Utterson looked up from the fire. You’ll have to imagine it for me, Harry. You’re the expert.
What is it he disapproves of? I wonder. Jekyll paused, musing. Do you think that your bachelorhood would have troubled him, if he had lived to see it? I think, Utterson replied hesitantly, he would have been glad if I’d had a family. That isn’t what I asked. Jekyll let a moment pass. He knew I wasn’t married, you know. My father. When I went to see him. He looked at me from that wheelchair, and he said, Kept yourself a bachelor, have you, boy?
I caught an unexpected flicker just then: a young blond woman playing the piano. It was like a bubble wobbling to the surface and bursting, leaving a name hanging on the air. Georgiana. Jekyll shook his head, cleared his throat. Of course my father would have briefed himself beforehand. Wormed some information out of his Dr. Pinter. The good doctor was fairly infatuated with him. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking about it. Not of marriage. But the idea of having an heir. Leaving something of myself behind. A legacy. He let another pause swell the silence, and with a thrill of fright, I could suddenly see what was coming. There is someone in particular, you see. A protégé.
A protégé, Utterson repeated.
Yes. A younger man. I’ve taken him under my wing, I suppose. He is from hard beginnings; he hasn’t had any advantages. But his mind is quite unique. He could do great things, given the proper support and encouragement. That’s what I want to provide, the support for him to flourish. Well, Utterson said, Harry, you are free to support whomever you like. Thank you. But I had something specific in mind. I’d like to include him in my will.
Include him to what extent, if I may ask?
I want to leave him the house on Leicester, Jekyll said, and whatever’s in Coutts, and the securities. And Pent Manor, I’d like to leave him that too—
Utterson made an astounded noise. Harry, what on earth are you talking about? I’m talking about revising my will, John. Leaving everything you own to some—some protégé? Your house? Your family estate? Who even is this man? First of all, as it stands, Jekyll said calmly, at my demise, the family estate will fall to my father’s sister’s step-grandchildren. They’re not blood. And if you are concerned that I’ll be cutting you out in the process, my friend, I hope you know— Stop it, Utterson interrupted. That’s not remotely my concern, and you know it. Harry, who is this man? You mean, Jekyll said, his name? Yes, all right, his name. What is his name? His name is Hyde. Edward Hyde.
Edward Hyde.
Utterson murmured it to himself. This Mr. Hyde is a student of some kind? Yes, Jekyll said. But he teaches me things too. Utterson sighed. Harry, look. You wish to support this disadvantaged young man, and that is commendable. There are a variety of ways this can be done. You could establish a trust, which I could hold in escrow. Or an annuity, from which he would receive regular payments. You could do any number of things, each of them more immediately beneficial to Mr. Hyde than making over the whole of your estate to him in your will, which doesn’t do him any good until you are dead. Why would you wish to place yourself in such a position with respect to anyone, let alone a man you have known, what, since you’ve been home? Six months, at most? John, Jekyll said gently, I’ve known him far longer than that. I knew him many years ago. Then he left for a while, and now we’ve become reacquainted. And it isn’t about the money. Those options you mentioned, they are practical, yes, but I want to give him something more than money. I want him to inherit what is mine; I want him as my heir. It may not seem—legally pragmatic, but that’s because it is a symbol. A gesture. And here Jekyll lifted his hands and opened them outward to the fire.
A gesture, Utterson repeated. And you wish me to help you put this gesture into a legally binding document. Is that correct? Jekyll didn’t reply. Well, I’m sorry, but I won’t do it. It would be greatly irresponsible on my part. Irresponsible, Jekyll said. Yes, irresponsible. Harry, forgive me, but you haven’t considered this properly. Your will at present identifies a number of beneficiaries, all of whom you propose to oust in favour of a total stranger. There will be complications. And then—well, let us be frank. I’m not certain that you are in the proper frame of mind to execute such consequential decisions. The events of this year, you cannot tell me they have been without effect. I don’t know what happened in Paris, and I respect your desire not to speak of it. But losing a patient under any circumstances—and then, shortly after your return, losing your father as well. I did not tell you this, but I corresponded with Dr. Pinter after your father’s death. There were some details the hospital wanted to clear up. He told me, Harry, the manner in which your father . . . It must have been tremendously disturbing for you to witness such a thing. I am sorry. Obviously it’s on your mind. This idea of yours seems to stem rather directly from this last contact with your father. And now you come to me wishing to leave the whole of your fortune and property to a man whose name I have never heard until tonight, a man who has suddenly reemerged out of the past—Utterson paused, lips parted, at a momentary loss. So what are you telling me? That you question my sanity? That you consider me legally incapable of making decisions for myself? Utterson shook his head and said, reproachfully, Harry. Can’t you understand? I’m concerned. You can be truthful with me. Are you in some kind of trouble? This Hyde. Did he put you up to this?
Jekyll looked away, across the room. A smile was fighting its way onto his face, an odd, reflexive smile. You insult me, my friend. You think I’d let myself be bullied into this? I make my own choices. And I have chosen to do this of my own will. If you don’t wish to help, I’m capable of writing it myself. Or finding another solicitor to do so.
Utterson stood from his chair and posed before the fire, head down, hands clasped behind him. You make your own choices, indeed. You still haven’t seen Lanyon, have you. Jekyll said nothing. So I thought, Utterson said. You sit there and speak of gestures, and still you haven’t been to see Hastie, not once in the six months you’ve been home. Have you even written him your condolences?
A flush bled into Jekyll’s face. The coals hissed and popped.
Utterson shook his head. Such a shame. Such a waste of friendship. Like it’s some common thing to be thrown away.
I didn’t come tonight for a lecture, John.
No, Utterson said. No, you didn’t.
Back at Big House on Leicester Square, Jekyll went up to his study on the second floor. He shed his jacket and crossed the plush rug to his massive desk, then eased into the swivelling chair. He removed a few sheets of paper from a drawer and reached into his trouser pocket for Father’s fountain pen. Jekyll bent over the blotter and began to write, his intricate script scrolling from the scratching nib. I read in growing bewilderment and horror. The houses, the accounts, the stock funds, all were to pass to me, Edward Hyde; my friend and benefactor, he called me. Benefactor? Wasn’t I his protégé a moment ago? But that was not all. In the event of Dr. Henry Jekyll’s disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, Mr. Edward Hyde should step in without further delay and assume Dr. Jekyll’s residence and possessions.
At last Jekyll flashed off his ornamental signature and dropped the pen to the blotter. He sat back, flexing his hand. That odd, guilty smile was again inching its way onto his face.
The surgery block across the courtyard glowed against the misted dark like a white pebble on a forest path. Jekyll stepped from the conservatory and crossed the gravel yard to the steel block door, and as he climbed the steep creaking stairs to the cabinet, I was leaping in his breast with apprehension. I didn’t know what to expect or to think. In the cabinet, Jekyll moved to the glazed press and fitted in the antique little key. He slid E drawer from its slot and set it down on the long walnut table. I had watched him prepare the syringes fifty, sixty times by now. Yet this night I felt an echo of the first night: the first time I’d watched him pour the transparent green solution into a phial, punch the hypodermic through the rubber stop, tip the phial upside down, and
suck out the fluid to the half line on the glass barrel. Now Jekyll filled one syringe and then the other, and then he began to undress. He hung his clothes in the wardrobe and retrieved from his jacket pocket a folded wad of papers—banknotes—which he slipped into the trousers of my black misshapen suit, which was hanging alongside his. Naked, Jekyll passed before the mirror without looking and took up the coil of rubber tourniquet. I felt myself teetering on the brink of something new as he slid the needle into the vein, and then he pressed the plunger, and the floor flipped upside down, flinging me into the sickening fall. I groaned as blood filled my head and a billion needles rained through the skin as if to shred us to particles, and then the room whipped upright once more and I staggered into the body, seasick, momentarily blinded, and back again.
I went to the Toad. The sleazy, subterranean Toad, off Greek Street, hot and loud, voices ricocheting in an indistinguishable din. A youngish, gaudy crowd sharked about the room, releasing the yeasty stink of beer and bodies in heat. By the sticky bar I watched a pair of handsome twits in yellow checked jackets, Oxford boys, gleaming with oily assurance and chatting up a trio of ostentatious tarts. Jekyll always drew my attention to these types, the slummers, the gentlemen from high town, Mayfair, Belgravia, St. James’s, out for a taste of the low life. Tourists, impostors. Jekyll could instantly see through their disguises, and these two schoolboys playing at being scoundrels were particularly transparent. Even I could imagine them huddled with their chums in an oaken dining hall telling their tales of scummy London town. Crammed in the crush at the bar, I was observing them, more out of habit than genuine interest, when a shrill of laughter cut through the clamour. I glanced down the busy plank and saw her. She was just a girl to me, on this night. Just some young piece of dolly shaking her head and touching her collarbone as another bout of laughter fluted from her throat. A man was talking to her, cupping his mouth with one hand as he spoke into her ear, and she was laughing and tossing her burnished red head and patting his arm as if telling him to stop. Fifteen, sixteen maybe, young even by the Toad’s standards. I had only this glimpse, through this opening, before the sound and bodies moved back in to swallow her from my senses.
Georgiana.
The name welled up out of Jekyll again to the surface. And for an instant I saw another flash of that small, honey-haired woman, this time in a powder-blue evening dress laughing in a marble ballroom, a musically rising laugh, as she touched Jekyll’s sleeve and helplessly shook her head.
I blinked rapidly, then looked down into my gin. My heart was clenched, a stricken, winded sensation. I glanced back for another glimpse of the girl, but instead I found a man standing a few paces down, blocking my view.
He had one fist propped against his hip; his overcoat flared open to reveal an iridescent emerald waistcoat shimmering like lizard skin. Black chops framed his smug, rosy face. He brought a shot of whisky to his lips and tipped it back with a stylish toss of his chin. A tourist, obviously, the kind who hardly took any trouble to hide it, who flaunted his lavish foreignness. I watched him knock back two more drams of whisky as my heart gradually released, and blood began to pound in my cheeks, and I forgot about the girl and Georgiana and even the mystifying business with Jekyll’s will. For my attention followed Jekyll’s, and his was riveted upon this ridiculous impostor. The man slipped a finger into his waistcoat pocket and produced a coin, which he set on the bar, and then he turned and pushed through the crowd toward the rattletrap stairs. I felt a jerk behind my breastbone and followed after him.
Fogbound night, not many people about. I tried to match his footsteps from thirty paces behind, impelled by a curiosity and an instinctive disliking I did not need to understand. He led me across Soho Square and down a deserted road to a blind alley lined by dead-eyed brick tenements. At the corner I waited, watching him approach a door, which he knocked on, in a kind of code, four times, with a pause after the third. There was a metal grating sound, then the door opened and the man slipped inside.
I tarried, shifting on my feet, needing to urinate. This was no simple dolly shop. I had followed gentlemen to the Frenchie houses with their red-shaded windows and frilly dolls, and this was something altogether different. In my trouser pocket, my hand gripped the wad of banknotes Jekyll had transferred there. Was this what he’d intended me to use it for? I looked over my shoulder, then crossed the decrepit alleyway to the battered door and lifted my fist. Knock-knock-knock, pause, knock. A slot scraped open above my head. A pair of examining eyes peered out. I didn’t look away, bold in Jekyll’s high-buttoned greatcoat, hat brim screwed low over my brow. Ten pounds for entrance, sir, said the voice behind the door. I poked a tenner through the slot, and then I was inside.
A narrow corridor. The hulking doorkeeper motioned me down it. At the end I found, with some surprise, a small, warm sitting room, two flowered armchairs by the fire, and a red teapot hanging by its handle from the hob. Charily I stepped into the empty room, eying a wooden cuckoo clock on the wall that I expected to explode open at any moment. Framed photographs hung around the room. In one, a girl in a white nightshirt stood holding one arm behind her back, regarding me with washed-out eyes. Another girl in the next frame was moving, in two places at once with a ghostly blur in between. I heard a sound behind me and turned.
An elderly lady had materialised from the far doorway. Iron-stranded hair moulded to her scalp, navy dress with lace at the throat, hands clasped before her. Watching me, head cocked. She too struck me as familiar. I could feel another memory welling upward. I shook my head to dispel it, and the lady lifted her eyebrows. Good evening, sir, and welcome. This would be your first visit? I nodded. Delightful. Her eyes seemed wholly black in their nested wrinkles. I was trying not to look at her hands, liver-spotted, shot through with tendons, talons hooked at the ends. How had I come to learn of their establishment? I cleared my throat. A friend. She nodded. Would you care to sit down, sir? I did not move, and she gave me a trace of smile. To business, then. Have you any preferences with respect to colouring? I stared at the ivory brooch at her throat. The cuckoo clock was minutely ticking, springs winding tight. Room three will do, the lady said, moving her eyes behind me, and I turned to find the massive doorkeeper wedged inside the tiny room. Ivan here will lead you. Do enjoy your stay with us. She bowed and withdrew. Ivan bestowed upon me his stony glare. Just this way, sir.
Room three was off another narrow corridor. Hooded gas brackets stuck out from papered walls lumpy with shadows. Ivan unlocked the door, pocketed the keys, and stepped back. I entered.
The girl was sitting on the edge of the bed, her back to me. The room was a cube: four walls, low ceiling, carpeted floor, and the four-poster bed in the middle. A wooden crucifix hung above the headboard, Jesus carved in His agony upon it. I stood with my back against the door. The girl did not look over. Her dark shiny hair was braided down her spine and tied with pink ribbon. Her dress was pink with white sleeves, scooped away in back to reveal her delicate scapulas. The silence was thick, and as my eye fell on the wall I realised the room must be soundproofed under the paper. I took a step onto the padded carpet. The girl was looking down at something in her lap. From the bedpost I could see it was a doll of some kind, wearing a bonnet; she held the rigid thing in both hands. I had an obscene inclination to laugh. The girl sniffed and moved her eyes to me.
Her face was rouged. Soot rimmed her lashes, then ran and stained her cheeks like dirty rain down a window. Her brimming eyes were large and remote, gazing through me into the glassy distance. She set her doll on a bedside vanity table and came to me, her feet in white patent shoes. The top of her glossy head just reached my chest. She said, in a soft mechanical voice, Let me help you with your coat, sir. Her hands rose as if on puppet strings and a quick, unaccountable terror surged within me. I caught her by the wrists.
That old lady’s hands—tendons hard under the spotted skin—all at once I knew what I was remembering. Auntie Gorgon’s hands, shapely and strong as Father’s yet
with those iron talons that curled like a falcon’s and dug into the underside of an arm. Oh God. How could I have forgotten Auntie Gorgon? Her grim house on the edge of that wind-scoured hillside where we had gone to live after they’d taken Father away. That house was the last thing I could remember, in fact, before the long, black intermission.
I was still gripping the girl by the wrists. She was beginning to breathe rapidly through her nostrils. I pushed her away and she tumbled back onto the bed, her skirts in a ruffle. With arms outstretched she lay there, head to one side, breathing, waiting. What did Jekyll want me to do? Until now it had merely been women he wanted, the novelty of women, after a life of virgin control. I pressed my fingers to my left eye, where a lance of pain was starting to spike. I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. Stop, I said. My voice sounded distant. I cleared my throat. Sit up. The girl shifted her head to look cautiously at me. She slid herself up with a rustle. What’s your name? I felt queer and faint and barely heard the girl’s reply—Violet. Violet, I repeated. The spike was pressing into the back of my eyeball, making me flinch. My other eye rolled to the crucifix: Jesus’s head tipped to the cross, mouth open, as if crying at the sky. I fumbled in my trouser pocket, pulled out a crumbled banknote. Here, take this. Hide it. The girl just stared at the paper rattling in my fingers. Take it, I snarled. Hide it good.
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