The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  There’s always Margot.

  The workers’ strikes of the 1890s weren’t as spectacular as the newspapers claimed, though the fact that there was any attempt to coordinate them at all, from the mines of Maine to the factories of the Rhine, sent a shudder through the halls of power. All the oratory of the socialists and unionists was only air against the hired Pinkerton’s and strike-breakers sent to batter the pickets into submission. But the air hummed with revolution, from the palaces of India to the collieries of Wales. And in the middle of all of it, the People’s Society dropped its blackmail like a grenade.

  The articles started in salacious local rags. The mainstream press wouldn’t print such garbage, but the farthing gazettes had no such concerns.

  Coming to the house on Tuesday last upon the recommendation of a trusted informant, our correspondent was astonished to discover Mr P. B. in a grasp of passion with two girls and one boy of some fifteen years of age. Both Mr P. B. and the boy were attired in corset, silk stockings, women’s shoes and lockets bearing the visage of Her Majesty the Queen…

  Everyone knew Mr P. B. Everyone knew his sexual inclinations. No one talked about it, and two days after the papers exposed him, Mr P. B. went to take the water cure in the Swiss mountains, and did not set foot in Britain again.

  Lord P., having returned to London for the season, brought with him a young Miss A. L. Introducing her to everyone as his niece, it is of course behoven upon this reporter to wonder how his niece came to be, given that Lord P. is an only child; and whether it is suitable for the said niece to be fitted up with private lodgings at which, our correspondent observes, Lord P. is a regular nocturnal visitor.

  Lord P. was far too important and self-assured to leave London. Only after he had paid out nearly four thousand pounds in blackmail money to the unknown informant was he quietly demoted, and put in charge of the arsenal at Woolwich.

  When I was summoned to see the colonel, I expressed some mild amusement at such things, and was astonished by his thundering roar of “For a man who knows the truth, you know nothing!”

  He was angry; more so than I’d seen him when faced with French spies or Austrian betrayals. Something profoundly true and personal in his understanding of the ordered way of things was under threat; and woe betide he who threatened the ordered way of things.

  “Blackmail,” he snarled, tossing a small sheaf of carefully type-written letters in front of me. “What you see in the papers is the very tip of it. Someone is running a vendetta against our best men!”

  My shadow was five days behind, otherwise I might have questioned what made these men our “best”. Given that our prime minister was fond of going into the East End with his britches sewn up to save the fallen women of Wapping, followed by some brisk self-flagellation, one had to wonder quite how to measure these things.

  “What do these blackmailers want?” I asked, fingering the paper edge of the letters.

  “Money, usually. Sometimes they tell a man to resign his post, or try to influence policy – policy! They call themselves ‘the People’s Society’ – utter rot. The Nineteen fear it’s cover for a foreign power, but to me this feels domestic, anarchists or some such. We shall root it out!”

  “You mean I shall root it out?”

  “Blackmail is the crudest, most criminal tool of revolution, showing just how little honour, how little respect our enemy has. The country must be run by educated men…”

  The truth of his heart, not that I need Langa near to know this, is that the colonel believes every word he says. The system has been very good to him and his friends. He has never seen a poor man or woman in the street who was not indolent before they were destitute. And if the system is broken, it is men like the colonel who shall fix it.

  (And Langa is coming, he’s coming…)

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “A certain gentleman received a letter two days ago demanding two thousand pounds. He is to hand it over at Paddington station. You will go in his place.”

  “Of course I will,” I intoned. “I’ve never seen two thousand pounds before.”

  Two thousand pounds in five-pound banknotes turned out to be remarkably heavy. Leather bag clasped in both hands, I cursed and struggled into the smoking, belching, rumbling interior of the soot-black station, coughing on coal. I wore an absurd red ascot tie, the kind of adornment that my father would have derided as the neckpiece of a weak-livered middle man with foolish aspirations. My father, having once been a middle man with aspirations, knew of what he spoke.

  Under one arm, constantly on the verge of slipping, I carried a copy of Huckleberry Finn. English society had heard the tome was crude and vulgar, and thus didn’t need to read it. My being forced to carry it for identification, along with the tie, felt like mockery.

  Under the pretence of getting the money together, my employers had delayed this encounter for two days, so now my third inconvenience, the shadow at my back, was also starting to pick at my good mood. Shoving my way through the crowds beneath the great smoke-smothered arch of the station, spun by porters

  who think on Sunday, Sunday at the ache in my hand that has not faded not faded now for five weeks too long something wrong something…

  buffeted by ladies with puffed-up mutton sleeves and scarred faces,

  she had freckles and as a child another child told her that freckles meant her mama had slept with a black man, that she wasn’t pure, wasn’t white, so she took the carbolic acid and scrubbed scrubbed scrubbed to hide her shame

  and young men in three-piece suits whose hearts yearn upon

  the great philosophers – the great philosophers! – one day he too will be a great philosopher if only he could think of something interesting to say!

  The bench where I was to wait was already occupied. A family – mother, father, two daughters, three sons – crowded over portmanteau and shoe box. The adults drooped as the five youngsters rushed and screamed and howled and clawed at each other’s hair and were, all things considered, utterly repulsive snots. I hovered, trying to find an excuse to usher them away. The baron would have a lie ready in an instant, but all I could think of was “Did you see them remove the leper’s corpse last night?”

  I stood silently a little to the left, and nudged the bag at my feet to make sure it was still there and someone hadn’t managed to whisk a small fortune in banknotes from under my running nose, and squinted through the smoke at the shadows of men and women about their business. The place was near the great black engine of the train. They would come, I realised, at the moment of its departure, when the coal furnace would be stoked to the height and billows of smoke would obscure even the eyes of the keenest watchers. It was a good time to stab me in the back and rob me blind; I wondered if I’d even feel the knife.

  I thought of running, and knew I wouldn’t. The Nineteen had trained me like a dancing bear. Langa would come, and I would stand my ground. Death would come, and mute and dumb I would look it in the eye and at the final moment shrug and say, “I couldn’t think of anything better.”

  I closed my eyes, and waited. Let the knowing of other people’s hearts wash over me, let their truths be my truths, drowning my thoughts. Easier to live in other people than be myself; thank you, Langa, for that gift.

  He knows he’s let his father down should have been someone but isn’t not really just an average man with an average job a betrayal of his education…

  Married too young. Married too young. Thought she knew what love was, but married too young.

  She said, “Is that my money?”

  Two truth-speakers meet, in the smoke of Paddington station, and there is rarely need for words. She wore blue and white stripes, a bonnet that bloomed around her head like a cotton bud, tight black leather shoes that pinched her feet, and a smile. Behind her, a man, half recognised from a midnight alley in Dublin, all curly mahogany hair, eyes sunk low beneath rolling brows, chin a little too broad for his tight-pursed mouth, thin neck above stoopi
ng shoulders. He hated me instinctively, had arrived ready to hate me, the agent of imperialism. She had little time for hate; she knew too much of men’s hearts.

  Margot, smiling as if we were the oldest friends.

  Her soul is warm amber, hard as time. She loves the colour yellow. The painters of Europe have only just discovered the cheapest way to make this brightest pigment shine, and now it is the colour of life, danger, a new way of seeing the sun.

  She learnt French to sound sophisticated, and speaks it terribly.

  Her shadow is near enough for her to know the truth of my heart, but far enough that she can smile as she lies.

  And she sees me.

  She sees me.

  Langa comes, and she sees me, and smiles.

  And to my surprise, I smile back. Smiling to see my enemy; delighting in the delight of her heart, unsure where her joy at this encounter ended and mine began. The man beside her twitched, moved forward, one hand heading into the pocket of his cord waistcoat, but she put a hand on his arm, holding him back. She could stand here all day watching herself being watched in my heart, but there is business to be done.

  Briskly: “Followed?”

  I nodded.

  “He’ll take the money and run. Will they go after him?”

  “Yes. It will be embarrassing for me on a professional level if you get away with two thousand of Her Majesty’s dirtiest pounds. Margot…”

  “We can’t have you embarrassed on a professional level, can we?”

  “I didn’t think it would be you.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you. My colleague will take the money now.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind bungling your escape…?” I suggested, lifting the case higher, fingering the catches. “Within reason, of course. Two thousand pounds is a lot to lose on the job.”

  Her eyes didn’t leave mine as she addressed the man by her side. “Coman,” she murmured. “Be a dear and take William’s money.”

  “William?”

  “This gentleman is William Abbey, agent of Her Majesty’s most secret, most potent intelligence service. You may recall striking him repeatedly in Dublin. Take the money, run, and when the police draw a little too near, open the case and spill its contents in the street. That will slow down even the most dedicated enforcers, feed a few poor and allow you to escape with ease.”

  “This is—”

  “Peadar, please.”

  For a moment, he thought of refusing her order. Any other man would have. But the man called Peadar Coman had seen Margot perform miracles. He knew her to be blessed, not cursed; to have a wisdom that exceeded that of all men and all women. And even then, in his own way, his trust was beginning to bloom into something more, so his hesitation passed, and he stepped forward, unsure if he should stab or thank me.

  “With the whistle,” mused Margot, and for a moment longer the three of us stood there, smothered in the bustle of the station, until the whistle of the great train blew, belching smoke, shrouding us in a blackening, choking cloud of hot dust. Coman grabbed the case from my hands and was running down the platform in a moment. Margot hooked her arm in mine at the same instant, spun me the other way, marching for the gate to the porters’ bay, into the mass of cargo boxes and trunks, of stacked cases and lost property waiting for transfer to the cart, the canal or the warehouse. I heard a police whistle cut through the chugging of the train as it began to pull away, glanced back but was immediately pulled along by Margot, who had walked this way before, mapped out every turn of the station before coming here, prepared as I should have done, if I were a proper spy.

  In a forest of crates and portmanteaus, of suitcases lashed together with leather straps and trolleys buckling under their load, we scampered from the shadow of one tower of trunkage to another, sometimes stopping for Margot to listen, to glance to the left, to the right, then grab me by the hand and pull me quickly on. A pair of porters rattled behind us, an old man with a stinking pipe, and a boy little more than thirteen years old dressed in trousers too big for him that he would never grow into, hauling post sacks on their backs. Margot waited for them to pass, then broke into a half-trot, half-run, barrelled up a ramp towards a man in a flat black cap and exclaimed, “Afternoon!” as if we were the most common, natural sight in the world, shouldering the gate open beside him with a delighted smile and pulling me into the shadowed road beyond. At the top, where light broke through the domed, soot-black arch that shielded us from the sun, carriages and omnibuses clattered and clacked, old nags and broken bays shuddering, heads down through the day. Around us, post wagons and cargo carts waited in a straw-chewed, shit-slewed mess of cobble and bustling men, through which Margot marched as if she were queen of them all. A single carriage waited at the top of the mass, a heavy dent on one side, the wood splintered and not yet sanded back, the driver shrouded in hat and cloak. She knocked twice on the door as if for good luck, heaved it back and pushed me inside.

  Once within, the carriage pulled away in an instant, blinds down and doors locked, the whole affair perhaps less than twenty seconds from the blowing of the whistle to what I supposed I would have to tell my employers was a terrible kidnapping.

  She fussed to arrange a great volume of skirt in a small den of seating, the shuttered space smelling of leather and other people’s sweat, our knees pressed tight to the bench, and then, with the light of day obscured down to a fabricked orange glow, she let out a breath, beamed, pulled the bonnet from her head, rattled her fingers through her hair, sat back and exclaimed, “So, William, how have you been?”

  Chapter 39

  This is the story of Margot Halloran, gleaned from the deepest recesses of her heart.

  She was born by the sea, on a night of storms. There were more women than men in the village where she was born, and more empty houses than full. The men had all left in the famine, and promised to send to their sisters and their wives from America, and never been heard of again.

  Her mother swore that they were of Romani blood, but the last four generations or more of Hallorans had gone to church, and sworn on the Bible, and thanked Jesus for what little they had, and even though their women were strong, clever and wise, these days they were hardly ever called witches.

  Margot should have been raised a romantic, but her father died at sea and her mother died bringing her youngest brother into the world, and so, as Carmine had been to me, so Margot became to her nine younger siblings – a mother they didn’t have.

  To live, the youngest were set to stealing, but that wasn’t enough, and the law cared nothing for the age of children. Her ten-year-old brother was sentenced to hard labour for larceny; her fourteen-year-old sister was put to unpaid service with the Sisters of Mercy after the pregnancy started to show, the child taken for who knew what destination. Boredom was as much a burden as poverty, and it was, she felt sure, boredom that made her brother take to hitting her the moment he was bigger than she.

  She met Eyre when bringing laundry to the big house on the cliff. He was nineteen; she was eighteen. He was beautiful, in his way; she was beautiful by all the measures of the time. He didn’t promise her money, or freedom, or marriage. He didn’t need to promise any such things. He took an interest in her, and laughed when she laughed, and smiled when she smiled, and this was the greatest human connection she had experienced in… she didn’t know how long.

  She didn’t ask him to pay for sex. It didn’t occur to her that this was the nature of their transaction. He enjoyed her for a while, then went back to college without a word, and never thought of her again.

  When the baby showed, she lost her job.

  The nuns told her she was a sinful little witch.

  The priests urged her to confess.

  Her siblings could not support her, and were already going their different ways, torn apart by money and law.

  In the end, she went to her aunt, who she had always been told was a wicked woman, and who fed crows and wore men’s boots and fished from black rocks and
never sang the songs the women were meant to sing. And her aunt was not, in fact, a wicked woman, but tutted and sighed and told Margot to sit by the fire and demanded, “What skills do you have?” and Margot snapped, leaning back against the weight of her own belly, “Cooking, cleaning, stealing and whoring.”

  “I hope you’re a better cook than whore,” was the reply.

  It was only the two of them there when Doireann was born. The girl looked too much like her father, but Margot found that she loved her all the same, and had no idea where such a foolish sentiment had come from.

  By day she helped her aunt plant and harvest the vegetables from the patch behind the cottage, and fish and set snares for rabbits, Doireann on her back. And on a Friday her aunt would take the child from her, bid Margot brush her hair and put on her brightest whoring smile, and go into town to sell whatever surplus they had, proclaiming, “They know I’m a witch, but don’t yet know what you are.”

  When she came home, and Doireann was fed, Margot would sit by her aunt’s side as the old woman told her of secret remedies and herbs, of the old ways of healing and the powers of certain stones. Sometimes women would come to her for help, always at night, always with faces shrouded from the sight of men, and she would slap tinctures on their warts and unguents on their blisters and exclaim, “Apply this for three days, say your prayers to the Virgin Mary, do not look east more than is necessary… and get plenty of fresh air and walking.”

  Even witches of the Irish Sea have certain commonalities with modern medicine.

  Some secrets that Margot learnt were not so savoury. Most were nonsense. At least one was not.

  When the end came, there was no warning. No one had told the Halloran family that the land they lived on was anyone’s but their own. No one invited them to court to state their claim, or establish ownership of that which had been theirs since birth. No one was interested in hearing their appeal. The bailiffs simply came to their door, already armed with hook and truncheon, and told them that they were trespassers on a great gentleman’s property, and had to leave at once.