By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  She came in wiping the backs of her hands on an apron and untying its strings and folding it over one arm. Her hair wild, a streak of flour on her chin.

  Mrs. Sykes, he said. How would you like to take the morning off?

  She looked at him as if he had just poured salt in the marmalade. What, and double the work for tomorrow? I’d guess not.

  Foole frowned. I’d like you to go with Mr. Fludd to an exhibition of paintings. Would you be willing?

  Now Mr. Foole, she said tightly. There’s a goose in the pantry if it don’t get dressed it goin to be getting back up onto its two feet an walkin out of here on its own. Leave you lot eatin lentils and potatoes and not a thing else.

  Foole raised an eyebrow.

  Mrs. Sykes, Fludd said, and cleared his throat. You got to think of it as a holiday like.

  A holiday? she said.

  Aye, Molly laughed. All Soul’s Day, what with him on your arm.

  Mr. Fludd will be your companion, Mrs. Sykes, Foole said. It would be a great favour to me. Unless you feel the two of you might need a chaperone?

  She flushed and turned her face away. But when Foole saw the wounded look on the giant’s face something inside him turned to ash.

  Forgive me, he said, his voice gentler. I shouldn’t tease. Japheth, you go on and bring Mrs. Sykes when she’s ready. We’ll proceed apace.

  What about Hettie? Molly asked. She don’t get a holiday too?

  You ain’t in the house, Fludd muttered. That’s the holiday for her.

  Edward was taken to the Major’s office in the third week of April 1862. The bearded Scot stood at a window in his vest, distracted, his back to the room and his hands folded behind him and the fingers flexing silently. He did not turn. His shirt sleeves had been folded back and rolled to the elbow. Edward studied his broad back nervously, his shaggy black hair. Outside it had started to rain.

  I understand you might have the makings of an operative after all, the Major said at last, returning to his desk. His voice was low, subdued, his eyes looked tired. I have an assignment for you. I’m told you can read?

  Edward was passed a slip of paper. On it was an address, a handwritten description of a woman. Tall, aristocratic, widowed. Tight auburn curls, eyebrows a little too thick, a mole to the left of her nose. Speaks with a Texas lilt. The paper did not identify her beyond this nor was Edward told her name. He was to find her and shadow her during the day but under no circumstances was he to approach her. He did not know if it was a test or a genuine operation but he was surprised at the seriousness he felt in his labours. As he trailed her carriage across the capital and memorized the addresses she visited he let himself imagine the Major’s interest in her was not professional. Certainly she was a beauty. There was a lithe grace to her both predatory and haunting and he watched her auburn hair dip across her face as she bent to smooth her skirts. It had rained all the week previous and the roads were mudded and the widow’s carriage rattled high over the ruts. Edward, quick on his feet, kept the carriage in sight with little difficulty. The widow visited several elegant homes in the west quarter and on the third day lunched with a member of the general staff. Edward understood this by studying the officer’s uniform although he did not know the man. Daily he watched, brooded, slipped along the streets, and as he did so he felt for the first time his new power, the delicious power of secrecy, of trailing a victim unseen and unknown and holding her fate in his hands.

  But nothing happened. For four days he followed her, memorized her movements, recorded her moods. He witnessed nothing incriminating. He feared his observations had failed.

  But the Major did not appear disappointed. On the contrary. We’ll catch that spider yet, he grunted. He did not smile but his hard eyes crinkled at the corners.

  You did a fine job of it, lad, he said. And picked a piece of tobacco from his lips.

  Edward could not recall the last time a kindness was spoken to him with such ordinary ease and he stared at his shoes, uncommonly touched, a lump in his throat.

  Foole would have liked to have walked. Instead Fludd strode down through the rain to a cab stand at the gates of Green Park and brought a hansom back up to Half Moon Street. When the driver climbed down he punched open an umbrella patched with grey squares of oilcloth and this he held blooming above Molly’s head as she came down from the house. Then he hurried back to Foole but Foole waved him irritably off with his walking stick. His hands were red in the cold and he looked up at the house as if to go back in for his gloves but he decided against it. The hansom was new and well-sprung with a blue wool blanket laid out upon their knees and they rode through the cold in a smooth and almost dreamy comfort. The rain had tamped down some of the city’s stink or perhaps Foole was growing used to the smells. He could not be certain which. Molly smiled her sweet smile, pointed to sights as they passed, played her role of innocence like a star turn upon the boards. As they clattered east down Piccadilly they passed the walls of the park and the ancient brick edifice of Devonshire House with its iron railings gleaming in the bright rainfall and at Old Bond Street Foole banged on the roof of the hansom with his walking stick that the driver should turn north. They drew to a stop outside the entrance to the Burlington Arcade. Across the street stood Farquhar & Son’s Fine Arts Galleria.

  The gallery had not been built to be ugly. Foole’s glance from the halted cab was casual and haughty as if merely double-checking the address. But in its stonework he saw balance and rigour despite the gaudy columns added to its entrance, already pitted and soot-stained, wrong in a false Italian style and garish like brass earrings on a young beauty. The stone blocks of its facade were large, the masonry deep, on the wide sills stood low sharp iron railings like an invitation to a burglary. He smiled cheerfully and Molly smiled back. The windows were lit and shining through the rain and he could see even at that distance the bovine shapes of ladies ascending the steps and moving through the rooms two by two like visitants to some foundered ark.

  An art heist.

  It had never been done before so far as Foole was aware. There was, as Fludd had sworn, little sense in it. Foole suspected this would be both the challenge and the grace. He would need to approach it as he would approach any bank job or vault job but he would need as well to be mindful of the differences.

  Inside was the tall cold room with the wrought iron chairs and tables and ladies taking their tea and Foole smiled and led Molly past. At the entrance to the first gallery was a table with small brochures like programmes to an opera and he took one with a dignified bow, Molly on his arm. There were crowds even at that hour and he was pleased to see this. At a small exhibit of watercolours of the Thames he stopped and read a few lines and studied the guard seated on his stool near the entrance and then he moved with Molly forward to the second long gallery and paused and read further. The brochure said nothing about any works in the gallery except the one astonishing painting all had come to see.

  As they drifted with the crowds Foole studied the floor. The gallery consisted of two long horseshoe-shaped rooms, connected at each end. In the centre at the rear a wide staircase with satin ropes for handrails ascended to the second floor and opened onto a hallway from which several small alcoves extended. At the front of the second floor, in the largest space, hung the most famous painting in England. Foole’s painting. His Charlotte.

  They let the crowds carry them up. It was, it seemed, the work of one Joseph Wright of Derby. Wright had titled the painting Iphigenia in the Mirror. He had come to London to have his subject sit for him and had worked on the painting on commission but he had never been paid and the painting had been thought lost for ninety years. It had been found hanging in the cottage of a retired schoolmistress outside Derby who claimed her father had accepted it in lieu of payment of a debt. The intrepid Mr. Farquhar had known the work at once. He had offered the schoolmistress ten pounds but she had insisted on twelve or no sale. All of this was written up in the brochure provided as well as the expected pric
e at auction. It was believed the work would fetch upward of thirty thousand pounds. Foole smiled to himself and passed the brochure to Molly and folded his hands behind his back and shifted in the crowd to get closer.

  There was a gentleman in a green frock coat standing at the door taking one and six from each viewer as they passed and providing them with a ticket stub for re-entry. There was something condescending and reserved about the man despite his elegance and Foole liked the look of him and suspected he must be Farquhar himself. The fellow would do nicely, Foole thought. Very nicely.

  He paid and went in.

  And there it was. Though titled Iphigenia by Wright the newspapers had taken to calling it simply The Emma. For the woman whose face Foole had known so powerfully was a young Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, lover of Lord Nelson and the most notorious seductress of her day. Wright had only painted her the once. She had been born into a life of drudgery but by the age of sixteen was dancing naked on tables for the private stag parties of her betters. She had slid from bed to bed trailing silk sheets behind her and found herself eventually wed and living in Naples to a dying man twice her age. There she had displayed herself to Goethe and to visiting monarchs and had studied the classical ruins around her for their elegance and fascination. Buried inside her was a fascination of her own that she longed to reach.

  Wright’s vision of Emma had been an unhappy one. A study of frail lights burning against an overwhelming darkness. She sat central to the canvas surrounded by gloom but for a single candle burning low on the table to her left and she stared with a livid and scorched expression directly out from the canvas. Her eyes were the eyes of Charlotte. Her dread and furious sorrow was Charlotte’s. He knew that farewell, knew what she was leaving. In the background all was shadow but as he stared Foole began to distinguish a second figure, only just visible. It hulked there unaccounted for and ominous and Foole knew it at once. He wet his lips and leaned upon his walking stick and the room seemed to go quiet around him and he might have been alone with the painting for all that he was aware of the crowd around him. He stared. That figure, he knew, was her future self coming towards her. It was her death.

  Mr. Foole? a voice said at his elbow.

  He turned in surprise. He did not at first know the man.

  What an unexpected pleasure, sir, the man was saying. And how are you enjoying London? How is your lovely daughter?

  It was the phrenologist from the Aurania. The man who had ruined him at whist and taken his silver pocket watch as payment. Foole smiled an elegant smile, slid into his role. She is excellent, sir. We both find London most stimulating.

  I’m pleased to hear it. I trust you are staying away from the cards?

  Foole had taken the man’s elbow and drawn him to one side of the crowd and he frowned at this jibe but did not respond to it. He had caught a glimpse of Fludd’s massive figure drifting through the crowds, Mrs. Sykes on his arm, her cheeks chafed with cold. He lowered his gaze, cleared his throat. What brings you to London, sir? he asked.

  The phrenologist tugged at the cuffs of his grey coat, raised both eyebrows in answer. Why this painting, of course, he said. All of England has an interest in it. I wanted to see it for myself before it was lost to the auction.

  Perhaps you will be lucky, Foole said. Perhaps its new owner will appreciate a game of whist.

  The phrenologist smiled. Ah. Very good.

  It is an extraordinary beauty, is it not?

  Indeed, sir, the man nodded. But just then a colour rose to his cheeks and he lifted his chin as if swallowing back some sourness and Foole followed his gaze. It was Fludd, drifting towards the painting. When the phrenologist glanced back down at Foole his white lips had thinned and his eyelids were heavy and there was in his face some slow horrified dawning.

  Foole withdrew from his vest pocket the silver pocket watch with the unblinking eye inlaid upon it and he clicked the lid smoothly open with his thumb and he cradled the watch in his left palm. Well it is 11:52, sir, he said pleasantly. Midday does approach.

  And he looked up, and he met the man’s startled eye with a cold and murderous gaze.

  Edward was issued a small gambler’s pistol with an enamelled grip which he tucked into the fold of his stocking. He would stump up the Major’s stairs at five o’clock in the morning and scrape his boots and enter to find the Scot already seated at his desk, coffee steaming before him. Edward’s task was to scratch out the man’s dictation by the light of a weak sconce lamp and to lose nothing in the speed. The Major kept him close. In the afternoons he sat in drafty waiting rooms, hat on his knee, while a cold rain drummed the windows. At night he lugged a satchel filled with papers across the mudded street to the safe house and made a fair copy of the day’s correspondence. Some nights he found a clothed stranger asleep in his cot, sullen-looking, bearded, dirty. In the morning that man would be gone leaving only the folded blanket and a stink of tobacco as proof that any had been there at all.

  A kindness began to creep in. One Tuesday the Major took him by carriage into the city. At a tailor shop he stood shivering in stained underclothes while a Frenchman fussed around him with swatches of fabric and scissors. Across the street a haberdasher wrapped a cold measuring tape around his skull, disapproving. Later a barber waved a straight razor in a mirror, smiling at the Major, pretending to shave the boy’s smooth cheeks. Perched on an army waggon under an overcast sky the Major told Edward how he had come over from Edinburgh in his youth. His ship had been wrecked off Nova Scotia and he and his wife came ashore on a beach somewhere off Sable Island, half drowned. This was in the cold under a web of stars and they were taken in by a fisherman there for the week until word could get out and a ship could come for them. He and his wife were the only survivors. Edward listened to this thinking of Mrs. Shade’s descriptions of his true father, trying to recall through a haze some memory of the Atlantic, of ships, of salt water and wood.

  On the last night of April before Edward was dismissed the Major reached into his desk drawer and withdrew an important-looking envelope. There was a government seal upon it.

  This, lad, he said gruffly, is a pardon for the man who sold you out. Fisk. You know the man I mean? The Major rose and walked to the stove in the far corner and banged open its grilled door. A pulsing red heat from the coals within. He stuffed the envelope in using a poker and then he shut the door with a clang and blew on his fingers.

  His brutal eyes lifted, met Edward’s. The bastard’ll burn too, he said softly. Just that easy.

  The next day at Camp Barry he stood beside the Major in the General’s quarters listening to a proposal to move against the Confederate capital of Richmond. He was wearing his new suit, a grey silk hat, a pink pinstriped vest. Afterwards the Major waded the deep mud of the mustering yard and they entered the stockade and Edward stood in the hushed gloom staring at the condemned men there feeling nothing. The air reeked. He did not say a word. He could see the tangled white beard of Fisk where he lay in the straw, frail and sick, a bony wrist covering his eyes.

  That afternoon in a hired carriage as they rattled back through the streets the Major reached out and gripped the boy’s forearm. His fingers felt hot. Where do you hail from, lad?

  Edward looked away. No place, sir. My people all are dead.

  The Major grunted and withdrew his hand, a cigar smouldering between his teeth. When this is all over, you’ll come to work for me in Chicago, he said quietly. He raised an eyebrow, studied the boy’s reaction in the settling darkness. You know who I am, what it is I do?

  Edward stared. Yes sir, Mr. Pinkerton, he whispered. Thank you, sir.

  The Major turned his face to the window. You’re wrong about your family, lad, he muttered. There’s the family you’re born to, and the family you make. It’s the latter kind that lasts.

  Foole stayed at the Farquhar gallery late. He sent Molly home by hansom with a fatherly pat on her arm and dignified instructions to the driver and he watched her sweet crestfallen happines
s and wished it could have been real, that this could have been her childhood in truth. When she had gone he sat in a café at the entrance to Burlington Arcade and watched the constable walk his beat and the gallery’s watchman trade off his shift and the crowds ebb and flow.

  When he returned to 82 Half Moon Street it was late and he fumbled on the unlit step like a burglar then withdrew his key but when he went to unlock the door he found it already unlocked. He went in feeling uneasy. The house was cold. He stood just within the door then closed it behind him and stood longer, listening to the floors creak above him. On the pier table he saw the gloves he had forgotten. Then a muffled clatter came from below and he crossed to the stairs and peered down. He could see the dull orange glow of a light from the kitchen there and without taking off his hat or setting down his walking stick he moved stealthily down and stooped and entered the kitchen.

  The counters, wiped and tidy. Pots hanging from their hooks in the candle fire, the linoleum gleaming as if just waxed. A metallic stink of poison in the air. At the cutting table with her back to him and her face turned away stooped a wide-hipped figure, feet planted powerfully apart, elbows sharpened and moving.

  Mrs. Sykes, Foole said.

  She looked around at him in alarm. Mr. Foole, she said. Why you scared the daylights out of me, you did. I were just, but then she faltered and trailed off and glanced behind her at the candles burning down in the pantry where her bed had been laid out. He could see the straw ticking and the fusty brown blanket and a basin of water under the nearest shelf of dry goods. There was a nightgown folded upon it. The door to the scullery was closed and he heard muffled snoring from beyond and he knew Hettie would be asleep in her own darkness there.