The Kingdom of Bones

by Stephen Gallagher

  “It was Bram who showed me the lines in The Era announcing Miss Louise Porter’s retirement from the stage. There would be no farewell performance, no benefit night. From that time onward, she was rarely out of Whitlock’s company. He became her guardian.

  “Although hardly of the top drawer of society, Whitlock had an ‘in’ to many a fashionable gathering. That is the peculiar thing about our profession: You can be born the son of a costermonger, but play a few kings and it sticks to you. I’ve even seen a clown talking to a duchess, where the duchess was the one making a fool of herself.

  “Whitlock was escorted by Louise wherever he went, and the way he dressed her and presented her, you would have taken her for some foreign princess and the highest-born woman in the room. She was pale and beautiful, and she rarely spoke. Old rakes and young men would vie for her attention; Stoker said that there was always a group of them around her, and that she only ever half listened and seemed to be looking beyond them as if through cloudy glass. This made them see her as some kind of goddess of ice, and they competed for her attention all the more.

  “Stoker said he saw it differently. He said that to him it was as if the very soul had died in her.”

  Sayers hesitated. First he seemed about to say something more; but now he seemed to be done. Then he started to rise.

  “The rest of it,” Sebastian said quickly.

  “You know the rest of it. You were there.”

  “Only for a part of what happened. Good God, Sayers, you can’t stop now. This is the very thing I came back here for.”

  Someone outside was calling a name. The name was not Sayers’ own, but it caused him to look up sharply.

  “I’m needed,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” Sebastian said. “If I let you out of my sight now, then you’ll vanish with the circus and I’ll never know the truth.”

  “You have most of it.”

  “I want it all.”

  Sayers gave a resigned sigh, then started gathering together his few possessions from the makeshift table.

  “Then we must move to another place,” he said. “Or they’ll have the tent down around us.” He went over to his steamer trunk and raised the lid. A shabby but serviceable suit of clothes lay folded on top of the contents.

  “You say that after persuading her to lose the child he became her guardian,” Sebastian said, rising from his chair, “and that she served some purpose for him. Is it your belief that she became his mistress in return?”

  Sayers was stowing his few trinkets and taking out his street wear. He paused in what he was doing, as if the suggestion was an unexpected one that he had never considered before.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then…”

  “There is much more to it than that,” Sayers said. “The sorcerer had lost his apprentice. He had been grooming Caspar to take over the Wanderer’s role, but now Caspar was gone. He needed new cover, and time was getting short. His deal with darkness was about to expire. From his increasing desperation, I would not have been surprised to learn that his doctors had put a number on his days.”

  Sayers let the lid of the trunk fall with a bang.

  “Louise was not his mistress,” he said. “She was bait.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  In sixteen acres of Southeast London’s Forest Hill stood Surrey House, the residence of Quaker tea trader Frederick Horniman. Originally the family home, it had come to hold so many objects, books, and pictures gathered in the course of Horniman’s travels that a few months ago he’d thrown a part of it open to the public, by appointment, so that anyone with sufficient interest could come in and view his collections.

  Sayers and Stoker were met at the gate by a man with a strong-looking frame and a starved-looking face. He wore a brown velveteen coat, and Stoker introduced him by the name of Samuel Liddell Mathers.

  “You’ve the hand of a boxer!” Mathers said as they shook, and Sayers gave Stoker an uneasy glance. “I box every evening myself,” Mathers added.

  Stoker returned the look with a slight shrug and a raise of the eyebrows, as if to say, I told him no such thing.

  They walked up the circular driveway to the square-set, ivy-covered house. It was shabby and rambling and comfortable. Mathers led them around to a side entrance, where he produced a key to let them in. The house was mostly dark, and the furniture sheeted—the Horniman family was not at home. The two men followed their guide through the kitchens to a door that opened onto a stairway, which in turn led down into the cellars. The house had electric lighting but the cellar did not, and he stopped to light a lantern before carrying it ahead of them to show the way.

  As they descended, he said, “The place is full to bursting point. This is where they keep the pictures no one cares to see.”

  Sayers said, “Do we have permission to be here?”

  “I’m a friend of the daughter. We both belong to a little order of Christian kabbalists. Bram picks our brains every now and again, but he refuses to join us. Don’t you, Bram?”

  Stoker, at the rear of the party, said, “You know my interests have been entirely academic.”

  “Really,” Mathers said. “This might end your sense of detachment.” Whereupon, he winked at Sayers.

  He had Stoker hold the lantern while he looked through a stack of unframed pictures that were being stored side-on. He knew what he was looking for, and it took him a while to find it. Finally, he drew one of them out. It was mounted in cards and protected by a large sheet of paper that he lifted and flipped back.

  The picture was a head-and-shoulders sketch in charcoal and oils, possibly a preliminary rough for a full theatrical portrait.

  Mathers said, “The portrait is dated seventeen-seventy-five. The actor is not named, but does he look familiar?”

  “It could well be him,” Sayers said, peering more closely and having to move to keep his own shadow out of the way. “I believe it is him, Bram.”

  “His very last mistake, I imagine,” said Mathers. “A Wanderer would soon learn to permit no record of his image.”

  To Sayers’ eye, the sketch showed a younger but no less magisterial and cynical Edmund Whitlock. The hair was brown, the face tauter and unlined. Given the freedom of the artist’s hand, there was scope for saying that there was merely some physical similarity across a century’s gap. But Sayers’ first instinct had been to recognize the face as that of his former employer.

  Stoker, who seemed to have been hoping for something more persuasive, was clearly less convinced.

  “A resemblance,” Stoker conceded.

  Sayers said, “You brought me to this threshold. Can you not cross it with me?”

  “At heart, I’m a rational being,” Stoker said. “I’ve always placed my trust in science and nature.”

  “Yet you’ll publish fairy tales. You have friends”—this with a glance toward Mathers—“who’d raise the devil if they could. And do your best to talk Irving into Faust and The Flying Dutchman.”

  “No one talks Irving into anything,” Stoker said. “A man can disagree with his friends. And one does not have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost story. I’m prepared to believe that Whitlock charts his life by the symbols in which he places his faith. But this…this is the point at which men are seduced into co-opting history to support the impossible.”

  Mathers, who had been inspecting the tag on the portrait before returning it to the stacks, now joined them and said, “But do you believe in evil, Bram?”

  “As an abstraction, yes.”

  “What exactly do you think it is?”

  “A word that describes a condition of the human soul.”

  “Not a force in itself? With its own life and substance?”

  “No.”

  “My considered understanding is that evil lives,” Mathers said. “It moves. It finds places to show itself whenever it can. A being can be emptied and shaped into a vessel to hold it. We have a term for such a person. We call them…godles
s.”

  Sayers said, “But how can even a godless being defy the very processes of nature?”

  “By embracing the idea that one is cursed, lost, beyond the very sight of one’s creator,” Mathers said. “Cruel deeds are the means of ritual affirmation. Evil enters the vacuum from where man’s natural spirit has been driven. And, of course, in a vacuum…”

  “There can be no decay,” said Sayers, with the wonder of discovery.

  “He ages slowly,” Sayers said excitedly, as they walked along London Road toward Forest Hill station. “But he ages. He’s flesh and blood like the rest of us, Bram. Cut off his head and he’ll streak down to hell like a comet.”

  “Speculation,” said Stoker.

  “Think of it, Bram. He cannot hold off damnation forever. But he can escape it by influencing another lost soul to take his place. Caspar was to be that soul. He’ll seek another.”

  “And you believe you’ll stop him?”

  “I care nothing for Whitlock or his future! I think only of Louise in his foul company. I’d go straight to hell myself to make her safe.”

  At this, Stoker took his arm and stopped him so that he could look him in the eyes.

  “I can smell the gin on you,” the Irishman said. “Edmund Whitlock is no more than an ordinary man, seduced by a legend. Be very careful, Tom.”

  Sayers pulled his arm free.

  In an uncomfortable silence, the two men walked on toward their train.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As soon as he received Edmund Whitlock’s telegram, Sebastian Becker sought permission from his superiors and then caught the next train down to London. By this time, Whitlock had wound up the Purple Diamond company and was playing a fifteen-minute sketch titled He Knew It, All Right. It was a four-hander he’d revived from some fifteen years before, inexpensive to stage and for which he could reuse props and costumes from the last production. He’d sold the Purple Diamond sets and the rest of the properties, and used the proceeds to pay off the cast.

  Some thought it an odd choice. It was a comic piece set in a draper’s, with no songs and no girl. Four skilled comedians might have carried it off, but Whitlock held an open call at which every dodgy character from the twilight fringe of the theatrical world turned up. Of the three that he cast, one had the nasty ticket-of-leave look of a man who’d spent time in prison—hardly the type for a draper’s boy—while another was regarded with wariness by all the chorus girls. No one could give a specific reason for it, but if this man happened to enter a room where one of them was alone, she would quickly find some excuse to leave.

  So the sketch, as they performed it, was no better than passable. Some suggested that Whitlock had taken a big step down in the world and was showing desperation, although others reckoned that he hardly needed the money. He was said to own property, and had been coining it in as an actor-manager for longer than anyone could actually remember.

  Sebastian caught up with him during the first house at Gatti’s Music Hall in the Westminster Bridge Road. Whitlock’s little troupe was playing the sketch on three bills in the same evening; from Gatti’s they’d go to the Canterbury, then to the Camberwell Palace, then back to Gatti’s for the final show. Gatti’s had only two dressing rooms behind its small stage, one shared by the men and the other by the women, so they met in the manager’s office.

  Whitlock was in full makeup and a draper’s apron, his costume for the skit. He said, “We’ll be following the Coulson Sisters in about ten minutes’ time. I am at your service until then.”

  “Your telegram said you had letters to show me,” Sebastian said.

  “I have.” The actor-manager reached into his waistcoat behind the apron and brought out a small bundle of assorted and very cheap-looking papers. “I’ve been keeping them about me. I would not want Miss Porter to see them.”

  “Weren’t they addressed to her?”

  “They were, but I recognized the hand. So I intercepted them. She is suffering enough distress without having to bear the ravings of a lunatic.”

  The clock on the manager’s wall ticked the minutes away as Sebastian read the first of the notes, and then the next.

  “Hard enough for you to read such a personal tirade,” he commented after a while.

  “I’ve been reviewed by Shaw,” Whitlock said. “Believe me, those letters are nothing.”

  Sebastian glanced up. “Do you have the envelopes?”

  Whitlock made a sign of regret. “There were no postmarks,” he said, “but the content alone proves that Sayers is here in London. If I were you, Inspector, I would investigate the public houses around St. Martin’s Lane.”

  “Why so, sir?”

  “They’re a home to the boxing fraternity. And one sniff at the paper should tell you those letters were written on a beer-stained table. You’re far away from your own territory, Inspector Becker. I suggest you share this bounty with your brothers in the Metropolitan Police. Or else how effective can you really hope to be?”

  “As effective as my dedication can make me, Mister Whitlock. I must keep these, and study them further before I decide what best to do.”

  “As you wish,” Whitlock said. “I feel I have done my duty.”

  Sebastian moved to put the letters safely inside his coat. “Rest assured, Mister Whitlock,” he said, “I shall have him.”

  “Then I am certain we can all sleep safely in our beds.” Whitlock rose and put out his hand. “Tell me, Inspector. What exactly do you believe you are pursuing? Some man, or some fiend?”

  “I do not believe in fiends,” Sebastian Becker said as he took the actor’s hand and returned his grip. Whitlock held on and looked into his face for a time that bordered on the uncomfortable.

  Then he said, “Quite right,” and released him.

  A boy looked into the manager’s office and said, “They’re playing out the Coulson Sisters, Mister Whitlock.”

  “You must excuse me,” Whitlock said. “I wish you all the success you deserve.”

  “Where is Miss Porter now?”

  “She is a guest at my apartments,” Whitlock said, as he followed the boy out of the door. “She no longer has the heart to perform.”

  He paused.

  “Nor for anything, much,” he added, and then he left the room.

  The actor had gone off without leaving him an address, but it was the work of only a few minutes for Sebastian to find what he needed in the manager’s files. Whitlock was still onstage when Sebastian left the theater and walked in the direction of Waterloo Station, hoping to pick up a cab to take him back across the river. Perhaps Whitlock had been expecting him to go straight to the boxing dens on St. Martin’s Lane rather than seeking out Miss Porter, who had, after all, had no knowledge of the letters that Sayers had intended for her.

  But Louise Porter was some essential factor in the prizefighter’s mystery. In all that he’d done so far, he seemed to care more for her wellbeing than for his own survival.

  In everything he’d done, that was, apart from killing her beloved.

  Whitlock’s housekeeper said nothing, pretended not to understand anything that Sebastian said, and seemed determined not to admit him until there was the call of a young woman’s voice from within, which she understood well enough. Louise Porter received him in the parlor, that little-used, overornamented, excessively proper space set aside in the Victorian household for the sole purpose of making an impression. She was in a dark dress. It was not formal mourning wear, but she moved and spoke like one recently widowed.

  Sebastian asked her to look at one of the letters. It hardly mattered which one she chose; they all said more or less the same things.

  She glanced through one, then another. She seemed unsurprised by them.

  “These are the milder ones,” she said. “There have been others. These omit the strangest claim of all.”

  “Mister Whitlock thinks you know nothing of them,” Sebastian said. “He thinks he intercepted every one.”

  “
Everybody wants to protect me,” she said.

  “So what is ‘the strangest claim of all’?”

  “Tom Sayers would have me believe that my former employer and present protector is a devil in human form. One who has turned from the face of God and now seeks to avoid just punishment as his days approach their end. He says that my late fiancé was being made ready to replace him.

  “I ask you, Inspector Becker. As we speak, Edmund Whitlock is running from one music hall to another, in costume, to perform a piece of nothing before a pack of drunkards. If they should laugh at his antics, then that is the most he can hope for. And he is not a well man. If such is a reward of long life and good fortune, I call it a poor sort of bargain.”

  “Tom Sayers is quite mad.”

  “Will they still hang him if you catch him?”

  “I cannot say. How will you feel if they do?”

  She looked toward the window. The main curtains were tied back, and a streetlamp outside could be seen through the lace. “They should spare him,” she said. “He believes I’m worth saving. What better proof of a man’s lack of reason?”

  Sebastian said, “Is there anything more you can tell me?”

  She looked down.

  “Hell is not a warm place,” she said. “It is a place where ice becomes ashes.”

  Sebastian waited, but that was all she had to say. Nonplussed and a little disturbed, he got to his feet.

  “Then,” he said, “I’ll thank you and say good night.”

  She rang for the silent woman to show him out. Somewhere in another room, a small dog started to bark at the sound of the bell. Louise Porter raised a hand to her head and settled into the attitude of the irrevocably depressed.

  She said, “Tom Sayers does not understand. Even if Mister Whitlock were a demon, I would not care. I care for very little, these days.”

  Sebastian could think of nothing else that he could say to her, other than “I am so sorry, Miss Porter.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence as he waited for the silent woman to appear.