By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Foole furrowed his brow, he cleared his throat as if to speak but he did not speak.

  That is not the answer I was hoping for, Mr. Foole.

  I have a few projects in the planning. You’ll have your money.

  I certainly shall.

  Foole smiled tightly. Then what is the concern here, Mr. Barr?

  It is a question of when, sir. What manner of project?

  Profitable ones.

  Barr licked at his lower lip. A thick blunt tongue, white as a grub. I shall need more than that, Mr. Foole, if you wish to appease my associates. What sort of return are you expecting?

  You’ll have your money, Mr. Barr, Foole said again.

  Molly chewed at her nails, leaned over, spat into the carpet.

  Fludd’s low voice rumbled from the shadows. That ain’t the way to ask for it now, is it, he said, his huge strangler hands open on the table.

  Barr looked unimpressed. Mr. Fludd, I presume?

  Mr. Fludd, Foole said, gesturing wearily. Mr. Barr. Mr. Barr is a business associate of ours.

  An investor, Barr corrected. Who has yet to see a return on his investment.

  Some prospects is just a losin proposition, Fludd grunted. Sometimes you just cut your losses, like.

  Mr. Barr’s prospects do not lose, Foole said. Do they, sir?

  They do not.

  Fludd turned his shaggy face towards Foole, raised his eyebrows.

  You’ll have your return, Mr. Barr, Foole said quickly. He wanted to avoid further provocation. I assure you of that. But I do need a little more time.

  You are out of time, sir.

  Another few weeks. My reputation as an earner is worth that much, surely.

  It used to be so.

  A jack can’t pay what he can’t pay, Molly muttered.

  Barr sat with his oily face calm and he ran a finger over his hair, smoothing it. He said, Ah, child, but there are many ways to make up what is owed. Are there not, Mr. Foole?

  Foole frowned.

  Next time, sir, it will not be me coming to visit, Barr said with a shrug. He pinched up the fabric at his knees.

  An it ain’t like to be Mr. Foole they find waitin, Fludd growled.

  Barr nodded coolly, a flicker of a smile at his lips. Mr. Foole, Mr. Fludd, he said, rising from his chair. He set his hat delicately on his head, screwed it into place. At the door he paused. Might I recommend the ’72 Chateau? An excellent companion to the salmon.

  And then the door closed, and Foole sighed, rubbing his temples with two fingers.

  Just how much you in the bag for? Fludd said, as soon as the man was gone.

  O we’re all ears, Adam, Molly said. She sat in the chair Barr had been using and wriggled on her haunches. It’s all bloody warm now. Like sittin down in his lap, it is.

  Cork it, kid, Fludd said. You’re the one what brought the bugger.

  Molly was making a show of standing, draping her coat over Barr’s seat.

  It’s only business, Japheth, Foole said. It’ll be settled soon enough. Mr. Barr is a useful man to know. Maybe the cleanest fence in the flash. I’d regret offending him unduly.

  Then you best pay him.

  We’ll need the funds first. Foole tried to smile but did not quite manage it. We’ve been shifting stock through Mr. Barr since eighty-two. He’s floated us a few times when he needn’t have. He has his own pressures, I’m sure. This visit wasn’t much more than a gentle nudge. Foole could hear the roar of the flash house below. I think Mr. Barr looks on us with a rather friendly eye, he said.

  Fludd grunted. Eyes glistening in the candle fire like the heads of twin nails.

  Molly looked up, met Foole’s gaze, and there was in her face some troubled thing. She dragged a shoe over the carpet, back and forth.

  What is it, Molly?

  She shook her head. Nothin. I were just thinkin. You should find that mudlark.

  Fludd raised his face in surprise, studied Foole.

  Seeing the girl’s expression cloud over Foole thought of her that night after Sharper’s, in the carriage as they rode slowly back towards Half Moon Street. How she had laid her head on his shoulder, the light warmth of her curled there, her soft breathing. For days now he had glimpsed her standing at the Emporium windows lost in thought and had understood, grievously, what had been stirred up in her from that visit. Foole had lost his own share of loved ones. But for Molly there was only the lost child Peter, eaten by the outer darkness of London.

  Mrs. Sharper said Annie’s down in the cubbies, Molly muttered. If you think the Grindbones likely done in your Charlotte, it don’t seem right not to go on after him. You don’t want the not knowing, Adam. You want to feel like you done all you could.

  Foole nodded.

  I don’t know as how you get down there and back out in one piece. But a dipper used to work the lay with me maybe knows somethin. Used to hole up down under Blackfriars in the winters. I can ask him, if you like.

  Foole felt Fludd’s eyes on him. He said, softly, We already have a man in mind.

  He ain’t agreed to it as yet, Fludd said.

  Molly paused, studied them with her small eyes. Who is it?

  Pinkerton.

  Pinkerton?

  Aye. Pinkerton.

  You met with William Pinkerton, she said slowly.

  Foole nodded.

  He had thought she would be angry but instead she only nodded and folded and unfolded her hands, solemn and thoughtful. We operated a long time without never attracting undue attention, Adam, she murmured. You always said it were the best way to keep in the clear. Not bein noticed, like. She looked up, frowning. An now you bring in William Pinkerton? You can’t mean to trust the bastard.

  Trust has nothing to do with it.

  But you’d send him down into the cubbies. On flash business.

  You want to go instead?

  I ain’t scared to. She scratched angrily at her ear. We can always find some jack to go, Adam. But using Pinkerton in the risk? A faint downturn at the edges of her lips as she considered. What don’t I see? Is there some roll to it? Jappy?

  It weren’t me decision.

  Foole rapped a patient knuckle on the arm of his chair. It’s been decided. Rightly or wrongly. It’s a calculated risk.

  Calculated me arse. Molly leaned across, picked a chunk of salmon from Foole’s plate with her fingers. It’s our bloody necks in the noose too, that bastard ever gets a wind up. Them Pinkertons keep a record of every jake in the flash an they share it out to the four and ten, Adam.

  I don’t believe we’re in any danger.

  You don’t believe it? Molly muttered. You send Pinkerton in, there’s no knowing what will happen. Or even if he’s to come out of it in one piece. Those berserkers, they cut their own tongues out, to stay quiet. A mollswop I known, she told me them berserkers keep hordes of rats. Herd them like sheep. She lowered her voice. I heard they eat people who get lost in there.

  Fludd loosened his collar. Maybe they’ll eat Pinkerton an be done with it, he said.

  He was nine years old and standing at the great library windows watching the rain blow in sheets against the glass when he heard the maid in the hall cry out. The cry was terrible, forlorn. In the marble foyer he found the house servants gathered, hushed, none at work. She’s dead, the cook told him, her voice breaking. She was clutching a letter. Poor Mrs. Shade is died, Master Edward, bless her soul. Foole started to cry. The last time he had seen her she had kneeled before him in the gravel drive of Shade House and kissed him farewell and her lips had felt cold on his forehead. Then she had smoothed her skirts, adjusted an elaborate floral hat brim over her eyes. She was to travel to a hot springs in Colorado for the waters.

  A strange lightness came over him in the days following. He drifted on the edges of rooms, uncertain, he was noticed less and less and fed only intermittently. His governess packed her bag the second day and was gone. The cook did not attend to her duties after the fourth day. He and the boy James sat wi
th their legs dangling through the railing posts on the second-floor landing and watched the adults wander through the house, removing statuary, silverware, valuable books. On the sixth day Fisk found him and told him no provision had been made for him in the will. The estate is to be divided among Mrs. Shade’s relatives, he said curtly. They will sail out here from Ireland in the new year. In the meantime I am to close up the house and begin a stock-taking.

  Where will I go, sir? Foole had asked.

  You, Master Edward, Fisk had said, shall be reacquainted with the real world, I should think.

  He and the boy James were sent south by rail to Washington, D.C. They arrived cold and frightened and slept two days in the railroad depot with their little suitcases at their feet, watching the travellers striding past, dragging upturned crates across the floor in the hours between trains to pick through the garbage bins for food. On the third afternoon a fruit seller took them to a police station for the constables to deal with. He could remember a sergeant walking through the cold dusk and them climbing endless stairs in an apartment house where carts rattled past every half-hour and where they were fed plate after plate of scrambled eggs and great, thick, hot slabs of ham. He remembered the shine of grease on James’s lips.

  He had thought they might live there. But in the morning the sergeant returned them to the station as if they had done something wrong and later that afternoon a nun arrived and took his friend away holding the wrong suitcase in her enormous hand and two hours later a very old priest in a black suit came for him. They had been separated as a matter of principle and they would not ever see each other again. Foole wore his friend’s baggy clothes for six months with the sleeves rolled back and the waistlines ballooning under his fist before he at last gave up hope and when he could no longer remember his friend’s face he traded the clothes for a box of marbles and the suitcase itself with James Gray in copperplate for a pair of good leather shoes.

  He slept in that orphanage for three years, slept whether awake or no. The long chilly wards with their tiers of beds, the gangs of boys brutal in the dining hall, the quick illicit nature of their deceptions. He learned not to remember Mrs. Shade, Shade House, the kindnesses of a life now lost. There was anger in him, at first, that she too had died and abandoned him, but slowly that anger drained and left only emptiness. All was grey in his new home, the walls, jerseys, the skin on the backs of the nuns’ hands. The boys had been put to work stitching or repairing clothes and the older ones would work in the wood shop in the basement and all were beaten with hollow canes as a matter of course. At night they would move from bed to bed while the ward master snored in his enclave and they would trade their goods and whisper rumours of an easier world beyond the orphanage walls. A world of pickpockets and fine suits and easy women. Foole there learned that size did not equal power and strength was sometimes weakness. He learned the trick to not getting caught lay in being among the unsuspected. He learned compassion by its lack, he learned blood by its plenty.

  Then one April morning in his eleventh year he stuffed his belongings into a pillowcase and walked out of the front gate of that orphanage with a boy named Cullen at his side. That boy took their few coins and all of their food and disappeared on the second night and Foole never saw him again. He slept under bridges, he stole from street sellers. He begged and dealed and sold to pawnshops. He learned in time to steal pedigreed dogs from the finer houses and then return them for their rewards. He was twice beaten and once near raped and those men he fled from with his shirttails flapping and shortly thereafter he made his slow way by road north to New York City.

  He was small for his age but quick and savage with the razored instincts of a survivor and it was not long before he found himself adopted into a gang of pickpockets and thieves. He learned the art of the lift and they worked in teams of three under a master thief and they kept only a small portion of their takings. His violet eyes were startling but he had heavy shaggy eyebrows that gave him a glower beyond his years and his looks attracted notice in the daylight. He learned to prowl the night streets outside the theatres and to slip between the carriages of the wealthy and he would dream as he did so of one day walking among them undisguised. That was a world of grand dinners and fiery candelabra glimpsed through closing doors and of fine white horses that would knock a street lad into the mud without slowing and he loathed it and longed for it and lived in the shadow of it learning his trade the while.

  He was thirteen years old when the war broke out. There was a wildness in the streets, a reckless electricity in the crowds. In September of that year he lined up with several hundred others at the enlistment tents for the New York Light Artillery, hoping to acquire the signing bounty of one thousand dollars. He had smudged his face and roughened his clothes in an attempt to look older but the tired men around him in line jostled him and laughed at the disguise. It was raining and the water tipped from the brim of his hat as he looked away.

  When Foole reached the front of the line the enlistment sergeant was seated at a table under an awning, shuffling papers. The grass had been trampled to mud. Name, the sergeant barked. Then he glanced up, paused. How old are you, son?

  Eighteen, sir.

  The sergeant frowned past Foole in his ragged coat at the lines of men in the rain. Someone snickered. You want to fight for your country, son? the sergeant asked.

  Foole thought of Mrs. Shade, buried somewhere in the western deserts, he thought of his father dying in a lodging house in Baltimore. Death was life. He said, in his roughest voice: I want to kill the bastard enemy, sir.

  The sergeant eyed him grimly up, scratched at his chin. That’s what I like to hear, he grunted. Welcome to the United States Army, son.

  SEVENTEEN

  William left Blackwell at the gates of Millbank and drifted down to the Embankment. He glared out at the river seeing nothing in the orange light and shaking his head as he did so. Reckitt had named Adam Foole. Had named him. Whatever else, then, Foole was telling the truth about having once been a part of the Reckitts’ world. It did not mean that Foole’s account of the killing of Shade was true. Nor did it mean Foole’s clue about the mudlark was to be trusted. He frowned out at the river. But Shore had heard of the Saracen, that killer was real. William thought of the sewer lines and the berserkers prowling them and the likelihood of finding a solitary mudlark long ago eaten by the city’s darkness and of finding her alive. There was just enough truth in the man Foole’s accounts to make something possible. Just enough truth, he scowled, to make a dangerous lie.

  He started to walk towards Whitehall, hesitated, his breath clouding the cold air. The brown waters of the Thames muscling past, the city rooftops millionfold in the haze beyond. His mind kept returning to that one undeniable fact: the old thief had named Adam Foole.

  Go on then, he muttered. What are you waiting for? Go seek out your mudlark.

  He smiled all at once at his heart’s delusions. But?

  But take the man Foole when you do.

  Margaret Ashling would be a mystery to him his entire life. He thought their happiness unlikely, chanced, as all happiness must seem in retrospect. After twenty years he still held her chair out for her at dinner with a wonder tilting inside him that she had chosen him, had married him. He would watch her from bed as she sat at the vanity and combed her long hair, seventy strokes each night, and he would not speak only listen to her breathe knowing that nothing in his life would be as beautiful or as complicated as the silences between them. It astonished him how young they had once been. He had loved her name from the first, the aristocratic lace of its syllables, the knots it made of his tongue. Margaret, he had murmured, staring in his pyjamas into the looking glass at Notre Dame, then blushing and rinsing his mouth at the unmanliness of it and hoping the other boys had not heard. But he could not help himself. Margaret Ashling. A name he could lean into, a name to keep pace by. She was two years his junior and small but there was something in her that made him feel foolish, brash, like
a dulled knife, and he mooned over her during his classes and while playing rugby and cricket in the autumn evenings. He never did learn to predict her reactions. She would prove calm and then furious, patient and then stubborn, she would break upon him like a wave and leave him staggering and then just as quickly stop and apologize and the rage in her would snuff itself out.

  I feel I hardly know you, he whispered to her in the third month of their courtship, standing at the edge of a frozen pond while their friends skated past. He brushed her wrist with his glove. Her cheeks were red in the cold.

  Because you don’t, she said, and bit her lip. Not yet.

  Scotland Yard felt big and empty at midday although there lingered a waft of night dirt in the halls from the full pails. He passed no one on the stairs and when he reached Shore’s office the chief inspector was not in. William tried the door and was surprised when it opened.

  A weak daylight was coming in through the coal-grimed windows and he let his eyes adjust before closing the door behind him. It was then he felt a movement at the edge of his vision, a sort of slow unfolding in the dimness, and when he glanced across he saw the long thin figure of Dr. Breck behind Shore’s desk. He was in the process of closing a drawer.

  I guess John doesn’t mind you sitting there, William said.

  Breck shrugged curtly. I wondered if he would send for you.

  But he had not been sent for. Neither Shore nor Blackwell had informed him of a meeting. True, he was not present on official duty, and perhaps, if he were Shore, he would not bring a man like himself into an investigation either. He thought this and then he scowled at the idiocy of it. No, he would use a man of ability, rules be damned. He thought of Martin Reckitt’s account of Shore as a bullying child and what Blackwell had told him about his personal antipathy towards Reckitt and then he grimaced at the murkiness of it all. But in their world everyone was tainted, eventually.

  He glowered, looked up. You have some results?