By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  It was his first journey by rail. As the train gathered speed he sat with his nose against the glass, the fields and forest scrolling past and the train rattling up through the boy’s bones and settling, a low throb, into the nerves at the base of his skull. The dining carriage was wondrous, the sleeping compartments cold, the scent of oil and polish in the wooden floors unlike anything he had known. The journey passed, the days passed. Boston when they arrived was cooler, calmer than Baltimore, the wide boulevards strangely clean, and Fisk hailed a coach under a red evening sky and took Foole across the city and past the Commons and into its outlying estates. As they rode Fisk sat facing the boy, his hands crossed on the handle of his cane, his head drooping and jerking awake. But his eyes all the while remained fixed on the boy in his dread.

  Fisk’s employer, Foole’s benefactress, awaited them in the vast marble foyer of her mansion. Foole had seen big houses before but nothing so grand, so forbidding, so cold and clean and silent. The gates stood open, the long drive was lined with sycamores, hedges, vast lawns. Then the house was looming up before him, a great stone fortress, and he had stared at the windows in their shimmering rows feeling whelmed with fear. Fisk had alighted at once, cleared his throat in impatience, and tapped the child on the backside with his cane as he clambered down. He leaned his face close and whispered, Best begin your begging, boy, then brushed past and ascended the entry stairs and pulled sharply on the reception bell.

  She was dressed in a grey silk and wore her black hair up so that the streak of white at her temple startled. She clasped her long pale fingers at her belly and lowered her chin and studied the child where he stood still clutching his father’s old sailor’s satchel, shivering, small, and her gaze was steady, curious, intent. He wanted to hide his face but did not dare.

  This is the boy? she murmured. Her voice was low, surprisingly gentle. Is he hungry? Have you eaten, child? Stand straight, do not be afraid. Ah, yes, you have your father’s eyes.

  She had been standing on the first riser of a wide curving marble staircase and he had not seen this until she stepped down and walked towards him. She was smaller than he’d thought.

  O you sweet poor creature, she said. She kneeled, lifted his chin in her fingers. Her eyes were two different colours, one grey, one the green of a sunlit sea. What shall we call you? Certainly something English, something to help you get along in the world. Edward, I think. After your father.

  Foole trembled. The great house around them creaked.

  After a moment when it was clear he would say nothing she rose and brushed at her gown and turned and regarded Fisk lurking in the shadows. Mr. Fisk will show you to your arrangements. Tomorrow we shall have a look at the nursery and see that it is made suitable. For tonight, the library will suffice. Mr. Fisk?

  The man in white bowed gravely.

  See that young Master Edward is settled. Take him down to the kitchens for his supper.

  Fisk nodded. As you wish, Mrs. Shade, he said.

  And he took up the child’s battered satchel and crossed the marble floor and guided him down a dark passage into the shadowy rooms of his second life.

  FIFTEEN

  A fine mist was drifting sidelong out across the river. A frenzy of rooks burst black and savage in the air over the south bank and William stopped with a hand shielding his eyes, taking in the metallic sinew of the Thames, the cries of rivermen adrift over the waters. The rooks rose and wheeled as one in the cold light and there was a wrongness to it, like a warning.

  Mr. Pinkerton, Blackwell called. It is near eleven, sir.

  He grimaced. He had insisted on their walking to Millbank, despite the cold, wanting to turn over in his head some of his confusion. He did not know if Martin Reckitt would have heard of the man Foole. An uncle could hardly be expected to recall his ward’s dalliances in detail, especially from long ago. As he had drifted into sleep the night before he had decided not to follow the lead on Jonathan Cooper, the Saracen, bristling at Adam Foole’s insinuations. Then of his dreams he recalled only fragments, the tissue-thin drafting plans for the sewers unrolled on a stone table, a clerk shouting at him that Muck Annie’s hole had not been built to specifications. He awoke exhausted, troubled, and knew by the hollows under his eyes that he had decided nothing.

  At a pie stand just past the rotted timbers of Lambeth Bridge William stopped and Blackwell paused then came back towards him and he bought the inspector a mince pie and they walked on. The pie vendor banging the lid of his cart behind them in the cold, grinning toothlessly into his fists. William pulled off his gloves, held the pastry steaming in its brown paper between two fingers. The heat of it scorched the roof of his mouth.

  I remember when it froze five years ago, sir, Blackwell said, blowing on his pastry. You could walk right across it, bank to bank. There were barmaids out on the ice with brandies for sale. A queer feeling that was, standing on something that shouldn’t hold your weight.

  It took William a moment to understand his meaning. He let his eyes drift out over the river, shimmering in its steel.

  They have a history, sir, Blackwell said. The chief and Mr. Reckitt, I mean.

  William felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He folded the remains of the pie very slowly in its greasy wrapper. What history? he asked.

  I don’t mean to speak of it, sir. It’s not my place.

  William put out a hand and held the man’s arm. What history?

  Blackwell cleared his throat. Well the chief has a, well, a weakness for the chippies, sir. You might have noticed it. Oh he’s a fine husband, I don’t doubt, but he has a weakness.

  This sounds like gossip, Blackwell.

  Not gossip, sir.

  He gave the inspector a hard look.

  It’s not gossip, sir, he said again. Mr. Reckitt’s crew were passing bad notes on the Continent and the chief went to Paris and arrested one of the screevers himself. I suppose Mr. Reckitt had an eye out for revenge. The chief was a regular at Nellie Coffey’s house in the Borough. She and the chief used to meet at the Rising Sun on Fleet Street and exchange, ah, information. She was the widow of Big Jack Casey, you might have heard of him? Had the one leg? Well Mr. Reckitt arranged to have a gentleman step in at an unsuitable moment and notify a night watchman of a theft on the premises. Being a gentleman of some standing, this would have involved the detaining of all of the guests for questioning. And Mr. Shore would have been, ah, interrupted, sir.

  You mean in the act.

  Blackwell flushed. Yes sir. In the act. Fortunately we learned of Mr. Reckitt’s intentions on the evening in question and avoided the scandal. The gentleman-associate came to us and confessed. Cold feet and such, sir, I expect. Rumour of it passed up the line all the same though and Mr. Shore was overlooked for promotion the following year.

  When was all this?

  Seventy-three, I think it was, sir. Mr. Reckitt was taken the next year. Arrested at customs with a bag of uncut diamonds traced back to a heist in South Africa.

  William stopped walking. Why are you telling me this, Inspector?

  Blackwell turned to face him, his blue eyes fiat, his cheeks raw in the chill. Because no one else was telling you, sir, he said.

  William’s father too had loved a woman not his wife. William had known this even as a boy though he did not know the nature of that love, even now, and would sometimes tell himself it was a chaste love, a love of friendship and not of passion. His father called her Kitty but to the world her name was Kate Warne and she came to the Pinkerton offices in 1856 with no experience, a slender widow of twenty-six, brown-haired, with bold cheekbones and a gift for accents and the intelligent eyes of a schoolteacher. She had taken from her handbag an advertisement for the position of detective and his father had scowled, refusing her an interview. Detective work was not for women. But later that morning he had, inexplicably, relented, and by ten o’clock he had put her on the payroll as a full detective. William remembered the stubborn way his father’s neck would
thicken and bull into his chest whenever his mother mentioned Kitty’s name. He trusted her as he trusted few others, he would tell her. A married man shouldn’t trust her kind, she would reply, leaving his father apoplectic and stuttering. Her kind uncovered the plot to kill the president-elect, he would shout, even if Lincoln’s people didn’t want to pay the expense of it. Oh I’ve heard about her expenses, his mother would shout back. And don’t you talk to me about being reasonable or the Drysdale case or how she traced that $130,000 again, hush now, stop, the boys are listening. But his father did not stop. When Kate fell ill with pneumonia William’s father sat vigil at her bedside and when she died he did not come home for three days straight. That was in January of 1868. She would have been younger than William was now, he realized. His father had her buried in the Pinkerton plot, next to where he himself would lie. His mother never would discuss it and her humiliation, like so much about her, could be savage in its silence.

  William himself had never been unfaithful. He would drink late in outpost saloons under fiery candle wheels, make his way upstairs to whatever creaking bed alone. On railway carriages he would eat in silence, his dark eyes unfriendly. He was indifferent to a well-turned ankle, to the flare of a pale throat in an elevator cage late at night. Yes he knew how women looked at him. He just did not care. There were men with appetites in his line of work as in any but he could not be counted among their number and the truth was he loved his wife and desired no other.

  William watched Blackwell cross the white gravel of Millbank’s outer yard and call through to the gatehouse. The prison was silent, the street around them empty and desolate. Blackwell called and called and he shook the cold bars of the gate.

  After a moment a hooded figure crunched around the corner of the gatehouse and peered at them through the bars and then worked a clasp. The gate swung inward with a slow heavy screech. Blackwell gave William a look and they stepped single file through onto the dead black earth of Millbank and the porter—a small man, cowled in his cloak—cast a quick sharp glare at them as if at a shank of meat at market found wanting and then he stumped back inside.

  William had been through many prisons in his life and seen terrible things. He had seen the small brick jail in Denver where men had been hauled kicking into the rafters on coils of rope and the ancient Tombs where Manhattan’s indigent were dumped to die. He had been beneath the stones of Kingston Pen and seen men’s limbs lost to frostbite and he had prowled the haunted underground cells of Newgate with neither escort nor guide. But not Millbank, never yet Millbank.

  Of course he had heard of it. What lawman had not. It stood near empty now, though it had once held thousands of men in a solitude and silence that broke the spirits of prisoners and wardens both. Its stone walls were the grey-yellow of the high California canyons and rose around them sullen and cracked in the sulphurous light and as he walked William could not shake the feeling of being watched. The small openings high in the walls would not be within reach of their occupants but in the central tower rising up before them the windows burned with a greenish light. A stink of vinegar filled the air as if some wrong thing had burned there. William held his handkerchief close.

  They followed the porter in. A low coal fire was burning in the grate.

  Gentlemen, the porter said. He had taken down his hood and stood side-whiskered and ancient with his backside to the fire, his stubby hands held out behind him for the heat. I’ll ask ye to sign the ledger on the perch. And to relinquish any firearms ye be carryin on your person.

  This last was said with a direct look at William and William glanced at Blackwell then back at the porter but did not move.

  The chief told him you were an American, sir, Blackwell said.

  Meanin no offence by it, of course, the porter added.

  William cradled his Colt in one hand, passed it upside down to the porter. Is that it?

  The ledger, the porter said.

  William dipped the pen, wrote his name in his big crooked hand.

  It was a .36-calibre Colt Navy and in Chicago he kept it the way some other men kept secrets: it was the first thing you saw. You saw a gun and there was a man with it like he was on retainer and first the gun said hello and then the man nodded and said hello too.

  He sucked at his teeth.

  Nodded at the porter and they went on in.

  The porter guided them to the inner gate where a warden took their charge and they followed along a windowless stone hallway and through an iron door without speaking and as they went the darkness at first distinguished them and then made them as one. The immense weight of stone around them pressed deep. The halls were unlighted and the floors covered in gravel from the yards and at each heavy safety door the warden would pause and turn sideways in the gaslight and pull slowly through the ring of keys tied to his belt as if he had not covered that distance in many years and did not himself trust his way.

  At last the corridor widened and they came to the cells. The doors stood open and the cells bare and William saw neither the incarcerated nor any guard. As they went Blackwell talked to him in a low voice about the military use of the prison and its now-empty cells and the reasons for its dismantling and when he asked what would happen to Martin Reckitt Blackwell only shrugged and said the chief had recommended the decommissioned naval hulks south of Portsmouth.

  The warden led them along the angled corridor towards a narrow iron staircase. The cells stood all to the right and facing them were small deep-set windows spilling an eerie grey daylight down the walls. At the top of the stairs he made his way down to a turning in the corridor where a single cell stood barred fast and where seated upon a hard bench picking at a strand of oakum sat an old man with shorn hair in brown prison-issue clothes.

  The old man stood slowly. He set the frayed rope aside in a tangle.

  Martin Reckitt? William said.

  The prisoner regarded him for a long quiet moment and then he nodded slowly. Mr. William Pinkerton, he said.

  He was informed of our visit, sir, Blackwell explained in a low voice. But not its purpose.

  Martin Reckitt was thin as a rail, his skin greasy as if some deep illness were seeping up from his core. A bruise on one cheek had browned like bad fruit. His eyes were small and bloodshot in a face the more deeply etched for the bad light in that cell. But his ancient fingers were thorny with calluses and still strong and when he moved there was a lean muscular stiffness in his shoulders and neck as if he had slept a long time on a hard surface and it had not broken him.

  And what are you in for, sir? he was saying. His smile did not reach his eyes.

  William inclined his head. He waited while the cell was unlocked and then went in and sat at the end of the bench and withdrew a notebook from his pocket.

  Mr. Pinkerton means to ask you some questions, Blackwell said sternly. He stood just inside the cell. You’d be wise to listen and answer honestly. No nonsense from you now.

  Martin Reckitt studied the young inspector with a baleful smile and then he looked at William. I’m innocent, he said.

  William shook his head. A case of mistaken identity, was it.

  It always is, Mr. Pinkerton. In all but the eyes of the Lord.

  William gave him a quick puzzled smile. Except I’m not here to talk about you, he said. I want to talk about Charlotte.

  Charlotte.

  Your niece. Yes.

  Martin Reckitt shifted on the prison cot, he turned his face aside. When he glanced back his expression was careful, composed. I haven’t seen Charlotte in years, he said flatly. The last I heard, she was lawful and not causing any trouble. You should leave her be.

  Blackwell scratched at the back of one hand, bored. He said, Charlotte signed herself in as a visitor two months ago. We know how often she came to see you, Mr. Reckitt.

  William waved the inspector quiet. Tell me about her and Edward Shade, he said.

  He was watching the old thief’s face as he said it but the man did not flinch and his ca
lmness betrayed nothing, neither recognition nor confusion. She worked with Shade before he died, did she not? he pressed.

  I’ve been inside ten years, Mr. Pinkerton. I know nothing of such matters. I’m old and tired and would like to die outside, that’s all.

  That’s not likely to happen, Mr. Reckitt, Blackwell said.

  Reckitt looked across at the inspector standing by the cell door in his black morning coat and said, I’m surprised to see you with a chaperone, Mr. Pinkerton. The great American detective.

  William turned to Blackwell. Give us a minute.

  Blackwell frowned. My instructions are clear, sir.

  William waited.

  Blackwell hesitated, glanced from William to Reckitt and then back. Just a minute then, sir. I’ll be just along the hall.

  He called for the warden and the hunched figure came slowly back along the corridor and unlocked the cell then locked it again and William sat in the silence listening as the clinking of the keys and the scrape of the two men’s footfalls passed away. Then he turned to the aging thief.

  Edward Shade, Mr. Reckitt. What did you know of him?

  Reckitt blinked wetly. Shade. Shade?

  William still had not opened his notebook. He said, I’m not interested in your niece, Mr. Reckitt. Unless I have to be. I’m interested in the man Shade and what happened to him.

  Did your father send you? Reckitt gave him a sly look. He used to be rather interested in the whereabouts of Mr. Shade, if I recall. It was the first question he’d ask any of us, back then. I expect he is still—?

  William cleared his throat. My father died last year, he said.

  Ah. Such a loss. Sometimes I think there is a wall separating all of us from the world, Mr. Pinkerton, he said gravely. Free and not free alike. Sometimes I think that wall separates us from ourselves. If you’d like to know about Charlotte’s acquaintances, you should ask her yourself.