by Steven Price
Foole was staring at his hands as if deciding something and then he looked up, his eerie bright eyes shining. Do you believe the dead can be reached? he asked.
The dead? No.
But you do believe in an afterlife.
William opened his hand and stared at the cross-hatching there in the firelight and then he said, Mr. Foole, I believe the dead live on inside us. In our memories. That is the only afterlife I believe in.
I was contacted by an old friend yesterday. A spiritualist.
William said nothing.
You do not approve.
I’d never have taken you for a believer.
A believer? Foole said with a bitter laugh. He wet his lips. When I was four years old I was visited by two small girls. They would stand at my bedside in silence. They were my sisters. Foole paused a moment, then said, My sisters drowned the year I was born, Mr. Pinkerton. Yesterday, when my friend asked me to a seance, he asked me to bring a companion. To make up the numbers for the gathering. I told him it could not be done.
William regarded this man in his grief and felt something, a sudden anger, on his behalf. It’s natural to want to believe, he said sharply. But don’t let your loss belong to someone else.
Foole’s face darkened.
Did you ever read of the Reno business, back in sixty-eight? William said. It was in all the papers. When Foole nodded he went on, Well, the next year, after the brothers had all been killed or strung up by the mobs, a rumour started to go around. Their gains from the various holdups were never recovered and it was said all of it had been buried somewhere near Seymour, Illinois. Scores of treasure hunters turned to mediums to find it from the dead men. William eyed the smaller man sitting bruised in the shadows and he felt for his split lip with the tip of his tongue. Our general superintendent in New York at the time was contacted by the vice-president of the Adams Express Company. One of our important clients. He’d had an intuition, this man said, that he ought to contact a certain medium about his company’s stolen money. He wanted Mr. Bangs—that was our superintendent—to go with him.
I’ve heard such stories.
Yes. Well the medium could tell him nothing, of course. When asked where the Express Company’s money was at, a spirit, Sim—one of the dead outlaws, presumably—had only excuses, vague allusions, all unverifiable. He named an accomplice, Sheeley. There never was a Sheeley with the Renos. Mr. Gaither—that was our client’s name—admitted later to us that he didn’t even believe in spiritualism.
But he went all the same.
Exactly. Just on the possibility of it.
He knew it was all lies and deceits and yet he went all the same. Foole lowered his voice. It’s a question of hope, of course. Having that possibility, no matter how unlikely. Living with it.
There’s hope, and then there’s gullibility, Mr. Foole. I’d be sorry to see you taken advantage of.
Foole smiled a quick barbed smile. It is such a relief to hear you say it.
Say what?
My friend asked me to speak with you. You were the last to see her alive, the last to touch her. He believes your presence might make contact possible.
My presence?
At the seance.
William stared into his gin. I wasn’t the last. You know that.
I would be in your debt, sir.
You already are.
Foole raised his eyebrows, his expression faltering.
Edward Shade.
Ah. Foole picked up his glass, set it back down. His face was flushed.
What is it?
I fear I have misled you, he said. What I told you in the tunnel—
William was quiet while the firelight played over the table, the glasses, his bruised knuckles. That would be a shame, he said.
I did not lie to you, Foole murmured, leaning forward. But I know you are a man of facts, not conjecture—
I’ll take the conjecture.
Some of this is nearer to rumour.
William said nothing, waited.
I cannot promise it is entirely true, Foole said. That’s all I mean. Edward was small, even for his age. And he was always hungry. He would eat anything, just eat and eat, as if he could never get full. Foole regarded William with a cautious gaze as if weighing his next words. Then he said, Edward loved your father.
You knew Shade?
A long time ago. He used to say your father was a great man.
This was after the war.
Yes. After the war. Impatience had crept into the man’s voice. Edward and I met in New Orleans in eighteen sixty-five. That was a terrible year. The war had stripped the city. I daresay they deserved it. But grift became a way of surviving. Either you were quick or you were dead. Edward was very young still but he knew how to work a street. I had established an import business there the month the war ended and I hired Edward to help me with incoming cargo on the docks.
He worked for you.
Only briefly. He could not keep out of trouble. I let him go when the customs officials started harassing me. It seems Edward couldn’t leave the army’s supply depots alone. My business had been flagged, as it were. Very troublesome, that. Years later I saw him near the warehouses in Detroit. I was just passing through. He invited me to an evening at a rat baiting and it was there I met Charlotte.
He wanted to ask which side of the barrier she’d been on but he did not.
I courted her, Foole said. I didn’t know then just how involved she was with the criminal element. I loved her from the first. Foole said this and then lowered his face, as if embarrassed.
Tell me about Shade.
Foole cleared his throat. I met Charlotte again ten years ago here in London. It was she who told me what had happened to young Edward. She said your father had been hunting him for years, that they had worked together in the Secret Service during the war. Edward had done something terrible, had run from his post, or leaked secrets, or some such. Your father hunted him relentlessly. In eighteen seventy-three the boy grew tired of running. He went to your father’s mansion in Chicago, to your mansion. He broke in. Waited in the dark with a revolver for your father. A struggle ensued, Edward was shot. Your father dispatched the body.
William stared at the small man in the firelight, the mottled bruising along one side of his face. In eighteen seventy-three, he said.
Foole nodded.
In eighteen seventy-three Edward Shade tried to kill my father. In his own home.
Yes.
He was in my father’s house. With a loaded gun.
Foole furrowed his brow. I could be mistaken. Perhaps I am.
William left the unlikeliness alone for a moment and tried to think his way through the account but it did not make sense. It would have been self-defence, he said abruptly. An armed intruder in his house? Why would my father not alert the police? Why would he not tell me?
Foole turned his sad bright eyes on William, shrugged.
How would your Charlotte Reckitt know this? William muttered. Who would she have heard it from? War offences were forgiven in sixty-six. My father couldn’t have prosecuted Shade even if he wanted to.
Forgiven? Foole turned the word in his mouth, as if testing the possibility of it. But who did the forgiving? Not your father, I would wager. Not the men who suffered in the field.
Why would my father keep hunting a man he knew was dead?
Perhaps to hide the murder? Foole shook his head. I really couldn’t say. Tell me something. What was your true interest in Charlotte?
I never had any, William said, distracted. I was only ever interested in Shade.
Foole was quiet a long moment. What would you have done, had you found him?
William’s fingers were still crouched on the rim of his glass. He felt the blood slow in his throat. He looked up. I guess that’s the question, he said tightly.
TWENTY-TWO
Edward Shade made his first escape before the barge had left the Hudson.
It was March 3, 1862. I
n the pre-dawn darkness the foam in the ship’s wake seemed to him to glow with an otherworldly light and when he turned his face to the wind a long crack of red light could be seen seeping up out of the east. But the deck he lay crouched on, handcuffed and huddled in a threadworn blanket, was still black, the boards slick and freezing. Others sat shackled half asleep nearby and a guard stood in the lee of the wheelhouse with his hands tucked under his armpits for warmth, shoulder turned to the wind. He could hear the low thrump of the engines, the water slapping past. He rose in silence, just levered his elbows onto the railing, hoisted his hips up, and let himself over. He felt nothing. Then his back struck the icy waters and he went under. A sailor leaning out over the stern witnessed his plunge and cried the alarm and fired a warning shot that went wide and after a long slow turning of the barge and the criss-crossing of lamplights across the waves a lifebuoy was hurled at his head and he slapped his way to it and struggled to hold on. He was hauled up half drowned, given a dram of rum, left shivering in his frost-stiffened clothes while a puddle seeped under him on the deck. By the time the sun had risen he was coughing and could not get warm.
His second escape came one week later while trudging through the churned mud of Camp Barry in the gloom of the Capitol’s half-built dome. In the wind its scaffolding would lean and rattle like a broken door and though he was still weak from his sickness the sound of it made him bitterly resentful. They were returning from digging a line of fortifications at gunpoint and were shackled at the ankles each to each and he being the smallest and frailest walked the rear. He had lifted a key from a guard as he drifted into line and now as they turned a corner he bent down at a half walk and unlocked his chain and it slithered heavily clear and he started to run. He made it as far as the rail yard pilings before a shot rang out over his head and he stopped, hands raised high, his eyes fixed on the boxcars in the distance.
He was stripped and beaten badly for that. Four grown men in outsized boots, kicking and stomping, his spindly child’s limbs snapping out and then curling back in again. They left him crying in the straw, laced with blood, bruised, too broken to tremble. He was but one of eighteen in that stockade and the least vicious of all but after his second escape he became known as a wily and dangerous convict. He did not care. He would be damned if he would permit the Union to tear him to pieces. Daily he ate, he dug, he hauled, he slept, daily he brooded over his escape. Weeks passed, the Peninsular Campaign drew nearer, the wheat fields where he and his fellows would be shackled and driven into a grinding hail of shrapnel and bullets. He slept badly. On moonless nights his death came to him silent and shrouded and studied him through the bars.
He watched the others with hard eyes, he kept his distance. They had come to believe him a bad omen, a boy marked by evil, and though he did not understand this he was grateful for it. Some of those men were deserters, some thieves, one barrel-chested sergeant had strangled a corporal in a card game, all of them were sly desperate men. He stole another man’s spoon one night and after the man had been beaten for it and the stockade overturned in the search he began to sharpen it, very quietly, muffled by straw. After the second week he became aware of a figure lurking, slyly, at the edge of his vision, and he understood his third escape would be his last. That figure was a tall thin man with a broken nose and a shaggy white beard stained to copper from tobacco and his eyes were creased to slits and Edward could not be sure when the man was peering his way.
Edward was careful, Edward was patient. He studied the guards’ turnovers, he listened through the walls for the crunch of their boots in the gravel as they took the shorter route behind the stockade, he took note of the different mechanism locking the outer door from the inner. He knew the number of paces to the high corner of the camp fenceline and he knew too where a washing line of old clothes could be found the second street over. He knew the operations were under way for a major offensive and that they would be shackled and shipped out soon. He waited for the next new moon and kept his head clear.
In the third week the old man who had been watching him sidled close. Edward had taken a fistful of rotten rice from the floor and crawled back to his corner. The old man’s two bottom teeth had been knocked loose and in the gap his tongue looked grotesquely pink.
I’ve been watching you, he whispered. His voice creaking.
Edward sat unmoving, hair long in his eyes.
I said I’ve been watching you.
I heard you.
The man wheezed, it might have been a laugh. His knees were folded up near his shoulders, twisted, crablike. I always knew the world would catch up with you.
Edward paused in his chewing, rice clinging to his knuckles. He studied the man’s face.
Do you not know me, boy?
I know you, Mr. Fisk, he said.
And then Mrs. Shade’s trusted servant, broken now, withered, six weeks out from his own death on a grassy hillside in Virginia, leaned in close and muttered: They know what you are planning, boy. They know.
He had been dreaming about the Saracen. He heard his door creak in the morning cold and he rolled stiffly onto one elbow and cracked an eyelid and watched Fludd hesitate with his hand on the latch of the door. Mr. Adam? the giant murmured. You awake?
No.
The giant wiped his hands front and back on his shirt front and stepped through into the gloom and crossed the room with very small slow steps. Give us a look at them ribs, he said. When he sat on the edge of the mattress the bed buckled under his weight and Foole slid against the big man’s sloping thighs. He scowled, shut his eye. He could hear through the opened door Molly two floors above hollering down some curse about hot water and towels. After a moment Mrs. Sykes’s voice rose from the depths of the Emporium muffled and fierce as if from the bowels of a ship but he could not make out her reply. There was a thump above his head and then a second thump and the door juddered on its hinges and then there was silence.
O they been at it all morning, Fludd said. I just come in here to hide.
Foole groaned.
Fludd was quiet in the grey light. After a time he rose from where he sat on the corner of the bed and he drew back the curtains on a grim drizzling morning. The pane was streaked and filthy.
Foole said, That was you in the alley. Last night, dealing down those footpads. That was you.
So me fists tell me, Fludd said. Curling his blotched hands spider-like open and shut in the grimy light of the window. He didn’t see nothing, your Mr. Pinkerton?
Foole coughed and as he did so he felt the bruises along his left ribs come alive.
Fludd frowned. You always was contrary, Mr. Adam. You sure he ain’t playin you?
Foole rose clumsily and swung his bare legs out dangling over the bed and then he got to his feet with a grimace. The floorboards were freezing. He stood with one hand on the brass bedpost and stooped and cleared his sinuses and raked his fingers through his hair and they came away black. The night before was coming back to him, slowly.
You followed me, Japheth, he said. He met the giant’s eye.
Aye.
You likely saved my life.
Fludd grinned a sudden shaggy grin though the lines of worry did not leave his eyes. Well, he said. I weren’t goin to let me boss and saviour get his throat cut now, were I?
Foole stood there with his nightshirt flapping at his knees, legs trembling in the cold. He stared at his white toes gripping the floor.
You follow me again, he said, I’ll cut your throat myself.
He felt the blood rising in his skull. It was a hot dark wrath and it did not subside all morning. At the open door to his study he found Hettie stooped at an overturned basket of laundry and he swore to see it and in the Emporium office he dismissed Molly for the ragged state of her clothes and in the dining room he sent his breakfast back uneaten. Later he stood glaring out at the mid-morning street traffic through the display windows amid shelves of coral from the South Seas and Hettie came in to feed the fire and saw him and w
ithdrew in terror. He felt ashamed but whatever was in him would not leave him. After a time he sat at the small cutaway and shifted a fossil and wrote out a curt note to Gabriel Utterson confirming the seance and then without further thought he sealed the note and gave it to Fludd for delivery.
He did not trust that Pinkerton believed his account of the killing of Edward Shade. That was a part of it. But some other thing would not let him alone. What he had felt, staring down at the Saracen the night before, was the horror of his own future. He had understood that this was the fate of any man strong enough to live out his youth, in his world, in their world. He was surprised that he had asked Pinkerton to the seance. What was it Mrs. Sharper had said to Molly that night? The dead do not come back. He was not certain they ever left.
The heart is a locked room, he thought. To you as to any.
But first there was something he needed to do.
After dark had fallen that night he went back through the filth of Wapping. Kicking his way through the trash and rats in the wet. This time he did not knock. He stood listening at Mrs. Sharper’s door and when he did not hear any stirring within he slipped a slender file into the frame’s gap and worked a bent pick into the keyhole and after a moment the door clicked and creaked inward. He held the handle, listening. Then he slipped through.
Sharper’s house was silent. He stood in the dim as his eyes adjusted and then he removed his shoes and set them outside on the step and closed the door. He padded soundlessly in his stocking feet to the room under the stairs. He could hear a raw unhealthy snoring from within and when he opened the door he saw the one-legged doorman, Curtains, asleep on a cot. A tattooed forearm dangling, mouth agape. Foole took the man’s crutch from where it leaned against the foot of the bed frame, slipped back out.
At the drawing room door he paused, glimpsing the light underneath. He cracked the door an inch. The rose lampshade in the middle of the room was still bright. Foole could see the pianoforte, the draped tables, the utter black of the cold fireplace. But there was no one within, and he set the doorman’s wooden crutch just inside the room, and closed the door.