by Alex Reeve
I sought inside myself for the guilt I must surely owe them for such deception, but found nothing. I had been emptied out.
‘Careful, m-m-mister.’ A young fellow in mismatched boots and a knitted sweater was passing. He was carrying a tankard and pointed it at me, swaying a little. ‘You’ll f-f-fall.’ He noticed the tankard was empty, and tossed it over the side. I watched it go. It was in the air for a second, spinning end over end, and then hit the water, making a meagre splash among the white horses streaking along the river. ‘Are you g-going to j-j-jump, m-mister?’
I didn’t move and he dug into his pocket, pulling out a piece of paper.
‘There’s a p-p-place on Old K-Kent Road that’s still open if you’ll b-b-buy me a drink. I h-have the address.’
I started twisting the chain around my hand, out of his sight, leaving a few inches loose so I could swing it with force. He wouldn’t know what had hit him. Take a step forwards and you’ll be bleeding from the head, my friend, and I will flay you where you lie. Take one step forwards.
He gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘Your choice, m-mister. Jump for all I c-care.’
I watched him go and released the chain again, feeling it unwind and tug on my wrist as it reached its limit.
More people noticed me but none stopped. I was shivering, saturated by the rain and the dampness of the stone. I shifted my position, lying for a while on my back, gazing up at the blackness. I wasn’t angry, not in any recognisable way. I’d been angry with my father, and with Jane and with myself, and more lately with Jacob and Thorpe and Lord knows who else, but this was a colder kind of fury that was not righteous or just, but simply was.
The rolled-up cloth in my trousers had gone, left behind in that room. Had I ever truly wanted a real one? Surely a fake was better than that vicious, tumescent shaft. He had invaded me, forced me to be what he wanted me to be; not a man or a woman, but a thing, not even alive. He had used my body as one might a flannel or a comb, and when he was finished he would doubtless have disposed of it with the same disregard.
If that was a man, then I wasn’t one.
I’d rather be dead than be that.
My heartbeat slowed and I willed it to stop, finding it curious that I couldn’t. Is this still my body? Can’t I control when it breathes, when its eyes blink, when its heart beats? If not me, then who? Surely not God, who has never shown any sign of caring for me. He doesn’t impel my heart any more than He moved my limbs to kick when I would have preferred to drown. These things happen with no grand design, they are the products of an instinct for survival imbued in the smallest mouse, even in ants and slugs, in all His creatures, proof that we are nothing better than insects. Living or dying, it’s all the same to Him.
I climbed down on to the pavement, tilting my face up to the rain. My feet were icy and wet and my skin was sore along the line of my cilice. There was blood on the white cotton camisole, and my teeth were chattering so hard from the cold I thought they would fall out.
Between the streetlamps there was an iron balustrade. I crouched down and took a link of the chain in my hand and scratched it against the grey paint, making an inch-long vertical line beneath the handrail where no one would notice it. I thickened it and scraped another line perpendicular, and then another parallel to the first. Then three horizontals and a circle, to mark the name ‘LEO’ in the paint. I continued, scraping and scratching, until the word ‘STANHOPE’ was written next to it, and so my name was complete.
That was my name: Leo Stanhope. Not Lottie Pritchard. Not Charlotte, which I’d always hated, even back then. No man could make me something I wasn’t, no matter how they used me. Someone really had been reborn in the New River all those years ago, just like the Baptists say, although in their cant they make little allowance for the newly made to ruin his dress and be told by his father to sweep all the leaves from the churchyard as punishment.
I was what I was, a boy who’d been named Lottie and was now Leo, and like it or not, all my burdens were mine. I had loved Maria, and my most precious burden was to discover who had killed her.
I traced my finger around each letter of my name in turn, feeling the hard edge of the paint, and made a promise to myself: I could return to this spot at any time. I had no fear of it. But not until I knew.
I stood up and looked back the way I’d come.
One last breath.
By the time I reached the pharmacy, night was turning into morning. It was raining hard, and the yard was awash. Streams were pouring over the stones, wicking into the mud, forming deltas, tributaries and teardrop islands.
Inside, I steamed in the warmth, slopping footprints across the back room, which was unusually empty. There were no boxes of stock piled up, not even discarded cartons and bags. It was bare, with just the table and chairs, and one of Constance’s drawings exposed on the wood panelling. Like so many of her pictures, it was of a prim cat, a hint her father resolutely refused to take. We had sat side by side at the table one lazy afternoon, with sheets of paper and coloured pencils. She had no natural gift, but diligently copied my large oval for a body, a smaller one for a head, with two triangular ears, circular eyes and little lines for whiskers. Had that really been me, or was that another man altogether?
I found Alfie’s hammer and spent ten minutes in the yard breaking the lock of the manacle. Once it was off, I hurled the thing over the fence as far as I could.
The pan on the stove contained an inch of water. Barely enough to wash, but I dared not turn on the tap as it would clonk and gush, and wake Alfie up. So I carried the pan to my room, took off my clothes and cleaned every part of my skin, slowly and methodically, exactly as I would a dead body in Mr Hurst’s examination room.
I wasn’t clean, but I’d run out of water, so I put on a nightshirt and crawled into bed, wrapping myself up in the blankets. I was paralytic with tiredness, yet I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake until the glow of the sun seeped through the darkness outside.
The camisole was on the floor where I’d dropped it. I wondered whose it had been. Perhaps some girl had been kept in that room before Rosie and me, and someone was out there looking high and low for her. Had she been sent to a wealthy aristocrat in Brussels, or discarded in a whorehouse, or killed?
The shadows inched along the floor. Outside, carts were clattering as the first deliveries of the day arrived. I could hear Ted Boyd next door opening the shutters of his grocery, and imagine him scratching his beard and stamping his feet in the morning chill. Alfie and Constance would be getting up soon.
There was nothing else to be done.
I silently opened the door and crept down the stairs and into the shop. In the centre of the room, the dentist’s chair was still gleaming.
The shelves were half-full at most. Where normally they would have been crammed with packets and pots of all sizes, shapes and colours, lined up three or four deep, there were great gaps, single remedies standing on their own like little sentries. Even the window display was depleted. Constance was usually so careful about it, arranging the bottles so that, with the light behind them, they cast a mosaic of colour across the floor. But today they were sparsely spread and I could see beyond them to the street outside.
With no bank loan and no takers for his dentistry, Alfie must have been forced to sell his stock wholesale, which meant a heavy loss. I knew I should care more about that, but I was distracted. There was something I needed to find.
I scanned along the racks, uncertain whether it would be there or not. I’d almost given up hope when I saw it, a tall, dusty vial, mostly full. The label was faded, but easily readable: chloral hydrate.
I swigged a tiny amount, not even a spoonful, re-stoppered the vial and put it back. No one would ever know.
It acted fast. I had barely made it back to my room and lain down before the walls started to swing away from me and I was descending. The sky opened up above my head. I shut my eyes and drifted down as my breathing slowed and the black water closed over me.
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23
There were three hooks on my wall, for my coat, my jacket and my bowler, and now one of them was empty. They’d taken my bowler hat. I’d gone to that house with it on, and when I’d awoken on the floor, my head was bare. That hat had been my favourite and fitted as if it was made for me specially, in a small size but with a tall bowl and a wide brim.
I tried to find my flat cap to put on the hook, to cover it up, but it wasn’t where I thought I’d left it and wouldn’t come to hand no matter how frantically I searched. And when I woke up again, sitting in front of my wardrobe, I was certain I was back in that house, and my heart raced so fast I thought it would burst out of my chest.
I opened the window to breathe in some air. Dawn seemed to be rising, except the shutters on the shops were already open and there was a weariness in the people that spoke of the late afternoon rather than early morning. I’d slept most of the day, and still I was exhausted.
I heard a knock at the door and opened it a crack. Alfie frowned at my nightshirt. I put my foot against the door.
‘Someone came here today,’ he said. ‘Looking for you. Didn’t leave a name.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Dangerous. I wouldn’t turn my back on him. Smelled like a tar from the docks.’ The weasel. They knew where I lived. I should have thought of that. ‘He was very keen to see you. I told him you weren’t here. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing. Just don’t let him in. And keep a knife handy just in case.’
‘In case what? Constance lives here too, you know.’
‘Hence the knife.’
He looked at me quizzically. I tried to close the door, but he hadn’t finished. He cleared his throat. ‘Leo, come downstairs. We need to talk.’
‘What about?’
‘It’s the shop. You must’ve noticed it hasn’t been doing well. We need to discuss things.’
‘All right.’
From the look on his face I knew I should say something more, or show greater sympathy, but my head was aching too much, and I was so angry about my hat that I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. When I shut the door I could hear that he was still standing there.
I lay on the bed again and listened to the rush of blood in my ears, the sound of my own heart pumping. I dreamt of a lake I had heard of once, in Scotland, which was so deep that no one could find the bottom. Even if you were able to swim down that far, hold your breath for all that time, it was so dark and dense you would be crushed by the weight of it. What kind of fish might live in such a place? Small and strong and enclosed in a carapace of pearl, with owlish eyes and teeth like razor blades.
When I finally came downstairs, Alfie was eating bread and cheese at the table, and Constance was resting her head on her folded arms opposite him. She looked up at me with red eyes.
‘There’s a letter for you.’
Alfie held out a brown paper envelope. ‘A fellow dropped it off this afternoon. He didn’t seem all that happy.’
I ripped it open. It was written on headed notepaper.
February 18th 1880
Dear Mr Stanhope,
You are hereby dismissed from your position as Porter due to persistent absence.
Your truly,
Lloyd Greatorex (Senior Porter)
I screwed up the letter and thrust it into my pocket. Alfie sat back in his chair.
‘What’s got into you? Did you hear what I said before, about the shop? We’ve almost run out of money. We have to get out while there’s still some capital left. I’m sorry, Leo, but you’ll have to find another room.’
‘Very well.’
‘Very well? Is that all you have to say? You’re out all night, you sleep for days, some ruffian turns up here looking for you, this letter, and the state of you! What the … what’s going on?’
I was sick of his questions. ‘I’m quite fine, thank you.’
Constance shook her head. ‘No, you’re not. Have you been given the sack?’
I looked at her squarely, without expression. She was always so precocious. If she acted like an adult she deserved to be treated like one. ‘It’s not your business.’
Alfie slammed his fist down on the table. I’d never realised before how snappish he could be. ‘No, you’re right, it isn’t! Not any more. Very well then, you have two weeks, and then we all have to leave. All of us! We’ll be going to my sister’s family in Chelmsford. She has a mattress, and Constance can share with her cousins. You do whatever you want. Pack up your possessions and go.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I shall.’
Constance leapt to her feet and glared at me, and I thought she was going to shout, but she remembered herself and fled the room, slamming the door behind her and running up the stairs.
Alfie began packing the following day. He started with his own possessions, lugging boxes of clothes and other things into the back room. I noticed his old army uniform in one, neatly folded, and another contained his medals and bundles of letters bound with string. Constance refused to join in, and spent the morning sulking, only emerging to tear down her cat picture from the wall and throw it in the rubbish.
By lunchtime, there was a thick fog outside and pedestrians were groping along the pavement, blundering into each other. I was standing in the shop watching them, and waiting for someone to come. The police or Hugo Cooper, I didn’t know which I dreaded more.
We had killed a man, Rosie and I, and you can’t do that without consequences. I had considered running, but it would only confirm my guilt, and they would chase me anyway. I could call myself Lottie again to hide from them, but I wouldn’t do that. Come what may, I would remain Leo Stanhope.
I wasn’t sorry Bentinck was dead. For what he’d done to me and many others, I could see him die a thousand times and still not be sated. It was justice.
And surely he had murdered Maria too. Surely he had. And yet … there was still a quibble, a hateful quibble, a small part of me that wouldn’t make it true simply because it should be so. The part that reminded me that he’d told us he was away at the time, and anyway, why would he kill her? I had objected when the police had jumped to the easiest conclusion, and I refused to do the same now. He was guilty of so many things, of murder, kidnapping, procuring and … and other crimes I wouldn’t name, but I couldn’t be certain he was guilty of this thing.
I needed some more chloral, but I wouldn’t take it, not yet. Not while I was waiting for someone to come.
The police might have gone to arrest Rosie first. If so, she would explain that she killed Bentinck to save me, and then I would be exposed and she would be hanged. After all, he was a man of means and she was nothing but a butcher’s daughter. It would be the end of both of us.
But then an idea came to me, the exact opposite of my usual method. Why not be honest? Or almost honest. Instead of waiting for the police to come and arrest us, what if we went to them instead? We could tell them how we were captured, and about the boat and the young girls being sent to Belgium to satisfy the cravings of those very high-class gentlemen.
And to avoid difficult questions, we could bend the truth, just a little. A simple transposition. It would be Rosie who was rescued and me who had brought down the manacle on Bentinck’s head. It was a more plausible explanation anyway, and there was no one alive who could argue with it. I wished it had been me. It should’ve been me.
I just needed Rosie to come too, and tell the same story.
I put on my jacket, wrapped up the poker in a towel again, and set out, grateful for the fog. Whoever came for me, they would struggle to find me in this.
I couldn’t see more than a few yards along the pavement. At first I walked slowly to avoid other pedestrians as they coalesced and dissolved, but then I experimented with closing my eyes and striding forward, letting chance decide whether I collided with someone or wandered into the road. It was strangely peaceful, that world of sounds and smells, feeling my feet, untethered from my purpose, carrying me whe
rever they chose. But my head began to daze, and unwelcome thoughts crowded in: a wolf’s face, straining red, bristling hair on his shoulders and chest, his thighs hard under my fists as I beat against them.
On the edge of my hearing there was a voice I knew I should be listening to. It sounded like Madame Moreau.
I opened my eyes. I was alone.
By the time I reached Rosie’s shop, the temperature had dropped and my teeth were chattering. I was about to knock when something made me pause.
It was starting to get dark, and the view through the window was like looking at a stage. Rosie was sitting solemnly on a stool with her little girl on her lap, next to the leather-faced woman whose name I couldn’t recall, and a genial older man who I took to be the woman’s husband from the way she fussed over him. From where I was standing I could just about hear the sound of their voices, but no words. There was another man there as well, younger, my age perhaps. He was leaning in towards Rosie and tweaking her daughter’s nose to make her giggle. Rosie batted her hand at him and he caught it briefly before letting it go.
For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel jealous of such easy, masculine flirtation. I felt a coil of revulsion and a rising, venomous anger, not just for this fellow but for all of them, all the charmers, persuaders, cajolers, seducers, kidnappers and molesters. All of them.
He looked out of the window, squinting at the gloom outside. I wasn’t sure if he could see me. He turned away again, giving Rosie his full attention. He had an open face and dark hair, unshaven but not properly bearded.
I remembered Jack, lying on the slab at the hospital. He was a hairy man, Jack Flowers, much like this fellow, about the same height, and the same weight, more or less. They were eerily similar.
Now I came to think of it, I had seen nothing to identify Jack. Rosie had told the police her husband was missing, and had named the body on the slab as him, but we only had her word for it. No other member of his family had come in. There had been no reason to be suspicious; she was the grieving widow, and anyway, Mr Hurst had determined it was an accident.