Utterson kept his cardsharp’s gaze on Jekyll another moment, then folded the envelope, slipped it back into his breast pocket. No, he does not mention Hyde by name. He does not mention either of you by name. But your name, Harry, is all over this ghastly business as it is, and if it ever comes to trial, you will be dragged into it without a doubt. Do you really expect me to show Hyde’s supposed suicide note to the police? With your name on it? Of course you don’t; you expect me to stow it away in my safe. You have already made me an accomplice, an accomplice to crimes of which I do not know the extent. But not anymore. Do you understand what I’m saying? As far as we are concerned, Mr. Hyde is dead. We shall not speak of him again, because he shall never be seen again, by anyone. And if I should learn that this is not the case, if I should learn that you and he are—in communication, then you are on your own. You are without my protection. And I do not think you fully realise how much you depend upon my protection. This is the end of it, right here. Utterson came forward, extending his hand. Take it, Harry. Jekyll did, in a kind of awe. Say it, Utterson commanded. This is the end.
This is the end.
That evening Jekyll went out and bought four newspapers and carried them back to the cabinet. All featured the same drawing of me, that troglodytic pencil sketch I was to see over and over in the following weeks: the snarling face of an ape with hairy chops and gnarled brow and tiny needlelike teeth. They had been busy, those newspapermen. They knew where I lived. A decrepit palazzo, one writer called it, tucked amidst the dingy back roads of Soho. They knew what the police had found in my bedroom, ransacked by the villain in a futilely pathetic attempt to erase in an hour the whole of a sordid career culminating in murder, the primary evidence of which, the missing half of the shattered walking stick, was left in plain sight on the floor. They knew how much money I had in my Blackhaven bank account, an amount just shy of forty-five hundred pounds, which, they assured the public, was but a per diem pittance set aside from the monster’s fortune to facilitate his foul pleasures. And of course they knew about the witness. Not Luce, but a servant in Mr. Luce’s household. The maid, I realised at once, the pretty thing with the green mistrustful glare, who reported that the victim was merely asking me for directions when I set upon him like a madman. Who had instructed her to say that? Was Luce trying to distance himself, deny involvement?
Alongside these diatribes unfurled the eulogies for Sir Danvers Carew. They produced a photograph of him, partly in profile, hair flowing in platinum wings and eyes incandescent. Carew was a national hero, an impeccable gentleman, a white knight, a champion of progress and science, a crusader against the vile criminality infecting this city. Every hour his killer roams free, one writer cried, chalks yet another blackened mark upon the tally of outrages scratched across English virtue and character. They had a field day, those newspapermen. I imagined a pack of them storming about, a fledgling revolution, shaking farming tools and chanting anti-Hyde slogans. By the second day after the crime, however, some were beginning to suggest that the murder was deliberate. That I had eliminated the distinguished gentleman not in blind hot rage but in cold-blooded calculation. They were conducting interviews with my neighbours, my unwitting associates. Here was Victor Fleming, proprietor and barkeeper of the Pig and Gibbet public house—old Vic, I realised with a pang of betrayal—calling me a rightly perturbing character, flashing his tin about and boasting of the pretty polly he’d dossed afore dropping in. Sometimes, it was said by the establishment’s regular clientele, I brought my girls in with me and bought them gin, offered them for sale to anyone with a fiver to spare and then laughed as if it were a good joke. I was suspected, furthermore, of being a frequent visitor to the houses of horror so recently brought to light, wherein gentlemen of means may purchase the abducted maidenhood of unfortunate innocents. It was known, one paper suggested, that before his untimely death, Sir Danvers was investigating on behalf of the LSPYF the claims that a ring of such houses were operating within the anonymity of Soho. Was it possible that Carew’s murder—or, rather, his assassination—was Mr. Hyde’s fiendish solution to the problem of his own imminent exposure as a purchaser and purveyor of English maidenhood? During the days of the Maiden Tribute campaign, there were reported disturbances at the front gates of Mr. Hyde’s palazzo, and rumours circulated as to what precisely went on in the dilapidated seventeenth-century manse. From the street was plucked a nameless denizen who said it was commonly known that Edward Hyde kept a pair of girls at a time, chucking the old ones out when the fresh ones came in. In agreement was a mother of six, who said she tried to stop her nippers running free about the streets, but if he has his eye on them, who can really stop him, living up there in his castle? Who could stop him, indeed, the writer cried, when men like Edward Hyde operated with impunity behind their piles of money, and Samaritans like Sir Danvers were executed in cold blood whenever they approached too near the uncomfortable truth?
It was all happening just as Carew had promised it would, as if his death were the trigger to a complex trap he had rigged. I seemed to watch myself dangling before the masses, with their jeers and poles and rotting vegetables, and my sole consolation was that Mrs. Deaker’s voice was not amongst them. I kept waiting to see her name, her denunciations against the master who had practically enslaved her in the house, et cetera. But she had slipped away into the crowd, and I said a private prayer of gratitude every day the old lady remained out of print. The final vanishing act of Eudora Deaker.
Jekyll was more concerned with his own absence from the expanding story. Every day, I knew, he expected to hear the doorbell ring, to find a clamour of reporters on the front stoop, to see his name stamped at last on the newspaper page. Surely some enterprising investigator could sniff out the source of those pounds in my bank account. Surely the story of the Night of the Little Girl would leak out and someone would start poking about the Castle Street door. I waited for it too, tense as a spring wound for a celebratory burst. Not that I wanted Jekyll to be caught, of course. He was my hideout, my sanctuary. Nonetheless, it rankled me to take all the blame, all the jabs and ranting spittle in my face. I didn’t care for Jekyll’s increasingly exuberant attitude, either, his incredulous relief. He ventured out to the Grampian at the end of that first week, engaged in the usual banter with the barman who served up his soda water, then eased down with a few of the old boys by the fire. They were talking about me. What’s your bet, Doctor? Percy asked. Osgood here thinks he’s headed for Shanghai, and Bertie said—what was it, Bangalore? My guess is South Africa. What’s yours?
They were all merry and red from drink and the hearth. Jekyll looked off, pretending to think. What about America? Percy’s eyebrows shot up and he nodded approvingly. America, yes, I hadn’t thought of that. He’d fit right in with the Yanks, wouldn’t he?
Jekyll sipped his soda water, smacking his lips at the fizzle.
The next afternoon, he went up to the cabinet with a valise. One of my suits hung inside the wardrobe, along with a spare overcoat. He went through the pockets, folded the clothes. He found a rumpled shirt in the drawer and folded that too, then packed the articles into the valise. This he carried to a pawnbroker off the Strand. The clothes had belonged to his dead brother, he said, he didn’t want to sell them, he just couldn’t look at them anymore. Back in the cabinet he removed my chain of keys from the wardrobe drawer. There were three—to Ghyll, to Castle Street, and to the cabinet. Jekyll pocketed the cabinet key and put the two others into a glass dish and poured in a clear, acidic solution. Several hours later, he plucked the keys out with a tweezers, rusted and bitten through. They snapped between his fingers like tinder. The pieces he threw down the rear stairs, and that was that.
I watched him do these things in silence. When I did not react, when I did not think or do anything at all, I found that I could hear the flow of Jekyll’s thoughts beyond the tissue-thin membrane far clearer than ever before. It was as if Jekyll had relaxed in his concentration against me, as if he wante
d me to know his reasoning, to appreciate that he did not have a choice. Hyde, after all, had become an impossibility. There was no point in keeping the keys or the clothes; it was finished. We had eliminated Carew and gotten away with it. If I had not smashed the man to death, if I had administered the needle like we had planned, then perhaps things would be different, but I couldn’t expect Jekyll to let me out into the body again. I did not plan to argue. I did not want the body back. But I wasn’t simply going to evaporate within the mind. He would have to let me out eventually. For now, however, it was better for us both to have a calm inconspicuous façade to hide behind until everything simmered down.
Jekyll returned to his fencing club, found his former opponent in the bar, and apologised. He accepted an invitation to a gala at the British Museum. He wrote cheques. Five hundred pounds to the Royal Geographical Society. Five hundred to the LSPYF. Five hundred to the Ladies National Association. Five hundred to the Committee of Investigation into the Deplorable Condition of London’s Slums. The last sent Jekyll a letter inviting him to join an excursion into the East End, and a few days later he trooped with a dozen men and ladies out to Whitechapel to inspect lodging houses and tenements and to interrogate the wretches and distribute pamphlets. The company was passing a dripping archway when I spotted a peeling poster of my apish mug slapped to the bricks: WANTED, EDWARD HYDE—5,000 POUNDS. Alongside Jekyll, a gentleman snorted and said quietly, They could make it a million for all the good it would do. The man must be halfway to the moon by now.
There was a consensus to these stray remarks. No one believed I was still in London. After all, why would I remain when there was a world out there to hide in? Did we have to stay in London? The idea bloomed inside me over the course of that October: leaving the city, escaping England altogether. We could go anywhere! Perhaps not Bangalore or Shanghai . . . but what about America? Jekyll had suggested it himself. The New World. Was that not exactly what we needed now, a new world to explore?
I nourished the idea quietly in my cell, for by now I had learned that hectoring Jekyll would not accomplish anything. Ideally, Jekyll should come to the idea as if by his own inspiration. It was Utterson who, inadvertently, provided the catalyst. At the beginning of November he invited Jekyll to dinner at his house, where we found another guest already waiting. Jekyll vaguely knew him, Dr. Church, a spritely old man in tweeds and owlish spectacles who reminded me of someone. Halfway through dinner it struck me: Dr. Pinter. He looked like Dr. Pinter, Father’s doctor at Bagclaw Hospital. I remembered the doctor standing on the steps of the massive stone castle as our carriage crunched into the drive; remembered his knuckly grip and sly admiring searching smile. This Dr. Church was speaking of his own hospital, St. Bartholomew’s, with that same meekly crafty smile, humbly boasting of the medical college and its interest in developing a department of psychological medicine. Utterson listened, chewing, and when Jekyll caught his gaze, he lifted his eyebrows innocently. Utterson had arranged this, of course. This job offer, or whatever it was. I can imagine, Church was saying in his tweedy voice, you have many demands on your time, Dr. Jekyll; we would not expect anything more than you are able to commit to. Perhaps a short series of lectures to begin with?
I saw Dr. Pinter again, knuckles raised to knock on the door to Father’s room. You understand, Pinter said quietly, he does not expect your forgiveness.
After Church had gone, Jekyll and Utterson sat in the study. Jekyll pondered the snapping coals, fingers steepled before his chin. Utterson lounged with his longs legs stretched and ankles crossed, nursing a glass of burgundy. At last he said, Is the offer really so insulting? Jekyll roused himself. I’m sorry. No, it’s not insulting at all. It’s quite flattering, in fact. You might even enjoy it, Utterson suggested. Teaching. Fresh minds to mentor. A new protégé, perhaps . . . Jekyll glanced over at his friend, who was frowning into his wineglass. I think, Utterson said, that you should do something, Harry. You have been given an opportunity to make a new start. You should use it.
You should use it. Jekyll mulled the words over on his walk home. A new start. This was true. He had been spared, miraculously. But teaching? Professor Henry Jekyll? The idea had a certain allure, a muted dignity. Yet it was also a kind of retirement. He would be turning fifty-one in January. Was that too old for a new adventure? He was a Jekyll, after all; the line of Jekylls ran back to Nordland, to the Vikings, shipbuilders, explorers, adventurers to the very end, to the flaming pyre set adrift on the sea. Was he not an explorer himself? He had braved the outermost limit and returned home alive, in private victory. Now to teach, to retire, for the rest of his life on this gloomy island, in its safe familiar heart?
In his study Jekyll strolled up to the globe in its wooden stand near the far window. The Earth was slanted on its axis, the landmasses lumpy with mountainous texture in their dun-coloured oceans. He put his hand upon Russia and spun the world with a fast, rattling whir, then stopped it abruptly, his fingers in the middle of the Atlantic. He walked them over to England, and then with his index finger traced a route across the Atlantic Ocean to the twin Americas connected by a tapering umbilical cord, which he crossed at the slenderest point and turned north along that gnarly root up the coast to California.
California. San Francisco, California, on the Pacific Ocean. The city shimmered in our mind, built into the mossy-green hills and bathed in blue haze. I had heard of San Francisco on my travels in the East End; some loony old salt was crooning on about it in the opium berth above mine one night, and as I listened, the city rose from the smoke, impossibly exotic, with its turquoise coast and snaking hills and tramcars clanging, its clapboard bars where men paid for whisky with dirty nuggets of gold. Jekyll tapped his index finger on the spot, the gigantic rounded rump of the United States. I could feel the fantasy starting to spark like fresh coals before they begin to truly burn, their flammable dust dancing and crackling in the air above the flames. I hovered, beating my wings, awaiting the invitation to plunge.
Yet there were practicalities Jekyll had to consider. If we were going to immigrate to America, he wasn’t going to sever himself from London entirely. He had no intention of selling Big House, for example. But if he closed up the house, what would he do with all the staff? He didn’t like the idea of dismissing them, releasing them into other scattered households, where they might gossip, spreading rumour like contagion amongst the serving class. And what about Poole? Obviously, we wouldn’t bring Poole with us to America, that would defeat the whole purpose of starting anew. Hypothetically, Jekyll determined, he could put all the staff on paid, indefinite holidays, on retainer, as it were, and as for Poole, perhaps he would be able to stay on at Big House as caretaker, selecting one or two underlings to keep him company.
I listened to these calculations in stifled, torturous anticipation, restraining myself from attempting to influence his decision in any way. He would come around. He didn’t want to teach, to waste away in retirement. I tried to soothe myself with fantasies and plans for our life in the New World. We would be wise, this time; we would learn from our mistakes. No big conspicuous house for Mr. Hyde, no servants, no steady dolly, no bank account, and no name. I would be an unofficial phantom in a foreign land with no traceable connection whatsoever to the eminent English doctor. We would not settle down in San Francisco either—we would keep on the move, roving through all that enormous, anonymous country at our wondrous disposal. Jekyll drew from his shelf a coloured atlas and perused the ruggedly geometrical shapes of the states and the territories and read their marvellous names: Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Montana, Jekyll whispered, covering the glossy page with his hand, and I conjured a picture of him standing atop a mountain in leather boots with a red kerchief tied round his throat, sunburnt and tousle-haired, surveying the expanse of timbered wilderness.
I could not really imagine Jekyll climbing mountains and camping outdoors and so forth. But the vision tickled his vanity: Jekyll the explorer, the rugged pioneer. And the next morning
, he went to the offices of the Cunard Steamship Company and was escorted to a private chamber with paintings of ships displayed around the wood-paneled walls. Jekyll sat down across the desk from a gentleman in pinstripes wearing a monocle. I’ve been thinking about America, he said breezily.
Half an hour later he strolled out, having purchased a first-class ticket aboard the almost brand-new RMS Umbria, which would sail from Liverpool on 25 January 1886 and arrive approximately a week later in New York. From New York, the monocled gentleman assured Jekyll, he could travel all the way to the western coast by railroad.
I contained my jubilation, superstitious at the suddenness of it all; 25 January was more than two months away, and Jekyll had arrived at the decision so abruptly that he might just as quickly change his mind. Yet the following afternoon he went to Lobb’s and was fitted for a pair of flexible travelling boots. At home he inspected his wardrobe and then paid a visit to his tailor, where he ordered three suits of durable Harris tweed and two paisley waistcoats, one double-breasted and the other a low-slung, five-button affair. He dropped by Louis Vuitton on Oxford Street and ordered a set of cream-canvas flat-topped trunks, a valise, and a carrying satchel with monogrammed buckles and caramel leather straps. At Coutts he spoke with a bank manager about the conversion rate to dollars and liquidity and railroad bonds.
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