The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  The vast majority of the baron’s luggage was tobacco and port; having been stranded in Singapore once during a cholera outbreak, he’d sworn never to be caught short again. For actual clothes, I rarely saw him out of the same burgundy waistcoat and slightly tattered black jacket, nor would he wear any hat apart from a silk opera hat he’d had made in Savile Row, nor any coat save a silver sable fur he’d purchased in St Petersburg and which he wore from September to April, regardless of the weather, and would not touch from May to August even if we had crossed the equator and were shivering our toes off on the southern lip of the world. If the baron had decided it was summer, summer it would be, geography be damned!

  Everyone knew him; many found him amusing, especially the ageing ladies who lurked in the cafés around Unter den Linden and loved to watch men made uneasy by his casual rudeness. Many more found him an obnoxious bore, but good manners and some lingering suspicion that he might have connections he could spitefully use against those who displeased him opened every door with a cry of “Ah, Herr Baron! How… nice.”

  And indeed, as promised, some ten days after I came to Berlin, I started to dream the dreams of my neighbours. Then to know the truth of men’s hearts, including the baron’s, for I shared his apartments by the Lustgarten.

  “You have never doubted yourself at all, have you, sir?” I mused, as the truth settled upon my soul.

  “Absolutely not! I was taught from infancy what it is to be right, and what it means to do right. Live your life righteously, William, it is the only happiness!”

  In this way, we spied on the final days of the Berlin Conference.

  I suppose some of what we gathered was useful. The questions my handlers wanted answered – the strength of the growing German navy, the ambitions of the French, the intricacies of the Austrian court, the business dealings of the Belgians – were so specific that I struggled to answer them. I could not, by simply willing it, know these things. Those truths that came to me were directly proportional to how strongly a person felt it, as thus:

  A colonel of the oldest Prussian guard, who doubtless knew many a secret my government desired, stood before me as Langa approached, and at once I knew not his military stratagems, but that he loathed his wife. He loathed her, ye gods he loathed her, for she had discovered long ago that she could sleep with the man she truly loved (a midget! A veritable shrivelled thing, and worse, a poet! A bad poet!) and her colonel husband was so paralysed by shame and horror at her liberty that he did precisely nothing. He who had stood before the line of fire and risked his life to rise in an air balloon above the roaring field, who had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in a part he would rather not disclose – but which absolutely did not diminish his manly prowess! – was cowed by a woman. They never spoke of it, of course. They ate breakfast and made small talk about the weather, and she sometimes attended the parades, and they went to lectures together, a mutual interest in ornithology being one of their few shared traits. But he knew, and it burnt within his soul with such brightness that he had worn down two of his front teeth with silent, endless gnashing, and would soon need to be fitted with dentures.

  This was the truth of his heart.

  Or she, whose mother had been dead some thirty years but was still cursed every morning and every night, and held accountable for the fears, failures and bitter loneliness of the daughter who hated her as much as she hated that she had not done any better with her own child.

  He who knows that he will die soon from the lump growing between his legs, and hasn’t told anyone, and has left it so long now that he doubts he ever will.

  She who has not asked her husband what the matter is, because she knows it will not be good, and does not think she can bear having to care.

  The nearer the shadow came, the more I could deduce – more than deduce; the more the hearts of men filled my own, their sentiments drowning out my own. Did I feel hungry, or did he? Did I shake with rage, or was it the magnetic pull of another’s fury? Now Langa comes, and now I know more and more, and here the baron was most useful, for with his casual rudeness he could demand, “And how are the naval plans going, Admiral?” with a wink in the corner of his eye, and as the admiral laughed and lied, I would listen to the truth in his heart, surging like the stormy sea. Damned if I knew what any of it meant for international politics, but I transcribed it all anyway, every petty lie and grandiose scheme, and Parr dispatched it to London and seemed, generally speaking, pleased.

  In this way we traversed Berlin, wandering between old fountains and new monuments; taking champagne with the great, beer with the moderately empowered and coffee with the disreputable.

  And every day my shadow came, and the truths of men’s hearts grew that little bit louder on my lips. That man who served us tea by the Tiergarten barely glanced our way, so much did his heart blaze with a freshly felt rebuke from his master. This woman with her child wonders at her daughter growing up so fast, and wishes she had not made so many mistakes when she was young. The couple who sit opposite us laugh and flirt and secretly touch ankles beneath the table, but she has had sexual relations before and knows that he is not nearly as wonderful beneath the sheets as he thinks he is; and he is delighted that she let him take her virginity, and is relieved that she is so innocent and he so worldly, since he has nothing much more to give than his experience.

  The maid who steals from work, and damn right she does, stingy bastards.

  The socialist who meets with a Russian who knows someone who knows someone who is cousins with someone who helped assassinate the tsar! She doesn’t believe in violence, of course, but think of it! To kill a king!

  The anarchist who isn’t sure what anarchy is, but saw his sister sold to a man for a mark and a lump of beef, and never saw her again, and hasn’t read Engels or Marx but heard from a man in a tavern about the People’s Society, fighting for the just, and thought it sounded like his kind of heroism.

  The baron put extra sugar into his coffee, and remembered a time when that was a ridiculous, luxurious thing, and added another spoonful with a grin even though he didn’t really enjoy the taste.

  Langa comes, shuffling beneath the full moon across muddy plains.

  “I need to leave,” I told Parr, pacing round our apartment on a cold night in February. “I can feel him, I can feel him coming, ask me to lie ask me anything did I ever love Isabella I don’t think so, my brothers were cruel and so was I, please, I need to go, I need to…”

  Mrs Parr watches me, arms folded, and the baron pretends to read his newspaper.

  “You love the game,” I snapped at her implacable crocodile stare. “You love the dance, the sweep of pieces on the board; you don’t see people, only duty and success, but because you are a woman no one takes you seriously. You will never be permitted to do what a man might, you will never be treated with the respect you are due, the Nineteen never tell you their real plans; they rely on you to be ignorant. Ignorant, foolish Nellie Parr, that’s what they say, as long as she knows nothing then Abbey will know nothing too, it’s the perfect way to use the old woman. You know it, you hate it, but at least it is something. At least it is something. And you will show them by God how good you are at it too.”

  I slapped my hands over my mouth, trying to swallow back the babbled truth of her heart, but the knowing was strong on me then and I tasted blood as I bit my lip, closing my eyes against her unflinching gaze.

  A moment of silence in the room, in which even the baron deigned to glance up, eyebrow raised, from his study of the newspaper. Then a rustle of fabric, a great unfolding of petticoat and tweaking of perfect cuff.

  “Yes,” Mrs Parr declared. “That is about the truth of it. Come, gentlemen. Let us find a train.”

  On the day I left Berlin, Langa could not have been more than eight hours behind.

  “Well,” mused the baron as I dug my nails into my skin, swallowing down the truths that threatened to burst from my chest. “Looking a little peaky, what?”
>
  With every mile we put between ourselves and the city, the desperate knowing, the desire to holler the truth of every man I met, receded, until at last, a little calmer, we dismounted and shuffled towards a snowy guest house, to sleep and speak without the burden of truth between us.

  “Whisky, perhaps a little,” was Parr’s conclusion, upon cautiously asking me if I felt any especial compulsion towards honesty.

  “I love my work,” I grunted. “I am happy and fulfilled and always imagined that my life would come to this.” Then, ashamed: “I’m sorry. For… in Berlin, for…”

  “Never be sorry for the truth!” she barked, and that was the end of that.

  At night, I wrote my reports. I wrote of generals and kings, princes and ministers who knew above all other truths that they were right. Man’s heart is an inconsistent, flailing thing. We doubt ourselves in every moment, constantly quest for some sort of absolute meaning in which we are immortal heroes, rather than organic matter shuffling towards the grave, unremarkable, forgotten in a week. To live in a state of truth, to truly know the world as it is, rather than as you wish to perceive it, is frightening. Terrifying. A wonder. It is easier to believe in yourself, to spin a thousand fantastic lies and construct a palace in which you are king, than to look with eyes open and truly see. The bricks and mortars of our lives are built on a story in which we are right, which no cannon of truth can ever blast down. So it was that the hearts of the men who divided up the world were stripped of all confusion. They believed in their nation, whichever it might be, and that it was superior. Superior in moral fibre. In consciousness, in leadership, in good Christian judgement, in power of arms. Superior because of the character of the men who led it – men bred to lead.

  No one could back down.

  No one could concede of the rightness of anyone else’s cause. To concede of someone else’s rightness was to perhaps admit that the very heart of you, the very essence of who you were, was wrong. Not merely your doctrine, but you, yourself – wrong.

  And that was impossible.

  The Great War has been coming for such a long time. It was born in the hearts of our ruling men the day they were held up in the crib and told that they were blessed with a greatness that others could not share. It was nurtured when they saw their greatness challenged, and sought some way to prove their strength. Now it eats us whole. Though it does not yet eat the men who created it.

  This is the truth. I pronounce it now, as a truth-speaker must. And in my own way, I helped create it.

  Chapter 23

  Here, the doctor stopped.

  The distant cannon had snored themselves to sleep somewhere in the night, and now a lone magpie greeted the coming dawn. The fire was shivering, shimmering embers in the hearth, and when I turned my face away from the stove, my breath puffed and huffed in the air.

  “Enough for now,” he exclaimed briskly, lurching to his feet. “Matron will want us both in a few hours. Enough.”

  I wanted to argue with him, to tell him to sit back down and tell his damn story; but almost immediately I opened my mouth, I realised how tired I was.

  I tiptoed into my room, and Helene stirred when I came in, but didn’t wake. I must have been asleep the moment my head touched the hard pillow, but it wasn’t two seconds later that Helene was shaking me awake, ordering me to get dressed quickly, quickly, before Matron realised we were late!

  Habit got me into my hat and dress, smoothed down my apron, buckled my shoes. Habit kept me quiet at breakfast, and quiet as I went about the wards. Once I passed Abbey in a corridor, but he showed no sign of even seeing me. I wondered how close his shadow was now. If he was to be believed, was the need to speak truth coming upon him? What would he do if Langa came and he could not keep silent? Would he point at Matron and denounce her for the hidden secrets of her heart? Would he call me a coward?

  Immediately after supper, when usually we had some few hours to ourselves to write and pray, I went straight to nap, ordering Helene to wake me on the stroke of nine.

  “That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed. “Just sleep!”

  “At nine!” I commanded, and she grunted and woke me at ten past without apology. For a moment I wondered what the truth of her heart was, what she made of this place, this endless war, and our odd, forced friendship. I were almost tempted to ask Abbey, but stopped myself. Even if he told the truth, what would I do? Truth wouldn’t make our sharing a room above dying men easier.

  This time, we met in the dining room a little after ten without saying this was what we would do. If he was a truth-speaker, he should simply know. I put fresh logs on the fire and a kettle to brew, and like the steam from the spout were a captain’s whistle, he was there.

  Matron had moved her whisky bottle without saying a word about its sudden decrease, so we made do with weaker stuff. Folding himself by the flames, Abbey muttered, “I really enjoy Wagner. I never betrayed my friends. Saira forgave me.”

  Did the words come a little harder tonight? Maybe. Maybe I just imagined it. The important thing, I decided, was that William Abbey could still lie.

  At last he said, “There were others, of course. Other truth-speakers. There had to be, for the Nineteen Committee to know so much about them. Kalberloh had hunted them for years. At the time, I imagined that they’d never caught anyone, but of course… I imagined a great deal then, and my masters were always very careful to have Parr handle me. That way I would only ever know the truth in her heart, and never the secrets that they kept from her. I never considered how deep the deceptions went.”

  Chapter 24

  Without family, he said, it can be hard to stop and think.

  I had been swept off my feet from the Cape, flung up the African coast to Liverpool without really knowing what I was doing. By the time I realised just what a bargain I’d made, the papers were signed and I was in Mrs Parr’s care. There was no time to stop or make demands. There was simply the job that had to be done, and then the next job, and the job after that, so that very quickly the absurdity of the situation, the shock of suddenly being a spy where not six months ago I had been a doctor, became purely habit. I didn’t ask questions. The Nineteen were relying on that too.

  We travelled east, the baron, Parr and I. Our trick was to always travel just fast enough that the shadow could never catch me, but never too fast that I lost my value. So we went from Berlin to Prague, visited all the great men of Bohemia, and as soon as the shadow was a little too close for comfort, we hopped onto the next train south, to Vienna. There we repeated our trick of wait – visit – flee. Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul, then around the Black Sea, Moscow, St Petersburg, Krakow, back to Berlin. I became quite the connoisseur of the railways. Russian trains were either calamitous dives of appalling squalor and delay, which several times risked my sanity as Langa shuffled towards our paralysed engine; or luxurious machines with a samovar and two porters to every coach who scrambled up and down to fulfil your every need. Turkish trains, such as they were, were built by the French from their half-used rolling stock, while the trains in America were great roaring beasts that stopped for neither snow, sand nor buffalo.

  Sometimes the necessities of geography put us under greater pressures. Visiting the shah in Persia could only be accomplished by laborious journeys on dusty roads. Under such circumstances I would not stay more than a few days in one place, dreading my shadow’s approach, and Parr never forced me to remain in a town where a speedy exit might prove difficult.

  In this way our strange little band travelled. The baron who was not sick, the woman in a great lavender bonnet who knew all things, myself, and my shadow. Always my shadow. They indulged me sometimes, of course. A man drinking black sludge coffee in Samarkand hummed and hawed and tugged his beard and finally said no, no, he had never heard of my curse, though he was an expert in such things. A naked fellow surrounded by shaven-headed brides in India pronounced on a great many things that were sometimes true, frequently unintelligible, and never once glimmered
towards my case. A woman in Egypt took one look at me and ran away, and she probably knew more than all of them about my case; but she ran fast, and I couldn’t catch her in the black alleys of the city.

  These things take time, Albert explained, his letters tucked into diplomatic bags and padded with rumours of another mystic to investigate, another mystery to explore. How do you feel about a trip to Sinai?

  I felt pretty depressed about a trip to Sinai, but if there were answers to be found among its wandering peoples or in the tumbled towers where once the hermits waited for God, into Sinai I would go – and out I would emerge three weeks later, dusty, tired and none the wiser.

  Maybe not Sinai, replied Albert to my despairing missives. Maybe my sources meant the Sahara.

  Soon I had travelled half the globe, and was ensnared in this ritual, too drained by travel and truth to question it, when in 1887 we were unexpectedly summoned home.

  Her name was Margot Halloran, and she never really knew who she loved.

  We met in Dublin, in the rain. Ireland was a mess of Britain’s making. In the north, the Unionists celebrated Queen and Church; in the south, the Catholics cried conspiracy, mayhem, rebellion. Every time Westminster failed to pass another Home Rule Bill put another stick of dynamite under the foundations of the state. Yet for all that the fires were simmering, Dublin felt as drab a place as any I had seen. Away from the tumble and belch of the port, its wide streets were illustrated by brick terraces attended by horse and carriage, butler and maid. Its buildings of state, from the pillared portico of Trinity College to the state rooms of the castle, were well appointed, without pomp or frippery, its theatres were polite, its music halls no more or no less rowdy than any in London. The churches rang with song, and though there were the usual winds of alleys and factory paths down which respectable men might not go, what rebellion was brewing felt still a thing of cigars and sherry, not blood and brimstone.