Ruler of the Night
Page 34
Now De Quincey shook hands with Ryan and Becker. “Thank you for your friendship,” he said.
The train’s whistle shrieked.
“We’re departing,” a railway guard said to De Quincey. “You need to climb aboard.”
“Thank you. I’ll leave Emily to bid farewell.”
After the little man disappeared into a compartment, Emily kissed Lord Palmerston on the cheek.
“Can you actually be blushing, Prime Minister?” she asked.
He deflected the question by pointing at the healing injury on her face. “The swelling and the redness have disappeared. I predict there won’t be a scar.”
“You know exactly what to tell a woman,” Emily said.
She proceeded to Commissioner Mayne and kissed him on the cheek. “I shall miss having adventures with you.”
“The past three months have been a rare experience,” he said, blushing as Lord Palmerston had.
She kissed Becker on the cheek and then Ryan. “And I shall certainly miss the two of you. I don’t wish to leave, but Father would die without me.”
“Perhaps one day you’ll return to London,” Becker said. “You know that we would welcome you back.”
“Yes, perhaps one day,” she said, wishing.
The train’s whistle reverberated shrilly beneath the iron-and-glass ceiling.
“I shall write to you,” Emily said.
Wiping away a tear, she stepped into the compartment.
The guard locked the door and waved to the driver. As the engine made labored sounds, the train moved forward.
“Commissioner Mayne, I have two items for you,” Ryan said.
He tugged the Benson chronometer from his pocket. Its gold had been dulled by the water on the night of the fire.
“It no longer keeps time. But perhaps Mr. Benson can set it right. As for the second item…”
Ryan pulled out his badge and gave it to the commissioner.
“Sean, what are you doing?” Becker asked.
“Because of my regard for Emily, I nearly killed a man who’d cut her face,” Ryan said. “And then I nearly allowed a hangman to kill him for me.”
“Sometimes emotions get the better of us,” Becker tried to assure him.
“Us? Were you tempted to kill for Emily?”
“I…no.”
“Tell me what you want from her.”
“Want?” Becker hesitated, self-conscious about having this conversation in the presence of Lord Palmerston and Commissioner Mayne. “To marry her and have children with her.”
“For a time, that’s what I wanted also. But now all I want is to be in her presence and keep her safe.”
Ryan walked toward the departing train.
“I’m fifteen years older than you,” he told Becker, turning his head. “Only a few times have I felt like this. In each case, I let the chance slip away. But I won’t let this chance slip away.”
He walked faster toward the departing carriage.
“Commissioner, I recommend my friend as my replacement!” he shouted over his shoulder. “There might be a few things that I didn’t teach him, but I can’t imagine what they are!”
He broke into a run.
“All the compartments are locked!” a train guard yelled. “You need to wait for the next train!”
“And maybe never find her? No!”
Ryan leaped and grabbed the bars on a compartment window. Dangling, he felt gravel scrape past the bottom of his boots. He strained to pull himself higher and managed to brace his feet on the metal step outside the door.
Perhaps the driver will look back and notice me clinging to the side of the train, he thought. As air pushed against him, his newsboy’s cap blew away, exposing his red hair. Perhaps the driver will stop.
But even if the driver didn’t see him, Ryan was prepared to cling to the bars until the train reached the next station, no matter how far it was.
Or cling to the bars forever.
Through the window, he saw Emily react with surprise to his sudden, impossible appearance. She put a hand on the glass.
She smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For seven years, while writing Ruler of the Night along with its predecessors, Murder as a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead, I felt like a time traveler. Several people made the journey possible. I’m deeply grateful to Robert Morrison, author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, and to Grevel Lindop, author of The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, for their friendship and support.
Victorian scholar Judith Flanders became a friend also. Her The Victorian City, Inside the Victorian Home, and The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime occupy a prominent place on my research shelves. Judith also authored a series of addictive mysteries (A Murder of Magpies, A Bed of Scorpions, and A Cast of Vultures), the amateur detective of which is a London book editor whose sense of humor sounds suspiciously like that of Judith herself.
The first murder on an English train occurred in 1864, not 1855, but its details are essentially as I describe them. I use those details for my own purposes. In life, the historical plot went in a different direction; Kate Colquhoun describes it in Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing.
That murder struck a blow to the heart of what made Britain great, intensifying an anxiety that had festered since the railway era propelled the nation from traveling at a few miles an hour to moving at an unimaginable fifty. Newspapers wrote fearfully about “the annihilation of time and space.” Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century analyzes the trepidation with which passengers sat in small locked compartments, seeing little of the landscape they hurtled through, fearing for their safety while they did their best not to look at the strangers with whom they traveled.
The hydropathy craze of the mid-1800s began when Vincenz Priessnitz, the son of a farmer and a man with no medical training whatsoever, established a water-cure clinic in the town of Gräfenberg, located on an Austrian mountain that’s now part of the Czech Republic. The clinic became so popular that British doctors replicated it in the town of Malvern Hills in the West Midlands of England. My Sedwick Hill is a version of Malvern Hills, but for plot reasons, I moved the location near London. I didn’t invent or exaggerate the wet-sheet method with which Dr. Wainwright attempts to cure De Quincey of his opium addition. The shoulder and upward douche treatments as well as the plunge bath were all widely used. No less a literary personage than Edward Bulwer-Lytton (renowned for his often-parodied sentence that begins “It was a dark and stormy night…”) became a hydropathy addict and wrote a magazine article called “Confessions of a Water-Patient,” its title echoing De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. For more about this mania, read Kate Summerscale’s Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady and E. S. Turner’s Taking the Cure.
Dr. Mandt and the suspicions about him aren’t invented. I first learned about him in Orlando Figes’s definitive history The Crimean War. The story that De Quincey tells about the field-worker and the adder is part of Mandt’s legend.
Emily’s medical knowledge (the benefit of inhaling the steam from pine resin boiled in water, for example) is taken from Enquire Within Upon Everything, a popular Victorian “how things work” volume that was published in 1856. My descriptions of London’s streets, particularly Ludgate Hill, are based on Gustave Doré’s vivid illustrations of the city’s daily life published in London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
Wyld’s Monster Globe, with its mountains and oceans turned inward, attracted millions of London tourists in the 1850s, but after a dispute about its Leicester Square lease, the building was destroyed in 1862. Lord Palmerston’s Cambridge House still exists, however. One of the few set-back-from-the-roadway properties on Piccadilly, the dramatic structure is located across from Green Park, just down the street from Pa
rk Lane. In the twentieth century, it was the site of the Army and Navy Club, popularly known as the In-and-Out Club because of signs on the two gates giving entrance and exit directions to drivers, but the club members departed years ago, and two Russian investors now own it, with hopes of converting it into the most expensive private residence in London. On the Ruler of the Night page of my website, www.davidmorrell.net, you’ll find photo essays about the Monster Globe, Cambridge House, Euston Station, and the Malvern Hills hydropathy clinic. You’ll also find an 1855 sketch of what De Quincey and Emily looked like.
Commissioner Mayne existed, as did J. W. Benson and his fabulous gold chronometers. They are some of the fascinating figures that I encountered in the following books: Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd’s Wilkie Collins, Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas, Anne-Marie Beller’s Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, Alfred Rosling Bennett’s London and Londoners in the 1850s and 1860s (a memoir), Jan Bondeson’s Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones, Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale, David Brown’s Palmerston: A Biography, Jennifer Carnell’s The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Belton Cobb’s The First Detectives and the Early Career of Richard Mayne, Police Commissioner, Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, Heather Creaton’s Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women, Rosalind Crone’s Violent Victorians, Alison Gernsheim’s Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey, Horace Ainsworth Eaton’s Thomas De Quincey, Judith Flanders’s Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, Gillian Gill’s We Two: Victoria and Albert, Rulers, Partners, Rivals, Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian, Kate Hubbard’s Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household, Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic, Petrus de Jon’s De Quincey’s Loved Ones, Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor (a contemporary account published in 1861 and 1862), Sally Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England, Paul Thomas Murphy’s Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy, Catherine Peters’s The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Liza Picard’s Victorian London, Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, Edward Sackville-West’s Thomas De Quincey, Charles Manby Smith’s Curiosities of London (an 1853 account), Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, Judith Summers’s Soho: A History of London’s Most Colorful Neighborhood, Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians, F. M. L. Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900, J. J. Tobias’s Crime and Police in England, 1700–1900, Tamara S. Wagner’s Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901, Yvonne M. Ward’s Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon, A. N. Wilson’s Eminent Victorians, A. N. Wilson’s Victoria, and A. N. Wilson’s The Victorians.
Many of De Quincey’s principal works are included in the following collections: On Murder, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, and Thomas De Quincey: Twenty-First-Century Oxford Authors, all of them edited by Robert Morrison. To immerse yourself totally, go to the complete Works of Thomas De Quincey in twenty-one volumes, for which Grevel Lindop acted as general editor. (Somehow Grevel also found time to write about another fascinating author in his Charles Williams: The Third Inkling.) Walladmor isn’t usually included in De Quincey’s collected works, but he did indeed write that fraudulent Sir Walter Scott novel under the comedic circumstances that I describe.
About the title Ruler of the Night: When American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to Britain in 1848, one of the authors he most wanted to see was Thomas De Quincey. They met in Edinburgh on four occasions, for one of which De Quincey walked ten miles in the rain (getting robbed by two children en route). Emerson gave a lecture about Transcendentalism and was so delighted by De Quincey’s presence that he couldn’t restrain himself in a journal entry: “To my lecture! De Q at my lecture!” The two spoke about De Quincey’s opium addiction and how his nightmares led him to conclude that the human mind is composed of “chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths.” De Quincey later said that Emerson, referring to those opium nightmares, called him the “ruler of the night.”
The mysterious Brunell, the rat-filled house on Greek Street, the haunted ten-year-old girl with whom seventeen-year-old De Quincey shared a horseman’s blanket, and beloved Ann, the fifteen-year-old streetwalker who saved his life—these are the most vivid parts of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. De Quincey never stopped searching for the little girl, just as he never stopped searching for Ann. In fiction, he has now found both of them.
I’m grateful for the friendship and guidance of Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich along with the other good folks at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management, especially Lauren E. Abramo, Mike Hoogland, Sharon Pelletier, and Amy Bishop.
I’m also indebted to the splendid team at Mulholland Books/Little, Brown/Hachette, particularly (in alphabetical order) Pamela Brown, Josh Kendall, Michael Noon, Tracy Roe, Ruth Tross, and Wes Miller.
My wife, Donna, gave her usual excellent advice as my first reader. It takes a special person to be married to a writer. She understands the tyranny of deadlines and loves narrative as much as I do. Her decades of companionship and wisdom have filled my life.
ABOUT DAVID MORRELL
David Morrell was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. As a teenager, he became a fan of the classic television series Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible driving across the country in search of themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
The work of another writer, Hemingway scholar Philip Young, prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his MA and PhD. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a groundbreaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of which became international bestsellers. They include the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for the only television miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.
Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full-time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of more than thirty books, including Murder as a Fine Art, Creepers, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). An Edgar finalist and a recipient of the Anthony, Inkpot, Macavity, and Nero awards, Morrell is also a three-time winner of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious Thriller Master Award.
With eighteen million copies of his books in print, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he’s learned during his more than four decades as an author. Please visit him at www.davidmo
rrell.net, where the page for Ruler of the Night features pictorial essays about some of the Victorian locations in this novel.
@_DavidMorrell
ALSO BY DAVID MORRELL
NOVELS
First Blood
Testament
Last Reveille
The Totem
Blood Oath
The Brotherhood of the Rose
The Fraternity of the Stone
Rambo (First Blood Part II)
The League of Night and Fog
Rambo III
The Fifth Profession
The Covenant of the Flame
Assumed Identity
Desperate Measures
The Totem (Complete and Unaltered)
Extreme Denial
Double Image
Burnt Sienna
Long Lost
The Protector
Creepers
Scavenger
The Spy Who Came for Christmas
The Shimmer
The Naked Edge
Murder as a Fine Art
Inspector of the Dead
SHORT FICTION
The Hundred-Year Christmas
Black Evening
Nightscape
ILLUSTRATED FICTION
Captain America: The Chosen
NONFICTION
John Barth: An Introduction
Fireflies: A Father’s Tale of Love and Loss
The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing
Stars in My Eyes: My Love Affair with Books, Movies, and Music
EDITED BY
American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young
edited by David Morrell and Sandra Spanier
Tesseracts Thirteen: Chilling Tales from the Great White North
edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and David Morrell