The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  He did this with the gleeful willingness of a child who has discovered that he can lie and get away with it, and what’s even better, someone else will be punished for his lying, and if he’s lucky, he’ll get to watch.

  He always got away with it.

  He was going to get away with it now. As I sat in the study of his repugnant faux-Tudor mansion beneath the old hammer ponds of the Weald, a fat ginger cat licking its nethers on the rug besides me, a parrot moulting gently in a cage to the side of his great mahogany and mother-of-pearl desk, my shadow followed and the heart of the man before me beat in my ears as he said:

  “Prove it. Can’t, can you? Can’t prove a thing. Try and I’ll take you to court. And I’ll win. Yes indeed, so try it, please, I will enjoy the money. There’s a workhouse in the village I fund, they’re very grateful to me, I get the pick of the young ones, boys, girls. I have them whenever I want, and now I’ve told you, and you can’t do anything about it. Never write anything down. Never hire people you can’t destroy. Met a man once who said family was the strongest bond. Family! You can’t choose family, they could be the most unreliable sort around. Fear is the strongest bond. It’s an art. Too little, they’ll talk; too much, they’ll break. The perfect quantity, precisely measured, that is what you require. Everyone fears me. What’s your name again?”

  “Friar.”

  “I can destroy you, Friar. I really can. The only reason I won’t is because you’re small fry. A little man. It’s the big men I like to hurt. I’m almost a socialist.”

  And his heart beat, and Langa came, and the truth of his soul was that he knew he was malign, and knew he hurt people, and he just didn’t care. His was not an evil of deeply formed trauma, of suffering that shaped him into a beast of pain. He did not take pride in his actions, was not insane, nor particularly relished pulling the wings off flies. He hurt people to test the limits of his power, and found they were limitless, and that was satisfactory.

  Nor was he unhappy or lonely. He had people whose company he found amusing. He had concerns about his health and age, which he shared with sympathetic ears. He wanted his son to do well at school, and had no qualms about sending servants to beat any man or boy he considered to be potentially standing in the way of the brat’s advancement. He told his son when he did this. He wanted his son to understand the facts of life. The fact of life was that if you were strong, and rich, and could get away with it, then no harm would come to you. This was the simplest truth. It was an act of love to make sure his child grew up aware of it.

  And he would get away with it.

  Which really rather proved his point.

  This was the truth of his heart, and I suppose it would be fair to say that even then, I couldn’t hate him for who he was. Rather, I hated him for everything that he stood for, and for the truth that nothing I might ever say could change his mind. He was the black wall that stood against the light; the ice that would remain at the end of the world. He was the tumour that the surgeon cannot excise, and which you will live with, watching it consume you, until the day you die.

  He was fine with that. He was absolutely fine, and I’m sure his son is doing very well right now.

  I didn’t hate Ritte.

  He believed he was doing the right thing. The necessary thing, to be good.

  When I trained as a physician, we would give bread pills to patients who were sure to die. Several said it made them feel better. In the American Civil War, doctors reported that they could operate without anaesthesia on the wounds of soldiers without a single cry of agony, so long as they could convince the bleeding men that they had already given them something for the pain. My lecturers would take men and women from the workhouse to the surgical theatre and demonstrate their various maladies and afflictions to the students, including common errors in stitching and the fascinating ways in which sepsis might kill.

  We learnt a lot, as our patients screamed and bit leather gags and writhed against their straps.

  We were doctors, doing good.

  I met a general once. He sends troops into battle in this endless, futile war. He represents his men with little lead figurines on a map. Each figurine is ten thousand men. At the end of each day of battle, he removes the appropriate number of figures from the table, and puts them on the mantelpiece above the fire. He did this for nearly a year at the start of the war, until he ran out of room in October 1916. Then he mentioned to his orderly that the figures were a clutter. Not to remove them; he is far too good a man to have them removed. Just… that they were causing him exasperation.

  I didn’t hate Ritte. I wanted to; but frankly, if I had been in his position, might I not have done the same?

  They smuggled me out of Budapest down the Danube, then west towards the sea. The journey took six days, crossing the Adriatic and wiggling up through Italy and France, pausing in one-train towns to swap papers and whispered understandings, watching our backs, waiting for retribution.

  In the foothills of the Alps, not-Smith thought he saw some men following us, and we hid on the edge of a snowstorm, shivering and lost in a white blanket, lips turning blue, until they passed us by.

  “Well?” he demanded, and it took me a moment to realise what he meant.

  “I don’t know who they are. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Worked pretty damn well in Hungary.”

  “It’s a curse,” I muttered through frost-wrapped misery. “Not a gift.”

  On the ferry to Dover, I watched the cliffs approach from the edge of the horizon, and felt only sickness and dread at returning to my masters, and wondered again who I had killed, and what on earth I was going to say.

  Albert blurted, “Escaped!”

  The colonel grumbled, “Escaped?”

  Mrs Parr mused, “Escaped? Well.”

  In London, the Nineteen were waiting for me. I had rarely seen the colonel and the professor in the same room together, let alone the triad with Mrs Parr. They assembled in a white drawing room in Pimlico, sipped tea from porcelain cups and ate little biscuits, still hot from the oven, rich with butter. The colonel drank with his little finger out. Mrs Parr held her cup so tight I thought the fragile china might break. They assembled themselves three in a line, and I sat alone opposite them, tired, salt in my hair and barely three hours’ sleep in my eyes, and hoped that the fatigue of travel would mask the scent of fear.

  “I never would have thought – a daring escape!” chuckled Albert. “Breaking out by yourself in the middle of the night: a triumph!”

  “I didn’t think the Austrians would be so bold as to take one of ours in broad daylight,” grunted the colonel.

  Mrs Parr said nothing, and watched.

  “We shall have to retaliate, of course,” muttered the colonel. “Round a few of theirs up. Make it clear that this sort of thing isn’t on.”

  “Your business, your business!” mused Albert, eyes bright and gleaming, the pupils open wide against the cold grey light of day. “What I want to hear about is how much they know. They’ve definitely had experience with this phenomenon before. But the fact they took you means they don’t have one of their own. Did you get anything from them? Come come, you were there long enough, the shadow must have come, the timing of it…”

  Mrs Parr’s fingers, even whiter around the cup, her face drained like the snow.

  I took a long breath. “Are you asking if someone I love is dead?”

  They had the decency to look briefly embarrassed. It was Albert who pushed on, softer now, tempering his interest with a modicum of humanity. “The mathematics, William, the mathematics of the thing…”

  “They moved me. Kept Langa close, but not too close. They knew what they were doing.”

  The colonel nodded, as if this scheme made perfect sense to him.

  Albert leant forward, and I couldn’t read the smile on his face.

  Mrs Parr knew I was lying. Just like the baron, she knew, though she wasn’t sure about what. After, I was sent to a house out
side Canterbury and very politely and very thoroughly debriefed for four days. They didn’t threaten me. At every stage the conversation focused on my heroic efforts and bravery. Someone said I should get a medal. Only their interest in the secrets of Ritte’s heart kept them from pulling apart mine.

  “But what about agents?” one interrogator demanded. “All this… women’s business… about how Ritte feels and what he cares about doesn’t give us much.”

  “It’s what matters to him,” I sighed, a repetition I couldn’t quite believe my interrogators weren’t bored of too. “I know what matters to the heart.”

  In the evening, they returned to my escape, phrasing their questions with an astonished, admiring, “But how did you get through the gate?”

  When people lie, they tend to give fewer details, or they repeat the same details again and again, without much clarity. “Her dress was blue. Yes, it was blue. It was a blue colour.”

  Truth is much less clean.

  “Her dress was blue, this sort of pale blue – no, maybe it was green. I think it was green. Well, it depended how you looked at it, and now I think about it, maybe she wasn’t even wearing it that night.”

  I had spent so much time around truth and liars that even I knew some of these basic rules. Over those days in Canterbury, I lied, and knew that I was a very poor liar.

  On the fifth day, they let me go.

  Packed me back off to London, ready to receive orders for my next mission.

  I had missed the baron’s funeral. There was a lack of volunteers to take his place. Sheer headlong self-assurance of his flavour was a dying trait, even among the best English public schools, it seemed. With him dead, Mrs Parr, it was announced, could serve more usefully in a secretarial position. She was not invited to share her feelings on this matter.

  The night before I departed, Albert and I drank port, stained lips and dirty glasses, and talked about almost nothing. Truth. Reality. Nothing. Finally he mused, the thing he’d actually wanted to say, “If the Austrians know something… if they have information on the phenomenon… We are coming from so far behind in the field, you see. Other countries, even Russia, have more experience of the thing. We are attempting to apply science to something that has always been considered magic, and if we can do that, if we can pick apart the mystery and find a force behind it… Do you understand what I’m saying, William? If the Austrians know things about the shadow – even mystical mumbo-jumbo – that could be incredibly useful to us. To you. To curing you, even.”

  “They didn’t say anything about a cure. They didn’t care.”

  “No. No. Of course not. I just want to see us get ahead. It feels like we’re coming from so far behind – you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. Well then. Perhaps we can find… something else.”

  “Perhaps.”

  By my maps, Langa was walking barefoot across the ocean as we spoke. The waves wouldn’t disturb him. Foam passed through his burning form, the fish nibbled at darkness and tasted only ice. I wondered what I would see in Albert’s heart if Langa was near, and felt I already knew the answer, and it was disappointing, and I hated myself more than anyone I had ever known for the things I had done.

  I caught the Liverpool steamer to Dublin the next morning, shuffling across Ireland in a slow arc with Langa at my back, condemning men to die for their beliefs, ripping out their hearts and turning them into ink and paper, nothing more than a blot upon this earth.

  Chapter 49

  If I had been a casual traitor before, from then on I was Margot’s most devoted servant. Travelling the world, there was no secret I would not reveal, no great scheme of powerful men I would not betray, if she willed it.

  Let it all come down; let the whole thing burn.

  And for the first time, I found myself a little of her mind: perhaps I was not cursed at all. Perhaps Langa’s presence at my back was a duty, a blessing, and since that night in Baker he had been willing me on, urging me to finally stand up and do the right thing, work with him to tear it all down.

  Let the whole world burn.

  In the Sudan – the Mahdi’s great war of independence and God is crushed by the redcoat and the Maxim gun.

  Karl Landsteiner identifies different types of blood and the medical community becomes excited by what it can do with sharp needles and long tubes after so many years of failure.

  The Cape descends into war again, Boer against British.

  In America, unarmed miners are massacred; black men are lynched, their burnt bodies suspended from the long white branches of the trees like Spanish moss, as their killers thank the Lord and pass the whiskey.

  And with a whimper, not a roar, the twentieth century dawns, and Langa comes, and I run.

  Of course, things are never that simple.

  In 1901, in San Francisco, I met a samurai.

  Wanting to be a samurai had been Hideo’s undoing.

  “At the time, I didn’t have any better idea!” he exclaimed. “It was the thing I had to do!”

  Hideo was born to an old, respected family in Kyushu. When the Americans came and blasted open the hitherto-sealed Japanese ports, the brewing national crisis that had smouldered under the surface burst into flames. It was not merely a colonial crisis – how could a noble and martial empire respond to the sudden arrival of gunpowder and steam at its door? Rather, it was more deeply rooted, for centuries of samurai rule had been dented by that most deadly scourge: an excess of peace and contentment.

  “It is hard to wear your ancestor’s sword while running a fishing fleet,” he confided. “Bickering over the price of tin – no good for the warrior spirit.”

  Hideo was sixteen years old when, in 1868, the Meiji emperor abolished the shogunate, hurled open the doors of Japan to the West and began to institute unprecedented change. When the samurai rebelled in 1877, Hideo’s family split down the middle. His father, who had always been a stickler for the ancient ways and refused to admit that the vast majority of his income came from tuna, swore he would stand up for tradition and bring the emperor back to the true Japanese path. His mother and his sister, who had always had a good head for numbers, pointed out that this would do nothing for the family’s burgeoning investment in the national telegraph project. Hideo, having spent the majority of his childhood being educated in sword, bow, horse-riding and the tea ceremony – matters of accountancy being considered beneath him – decided to join the revolution. When he informed his sister and her husband of this fact, his brother-in-law rose from the table, threw his cup to the ground and declared that Hideo was a spoilt little monster who spent so much time dressing up in his ancestors’ borrowed armour that he couldn’t find his own foot without some servant girl to tickle it for him.

  Or words to that effect.

  Years later, Hideo struggled to remember the gist of the thing.

  Being a proud man of proud birth, and not inconsiderably into his cups, he couldn’t let this insult go, and ran his brother-in-law through like a piece of knitting.

  He’d never killed a man before.

  That night, he ran away, and his sister cursed him. She had in her heart both the learning of this new world and the secrets of the old.

  Hideo’s wife died, his brother’s shadow crawling out of her frozen chest, before he realised the error of his ways. He sought out the yamabushi of the mountains, killed a monk, contemplated suicide, realised that it would not save the lives of the ones he loved. Was surprised to find that he loved at all. He cut off his hair, threw away his swords, stowed away on a ship to Vietnam. It turned out his honour was of an entirely different sort from that he had imagined after all.

  Nearly thirty years later, we met in America. He worked on the railways, shovelling coal. The job kept him constantly in motion, and every year he was astonished at how much further the railways had gone, reaching out to the Pacific in a tongue of iron. Sometimes he thought he saw his shadow through the smoke as he rattled across the continent; but t
hen again, you could imagine things in the glare of the great white desert, or see strange patterns in the swirling dust.

  I recognised him before he recognised me. He had not had the truth upon him for a very, very long time, whereas my shadow was five days behind, and the certainty of knowing was a nudging doubt that grew to a beating conviction as I watched him.

  We met in San Francisco, before the earthquake, as the city scuttled up from the bay in a hammering of nail on wood, the creaking of iron and a thudding of fresh brick straight from the kiln. He was there at the end of a long journey, waiting to return east to collect more prospectors and dreamers come to supplant the old wagon pioneers and the lawless cowboys with their genteel urban ambitions.

  I was there to listen to the naval men, to pick at the truth in the hearts of the sailors freshly come from the Pacific. I was alone, apart from the ever-constant check-ins and assignations I was required to meet as I wandered across the States, shadow at my back.

  At least that was what I thought, back before the truth was known.

  So it was that alone I approached Hideo at the railway bar, and bought him a whiskey. “Drink?” I grunted, pushing the dirty tumbler towards him across a bar slick with dry sugar.

  No one else talked to the Japanese man. The Yellow Peril was in full swing, and though America was most keen on lynching black men and Chinese, they were not particularly discerning of one foreigner from another. The railway bar was one of the few places where a man of Hideo’s complexion was safely permitted to drink, his place earned with a coat of oil. He had long ago resolved not to care. He had been in favour of lynching the white men who came to Japan when he was young, and he had been stupid too. At least, he mused, the men who wanted to murder him had the decency to be mostly hungry, mostly poor, mostly torn apart by broken dreams, their powerlessness turned easily into violence and bigotry with the enthusiasm of a starving man. The shadow of his dead brother-in-law gave him a glimmer of that truth, and in a strange way it comforted him.