Looking down, he noticed a stack of engraved postcards, freshly cut from the printers’, on the side table at her elbow. He saw the word discretion in flowing script. Obeying the impulse that it inspired, he slipped the topmost card from the pile. He flipped it up so that it was hidden by his sleeve as the mute woman came in.
It was still in his hand when he reached the street. Under the lamp, he looked up at the parlor window, but saw no one there. He raised the card to the light. It was a formal invitation and it read, In the presence of Miss Louise Porter. Selected gentlemen of discretion only. That was all. Below it was a time—midnight, two days hence—and an abbreviated address.
Selected gentlemen of discretion only. The phrase seemed to have something decadent about it. Almost an air of degeneracy.
How strange, he thought.
How very, very strange.
Over at the Lyceum, the so-called Scottish Play was still running. Its critical reception, though generally positive, had been qualified; William Archer had written to the effect that Irving had managed to “keep a rein on those peculiarities of gesture and expression which used to run away with him.” Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth had been greeted with similarly faint praise, and she was rumored to be considering giving up her part.
But as Bram Stoker knew, those rumors were false. The voices of the critics were drowned out by the voice of the public, every night. The company played to capacity houses. Ellen Terry swore that she would not budge an inch in her reading of the role. Sargent was asking to paint her in character, all dark red hair and a dress that glittered blue and green with real beetles’ wings. The advance bookings were tremendous, even by Lyceum standards.
When Stoker left the theater late that night after another full-house performance, he did not go straight back to Chelsea and his Cheyne Walk home. He walked instead the half mile or so to St. Martin’s Lane, where he sought out a yard close to Leicester Square. He paid sixpence to the doorman of a sporting public house there, and received a metal token to be exchanged at the bar for beer or grog. Intending to take advantage of neither, Stoker climbed the stairs to the upper room.
Over at the bar sat the broken-nosed owner with his bullnecked friends, ex-fighters all. In the early part of the evenings when the room was full, any two of them might strip off their shirts and don gloves to spar for a while, before taking up a collection from the crowd. Around the walls hung the portraits of boxers long dead: lumbering Bill Neate; Bob Gregson, “the Lancashire Champion” Jack Randall versus Ned Turner. Alongside them hung an engraved picture of the owner himself in a posture young, fierce, and challenging, while his older and even uglier modern-day self nursed a gin just a few feet away.
In this company, it was plain that Tom Sayers, alone at a table and some distance from the bar, had managed to escape their common disfigurements due to the brevity of his fighting career. His nose was straight and his brow unscarred. His ears resembled ears, and not bloated fungi.
He looked up sharply as Stoker came in. Stoker was in no doubt that he would have an escape route planned, but, by the look of him, he’d have a struggle to make use of it. Sayers had papers spread on the table, and was composing a letter. A bottle and a glass stood close to hand. The glass was unwashed and the bottle was half empty. Sayers was flushed, and the gaze that he turned on his visitor was unsteady.
“Tom,” Stoker said sadly, and gestured to the bottle as if to say, And this will help you how?
“I know, Bram, I know,” Sayers said. “I’ve had one or two, just to steady me.”
He needed no explanation. Gin dulled pain. It was the remedy for all those whose lives were such that they had no other.
Pulling out a chair to sit down, Stoker said, “Letters are a waste of time, Tom.”
“I can’t get them to her anyway,” Sayers said. “I send the potboy with orders to place them only in her hands. Whitlock stops them.”
“He’s hired the Egyptian Hall for a night.” Stoker slid a printed card in front of Sayers. The prizefighter struggled to focus his eyes on it in the candlelight.
Stoker said, “I know the floor plan of the house. Maskelyne’s rigged it for his magic shows. There’s no easy way to get backstage.”
Sayers would understand what he meant. Most of the major illusionists prepared their venues in the same way; it meant sending in a team of carpenters to panel around the backstage areas, effectively boxing them in. With a boxed stage, no one could get into the secured zone to interfere with apparatus or observe trade secrets.
Still with his eyes on the card, Sayers said, “Who are these ‘gentlemen of discretion’?”
“Well-born young men who’ve already wasted fortunes. They’re the reason why he’s been parading Louise at social gatherings all over town.”
Sayers nodded. “Then I am right. He means to recruit his new Caspar. It’s not just a matter of finding a rake or a dissolute; they’re ten-a-penny, and not fit for purpose. He seeks a Caligula for our age, one who cannot fail to understand the full import of the choice before him. Louise is the bait on his hook. What can we do, Bram?”
Stoker looked at the gin bottle.
“With your head skewed by that? Nothing. I liked your company better when all you could afford was half a bed in a temperance hotel.”
Sayers raised his hands, as if calling an entire crowd to silence.
“Don’t judge me, Bram,” he said. “Please. You cannot know. I pray you never will.”
Stoker was about to say something else, and then changed his mind. He stood up. He left the printed invitation on the table, and threw his sixpenny token down with it.
“God be with you, Tom,” he said, before he turned away and walked back to the stairs.
TWENTY-FIVE
Two nights later, at an hour when most people were thinking of retiring to their beds, Louise descended to the street outside the apartments where a four-wheeler waited. The Silent Man had gone on ahead of them, and his wife accompanied her now. They were to pick up Edmund Whitlock from the stage door at Gatti’s and then proceed to the evening’s destination.
The Egyptian Hall stood in Piccadilly, and had been England’s Home of Mystery for the past sixteen years. It had the frontage of an antique temple, four stories high and with the look of something hewn from the rock of the Nile Valley. Two mighty columns braced the lintel above its entranceway. Two monumental statues stood upon the lintel. All illusion, in plaster and cement. To either side of this slab of the ancient desert continued a row of sober Georgian town houses.
Within the building there were two theaters. One had been taken by Maskelyne and Cooke for a three-month run of magic and deception that still showed no signs of ending, more than a decade and a half after it had begun. The other was used for exhibitions and the occasional show.
A few minutes before midnight, their four-wheeler drew up outside. Edmund Whitlock stepped down to the pavement, where he turned and offered his arm to Louise.
To an observer’s eye, the halls were closed and dark, but a watchman waited to let them in. Louise moved with her eyes downcast, looking neither to left nor right. They went directly backstage, where the Silent Man waited to lead them to the auditorium.
It was an intimate house, with a small stage and a runway out from the footlights across the orchestra pit. The houselights were on and the curtains were up; Maskelyne was between shows, so his sets were half struck and the theater’s back wall was visible. About a dozen figures were out there in the stalls, all male, no two of them sitting together although some were conversing across the rows in raised voices. They fell silent as Whitlock led Louise to the center of the stage, where a chair waited. He left her there and moved to the footlights.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice ringing all the way up to the hall’s domed ceiling. “Welcome. I have spoken to each of you in turn before this evening.”
Louise sat on her chair and continued to look down at the stage. Whitlock had taken her to Bond Street the day befor
e, to be fitted for a new dress that the milliners had run up overnight. Her hair had been artfully pinned by the Mute Woman, who had a talent for such. Her face was powdered and her natural pallor relieved by the merest hint of rouge.
Over by the wings, she was aware of the Silent Man easing out of the shadows and into a spot from where he could observe the auditorium.
“I know you are intrigued,” Whitlock said. “I know you will be discreet. And I know the fascination that Miss Porter holds for each of you. Tonight, I offer the chance for one man to pursue that fascination to the full.”
Hearing mention of her name, Louise raised her head to look at him. Slowly. She saw him outlined against the footlights with the pasty gloom of the auditorium beyond. The men out there were but shadows in shadow. The white fronts of their dress shirts outshone their faces.
“Know that I am hiding nothing,” Whitlock was saying to them. “I am damned. I have lived a life beyond the sight of God and it has been…wonderful. To be free of conscience is the greatest freedom of all. Christ hung upon the cross, and I feel nothing for his pain. Guilt does not chain me down. God is not my master. I have no master.”
A voice from the stalls called out, “What of his final retribution?”
“Avoidable,” Whitlock said. “By handing on the gift to another as I offer it to you now.”
From a man somewhere close to the footlights she heard, “There’s always a reckoning in the end,” but Whitlock had a ready reply.
“True, sir,” he said, “but I chose your company tonight because every single one of you is skilled at passing a reckoning on to someone else.”
This caused some nervous laughter, and Whitlock took the moment as an opportunity to turn his back on them and move to Louise.
She looked up at him. “Are we done here, Edmund?” she said.
“Just a little longer,” he said. “Stand up.” He offered her a hand that she did not need, and she rose to her feet. He smiled, and she saw a muscle in his cheek quiver uncontrollably for a second or so. Far from being in full command of the situation, he seemed to be in a state of quiet terror. When he turned again to face the auditorium with her, the telltale sign was gone, masked by the actor’s show of confidence.
He said, “Here is your way in, gentlemen. You can do anything to her or with her. She does not care. There is nothing in her heart.”
Unexpectedly, he raised his hand and slapped her across the face, hard. Her head snapped around. She did not fall.
Out in the stalls, one or two of the young men were on their feet. Any urge to protest was stilled as their attention was drawn to the Silent Man over at the side of the stage. In the emptiness of the theater, the sound of his revolver’s hammer being cocked was impossible to miss. Once it was readied, he held it with the barrel pointing upward, all set to level and fire should it be necessary.
Whitlock said, “What do you say, Louise?”
“Thank you, Edmund,” Louise said.
He turned back to his audience.
“Well?” he challenged them. “I seek a man without fear. And I offer him the world.”
The man just beyond the footlights was on his feet.
“Not for me,” he said, and he started to make his way out. After a moment, two or three of the others started to follow him.
“As you wish, gentlemen,” Whitlock called after them, trying to make the best of this unwelcome response but failing to disguise a growing anxiety at a plan that was falling apart before his eyes. “This prize is not for all.”
“You’re afraid, sir,” one of them shot back. “You’re no advertisement for your own bargain.”
“If damnation’s such a prize,” called another, “how come Irving’s in the Lyceum while you scratch for pennies on the circuit? Who did he sell his soul to? I’ll go there!”
Some of them laughed. Another said, “Your gift is no gift, sir, it’s a burden. I’d happily take the lady. But I’ll have none of you.”
By now, the sounds of people rising and leaving were coming from all parts of the stalls. Dark shapes were moving across the rows like ghosts, heading for the aisles and the exits.
Whitlock lost his composure. He took Louise by the arm and roughly thrust her forward to the footlights where, with a savage jerk, he ripped open the front of her new dress. In that one move, he tore open her bodice, her chemise, everything. The force of it almost threw her off her balance. She grasped at the ripped material and held it together. She was embarrassed, but she did not actively resist.
“One man!” Whitlock roared at the departing group. It was a tragedian’s yell, meant to stir and inspire, but it did no more than betray his desperation. “One man with real blood in his veins!”
And from the back of the hall came a voice that said, “May one inspect the merchandise?”
With the sudden focus of a wolf spotting the weakling in the chaos of a panicking flock, Whitlock turned all of his attention to the tall figure that was moving down the center aisle. Or perhaps it was the drowning man’s interest in the one line that he might be able to reach.
Dressed like all the others, no more recognizable in the shadows than any of them, the man was raising a hand to shade his eyes against the footlights’ glare.
“An inspection?” Whitlock said. “But of course.” He pushed Louise, propelling her forward, and she took a couple of stumbling steps toward the runway. It extended out from the footlights and across the orchestra pit to end over the front row of the stalls.
Recovering her balance, holding her ripped bodice together, she walked with some recovered measure of dignity to the end of the runway. There she stood, self-conscious but straight-backed, to present herself for inspection. Alone, with the darkness of the empty orchestra pit to either side of her, she looked ahead and waited. He was interested, or he wasn’t. Whichever it was, she did not care.
From down in the stalls, the man said in a low voice, “Is this what you want, Miss Porter?”
“No, sir,” she said. “But it is what I deserve.”
“Do not believe that,” he said. “And do not dishonor yourself for his purposes. You are worth so much more.”
She looked then. He was standing down there with his face upturned, still using one hand to shade his eyes.
She saw that this gesture was meant as much to conceal his features from the others as anything else. She saw him glance in the direction of the Silent Man, still armed and ready for trouble. Then he held out his other hand toward her, as if she might crouch and take it and so be helped down from the stage.
“Tom?” she said in a small and broken voice.
“Come,” he said, low enough for only her to hear. “You have seen the man’s nature and learned his purpose now. Can’t you see that I spoke the truth?”
For those out in the auditorium and in the wings, she betrayed no sign of having recognized him. She kept her face blank, and barely spoke.
“Leave here,” she said. “Leave while you can, before it is too late. Forget me.”
“How can I?”
“You must. He has me. I am lost. Go, Tom. Save yourself.”
Sayers began to say something more. But at that moment, the shooting began.
Splinters flew. Bullets were thudding into the seats around him. The Silent Man had stepped forward and taken aim, and he was emptying his revolver in Tom Sayers’ direction. Sayers knew that he’d been recognized. He threw himself down.
Up on the stage, Louise did not move. She barely flinched as the theater echoed with a tattoo of pistol shots. Those who’d been halfway out were diving to the floor or scrambling for the exits; those who had not yet left their seats were jumping up out of them now. There was panic, with little sense of how best to achieve safety. Sayers was aware of at least one man clambering onto the stage.
The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun, all chambers emptied. None had touched Sayers, but a rising cry from the other side of the stalls suggested that at least one of the bullets had
found a living target. Up on the stage, Whitlock had grabbed Louise and was dragging her toward the wings.
There was a rumble from above. Sayers looked up and saw the descending safety curtain; someone backstage had tripped the counterweight release, and the five-ton sheet of asbestos and metal was coming down like a guillotine.
Sayers took a leap at the end of the runway and pulled himself up onto the stage. “Iron flying in!” he roared in warning to anyone within earshot. Once the fire curtain was down, there would be no way to move between the auditorium and the backstage area. And anyone standing in the wrong spot when it fell would be crushed, or worse.
The “iron” hit the stage within a second of his passing under it, the weight of it shaking the boards and sending a booming echo through the cellarage below. Dust rose from the wood as if from a beaten carpet.
If the stage had been boxed in for magic, as Stoker had said, then Whitlock and his cronies would now have only one way out. But where would their exit be located? Sayers had never played the Egyptian Hall or brought a company here, so he could only guess. He guessed stage left, trying to remember the layout of the building as he’d seen it on the way in.
When he reached the back of the wings, it was to find the pass door closed, with the inert body of the Silent Man sprawled before it. Another man was standing over him, looking down at the body while barring any exit from the stage with the Silent Man’s revolver in his hand. Sayers did not recognize him until he looked up and spoke.
“My God, Sayers,” Sebastian Becker said. “Tell me what I’ve walked into.”
Sebastian had entered with the ticket he’d stolen from Whitlock’s rooms, and had taken a seat to one side of the auditorium. He’d had no idea what to expect. When he’d seen Whitlock stepping forward and offering his young ward for immoral purposes like a slave at the block, he’d been dismayed. He’d never known such a thing—at least, not outside the pages of banned fiction. The lower orders might trade their women and slap them around, but these were not brutes. These were men with clean shirts, and fortunes.
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