The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  Chapter XIX

  IT WAS A MISSION, and I felt righteous, but in fact he felt deeply and unutterably scared—mortified—and the perspiration froze on his face and his heart was thumping like a lunatic in a cell. He was flanked by Pringle and a plainclothes constable and together they were heading for Candlemaker Row, Groves repeatedly clearing his throat and fighting for composure, for manly power, indignation—for anything that might take the place of fear.

  “You know what the good Piper McNab used to say?” he muttered, to belie his nerves.

  “What did he say?” Pringle asked.

  “That a cornered dog has one instant in which it decides to become either a tiger or a hare. One instant. And do you know the most merciful thing the aggressor can do? In that instant?”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Make the decision easy for the dog, one way or the other. For it is the moment of decision that is terrible, not the decision itself.”

  “Aye,” Pringle managed.

  “You see my point?” Groves persisted. “We must not allow her the option of defiance. We must remove that moment from her completely. It is why I have called the two of you to be at my side.”

  “Aye…”

  They arrived at her tenement under darkness and swiftly moving clouds. At a gesture from Groves they made first for the laundry, but it was vacant. They turned and headed purposefully for the dogleg flights of stairs, and with each creaking step Groves felt his innards clench and his hands tremble helplessly. His disquiet was such that had he been alone he might have reconsidered. He might have retreated. The powers facing him were potentially enormous. But the real reason he had brought the other two along was to commit himself to action; to make prevarication too humiliating to be a ready option. He was going to confront the Todd woman and shake loose the truth. Or at least exert such an atmosphere of intimidation that she would be propelled into incriminating action and guided into one of his still-assembling traps. But it was all so very delicate.

  “You have your truncheons ready?” he asked when they arrived at her eerily grooved door. “Very well. Then let us not waste another word. Let us do our duty. Let us not hesitate or be repelled in any way. Let us perform our duty, in the name of God.” He fondled his silver buttons, trying to summon a wave of determination. But all day his head had been reeling.

  The morning again had been marked by numerous reports of an abominable creature roving the benighted streets. In one particularly disturbing testimony, a Marchmont widow—seventy but steely of face and constitution—claimed that the beast had pursued her through the back streets and vennels and almost snatched her at her gate. Making it inside, with a clump of her hair missing, she had sealed the door and cowered in her bedroom as the creature—she claimed it was Satan himself—rattled the bars of her fence for close to an hour before departing. In the morning she burst into Central Office demanding that she be locked in one of the holding cells for her own safety, and relented only with Groves’s assurance that she would receive a police escort home and be guarded day and night. Her name was Hettie Lessels, and she was the erstwhile matron of the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls.

  “He’s come to take me!” the woman cried, hysterical and barely comprehensible.

  “Who is this, you say?” Groves asked. “The devil?”

  “Aye, the de’il—she’s sent him for me!”

  “Who?”

  “The wean, don’t ye know!”

  “You speak of Evelyn Todd? A lass from your orphanage?”

  “Aye—the wean! We thought she was dead! But she’s come back to claim me!”

  Pasted with powder and damp with perspiration, she was hunched in a corner of the Chief Constable’s Office and kept glancing at the window, as though fearing she might be taken at any moment.

  “You’re making no sense, woman,” Groves said, though he had a terrible feeling she was making perfect sense. “Who is it that is after you? Is it Evelyn Todd or the devil?”

  “The two! The same!”

  “And why should either want to claim you?”

  The widow was sobbing. “I had no direct part in it!”

  “Part in what?” Groves asked, pulse racing. “Tell me, woman—for your own good!”

  Her hand slid over her mouth.

  “Do you want to swing from the gallows? Is that it?”

  Her grief gave way to resentment. “Ask him! If ye must know!”

  “Who? The devil?”

  “Ask Lindsay! It was he who was at the head of the matter!”

  “Who?”

  “Abraham Lindsay! The orphanage governor!”

  “Abraham Lindsay?” Groves recognized the name. “He’s still alive?”

  “Aye! He’s the one! I had no direct part in it, I tell ye! No direct part!”

  Abraham Lindsay, founder of the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls, was well known to the police, especially at the West Port Station, where Groves had once been stationed. A severe-looking man of great rectitude, he had been for several years in the 1860s the subject of some incongruous scandalmongering, generally related to the demise of his second wife in childbirth. Veronica Lindsay had been a celebrated beauty and free spirit, at least thirty years her husband’s junior, and the unlikely union had been more or less forced upon her by a strictly conservative father seeking to “correct her inclinations.” But unsavory rumors continued to plague her marriage, culminating in 1865 in the premature arrival of a firstborn child with skin the color of Ceylonese tea. Due to the unexpected nature of the birth and the fact that it was Christmas, Lindsay had been forced to perform the midwifery himself, and the next day, with vacant eyes and impassive voice, he informed the police of the terrible tragedy: the demise of both mother and child in labor. Under the circumstances this was entirely plausible, and none of the subsequent suspicions could ever be validated. The Indian manservant of a neighboring property denied any knowledge of Veronica Lindsay; her father, a member of the Faculty of Advocates, had no interest in pursuing the matter; and Abraham Lindsay himself was considered a man of impeccable character. And so wife and child were laid to rest at Drumgate Cemetery with a headstone inscription of either piercing grief or shameless duplicity (“Sweet hallowed ground, I’ll long revere thee…”).

  Lindsay’s subsequent demeanor was similarly difficult to interpret. As flinty as he had been, he became adamantine. As menacing as he had been to his charges, he became positively hostile. His religious convictions, once admitting some chink of clemency, now became declarations of war. The Fountainbridge Institute formed a carapace around him, into which no stranger dared venture and through which no secrets were allowed to seep. Since the day of the building’s destructive inferno he had retreated even farther into obscurity, with most happy to think of him as deceased.

  But, as Groves discovered later that day, the fossilized remains still breathed, a heart still pumped, and bile still spilled from the parched lips. The old man was seated in an archaeological chair in a dust-filled villa shuttered with yellow blinds, not far from Queensberry House and the eternal Crags. He looked sapped, coarse-hided and shriveled, his flame of life reduced to a barely distinguishable gleam, his eyes as white as the ice accumulating on Duddingston Loch. And he proved as cryptic and unhelpful as the matron Hettie Lessels.

  “I have done unspeakable things,” he wheezed as behind him a clock marked time in curiously protracted seconds, “and I have had unspeakable things done to me.”

  “A lass by the name of Evelyn Todd resided in your orphanage, did she not?” Groves asked, ill at ease in the heavy air, which reeked of dust and rotting flesh.

  “That much is certain.”

  “And she was discharged at some stage to the care of some relations?”

  “She was discharged.”

  “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “I…arranged it,” Lindsay said. He spoke as though testifying before a judge, though in a higher court than any
that could be called terrestrial.

  “Did you know her mother?”

  “The girl had no mother.”

  Groves sniffed emphatically. “She was the daughter,” he stated clearly, also as though making an official statement, “of Isabella Todd, a notorious prostitute.”

  Lindsay did not speak or move his eyes, and Groves was not even sure if they were capable of sight. “The girl had no parents,” the old man said defiantly.

  “Then who did you discharge her to?”

  Lindsay moistened his lips. “To the care of some people.”

  “To a society? To the Mirror Society, is that it?”

  Whether Lindsay could actually see or not, he now turned his eyes and stared at Groves frostily.

  The man could not hide everything from me, he was awed by my knowledge, and for all his years, he quivered before me like a feeble adolescent.

  “It was a society formed,” Lindsay said, “with the most divine intentions.”

  “And who was part of it?”

  Lindsay looked away. “Few who remain alive.”

  “Colonel Munnoch?”

  No response.

  “Professor Smeaton? James Ainslie?”

  “Ainslie,” Lindsay said, “was not one of us.”

  Groves frowned. “Then pray tell, sir, what was his part?”

  Lindsay shook his head slightly.

  “And the lighthouse keeper Colin Shanks? The widow Hettie Lessels?”

  Lindsay’s brow creased. “Mrs. Lessels?” he asked, curious. “Has she also been taken?”

  “I met the woman this morning. She has not been taken.”

  The old man grunted. “Then it is only a matter of time.”

  Groves shifted on his feet. “You still have not answered my question, sir. About the members of the Society.”

  “It will serve no purpose for you to know. Justice will be administered by a greater power.”

  Groves felt his hackles rise, partly at the man’s continuing recalcitrance and partly at the suggestion that the resolution of the case was beyond his capacities. “And what power is this, that it has been elevated above the country’s courts and forces of law enforcement?”

  “I speak of the Lord God, Inspector.”

  “It is God, now? And not the devil?”

  Lindsay spoke solemnly. “The Lord has the devil as his executioner, and unleashes him to deliver justice on notorious sinners.”

  “And what sins are these, sir, that they are beyond the laws of normal men?”

  Nothing.

  “What did you do to her? To Evelyn Todd?”

  Lindsay looked briefly as though he were about to say something, but thought the better of it.

  “I said what did you do to her?” Groves repeated, more loudly. “What on earth did you do that you warrant such punishment?”

  Lindsay’s knotted hands slid around the arms of his chair. “Do you know…do you know what he said to me? So many years ago?”

  “Who?” Groves asked, his brow bent. “Do I know what who said?”

  But Lindsay was looking dreamily at the amber blinds. “I hear his words most distinctly, and I have lived with them every day.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  The old man recited the words with fatalistic relish: “‘I shall hibernate, draw nourishment, and when I return, though it be an eternity, it will be with great vengeance and no mercy.’”

  “Who said this?”

  But Lindsay, ignoring him, had not finished. “‘In punishing me unjustly you have just awakened me. But you can never eliminate me…for in shattering the mirror you only create a thousand new reflections.’”

  The man was grinning at the recitation of these words, which he pronounced like a prayer, and I judged him the maddest of the mad lot I had met in this terrible investigation, he had drawn himself through years of ill health with the mad aim of being properly punished, by a severe hand, before his demise.

  Groves hissed his impatience. “Who said this to you?”

  Lindsay chuckled feebly, enjoying his own evasiveness. “She said it. The lamb.”

  “You said it was a man.”

  “They were his words. But I did not say he pronounced them.”

  “Then who? Who said them? The devil?”

  Lindsay drew air through his papery nostrils. “You might ask her, Inspector. And pray she is not dreaming.”

  “Ask Evelyn?”

  No answer.

  “You speak of Evelyn Todd, is that it?”

  “Have you seen her?” Lindsay asked suddenly. “Have you met her? What does she look like? Is she beautiful?”

  But now it was Groves who did not answer.

  Lindsay nodded delightedly. “The others thought she had died, you know. On the seas. They thought she had perished. But I knew better. She was too strong to die. I was the one who chose her, you see, and I was the one who first lashed her. There was a creature she drew in chalk….”He lapsed into silence, remembering.

  “This is madness,” Groves decided, though in truth he desired most of all to be away, for with each passing moment he felt more in the presence of some contagion, some being truly beyond human jurisdiction. Each of Lindsay’s hints seemed calculated to urge him closer to a revelation that he could barely contemplate, but this was something he wanted to extract from Evelyn herself, and indeed it was a scene he had written countless times in his head. “I shall come back,” he warned, “and I shall bring the entire constabulary with me, if that is what it takes to make you talk.”

  Lindsay shook his head. “I will not be leaving the city, Inspector. Though I will certainly advise the others to take that course.”

  “What others? The Mirror Society?”

  But again Lindsay did not respond, and Groves posted a constable outside to check for any movement. If the Society was to be drawn together one last time he wanted to know immediately: it could prove most illuminating. He returned promptly to Central Office, fetched a package of letters freshly delivered from Ireland, summoned Pringle, and now stood in the gloomy passage outside Evelyn’s corrugated door, recalling with distaste the she-devil of his unmentionable dream, battling whole armies of nerves, and raising a tight first to deliver the Fearsome Knock of Inspector Groves.

  RAT-TATTA-TATTA-TAT.

  Canavan was as pleased as he was awed. For all its surrealism, the Beast was too real, too temporal, to be denied, and this must surely exonerate Evelyn, even in the eyes of the skeptical McKnight. Because she surely could not have been dreaming, or even sleeping, so soon after leaving the Crypt of the Poets in such an agitated state. So the Beast did not live entirely in her imagination, as the Professor believed. The Beast was not harbored exclusively in her dreams. It was alive in Edinburgh, and an entity in its own right.

  He claimed this not as a victory for himself or for theology, or even as a certainty. Science might still have an answer. Philosophy, too, though it would require McKnight to seriously reorganize his theories. It was no victory at all, in fact, because their adversary was incarnate, with a dwelling place all its own, and to defeat it would require a truly biblical confrontation.

  When he arrived at McKnight’s cottage it was with a lingering quiver in his skin, but no one who had so recently looked into the eyes of the Beast could expect less. He was confident he would find the Professor similarly shaken—the pallor of his face after stumbling out of the Cowgate was that of a man who had stared into the Abyss—and indeed Canavan prepared himself to be as magnanimous as possible in victory. It was the least he could do for a friend who might well be shattered.

  He was surprised and a little alarmed, then, to find McKnight exuding an atmosphere of grim satisfaction. Ushering Canavan to the kitchen, he chuckled repeatedly and fatalistically under his breath, for all the world as though he had made a discovery that was everything he had always suspected and everything he had always feared.

  “Time to eat,” he said first, and directed his guest to a table where he l
aid out a most generous meal but absentmindedly jumbled the order of courses, so that mutton was followed by soup, fruit by fresh bread, and the singing brass kettle ignored entirely. He paced around the room distractedly and with great energy, his own plate steaming but untouched.

  “I’d be obliged if you’d join me,” Canavan said at one point.

  “Hmm? Very well,” McKnight responded, though he seemed to have misunderstood, for he disappeared for a moment and returned from his library with two black books, which he placed on the table in front of his still-dining friend.

  “Recognize this volume?” he asked.

  Canavan swallowed. “Your Douai Bible. The one I had at Drumgate.”

  “Are you quite certain?”

  Canavan dried his fingers and reached across to flip the book over and examine the spine. There was clear scuffing where the book had hit the watchtower floor.

  “Entirely,” he said.

  McKnight smiled. “Then what about this one?” He placed beside the first an identical black book, scarred and scuffed in precisely the same places.

  Canavan shrugged. “Another Bible.”

  “This is the Bible I lifted from Evelyn’s shelf,” the Professor explained. “The same as my volume in every aspect.”

  Canavan conceded the point but saw little relevance. “I’m sure it’s a popular edition,” he noted, “and prone to being damaged in the same way.”

  McKnight turned each book to the Gospel According to St. John, Chapter Eight.

  “Take a look,” he urged, and—a little uneasily now—Canavan did so, reaching over his unfinished meal and fingering the ragged ends of the torn-out pages as McKnight watched expectantly.

  “Identical,” he agreed.

  “Indistinguishable,” McKnight contended.

  Canavan shrugged again. “At a cursory examination.”

  But the Professor would not have it. “The sliver of page left in the binding of each book is precisely the same. Down to the minutest visible fiber.”

  “You’ve examined it with a microscope, I suppose.”

  “I have.” McKnight smiled.