down there regular, like.

  I’ve heard stories.

  Ah, yes. You mean the berserkers.

  The what?

  The clerk gave him a quick searching glance. The berserkers, sir. It’s said they live in the tunnels, never come up into the light. Keep rivers of rats with them and swarm a man who ventures into their territory. The rat catchers and sewer workers tell dreadful stories about them. I never saw sight of them myself, sir. The mudlarks, now they’re another story. We saw three, four, five of them, scuttling away when our lanterns caught their nests. Mighty shy, that sort, collecting the trash from the sewer mouths. No sir, the real danger down there is getting lost. It’s easy to get turned around, and the sound of the tunnels can make it rather disorienting. We used chalk lines to mark our way when we went. The clerk was quiet a moment, remembering. Then he said, Well, the risk of getting lost and the treacherous footing too. Those are the dangers, sir. You walk the masonry of those dykes at your peril. A slip into those waters and you’d be dragged under and drowned for certain good, sir. You’re not needing to go down there, I trust?

  The building around them was quiet. A sound of dripping water somewhere. The afternoon dialed darkly down.

  William studied the man, frowned. You’ve been a help, he said.

  At his hotel that evening he stripped to the waist and scrubbed himself at the standing basin and thought about what the clerk had said. He had taken a copy of the tunnel plans with him but he understood it was likely inaccurate. He thought about his father and about the Saracen. In the morning he would go to Millbank to meet with Charlotte Reckitt’s uncle. He stared at himself in the clouded glass, the sacks under his eyes, the two days’ stubble showing through. A smear of ash at his hairline where his hat had been, his greasy hair crushed flat.

  And Adam Foole? he brooded. Who was he? What was he after?

  William tightened his grip on the basin. His murderer’s eyes glared out, black, unblinking.

  Go find out, they told him.

  FOURTEEN

  He was born on a kitchen floor surrounded by keening women in a big house in Calcutta in 1848.

  His name was not Adam then, it was not Foole. Through an open door a late sun was sinking into haze and in this way he was born to the coming dark. Wrenched free from his mother’s dying, wrapped in a sheet, passed hand over hand to a wet nurse looming at the lintel while slicks of blood cooled on the tile floor surrounding. That was his world and patrimony. And yet for the bastard-born he was raised nonetheless with love, in the long shadow of a Bengali girl who had hired herself out for tinny, raised by an English merchant-man father who captained a fleet of six vessels and owned a profitable shipping company and adored his half-breed son. That father would drift wraithlike as a curl of smoke on the fringes of Foole’s memory and though he had no voice and did not speak there would be no figure else of greater importance. Of his mother he would recall nothing neither face nor smell though he would pull at the edges of his mouth with his long thin fingers years later and stare at his reflection and try to see the stranger in the glass. There had been two before him both girls and one an albino and both had drowned in the year of his birth. He wondered at these ghosts as he would at the faces in railway stations, at all those who would stare through him thinking they had seen an apparition themselves.

  For he must have heard stories, he must have been told. How else to account for that memory of two girls in white holding hands at his bedside while he hid his eyes and trembled. There had been such resentment in their faces. When they vanished they left behind fading wet footprints and a terror that ate away his childhood. He thought of his first years in Calcutta now as a kind of aborted life, as if he were spying through the broken slats of a fence into a courtyard where a child who looked like he looked, who laughed as he laughed, who played alone with a hoop and rod did not hear his calls and did not look his way. White Town was but a blur in his mind. Heat in an alley behind a bakery kiln, the kick and sprawl of broken crates where old loaves were dumped to waste. He remembered the monstrous bulk of black cattle snorting in the heat near a river. Boot prints filling silently with water. The cry of peddlers. The calluses of his father’s hand at his neck as they trudged uphill through a warm rain.

  His father, yes, that. Captain Edward Benlowes was a tall Yorkshireman with shoulders like planks and a wiry beard that stood out from his chin like some benevolent Assyrian king’s. A sheen of oil would glisten on his forehead when he came slowly up the old street each evening, shuffling past the sandesh bakery and the colonial offices, doffing his hat, rubbing at his hair in the dusty light. Foole remembered that, or believed he did. There had been such power in his father’s wrists, such pragmatism. Captain Benlowes had contracted his first vessel with the East India Company in 1841 and throughout that seething decade had shipped opium along the coast between warehouses and depots never once failing to deliver his cargo on time. Somewhere Foole held a memory of being hoisted like a travelling satchel over his father’s shoulder in the humid evening air while insects batted against a screened porch and an old woman stood nearby, arms folded, smiling. Was it a true memory? He wanted to think it so.

  But all that he knew he knew only through the telling. That was the truth of it. A shy child, a watchful boy. He had walked late but never fallen. He had spoken late but in full sentences. Somewhere a photographic plate existed taken by a bellows camera when he was two years old and in the cloudy image he stares unsmiling, uncurious, black-haired and pale-eyed, a fat flushed English boy from the colonies hot in his little white suit.

  All of that was his first life. He remembered so little of it, flashes, broken fragments, the faint scent of spice or the smothering heat of the summer evenings. He was four years old when his father determined to take him on a business voyage to Baltimore and though no stranger to his father’s ships in the port still he had not sailed before. Was it not strange in such an age to take a shipowner’s child along like so much ballast? All his life he would wonder what had possessed his father: had a nurse been dismissed, was Foole to learn the trade that would one day be his own, had his father woken from some troubling dream warning what was to come?

  They set sail at dawn under a red sky with the quiet sailors padding barefoot along the spars and hauling at ropes in silhouette in a choreography of rigging and silence. The boy perched on an overturned crate at the railing watching the brown land fade into haze and feeling the lift and roll of the waves take over. His father’s schooner tacked away from the coming weather into green seas, past the calm red outline of desert hills, south and east and south again into open water where the sparkle and flare of shoaling fish startled the boy he was. Days passed, weeks passed, under a gauzy webbing of stars and noon skies white as salt. His father led him through the stations of the ship with a patient eye for all he saw while the midshipmen grunted at their work and avoided his gaze until one evening on deck without his father a pod of dolphins was sighted to starboard and he begged the second mate to see. Whatever happened the man held him there by his scruff leaning him farther and farther out until he swung half suspended over the cresting waves and the salt spray flecked his lips, his jaw, and he started to fear. He squirmed in that grip while the mate crooned, Aye I could let ye go, lad, ye’d be eaten by fish and no part of ye’d ever be found, and w
hen he started to cry with the wind punching at his face the mate only scowled and shook the boy until his little teeth chattered. Bollocks, he hissed. Don’t ye go weepy on me, ye ain’t worth the weight of ye.

  His father heard of it. He said nothing but still his father somehow heard. He could remember being locked in his father’s quarters while the ship lay becalmed and hearing above deck the roar of his father’s voice, the rumble of some heavy thing dragged sternward. He tried not to listen, watched a fly crawl across muslin curtains, blink into motion. The mate kept his distance from then and when they put ashore in Cape Town he trudged down the gangway with his satchel strung over one shoulder and not a look back to crew or captain and Foole never saw the man again.

  All that was soon forgotten. After weeks at sea he jogged unsteadily alongside his father feeling the weirdness of packed earth underfoot. They slept side by side in a rented room in clean sheets and when he closed his eyes he could still feel the roll of the ship and when he awoke his father had returned from a street market with fresh fruit and warm white bread. In the mornings his father met with shipmasters in warehouse offices while he waited bored, his feet drumming the floor, and in the afternoons they wandered the Company Gardens flapping their arms at the birds and whooping and smiling at the shy black nannies as they passed. There were prams with enormous wooden wheels standing in the paths and ladies in white seated on benches and under the azure sky the trees were very green, the earth very red.

  The accident when it came was nothing, ridiculous, it could have been avoided. They had set sail from Cape Town into a wilder ocean and the first storm had struck on their second day out and it did not let up for weeks. He was sick, seasoned sailors were sick. His father stood at the rail soaked and battered and leaning into the wind with a fury that contained both joy and desire while below decks Foole swung in a hammock, greening, and the pitch of vomit slid from wall to wall underfoot. The ship would rise and rise and crest and then plunge violently back down the steep black water shuddering and creaking the while until the boy feared the timbers must split and the sea pour in. At some point his father came below, sea water streaming from his beard, his right hand cradling his left in a wrapped cloth where a splinter had gone through. It was nothing, a broken bite of wood, a loosed rope in the strong wind. But the fever came over him gradually, the arm weakened gradually, the wound went bad and the gangrene set in. As the Americas neared his father went among the crew less and less often and the stink when he did so was black.

  It was the first mate who piloted the schooner past the shipyards and up to the Baltimore waterfront and the same man who carried his father to a lodging house above the harbour. He’ll be at peace here, the mate said, and cleared his throat, and added, I’m sorry for ye, lad. He clicked a small bag of English coins down on a writing desk, and shut the door firmly when he left.

  His father was lucid, his father raved. He slept often and like the dead. His arm had swollen to the thickness of a melon and was green-black and he screamed at the touch of it. Foole was too frightened to leave his side and ate only what the maid brought him out of pity. After two days the desk clerk came and stood over his father frowning and a short while later a surgeon came and withdrew from a small satchel several ferocious-looking instruments and folded his frock coat over a chair and rolled his sleeves past the elbow. Get the boy out, he said sharply. That was all he said. Foole was taken next door to a restaurant kitchen and seated among the steam and bustle of the Negro dishwashers and there he ate thick slices of bread and strawberry jam and though the sweetness of it turned his stomach he could not stop eating. When he was at last brought back to the lodging house his father’s arm was gone and the doctor was leaning over a basin scrubbing the red foam from his knuckles and he could see blood freckling the man’s sleeves. Through the open window a fishmonger was calling out his catch. The curtains shifted. On the bed in a square of sunlight the man his father lay, mouth open, his thick beard inexplicably cut short, dead the half-hour at least.

  How much of that was true?

  All of it, he would say. None of it.

  He stepped gingerly through the iron flood doors on the north side of the Thames just before midnight, and started up the stairs, Fludd trailing some ten feet behind. They had waited in the haze with their backs to the wall like cutthroats to give Pinkerton time to exit and after twenty minutes set out in the same direction. The giant had said nothing the long walk north along the tunnel and that silence Foole knew was its own rebuke. He could feel still the soft thrum of the river through the rock overhead, the slick of the tunnel walls shining weird in the gas. There had been a brutality and economy in the American’s gestures, the way he had held the revolver at his trouser leg, thumb cocking the hammer, silk hat darkening his face as he watched them go. The father in the man, yes, that. But also a weariness, a sadness at the eyes the father had not suffered.

  Around and around, up and up Foole trudged, his hand on the iron railing, his heart drained and sick of it all. Charlotte in the sunlight walking through warm sand. Her face, her hair adrift in the green mortuary light. That snowy morning in New York when he had opened her letter. He ducked his head at the top of the tunnel stairs, slipped out into the night. After a moment he heard Fludd grunt, squeeze his bulk through the narrow door.

  The outline of the Tower rose before them.

  What is it? Foole said at last. He could not keep the irritation from his voice.

  The giant’s shoes crunching heavily. Foole could see the huge outsized hands, the brass knuckles glinting.

  Say it, Japheth.

  Say what.

  You think me reckless.

  Aye, I do. Bastard’s like to start his peeping now until he learns the truth. A man don’t dance with the devil, Mr. Adam.

  The devil, Foole muttered, turning away.

  The river was dark. A family of nine lay huddled asleep on a stone bench cut into the wall, heads lolling, mouths agape. Foole walked over and slipped a guinea into the folds of cloth in the mother’s lap. Then they turned north and walked in silence and came out of the shadowy mouth of an alley onto Gracechurch Street like visitants emerging from a dream and they mingled there with the night crowds flowing along the footway.

  Fludd was rubbing slivers of frost from his beard. He said, Before sundown tomorrow Pinkerton’s goin to know who we is an who we ain’t an like as not what we ate for breakfast. He ain’t a man we employ for this sort of a task. Not jakes like us, we don’t.

  Foole slowed before a dressmaker’s leaded window, studied their warping reflections in the glass. Crowds swirled past, rivers of light, rivers of pitch.

  And just who are we, Japheth? he murmured.

  But Fludd was regarding him with an expression of almost grief and did not reply.

  His father had lain six days buried in that cemetery in Baltimore when on the seventh day the man in white appeared. A man with long sharp vulpine teeth, plucked eyebrows, tiny spectacles squinching his eyes to slits. The boy he was sat huddled on a bench in the gravel yard of a Catholic orphanage, watching the man glide towards him, a withered nun in her winged cowl dipping at his side. He felt the hairs on his arms prickle. He was four years old and alone in the world and still he could feel the wrongness in the man. His father had been laid in a pauper’s grave loose-boxed under a shovelful of lime and Foole had stood at the gravedigger’s knee while a ladies’ aid member set her gloved hand to her hat and struggled to find her tears. That gravedigger with his African skin and trousers tied with rope and his heavy stooped shoulders proclaimed a prayer none of which the child understood beyond its final cruel Amen. All his life to come Baltimore would be that: a city of open graves and hot wind and skies rolling blackly overhead.

  The man in white did not announce himself. He took the child in hand and led him past the staring orphans in their grey wool shirts and had him repack his father’s satchel and took him from that place without a kind word or smile. There was a letter with some signatur
e and seal at its bottom which the man showed and the holy sisters nodded gravely at it and regarded Foole from the depths of their eyes. He did as he was told, he did not cry. But he missed his father and it was a physical pain, a hurt in the hollow of his breast. He missed the sea in his father’s skin, his ropy forearms as he swung the child whooping skyward. And he missed Calcutta, too, already fading from his memory, the big house in White Town near the bakery, the heat and clatter and noise of the Bengali processions along the riverbanks under a setting sun. In comparison this forlorn land, this America, seemed cold and vast and brutal, a land where the loved could be swallowed by the earth and lost forever.

  The man in white took him in a hired coach to a bustling hall and lifted him up a steep set of stairs and down a corridor lined with windows and into a small plush private room. There was a window, and Foole remembered the seat underneath it, soft, maroon, and the man’s quiet meticulous gestures. That man wore a long cream coat whose tails he folded up over his thighs as he sat down and a tall white top hat and his head, when he removed his hat, was hairless. Foole remembered the creased skin at the back of the man’s skull, the way his ears pressed flat against his head like white knots of bone, the eerie stillness in his face when he turned around.

  His name was Fisk, the man said, speaking at last. He peered at the boy from over the rims of his spectacles. He worked for a woman who had once known Foole’s father, he said, a woman whom his father had written from his sickbed, begging that she care for the boy. Should his employer so agree, the boy would be raised in a city called Boston, far to the north. Even as they spoke his father’s schooner was being negotiated down to cover the debts incurred by its incomplete voyage and the big house and the shipping business back in Calcutta would be similarly disposed of. He, not a legal heir, could lay no claim to the properties. All this Fisk said with a quiet contempt and then he unhooked his spectacles and rubbed at his eyes and added in his crackling voice, It is a pity about your colouring, boy. If you are lucky you will be mistaken for Spanish. Foole sat, absorbing all this. And then came a sudden swift jolt, and the child put out his arms for balance and stared in horror as the small room began, incomprehensibly, to move.