“Well, if I were the Almighty,” offered Coggie gaily, “I should most certainly favor your offering.”
“You read my shilling shocker, then.”
“Of course I did. As I do everything you write. As I always will.”
What to say? Thank you? What a saintly girl you are? Why didn’t I listen to your brother all those years ago?
“And what did you think of it?” he settled on saying.
Coggie laughed. “It is certainly a gripping tale. I believe I may have lost some sleep over it. Waiting out the midnight hours. Thinking that at any moment a swarthy Mr. Hyde might steal into my bedchamber.” She shivered histrionically.
“I trust none did,” responded Stevenson, surprised by a stab of arousal that she could not have meant to provoke.
“No, thank goodness. Our locks are excellent, mother’s and mine.”
The moment’s titillation was swept away on a wave of pity. Why hadn’t this flawless woman found a deserving and loyal husband and gone on to mother a score of red-blooded Scots babies?
“I must say, Louis,” Coggie continued, eyeing him closely. “Your Jekyll sometimes reminded me of my own poor brother.”
Stevenson winced inwardly. “Oh, Coggie,” he exclaimed. “I am so sorry!”
“Why?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he sputtered. What had he said to Fanny? This needn’t be Ferrier’s actual life? In fact it shouldn’t be? “I suppose because I don’t think of Jekyll as being a very good man.”
“No,” said Coggie, thoughtfully. “But he too wrestles with that you might call a ‘lunatic brother.’”
“A lunatic brother,” echoed Stevenson, groping for an association.
“In the letter you had Charlie Baxter forward to me—that kind letter after Walter died? That is what you called the side of him that he found in the bottle. ‘His lunatic brother.’” Coggie smiled at him, with a look suddenly well past pity—serenely wise and enduring.
“I recall,” said Stevenson.
“Perhaps,” she suggested with a grin, “it was all of the wine you poured into the book.”
“I don’t know that I am capable of writing about anything without writing about wine.” Stevenson blushed again. “At least without thinking about it.”
“I suppose one writes about what one knows and loves the best.”
“That, or what one knows and fears the most. Not that I wish to take our conversation down too dark a path.”
“Of course.” She reached for the last piece of her petit four. “You described Jekyll’s transforming draught as a ‘blood-red liquor,’ did you not?”
“Compounded with a chemical concoction that Fanny very much wanted me to do away with. But yes. You have a remarkable memory.”
She gazed at him for a moment without speaking. “Given what happened to Walter, it would have been difficult not to notice a phrase such as that.”
“Again, I am so very sorry, Coggie.”
“Not at all. It makes your allegory all the more potent. Universal. We hear constantly these days about the bane of alcohol. Even if we have never seen it devour someone dear to us.”
“Perhaps,” admitted Stevenson. “But please remember, dear Coggie; I know Walter to have had a truly good heart. A good soul. Jekyll was at best a hypocrite. At worst…well, you know.”
Coggie removed her hand from the teacup and laid it over the back of her other on the white cloth. “Walter was no saint,” she said softly.
“I know he wasn’t. But neither was he a murderer.”
Coggie looked down as though she might be gathering herself for a leap of some sort. “There were things that I don’t care to talk about,” she continued in a hushed voice. “Not even with you.” Her eyes were strained, but they were filled with intimacy and affection. “No matter now,” she said bravely. “And I do know that, in the end, while my brother persisted in drinking until the day he died, he truly repented for where his compulsions had taken him. And for the things he had done in pursuing his pleasures. So, if there is a God and if He forgives those who truly repent, I do believe we shall see Walter again. Provided we prove ourselves worthy.”
Stevenson felt himself as wanting for words as he had been the last time he had seen Coggie’s brother. When a hoarse “Amen” tumbled from his lips, he laughed at the power of the hopefulness that tumbled out with it.
Coggie gazed at him with a fixity he was not sure he had ever seen from her. “Think of this, Louis. How happy Walter—your ‘good, true Ferrier’—how happy he would be if he knew he had perhaps inspired so well-regarded a tale as the one you have written. And one, moreover, that warns so clearly against the kinds of indulgence that brought him low. Your tale of a weak man makes us all stronger.”
She seemed to Stevenson to be completely convinced of what she was saying—and was so very appealing to him in this as well. In the glow of her optimism, and for the rest of a delightful afternoon together, he was able to shut Symonds’s letter completely out of his mind.
Part Three
M R. H.
15
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde.
—DR. HENRY JEKYLL
EDINBURGH, AUGUST 1888
Stevenson, Fanny, and Sam headed south after ten days, having confirmed virtually all of the plans for settling Thomas Stevenson’s estate. Stevenson’s mother would remain in Auld Reekie until the most pressing items had been attended to, and then decamp herself for Bournemouth, where the family could decide exactly what lay in store for them.
Stevenson had received a flattering letter from the editor of New York’s Scribner’s Magazine, offering him a contract for twelve articles to be written over the course of a year at an astounding £60 per article. The magazine was especially interested in travel pieces, which made a return to the United States all the more sensible and appealing. This time, however, Stevenson would be traveling not as an impecunious and unknown foreigner, desperate to claim Fanny from her adulterous husband, but instead as the luminary author of the wildly popular Jekyll and Hyde—meaning that all of the household’s transportation and accommodation would now be first-class. Fanny, especially, savored the prospect of a triumphal progress across her native continent in the kind of flush circumstances she could only have dreamed of in the past. Sam, too, was keen enough to “go home,” and Margaret Stevenson continued to surprise her son with the gameness she brought to her new life as a widow. Stevenson found himself wondering, poignantly, if his mother had not suffered in some of the same ways he had, throughout her years under his father’s stern and restrictive eye.
It was not without twinges of profound melancholy that Stevenson bid adieu to the home he had moved to at the age of seven. While Fanny waited with Sam in the library, their luggage already stashed in the family barouche, he undertook a pilgrimage through every room of the house. The most richly charged station of his wistful progress was, not surprisingly, his old nursery on the topmost floor. A few toys remained on the dusty shelves that lined the west wall, some of them the clear originals of this or that prop in the Child’s Garden poems: a toy drum with a broken head, a pirate’s hat and cutlass, a battery of tiny brass cannons. The lingering genius of the place, however, was the spirit of the resolute little Scotswoman who had spent countless long nights with him there, nursing him through fever or fright—Alison Cunningham, to whom he had dedicated his nostalgic collection of verse. My second mother, my first wife, the angel of my infant life—from the sick child, now well and old, take, nurse, the little book you hold!
He indulged himself in a lengthy minute at the window, looking across at the long row of houses up against the skyline of Queen Street
. It was to this prospect that Cummy had carried him on those frequent nights when sleep refused to come. Pulling back the curtains, she had pointed to whatever windows still shone there high above the dark belt of gardens, wondering if there weren’t other sick little boys up there as well, waiting with their nurses for the dawn. Cummy had meant to be there this very day to say farewell. Sadly, a relative had taken ill, such that she could only send a written message to “her boy”—a note that, very much to her customary form, balanced in equal measure deep affection and the sternest admonition about the future.
He entered the drawing room last of all, where the indelible shade of his father hovered in the darkened chamber like the effigy of a vanished king. Of all of the times they had shared the space, it was the very last that had torn from Stevenson words he might have given his soul not to have had cause to write.
Once more I saw him. In the lofty room,
Where oft with lights and company his tongue
Was trump to honest laughter, sate attired
A something in his likeness. “Look!” said one,
Unkindly kind, ‘look up, it is your boy!”
And the dread changeling gazed on me in vain.
“Richard seems like a nice boy.”
Fanny settled her handbag by her side in their first-class compartment as the Bournemouth train bucked once or twice and eased out of Waterloo Station on the last leg of their return from Edinburgh. They had left Sam in London for a two week stay with a school friend prior to the start of the term. “Don’t you think?”
“He does,” replied Stevenson, looking up from the Times. “They seemed happy to see each other.”
Fanny nodded. “I’m worried, though, about his skin.”
“Richard’s?”
“Sam’s, you ninny.”
“What precisely are you worried about? That he’s growing so fast his skull and feet will pop out his two ends?”
“Honestly, Louis. Your perpetual attempts at humor sometimes try my patience.”
“In that event, I shall do my best to be endlessly dour. How is this?” He pulled his chin down into his chest, arching his lips into a glum scowl. Fanny tittered in spite of herself.
Sam had grown what seemed like three or four inches over the spring and summer, if one judged by the unfashionable rise of his trouser cuffs above his boots. As a result, he fully expected to be moved into the second row of his rugby fifteen. He had also developed an impressive case of acne, something more for Fanny to hold against his birth father, who had suffered the same condition as a youth.
“I myself have always had the skin of a Vestal Virgin,” Stevenson declared. “You should have waited to become a mother until you met me.”
“Sometimes I think I did become a mother when I met you. Yours!” Minutes passed as the train gained pace and London’s sooty, brick sprawl yielded to the fields and lanes of Surrey. Fanny reached into her bag for the novel she had been reading: Haggard’s She. Stevenson had pressed it upon her as both a stirring tale and one, he averred, that boasted a central character with whom she might feel some commonality. Fanny needed to read no more than the title to appreciate his sarcasm. She was nonetheless finding it to be good fun.
“My God! How awful!” exclaimed Stevenson a minute or two later.
“Hmmm. What, dear?”
“Another murder of the foulest kind,” he read from his paper, “in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel. At a quarter to 4 o’clock Police-constable Neill, 97J, when in Buck’s-row, Whitechapel, came upon the body of a woman lying on a part of the footway, and on stooping to raise her up in the belief that she was drunk he discovered that her throat was cut almost from ear to ear. She was dead but still warm.”
Fanny cringed visibly. “Good heavens!”
“He procured assistance and at once sent to the station and for a doctor. Dr. Llewellyn, of Whitechapel-road, was aroused, and, at the solicitation of a constable, dressed and went at once to the scene. He inspected the body at the place where it was found and pronounced the woman dead. He made a hasty examination and then discovered that, besides the gash across the throat, the woman had terrible wounds in the abdomen.”
Fanny stared at him aghast. “What is this world coming to?”
“It’s the third murder of a prostitute in Whitechapel in six months,” said Stevenson, shaking his head. “And the second in four weeks.”
“Do these women know what they’re risking?”
“I have no doubt. But times are hard. And they know they have a market, I suppose. It’s a way to stay alive. Or it should be.” The thought of Old Town Mary leapt distressingly to mind. Would she and her compeer be reading these accounts as well? Might they just be waiting for a lowland killer to come north in search of new quarry—or for some twisted Edinburgh regular to try his hand at what was now a newsworthy trick?
“One may search the ghastliest efforts of fiction,” he read on, “and fail to find anything to surpass these crimes in diabolical audacity. The mind travels back to the pages of De Quincey for an equal display of scientific delight in the details of butchery; or Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ recur in the endeavour to conjure up some parallel for this murderer’s brutish savagery. But, so far as we know, nothing in fact or fiction equals these outrages at once in their horrible nature and in the effect which they have produced upon the popular imagination.”
“‘Nothing in fact or fiction,’” said Fanny, sighing deeply. “Nothing, at least, they have been allowed to see. Thank God, Louis, you destroyed that first draft of Jekyll. A girl trampled in the street, running for the doctor, is a far cry from a bludgeoned whore.”
“Amen,” said Stevenson.
While it was a considerable relief to be back at Skerryvore after the emotional trials of the journey north, Stevenson struggled to re-establish his routine. Cassell’s had finally sent along a contract for a sequel to Kidnapped, but David Balfour stubbornly refused to offer any hints about where he hoped to go with his life, and the brownies seemed to have gone into some kind of hibernation. The best the mourning son could do was potter away at a piece tentatively titled, “Thomas Stevenson, Civil Engineer,” thereby parleying his grief and manifold regrets into a lame simulacrum of creative energy. Within a matter of days, however, a letter arrived from Henley in London that put paid even to that meager effort.
It bore the highly unsettling news that, in light of the ongoing series of macabre murders in Spitalfields and Whitechapel, the Lyceum had suspended for an indefinite interval its performances of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Times and other London papers had received dozens of letters declaring how unconscionable it would be for the theater to stay lit while the precise sorts of inhuman violence that were drawing crowds to its seats were also taking the lives of real Londoners in dark alleys mere miles to the east. Not a few editors suggested, in fact, that the brutality represented in the play had effectively inspired the crimes now associated with “Leather Apron.” For a brief time, the principal actor, Richard Mansfield, was himself even considered a suspect. It took Henry Irving and some other men of influence to provide him with an unassailable alibi.
Apprised of this shocking development, Fanny stood next to the chair in which Stevenson slouched in despondence, a bottle of whisky by his side.
“There’s no reason to think there is any connection,” she said softly but assertively. “No reason at all. The first murder—the Smith woman, was it? That happened last April.”
Stevenson stared at her blankly.
“Jekyll opened in August,” she explained.
“And since then, what? Three more women have been butchered.”
“One of the killings was the day after the opening. The night after, Louis. Are we supposed to think someone was turned into a monster by three hours at the Lyceum? And then went out the very next night and slit open a prostitute’s belly?”
Stevenson looked up at his wife with tortured eyes of the kind she was acc
ustomed to seeing only when he was in the deepest throes of a fever. “It could happen that way,” he said. He reached shakily for the whisky and poured himself another measure, spilling a jot on his trousers.
“Louis,” said Fanny, pulling a chair up in front of him. She reached out for his left hand and, cradling it in hers, stroked the back of it gently. “If it happened that way…and there’s no reason at all to think it did. But if it did—even if it did—it would be Mansfield who might feel guilty. It would be his doing, not yours!”
Stevenson peered at her fixedly, pausing before he shook his head. “The story’s mine, Fanny. Hyde is mine. I brought him to life.”
“You wrote a book, Louis. What people are talking about is the possible effect of a play. The possible effect. And it’s not even your play.”
“I loosed him on the world. And look at what he’s done.”
“Louis!”
“What a vile, stupid creation he was. Is!”
“Stop it!” cried Fanny, throwing his hand down into his lap. “You’re drunk, and you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s total nonsense, for God’s sake! There’s nothing linking you to anything.”
“No? No?”
“None at all!”
What seemed like a cough turned into a deep, gasping chuckle. “There’s Symonds, Fanny! No? Symonds’s letter. He said it could push a man over the edge, what I wrote. What I wrote!”
“Symonds is a madman, Louis. He’s unstable. He’s a buggerer, for God’s sake.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. It’s written all over him.”
He tipped his glass up to his lips. Finding it all but empty, he reached again for the bottle. “Even if he is. And remember the damn… all those reviews.”
“I don’t remember any stupid reviews. And you’re drinking too much. Please stop.” Fanny reached for his wrist, but he shook her off and poured himself another measure.
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