The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  I listened to all this very carefully, and managed throughout not to shout, or laugh, or let the shaking of my soul manifest in my hands or mouth. Then, when he seemed to have nothing more to say and I thought I could speak without mangling every word on my tongue, I said, “I know the truth of men’s hearts, and what I know is that they are right, every single one of them. They live within the power of their own rightness, and anyone who disagrees with them can only be wrong, and being wrong, they are therefore less. That is what I know, and it terrifies me.”

  We sat in the compartment in silence for a while. The stations along the route were hung with summer flowering baskets, and children stood on the bridges above the track to wave at the driver as we chugged below. It was a little cutting of England to put on a postcard, as far removed from the crippled wounds of Whitechapel or the docks of Liverpool as a desert from the river.

  Finally Albert said, “When did you last see your family?”

  The question surprised me, made my fingers clench into fists before I even noticed it, and perhaps I had spent too long with Langa’s company, for I was not used to being surprised.

  I blurted: “A long time ago. Why?”

  “A man should have a home. A man should have… certain truths. I think that is most essential. It offers a certain conviction.”

  “My family hasn’t been home for a very long time.”

  “No. No. Of course not. It would be… I know it is frightening for you to feel… affection. Sentiment. By loving someone, you naturally endanger them. But I believe that you and I have a professional respect, a courtesy perhaps…” Here he stopped, and I had never before seen him struggle with an idea, let alone expressing it. “I am, of course, frightened of you – naturally I am. Oh, not of you. But of your affliction. If the colonel appears… it is because he too is terrified of you having any sort of sentiment. I tell him the notion is laughable; neither he nor I is worth your affection. And yet, humans have always wanted friendship. You are no different, and I… have put a great deal of my value, my self-truth, upon the notion of being a good man. If that endangers me, then…”

  Again he stopped, stumbling over the words.

  What would I have seen if the shadow had been upon me?

  As well as the truth of his heart, perhaps I would have seen a genuine kindness. These things are never absolute.

  “We all take risks,” he concluded. “For one reason or another.”

  It was the closest he ever came to admitting that we were friends, and at the time I thought it was the bravest thing I had ever heard.

  I did see my family again – or at least, parts of it.

  The Nineteen informed me that my father was ill, and to his bed I went, and he blinked at me suspiciously and muttered, “Oh… you. Didn’t think I’d see you. Well; tell me about your affairs.”

  I lied, and told him I was rich. I didn’t say how, or what possible relevance my wealth had to my profession, and he didn’t much care. He was satisfied, and summed the experience up with a brisk “That will do,” and was dead a week later.

  He died angry, in his brother’s house in Kettering. Edward and Andrew had plucked the business from him, and in a sense he admired them for that. They were every bit as ruthless and determined as he had bred them to be, and though he was the final victim of their ambition, at least he knew the business would be in good hands. Yet from being a great potentate in a little world, he was overnight a doddering, boring old man. No one who mattered at all, and that was what really killed him.

  I would like to say that the truth of his heart was that he loved me.

  Regrettably, he loved only the idea of sons. Sons were correct, worthy, and it was his duty to love them. The reality of humans, whole and true, was far more messy than he was willing to engage with.

  My mother outlived my father, and on his death made a remarkably swift recovery from her endless maladies, aided no doubt by a move to a town in Norfolk, where she took up work for the local council and discovered, in doing so, that she was in fact capable of more than childbirth. We wrote occasionally, and I lied to her by omission, and visited when I could, and she secretly wrote mildly erotic letters to the vicar, who wrote letters of such poorly imagined sexual depravity in reply that it would put a rabbit off mating in spring, and they never kissed, and were remarkably happy.

  Edward is still alive, running Father’s business in London. He had two sons, who died within days of each other in the first weeks of the war, and he doesn’t understand the idea of leaving a man’s affairs in the hands of his surviving daughter. It’ll be broken up when he dies, and I will not regret its end.

  I suppose it was easy for Albert to become family; my true family. His wife, Flora, eleven years younger than he, dressed in the garb of a woman some fifteen years older - voluminous skirts and yellow hair beneath a starched white bonnet. She held out a gloved hand to welcome me to their home and served cold meats and over-boiled vegetables, talked about the rights of Catholics and the latest fashions on the London stage, and said she was proud to have married a scientist. Then Albert would hold forth on the difficulty of preserving bodies and the science of the brain, and when I suggested that we had plenty of brains, plenty of scalpels, plenty of microscopes and still not a damn jot of science, he pursed his lips and hummed and hawed and pretended he wasn’t annoyed by this particular truth.

  He was no baron; he could not abide to see me when Langa was near. Yet every time I visited London with my shadow far behind, they invited me to visit in their small, neat home in Richmond, and we would eat bad food kindly made and I would practise French with Flora and pontificating with Albert, and feel, for a little while, like I had a home.

  I was there when in 1900 Flora finally gave birth to the child she so desperately wanted. Little Richard Wilson, born late and ridiculously large, given to bawling unless he was fed or rocked constantly; the apple of his mother’s eye, a creature to love and dote on while her husband continued to politely kiss her on the cheek and marvel at how strong a baby’s hand could be.

  Richard Wilson, son of the professor and his wife.

  He was fourteen years old when this war broke out, and wanted to enlist immediately. When he turned fifteen, he tried to sign up again, and was caught, and his father sent him to the countryside to work on his uncle’s farm, in the hope that the lad would feel he was at least doing some sort of honest labour. Two months before he turned sixteen, he finally made it into the ranks under a false name – Richard Charlwood – and was shipped to France within the month. His mother is probably proud, even though she is terribly, terribly afraid.

  I don’t know whether I will curse the son and kill the father, or curse the father and let him watch his son die. I am still weighing my options in that regard.

  Chapter 43

  I was not the only one spinning round the world.

  A year after Margot vanished from Paddington station, the People’s Society were implicated in riots in Paris; but then the working people of Paris had always been inclined to radical ideas, tutted the colonel, and the French had never known how to keep these things in order.

  Six months after that, the Society was blamed for a spate of resignations and sudden departures for prolonged yachting trips among the gentry of northern Italy; three weeks after that, Pinkerton informed Scotland Yard that they suspected the Society of having swayed a senator in New Jersey over a matter of certain improprieties, inappropriately learnt.

  Margot was up to her old tricks, peeking above the parapet again, and I followed her every move with fascination from afar, and kept her always one step ahead of the law, and wondered if I would see her again for more than the briefest exchange of coded messages, and was bitterly disappointed when I did not.

  Then there was Vienna.

  We came to Vienna in the winter of 1895. Few courts of Europe had the bombast of the Austrians; even the Russians had more savour in their pomposity, relishing the grandeur of their pageants, whereas the Austr
ians claimed to have been performing their pronouncements and endless, tedious duties since the age of Charlemagne. I had no time for it, but the baron was in his element, for he loved nothing more than a duel of grandiloquence.

  He was also dying. There was no escaping the truth of it by then, and though we should have written to the Nineteen weeks ago and requested his transfer home, Mrs Parr and I had concluded mutually that the only thing more likely to kill him than time and pneumonia would be enforced retirement.

  I had spent so much time with the truth of his heart, and had no doubt of it. There had been a moment, aged twenty-three, when he had been discharged from his commission with the cavalry after having a seizure on the parade grounds. He’d only ever had one seizure in his life preceding, when as a three-year-old boy he nearly died from the measles; he’d only ever have one after, when aged forty-eight he was taken with a parasitical worm that crawled into his feet through the bare sand of Siam. But even one seizure was one too far, and announcing briskly in his papers that he was “crippled – beyond medical use”, he found himself stuck in St James’s Park in the pouring rain, shaking with rage and indignity, and swore never to leave the parade ground ever again. Since then, his every moment had been spent carving a podium for himself from which not infirmity, general, minister or God himself might dislodge the baron’s essential, inescapable value. Death was kinder than to take away the truth he had made of himself.

  “Just a sniffle,” he would mutter as his eyes sank deeper into his skull and every breath came in a rattle. “Just a bit peaky!”

  And in his heart, he was terrified, and he hoped he would die alone, no one to see his end, and couldn’t bear for us to leave him behind.

  Yet the Nineteen still had orders, which must be obeyed. I waited for Langa to draw near, ready to write reports on princes and princelings with as much interest as if I were a fishmonger scraping scales, and at night I sat with the baron and read him the newspapers, and wondered if he would die tonight, or tomorrow, or next month, or next year, and didn’t know the answer, merely that the only thing left to do for however long he had left to do in it was die.

  When the woman in the blue skirt and white shawl knocked on my door, it was both a terrible imposition and a dreadful relief.

  “You doctor?” she demanded, lips blue from the cold. “English doctor?”

  “Um, I suppose…”

  “Doir-e-ann very ill. You must come now!”

  She struggled to say “Doireann”, sounds unfamiliar on her tongue. Margot’s child, buried beneath a crooked beech tree somewhere in southern Ireland. My heart stuck in my throat. “I’ll come at once.”

  Snow was falling heavily from a bruised purple sky, muffling all sound and life in the city save for the jingling of horses’ bells. The baron was sleeping, wheezing and swaddled in his bed. Mrs Parr sat dozing by the fire. I woke neither as I slipped into the dark. Shuffling through ankle-deep fresh fallen snow, slipping over frozen horse piss and cobbles turned to blackened sheet ice, I followed the woman in the shawl through lung-locking cold, not sure if I’d ever be able to find my way back. The grandeur of the centre of the city rolled down to ever shorter houses, the parade of Habsburg monuments to this emperor or that triumph breaking down now to scratchy crucifixes and low, bolted black doors. Sometimes a carriage emerged, slipping and sliding, through the falling ice. Sometimes a man tripped and cursed, far, far away, and probably right next to where I walked. My trousers began to seep through, damp and frozen, frost crawling up towards my knees. I shivered and panted, lips turning blue, and still the woman tutted, “Come, come come!”

  The street she led me to was perfectly polite, in its way. In summer, boxes of flowers might have bloomed in the windowsills, and the neighbours all kept a servant upstairs and a clean pantry below. Through one, the woman took me to a room adorned with cross-stitched figures of mortified saints, withered purple posies in dusty white-blue vases, and there, swathed in blankets and furs, head towards the fire: Margot.

  “Hello, William,” she said, as the door closed behind me. “Take your shoes off; dry those socks by the fire.”

  Since London, we had almost never met, and I had wondered about her, dreamt about her, not even known what to call the tumult of my thoughts and fantasies. Now there she was, huddling against an orange glow, consumed beneath the weight of blankets, smiling, eyes bright, laughing at my fluster as I struggled, undignified, into the great armchair opposite hers.

  “For God’s sake,” she barked, when I fidgeted and fumbled at the bag in my lap, “Just take your socks off and get comfortable. Do you think I care if you have hairy feet?”

  I took my shoes and socks off, wiggled my toes by the fire, and even that was a stranger intimacy with a woman than I was used to.

  “How have you been, in yourself, William?” she asked at last, watching me.

  I shrugged. “It all continues as it always does.”

  “Langa?”

  The awareness that for the first time we were meeting and my shadow was nowhere to be found made me shuffle a little lower in my chair as I mumbled, “Ten days away, at least. There’s talk of revolts in the Balkans, and unrest in Russia. The Austrians are hoping the tsar has enough problems at home to keep him occupied, and the tsar is hoping the Austrians have enough problems in Serbia and Bulgaria to keep them busy.”

  “I imagine it makes them feel like big men, to have such big problems to worry about. Why do the British care, or does it just make them feel sizeable in the trouser region to swagger around?”

  To my surprise, I blushed. I have spent a large part of my life dusting the nether regions of infected individuals with an array of powders and poultices, but to hear the sweep of global politics reduced to pissing up the wall was briskly unsettling for me. My answer was a pink-cheeked mumble delivered to the flames. “We want the Russians weak, but we don’t want the Austrians too strong. We need the Ottoman sultanate to remain stable enough to keep on paying its debts and legitimising our occupation of Suez, so that the trade routes remain open. An Austrian resurgence might threaten that status quo, or worse, allow the Germans to move in and…” She laughed, high and sharp, and I stopped, strangely embarrassed. “I’m… sorry. This is my job.”

  “No, no! I didn’t mean to laugh. Peadar, the Society – they see everything as a struggle for the working man to be free. Everything the great men of Vienna do is seen as a personal assault on the freedoms of ordinary men, but I try to tell them – it has nothing to do with you, or me, or anyone you’d meet in the street. We don’t even register. If they go to war, it is not men that are going to be fighting. It is Austria. It is this idea that is Austria. There is nothing about man or woman within that, at all. We are not in the calculations of great men.”

  “When you say ‘we’, does that include you?”

  A dismissive wave of the hand. “I have drunk the cup of revolution too long now to drink anything else, even if I sometimes just want a shandy. There are arrest warrants for me in every country of the civilised world, as far as I can tell. Peadar says that’s a sign we must be doing something right.”

  “Peadar… the overprotective gentleman with the fists?”

  A brief nod, a slightly apologetic smile. “He thinks I’m magic.”

  “Magic? Literally or metaphorically?”

  “A bit of both; can’t it be a bit of both, William? He’s a believer. Sometimes he believes so hard that I forget what I think. The lines, when the truth is on me, the gap between his heart and mine – it can be difficult, you know?”

  “I… have some familiarity with it.”

  “I sometimes think it would have been easier to meet a dashing rogue, or a wealthy libertine. I could have believed in doing nothing at all then, except travel and wine. Would have been much easier.”

  “Don’t you believe anything for yourself?”

  “Do you?” she retorted, eyebrow flicking. “I find knowing how strongly and how deeply people believe in their own pers
onal little truths, their deep certainties and fantastical lies makes it hard for me to give much credence to anything at all these days.” I looked down at my soggy socks, wiggled my toes towards the fire, said nothing. Her face softened a little, and leaning out she brushed my knee with her hand, a strange intimacy entirely alien to any women I’d known. “Thank you for your letters.”

  “I hope they’ve been useful.”

  “Very. And I appreciate the danger you put yourself in.”

  “Sometimes, believing nothing… is harder than believing in even a flawed idea.”

  “You think the People’s Society is flawed?” She laughed before I could reply, backpedal over my words. “You’re right. Of course you are. But if truth-speaking is good for anything, it should be good for giving the silent truths a voice, no?”

  “That’s… probably what I’d like written on my tombstone.”

  “A terrible epitaph for a spy.”

  “As you say: I am a terrible spy.”

  Another laugh, and now I wished Langa were near, yearned for him with every fibre of my being, longed to know what was in her heart. Now she talked, chatted away as if we were the oldest of friends, above revolutions and pamphlets, bickering among the committees – how could even revolutions have bickering committees? – about blackmail and funds, how she hated a wet winter and would rather have snow, and whether this absurd “zipper” thing would really catch on in clothing.

  I made some feeble noises as she talked, and all the time watched her watching me, and wondered how far Doireann was, and what she saw in my heart.

  An abruptly as she had started, she stopped talking, as if she had walked straight into the wall of my curiosity, and staring past me as if I were suddenly no more than a piece of furniture said, “Near enough, William. She’s near enough.”

  I nodded, found I had nothing more to add.

  Head on one side, she examined me a little while more, then blurted, “I’ve married him, you know?”