Well, that’s what I do, she replied, isn’t it. She shrugged her shawl up to cover her shoulder. Make friends.
It was only a matter of time before I followed her home.
It was the next evening, in fact. I had met her in the Pig and Gibbet again, to rub their faces in it. But she was distant, evasive, and in my bedroom later she stood looking stiffly off as I undressed her. I saw the bruise when the underthings dropped. Left flank, side of the thigh. Fresh with broken vessels, swollen. She always seemed to have a bruise or two, her skin so pale and sensitive, faded yellow or indigo dings. But never one like this. I tried to ignore it, but she just lay unresponsively on the bed until it began to feel like I was feasting on a corpse and I stopped. I sat up against the headboard next to her. She had begun to cry, fiercely, in silence, sheets tucked into her armpits. Was it your da, I said at last. She didn’t answer. Jeannie. Did your da do that? She nodded, wiped her nose with her arm. I watched myself reach out and put my hand on her head. She braced, resisting, as I tried to pull her toward me. Ssh, I said, and drew her head down to my bare chest. After a few seconds, she started to weep in earnest. I stroked her hair and stared across the room, a ring of darkness tightening round my heart. Eventually she fell asleep on my chest. Her head rose and fell as I breathed.
I must have fallen asleep because I woke when the weight on my chest lifted. I could hear her sliding on her clothes. I whispered her name. She came to the bed’s edge and found my fingers, gave them a clumsy squeeze. Then she tiptoed out. When the front door all the way downstairs creaked shut I threw off the sheets and scrambled into my clothes. I snatched my stick and picked up her trail halfway down Ghyll Road. We were alone on the lane and I crept a good distance behind, keeping to the shadow side. She left Soho to the northeast, took Theobald’s Road a long way until it turned into Clerkenwell, then hooked into the side streets. Tight lanes, few gas lamps. She led me up a climbing alley with gaping stalls and black workshops. Washing lines crisscrossed overhead, and clothes bellied in the breeze. Uphill, to a wider street lined with narrow houses jammed together. She turned up some steps and went inside. I waited, then entered a lobby with a cracked tile floor, a smell of mildew and soup. She was clumping up the old wooden column of stairs, and I followed, my back to the wall. She stopped on a landing, and I stole up to the switchback below it. Saw her feet, through the railing, her shabby slippers. The key clicked in the lock and she closed the door behind her.
I slipped up and listened at the door. Low voices, indistinct vibrations from inside. I could make out Jeannie’s frequency, and another, deeper. I hovered. Hell with it. I banged on the door. Silence. I banged again, and a slim man in shirtsleeves wrenched it open. He had a full, drooping moustache just like Father’s, chin and cheeks grizzled with stubble. The stink of whisky wafted from him as he ogled me, unsteady on his feet. Who’re you supposed to be? he said, and then Jeannie stepped into my narrow view of the peeling room behind him. I met her eyes. Father swayed, turned half around to look back at her, and I shouldered the door open, slammed him against it, jamming the shaft of my stick under his chin. I gripped the stick at either end, pinning him to the door as he grimaced and gasped and kicked the hollow wood. My head was pounding; I could hardly hear my voice as I leant in and snarled, You know me, old man. He flashed his teeth, emitting a croak as the thick oaken shaft ground the crushable cartilage of his windpipe. How easy it would be. My knuckles were blanched. With a grunt of effort I tore myself away.
He clasped his throat and coughed, pressing himself to the door. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a fistful of coins. You know me now, old man? His eyes moved over my shoulder and I said, Don’t look at her, look at me. I let the coins fall to the floor; they bounced and rattled at my feet. Pick them up. He took a hand from his throat and turned the placating palm out to me. Pick them up. He nodded, slid down to his knees, and began to blindly feel for coins on the floor. All of it, I said, and when he got down on all fours like a dog, I kicked him in the thigh. Another punt to the ribs flipped him back against the door. Ah, he gasped, clutching his side, ah God, please, sir. I lowered myself to my hams to look him level in the eyes. Please, he said. I reached and took a handful of his oily hair. I’ve always wanted to scalp a man. Rip his rug off by the scalp, like the Indians do. How’d you like that, old man? He tried to shake his head but I gripped tighter. Touch her again, touch any part of her, and I’ll come back here with something sharp and take a souvenir. Understand? I knocked his head back against the door, twisted his hair. Understand? Yes! he cried. Yes, I understand, please, I understand.
I released his hair and wiped my hand on his shirt. When I stood up a dizzy wave rolled under my feet and my vision went grey. I blinked rapidly, startled by the dingy room behind me. Jeannie was backed against the kitchen table, her expression wide with alarm and wonder. Beyond her shoulder stood a flimsy door, cracked inward ever so slightly. I had the feeling that a person was crouched behind it, one glistening eyeball to the gap. It’s all right, I said, glancing uneasily back to Jeannie. I’m all right.
By the time I got back to Ghyll it was morning, unseasonably warm and smelling of mud and dung. I dropped my coat in a heap on the floor and wandered into the drawing room. I was going for the sideboard, I think, but I stopped, struck by the light filtering like dust through the great front window. There was something in a pot on the table beneath it. Suspiciously I approached. A flower, with a large brown face and golden crowns, turned up to the light like a sunbather. I was almost afraid. It was as if the thing had materialised from thin air, from the morning itself, all the way from some other dimension. Very pretty, Mrs. Deaker crooned behind me. Very pretty, doesn’t Master think so? I whirled to the sound of her voice and found the old lady watching me from the depths of an armchair by the doorway. She drew the blanket off her legs and with a soft groan pushed herself from the chair, shuffled over to stand beside me. Master must permit the indulgence. Does he find it pleasing? It’s going to die, I said. It’s still winter. She clucked her tongue and reached a long-nailed hand to the flower. I could smell her, unbathed and gamy, beneath her clothes. Of course it will die, she said softly, running a fingernail down its furry stalk. Young missy will like it. You’ll see.
Day Two, Morning
You’ll see.
I bang awake, the words ringing. A dream—people trampling me into the muck, Mrs. Deaker kneeling beside me, pushing my face into the ooze, whispering. I sit up and look around: I’m on the floor by the stove, where I must have curled up to sleep, leaving the old woman and her flower frozen in the past. Daylight fills the dusty windows. I lie back on the floorboards, gasping. A cobweb is strung between the bench and the underbelly of the walnut table. With both hands I cover my face and scratch my bristly beard, then give myself a hard smack. Get up.
On my feet, I grit my teeth and arch my spine till there’s a nice fat pop from the lumbar vertebrae. Then I grab the edges of the table and hunker down to crack my knees. The body stiffens up more every day, the muscles bowing my spine, pulling my pelvis askew. Hyde the Hunchback. I limp toward the glazed press, the jug of ethanol on the shelf above it. But as I pass the little writing desk, my eye falls on the envelope propped against the lamp. The line of ink engraved on its face: Gabriel John Utterson.
I do not like this thing. The way it just sits there, mocking me with its immunity, so certain I won’t burn it or shred it. How did Jekyll know I wouldn’t? I don’t know that I could even touch it. My fingers tingle at the thought, as if the paper carries the trace of some contagion, of Jekyll’s insanity. Yet insane as he was, he still knew I would obey him in this last command, to leave his confession as it lies. How I long to prove him wrong! To pick the thing up and slowly, painstakingly rip it into scraps . . .
My lower eyelid starts to twitch, an erratic tapping under the skin—I touch it with my fingertips, alarmed.
Just as quickly, it stops.
I edge away from the desk. Nothing to be frightened
of. There is nothing in that envelope but desperate lies that Utterson will not believe. He knows far too much to be taken in by Jekyll’s incomplete account. He must have nearly all the pieces by now, enough to get a rough idea at least. Has he seen it yet? The whole picture—the truth?
He surprised me, Utterson did. In spite of my chariness of the man, I’d still underestimated him, the power of his curiosity. He’d said he wanted to meet me—it was necessary that he meet me. Yet I never thought he would do what he did. How long had he been watching the Castle Street door? How many nights? He knows how to wait, Utterson does. Even now, with the puzzle all assembled before him, and that envelope sending out its siren song, he waits for Poole to come and beg his help. Today? Maybe not. But tomorrow? Day after? How much longer will they let me live like this?
Utterson’s perseverance paid off not long after my visit to Jeannie’s flat. I was almost convinced she wouldn’t show at the Pig and Gibbet the following night, convinced I had scared her off. But to the Pig she came, and when I woke early the next morning, for the first time, I found her still in my bed, her brow intently furrowed in sleep. In the chill light her skin was like ivory, inset with tiny gemlike pimples on her chin and forehead. I had never seen her in such sober, meticulous detail, inches away, breathing softly on my face. A strand of hair was caught at the edge of her mouth, and delicately I plucked it free and placed it behind her ear. One agate eye flickered open and fixed upon me. I half expected her to recoil, to sit up in a hurry and grab her clothes. Instead, her eyelid dipped shut again, and she smacked her mouth and sleepily mumbled, G’morning.
A day or two later on my rambles I passed a chic shop window with a pink dress displayed on a smallish wooden mannequin. It had white puffy sleeves and lacy embroidering around the collar and waist. I went inside and bought the thing for a whopping five pounds—for my daughter, I explained. It fit Jeannie as if tailored for her. I took her to the Hotel Grand for dinner. A three-piece orchestra performed brightly in the centre of the room like an elaborate wind-up mechanism. Jeannie had washed her wonderful hair and pinned it up; her neckline was flushed as she gazed about, trying to look unimpressed. I told the waiter it was my daughter’s birthday and he brought her a sherry-size glass for her wine, which she took down in quick, covert gulps. When the waiter dropped by to inquire how mademoiselle was enjoying the consommé, Jeannie placed her hand over mine and said, in a posh little voice, Daddy says it’s too fishy. I snorted a spoonful and started coughing, and she patted my hand and whispered to the waiter, It’s the worm, Daddy’s never been the same since In-ja. Later, she spooned up a glob of my lemon custard and when it plopped into her lap, she cried, looking down in dismay, Oh shit!
Christ, these details, these futile details.
It was the next night, or the night after that, when I returned to Castle Street. I had not intended to, I’d just been wandering aimlessly, for Jeannie had taken the evening off to spend with her sister at home. When I looked up and took stock, I realised my roaming had landed me very near Trafalgar, a few blocks south of Leicester Square. I felt a tug at my navel, a jerk of the reins, and with a shrug I turned toward Castle Street.
I came up the cobbled lane and approached the surgery block from the south rather than the north, the way I usually did. I was fishing my chain of keys from under my collar as I passed the narrow alley that led from Castle Street into Big House’s courtyard. Utterson must have been hiding in there, just inside the alleyway. I’d like to say that I stopped, nose lifted, eyes sharp, detecting some watchful presence. But in truth I divined nothing as I climbed the three encrusted steps. I sensed approaching movement below only at the last quarter-second, just before he touched my elbow and said, Mr. Hyde?
Hissing, I raised my stick to strike blind at the voice. Yet Jekyll held my arm. The nearest lamp was behind me, and from under my topper I peered out at Utterson’s grave, horsy face, its startling detail: the close-set grey eyes, the wiry chops bristling from his cheeks, the flesh-coloured mole on his long upper lip.
I stood rooted to the spot. You are Edward Hyde, Utterson said, and I found myself nodding. I am Hyde. His eyes narrowed, slightly. He could not see me, I realised. I was just a dark figure above him. I am Utterson, he said. I know who you are. What do you want? I was hoping to see Dr. Jekyll. Perhaps you might let me in? Jekyll’s not home. I see, he said, and glanced up at the windowless wall of the surgery block. Are you living here? I’ve a house of my own. Now excuse me. I turned for the door. He touched my arm again. Wait. I stopped with the key extended. What do you want?
I want to see your face.
My beard growth stiffened. My face. No, I could not show him my face, not Utterson. Yet with a riveted helplessness I was lowering the key and turning, my own hand involuntarily rising to the brim of my topper. Then I lifted it off. I stood above him, head steaming, a cold halo round my scalp where the band had indented my hair. Utterson stared up. He swallowed. Could you, he said faintly, could you step down, please? I laughed, a little hysterical. This is all you get, Utterson. Now go home. And as if released from his spell, I spun for the lock and crunched in the key.
Up in the cabinet I collapsed in a chair, shaking. What had just happened? How did he know to wait for me by that door? I felt queasy, exposed, as if a curtain had just been yanked away to reveal a busy backstage spying operation. I watched the courtyard out the window, the slim opening of the alleyway, almost expecting to see Utterson emerge leading a mob. Why had I taken off my hat? Had Jekyll made me do that? Why would he want the solicitor to see my face?
Jekyll sank naked onto the bench, unwrapping the rubber tourniquet from his left arm. The vein was getting hard and discoloured in the elbow crook, pocked with dried tiny punctures down the forearm. Jekyll flexed the hand open and shut as he held the left arm out against his right—that one smooth and clean, veins flowing fresh beneath the skin.
From the wardrobe he retrieved the razor and porcelain bowl, which he filled with cool water, and shaved before the mirror. The hairs pulled and crunched under the blade. Jekyll dipped a cotton ball in ethanol and smeared his raw face with the scorching stuff. Then he dressed in his own clothes, descended from the cabinet, and crossed the courtyard to the conservatory.
Poole was in the dining room, arranging silver along a cloth. Jekyll came up the two steps from the conservatory and stopped when he saw him across the table. The gas was turned down to a sepia stain. It was nearly midnight. Yet here was Poole, doing the silver. He looked up, as if surprised. Oh, sir, good evening, welcome home. Guardedly, Jekyll nodded. Evening, Poole. Up late, I see. Poole dipped his head. Yes, sir. Can I get you anything? No, no, I’m up to bed. You can catch me up in the morning. Very good, sir, Poole said, and waited until Jekyll nearly reached the far doorway before he added, Mr. Utterson called for you, sir.
Jekyll paused. Poole’s tone sounded unnatural. Oh? When was this? Just now, sir. He left perhaps ten minutes ago. Jekyll turned. Did he say what he wanted? Not really, sir, it seemed he just wanted to see you. I thought you would like to know, as he left so recently. Indeed. Past Mr. Utterson’s bedtime, I should have thought. Poole dipped his head with a trace of a smile, and then met Jekyll’s eyes. True, sir.
Jekyll was halfway down the corridor leading to the main hall when he paused again. Softly he snapped his fingers, then turned around and went back to the dining room. Poole was standing by the table, holding a fork, gazing into space. Sorry, Poole, it’s just occurred to me. Mr. Hyde plans to spend the night in the cabinet. Could you bring him back some water and wine? Don’t disturb him, just leave it on the stairs. Would you?
Poole looked down at the fork in his hand. Certainly, sir. Shall I bring Mr. Hyde some breakfast in the morning as well? No, Jekyll said, I imagine he’ll take off fairly early. Just the water and the wine.
Had Poole positioned himself there, in the dining room, with the silver? Had Utterson told Poole that he’d seen Mr. Hyde go in the back door of the surgery block? He’s back th
ere right now, Utterson might’ve said. Are you aware he has a key, Poole?
Jekyll lay in the bath with a towel over his face. The question beat in the blood-warm water: How had Utterson known to wait for me by the Castle Street door? How did he know I came and went by that door? Utterson had helped Jekyll buy the house twenty years ago when he first moved to London, so he would have known about the door itself, the connection of Big House to Castle Street. Yet how could he know that I used it? He had been waiting there. Poole might possibly suspect I had access to the cabinet. But would he share this with Utterson? Who knew how much those two said to each other? They could have been exchanging notes on Mr. Hyde for weeks now.
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