By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  William nodded in distraction, his thoughts adrift. He nodded and he nodded and in the silence he started to inform Reckitt about his niece’s death but then he did not. Instead he said, surprising himself, You and John Shore—

  Reckitt smiled a thin smile. Oh. I’ve known Inspector Shore a long time.

  Chief Inspector.

  Reckitt looked surprised. Chief? Well. Time shall creep in its petty paces, he said softly. We are here until we are not.

  Not you. You’re here until you’re transferred.

  I was referring to the condition we call life, Mr. Pinkerton, he said in a withering tone. The transfer means little to me. Reckitt rubbed at his wrists as if to ease an ache in them. It is a strange feeling, outliving one’s prison, he said, a rather strange feeling. I have found my days at Millbank not so trying. They have given me leisure to reacquaint myself with the word of the Lord. Do you know, sir, had I a second life I should have devoted it to the Church?

  You tried that. They wouldn’t have you.

  Reckitt regarded him a long cold moment. No, sir, it was I who wouldn’t have them, he said slowly. He blinked his moist eyes.

  You tell it however you like. About your niece and Shade—

  Reckitt gave a slight bony half shrug, almost theatrical. He said, In the seminary, Mr. Pinkerton, I was one of the more studious candidates. I had my faith, of course. But what interested me was how translation had changed the Bible itself. The Good Book was not written in English, sir. It was not even written in Latin. Some of it is from the Greek, some the Hebrew. And yet we are told the word of God is absolute. Does that sound sensible to you?

  William said nothing.

  Reckitt clicked his tongue. Nor to me, he said, nor to me. Language is created by men.

  Mr. Reckitt.

  Consider the devil, Mr. Pinkerton. The Satan. Only as an example, nothing more. In Hebrew, satan is not a name, only a word, meaning adversary. The figure of the Satan, when he appears in the oldest stories, is a servant of the Lord, sent by God to tempt the people of the earth by testing their faith. His task is to report back to God about who passes, and who fails, such tests. We invented the devil, sir, sometime in the Middle Ages. Nothing is absolute. Everything in the human world is translated by time. Even evil. Once I understood this, I was no longer fit to serve the Church.

  William wanted to ask the old thief about the man Adam Foole, Charlotte’s old lover. It seemed possible that the old man might recall some detail about him. But something held him back, some hesitation, he could not say just what it was. The old man was not forthcoming about anything and perhaps it was simply this. Perhaps it was something more. They could hear Blackwell pacing in the corridor, the click of his heels on the flooring.

  Mr. Reckitt, William said. How did your niece first encounter Shade? Who introduced them?

  Do you believe in love, Mr. Pinkerton?

  William looked at him, exasperated.

  Love is the great divide, Reckitt said. It is what we cross and how we cross out of ourselves. You must know I did not ever marry, sir. But I have loved. And I do love, I love my niece. I know the truth of it is love, because the word is inadequate to its meaning. The Bible tells us only a man incapable of love is a truly dangerous man.

  What does this have to do with Shade?

  John Shore, sir, is a man incapable of love.

  For god’s sake.

  We were children together, in the same neighbourhood. He was a troubled boy, a bully. I was older than him, and bookish, and even still I was afraid to pass him in the street. He went into the police force because he understood it was a way of holding power.

  William sighed, impatient.

  It was as if Reckitt could sense the shift in him for he fell silent and then he was regarding William with a strange intensity. Why are you here, Mr. Pinkerton? he said cautiously. Why are you here, speaking with me now? What is it has happened?

  William closed his notebook. Your niece is dead, Mr. Reckitt. She was found twelve days ago.

  Slowly Reckitt’s thorny eyebrows knitted together. He said nothing.

  She was murdered. I’m sorry about it.

  The ancient thief turned his face aside and they sat a long moment in silence. Then William got to his feet, he ran a hand through his hair, he set about buttoning his chesterfield.

  Charlotte’s dead? Reckitt said slowly.

  William nodded.

  Charlotte?

  Her head was recovered from the river, William said. Her torso was found at a building site on Edgware Road in a sack. Her legs were discovered on Saturday, in Bermondsey. This man, this Edward Shade. His old associates are the only lead we have.

  He watched the old man absorb the lie. At the cell door he turned. If you remember anything about Shade, you know how to reach me.

  I never knew an Edward Shade, Reckitt whispered. He did not raise his eyes.

  Anything at all, William said.

  Can I see her? Mr. Pinkerton?

  William banged on the bars. Blackwell, he called. He turned back. Who else worked with Charlotte in those years, Martin? Who else might have known Shade?

  When Reckitt raised his face his eyes were black with fury. Some brutal thing passed between them, some understanding about human suffering and the ways it might be increased. He swallowed.

  The man you want to talk to, he said, is Adam Foole.

  SIXTEEN

  Frightened? Foole said. Edward Shade’s been dead twenty years, Japheth.

  So show me a body, Fludd muttered. He gestured with his spoon and an orange light flared in its curve. Fact is, Mr. Adam, you crossed a line with those Pinkertons. Worst what you can do, to a certain kind of jack. I told you for years it weren’t over. Past has a way of dippin a man’s pockets when he don’t keep an eye out.

  This from you.

  Aye, Fludd said with a heavy look. This from me. It ain’t up to us to decide what dead is.

  Foole thought of Charlotte in the stillness of the mortuary and then of the American enshrouded in the tunnel darkness and he shook his head. Pinkerton’s of use to me, he said with a soft vehemence. If the Saracen can be found, Pinkerton will find him.

  He’s like to find more than just the Saracen.

  He’s not dangerous to us, Japheth. A rough laughter drifted up through the carpet from the flash house below, faded away. Foole shifted the claret aside, interlaced his fingers on the table. Pinkerton imagines he’s hunting Shade for his father, he said slowly. But he’s not. He’s doing it for himself. That’s what makes him dangerous. Do you know what I think, Japheth? I think his father told him nothing about what happened.

  You mean between you an his da.

  Foole nodded.

  That ain’t a reassurance, Fludd grimaced.

  They had come down King’s Cross in the hour after dusk, the two of them, crossing with care the three slimed steps, the broken knife-edged planking that led here to Bottle’s flash house. Fludd had hauled at the bulleted door with both hands, set his weight and leaned out, and then Foole had felt the sudden blast of heat from within. Dense smoke, the reek of unwashed flesh: Foole had held his pocket closed and his hat to his head as he trailed Fludd in and down. They had brushed by rampsmen with tankards asway, maltoolers with their fly forks fumbling the skirts of bonnet girls, they had glimpsed a child with a malformed spine grinding an organ on a low stage in a corner but they had not slowed. A knuckler had pushed past with a glass of max, his bad eye tamped like a white marble in mud. Then at a heavy oak door at the far end of the bar Fludd had banged thrice in quick succession and after a moment a small slot in its face had opened and the white rove of an eyeball pressed itself against the visible light.

  Bottle, Fludd called, ducking his face to be seen. It’s Japheth.

  The slot shut again. There was a rasp of bolts and then the door swung wide to reveal a man in evening dress grave and solitary as an undertaker. Foole glimpsed thinning hair, a liverspotted scalp. How old they had all grown.<
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  Why Mr. Fludd, the man said in a thick Scottish accent. You have come back to us. And Mr. Foole, sir. Table for two?

  Three, said Foole. Molly’s to join.

  Aye, an bring her a bucket when she do, Fludd grinned. Kid can drink like a fish.

  Bottle had led them upstairs, along a narrow corridor, their footfalls drumming over the hollow floor. In a panelled room at the front of the premises, on a small table, they found two thick tallow candles burning down, as if the men’s presence had been long foreseen. A bottle of claret wrapped in a white cloth had been left uncorked and breathing. Foole ordered a coconut soup followed by a salmon curry and Fludd the artichoke ragout and then Bottle withdrew, returned moments later with the dishes, withdrew again.

  Foole leaned close. I thought he’d be taller, he said with a quiet intensity, as soon as they were alone again. Pinkerton’s son, I mean.

  O he were tall enough, like. An light on his feet for his size, what makes for the trouble.

  He’s not much like his father. Less fire and brimstone. His father was wrathful but he doesn’t have that in him. Foole said this and then looked up as if surprised by his own words.

  Fludd nodded. You thought he’d be different.

  I thought there’d be—

  A resemblance.

  He regarded Fludd’s face in the candlelight but could see no ridicule in it. Yes, he said softly. A resemblance.

  They ain’t your blood, Mr. Adam.

  It was said in kindness but he felt all at once foolish, tired. He had lived always with a tight control over events and it seemed to him now that matters were descending, that he was losing himself in the face of some grand design not of his own making.

  Fludd snapped open a napkin and reached for the claret and poured out two glasses. To Pinkertons, he said. To them what’s here, an them what’s gone. The glass vanished in his huge hand, his fingernails black-rimmed and bitten.

  Foole drank.

  But Fludd had suspended his own glass at his lips and he growled now over the rim, his gaze steady, Still I’d go three rounds with the bastard without gloves, I would. Though I’d rather come on up behind him with a cosh in me fist an him asleep. Then he grunted and took a deep drink, set the glass down, wiped the claret from his beard. Law don’t never make for a clean tool, Mr. Adam. An Pinkerton’s a law unto hisself.

  Foole frowned. You make it sound Biblical, Japheth.

  Blame it on me upbringing, Fludd said, then fell to brooding. He shifted a meaty fist on the table. You’ll be wantin to tell the kid about it, he said. I know you won’t be eager to. You just need to decide how much to tell, when she gets here.

  Foole studied his cracked hands.

  You can’t protect her from it, Mr. Adam. I just come out of a stone jug. Dancin with a Pinkerton’s like to land all of us back inside. Molly won’t be treated no softer on account of her age.

  There was a distant crash from the bar below and then a muffled cheer but in the soft dimness of their little room Foole took no notice and after a moment he said in a tone all at once cold and brutal as a steel cable: Edward Shade never existed, Japheth, not legally. There are no papers in his name, no photographs, no outstanding writs or warrants. Nothing. No one else knows the truth of it, except you. I was careful.

  You never told Charlotte?

  I never told anyone. Least of all the Reckitts.

  The giant’s face contorted in the candlelight.

  No one can trace a ghost, Japheth. Not even William Pinkerton.

  Except you ain’t a ghost, Mr. Adam, Fludd murmured, and his low voice was like sheet metal shaken in darkness. You ain’t a ghost yet.

  Edward, Mrs. Shade would whisper at night, and the child would look up from his wooden toys startled. The speaking of his father’s name felt so strange to him, preposterous. Some afternoons Fisk would come upon him in the half-light of the stables and hiss: You should not be in here, Master Edward, and he would flee in a clatter of harness leather and iron, as if from the name itself. At supper, when his governess asked him sternly, And what do you say, Edward? he would set his spoon respectfully astride his soup bowl and murmur some assent that seemed to come from a different throat, a different child. And yet that name now belonged to him, and what might have been a kindness, a way of keeping a loved one alive and near, became in time its own erasure. Slowly he answered to that name as if it were his own. Slowly Edward Benlowes faded, his rasping voice forgotten.

  What did the child feel in Shade House, what did he think of its occupants? Was it fear? Mrs. Shade herself should have terrified. She was skeletal, a grave woman with death in her eyes, with skin so pale it glowed at times almost blue. But a sadness filled her, inhabited her movements. Widowed at thirty-one, young yet for the fortune she possessed, she never spoke of the husband dead three years that winter, his surveyor’s coach overturned into the raging Ohio. His body never was found. She often was tired, true, and in the evenings would clutch a hand to her throat to catch her breath, the tendons in her neck standing sharply out. She climbed stairs slowly, spoke in halting phrases. On summer mornings she would rise from her untouched breakfast and drift onto the garden terrace among the dahlias and the roses bearing an expression of stricken regret. Foole would watch her, anxious, fearful.

  Mrs. Shade was a freethinker, an atheist, an abolitionist. There was a greatness in her, in an age when women were refused greatness. When the child asked Fisk one day why the estate’s small chapel was boarded up, the man shrugged a sour shrug and said, Because she wants it that way. Her faith lay elsewhere. In the autumn she insisted the child begin his lessons though just five years old. He was to study four hours each morning and she brought a governess up from New York for the task. Mrs. Shade insisted he eat lemons, oranges, grapefruit during his lessons. A scientist in New York had discovered citrus opened new channels in the brain, she explained, and then with a sly smile added: It makes one think, does it not? Foole was dressed in little tailored suits each day and kept obedient but Mrs. Shade was fiercely opposed to any physical punishment. She told him once, A man is judged for his beliefs, Edward. You must never believe in anything that you have not first thought through. He learned through Fisk and the cook that her mother’s parents had fled the Revolution in France, only to have to flee Bonaparte again, and then again, as the smaller countries of Europe were eaten up by the French Empire. My parents believed in nothing, she herself said one evening. Nothing but human dignity, Edward, that and the importance of good walking shoes.

  In the afternoons he was given his run of the estate. He would scale drainpipes, prowl the slate roofs, hunting the half-wild cats with hands spread and a ragged fishing net slouching between. Or he would peel off his clothes and swim naked in the man-made lake among the lily pads and weeds. He would play with an older boy, James, son of the coachman who had drowned in the Ohio, who lived with the cook in a cottage off-grounds. That boy was pliant, and gentle, and twice Foole’s size. Together they would dig elaborate traps in the lawn for pirates and thieves, they would hide on his governess until dusk had fallen. They were more than friends, as boyhood allows, inventing a private language of bird calls and grunts, cutting each other’s hands with a flint arrowhead, swearing fealty each to each in the infinite undying twilight that is a childhood.

  All that he would remember as if it were a fairy story of impossible dimensions. And like all such stories there came a blight to this one also: a sharp pained cough, his benefactress doubling over in her chair, blood in a handkerchief folded and double-folded and secreted away. No she would not discuss it. But in the fall she disappeared for six weeks, travelling out west, to the high dry sierras there, leaving the child behind on the estate in its sudden gloomy vastness. The man in white, Fisk, went with her. Foole remembered his stern upright figure glaring straight ahead as the coach started slowly down the drive. She returned from that trip with blood in her cheeks, her eyes ablaze, and for a time she came alive. And then slowly, surely, she began again
to wilt.

  So the months passed, receded. Calcutta, his father, all that he once had been, receded. The frail silhouette of Mrs. Shade, coughing, took their place.

  It was on the last night of his first year at Shade House when he awoke in his blankets, startled, heart hammering. The two girls in white were standing at his bedside. He had not seen them since Calcutta. Moonlight fell aslant the floor in a silver oblong and in that shining he could see his breath and he started to shake. The girls’ eyes were filled with hatred.

  Papa? he whispered. Have you seen him? Is Papa there too?

  But they said nothing, only stared in their loathing, and then in the stillness they were gone, devoured by the dark.

  He was five years old.

  In the flash house Foole was rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand when Molly came in. He could see by her face that something was wrong. She had been quieter since their visit to Mrs. Sharper and her sister, a soft core of sadness in her, but it was not that. Fludd, the wings of his waistcoat spread and a dainty pink finger picking at his teeth, caught Foole’s expression and turned also.

  I never seen him until he were right behind me, Adam, Molly said. I swear. Like a bloody shadow, he is.

  The man who squeezed in behind her wore an elegant black coat with tails and a green satin waistcoat and his oiled brown hair was pressed and combed back from his ears. His cheeks were pitted and shiny in the light. He sat in the empty chair and set his hat aggressively upon the table. When he crossed his legs Foole noted his spats and the false ruby in his cane. There would be a blade hidden there he knew. The man was a fence by trade and long a part of the swell mob and rumoured to have accepted human cargo in lieu of outstanding debts. Foole had borrowed twenty thousand pounds from the monster two years earlier and not yet paid back a penny. His name was Appleby Barr.

  Barr regarded Fludd where he sat glowering and then he turned sidelong to face Foole. I had heard you were in London again, he said quietly. I did not believe it. I expect you will have a payment for me?