The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  And, besides, she’d found that actors loved the Church; they seemed to look upon it as a related branch of their art.

  The house was silent as she made her way down to the stage door. She’d dressed in haste and bundled her costume items into the theatrical hamper, ready to be transported. Someone had been around and turned out all the gas, so she carried the oil lamp from her dressing room to light her way. She was beginning to fear that she might have been locked in, but the stage doorkeeper was waiting for her.

  She said, “Has Mister Caspar left?”

  “Ages ago,” the doorkeeper said. “Ah’ve been waitin’ to lock up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Louise said. “I lost all track of time.”

  The doorkeeper said nothing and his expression, mostly hidden behind an enormous mustache that turned a youngish man’s face into an ancient’s, gave very little away. But she was convinced that he must have guessed her secret, and she tried not to blush while avoiding his eyes. She handed over the oil lamp and stepped out into the alleyway beside the theater, and the doorkeeper stopped to snuff out the various remaining lights before following her with his enormous bunch of keys.

  It had been raining. The stone flags of the alleyway were slick and shiny, reflecting the lit windows of the public house next door. There was a big crowd in there, making a lot of noise—most of them had probably moved over from the theater when the play had ended. Someone had told her that the landlord had closed off the saloon bar and was charging a penny for people to enter and look at the murder scene.

  She could see a policeman in a rain cape standing at the end of the passageway, and behind him a hansom cab waiting to take her back to her lodgings.

  She thanked the policeman for his patience, and made some excuse about having to look for a lost bracelet. He said it was of no matter. He sent off a couple of passersby who’d lingered to stare, and lent her his arm to climb up into the cab.

  The construction of the hansom was such that the driver’s position was above and behind her. She called up to him, “Forgive me, driver, but I can’t recall the exact address. It’s Mrs. Mack’s. Do you know it?”

  He did not speak, but for a reply cracked his whip across the horse and set the carriage into unexpected motion. She was taken by surprise and fell back roughly in her seat; although the seat was padded and buttoned, the breath was driven from her for a moment.

  She supposed she must have annoyed him by keeping him waiting for so long. But this really would not do. They were barreling along as if the ground under their ironbound wheels were a compact sandy beach, not the cobblestones and tram rails of an industrial town. She was shaken back and forth and had to hang onto one of the side straps; she genuinely feared that the next rut, jolt, or bang into a kerbstone might throw her out of the cab altogether.

  “Driver!” she called over her shoulder. “Driver, what are you doing? Slow down, please!” But if the driver heard her, he did not respond.

  As they tore down the length of Liverpool Street, she began to get the impression that they were only speeding because the driver did not have complete control of the reins. She could hear him calling to the animal, to no great effect.

  They did not slow for the next crossroads and barely managed the turn as they cut across before a late tram; she could hear the angry ringing of its bell as they left it behind, plunging on into darker and less-populous streets.

  Needless to say, this was not the way to Mrs. Mack’s. They were heading into an area of tall, dark factory buildings and railway viaducts. A train thundered over as they thundered beneath, and in the shadows of a brick archway where a single streetlamp burned, the driver finally managed to bring his horse under control and rein it to a halt.

  Louise wanted to jump from the cab before it could set off again, but could not turn her intentions into action; she stayed frozen in her seat and clinging to the strap, while the carriage shifted and rocked as the driver tied off the reins and climbed down from his post.

  He was coming to speak to her. A fine time to show concern for her welfare! She might have been shaken to death already, or flung out on some corner.

  The cab rocked again as the driver put his weight onto the step and drew himself up to look in on her.

  “Louise,” he said, and he reached up and pulled down the coachman’s muffler that had been wrapped to cover the lower half of his face. “It’s me. Don’t be afraid. Everything you’ve heard is untrue.”

  She stared in horror. By the light of that single lamp, he stood revealed. Tom Sayers.

  She’d supposed him long gone in his escape but here he was, an immediate presence with nothing to protect her from him.

  “Stay away from me,” she tried to say, but he climbed up into the cab to join her on the seat. She pushed herself back across it, as far as she could go until the armrest stopped her.

  Not even seeming to notice how she shrank from him, he kept on moving in closer to her and said, “Caspar is debauched, Louise. He is the author of all those crimes of which I am accused, and the engineer of my entrapment. He’s not some errant angel that you can save and subdue. He is a beast among men.”

  “I want to go back,” she said.

  “Have you ever known me to break a promise, Louise? Or known me to go back on my word? Or tell a lie when the truth was inconvenient? Think hard now, it’s important.”

  His manner was so intense that she hardly dared offer an answer.

  “Never,” he said. “Isn’t that right?”

  She nodded, too eagerly.

  “So, listen to me now. I will walk with you into any police station in the land, if you will let me get you away from that man and if you promise me that you will not return to him.”

  “I beg of you, Tom,” she managed then. “Please let me go.”

  “Have you heard nothing of what I’ve been saying?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And you believe me?”

  She tried to answer, and to say whatever he might want to hear. But it was too late. He could already see that she did not.

  “Then what, Louise?” he said. “I’ve shown you the truth. What more do I have to say?”

  “Tom,” she said. “The whole world knows what you did. Can’t you see that I’m afraid of you?”

  This was clearly not a possibility that had occurred to the former prizefighter. For the first time, he seemed to see this situation through her eyes. It was as if he had not been able to imagine that she might ever believe him guilty.

  Until now.

  His face showed his dismay. He drew back, raising his hands to show that he meant her no harm.

  “I understand,” he said. “I had thought that you might…” But he did not pursue this.

  Instead, he said, “Louise, whatever you may think of me now, promise me for the friendship we once had. Will you at least stay away from him?”

  “How can I promise that?” she said. “I love him.”

  He was about to say something else, and stopped. It was as if her words had settled before exploding, changing his world instantly and for all time. Whatever else he had been preparing to say, it would count for nothing now.

  He turned his head aside. He looked at his hands. He rubbed distractedly at his brow for a moment, then he seemed to remember where he was and started to climb out of the cab. Louise slid down a little—she had been so tense and fear-stricken that she’d pressed herself against the side of the carriage and had risen several inches in her seat.

  She felt sick and weak. It was late and she would have to walk alone in darkness to find some kind of safety, but that would be as nothing compared to what she might otherwise have been forced to endure. She tried to summon the strength to climb out of the cab but knew that she dared not move until Sayers had gone; she could hear him out there, pacing up and down and raving aloud to himself in the echo of the viaduct archway, words that she could not make out but which confirmed him to be the madman suggested by his deeds.

&
nbsp; All she could be sure of was a cry of “No,” anguished at first, repeated with defiance, and then repeated again with determination as the carriage rocked on its wheels once more; she realized then that her chance had come and gone before she’d known it and that Sayers was now climbing back up to the driver’s position. She wondered if there might still be time for a rash leap for safety, but even as she began to move the whip cracked over the horse again. Like Pegasus, he took off. It was all Louise could do to grab hold of the strap and hang on.

  For a moment she entertained the faint hope that she had somehow touched Sayers’ heart, and that he was taking her back to light and life and the safety of the lodging house.

  But as they galloped on into deeper and deeper darkness, leaving even the factories and the gasworks behind them, she knew that her hopes were unfounded.

  At the public counter in the police station that served the Knott Mill district of Manchester, an aggrieved cabbie was giving his details to the night sergeant and watching as the officer painstakingly wrote them down in the station’s incident book. The sergeant had a neat hand, but a slow one. But then again, the nights could be very long. There was rarely anything to hurry for.

  “Anything else taken?” the sergeant said.

  “What’s left to take?” the cabbie said. “’E got me cab and me ’orse and me ’at and me scarf.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You saw him, didn’t you?”

  “But how do you say? Ordinary.” With this, the cabbie pointed to his cheekbone. “Wi’ a big bruise just ’ere.”

  For some reason, that seemed to make the sergeant take notice.

  “Did he?” he said.

  “’E did.”

  “Stay there,” the sergeant said, and disappeared into the back.

  The cabbie leaned his elbow on the counter and looked around. Behind him was a wooden bench, and on the wooden bench sat an assorted group of low-living characters who seemed to be assembled there for no obvious purpose. None were clean, and most were missing teeth. Two appeared to have been in a fight, perhaps even with each other. All sat in silence. None seemed bright enough to be bored.

  The sergeant reappeared with a well-read copy of the late edition of the Manchester Evening News, which he slapped onto the counter in front of the cabbie. It was opened and folded to show the account of the arrest for murder and sensational escape of former prizefighter Tom Sayers, lately of Edmund Whitlock’s touring theatrical troupe. The three-columned story was accompanied by an engraving of Sayers in his boxing days, stripped to the waist, fists raised, hair slicked down, standing with all his weight resting on his back foot. The cabbie looked at the picture and then looked at the headline across the columns beside it.

  “Blimey,” he said.

  “Follow me,” said the sergeant, beckoning him around the counter.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sebastian was woken early by an urgent knocking elsewhere in the house, followed by the sound of voices in the street just under his window. When he climbed out of his unfamiliar bed and looked down through the curtains, he had a partial view of two uniformed men on the doorstep in conversation with his host. Letting the curtain fall, he reached for his trousers and quickly stepped into them.

  Within a minute or two, he was on his way downstairs, dressed as well as any man whose tailor is a pawnbroker. He was in the house of Thomas Bertorelli, an officer of the Detective Department upon whom he’d been billeted. The Bertorellis were between lodgers, and happy to have a contribution to their rent. Their second bed was lumpy, its covers heavy, the room oppressive; Mrs. Bertorelli was very young, and a terrible cook. Sebastian had felt very much at home.

  Bertorelli looked back as Sebastian descended the stairs. The house was too small to have a hallway. The stairs came down the middle of the building between the front and back rooms, their width creating a short passageway between the two. The Bertorellis’ front door opened directly onto the street outside.

  Bertorelli waited until Sebastian was close enough for him to speak in a lowered voice.

  He said, “One of the actresses didn’t return to the lodgings last night. It seems that Sayers picked her up in a stolen cab.”

  “What about our man at the theater?”

  “He failed to recognize him.”

  Sebastian managed to restrain himself from emitting an oath.

  “There is more,” Bertorelli said, and indicated the waiting men with a movement of his head. “We’re assembling a raiding party. The two of them have been located.”

  “Where?”

  “Just outside of town, in the waiting room of a branchline station. Sayers thinks he can go on fooling us by crossing boundaries. But we’ll have them before the county bobbies get their boots on.”

  “This actress,” Sebastian said. “Did she go willingly or not? What I mean to say is, is the woman his victim or his accomplice?”

  “According to her employer, Sayers looked upon her with an affection that she did not return. Imagine that, Sebastian. Her situation is not good.”

  It was the work of a few seconds for Sebastian to be ready to run. Bertorelli shrugged into his coat and had his necktie in his hand, to fiddle with later. Before Sebastian left the hallway, Bertorelli’s young wife appeared from the kitchen and pressed something into his hand; he looked down and saw that it was a slice of bread, folded over generous dollops of butter and jam.

  “Thank you,” he said in genuine appreciation, and then he and her husband set off up the street after the uniformed men.

  It was a wide cobbled street with terraced housing down either side. Fifty years before, this had been an area of fields and meadows, but after the building of the local cotton mill and printing works a good seven acres of it had disappeared under brick and stone. At the end of this street, another one ran across. On every corner stood a shop or a pub.

  A police transport wagon was drawing into view as they hastened across. Its rear doors were thrown open, and those already inside shouted and beckoned as the four came toward it. The wagon slowed, but didn’t come to a complete stop. Sebastian and the others had to board it on the move. Hands grabbed his shoulders and sped him inside. There was no waiting to get everyone seated; the horses were urged to a trot as soon as all were off the street, and Sebastian had to grab a man’s shoulder or fall. Everyone shifted around to make room on the benches, and he dropped into a seat with his breakfast still miraculously intact in his hand.

  Now that all were on board, the officer in charge of the so-called raiding party began to explain what would be required of them. Besides himself and Bertorelli, Sebastian counted ten men in the wagon. One had a shiner of a black eye, and at least two of them bore other signs of battery. All but the officer in charge had turned out with an untidy, unshaven look that would have been frowned upon were they on normal duty. Their officer had a full, dark beard and a center parting.

  He said, “A signalman was cycling from his cottage to his work in the early hours of this morning. He passed an unattended horse and hansom in the lane behind the station. The cab was empty and the horse had been set to grazing among the weeds at the roadside.

  “He found this unusual. A private carriage left abandoned would be odd enough, but a city cab, so far out of town…When he reached his signal box, he telegraphed up the line to report it.

  “When the news reached us, we had him go back to check the number on the carriage license. It was then that the stationmaster told him a man and a woman were in the station’s waiting room, and had been there when he’d arrived. The carriage license matches the cab that Sayers stole.”

  Sebastian said, “Are they in hiding? Or do they intend to travel?”

  “No one can say.” The officer took out his pocket watch and checked the time. “The first train on the Sunday timetable is due to pass through around now. I’ve ordered the signalman to hold it back until we get there.”

  They traveled west, out
toward the mill towns and coal-digging communities that marked the spreading edge of the urban sprawl. Here, the future was arriving all of a piece, the canals and the railways, the factories and houses, rising from the green earth like some invader’s machinery of war. It was as if two very different lands occupied the same space. A person could live in a slum, and walk to his twelve hours of labor through fields of grazing cows.

  During the last part of their journey, Sebastian shared the breakfast with Bertorelli, and took care not to get jam on his new clothes. His own had been ruined in the canal basin. They’d checked the property store for him but found nothing to fit, which was how he came to be wearing some stranger’s Sunday suit from Uncle’s around the corner. Appropriate, really, as it was now Sunday morning and soon the church bells would start to ring.

  The man with the spectacular black eye caught Sebastian’s look, and grinned.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “This time he’ll get as good as he gave.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sebastian said.

  The officer in charge, who was sitting in the opposite corner of the wagon with his arms folded, said drily, “I’ve heard it suggested that some of these lads may have had it in mind to take Sayers out into the yard and try their luck in a pugilistic contest,” he said. “And that they got a little more competition than they bargained for.”

  One of the others, seeing Sebastian’s expression, said, “Our visitor doesn’t approve.”

  “Our visitor should remember that he’s a bloody long way from home,” muttered another.

  The signalman was waiting for them at the end of the lane. He’d left his apprentice in the box to watch the operating levers and to listen out for messages. Now he stood here with his bicycle, guarding the way. As the men climbed down from the police transport, the officer in charge had a brief consultation with the railwayman before turning and calling Bertorelli forward.

  “Take four men and follow the signalman,” he said. “He’ll show you a pathway that crosses the line to the other side of the station. Once you’re in place, spread out so we’ll have Sayers encircled. Whatever happens, we’ve got him now. So let’s not take any chances with the woman’s safety.”