The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

It is as you have said: we were lovers because it was easy.

  My history of relationships with the fairer sex has been, I would say, fairly catastrophic.

  From my first infatuation with Isabella, to my entanglements with Margot, the truth has kept me from engaging in anything meaningful with anyone much at all. For a moment, I thought perhaps there could be a way in which Saira and I knew each other’s hearts, without the burden of saying things that could be left unsaid. The same thought crossed her mind, but her truth met mine, and in each other’s gazes we were forced to confront not what we believed in our hearts, but what we saw honestly in each other, and that can take the amorous wind out of anyone’s sails.

  I have, in my travels, visited brothels of the less contagious sort, but when Langa is close it is almost impossible to find a liaison that doesn’t destroy itself with too much knowledge of a woman’s life, truth, boredom or pain. You might think that knowing the truth of a woman’s heart could make me a superb wooer, but what I mostly perceive is of how little interest I am to my conversational correspondent.

  Margot was different. We went to great lengths to keep the truth away, so that we could believe whatever we wanted.

  We would meet, sometimes in this city, sometimes another, and for a brief night we would forget ourselves and each other, and there was no place for infatuation, sentiment or meaning. We both knew far too much of each other to imagine that it was anything other than a brief flurry in the dark, and that was enough. That was extraordinary. The single most honest thing either of us could ever do; brutal in its honesty. Arousing in its honesty. The single greatest joy in my life.

  It was a game. The shiver of betrayal, the excitement of finally making my own choices, being my own man – even if that man was a traitor. I had no illusions that Margot would ever leave Peadar Coman for me, though sometimes I dreamt of it. And whenever we met, she always made sure my shadow was far, far behind, and I understood why, and it was fine. She never trusted me. She just loved the game. The game made her feel… alive.

  Seven days after my first liaison with Margot in that Vienna winter, the baron died. He withered in front of the fire, a needle in a haystack of blankets and bedpans. Mrs Parr wrote to the Nineteen, informing him that he was too sick to travel.

  Return Cresswood England STOP Abbey proceed Istanbul STOP

  Mrs Parr received the telegram, and pretended she hadn’t. By the time we were spoon-feeding him he had a few days at most, swinging in and out of lucidity, so we took turns, sitting by his side, reading nonsense out loud to him as his breath whistled away. He had never wanted to die in his own bed, although now that death finally had him by the heart, he found his absolute certainty on this subject was in fact rather irrelevant. He was going to die; and for the first time this certainty scared him. Death does that; the truths of our hearts dissolve before that final, inescapable reality.

  In the end, I stayed a little too long by his side. The truth was pressing hard against my lips, and he could see it, and was grateful that I ran the risk, and did not approve.

  “What has Mrs Parr brought today – ah, the plays of Goethe. Lucky us. Are you ready? I’ll try and do the voices…”

  Sometimes, when a man dies a slow and thoroughly unpleasant death, it is tempting to offer comfort. I looked in the truth of the baron’s heart, and there was only the certainty of the darkness, and fear without comfort, and the fading-away of everything he had been. It is easy to want to remove another person’s pain. You have seen it too, Sister Ellis. The young ones, the fresh-faced children, come to the front line, they sit with the dying men and they exclaim, “What can I do?”

  “Nothing” is the reply they want to hear. “But don’t you worry yourself, I am going to a better place.”

  In this way, the living ask the dying to comfort them, the ones who will go on. It is a very human act. It comes from a place of devotion, absolution. The nurses soon grow out of it.

  “Dear God, I think this bit is in verse. Brace yourself, Baron…”

  I read to him as he died, and I was an appalling reader and dull company, and that was all there was to it. And Langa came. And with him, another truth, nestled in the deepest, most secret part of the baron’s heart: that he believed I was a traitor.

  This knowing came upon me slowly, a distraction that needled at the edge of my reading, skipping over lines. Then a creeping conviction, then an absolute certainty that made me put the book down and stare at nothing much, feeling the deepest corners of the baron’s soul as if his blood pumped through the cavities of my chest.

  He looked my way and thought for a moment that Langa was come, but seeing I was silent, knew it was not so. Then he knew what it might be instead that silenced me, but wasn’t sure, and this was deeply disquieting for him. He had understood everything in his life with blazing certainty, but had, alas, allowed himself to grow almost fond of me in time. Fondness was a terrible curse. It reduced the clarity of the thing. Like many men who do not want to know the answer, he had never once asked the question, and knew in that act itself was truth.

  And soon he would be dead.

  These things are hard to judge, even for a doctor. A man might go in an instant, or linger for weeks.

  “I am,” I said at last, watching the open page in my lap. “You are right. You are right about me.”

  The words came, and that must mean Langa was near.

  And yet again: “I think my father was a warm, friendly sort of chap, and my brothers have great depths of genial sentiment.”

  The words were hard, each syllable pushed through like a tired man trying to argue before a black-capped judge, but they came.

  And then: “But I am. Also. What you think I am. I have never betrayed anything to agents of a foreign power, nor collaborated in violence, but in every other way, you are right about me. You are right.”

  The baron nodded once, and we sat in silence a while. Then I rose, and as I did, one hand brushed out, tickling the surface of my skin like the brush of a bottle fly. He tried to speak, and couldn’t, sticky gum around his eyes, his lips.

  I nodded, already half turned to the door. “I know it’s a mistake. I know it is. I know there’ll be a price. I just… needed something that was mine. I’m sorry.”

  He wasn’t angry. Disappointed, and pleased that he’d been right. Sad to see someone he accounted as near to a son making a terrible mistake. Resigned, knowing that there was nothing to be done. He had never experienced that sensation before. In a way, it brought him astonishing relief, and he was briefly annoyed that he hadn’t been resigned to a few more things throughout the course of his life. It might have made things easier.

  “Run,” he whispered, and that was his last ever word to me.

  That night, I stood alone on the platform of the station waiting for the train to Budapest, and rattled off the truth of every slumbering soul and dreary dream that shifted through the midnight air around me. I blurted the broken heart of the porter and the injustices of the stationmaster, I wittered about the driver of the train and the engineer with his coal-baked skin, and when at last I boarded at an empty coach, I looked back over my shoulder and Langa was there, shuffling up the stairs, one hand held out to me, like a friend long lost, coming home.

  I waved goodbye to him as the train pulled out of the platform, and received a telegram the next morning to inform me that the baron had died in the night.

  Stop.

  Dawn in Budapest.

  I sat alone by the river that divided the city, and was briefly alone.

  No one else’s heart beat in my chest.

  I dreamt no one’s dreams but my own.

  The sky was infinite, the last of the stars chased into the west. The birds stirred in the domes across the river, fluttered around the spires at my back. The cobbles beneath my feet were worn to smooth curves, the first smell of coffee and pastry was beginning to drift on the biting wind, but here, the banks were not yet open and only the maids of the wealthy were stirr
ing, picking around the shuttered houses to stir embers back to life.

  I felt entirely at peace, perfectly quiet and alone. I had a letter in my pocket from Margot, an appointment to meet that night. I had no other responsibilities in the day. I should be halfway to Istanbul, but no one would punish me for stopping a while as Langa shuffled after. I could not remember the last time I had not been drowning in the thoughts of other men. I had spent my coin of grief for the baron over the long months of his demise, and now felt free. I had seen too many people who loved powerfully for one who died a slow death turn to gratitude when the pain stopped, and had no guilt at the thing.

  Naturally this state of affairs offered superb opportunity for the Austrians to swoop in and arrest me, which they did with a brutal efficiency and a hasty “Entschuldigung, you will now come with us, danke.”

  Well damn.

  Being arrested by a foreign power had always been a possibility. Britain and Austria spied on each other with merry abandon all the time; it was just the way of things. Our interests were not entirely aligned, but we could all agree that no one wanted a powerful Russia or a frisky France, and if we stole from each other occasionally, who cared? That was just the game.

  Damn.

  I was handcuffed and bundled into the back of a heavy grey carriage, flanked on either side by gentlemen with thick brown coats, impressive moustaches and small bowler hats. I felt strangely detached from the procedure, noting without sentiment when the nature of the road beneath the cart began to change from cobble to mud, a rougher, ice-pooled track heading out of the city. The whole business seemed suddenly so absurdly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I was calm when, some few hours after my arrest, I was prodded politely into a frozen courtyard flanked on three sides by the cracked stucco of a grand hunting lodge, complete with stables and barking, eager dogs that spun and yapped around my legs, trying to work out if I was friend or foe. I was calm through a corridor lined with the severed heads and horns of a hundred slaughtered beasts, pinned up floor to ceiling, barely enough room for the ancient, wax-entombed stubs of candelabra to peek through. I was calm when led to a small servant’s room in the highest floor of the house and padlocked by a length of chain to a bar across the window in a manner that smacked of hasty improvisation. A rope bed was pressed to one wall, and a fireplace of dirty ashes and unswept char was cold by the door, which was locked with a heavy clunk of bolt and key, leaving me alone.

  For a while, alone I stayed, shivering in the cold, until at last this, more than anything else, made me uncurl from my huddled ball in a corner and stamp on the floor shouting, “Hello! It’s freezing in here! Do you want me to fall ill?”

  On reflection, it was such a monstrously stupid sentiment that I’m surprised my cries weren’t answered with laughter. Rather, they were met with a silence so profound that for a moment I wondered if I’d just been abandoned here to starve, and the whole thing was a strange, barbaric murder attempt. Only the distant barking of dogs and the occasional strike of metal hooves on stone reassured me that life continued in this place.

  One sense may quickly drown another. I was, within a very short time, extremely thirsty, and very hungry – but the cold was so much more profound than all of these that I could hardly spare the heat to think on them. As my fingers and lips turned blue, then white, the fear finally began to settle on me. What if there was something more to this affair than mere bombast between distant powers? Suddenly the abstract certainty in which I had invested my faith – that a place called Britain gave two figs for my well-being and would scour all of Hungary to find me – began to totter. My death might be an embarrassment for the Nineteen, but great men wouldn’t be shaken a jot if I died in this place.

  Now came the fear, so that when the door was unlocked and a woman came in to light the fire, eyes down and shoulders turned against me, I found myself babbling all sorts of imprecations and enquiries of her in English and ragged German, all of which she ignored absolutely. Her hands shook as she lit the fire, and the moment the kindling curled she was on her feet and out of there like I was a barking fox.

  My chain would not permit me to huddle close to the flames, so I stretched myself as far towards them as I could, spinning my body so that now my face could get the benefit of their warmth, now my feet; yet no sooner was one part warm than another was cold again, and I cursed this damned room and these damned people for keeping me in such an uncivilised state.

  A few hours after the sun had set, the door opened again, and a man came in to leave me a bowl of chicken and potatoes, just within arm’s reach, and a jug of ale.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded in every language I could muster. “I need to use the bathroom. Who are you? The fire is getting low. I demand to speak to my embassy!”

  He was less anxious about meeting my eyes than the fire-starter, and clearly unimpressed. He said not a word, and left me to my meal, though a few minutes later the woman came back in to put more damp, mouldy logs into the flames, which spat and smoked extraordinarily, and which I was immoderately grateful for.

  I tried sleeping that night on the bed, being mildly less freezing than the floor, and it was profoundly uncomfortable and I slept not a wink.

  By the next morning, the confidence I’d possessed was entirely smothered by cold, misery and ignorance. Two men took me to the edge of what I took to be extensive forested grounds, so that I might wash and relieve myself, and may as well have been deaf for all they responded to my relentless barrage of noise. They were not cruel, nor kind, nor any sort of human that I could detect, and by the time the woman came to relight the fire, I’d given up on asking anything.

  “Thank you,” I blurted, as she scrambled away from the hearth.

  She didn’t look at me, but crossed herself as she scuttled out.

  The next night, I began to dream the dreams of the house.

  In the stables, a man who dreams of…

  … nailing on horseshoes, nailing on horseshoes, nailing on horseshoes for ever but he can’t ever quite get it right, tries again, tries again, can’t get it right.

  In the servants’ quarter, a woman who dreams of great black demons sitting on her chest, come to eat her soul, and wakes paralysed, and has woken paralysed a hundred nights before and still can’t stop the terror.

  Downstairs, a room of slaughtered animals comes alive, to chase the dreamer though crimson snow. He called out in German, and so did I, and the sound was enough to jerk me awake, and maybe him too, and the moon was full and peeking through the high barred window, and Langa was coming.

  In the mid morning, the door was unlocked.

  A man in black riding cloak, white leather gloves and tall grey fur hat stood in the door. He had a military bearing, and the truth of his heart was that he considered espionage and war to be precisely the same thing, and that it was a damned poor general who looked down on his spies, and a damn poor spy who didn’t listen to his general.

  He said, in thickly accented English, “How far is the shadow?”

  It took me a while to answer, so he repeated the question, harder, impatient.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “How far?”

  “I don’t understand. My name is William Bishop, I’m a doctor, your men – your men arrested me, I have been held here in these appalling conditions, I demand to speak to my—”

  “You are Dr William Abbey, late of service to the deceased Baron Cresswood, of the Nineteen. You are cursed with a lidérc that follows you wherever you go. The nearer it is, the more you know the truth of men’s hearts. Your presence has been noted.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My name is William Bishop, I’m—”

  “Do you have people you love, Dr Abbey?”

  I licked my lips. “I demand to speak to my embassy, I have no idea what you’re talking about, I have no idea who—”

  He sighed, and slammed the door.

  Now is the time for terror.


  I hauled and tugged at my damn chain until my wrists were swollen and bruised. I smacked the padlock against the stone wall, I cursed and stamped and sulked and fumed and almost dislocated my thumb trying to wiggle free, to no avail. I pretended to be dead, but no one came and I got bored of the pretence, and when someone did come they caught me off guard and I didn’t have time to get into the character of a corpse, and I wasn’t sure they’d care anyway.

  All the time Langa comes.

  He comes, he comes, the truth of the house begins to fill my soul, she believes in God which means she must believe in the Devil but why does the Devil seem so free to spread mischief whereas the angels hide their wings, why does evil run free and goodness never come when kind women beg for mercy? The priests answer but their words mean nothing, and now there is a devil in the house and she must pray, she must pray…

  He comes, Langa comes, and the truth of the man who brings me food is that it’s a job, and it’s a bad job, and he doesn’t like his bosses, but he doesn’t have any other job going, and he’s got mouths to feed and that’s all there is to it really. It’s just a job. He doesn’t think about it too much. He doesn’t think about anything much, except the white pigeons he breeds; they are all the love and all the thought he has to give.

  He comes, he comes, and on the morning of the fourth day the man in the fur hat returned to my door, and his name was Ritte, and he was the bastard son of a great man who was not so enamoured of his spawn as to ever acknowledge him, but who felt a degree of guilt over the whole affair enough to make sure he had a chance at promotion, even if it was in the dirty game of espionage, and Ritte respected that. Other bastard fathers of bastard sons were perfectly content to let the children starve, but his father had taught him the meaning of backbone.

  And Ritte said, “You are Dr William Abbey, you are an agent for the British government…”

  “Yes, yes, I am, listen, you don’t understand, he’s coming – he’s coming…” But he understood perfectly, and before he could answer the certainty was on me and I bit my hand hard enough to leave semicircular dents in the flesh, riding the pain in search of some other answer. “I don’t know anything. I just go where they tell me. I listen to people, and I write it down, but they don’t tell me anything for precisely this reason. You understand, you know I need to keep moving, please, I’ll do anything you need, just don’t keep me locked up here.”