By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  There were parts of him now as he felt himself growing older that would plunge vertically, like a mine shaft dug out of his life, into old fears and unresolved moments. Quarrels he had held with Margaret in their early years together. The silence in the house at the birth of their first daughter, Isabelle, the impossible quiet as the walls creaked around him and Margaret’s screams fell abruptly away and how he had stood with one hand on the fireplace mantel and stared at his father across the room as the two of them waited. And then the thin thread of a newborn’s cry, and the sudden fire blazing inside him. He did not know how much of this remembering was to do with the death of his father. He thought of Isabelle, of the croup that had come so much to her in her first winters. The savage coughing like a dog’s bark, the heat of her skin, how he would walk with her the length of the house for hours at night and how Margaret would look at him in the morning, her eyes red-rimmed and hazy. He remembered the dropper of ipecac and the languid shift of his daughter’s arms heavy at her sides, and the calomel powders in their small blue jars. How they had filled nightly the gutta percha bag his father had brought back from England with scalding water and how they had laid this down in their daughter’s crib in a desperate attempt to keep her temperature steady while the snows came smoothly and whitely down over their world, tacking against the glass and melting and streaking the darkness beyond. He had never known such fear.

  And he remembered his own early years with his father, how his father would open an enormous Bible someplace thick in the Old Testament and the boy that he was would struggle to read the verses aloud. His father would sit forbiddingly beside him at the kitchen table with his knuckles in his beard like some ancient desert patriarch while Robert cried in his crib. Holding a gnarled rootlike finger under each word and William would sound them slowly through. Balanced crazily on the adult chair, his feet kicking in the air under the table. His father would explain nothing of the verses to him and he learned not to ask. When he shut his eyes at night he feared the Godhead would pour out from the dresser, an eerie mist enshrouding both father and son and no part of it loving only terrifying and wrathful.

  It was a warren of narrow lanes east of Edgware Road, ill lit, filthy, its ash-brown bricks as old and air-pocked as any in London. He found Blackwell gingerly picking his way out of a tight alley on the edge of Portman Square and he watched the inspector pause and withdraw a folded sheet of newspaper from his sleeve and lean down with one hand on the wall and wipe at his shoes. Then wipe at his fingers one by one. Then drop the crumpled newsprint to the ground.

  He had come upon him almost at once and he could not believe the chance of it. He knew this corner of London had pubs the way Manhattan had jewellery rigs and that he should have been hunting the man all day.

  Your Mr. Shore sent me, he said, coming up alongside him. His head throbbing. I think he wants to keep me occupied. Any luck?

  Blackwell was clutching a broadsheet and William took it from him and unrolled it and it was the drawing Breck had made. The face resembled Charlotte Reckitt around the eyes, perhaps, in the severe set of the jaw. The inspector was looking at William with something like concern. You should be abed, sir, he said. You look like death.

  I’ll sleep when I’m dead, William grunted.

  As they cut across Seymour Street and stood under the eaves of a papery shop Blackwell told him which thoroughfares he had so far searched, which pubs he had entered, and there were bruises under the man’s eyes. He had been on his feet since four o’clock that morning and had learned, he said, nothing at all. At the corner of the next block he showed a lad behind the spigots the drawing of Charlotte Reckitt but the lad was either foreign or simple and only gurgled some indecipherable reply. A woman with a washrag over her shoulder peered at the picture and shrugged. There were a few sullen men drinking under the windows in the smeared light but none had seen the woman either.

  They entered a small pub in the confines of Great Cumberland Street and asked if there was a cellar on the premises and the barman there laughed a toothless laugh and said, Aye, and a carriage house with oats and hay for when the duke comes a-callin. The barman was sixty years old if a day and one sleeve was pinned to his shoulder and William studied his bleary eyes and said nothing. Blackwell showed the drawing.

  They turned east on Berkeley Street and north on Montagu Street and passed two pubs on either side of a haberdashery but Blackwell explained neither would have a cellar. At the end of that block they entered a corner pub and stepped down into a smoky darkness and stood at the bar a long while before anyone came out to meet them. The girl who emerged from the back had a smudge of grime on her cheek and mouth and she could not have been more than ten. William wondered what else they served beyond ale and food but he did not ask. Blackwell showed the drawing and she tucked a greasy strand of hair behind her ear, bit her lip, shrugged. She told them she weren’t like to answer nothing except to paying customers. William bought a pint and she drew it off with a practised flick of the wrist and carried it in her small hands and he saw when she set it on the counter that she had to lift herself up onto the balls of her feet to do so. Blackwell showed her the drawing again. Never seen her? No never.

  So it went.

  On Gloucester Place they walked up two flights of stairs and entered a rickety pub grey and shabby in the light of its big windows and they asked two girls in gaudy shawls who were eating beef stew with their fingers but neither had seen the girl.

  On Upper Dorset Street they found a proprietor who thought he recognized the woman in the drawing. He asked them what they wanted her for and Blackwell said it had to do with an inheritance, a distant relative who had passed. The man had thick hairy forearms like a sailor and dense white eyebrows but was otherwise bald as a saddle. He thought he had seen her in a brothel off Drury Lane and though Blackwell took note of this William knew it would come to nothing.

  They crossed back down through Byranston Square and walked west on Upper George Street and had no better luck. The weak daylight drained off. Their shadows melted in the dusk. By then it had been failing for an hour and then it had been two hours and then the streets had filled with men coming off shift then emptied again and by that time the pubs were lit and roaring.

  After a while William swore and stopped and looked grimly at Blackwell.

  Well, he said. I guess Charlotte Reckitt is keeping her secrets still.

  Blackwell nodded. Whatever happened on that night, sir—

  William stared down at him.

  That is, whatever state of mind she was in, when last you saw her—

  For god’s sake. She jumped from Blackfriars Bridge, Inspector. What state do you imagine she was in?

  Blackwell flushed. Distraught, sir?

  He turned away, discouraged. He had been watching the inspector all afternoon and thinking of Shore’s lack of faith in the man and he wondered now through the haze of his thoughts what sort of enmity lay between them. He put a shaking hand to his chest like a man twice his age and felt his heart thrumping rapid and shallow like the heart of a caged rodent. The day was done. Done and they had nothing for it but a heat behind each heel that would blister up as soon as they took off their shoes. Charlotte Reckitt had vanished into the depths of the city and been carved up without a trace. But there’s always a trace, he told himself. Almost always. You just want a bit of luck in the finding of it.

  His knee ached. He left Blackwell going through his little black notebook and went limping down to the corner to find a cab.

  But Charlotte Reckitt had not been distraught. Breathless, yes, from the run, but calm and assured under the gas lamps of the span, the crescent of her hair fuzzed in its glow. It was as if she had intended he run her down. As if she had desired it.

  He thought of Adam Foole’s grief and felt a splinter worry away in his skull. He had known by nightfall that something must soon break. She had descended from her doorstep in Hampstead, looking left and then right, then walked south the half mile
in the twilight to hail a passing hansom. William had watched her go with his hands plunged into his chesterfield and his hat drawn low over his eyes. It had taken him some minutes to find a cab of his own and he followed her to a theatre in St. Martin’s Lane. The carriages and hansoms were jammed and moving slowly and he paid and got down and walked ahead. He watched from under a closed shopfront facing the theatre as the gaslights blazed and blazed, as the audience arrived in their finery and drifted laughing up the wide steps. A beggar shuffled near, crooning, shuffled away. The carved doors had been propped wide with chains hooked to their frames. He watched the arrivals in their hooped gowns and sleek silk hats mill and laugh and make their way inside. At last Charlotte Reckitt had appeared in the window of her cab and he waited for her to step down and when she had gone in he started across. In the lobby he waited with some muttered excuse to the ushers as the doors closed and the house lights dimmed and he could hear through the walls a muffled viola begin in a mournful key.

  She had come out before the first intermission. She did not see him. She collected her beaver fur from the cloakroom and moved swiftly towards the front doors and it was then he had stepped out, taken her elbow in a fierce grip, and said: But Miss LeRoche, the performance is only just beginning.

  She had recoiled. Glared at him and started angrily to protest.

  Hush, he said.

  An usher lounging behind the ticket counter with a pipe in his mouth had quickly stuffed it into one pocket, straightened his cap, regarded them with a ferret-eyed suspicion as William steered past.

  You are mistaken, she was whispering to him. You have the wrong person.

  And all at once he had grown tired of it. Miss Reckitt, he had said. Twisting her to face him at the top of the steps outside. I’m not interested in whatever you might have done. That’s not what I’m here for.

  She had said nothing for a long moment, studying him with her dark eyes. The night air was cold. There were hansoms lined up at the cab stand down the street, the horses dipping into feed bags, the drivers with their legs crossed on their high seats, whips low.

  I’m interested in you, he added.

  In me, Mr. Pinkerton? Or in Edward Shade?

  He let her go, all at once uneasy.

  Come, sir, don’t look so surprised. You have made no secret of it. She drew on her long gloves, held her coat out to William. After a moment he took it from her, held it up, and she slipped her arms in and turned around. Do you think to frighten me? she had said, suddenly coy. By stalking me at my home, by following me on my outings? You should know me better.

  The usher was walking slowly across the lobby carpet towards them.

  He said: What I know is a man like me isn’t good for business. I know the sooner we talk, the sooner I leave you alone.

  The stippled light over her face, the tiny white hairs along her upper lip.

  This game we are playing, she had said softly. It has been amusing, sir. I shall enjoy playing it a while longer. And she stepped gently forward against him. Her coat was open and he felt the heat of her breasts against his side and then she slipped her wrists into his enormous hands and William watched in confusion as her face twisted into an expression of absolute terror.

  Help! she screamed. Help! Assault!

  William shoved her backward, cursing. But already the usher was running towards them and a second man from the street had turned in shock and started up the steps of the theatre and William felt his muscles tense and he set his feet wide and his fists low.

  Here, you now, the usher was calling.

  He glanced helplessly as Charlotte Reckitt fluttered down the steps her skirts billowing. Then the two men were upon him and he held the one at arm’s length as the other knocked his hat from his head and seized the collar of his coat. William hurled the usher backward and wrestled the second man against the iron railing and he struck him hard in the mouth and the man slid sideways and fell to his knees. And then William was taking the steps two at a time and running into the fog after Charlotte.

  She had turned onto the Strand filled as it was with traffic and he did not see her and then he saw her in a hansom some fifty feet away. He seized the first cab he saw and climbed aboard and followed her through the press of carts and carriages and when she jumped down at Ludgate Circus he jumped down also and followed her down Bridge Street. She moved quickly despite her gown and he was breathing hard when he reached Blackfriars Bridge but she was only twenty feet from him by then and he could see, yes, that he would catch her on the span and there would be nowhere for her to go.

  TWENTY

  In the second week of October 1861 Edward Shade was officially mustered into the Flushing Battery of the 34th New York Light Artillery. He was handed a slip of government paper with the advance on his bounty amounting to forty dollars inscribed in purple ink and he glanced up as the man next to him with a scarred face and unshaven throat carefully folded his own bounty into his shirt front and then he, three months shy of his fourteenth birthday, did the same. He had no belongings but an old bent hat two sizes too large and a pair of good leather shoes and he found himself in a long wooden bunk-house filled with the indigent and idealistic both, every man but he untying bundled sleep sacks and spare boots and long underwear. None of those goods would reach the battlefront when it came. All this was at a training camp on Long Island, the rain plunging through the winter dark until the fields fairly drummed with it and the men waded through the cold clear waters muttering about having enlisted in the navy.

  Flushing Battery’s captain was a fussy German by the name of Roemer who struggled to pronounce his w’s and whose voice, excited, would scramble to a shrill pitch. Roemer’s eyes were very blue and his ruffed hair very red and his left eye slid inward giving him a sinister visage. He had learned his shoemaker’s trade in Stuttgart before emigrating in 1839 and he had still the sharp waxed beard and mocking eyebrows of his trade. He was much hated. Roemer rewarded tidiness, promptness, boots kept in polish despite any weather, and punished severely any minor infraction. Private Shade, tidy, prompt, polished, found himself praised and soon promoted, never mind that as battery corporal he stood three-quarters the height of the next-youngest recruit.

  Roemer did not care. He wanted glory and death. He drilled them in the rain with a tireless ferocity, their field guns wedged on tremendous wheels, positioned, aimed, unlocked and dragged again through deep mud, the gun crews mucking their loads of hollow shells across the fields and back until it was too dark to see and the languishing men had lost their boots in the mud and Roemer himself had vanished into a thin orange outline of lantern shine and blown rain. Edward slept a godforsaken sleep each night and woke early and stirred his bunk crews to attention in the gloom knowing Roemer would soon stomp through. Roemer in full regimentals, Roemer impatient to spread his misery.

  All the same it was gentler than orphaned street life. The world of his father’s cutters, the world of Shade House and its vast elegant rooms, all of that had been obliterated long ago by the scrabble and grime and soft core of hunger that had been life in the gutters. When an ex-printer with black-rimmed nails and thick forearms pushed him aside for the second time and scooped up his food Edward met the man’s eye and then walked out of the mess tent. That night when the bastard went to the privies Edward followed carrying an iron pipe as long as his arm. He called to the man by name to turn him and then struck him sharply across one ear and when his hands went up Edward struck him twice in the groin with the pipe and the man’s bowels erupted. He crushed a rib on either side of the man’s barrel chest and when he was finished he threw the iron pipe into the open trench of the latrine. Come after me again and I’ll kill you, he said flatly. The man never did.

  At the end of October Roemer promoted him to sergeant in charge of his own cannon with a crew of five and on the thirteenth of November Flushing Battery was ordered south to Camp Barry in Washington. One week later in a freezing rain the entire battery, pale, dispirited, were shippe
d by cattle car to reinforce General Milroy at Camp Cheat Mountain in West Virginia. By the first of December they were peering grimly across the Staunton Turnpike at the white drifts of smoke from the Confederate camp on the facing mountain. Roemer brooded, paced, brooded, staring out into the dusk and the sheer drop with madness in his eye. The days passed. Occasionally they would fix their range and fire shot and shell for hours on end and the older Confederate guns would reply but there was in such probings a tired, depressed air.

  Then on the thirteenth of December came the bloody storming of Allegheny Mountain. Edward was struck in the knee and again in the thigh while loading a cannon in the freezing wind and carried away from the guns screaming. He had not ever known such pain. As no arteries had been hit he lay shivering in hospital at Green Spring Run near Cheat Mountain for several days with little attention. They had cut two balls from his leg and a third had passed clean through. Nineteen others from his regiment had been wounded that day and three horses killed and the confusion and stink of flesh was overwhelming. On the second morning in the field tent a nurse leaned over the next cot and spoke to the dying boy writhing there calling him Sergeant Shade and Edward had raised his own weak head at that, meaning to speak up. But something held his tongue. The boy’s lower jaw had been shot away and his face and chest heavily bandaged and no one could have known him by sight. Someone had confused the paperwork at the cots. A priest came that afternoon and sat on an overturned crate with his Bible open on one knee and addressed the boy as Sergeant Shade out of New York and Edward lay listening to the prayer with his eyes on the ceiling where the shadows crawled like flies and shortly thereafter the false Shade died.

  All that night he lay awake, thinking. In the morning a new snow had fallen and covered the yard and the crates and the flatbed waggons in silence. The sentry was asleep. He lifted his head and stared out through the open tent flap at an impossible whiteness and he climbed out of his cot and buttoned his coat with shaking fingers and vanished back into the civilian world a ghost.