The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  Sir Edmund Lenox had assumed his father’s baronetcy eighteen months earlier, still a young man, birth-side of thirty. Nevertheless, he had subtly changed since inheriting Lenox House and the tangible and intangible legacies that came with it. He was still his cheerful, rather countryish self, stouter than his younger brother, and gentler, too, easier to smile, full of goodwill, never most at home in London.

  But there was a new, decisive authority in him, and a note of service. He strove every day—silently, Charles knew—to be as good a squire to the land and its people as his father had been. It couldn’t be easy.

  “This is one of those nice surprises you hear about,” said Lenox. “How are you?”

  “Oh, very well,” said Edmund, setting his cane and his hat on the windowsill. He poured himself a cup of tea. “This rain is a treat, isn’t it? It was hot as Satan’s hoof in Parliament yesterday.”

  “Lancelot is still here.”

  “Yes, he just asked me for a pound.”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “No. Four shillings. Had to draw a line.”

  “That’s twice his weekly pocket money, you idiot,” said Lenox. “I just wonder how they’ve kept him at Eton! Some of the stories he tells—they would have buried us alive when we were at school. Did you know he and his friend put a snake in the headmaster’s study?”

  “A snake!”

  “Then gave each other alibis. He told me this with utter confidence that I wouldn’t tell anyone. Which he’s right about, blast him. Schoolboy code.”

  “Still, it’s just another day or two,” said Edmund sympathetically.

  “You know very well it’s six. I do wish he were staying with you. You’re a father!”

  Edmund took a piece of the stack of buttered toast between him and Charles. “I suspect that in fact Mother and Eustacia settled on you for exactly that reason.”

  “Please, help yourself to toast. But how’s that?”

  “Mother thinks you ought to be settling down.”

  Lenox laughed. “And that Lancelot will persuade me of it! What a scheme. If anything I’m going to spend the next several decades on a remote Greek hillside studying scripture in silence, like a monk.”

  “Not many murders there, unfortunately,” said Edmund, who, perhaps exclusively among Charles’s acquaintance, had never even once faltered in his support of his brother’s idea of a career. “Coincidentally, on that subject…”

  “Murder?”

  “Well, no,” said Edmund. “It’s about Dorset.”

  Lenox frowned. “What about him?”

  “He was at the Carlton this morning, apparently.”

  “Already! You weren’t there?”

  “Of course not.” The Carlton was for conservatives; Edmund sat for the other side, in the family seat. “But the word reached me quickly enough that he was saying very foul things about you.”

  “Such as?”

  “It was Capability Elliott who told me. I ran across him in Pall Mall and came straight here.” Elliott was an ambitious young conservative, affable, full of the latest gossip. “Dorset didn’t go quite so far as to blame the kidnapping on you, but he came close. Said he had asked you to consult upon a private matter, but that you were a pirate. That he had misplaced his trust, was thinking of firing his secretary. Is it really old Ward, from school?”

  “A pirate!”

  “Yes, Elliott emphasized that word.”

  This could only mean that the duke wanted his version of events spread early and quickly, to counter any tales he suspected Lenox might tell.

  “Yes,” said Edmund. “Of course, your friends will know that he’s wrong.”

  “Not many people remain your friend if they have to pick between you and a duke,” said Charles, smiling.

  “Ah, but there is every kind of gossip abroad about him, you know,” said Edmund. “His credibility is low. If I had to guess, I would say you stand a decent chance of coming out ahead.”

  “Hm.” Lenox sat back, arms crossed. “Well, thank you for telling me. I’m grateful.”

  “In brighter news, I was hoping I might speak to you and Jane, actually—two birds and all that—about Molly’s birthday. I thought it would be nice to have a party for her. A surprise. Jane is such a dab hand at that kind of thing.”

  Molly was Edmund’s wife. “What a thoughtful soul you are, Edmund. Nobody would believe that you used to chase me with that cricket bat.”

  Edmund reddened. “You called me fat.”

  “You were fat that year.”

  “I was growing into my build, and it was rude of you to point out.”

  “I’ll see if she can come.”

  Lenox got up and went across the hall into his study. He tapped on the wall in code: twice, once, twice. Come if you can, but no rush. Then he returned to the breakfast table.

  Not two minutes later, Lady Jane arrived. Both brothers stood up, smiling happily at their friend.

  “When it’s raining, for shame,” she said.

  “Oh! I am sorry,” said Lenox, and he was. “I hadn’t even—”

  “No, it’s fine. But what is it? Hello, Edmund, dear fellow. How are you?”

  “He wants help planning a birthday party for Molly.”

  Jane, in an overcoat, brightened. “A party! Oh, and for Molly. Nobody could deserve it more.”

  “I’ll have to leave you two to the planning,” Lenox said, taking a last sip of tea. “I’m due for an appointment.”

  “Where?” asked Edmund.

  “It’s Saturday morning. I’m—”

  His brother made a horrified face. “Oh, don’t say the name. Don’t say it. I’d forgotten. Well, go if you must.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  At five to eight, the broad iron gates of Bedlam opened to admit Lenox. He still hadn’t grown quite inured to the sound they made when they closed behind him.

  This hospital was only just twelve or twenty years younger than Oxford itself, and in an inverted way as august. In 1270 it had been founded as a house for the mad, the first in the world: Our Lady of Bethlehem. Within a century its name had been shortened to Bethlem. By 1440 it was called, thanks to the local accents, Bedlam. In the centuries since then that word had lost its capitalization, and now people spoke of bedlam, of frenzied uproar, madness, mass confusion. But they also spoke of this dread place: Bedlam.

  On a small plaque inside the hospital—and already he could hear the distant howls and cries of the inmates, guttural and horrifying—was a quote from the middle of the fifteenth century.

  And in that place be found many men that be fallen out of their wit.

  And full honestly they be kept in the place; and some be restored onto their wit and health again.

  But some be abiding therein forever, for they be fallen so much out of themselves that it is incurable unto man.

  Fallen so much out of themselves—that was the phrase Lenox always paused upon in the hours after his weekly visits to the hospital. On one of his first visits he had asked the warden, Dr. Hansel, under whose protection he was here, why the hospital had chosen that plaque.

  “Because we have hope, you know—all of us who work here—but our final faith must be placed in God. Else I think we all of us would go mad ourselves.”

  He was a humble, quiet man with graying hair, Hansel. He greeted Lenox this week just as he did each time, with a gentle reminder that he could leave whenever he liked. Lenox thanked him, but he would be in Bedlam for the next eight hours.

  This was part of his commitment to his career. It had started with clipping newspapers, then with seeking out the dangerous low places where crimes happened. Finally his investigations into crime, into what made a crime, had fetched him here. He had tried to convince one or two of the more open-minded officers at Scotland Yard to come with him, but they had laughed directly in his face.

  Yet what could be more constructive to understanding the criminal mind than to spend half an hour in casual conversation wit
h a man like Henry Fairfax?

  By half past eight they were sitting opposite each other. Each had a cup of tea. Fairfax was scrutinizing his closely, apparently without a worry on earth. He was a handsome man with jet-black hair, as tidily dressed as one could be in the flannel garments that Bedlam provided. He was relaxed and polite. He was also a murderer.

  Hansel—not given to hyperbole—thought him the most dangerous man in the hospital.

  Though Bedlam still housed men like Fairfax, it was nowhere near as terrible a place as it had been thirty years before, though, as Edmund’s reaction showed, not many people knew that.

  Back then, after centuries of neglect, it had been a true house of horrors. The final straw was a diabolical director earlier this century, a doctor; he had published extensively in the medical journals on the need to treat lunacy humanely, while in his private fiefdom of Bedlam he had been a figure of almost limitless cruelty.

  That lasted until Wakefield’s famous report of 1814, which roused public indignation and instant parliamentary action. The patients at Bedlam were treated as “vermin,” Wakefield had reported. Wholly coherent men, who suffered from little more than nervous anxiety, were beaten and hosed every morning, then left naked to shiver in isolation, eating one meal a day. Women were locked up in their cells, also naked, sleeping on filthy beds of straw.

  Being in a group was worse still: Wakefield described ten women, “each chained by one arm to the wall; the chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench or form fixed to the wall, or sit down on it. The nakedness of each patient was covered by a blanket gown only, nothing to fasten it.”

  The worst of all was the fate of those who had fouled themselves, even once. They were kept together, regardless of their particular mental condition, murderers and mild depressives alike. He had seen dog kennels in better keep, he wrote.

  Fortunately, now, the horrors of those days were in decline. Two men of science, Tuke and Pinel, had published theories of treatment around the time of the Wakefield report, and the world was bending toward their kinder methods. Tuke, a genius from York, had founded near his home a place that took the gentlest and most respectful care of lunatics. Dr. Hansel was attempting to catch up to his example, though the older guards were resistant.

  Tea with Fairfax was an example of how Hansel had changed the culture here, however. There were no chains in sight.

  “Thank you for meeting me again,” Lenox said to Fairfax.

  “Not at all, Dr. Carson.”

  That was Lenox’s name within these walls. “Last week we spoke at some length about the methods of your crime.”

  Fairfax looked immediately wary. “I don’t quite remember that.”

  “Perhaps I should have said … of the time in your life when you felt so troubled, unlike now.”

  Lenox had learned on his very first Saturday the violent reaction anything less than this kind of periphrasis could elicit.

  “Ah, well,” said Fairfax, calming. “Yes.”

  Four years before, Fairfax had been employed as a solicitor in Birmingham. One evening, after a normal day at the office, he had returned to the house where he boarded and spent twelve uninterrupted hours methodically murdering everyone there. In all, he took six victims. The details were so gruesome that even Lenox, who tried to be dispassionate, could not dwell on them. (Fairfax had grown up in Lincolnshire, and his face lit up when he described his memories of hunting, gutting, and skinning animals there.) He had ethered and then bound and gagged each victim, letting them wake up on their own, one by one, before proceeding.

  “Perhaps this morning I could ask about the ether,” Lenox said. “How long in advance did you buy it?”

  “Two weeks,” said Fairfax cautiously. But pride always got the best of him, and he added, “Two weeks to the day.”

  This conformed to a pattern that Lenox had slowly begun to discern. He thought it might prove important.

  The men at the Yard defined all murders as being, because of their bloodiness, crimes of passion. Was it true? There could be no doubt that something hideous and visceral had driven Fairfax on the night of the attacks—but had that passion been in him two weeks earlier, too? Or could a murderer be methodical in a way that, for instance, a bank robber could? Sir Richard would have said it was impossible. But Lenox and Hansel, when they discussed it, agreed that the idea should be treated more scientifically.

  Lenox had nine patients on his docket that day—among them a woman who’d slain her sisters, a wellborn and mannerly merchant named Jacobsen who had woken up one morning and killed every dog on his street, and a vagrant accused of no crime but who drew the most detailed, fond, and alarming pictures conceivable of humans butchering horses—and in all their cases he and Hansel agreed that fantasy preceded action.

  If it was true, it was a compelling piece of knowledge. Could a murder be prevented? Just imagine.

  “Two weeks,” said Lenox. “Can you recall your thoughts on that day?”

  “I just thought the ether might be useful,” said Fairfax, mildly sipping his tea.

  “Were you excited when you bought it?” Lenox asked in a quiet, distracted voice, eyes on his writing, as if he didn’t especially care about the answer.

  “Yes,” said Fairfax.

  “You were excited by the … sorry, just taking care of paperwork … the ether?”

  Fairfax leaned forward. “I slept with the bottles every night. Once I used it to sleep. I bound my feet. I wanted to wake into the stupor that—”

  “Yes?” said Lenox.

  “That they would wake into,” Fairfax said casually, looking away.

  But that approached too closely to the crime itself, and Lenox steered the ship away, back to Fairfax’s daily life in the solicitor’s office, talk about his childhood (idyllic, in every respect, as he described it—but Lenox suspected the deepest of lies lay there), the weather on the day of the murders.

  They spoke for perhaps forty-five minutes. After that, first nerves gone, Lenox went to work, a steady eight hours without more than a five-minute break to wolf down a sandwich.

  By the end of these days, he was always shaken and exhausted—more than ready to leave. Today was no exception. He was due at a dinner party at nine, but thought he might send late regrets if he could not rally from this horrible sunken feeling.

  Just before he departed, as he was packing away his notes, hoping they were worth what they cost him emotionally, a man approached the window. He had a tidy mustache and light, curious eyes.

  “Dr. Carson?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “They never let me out on Saturdays.” The man smiled grimly. “Because of you, I suspect.”

  “Me?” said Lenox.

  “The name is Irvington. Captain Tankin Irvington. I am a post captain in Her Majesty’s Navy. I am asylumed here under false pretenses.”

  They all were. “Oh?”

  “If you could request to see me next week—I will tell you why it is wise never to let a member of the royal family fall in love with your wife.”

  Lenox looked at him curiously. “What?”

  Just then a guard approached them and rapped Irvington sharply over the ear. The old methods lingered. “Back to your quarters, Belmont,” the guard said, and very pointedly didn’t look at Lenox as he chivvied the man away.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lenox departed Bedlam’s solemn gates at five minutes past five o’clock. He had politely declined his customary glass of whisky with Hansel, citing with half-accuracy his social commitment. It was at least an hour’s carriage ride back to the center of London—that much was true.

  He looked behind him, exhaling. Just inside the grounds of Bethlem was an unexpectedly beautiful expanse of green, washed gold now by the serene falling sun. Several inmates were playing a spirited game of bowls. One was Hellerby, among the most malicious men Lenox had ever met. His face was tight with happy concentration as he tossed his boule. He might have been on a quadrangle at C
ambridge.

  Lenox found his carriage a quarter mile down the road, greeted the driver, and after getting in flung himself back upon the seat, dog-tired. He spent the ride—south to north through Bromley, then on to Camberwell, before the Thames came into sight—recopying his notes from that day.

  “Here will do, Robertson,” he said, tapping the roof of his carriage when they were near Hungerford Bridge. He was a bit bilious from the heavy lunch Mrs. Huggins had packed. A walk would suit him. “You can take the horses home. Please tell Mrs. Huggins I’ll be along in about thirty minutes.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “My satchel is in the back here, if you wouldn’t mind having someone put it in my study.”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “Thank you, Robertson.”

  Lenox got out, and soon he was walking, unencumbered and alone.

  There was a feeling unique to Saturday evenings in London, when it seemed both emptier than usual yet also somehow fuller—full, at least, of imminence, as the restaurants set out their tables and the houses prepared themselves to entertain and people walked along, looking up at addresses, unused to whatever particular street they happened to be calling upon.

  Lenox strolled, unnoticed, across the river. He stopped at a park along the northern embankment. There was a small bar here, where two men played Spanish guitars with rosewood fretboards whose inlays were of intricate and lovely ivory. The notes of each instrument stood out, yet they blended effortlessly. What did it remind him of? Perhaps of love, this beautiful sound, where you could at once pick out what you saw and heard, the tone of a voice, the fall of a lock of hair, but each individual beauty was nothing without the greater whole that contained it.

  He was thinking of Lady Jane, he supposed.

  “Drink, sir?”

  Lenox turned, brought out of his reverie by a small Frenchman in a dark tie and waistcoat, sleeves rolled up, bearing a tray. “Oh, yes. What’s coldest?”