Riot Most Uncouth

by Daniel Friedman

  “You speak of God.”

  “No, I’m talking about Mad Jack. And about vampires.”

  “John Byron Gordon is dead.”

  “I know that,” I said, “but I don’t believe it. He cannot be dead. I’m not finished with him yet.” Death was only for the poor and the foolish, Mad Jack said. And Mad Jack was no fool.

  Whippleby licked his fingertip and contemplatively stroked it across his mustache. “They say both of us are insane, and perhaps they’re right.”

  “A woman I once loved will proclaim to all who will listen that I am mad and bad and dangerous to know. I’ve also heard that I am a drunk and an addict and a sexual deviant. But madness and drunkenness seem to me the only reasonable responses to the desperate reality of the human condition. How else can one dull the pain of past sorrows and quiet the howling inevitability of future grief?”

  When Whippleby spoke again, his voice was softer and gentler. His hands unclenched a little. After so many years of hatred, this man would never forgive me, but perhaps we had found a common cause. “If you truly mean to write a full account of the Cambridge murders, you must find out who hired the second private constable. This question has become, for me, an obsession. Both Fielding Dingle and Archibald Knifing claimed to have come to Cambridge on my behalf to catch my daughter’s killer. But I swear on Felicity’s grave that I hired only one man.”

  He waited for me to speak. When I did not, he resumed.

  “People have, in the past, suggested that I gave duplicate instructions to two servants, and thus, through my agents, I hired both men inadvertently. For a time, I believed this myself. I was near delirious with grief in the hours and days after I learned of my daughter’s death. But I could account for only one servant who had been dispatched on such a task. I consulted my bankers, and only one disbursement was made to compensate an investigator. One of those two men went to Cambridge at my behest. The second went there under false pretenses. The trouble is that I do not know which man I hired.”

  “Why don’t you simply ask your servant whom he retained?” I said.

  “He was killed only a few days after Felicity died, before I learned that a second investigator had gone to Cambridge, masquerading as my agent,” Whippleby said. “My man was knocked down in the street by a speeding stagecoach. The driver was never identified, and I have come to believe my servant’s death was not an accident.”

  “Does your bank not keep records?” I asked. “Can they not tell you who drew funds on your note?”

  He shook his head, and a visible cloud of dust shook loose from his hair and danced in the dim sunlight streaming through his dirty window. The old man’s skin was pale as milk, and blue veins rolled beneath the translucent surfaces of his neck as he spoke. Whippleby probably had not been outside in months. “My servant paid cash, so the bank could offer no assistance. I made inquiries into the backgrounds of both thief-catchers. Fielding Dingle was, at least, legitimate, known among the fraternity of professional investigators and respected for his doggedness, if not for his intellect. Knifing, of course, was among the profession’s greatest lights. He was a war hero and a personal friend of the King. His reputation was said to be unimpeachable, though I’d call that an overstatement.”

  Whippleby paused to pour himself a glass of warm, cloudy gin from a bottle with a crystal stopper. He didn’t offer me any, but I took no offense. His stuff smelled like pine sap, and I had a flask of a finer spirit in my waistcoat pocket. I unscrewed the cap and indulged. It seemed rude to let Whippleby drink alone.

  “Deceit and disreputability are the thieftaker’s apprenticeship. These men are former spies and criminals, ostensibly reformed, but turned to a task only marginally more respectable. I told my man to find me the best one I could afford. I’d think, with my resources, I could have hired a better man than Dingle, but I doubt my coin was sufficient to employ someone of Knifing’s eminence, unless he agreed to lower his rate for some reason. In any case, only one of the two went to Cambridge at my urging. The second was acting on behalf of other interests. Of this, I am certain, and for this reason, I have never been able to accept the claim that the killer was some deranged peasant of no particular consequence. Someone must have hired the second man. Something has been covered up, and if you mean to lay down a true account of these events, you must unravel that mystery. I’ve failed in all my attempts, but perhaps you will succeed where I could not.”

  I locked my gaze with Whippleby’s; stared into the deep hollows around his eyes and at the pinched, mealy-white flesh of his face. This man was wrecked, and I was partly responsible. I’d told a lie I believed was insignificant; Felicity Whippleby and the other Cambridge victims had gotten a sort of justice. There seemed to be little harm in manipulating a few of the facts.

  But this old man perceived the falsehood, and the lie had devoured him. He needed to know what had happened to his daughter, just as I needed to know what had happened to my father. And so, he’d ruined his mind and wasted his vitality trying to unravel a conspiracy I’d been a part of. We had offered the perception of justice, of certainty. And, as Knifing might have predicted, the others bereaved by the Cambridge murders had accepted it and found it comforting. But Knifing had been wrong about Whippleby. What the dead girl’s father needed was the truth.

  On one level, I had visited Whippleby to find an emotional center for my narrative of the murders. I didn’t really know Felicity, and she was already dead when I entered the story. Thus, she was an abstraction within the narrative. The murders and the process of their resolution, to the reader, seemed to merely be sort of a puzzle, and this made everything that happened afterward seem unimportant. I’d gazed upon the corpses with my own eyes and I’d filled my nostrils with the stink of their decay, so the pursuit of justice, as I experienced it, had had an urgency that I failed to convey upon the page.

  More than once, in the course of writing my polemic, I’d wished I’d spoken with Felicity’s mourners in the days after she was killed instead of running around uselessly in a drunken frenzy. Archibald Knifing, with the assistance of Angus the volunteer constable, interviewed Felicity’s close friends and her neighbors in the rooming house to try to reconstruct the events of her final hours. I will admit that it never occurred to me to do so. Just as, only a few years after the installation of gaslights, one can no longer imagine the streets of London dark and empty at night, it seems strange to recall that protocols of criminal detection have been only recently established, and to the extent they existed in 1807, they were certainly unfamiliar to those outside the fraternity of investigators. So, while readers of the mystery stories that now proliferate in the popular press may think it elementary to interview a victim’s associates as a first step in investigating a murder, it was by no means the obvious course of action for me in Cambridge.

  But there’s no point in defending myself. Because of my investigative omission, I knew very little of Felicity Whippleby, and I needed more information to write about the events surrounding her death. I’d hoped the girl’s father might provide me with some anecdote; some story about a sweet or precocious child that would become maudlin when placed opposite a depiction of the horrific details of her demise. If I could not fully convey my own visceral alarm on the page, perhaps I could instill in the reader some of Lord Whippleby’s gnawing sense of loss.

  But seeing the wreck that Whippleby became helped me realize that the story was never about his daughter, and I had portrayed her as unimportant because she never really had been important. The story I needed to tell about the Cambridge murders was about me and about my father, and about the choice I made.

  My instinct that my narrative was incomplete had brought me to Whippleby, but the problem was not with the beginning of my tale, but rather, the ending. There was no new information for me to uncover in Whippleby’s dirty London rooms. I’d come, instead, for some measure of redemption.

  I’d spent years pondering the things I did over the course of those fe
w days when I was nineteen, things I’d never spoken of to anyone. It was no coincidence that I had begun writing about what happened at Cambridge when my personal fortunes were at their nadir and my reputation was in tatters. I would not continue to lie, not to the world, not to Whippleby and not to myself. I would tell this man my secret and, thereby, atone for the wrongs I had committed and the scheme in which I had been a participant.

  Doing so would endanger me, perhaps. And it certainly meant that my planned exile from England would no longer be voluntary. But that was fine. I was done with lies and I was done with the rainy, squalid islands of Britain and the small-minded people who dwelt on them. Redemption seemed a worthwhile goal, and there was a whole unspoiled Continent to explore.

  “There’s no mystery to unravel,” I told Whippleby. “I know which investigator was false, and I know whose interests he served. And I know who really killed your daughter.”

  Whippleby wet his lips with his tongue and leaned toward me. His eyes bulged, and his hands quivered.

  I told him everything.

  Chapter 21

  She walks in Beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Thus mellow’d to that tender light

  Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

  —Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty”

  After arranging to release the bear into Joe Murray’s custody, I accompanied Angus and Knifing to the scene of the latest atrocity. The place was familiar to me; it was the residence of Professor Tower and his family. Indeed, Professor Tower was the first person I encountered upon our arrival there, though I did not immediately recognize him. I typically identify people by their faces, you see, and Tower was missing his.

  “I didn’t even know a face could come off like that,” said Angus as he stared at the grinning skull, which was a wet yellowish-brown color with patches of red flesh still clinging to it. The rough and messy surface was quite unlike the smooth, polished interior of my Jolly Friar, but having drunk from that vessel on so many occasions, it turned my stomach to see a human skull in its natural state.

  Angus had said there was not just one killing, but rather, “a massacre.” This was not the only body here to be examined. Though I was feverishly trying to imagine some circumstance by which my paramour had escaped her husband’s fate, I felt a near compulsion to fall to my knees and wail with anguish. I restrained myself, however, and maintained a bearing that suggested no emotion more intense than mild curiosity. Neither my interests nor her memory would be well served by the revelation of our indiscretions.

  “The face is less than an eighth of an inch thick, and it’s only stuck to the bone with soft, mobile tissues,” Knifing was saying. “All you need to loosen it up and get underneath is an incision along the hairline or beneath the jaw. If you can work your fingers into that, the whole thing will rip away with a good pull, especially if you’ve practiced the movement.”

  “Why do you know this?” I asked. What I was thinking was: One requires only a sturdy ax, a large pot of boiling water, and a strong stomach.

  “Knowledge of anatomy and other modern sciences are crucial to my profession,” Knifing said. “I’ve participated in a number of autopsies. And in my former life as a soldier, I learned exactly how deep my own face went.”

  “You were cut all the way to the bone?” Angus asked.

  “There is a notch, a groove in the skull beneath my scar. With only a bit more pressure, the wound would have been lethal.”

  “Mortality is for the foolish and the poor,” I said, because the recitation had become almost a reflex. “Decay is a consequence of individual failure. A man ought to control his destiny, and not be victim to circumstance.”

  Knifing’s dark eye narrowed, but his white one seemed to widen. “Those are the words of a man who has never experienced the horrors of modern warfare. Wedged into an infantry formation, there’s no place to run when musket balls fall upon you like hailstones, and there’s little one can do to evade a shot from a cannon. I’ve seen plenty cut down in battle; braver and better men than you. Their sacrifice was no failure, and nobody living has a right to call them fools.”

  “Can I feel it?” Angus asked.

  “Feel what?” said Knifing.

  “The groove in your face.”

  It was interesting to see Knifing’s features register surprise. His dead eye seemed to bulge a little, and his mouth sort of dropped open, as if he intended to speak but had forgotten how to form words. Knifing’s entire persona seemed to be structured around anticipating everything in advance, and he clearly hadn’t expected Angus to want to palpate his face. Of course, whoever gave him the scar and took his eye probably also surprised him a little bit. “Is there something permissive about my manner or demeanor that might possibly make you think that’s an appropriate thing to ask?”

  “I don’t know,” said Angus. “I thought, perhaps, we were becoming friends.”

  “If I’ve said or done anything to cause you to believe that, you have my sincerest apologies,” Knifing said.

  The killer had not been very interested in the blood of Professor Tower, apparently; as most of it was smeared on the walls and emptied onto the floor around the body, which had been positioned at the head of the table in the dining room with a white cloth napkin folded in its lap.

  “He was seated here at the table when he died?” Angus asked.

  “I think not. Note the cuts and gashes across the left forearm and the knuckles of the right hand,” Knifing said.

  “He’s ripped up so badly, I didn’t think those were special,” Angus said.

  “Those happened when he tried to defend his vitals from a knife-wielding attacker,” I said. “During the years before I inherited Newstead, my mother and I lived in Aberdeen, a city rife with drunks and brawlers. Knife fights are not uncommon when Scotsmen get to drinking, and I’ve seen such wounds before.”

  “Very good, Lord Byron,” Knifing said. He bent forward, leaning on his umbrella, and squinted at a mashed-down bit of blood-soaked carpet next to the body. “The body was dragged in here, and posed in this seat.”

  “To what purpose?” Angus asked.

  Knifing waved his hand; the kind of elegant gesture certain people can make to demonstrate that they don’t know something, but don’t really care. “Perhaps it’s some private ritual of the killer’s, or perhaps it’s merely some sort of theatrical flourish, for the benefit of anyone who discovers these bodies,” he said. “Or maybe it’s some specific sort of message to me or to Dingle. Or even to Lord Byron.”

  “Why would it be a message to me?” I asked.

  “Fielding Dingle can be relied upon to be the last person to learn of anything, so if he is aware that you have entangled yourself in this unpleasantness, you can be certain the killer knows, as well.”

  I stepped back and took a careful look at my surroundings. I had walked through this room a number of times during my secret trysts with Violet, but I had never noticed that this dining table was virtually identical to the one in my residence. It seemed a shocking coincidence, until I remembered that I’d purchased my furniture locally. In a town as small as Cambridge, it was not unlikely that both Tower and I would patronize the same carpenter.

  However, if Knifing was correct, and this scene was a message to me, then the killer must have been inside my home to have seen my furniture and learned of the coincidence. Leif Sedgewyck had seen my table, but how could he have connected me to the Towers? Another theory was gnawing at the back of my mind; the theory that had attracted me to the scene of Felicity Whippleby’s murder in the first place: blood-draining was the mark of the vampire. And the suspect likeliest to have left me a message was Mad Jack.

  My unease must have been plain upon my face, because Knifing said: “You’re getting exactly what you wanted right now. You decided to involve yourself and I c
an see that you’re only just realizing what it is in which you’ve become involved. I hope you’re enjoying the experience.”

  He followed the trail of blood to the heavy door of the bedroom. He found it unlocked, and pushed it open.

  “Oh dear,” said Angus as we entered.

  My sweet Violet had been killed and drained in the same manner as Felicity Whippleby. We found her naked body in the bedroom, hung by the feet from a knotted linen sheet, which was affixed to one of the four high posts of the canopy bed. I tried not to think about how I had cavorted there with her the previous afternoon, and instead concentrated on keeping my expression blank to prevent my face from betraying our affair to Knifing. I wanted to take her down, to cover her, to offer her whatever protection I still could. But the revelation of our indiscretions together would only taint her memory, and it certainly wouldn’t be the best thing in the world for me and my standing in the community. I did nothing.

  But my heart pounded in my chest, and my pulse fluttered in my throat. Feverish sweat began to pour from my forehead and my armpits, though the room was quite cool. I mopped my brow with my shirtsleeve and hoped my reaction to the sight of the corpse had escaped Knifing’s notice.

  The idea that Violet could be ripped out of the world seemed a direct rebuttal to the sentiment I had shared with her the previous day. How could life be imbued with purpose if someone like Violet could be unceremoniously and arbitrarily unmade? My guts twisted within me, and I nearly swooned. This, I realized, was the intrusion of disorder Knifing had told me his clients hired him to rectify. He was right; looking at that still, dangling form, I wanted order and I wanted certainty and I wanted vengeance.

  Knifing’s stony expression didn’t change when he saw the dead woman, and he did not seem to acknowledge her at all. He seemed more interested in a splatter of blood and bits of bone on the wall, near the doorway. He spotted a small hole bored into the plaster, and then, without commenting about Violet, returned to the dining room to look at her husband’s corpse again.