by Robin Paige
Charlotte caught her breath. She knew that sound, for this wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. The Clarion was being raided by the police, and someone had sent the heavy type form crashing to the floor, the loose lead type spilling everywhere. In a matter of seconds, a detective’s head and shoulders would pop through the opening in the floor, and Charlotte would be placed under arrest. It wouldn’t be the first time for that, either, and she had the awful suspicion that, given the violent anti-Anarchist mood sweeping the city, she wouldn’t get off with a fine and a stern lecture from the Police Court magistrate, as she had on other occasions. This time, she would go to jail, and her keepers would probably throw away the key.
There was another, muffled shout from Adam and a string of violent French curses from Pierre, and Charlotte knew instinctively what she had to do. Without hesitation, she stepped to the dormer window and pushed up the sash. Ignoring the rain that stung her face, she swung her left leg over the sill. On either side of the window, the slate roof sloped sharply downward for several feet, until it ended at a copper gutter. She gathered her bulky woolen skirt with a muttered curse (this would have been so much easier in trousers), swung her right leg nimbly over the sill, and eased herself onto the gutter, facing the roof. She could feel it give slightly, but it seemed firm enough to bear her weight—at least, that’s what she had thought when she’d watched the workmen putting it up the year before and decided that it might provide an escape if there was ever a fire in the building.
Now, balanced precariously, she moved carefully to the left, leaning forward at the waist, her left hand flat against the roof. With her right hand, she managed to yank the window sash down far enough so that it would not be apparent that she had escaped through it—although she seriously doubted that a man with as little imagination as a Scotland Yard detective would dream that a mere woman would clamber onto a roof three floors above the street.
Three floors. Giddily, Charlotte pushed the thought out of her mind. If she gave in to womanish fears, she’d be lost. Her mind carefully blank, her lower lip pinched tightly between her teeth and her palms flat against the wet and sooty slate, she inched awkwardly along the gutter. She had gone only a few feet when she heard a brusque shout from within, the sash was flung up, and a head popped out. Fearing discovery, Charlotte held her breath and pressed herself tight against the roof, her heart pounding like a trip-hammer.
“Well, she didn’t jump,” a disgusted male voice said. “Leastwise, I don’t see ’er down there. She must’ve sneaked out.”
“Don’t see ’ow,” a second man said, puzzled. “We’ve ’ad the entrances watched all morning. Inspector Ashcraft was most partic’lar about that. She came in at seven and ’asn’t come out since.”
“Well, she ain’t ’ere,” the first man said roughly, “unless she’s learnt ’ow to make ’erself invis’ble. Or maybe she’s learnt to fly. Ashcraft’ll be in a ravin’ paddy-wack about losin’ ’er.” Furiously, he slammed the window.
Pulling in her breath and willing herself not to look down to the street so dizzyingly far below, Charlotte began to move toward the corner of the building, sliding one foot at a time along the gutter, first her left, then her right, then her right again. It was hard going, made even more difficult by the rain that slicked the slate and the wet hair that fell across her eyes and—
Her foot struck an obstruction. There was a fierce squawk and a wild flurry, and suddenly something with beak and claws flew into her face, beating at her with hard wings. Terrified by the unexpected attack, she raised her arm to ward it off, almost losing her balance and pitching over backward. But as she swallowed a scream, she realized what had happened. A pigeon had built its nest in the gutter and she had dislodged it with her foot, sending nest and eggs hurtling down to smash in the street—as she would have smashed, if she had fallen, too.
For another moment she clung to the roof, breathless and giddy, the sour taste of fear in her mouth. But since she couldn’t go back, she had to go on. One foot, another foot, another—and in a few minutes she had reached the corner of the building. She looked to her left and saw, with a vast relief, that she had remembered correctly. This building and its four-story neighbor were only a few feet apart, and she was almost within arm’s reach of the iron fire-ladder that was bolted to the other building’s brick wall. Almost. All she had to do was lean out across that horrid, empty space, reach for the ladder, and . . .
Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut, her breath coming hard, the blood pulsing in her throat. The ladder was a full yard away, at least a foot out of reach. Only a foot, she thought, paralyzed with fright, but it might as well be a mile. She couldn’t reach the ladder unless she let go of the roof. And no matter how hard she willed herself to relinguish her grip, her fingers clung to—
From the street below, she heard the shrill of a police whistle and more loud shouting, and saw two uniformed policemen wrestling Adam out of the building and into a police van. Now! she thought. It’s now, or not at all! Closing her mind to her fear, she turned toward the ladder and launched herself across the void, her right hand grasping the rusty iron, her right foot reaching, slipping, leaving her swinging like a circus wire-artist above the emptiness.
And then her right foot found a rung, and then her left, and she was clinging to the ladder, then stepping smartly down, praying that her foot would not catch in the hem of her blasted skirt. A few moments later, she was safely on the sidewalk, to the delight of a strongly-built, dark-haired young man in a coal stoker’s singlet, worn trousers, and a green cloth cap, who had apparently been watching her descend. As she dropped lightly to the ground from the last rung of the ladder, the man gave her a look that seemed full of recognition, and she saw that he had very blue eyes, deeply fringed with black lashes. Then, his eyes still fastened on hers, he grinned engagingly and tipped his cap. His hair was dark, too, tousled and rakish.
Charlotte felt the immediate attraction between them as if it were an electrical charge. But this was no time for such things. She threw him a dazzling smile, put a warning finger to her lips, and disappeared into the crowd.
CHAPTER THREE
“GETTING INTO PRINT: ADVICE TO YOUNG WRITERS”
Don’t quit your job in order to write unless there is no one dependent on you. Fiction pays best of all, and when it is of fair quality is more easily sold. . . . Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible—if you care to see in print the things you write. . . . And keep a notebook. Travel with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than grey matter, and lead pencil marking endures longer than memory.
Jack London,
The Editor Magazine, 1903
Jack London stripped off his coal-smudged stoker’s jacket and splashed water from the basin over his face. Then he put on a clean white shirt and exchanged the clumsy leather brogans for his own soft leather shoes. With a sigh of relief, he pulled out a flask of gin, took a swig, and dropped down on one of the two narrow beds, surveying his surroundings.
The small upstairs room was rudely furnished and uncomfortable, but adequate for his purposes. It had been found for him by members of the Social Democratic Federation in the home of an East End police detective, an irony that was not lost on Jack, who during his vagabond days had developed an intense dislike of all policemen. But he was in something of a dilemma, for his research—he was conducting what he thought of as a sociological study—required him to go about the East End dressed in ragged, dirty clothes, while other business would take him out in his ordinary clothing. A decent landlady would be apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a double life, while lodgings in a house where nobody gave a damn might not be entirely safe. And Jack needed a safe house, a refuge where he could sleep comfortably, work on his book, and go and come as he pleased.
So when the S.D.F. had found him a lodging in the home of Detective John Palmer, known to East Enders as Joh
nny Upright, Jack had jumped at it. The room—which contained two beds, a table, and two chairs—was at the back of the house and had its own private stair. It was, of course, a far cry from his country home in the Piedmont Hills of California, a large redwood bungalow with a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific Ocean. There, he entertained his artistic friends and lived the lavishly hedonistic life that was entirely suited to a successful writer. If this luxury seemed at odds with his rough, rugged stories of life-and-death adventure in the wilds of the Yukon Territory or his well-known stance as a Socialist who advocated the abolition of the class system—well, so be it. Jack had left school to work in a cannery at fourteen, and had known a decade of poverty since. Now that his writing had begun to bring in money, he deserved (he felt) to revel in his prosperity, although he somehow managed to spend more than he earned and was continually in debt.
But the household in the Piedmont Hills also included Jack’s mother, his pregnant wife Bess, and their infant daughter, a stifling, suffocating responsibility. For a time—wondrous, but far too brief—it had also included the woman he loved, Anna Strunsky, she of the lustrous black hair and black eyes, a radical Socialist from a Russian Jewish family with Anarchist leanings. When Bess discovered Anna and Jack in each other’s arms, however, Anna had packed up and gone to New York, leaving Jack beside himself with lonely desolation.
Feeling trapped in a marriage to a woman he didn’t love, his writing mired in the lucrative but tedious Klondike rut, and (as always) in dire need of money to fund his extravagant life, Jack had jumped at an offer that came in late July from the American Press Association. The Boer War had just ended, and the APA wanted America’s foremost adventure writer to go to South Africa and report on the postwar situation. With enormous relief, he telegraphed his acceptance, packed his bags, and caught a train for New York—only to learn when he got there that the APA had canceled the project.
Having already bought a steamer ticket and not eager to return to Bess and his mother, Jack came up with another idea. An admirer of Jacob Riis’s graphic indictment of the New York slums, How the Other Half Lives, he proposed to capitalize on the best-selling book’s success by writing a similar exposé of London’s infamous East End. He would disguise himself as a tramp so he could travel unobserved through the notorious slums. “I shall sink down out of sight,” he had written to Anna during his crossing on the steamer Majestic, “in order to view the Coronation from the standpoint of the London beasts. That’s all they are—beasts—if they are anything like the slum people of New York—beasts, shot through with starry flashes of divinity.” He would call his book The People of the Abyss.
Of course, the East End wasn’t the only allure. For one thing, Jack had never traveled to England or Europe, and there were sights he wanted to see. For another, the British publishing company Isbister had recently brought out a collection of his short stories, The God of His Fathers, and would soon publish The Son of the Wolf. Perry Robinson, Isbister’s director, assured Jack that he had many British admirers and seemed anxious to introduce him to the literary community.
Well, Robinson’s introduction—a first-rate champagne supper in one of the best hotels—was over. Isbister had done well by him, inviting a posse of literary critics and several dozen of Britain’s literary lights to meet him. Jack knew the work of several, and particularly admired that of Beryl Bardwell, whose strong women characters reminded him of what he liked to call the “Mate Woman,” women who were filled to the brim with life and refused to be bound by conventional moral codes. Jack had told Miss Bardwell about his plan to go incognito into the East End, and learned to his surprise that she was familiar with the district and had gone there more than once herself, unaccompanied.1 Jack’s pleasure in meeting the striking Miss Bardwell and her husband (a baron) was offset, unfortunately, by his disappointment that Rudyard Kipling had declined Isbister’s invitation. That little slight had caused him to sulk all evening.
The Coronation was over, too, several days ago, and Jack had already made two or three extended safaris into the wilds of the East End. A dirty face and a knockabout costume gave him a marvelous sense of anonymity and freedom, while the coins in his pocket and the gold sovereign stitched into the armpit of his jacket made him feel secure. It was true that he wanted to sink down out of sight, but he certainly didn’t want to lose himself in the wretched hell-hole. If he got into a situation that was too dangerous for him to handle, he wanted to be able to buy his way out.
Jack had spent the afternoon in the company of a fiery young Socialist from the S.D.F. and a beaten-down sweat-shop worker who had taken them to Frying-pan Alley to visit the hole in which he worked, an eight-by-seven room that housed five men who spent fourteen hours a day attaching the uppers of shoes to the soles. Outside in the street, a spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, like tadpoles (Jack thought) just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. He reached for a pen and his notebook. He had a hundred impressions to jot down before he forgot them: images of hungry men, damned women, and doomed children, their plight making them stupid and heavy, without hope, without (worse) imagination. There was no question that the East End situation was a bad one, although he had occasionally glimpsed a determined resilience that would not allow these people to be kept down long, given half a chance to better themselves, and to be honest, it was hardly worse than the New York slums. But he had made a reputation as an adventure writer by focusing on the dark and dangerous side of things, on brutishness and inhuman savagery, the more brutish and inhuman the better. Readers expected brutality from Jack London, and that was what People of the Abyss would be about: people who had been so inhumanly, so pitilessly brutalized that they had no hope.
But there was one impression that wouldn’t appear in his book. Jack had been walking on Hampstead Road when a police van drew up to the curb in front of a green-grocer’s shop and a half-dozen policemen charged into the building. From the crowd of onlookers he had learned that the raiders’ target was an Anarchist newspaper on the second floor, the employer of the wretched boy who had blown himself to bits on Coronation Day. He watched, interested, as the policemen dragged three handcuffed men out of the door and shoved them roughly into the van. They were in for it, he thought—sympathetically, for he had been roughed up by the police himself, and had spent some months in jail.
At that moment, a bird’s nest fell at Jack’s feet, the eggs smashing on the pavement. He stepped out into the street and looked up to see a remarkable sight: a woman making her precarious way across the wet roof, then leaping nimbly across the gap between buildings to a rusty iron fire-ladder. While he watched, this lithe, strong young woman, her hair loose and wet, swiftly descended the ladder and dropped to the pavement right in front of him, dazzling him with her sudden smile. It was a smile of intrigue and mystery. It reminded him somehow of Anna’s smile, and yet it promised a greater excitement, for the girl seemed to hold nothing back, seemed easy in her body and eager for any challenge, for every adventure that the world might offer. In the long, intimate look they shared (longer and more intimate, perhaps, in Jack’s recollection than in the reality of it) he felt he had found exactly the woman he had been looking for all of his life.
But in the next instant, she had vanished, swallowed up by the noisy, milling crowd. He started to follow her, but she was fleet-footed, and he quickly gave it up as a bad job. He returned to the crowd and learned her name by the simple expedient of asking. Suspecting that she may have been attempting to escape from the police, he inquired of a male bystander whether a woman was connected somehow with the Anarchist paper.
“Connected, is she?” The man gave a snort. “I’d say she’s connected. She’s the bloody editor. Been raided more than onct, too. Damn persistent lot, those Anarchists. Knock ’em down and they come back for more.”
“And her name?”
“Conway,” the man said. “Charlotte Conway.”
Jack had just wr
itten that name in his notebook and drawn a double circle around it when there was a tap at the door.
“Teatime, sir,” Mrs. Palmer called.
Jack sighed. He wanted—he needed—to write, and his typewriter waited invitingly on the table under the window. He was not getting anything like his daily quota of a thousand words, and he would have to write fast if he intended to take the manuscript back to New York at the end of October. But he was also hungry, and he always wrote better when his belly was full. He put down his pencil and raised his voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Palmer. I’ll be down in a moment.”
Later, when Jack thought back over what happened during his stay in England, he would recall this occasion as vitally important, because it would lead him to Charlotte Conway. When he went downstairs to eat bread and marmalade and drink tea with Mrs. Palmer and her two pretty and flirtatious young daughters, he found that an even prettier and more flirtatious young woman had been invited especially to meet the famous American adventure writer. Her name was Nellie Lovelace, a former resident of the East End and now an actress of some fame. She was starring in a musical at the Royal Strand Theater, and before they had finished their first cup of tea, she had invited him to attend her Saturday night performance.
CHAPTER FOUR
DEATH IN HYDE PARK BOMBER MEANT TO KILL KING & QUEEN! NARROW ESCAPE ON CORONATION DAY!!
London Anarchist Yuri Messenko was killed yesterday when a bomb apparently intended for King Edward and Queen Alexandra exploded in Hyde Park. Witnesses say that the assassin, who was employed at the Anarchist newspaper, The Clarion, dropped the satchel he was carrying, causing it to explode. It is thought that Messenko, and several others in the cell to which he belonged, have been the target of a Scotland Yard inquiry for the past several weeks.