By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  I never expected to hear from you. After your uncle was arrested, I’d hoped to. For years, I hoped. I didn’t think it would happen.

  She wet her lips, she started to say something and then stopped. What was between us, she said instead. I have always cherished it.

  But—

  It’s in the past.

  He nodded, feeling a quick sharp pain.

  You are not who you were either, Adam.

  He nodded.

  I was married, she said.

  I’d heard, yes. He cleared his throat, he paused. You were married? Not still?

  I waited for you, she said abruptly, a bitterness creeping in. Did you know? I waited months. I lived in my uncle’s lodgings in Whitechapel for six months, until the rent was due. You had the address. You could have written. You did not.

  He nodded unhappily, he stared into the fire, remembering. I was young. I was angry.

  You were foolish.

  He smiled vaguely. That too.

  I thought I’d been mistaken in you. I thought my uncle was right. There was something in her expression both plaintive and miserable and then it was gone.

  Right about what?

  Charlotte gave him a long quiet look. She said, Three weeks after I’d returned, a visitor arrived at my uncle’s door. I recognized him at once. It was the French merchant from our hotel in Port Elizabeth. He had been informing on us, watching us. My uncle knew all about us. I remember he called me into his study. The Frenchman said you’d arranged a buyer to meet you in Brindisi. He said you’d already cheated us, that before your journey north you’d established for a transfer of funds to a private bank in Venice. He said you’d confided all this to a man at a campfire in the veld. Her eyes watched his as if for some sign, some recognition. My uncle left for Brindisi in a fury. He did not allow me to go. He was gone six weeks. And when he came back, well. The inspectors were waiting for him on the pier. I did not ever see him free again.

  I was sick in Brindisi, Charlotte. I was in a fever.

  In prison he said you’d threatened us. He had a letter, written in your hand, justifying your claim to the diamonds and denying me. His left hand was in bandages. He said you’d attacked him with a knife in an alley near the port.

  That never happened.

  No?

  For god’s sake. Foole shook his head, he turned away, he turned back. I had nothing, no money, nothing. I couldn’t even walk. Martin betrayed me. He took the diamonds and left me.

  I know.

  I couldn’t make sense of it. Why would he do it? Why cross me?

  For love, she said simply.

  Foole paused and studied her. He was not sure of her meaning. I visited him a few weeks ago, he said. In the Tench. I wanted to tell him about you, about what had happened. Foole cleared his throat. He told me there’d been a child.

  She was quiet.

  I didn’t know, he said. If I had known it then, that you were—

  Her eyes weighed him a moment. Did he tell you it was yours? Is that what my uncle said?

  Wasn’t it?

  No.

  Foole felt his face darken.

  I was pregnant two years after Port Elizabeth, Adam, she said. It wasn’t yours. She stood unmoving, her white hands clasped before her, hair in a curtain fall over her cheek. He wasn’t yours, she said again.

  He, Foole murmured. You had a son.

  Her own voice came low, soft. Does it appall you to hear this? It was like the poor thing just gave up. I was afraid from the very moment I held him. He never made a sound, not for two days. She looked at him. I have made my peace with it.

  Foole swallowed.

  He looked like his father. David was a forksman and a grifter. David Aldergate. Daring, quick, strong. You’d have liked him. I don’t know that love was a part of it but we made an effective team. What else was I to do? We left London for Kent in the autumn where he started a grift, using me as the lure. I’d been recently widowed, had lost my inheritance to relatives in Scotland, David was my loyal manservant, worried for my safety and for the child’s. There was a baroness living in that vicinity who was known to have lost her own grandchild due to similar circumstances. It went well at first and when the baby came the baroness stepped in and brought us onto her estate and we lived for a while in comfort. She believed our account.

  Foole could hear the street waking beyond the windows. A peddler crying hoarsely.

  It went well and then it didn’t, as always happened. We had to flee in the night and David had a trunk of the old woman’s silver strapped to our carriage and we rode fast. The carriage went off the road, we were stranded, it was the middle of winter.

  The baby—

  Died. And David died the next year in a road accident in Newcastle. I think he never forgave himself. Our marriage was ashes by then. Charlotte breathed quietly and said nothing for a long while and then she said, I grew ill after Kent. I wanted to die too.

  He stared at her. It felt all at once as if no time had passed, as if a hole had opened in their lives and they had slipped through to the intimacy they had known before, but awash now in sadness.

  She held out her wrists to him and he could see the white cross-hatching of old scars.

  I have lost too much, she said simply. I do not wish to lose any more.

  Foole nodded.

  The Tench is closing, Adam. They mean to send my uncle to Portsmouth. To the hulks there. He’ll die. He’ll rot in them and die and I shall never see him again. She made some small gesture with her hand. I did not want to ask it of you. Gabriel thought you might be willing.

  Foole stared at the fire. I came to London for you. Not for your uncle.

  It is the same thing.

  He frowned.

  He’s to be transported Wednesday. I have a guard who will arrange a miscount at a roadhouse in Heyshott. In Chichester. I’ll be there to spirit him away.

  Wednesday.

  Three days from now. Yes. She frowned as if watching for some betrayal in him. This wasn’t how I’d arranged it, she said. My uncle wasn’t due to be transported until the spring.

  But you’ll attempt it regardless.

  I must.

  She met his eye. There was no recrimination in it, no bitterness, only a long languid sadness. He felt again that sense of a second Charlotte, a shadow figure glancing sidelong from under her hair. She curled her fingers over the back of the sofa, stood very still, and after a moment she said, Pinkerton kept asking about someone, a magsman he was hunting. Some man Shade. Edward Shade.

  The clock ticked in the gloom. A log shifted on the fire and a soft hiss of sparks burst in the grate and was drawn up into the blackness.

  It’s you, isn’t it? she said. It’s you he was looking for. You are this Edward Shade.

  Why would you think that?

  Tell me I’m mistaken.

  A quick incredulous smile. A weak daylight was creeping across the far shelves, creeping towards them. He could hear in the house above them Molly and Fludd, waking, stamping about.

  Adam?

  Edward Shade’s been dead a long time, he said at last. And the dead don’t come back.

  She shook her head at that.

  I did, she said.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Talk of the dead and hear them choke.

  Blackwell came to the hotel the next morning. It was Tuesday. William was standing at a window fastening his cufflinks when he saw the inspector unfold bat-like down from a four-wheeler in the street below. The man held his hat out before him and he wiped at its crest with a sleeve then stared abruptly up at William. The sheen of glass concealed him but still he stepped back in alarm. He had heard nothing further from Scotland Yard about the stolen painting and supposed Blackwell had come with some word. But he had not come about that.

  The woman from the Thames? William said to him in surprise. He left the door standing open and turned away, speaking over one shoulder. You’ve finished your inquiries then.

&nbs
p; Yes sir. It’s the man I told you about. The publican.

  William wrestled into his frock coat, adjusted his collar with his thick scarred fingers. And not Charlotte Reckitt.

  No sir. Blackwell’s voice was low, urgent. If you’d care to fetch your hat, sir—

  John mentioned you might come by.

  And now Blackwell smiled a shy smile. It was a strange sight and all at once the funereal visage William had come to know dissolved and in its place was the face of a still-young man, an anxious, tired, excited young man. William reached over the inspector’s brushed bowler and took his own hat down from its peg and he held it upside down in his big hands as if it were very fragile, as if the nothing it held was rare and of great worth.

  Show me, he said.

  They rode slowly through the crush of traffic in an open hansom with a wool blanket heavy with damp shared between them and the smell of the wet reminded William of riding single file in the rain through the hills outside Santa Fe with a rifle strapped to his saddle. The streets were filled with carts and skeletal horses with heads low and labourers with great piles of goods on their backs and women in rags and shawls hauling barrows of laundry. A miserable crush of hogs shouldered its way around them, snorting. As they went Blackwell told him what he had learned.

  Her name was Ellen Shorter and she had been barmaid and then wife to a tavern keeper in a northwest district of London. The tavern was named the Baker’s Dwarf and despite his name the man Shorter had not founded it but had bought it out of receivership some twelve years ago. He was past forty by Blackwell’s best reckoning and the wife twenty-nine last April. Two children stillborn, a boy dead of fever at six months. Black hair, black eyes, she spoke a passable French from her mother’s family in Brighton which had kept her popular with a certain class of Continental customers. By all accounts a friendly woman and attractive.

  William ran his hand over the back of his neck. What do you mean friendly?

  Friendly, sir. With the working men.

  She was a prostitute?

  No sir.

  She was a flirt.

  Blackwell looked uncomfortable. Shorter himself is considered by everyone a gentle giant, he said. A very big man, sir. But no one I spoke to ever heard of him getting into a temper or raising a hand to anyone. He’s known by the art students nearby as a soft touch for a bottle or a hot meal.

  But?

  But one student, sir, a James McKinnon. Saw Shorter once mad as a hornet. It seems he had received a letter by mistake, addressed to his wife, and in this letter were certain inappropriate details. I understand he opened the letter in front of Mr. McKinnon.

  A love letter.

  An assignation, sir.

  Isn’t that the same thing?

  Sometimes.

  So he’s a gentle giant except where his wife is concerned. And where’s his wife now?

  Visiting a sick aunt in France.

  William frowned. I see.

  It seems she left rather abruptly, sir.

  Mm.

  No one has heard from her in six weeks. Though Shorter insists she has written him several times.

  And the letters?

  Burned accidentally. Misplaced. Eaten by stray cats.

  What about the good doctor’s blind insects? Is there a cellar?

  I couldn’t say, sir. Not yet at least.

  William was shaking his head. Is that it? A wife visiting sick relatives and a man with a temper?

  Blackwell frowned. He said a constable had met Shorter during his investigations and the man had expressed no interest at all in the ruse of the inheritance. He said the tavern keeper had looked at the sketch and said he had never seen the woman. But several customers identified her as Ellen Shorter. All of this struck the constable as curious but there were several other leads to pursue and at the time they were still seeking Charlotte Reckitt. He said yesterday a witness had come forward with information about a possible suspect for the theft of the Farquhar painting, a man complaining of a pocket watch stolen on an American liner just after the New Year. And that after interviewing the witness he had happened to pass by another interrogation of an elderly man reporting his missing daughter. Blackwell wiped at his nose with a red handkerchief and William recognized it as his own. The inspector told him this elderly man had come into the city from Brighton and that his daughter was missing and that her husband claimed she had travelled to France to visit sick relatives.

  William was no longer listening. Wait, he said. This man with the pocket watch, this witness to the Farquhar heist—

  Sir?

  From the passenger liner. Who was he? What did he see?

  A doctor from Liverpool, sir. He said he had a pocket watch stolen from him while on board and that he encountered the thief at Mr. Farquhar’s gallery shortly before the theft. He seemed quite insistent about it.

  That’s all, nothing useful? What did the man look like?

  The doctor?

  The thief.

  Blackwell cleared his throat. He claimed he was a gentleman travelling over from Boston with his young daughter. A smaller man, white hair, well-groomed, piercing eyes.

  William smiled. He watched a waggon inch up alongside them, its high wet wheel spitting mud. Did anyone else talk to him?

  I filed a report, sir. But it seemed a rather unreliable account.

  And this man from Brighton. This would be Ellen Shorter’s father, I guess?

  Blackwell nodded. He told William the curious thing was that this man had heard nothing of any sick relatives himself. He believed his daughter had come into some trouble. He said he did not like the husband nor trust him.

  And you were already investigating Shorter?

  Yes sir.

  Fair bit of luck there. William set a hand on the rail of the hansom as it jounced over the granite setts. What does Shorter say to all this?

  I had a constable in to talk to him. He says his wife was estranged from her father. She’d told the man nothing for years. He says his father-in-law is in debt to him for several hundred pounds.

  Sure. Whose elbows are the more frayed.

  I beg your pardon, sir?

  Doesn’t matter. He waved a hand. Tell me something. How much of this is gut feeling, Blackwell?

  Gut feeling, sir?

  Instinct. Yes.

  Blackwell bristled. It’s detective work, sir. Logic.

  William smiled, turned away. Two-thirds of this job is done when you’re not thinking about anything, Inspector. It’s your gut tells you what’s what. The trick is learning to trust it.

  The Baker’s Dwarf was an ancient tavern at the edge of Edgware Road directly across the field from where the grisly torso was found. It had been built in the eighteenth century, Blackwell told him, as an overnight house for travellers into London to change horses. That was in an age of highwaymen when London was confined to its own limits and nightfall set the hours of a man’s living. Now the city had devoured its outliers and what had once been an outpost was a casual drinking house for labourers coming off shift.

  There were fewer people in the streets there at that hour. The Dwarf was a crooked free-standing tavern with rooms to let above and an ancient faded sign hanging on its chains over the lintel. A weak gas lamp was burning even during the daylight hours but it shed no light and William shivered and turned up the collar of his coat against the chill. The air was grey with a weak mist.

  Is it warmer inside, do you think? William muttered.

  I fear not, sir.

  They stamped the cold from their boots and shut the door with a bang and made their way across to the bar. There were figures huddled at tables nursing their pints and two languid whores blinking sleepily from a corner and William and Blackwell shook the weather from their sleeves and took off their hats and William called for whiskey and the narrow door to the kitchen swung wide and out came the proprietor Shorter himself.

  William looked at his face and looked at his eyes and he knew him at once for a k
iller. It was nothing he could have articulated had he been asked. A faint crackling in the skin as the man emerged, a kind of red darkness in the eyelids.

  Shorter was enormous, thick-necked, his blue eyes bulging from their sockets as he made his way towards them. There was a power to his movements but he was slow and heavy. William had ridden out with his father once against a grizzly that had been killing stock and the man Shorter had something of that creature’s loose rippling power in his shoulders. He was bearded and his voice was loud as a prophet’s calling them to account.

  What’ll it be then? he boomed. And set both broad palms down on the counter and smiled.

  William smiled back. The man loomed a full head taller than him but he had struck down men half as big again in blacker days. Whiskey, he said again. The finest you have.

  American, eh? Shorter reached down under the counter and drew out a dusty bottle and two glasses upended between his knuckles. Ye never tippled a whiskey until ye tasted some of this.

  William glanced deliberately around the room. Where’s the wife?

  What?

  The missus.

  Shorter’s smile faltered. Do ye know her?

  William held up a hand. Not as such, he said. We came through here this time last year and she was awful nice to us.

  Where you lads from then? Shorter asked. He had not uncorked the bottle and now he leaned across and drew out an ale and cut the foam and slid the pint across to a man in coveralls with his head down on the brass railing of the bar.

  Florida.

  The both of ye?

  William glanced at Blackwell, glanced back. Yes.

  Shorter chuckled. He don’t look like a Yankee.

  He’s a Canadian.

  An what brings you through to England?

  William shrugged. Oh, business. Pleasure.

  Which one is it?

  William laughed. That depends. What class of bottle you keep here?

  The bottle was standing yet between them. Shorter set both stout hands on the bar and took a deep breath and his chest thickened and widened and the seams of his coat stretched. His nostrils flared as he smiled. This here’s the finest whiskey in any city establishment what don’t require you to pay for membership. Down out of the Hebrides, it is.