The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  He shuddered, and put his face under the covers, and then slowly started to warm by his own breath as its heat filled the space in which he lay. He was to meet Stoker later that day, in the time between the acting manager’s early Lyceum business and the hour or two he spent at home before the evening’s performance. Stoker had something of interest for him to hear, the message had read. Sayers faced a long walk from the East End into the middle of town, but it would use up his morning and save him some money. He had no idea how long his funds would last, or what new turn his life would take. Something had to happen. Things had to change somehow.

  For this life that he had now…what was it? Without home, without love, without friends—without even the name he’d been born with. This was no life at all.

  Early in the afternoon, by the iron railings that ran before the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Sayers waited for Stoker to appear. He arrived on foot a little after 2:15, as big as a bear and full of apology. Sayers was nervous, and tried not to show it.

  “Come,” Stoker said, using their handshake to pass him a square of pasteboard as they started toward the entrance steps. “Take this and show it as your own. It’s a copy of mine. I had our property man make it. I wrote in a name for you myself.”

  It was a reader’s ticket, required to enter the library. They went in through the museum to the open courtyard at the heart of the building wherein the circular reading room stood. Stoker was recognized, and did not need to show his own ticket. And because he was with Stoker, Sayers’ forgery was passed without a close inspection.

  It was a vast, airy dome of a room, almost as wide and high as Rome’s great Pantheon, the readers’ desks radiating outward from a central counter like the spokes of a cartwheel. As Sayers followed Stoker, he saw that every position at the long desks was numbered.

  In some of them sat old men who looked as if they’d been cobwebbed into place. Here was a young, intense student, leafing fervently through a high pile of journals; there a ginger man of great girth, breathing noisily as he read. At some seats the books were piled high, but with no reader present.

  Sayers could only wonder what it was that Stoker had brought him here to see. They’d walked half the circumference of the room before he cut inward and led the way to a spot where one scholar worked alone.

  Keeping his voice suitably low, Stoker said, “May I present my good friend, Mister Hall Caine.”

  The man looked up at Stoker, and then at Sayers. He was a man of some thirty-five years, balding like Shakespeare, bearded like Christ. He nodded, and Sayers offered his hand. The grip that returned his was limp, and slightly damp.

  Stoker said, “Caine knows only as much of your story as is necessary. For the rest of it, he trusts to my honor as I am trusting to yours.” He signaled for Sayers to draw in a chair from an unoccupied carrel, and reached for one himself.

  Hall Caine said, “I have some thoughts I can offer you. I know that Bram will not endorse them all.”

  “Spin your tale, old friend,” Stoker said. “Let us judge it for ourselves.”

  Sayers knew of Caine by name, but had read nothing of his writing. Stoker’s novelist friend had been making notes on unlined paper, in a hand so small that Sayers hardly believed that even its author could read it. He’d been working back and forth through a stack of volumes of various ages. Most had places in them marked by call slips.

  He closed and moved aside the book he’d been consulting and then, running his finger down the lines that he’d written, read aloud, “Cartaphilus. Ahasuerus. Salathiel.” He looked at Sayers. “You say these were the words of a dying man?”

  “As I heard them.”

  Caine reached for another of the volumes and opened it, first at one marked page and then another.

  “Over recent months,” he said, “Bram and I have spent time and energy and some imagination in an effort to fit Irving with a part. Most of our subjects have dealt with the supernatural. The Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the Demon Lover…these are themes around which our imagination has constantly revolved. The words you heard from Caspar are all names used by the Wanderer.”

  Sayers must have been looking blank.

  “A man who trades his soul for prolonged life and forbidden knowledge,” Stoker said.

  By now, Caine had found the passage he was looking for. He said, “In the earliest form of the legend, Cartaphilus insulted Our Lord on the way to Calvary and was doomed to wander until Judgment Day. But in later versions, he is shown as a man who has entered into an unholy contract for extended life and fortune. He bore the name of Ahasuerus in Hamburg in 1547. Salathiel came later. Close to seventy years ago, the Dublin cleric Charles Maturin recorded the story of Melmoth the Wanderer.”

  Sayers, ever a man of practical mind, said, “Perhaps that’s the explanation for your legend, then. There’s no one man living through all eternity. The role has a different player in every age.”

  “That may be closer to the truth than you think, Mister Sayers,” Caine said, and turned the book for him to see. The page carried an engraving of an elderly man, leaning on a staff as he made his way past the crucified Christ in a deep canyon under a stormy sky. Christ looked down, the old man looked up at him; no love appeared to be lost between the two of them.

  Caine said, “The Spanish call him Juan Espera en Dios, John who waits for God. He was reported seen in Paris in 1644, in Newcastle in 1790. In fact, there are sightings of the Wanderer going back to 1228. But the names often differ, and the descriptions sometimes change. In Melmoth, we find a possible explanation. There is an escape clause in the demonic contract. If the Wanderer can recruit another to take his place before his long life reaches its end, then he can avoid his fate. All men eventually die, while the role of the Wanderer becomes truly eternal.”

  “Take his place?” Sayers said. “How?”

  “By assuming the Wanderer’s burden of certain damnation.”

  Stoker was less than happy with the direction this was taking.

  “Melmoth’s a fiction,” he said.

  “All fictions have their originals.”

  “And are told through devices. Demons through trapdoors, and contracts in blood. Stuff for the pit and the gallery.”

  “And what are such devices,” Caine pressed on, “but outward symbols for a life within? Consider it, Bram. To turn knowingly from the face of God. To hurl oneself into the darkness and certain damnation. Would such an act not create the kind of delinquent soul the tales describe?”

  “Embrace damnation?” Stoker echoed. “Willingly? For what conceivable reason?”

  “Advantage. Defiance. Self-hatred. Each heart has its own.”

  “No,” said Stoker. “No one man can live forever.”

  “No one man is required to,” said Caine. “That is my point.”

  As the two friends’ disagreement had increased in passion, it had also begun to increase in volume. They were now attracting attention, and none of it was friendly.

  Sayers rose to his feet.

  “I am grateful to you, sir,” he said, inclining his head toward Hall Caine in acknowledgment of his researches.

  “Have I brought you some illumination?”

  “I very much fear that you may have.”

  Out in the city garden at the heart of nearby Bedford Square, Sayers strode about with such nervous energy that Stoker was hard-pressed to keep up with him. He took no specific path, walked with no specific purpose. The agitation was all, and it threw him this way and that like a dancing flame.

  “Something moves in me, Bram,” he said. “It made sense to me. I can imagine it. To dismiss God’s will, and be rewarded for it. What a gift it must seem at the beginning. What a curse it must be in the end.”

  “This wasn’t the kind of enlightenment I had in mind,” Stoker said. “Caspar’s was a natural evil, Tom. The rest is mere fancy.”

  “Not Caspar, Bram, although I’ve no doubt that he’d have taken over his master’s c
ontract once his education was complete.” He stopped and turned to Stoker.

  “Edmund Whitlock’s powers are fading,” he said. “Many have noted it, and Gulliford claimed he was ill. I think it’s more than that. I think he is a dying man, and knows it.”

  “And?”

  Sayers took a step closer to Stoker, seizing him by both his arms and shaking him once as if to make his point.

  “Can’t you see?” he said. “It’s Whitlock! Whitlock is the demon! And into that devil’s hands I’ve delivered Louise!”

  TWENTY-TWO

  At this point in his long tale, the battered prizefighter paused, and Sebastian began to think that he might not continue. Outside the tent, some kind of an argument was going on. By the sound of it, the stakes were to be pulled and the booth taken down as soon as the park closed for the day. The billboards outside might promise an exhibition of the Noble Art, but the reality of it had too quickly degenerated into scrapping and riots. So now the show folk were being moved on, and in future Willow Grove would stick with its more respectable entertainments.

  Sayers listened for a few moments and then said, “They’ll soon be calling for me. Everyone is expected to pitch in on a teardown.”

  But he made no move.

  Sebastian said, “So, after all the time that had passed, and everything that had happened…you still harbored strong feelings for Miss Porter?”

  The boxer in the dirty robe turned his head slowly, and looked at the detective. Then he looked away again.

  “I knew what a man in my position ought to do,” he said. “Walk away, close up his heart, forget the life he’d once had, and try to make a life elsewhere.

  “But I also knew what that would mean. It would mean living as one haunted for the rest of my days. A rootless, aimless man with my heart and mind tied up in a secret past that I could never discuss or reveal.

  “And that was only a part of it. Because to walk away then would be to abandon Louise to her fate.”

  “She shoved you in front of a train.”

  “A measure of how far she’d been misled. Make no mistake, Inspector Becker, my eyes were opened. All of my romantic illusions now hung in tatters. But you can imagine my dismay on finding that the framework on which they hung remained as strong as ever.”

  Sayers went on, “In those first weeks after I reached London, I saw Louise only once. Bram arranged it for me. He may not have shared my certainties, but he was my rock from the day I confided in him. I could have asked for no better friend.

  “No man of his honor would ever knowingly give shelter to a criminal, but he saw no evil in me. He could see, however, that as far as any living man could be, I was in hell. He thought that for me to see her might bring some relief.

  “The death of James Caspar had forced Whitlock to cancel the rest of the provincial tour and make an early return to London. Rather than see the company split up, he engaged a replacement juvenile and took whatever dates he could find in town at short notice. One of these was at the Middlesex Music Hall on Drury Lane. I don’t know if you’ve ever been—it used to be the Mogul Saloon and has the decor of a Turkish palace. I had to take care because many of the names on any music hall bill were likely to know me on sight. On this evening there was Nelly Farrell, who’d been with us on the bill in Salford. Daltry, Higgins, and Selina Seaforth had a comic boxing act that I’d helped them to stage. James Fawn had a drunk act. I’d lent him two pounds once, and he’d been avoiding me ever since.

  “I couldn’t risk being recognized, so I stood at the back of the gallery to watch. The Purple Diamond played in the middle of the evening, and it did not go well. Caspar’s replacement was an inexperienced boy in a crepe mustache. There was some new business with a clay pipe that didn’t come off. Caspar had been no great actor, but at least he could look the part by just standing there.

  “The entire company seemed without spark. Only Whitlock stood out, and he played his role with a kind of suppressed fury, as if he was about to turn on the audience at any moment. The first few scenes were received in silence, as if everyone feared he might do exactly that. But then after a while someone called out something disrespectful, and for the rest of the piece it was ‘Come on Edmund’ and ‘Give us a dance.’

  “I watched Louise closely whenever she was on the stage. I had eyes for no other. I mean it as no criticism when I say that as an actress, she is artless; what I mean is that her very soul is what you see. Her nature shines through her roles. Except that on this night, I saw a woman whose thoughts were elsewhere. She ran through the lines and the moves, but it was not exactly a performance—it was more like a polite but unenthusiastic reading of the part.

  “I began to dread her song at the end. I began to hope that Whitlock might have cut it. They cheered at the final scene, all right, but it was not a healthy response. There was a note of derision in it. I wanted to leave as soon as the curtain fell, but I could not. It would have felt like a betrayal. Whitlock brought her out and gave her the briefest introduction and then left her to it, alone and unsupported. She looked so fragile and I had to grip the rail before me, to prevent myself from leaping up and calling to her.

  “Despite my apprehension, the audience behaved. Only when she faltered did they begin to whisper. The whispers grew to a rumble of concern, as she lost her way in a song that she must have sung on a stage more than a hundred times.

  “Our company’s musical director was down in the pit with the house band. I saw him mouthing the words from his score as he conducted, trying to prompt her. But I don’t believe that memory alone was her problem.

  “After a while, the one we called the Silent Man opened the curtains and reached for her arm. He led her off and she went with him like a child. The band struck up something jolly and the chairman banged his hammer and started talking up the next turn as if nothing had happened.

  “I rushed out into Drury Lane and around to a spot from where I could see the stage door. I cannot tell you how I felt. It was as if something was swelling and about to burst within me. I wanted to go to her, but I dared not. I remembered her terror at my last appearance.

  “After a while she came out with Whitlock, and they got into a carriage together. She had his coat around her shoulders. I was able to follow the carriage on foot for a distance—long enough to observe that it was heading into the area around Marylebone High Street. Whitlock had kept a set of apartments there for longer than anyone could remember, and lived in them when the company was not touring. When he was at home, the Silent Man and his wife served as housekeepers.

  “I went out there the next day, and contrived ways to observe his building without drawing attention to myself. I did not dare to get too near, but I could not keep myself away. I needed to know if Louise was his guest, and that she was well. I saw the Silent Man go out in the morning, and return in less than half an hour. I saw no sign of Louise until the afternoon, when a cab drew up and waited until she and Whitlock came out to it. He wore a dark suit, and she a veil.

  “Their journey was a brief one, down Wimpole Street and into Henrietta Place, and I had no trouble keeping the cab in view. They went into a house with a brass plate alongside the door, one among many—these were the streets where the city’s wealthiest doctors lived and kept their consulting rooms. I had a premonition even before I walked past and read the name on the plate.

  “This was the home of a physician well known in theatrical circles. I had heard it said of a number of actresses that they had gone to him for their ‘irregularities,’ always said in such a knowing way that I had been sure it was a code for something more, and eventually, without ever pressing for the knowledge, I came to understand what it was. Although a specialist in chest and voice complaints, this man had a sideline in dealing with the inconvenient unborn.

  “Whitlock was compelling her to it, of that I’m sure. She could not have gone on to serve his purpose otherwise. I did not stay to watch them come out. I could not bear to.”

&nb
sp; He looked at Sebastian then. The detective had not moved, nor made any sound that he was aware of.

  Sayers said, “I know what you probably think of me. That I am one of those men who worships a certain kind of woman and thinks himself a knight of old, a hero in his own eyes and therefore, he imagines, in hers.

  “There was a time when this might have been true. That time ended as I walked the streets in the hours following my discovery. I did not flee the abortionist’s doorstep through anger, nor through jealousy. I began to understand the true nature of my feelings when I realized that I wept for her distress, and not my own.

  “I have learned that a man who offers his worship to women fails to realize how wearisome that gift soon becomes. Mere worship is a trinket to them—nice to receive, but one to pop in a drawer and forget.

  “It would have been so easy for me to imagine her defiled, and to make her an object of my anger or even drive her from my thoughts. But in the course of those next few hours, I came to realize that there would never be anything I could not forgive her.”

  Sayers paused for a while. He folded his scarred hands and rested his lips against them. He did not look up, and Sebastian began to wonder if his story had come to a premature end.

  But then Sayers said, “I did not see her again for a while. My money was getting low and I had to take casual work in a fruit broker’s on the docks, or else be turned out of my lodgings to live as so many had to…moved on by the police all night, and sleeping in public parks by day. Once a week, I would meet with Bram Stoker, unless he was away from town on Irving’s business.