The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  “I have lived here all my life, this is my land!” hollered the aunt.

  “Then you have trespassed all your life,” was the reply.

  Still the old woman refused, standing in the door, fingers dug into the frame, back straight, glaring at all who came near her. So fearful was her reputation and so ferocious her gaze that no one wanted to be the first to strike, but in the end the oldest, most senior of the men, sensing perhaps that his authority was waning a little, stepped forward and smashed the old woman around the head with his cudgel. Then they marched over her crumpled form and proceeded to burn her house to the ground.

  The initial blow didn’t kill her outright. Margot’s aunt lingered on for eight more days, as the slow, untreated bleed in her brain stole first her hearing, then her speech, then her sight, then her ability to chew, and finally her breath. She had been taken to the workhouse, but Margot was not allowed to sit with her as she died, for she had to pay her and her daughter’s way in that place, and slackers were sinners in the eyes of Jesus.

  Doireann died three weeks later, from workhouse typhus. This time, Margot was with her, holding her tiny body close as the child faded in her arms. And this time, with the gaze of mighty men looking down upon her as stone from the high balcony where the masters ate, with the women walking silently by, too broken down to lift their gazes to a mother’s grief, this time Margot put her fingers on her child’s lips and spoke the secret knowledge her aunt had given her, and from the body of her dead daughter brought forth the shadow of the only one she could ever love, the bringer of truth, blood of her blood, so that they might be together for ever more.

  Her daughter was not her curse. The shadow that followed Margot from that place was her beloved, her blessing, a spirit of truth come to bring down powerful men from their great places. Doireann was her freedom, her redemption and her forgiveness, and with her at her back, no one would ever make Margot grieve, or love, ever again.

  Chapter 40

  In a carriage stuck in traffic in the streets of London, Margot and I listen to the truths of each other’s souls and are, perhaps, surprised by what we find there.

  “Well,” she muses at last.

  “Quite,” I concur.

  “You are a terrible spy, Dr Abbey.”

  “I’m not convinced that you are the world’s greatest blackmailer.”

  A half-shrug. “I’ve fallen in with some people. They have ideas.”

  “What sort of ideas?”

  “Oh, social justice, revolution, votes for all – well, all men. Sometimes I remind them about women too, but they say we shouldn’t be unrealistic with our ambitions. Some of them are rich boys playing at being poor because it makes them feel moral. Some are poor men who found Engels when God stopped answering their prayers. A few are thieves and crooks. One is an agent of the Russians, sent to sow discord; another is French, sent to do much the same but far less effectively, and isn’t sure if promoting anarchy is going to be helpful for anyone in the long run. Many are just looking for something to believe in, and hear in the words of the People’s Society whatever it is they need to have hope again.”

  “They sound… thoroughly frustrating.”

  Her face flickered with a smile, smaller yet perhaps truer than the glimmer of delight I associated with her features. “They can be. They’ll be excited to know that the British have sent their very own pet truth-speaker to glean the truths of their hearts.”

  “I think my masters will be less thrilled to hear that their rivals have a truth-speaker of their own.”

  Her eyes flickered for a moment, then she looked away, as if she could stare straight through the blinds of the coach and into the outside world. “Will you tell them?”

  “I don’t know. I have to tell them something. They sent me to learn the truth.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I… honestly don’t know. To be free of it all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my shadow makes me the villain,” I replied simply, and was surprised to discover that it was the truth. “What I do and who I am makes me ashamed, and I would be done with the whole thing.”

  Her head turned back slowly, as if taking in some scenic view, and I wondered how much closer her shadow was than mine, and whether the truth was on the tip of her tongue, waiting to spill. “William,” she chided. “If you were not this, then I do not think you would be anyone at all. What you have is a gift. One you did not earn well, but still a gift. A kindness in revelation. Truth. How much is this world bettered by truth, by honest knowing? How many people have perished in pain, for the simple want of that?”

  Somewhere in Ireland is her daughter’s grave, and she knows that the child’s father is doing very well for himself, thank you, and thinks that one day she will remedy this fact.

  “You are blessed,” she declared, eyes focused now somewhere past my head, on a distant place in her heart, not mine. “You walk the songlines.”

  A little piece of another world, a snatch of someone else’s stories. She too had travelled, and listened to the call to prayers from the highest towers, sought out the wise men of the sands, imbibed far too much rum with the medicine women by the low dawn fires, and perhaps in doing so she had come to believe, with all her heart, in the truth of what she said. It is good for a truth-speaker to believe in something, I think. I’ve never quite mastered the trick of it.

  “I could join you,” I blurted. “Run from the Nineteen. Even revolutionaries need a doctor.”

  Her smile twisted down, an immediate no, a kind rejection. “And how long do you think it would take the Nineteen to find you? You are a precious gift to them – a polite white man they can put in rooms with other white men. No woman or sage whose skin is even a shimmer darker than old milk can do the same. They’d hunt you down, and they’d destroy my people in the process. No, William. You can run, but not to me.”

  “Then what do we do now?” I stammered, trying to hide the hurt even as she saw it ripple through my soul. “What now?”

  “How would you feel about betraying your government, your queen and your country?” she mused.

  I thought about it for barely a moment, then replied, “Will you help me find a cure?”

  “Why would you want one?” An honest answer. I put my head on one side, let her read the truth of it from my heart. She sighed, shook her head, did not approve, then held out her hand. “If you will be our inside man in the secret halls of power, William Abbey, then as the daughter of witches I swear I will help you find your cure, foolish though it be.”

  I shook her hand, and let the truth of her soul run through me as I did. “Socialism, liberty and votes for all, you say?”

  This time, her smile was sunlight at the parting of clouds.

  Chapter 41

  Margot and I, we spent years chasing each other’s shadow.

  In 1893, after nearly a decade of trying to find a little piece of redemption, I turned traitor, and it was the greatest thing I had ever done.

  Later, I would fully appreciate just how little Margot trusted me.

  She revealed nothing of her intentions, her hopes or her truth. With laughter in her voice she patted me on the shoulder and told me it would all be fine, and asked what did I know about secret inks. I knew more about secret inks than I’d expected, and so she gave me the addresses of three reputable-sounding people around the world to whom I could write, by which I might betray my country.

  “What would you like to know?” I asked earnestly.

  “Anything at all! It’s all of great interest to the People’s Society.”

  Sometimes I wrote nonsense; rambling missives regarding my travels and exploits. Sometimes I handed over precise, detailed intelligence: names of people to be arrested, the shape of investigations, new warrants or counter-intelligence operations against the revolutionaries of the world.

  Only occasionally did I feel a flicker of guilt, as in handing over the name of an undercover policeman set to
spy on a circle of socialists, but no no, she assured me, fear not. None of these people will come to harm. They just won’t come to truth either. I never knew if she lied. The question was never important to her heart, and I never asked.

  I very rarely got a reply, left in dead drops in libraries and little corners of obscure social clubs. When I did, it ranged from the blunt “thank you for your work” through to more detailed requests for information on my colleagues, masters and ministers.

  It was a weak system, at first. I could go months without making contact. Gradually, we refined it. In Berlin, I frequented a certain café where I was to accidentally leave a letter for Tante Hilde by the potted fir tree. In Paris, a lecture hall where I sometimes attended talks on vaccinations and infectious disease offered a diabolically uncomfortable set of benches, beneath which missives to one “Dr Giles” could go astray.

  In New York, I found a reproachful note waiting for me in Central Park, chiding me for having talked too long and too personally in my last missive, and to keep things to business, lest someone catch wind of what we were about.

  In Hong Kong, a girl with bare feet and strange, wide grey eyes came begging whenever we were passing through, and usually I gave her a few coins, and sometimes I gave her a tiny, folded slip of paper with my latest news, and sometimes received a tiny scrap of paper in reply.

  In this way, a little at a time, haphazard and chaotic, I betrayed my nation, and felt for the first time in a very long while free.

  First, I had to face my employers.

  “A woman? Kidnapped you?” demanded the colonel.

  “Yes. With a gun.”

  “A woman with a gun?!” Truly, what had civilisation come to?

  “What did you learn of her heart?” asked Albert, always the more level-headed of my masters.

  “She’s a suffragette, and a socialist. She believes passionately in rights for all, in political freedom, and doesn’t think it will be granted without turning to crime, maybe even violence.”

  “Her name?”

  “Mary. I didn’t get the rest.”

  “And why did she kidnap you?”

  “To send you a message. She wants you to know that revolution is coming. She wants the government to take the People’s Society seriously; to respect and fear the power of the masses. She’s a believer. I’ve rarely met someone who believes so much.”

  Believers – could anything cause more outrage? The colonel huffed and puffed and hummed and hawed, and Albert said nothing and smiled politely, and on my way I was sent, round and round, leaving the truth far behind.

  Chapter 42

  Back round the world.

  The indiscretions of generals in Bavaria, the corruption of Hungarian princelings, the ambitions of fresh-minted Italian politicians and the secret dealings of French traders out to make a packet. We spun from truth to truth, mining the shallow, pathetic vanities of men’s hearts, picking apart ego and pompous self-deceit, the fragile, futile pillars on which the so-called “happiness” of the great and the good was constructed. Lies, threaded so deeply into the veins of men. Here, the husband who was never so happy as when he beat his wife, because in work he was a maggot, a mouse, looked down on by all, but at home, when he clenched his fist, he was glory, he was fire, he was the master of his tiny, bloody universe.

  Here, the sexual conqueror; the more they screamed the better he felt, because he was in charge, he liked the way other people were disgusted by his fluids, his bodily fluids, he liked the way they tried to clean him off, knowing he went deep.

  The missionary, who whipped himself for finding African women beautiful; the slave-seller from Mali who couldn’t believe how well men paid for children; the soldier who knew he had to shoot first, because war was inevitable, and if he shot first it was because the other side were evil and were about to shoot first themselves. Someone always had to shoot first. That didn’t make them wrong. From the tiniest grudge to the great sweep of armies across the field, no one is ever wrong, until enough blood has been spilt and enough voices raised in pain that the pillars of their deceit crack, and all that is left is brutal, arctic truth.

  The truth that they all know in their hearts, deep below the surface.

  That they lie to themselves.

  That they deceive in order to pretend that they are right, and they are happy.

  That the values they use to say that they are good and great are nothing but a laugh twinkling in God’s eye, and all their vaulting, self-important noise will blow to dusty silence in the end.

  Everyone lies, Sister.

  Sometimes they lie to others, but mostly they lie to themselves. Even the best of men – sometimes, I think, especially the best of men – lie.

  It is how they get through the day. It is the gift that makes beauty possible. It is why we are in this godforsaken war. It is the truth of men’s hearts. It is the truth of my heart too.

  I also lied. Perhaps I’ve always been a traitor, in some way or another.

  And so the years passed.

  Albert was, in his way, sometimes honest. He never gave up looking for a cure.

  Visiting him in London – never with my shadow near – he and I would visit mesmers, hoodwinkers, card readers and scholars of magnetism to see if any of them might have something to say about my condition.

  “I see that you are often afraid,” offered a woman in Enfield who claimed descent from an Aztec priestess. She smoked constantly from a clay pipe, hacking up yellow and black spittle that ran from the corner of her mouth in between her pronouncements.

  “Have you ever lost someone close to you?” mused a man in Tonbridge who had studied galvanism and the anatomy of the toad and had concluded through his labours that the “other side” could be reached through the vibrations of certain crystals.

  “You are cursed!” pronounced a woman from Chelmsford, whose words stirred the briefest tingle of excitement in myself and Albert until, sending in Mrs Parr a few days later to double-check the powers of this wonder, she too was informed that she was cursed, and the matter could only be remedied with large sums of cash.

  “I don’t know whether to be relieved that so much is bunk,” mused Albert as we returned from yet another of our jaunts, “or to wonder what it was that England has lost through all that it has gained.” At my raised eyebrow, he threw his hands up, an unopened newspaper in his lap and hat forgotten on the rack above us. “I am not saying I yearn after any sort of naïve, romantic vision of a mystical England, or that I would be surprised to find that Merlin was skilled at open-ended questions or had a certain knack for predicting the weather; yet here you are, living proof that there is something our science hasn’t yet penetrated. It is so unspeakably frustrating to be able to see the symptoms, know the nature of the disease, and yet to lack the tools to say that this is what it is, that it was born of such and such or can be measured in such and such a way.”

  “I worked in a hospital,” I chided. “I know precisely how frustrating it is.”

  At this, a slightly sad smile tugged the corners of his lips. “You know,” he murmured, “I do sometimes envy you. ‘Knowing’ and ‘truth’. They are the two cornerstones of man’s existence. Philosophers have picked at their meaning for millennia, of course, but when you strip away the airy-fairy rot about existence or the soul, you have to return to this simplest truth: that mankind loves to be sure. To know. We cling to the most irrational truths like cornerstones in the houses of our lives. My father, for example, claimed until the day he died that you could cure a fever by rubbing fresh baby’s urine into your skull. Naturally I could present him with all sorts of arguments and evidence to prove him wrong. I could convince him of the validity of hypothesis, method, elimination. But he had spent so much of his life insisting that he was right that to admit he was wrong then would have been to raise the terrible shadow of what else he was wrong about. A strong man can’t be wrong. A father can’t be wrong. It is against what he needs to be; what he thinks his childr
en need him to be. And so he was right; he had his truth. Stinking of pee, but happy.

  “Now I often believe that the excitement of my profession – of yours perhaps too, as a medical man – is how much I don’t know. How much there is to know. I have very few truths in my heart, other than that I think, and I believe the methods I work by are the clearest and most effective ways to achieve clarity, and that I strive to be a good man. I may not always achieve this, but I try, within the moral framework by which I currently define ‘good’. Yet even these have about them a certain emotional… power. Emotional truth, if you will, a thing that stands entirely separate from the function of test and calculation, and that gives me a warm and contented feeling inside. I am pleased with who I am. I hold up some image of myself to the light and, as I see it, I find it satisfactory. And this satisfaction is, if we look at it too closely, built of no more firm stuff than my father’s conviction in the power of piss. Yet if you should take it away from me, remove my truth… how brutal would this world then seem. To serve a flag, a piece of tattered cloth, rather than an idea of Britain. To strive to find answers to questions that may never be solved, my life’s work just shouting into the storm. To make money for no better reason than to eat, sleep, die. To see in the sky only endless emptiness that will survive humanity by a million years, to feel in earth only dirt, to be deprived of those ideas that we swathe ourselves in to make of reality something better, something… true. That we know. As sure as we know that tomorrow the sun will rise and in the evening it will set. A thing we do not know at all, save that there is some experiential evidence to this effect; but not a truth at all. Not in the strictest sense of the thing. Without knowing, without this conviction, we are thoroughly damned.”