The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  Caspar said, “I was trying to think of a word to describe them and, do you know? It just came to me.”

  He leaned forward slightly. The cold metal ring of the shotgun barrel pressed firmly into Sayers’ forehead, pushing his head back a little.

  “Scatterbrains!” Caspar said brightly, and pulled the trigger.

  Even allowing for the shifting of his mount, it was the first movement of Caspar’s trigger finger that gave the signal of his intention. Sayers reacted in the same instant. He knocked the barrel upward and the firearm discharged above his head. He felt its heat and, for a few moments, was completely deafened.

  In silence, he saw the white horse rear up. In silence, he saw it spin around as Caspar fought it for control, the firearm now an awkward liability in his hand. Sayers felt the ground shake as the horse slammed its hooves down in an attempt to dislodge its rider and then reared again, this time casting him free. When Caspar was parted from the saddle he did not simply fall, but hurtled toward the ground as if flung. He bounced and rolled and lay still. All without a sound.

  Sayers moved to the fallen shotgun and picked it up. The white horse had backed off to a distance and then stopped, shaking its head and stepping about and looking bewildered. Caspar, equally stunned and bewildered, was still on the ground but was attempting to move. Sayers put his free hand to one of his ears, expecting to find blood, but instead found that his hearing was beginning to return.

  Caspar, it seemed, had fared rather worse.

  Sayers circled all the way around him at a wary distance. Caspar had rolled over and was trying to crawl. But there was something serious and horrible about the way that he had bent in the middle.

  “Caspar!” Sayers said, crouching down before him. Despite his injuries, Caspar was succeeding in starting to drag himself along. He was hooking his fingers into the dirt, like claws.

  “Caspar,” he said, “your back is broken. Don’t move, you’re making it worse.”

  But Caspar did not seem to hear. In fact, he no longer seemed to be aware of Sayers’ presence at all. It was as if the only thing that mattered to him was somehow to crawl his way back toward the pit village. He moved in sharp, sudden jerks, his nails breaking on the stones, his twisted body dragging behind like a sackful of dead things.

  Sayers had to move back as Caspar managed another pull forward.

  “Caspar,” he said again helplessly. He was torn between relief at his enemy’s fall, and dismay at the state of him.

  Caspar was voicing something as he struggled. The words were unclear to Sayers’ abused ears, but the tone was one of entreaty. He was repeating the same things over and over.

  “Cartaphilus!” he seemed to be pleading. “Ahasuerus!” He cried like one who had been abandoned or betrayed.

  “What?” Sayers said. “What are you saying, man?”

  “Salathiel!”

  Another grab at the dirt, another mighty effort to drag himself on. This attempt seemed to run out of steam before it was completed. Caspar did not exactly die. Like machinery running down, he simply stopped. He lay there with his expression unchanged and his eyes wide open.

  Sayers laid the shotgun down. Carefully, as if it might discharge again without his intending it. They’d be certain to have heard that first blast, down in the pit village, and they were hardly likely to ignore it.

  If he stayed here, it would all be over in a few minutes. No doubt with yet another capital offense to be added to his list of crimes. But what could he do? He’d been running for two days and a night, and that was after fighting his way out of captivity. He could run no more. He could try, but they’d be on him within a mile.

  Unless there was some other answer. Something obvious that he was failing to consider.

  He raised his gaze from the dead James Caspar to Caspar’s white horse, all saddled and ready to run, fretting unhappily just a few dozen yards up the lane.

  “Hey, old sport,” he said. “Come here, why don’t you.” He held out a hand in reassurance as he started walking toward it.

  TWENTY

  Faith,” Bram Stoker once said, “is to be found more often in a theater than in a church.” And in this last decade of the nineteenth century, London offered no greater Temple of the Arts than the Royal Lyceum, just off the Strand. Leased by actor-manager Henry Irving some ten years ago, it had become, if not a national theater, then the closest thing to it that the nation had yet seen.

  It was late in December, the last Saturday night of the year and the first night of Irving’s Macbeth. This was his second crack at the part and was the production for which, some four months before, he had taken his company north of the border to research background and atmosphere.

  Stoker stood at the heart of the theater’s empty auditorium and called out to each of the ushers by name, receiving echoing responses from their posts at the different levels of the house. The idea was that his voice would be recognizable to all of them, should he need to give out instructions in the event of an emergency. But in that great, dark, waiting space, there was a sense of something more. As with any ritual, it seemed to evoke a mystery beyond its meaning.

  When his inspection of the house was done, he moved out to the upper lobby. Stoker was in evening dress, and it was his custom, on every Lyceum first night, to stand at the top of the wide carpeted stairway and greet the evening’s more prestigious patrons as they ascended.

  Promptly at seven-thirty, the Wellington Street doors were opened and in they came—gowned, bejeweled, buzzing with first-night excitement. Outside, three braziers above the theater’s Corinthian portico threw a dancing firelight across the waiting crowds and the arriving carriages. The noisy gallery and the even noisier pit started to fill. In the Dress Circle and the boxes, London’s great, good, and merely fortunately born took their seats under the auditorium’s high gilded ceiling.

  “Mister Archer,” said Stoker.

  “Mister Stoker,” said the critic from the World. “I have heard it said that your employer is finally beginning to heed the advice that we all keep giving him.”

  “You should know that Mister Irving listens to every opinion that is sincerely offered,” Stoker responded diplomatically. Archer had been allowed into the theater for a couple of hours during a rehearsal one night. There he’d been heard to say of Irving, What can I say of his walk? It isn’t walking!

  It was true that Stoker’s master was an unlikely looking theatrical hero. With his stick-thin legs and his long, thin-lipped face, along with a style of diction that could be mannered to the point of peculiarity, Irving could more resemble an eccentric country parson than a Benedick or a Hamlet.

  Yet he brought to the stage a vital energy like no other since Kean, a presence that raised the pulse and drew the eye to him wherever he stood. He chose his roles with care, and put on plays with a canny blend of intelligence and spectacle that stirred the blood while it satisfied the mind. Irving’s style was not to everyone’s taste, but he drew grudging respect from even his critics…including, on occasions, George Bernard Shaw, who griped at Irving’s artifice but turned up for everything, besotted as he was by the charm of leading lady Ellen Terry.

  Like Shaw, Stoker was a Dublin-born Protestant whose passion for the theater had brought him across the water. A civil servant and amateur critic with a few pieces of newspaper fiction to his name, he’d met and been befriended by Irving during the actor’s Irish tours. When offered a position in the new Lyceum venture, he had given up everything and followed with his new wife to London. He’d been Irving’s devoted lieutenant ever since.

  At seven-forty, the overture began. For this night only, Sullivan was conducting his own incidental music. Some ten minutes later, the house was stilled and the curtain rose. Stoker went down to the box office to check on receipts and then took a look around backstage, where Irving’s usual army of supernumeraries was assembling for the first big crowd scene. After that, he moved silently into the back of the Dress Circle and, himself unobs
erved, observed the audience for a while.

  Down on the stage, in a setting that re-created a typical main hall in one of the drafty stone castles that they’d visited, Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth was reading her husband’s letter by the light of a practical fire. Over in her regular first-night box sat Irving’s estranged wife, the usual waves of silent hostility flowing from her toward the stage. Stoker scanned the audience for Florence, his own wife; there she was, seated with Sullivan’s working partner, her escort for the evening.

  It was at this point that the head usher appeared at Stoker’s side and signaled for his attention.

  They withdrew to the corridor behind the circle, where the usher said in a low voice, “Word of an intruder, sir. Spotted backstage.”

  Stoker nodded and sent the man back to his duties, before returning to the pass door into the theater’s backstage area. The Lyceum was a tight ship, but because of the large numbers of people working behind the scenes it was sometimes possible for a trespasser to get in. Newspaper reporters of a particular type were a particular problem. But if they came looking for evidence of any impropriety between the actor-manager and his leading lady, they were looking in the wrong place.

  A quick whispered consultation with a couple of the flymen sent him in the direction of the wardrobe and property store, down in the basement. Most of the Lyceum’s drop cloths and scenery were now stored in railway arches across the river, but there was much that remained here in the way of cloaks, chairs, goblets, and paste jewelry. There were weapons, there was armor, there was a ship’s wheel from Vanderdecken. And rack upon rack of costume, for everyone from Digby Grant to Robespierre.

  Stoker descended in silence, feeling his way down the handrail of the open iron staircase. He was wary, but unafraid. He had right on his side, and the physical authority to ensure that any intruder would be left in no doubt of it. To make doubly sure, he was carrying a heavy wooden belaying pin from the theater’s rigging, courtesy of the flymen.

  Up above, muffled by the thickness of the theater’s floor, the thirty-piece pit orchestra could be heard playing Sullivan’s second-act prelude. Down below him, somewhere deep in the basement area, he could see a glimmer through the maze of gas pipes that told him someone had set up a lamp.

  He couldn’t see the lamp itself. Mostly he could see the shadows that it cast up the walls. He reached the bottom of the staircase and started toward the source of the light, moving carefully in the darkness. There must be no commotion that might be heard from above; any moment now, the prelude would end and, since this was not Hamlet, ghosts in the cellarage were not called for.

  Something caught at his foot. He started back a little, and then crouched down and felt around ahead of him. Something, perhaps one of the costumes from the rack beside him, lay in a heap on the floor. Picking it up with care between finger and thumb, he raised it into the dim light.

  It appeared to be an extremely grimy set of combination underwear. Wincing, he let it fall and then wiped his hand on his side. All his senses were telling him that the grime was not stage dirt.

  Some tramp, then. Out to steal. No one stole from the Chief. Stoker kicked the foul clothing aside and strode around the rack to the other side, where the lamp was burning.

  The lamp had been set up beside an ornate full-length mirror. The mirror was dulled with wax for use onstage, but a patch in the middle of the glass had been scrubbed clean to make it reflect again.

  Before it stood a man. He was knotting a tie. As he stood there, he shifted his weight and flexed his shoulders a little, as if enjoying the very fit of the suit of clothes he wore. He was clean-shaven, and his wet hair was freshly combed.

  In as bold a voice as he dared with the stalls directly above them, Stoker said, “Those are stage properties that you are wearing, sir. This is neither an old-clothes shop nor a public bathhouse.”

  The man jumped in surprise, and then turned to face him.

  “I’m sorry, Bram,” he said. “I was desperate to regain a little dignity. This is not a way I would normally choose to conduct myself.”

  Stoker peered more closely in the bad light.

  “Tom Sayers?” he said.

  The man acknowledged himself to be the same. He said, “Half an hour ago, you wouldn’t have known me at all.”

  Stoker hardly knew him now. He was shocked at how gaunt and hungry-looking the former prizefighter had become since last they’d met. He said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m in hiding, Bram. You must have heard the accusations.”

  “I doubt there’s a single theatrical who hasn’t. You’re the talk of every green room in England.”

  As he was saying this, Stoker glanced back toward the stairway. Sayers noted the action, and quickly raised his hands as if to show that he meant no harm.

  “Don’t bring others, Bram, please. You’re one of the most loyal men I ever met. I’m begging you to extend a little of that loyalty to me, at least until you’ve heard my side of it. I know we’re not friends. But are we not fellows in our trade, you and I?”

  Stoker looked him over. The suit was a few years out of style, but Sayers had been lucky to find it. Most of the Lyceum’s stock was for the classical repertoire, or for historical subjects.

  Stoker said, “How have you been living?”

  “Nights in ditches, a few fights for money in fairgrounds. Since I reached the city, I’ve been sleeping on a rope in the Minories. If any man in London can help me to unravel this, it’s you. And if you won’t help me…then let them hang an innocent man, for what can he care if his last hope has left him?”

  Stoker considered the fugitive for a moment, and then he glanced upward. The second act was under way; no clear words could be heard, but Stoker could hear the swoops and cadences of Irving’s unique delivery of the dagger speech. Irving did not play Macbeth as a man wracked with doubt, or as a good man turned bad by an ill-timed prophecy. He played him as an arrow of evil, a man who had always been set to hack his way to the crown. For him, the witches merely opened the door that he’d been seeking.

  Stoker said, “Stay down here. There’s to be a private supper on the stage after the audience leaves. I expect you’ll be hungry—I’ll bring you some food when I can. Don’t make a sound until I come to you.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  At around two-thirty on a cold winter’s morning, Tom Sayers woke for no reason. It was probably too cold to rise but he threw back the covers and rose anyway, hoping to shake off his melancholy frame of mind and then, after a look at the moon and a few minutes of night and silence, to return to the warmth of his bed and find sleep again.

  He was in a temperance hotel, the General Gordon, which stood on a corner of one of the main streets in Spitalfields. When he looked out of his second-floor window it was through the gilded wooden “A” of the hotel’s name, the letters of which ran the full width of the building’s frontage. He was registered here as John Thurloe, a cabinetmaker seeking employment. He’d inquired about a room to let, and been offered “a part of a room”—which, he soon discovered, meant that he had it to himself but had to vacate it by seven in the morning, whereupon the bed would be taken by a young woman who worked all night in a bakery. At seven in the evening, she would leave for her work and the room would be his to return to.

  There was no moon. Just a dense, dark cloud pressing low over the roofs of the houses. Any lower, and it would descend into the streets and become a fog. These were mean houses, row after row of them: the City of Dreadful Monotony, London’s East End.

  Stoker had been cautious toward Sayers that night in the theater, but had not betrayed him. Three hours of suspense had ended in relief. Sayers would not have been surprised to see the acting manager return with the police instead of a basket containing half a loaf, a decent slice of ham, and six hot potatoes wrapped up in a napkin.

  In between gorging on the food and washing it down with beer, Sayers had told his story. He later learned that Bram Stoker did not
simply take him at his word, but over the next few days found ways to raise his name in conversation with a number of people they might have in common. Music hall managers, players, booking agents…none had any special knowledge that enabled them to declare Sayers innocent, but all, without exception, had expressed astonishment at his apparent guilt.

  It was no public trial, but coupled with what Stoker had seen of James Caspar on the railway platform in the Midlands that night, it had supported the fugitive’s story and tipped the balance in his character’s favor. Staggering, insensible, disgrace-bringing, blood-puking Caspar…Sayers could see that Stoker’s was a world of little shading, where those who stayed true were all pure, and those who’d been tainted were damned.

  Thank the Lord.

  As Sayers had expected, the death of Caspar had been added onto his own list of crimes. There were those who would add him to the suspects’ list for the recent string of slaughtered East End whores as well, despite the fact that he’d been begging food and shivering in the hedgerows of Oxfordshire at the time of their murders.

  He could have found somewhere safer than this to hide, but he’d tried in vain to find anywhere in London that was cheaper. Stoker had let him take clothing from the Lyceum’s stock and had given him money to help prevent him from starving, but he could hardly expect the Irishman to keep him like a dependent. He’d gone along to his Brixton house quite early one Sunday morning, but had found new tenants in residence—his lease had been paid to the middle of the year, but it seemed that in the light of his supposed crimes the landlord felt no duty to honor it.

  This was but one small injustice heaped on with all the others, and yet it was the one that he seemed to feel most bitterly.

  Down in the street outside the temperance hotel, a police patrol was going by. Patrols in the East End had been stepped up since the White-chapel murders, although there was a rumor—one among many—that the killer was known to the police and had drowned himself. Sayers turned from the window and climbed back into bed. As usual, he tried not to think about the sheets. On the two-relay system, they went unchanged. And this was a comparatively respectable house; at the lowest end of the scale there were lodgings on a three-relay system where not only did the occupants change every eight hours, but the spaces underneath the beds were let in exactly the same manner.