Amid all this clamour, Luis kept his eye on the mysterious Hackett.
Luis was a quick study. Oswald Hackett was a powerfully built man in his thirties, some years older than Luis, dressed richly but soberly in a handsome-looking surtout, and walking with an expensive cane. In the light of the lamp by the stage door Luis had noticed that the skin of the hand holding that cane bore marks, scars made by chemicals perhaps. Was the fellow some kind of scholar, a scientist – a chemist? And educated by the sound of it; he had the slight bray, the elongated vowels, that Luis associated with a history shaped by Harrow and Oxford.
Right now the man looked somewhat sickened: pale, breathing hard as he marched along. But this March day was unseasonably warm, and the London air was a touch less sulphurous than usual – the reaction must be due to after-effects of the man’s own disappearing act rather than to the climate. Still, Hackett kept pushing through the crowd, by an apparent effort of will.
‘Further than I remembered to this oyster-house,’ he said now, panting. ‘Not used to these crowds; forgive my lack of breath. What a swarm this is – eh? As if London is one great decaying tree trunk through which the maggots and the weevils chew their way, selling bits of bark to each other for farthings . . . Ah, but I imagine you feel more at home than I do, Elusivo? After all it was on streets like this that you once scrambled to survive, did you not? Chewing your quid and watching out for the bobbies . . .’
Luis watched sweeper boys at a corner, competing to clean the path of grander folk passing to and from the theatres, some of them somersaulting or handstanding in hope of a tossed penny. He had the uncomfortable feeling that this Hackett knew far too much about him – about a life he would prefer to remain his own secret.
It was a sorry affair after all: his father a shopkeeper who had died poor, of consumption, his mother marrying again before dying herself in childbirth – and a stepfather who had never treated Luis with anything more than contempt, and had eventually thrown him out on the street. Luis was nine years old. Well, he had joined Hackett’s ‘maggots and weevils’ of London to survive, at first sweeping the streets just like these boys he saw before him now, and using his unusual talent to get him out of scrapes – and, yes, away from the bobbies when he needed it. But then, aiming higher, he had developed a street act based on his disappearing tricks: popping out of existence behind a barrel, only to emerge from a doorway across the street. And that had got him noticed, and a job in the warmth of the Surrey-side theatres in variety shows or as an interval turn. All the while he had kept his secret: that his magic tricks weren’t tricks at all – though if they weren’t magic he wasn’t sure what they were.
And now, it seemed, he had been noticed again.
There was no point beating about the bush, he decided. ‘Never mind your oysters. So you can do it too, sir. I thought I was the only one . . . May I ask firstly what you call it? I do not like people having the better of me.’
‘I have a name for it. But does a name matter? And as for you thinking that you are unique, all I can say, sir, is: so do most of the others. As has been true all the way back into deep history, probably. One of my own ancestors, or so the family story goes, was Hereward the Wake, and he was damned elusive too, wasn’t he? Shall we prove it to each other?’
‘Prove what?’
Hackett halted, glanced around, and led Luis into the shadow of an alley. ‘What’s your preference, Mr Valienté?’
‘Preference?’
‘Widdershins or deiseal?’
‘I don’t know what the devil— Oh.’
‘There are always two directions in which to travel, aren’t there?’
‘I think of them as dexter or sinister.’
‘Fair names. Of course we don’t know which of our terms is congruent with t’other, do we?’ He held out his cane – which Luis now recognized as a sword cane, containing a hidden weapon. Hackett said, ‘Come – grasp the stick. Do me the honour of allowing me to take the lead. Widdershins for this first experiment, I think.’
Staring at the man, Luis considered. He had the feeling that his whole life hinged on this moment, the choice he took now. The chap could have no more on Luis than guesswork so far, guesses based on observing his stage show – it must be so, for Luis would surely have clocked the fellow if Hackett had followed him into the sinister forest to spy on him. Luis could still bluster this out. What could the man do, after all? He couldn’t force Luis to cross over into the eerie silence of the widdershins woods . . .
On the other hand, of course, once they had crossed, and were out of sight of any bobbies, Luis might get the chance to silence the fellow for good and, simply, leave him there. To survive in London’s demi-monde Luis had had to learn to be good with his fists from a young age. He was no killer, though he had before considered the possibility as a way of keeping his uncomfortable secret, in extremis. His life or Hackett’s, that would be the choice. And yet, and yet . . .
His racing thoughts juddered to a halt. Here was another like him. Here was a fellow, educated enough by the look and sound of it, who might be able to explain this peculiar phenomenon which, it was true, Luis had always imagined was his and his alone, his peculiar gift and burden, a secret to be kept even from his own family.
Oswald Hackett grinned, studying him. Luis had the feeling that the man knew exactly what he was thinking, the choices he was weighing up.
Luis didn’t trust this chap as far as he could throw him. But Luis had always been something of an opportunist; that feature had shaped the entire pattern of his life, his career. He would, he decided, see what the fellow had to say. If Luis didn’t like what he learned, he could always slip away into shadows and anonymity, as he’d done several times in his life before – although it occurred to him that it mightn’t be quite so easy to evade a man who could follow him even into dexter or sinister.
His choice made, without another word, he grasped the cane.
Hackett nodded. ‘Good man.’ He glanced about, evidently to make sure they were unobserved.
And, with the usual slight jolt to the Valienté gut, they were in the forest green.
Luis released the cane.
The trees here were oak, and not the wretched soot-coated specimens that populated the London parks but tall and handsome, like the columns in some great church, Luis often thought. The sky was bright and blue and not hidden from view by the city’s pall, and it was a colder day here too. The city, that great reef of humanity with its buildings blackened by centuries of soot and smoke, did not exist here – if this dexter or sinister forest corresponded to the London Luis knew at all. The ground underfoot was firm and dry, as Luis knew well, for he popped over here several times a day in the course of his stage act. Not all of the terrain was so accommodating; much of the landscape hereabouts was a marsh through which a broad river and its tributaries washed: a version of the Thames perhaps, but untrammelled by humanity. Luis had to choose his theatres well for his performances. The stages he used needed to map over to higher terrain here, or at least dry land, for the punters might be confused by his magical reappearances if they always came accompanied by wet feet.
He became aware of Hackett, who was again doubled over, clutching his belly, breathing hard, looking pale. Luis had never made such a journey other than alone before, and now the presence of another in what Luis had come to think of as his own private refuge was something of a shock.
Hackett straightened with an effort, dug a paper packet from his waistcoat pocket, and gulped down a couple of pills. ‘You don’t suffer this?’
‘What?’
‘The nausea. Like a punch in the gut from some East End footpad.’
‘Never had it.’
‘Then you’re blessed. And you saw I had a dose of it before, when I did my quick switch back and forth to show you my credentials.’ Hackett straightened up and eyed him. ‘I envy you, sir, you are evidently a more adept Waltzer than I am.’
‘Waltzer?’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s my name for what we do – this. To Waltz. Don’t you think the borrowing is appropriate? For we dance, you and I, as light on our feet as two German princelings, and skip to left and right, or in some direction, faster than the eye can follow. Waltz, do you see? Although I know the dance isn’t so fashionable yet in the twopenny hops of Lambeth as it is in Windsor. And here we are, having Waltzed to the forest. Tell me, have you explored this – new world – to any extent?’
Luis shrugged. ‘What for? There’s nobody here.’
‘No profit to be had, eh?’
‘England’s my world, sir. London.’
‘And wherever you cross over, do you always find the forest?’
‘Only ever tried it in London, and Kent, where I grew up. Yes, forest.’
‘And the deiseal side?’
‘The same.’
‘Well, the forest is the thing, everywhere you go, in England at any rate. Some of my own ancestors – for the trait has been passed down the generations, and preserved in family legend, though not written down since one distant aunt was burned as a witch – some of ’em called themselves woodsmen, you know. One of ’em ran with Robin Hood. No wonder the Sheriff of Nottingham could never catch those outlaws.’
Luis snorted. ‘Hood’s a figure from story. A ballad.’
‘If you say so. But tell me – if you do cross further, what then?’
That confused Luis. ‘Don’t know what you mean, sir.’
Hackett goggled at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You’ve grown up able to take this first spin of the Waltz, but it has never occurred to you to take the second, or a third? To dance on, into yet another world, and another?’
Luis frowned. No, it had never occurred to him to try. ‘To what end?’
Hackett shook his head. ‘So you have no curiosity at all, not a grain of the explorer – why, Captain Cook must be turning in his grave to hear it. I did wonder if the stage name you chose reflects your true character. Elusivo, from elusive, or to elude – it comes from a Latin root meaning to play, you know.’
‘Does it? Wasn’t aware.’
‘Sums you up, though, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, what of it? What is one to do with such a gift as this but to keep it hidden – to make a little profit – to play, if you like?’
‘Oh, what an unimaginative chap you are, Valienté. I myself thought that way, as a boy, but grew out of it. And as I’ve been implying, many of my ancestors had better ideas. How about a spot of burglary? Or spying, or assassination, or . . .’ Hackett stepped up to him boldly, all traces of his nausea gone. ‘How about serving your country?’
An alarm like the whistle of a steam train went off in Luis’s head. He extemporised. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’
‘Of course you haven’t. Let me explain. But first – how about those oysters? Let’s pop back and eat.’
The food at the oyster-house was indeed very fine, and Luis would have been happy to play along with shadier characters than Hackett for the benefit of a free meal.
Eating with a fellow always built up a certain degree of trust, Luis had observed before – especially if said fellow was doing the buying. They spoke of little as they ate, and by the time the empty shells had been stacked up and another round called for, they were, in a curious way, allies. Not friends exactly, but with a bond. Allies, each knowing that the other could disappear at any time, but each consoled by the fact that so could he.
Luis took a mouthful of porter and asked, ‘So – the Waltzers. How many of us?’
‘I know of fifteen,’ said Hackett. ‘Extant, that is, and then there are the records from the past, fragmentary as they necessarily are even within my own family, and fading into legend and outright spoofery the further back you look. We are rare, we Waltzers, Luis, as rare as a two-headed calf, and generally about as welcome. And often, I suspect, we don’t breed true, so the talent must pop up and vanish again with the secret going to the grave with the bearer. Even so I assume there are many more in the world. Recently I found two in Margate, in the course of a brief holiday.’
‘May I ask, a holiday from what, sir? I think I know all the escapologists and similar showmen in the city and I don’t recognize you.’
Hackett cleared his throat. ‘Well, I am no showman – not to denigrate your chosen course in life. I am in the fortunate position of having independent wealth. My father died when I was a nipper, but I inherited a decent trust fund on my majority – and then had the wit to invest a chunk of it in railway shares, and the fortune to pick the right stock.’
Luis said nothing, but cringed inwardly. His own father, by comparison, had backed the wrong horses in the mania of railway building that had followed the opening of the famous Liverpool & Manchester line, and had left his family destitute. He regarded Hackett bleakly. Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate.
‘As to what I do with my time,’ Hackett went on, ‘I regard myself as a scholar, without affiliation to any particular body, though I have presented papers to the Royal Society and the Royal Institution among others. I have been particularly intrigued by the great treasury of information brought back by the bolder naturalists, from those who voyaged with Cook whom I mentioned, to more recent fellows like Darwin – have you read the volumes of his account of the voyage of the Beagle? Who knows how much, in the decades to come, we might not learn of the operation of the divine life-sustaining machine that is the Earth?
‘And of course that scientific curiosity of mine has been turned on my own strange abilities, and those of my family and the rest of our scattered, furtive community. How has our peculiar faculty come about? What is it we do? Where are these enigmatic forests we visit? What is the meaning of it all? And what must we do with this strange gift? Tell me, Valienté, when did you first become aware of your own talent? Do you recall?’
‘Vividly. I was being chased by a bull – it’s not much of a story, to do with a couple of us scrumping apples where we shouldn’t have been, I was no more than six – when suddenly I found myself, not in a farmer’s field looking at a bull, but in a dense forest staring at something like a wild pig. Screamed the place down, then suddenly found myself back, but the bull had lost me. The whole episode had the quality of nightmare, and such I thought it was. Took me a while to find out how to do the thing purposefully.’ But he had needed to develop his prowess when his stepfather had thrown him out, not many years after that incident of the apples – not that he intended to tell Hackett about that, if he didn’t already know.
Hackett produced a pipe; he filled it, tamped it, lit it before speaking again. ‘Six, eh? I was older – but then I suspect your talent is rather more developed than mine. I found it when I was about sixteen. I was at school, and in the arms of the headmaster’s wife. I need not elaborate, but when it became necessary that I leave rapidly, and I found the window locked – well, I left anyhow, only to find no window and no headmaster, or wife, or school, or rugger field. Nothing but oak and ash trees, and swamp, and my own bewilderment.’ He flicked an empty shell on the table between them. ‘After that, I’m sorry to say, as an impudent young man I thought that the world was my oyster and I took what pearls I could find. Unlike you I was always impeded by the deuced nausea, but there are ways to combat that. As you might expect, no boudoir was secure. To the ladies of my acquaintance I was never less than a gentleman, but a persistent and rather omnipresent one. And of course money was no problem; no strongroom could exclude me.
‘As I grew older I became sated, and I matured – and after one or two close shaves with various forms of authority I learned to become rather more discreet. There was one irate father with an antique of a blunderbuss . . . Then, of course, I came into money of my own, and as a man of affairs I became respectable. And terribly pompous probably, as most reformed rakes are – you can judge for yourself. But I never forgot my origins, if you like.’
‘How do you find us? I mean those of us who can – um, Waltz.’
‘And to what end do you seek us, sir?’
‘Well, I could say that my ultimate goal – though it may sound a bit high-handed for a fellow with his chin greasy from Lambeth oysters – is to put our skills to constructive use. It is my intention, for the first time, presumably, in human history, to organize those of us with this faculty. To present a gift to Her Majesty and her government. To harness a talent that will ensure that Britain will continue to be the dominant power in this globe, as we have been since the downfall of the Corsican. And who could deny that that would be for the betterment of all mankind?’
Luis goggled at him. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? Well, sir, to raise but one objection, surely Prussia and France must have people with such powers as we possess?’
‘The difference is, sir, we are British. This year, this spring, as you may know, all Europe is in a ferment of revolt – the Continent is a pit of medieval chaos. We are a rational nation. We are scientific. We are disciplined.’
‘Really? What about the Chartists? And, you would go to the government? If we come out in the open at a time of such ferment, what’s to stop them locking us up as dangerous lunatics and monsters – or, more likely, simply gunning us down where we stand?’
Hackett leaned closer, and spoke more softly, conspiratorially. ‘The difference is, Luis, we will prove our worth. You mentioned the Chartists. Have you heard of the rally they’re mounting next month on Kennington Common?’
The Long Utopia Page 11