by Tim Mason
“Angel give it me.” A truculent note had come into the man’s voice. “See, there’s a specter haunting us.”
“Is there, now? Is the Queen a specter, Philip?”
“The Queen?” said the young man incredulously. “Not likely.”
“What’s the specter, then, lad?” asked Field, but Rendell put a finger to his lips and winked. “Did the angel tell you to put your mother in a cupboard, Philip? Did he tell you to take her teeth and keep them in a jar?”
But the young man had lost all interest in visitors evidently. He yawned wetly, leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes.
Field turned quietly to his superior. “We might just check on the missing mother—you never know, sir.”
“Actually, Detective Inspector Bucket, in this case we do know. Mother died in surgery at St. Thomas’ Hospital two months ago. We believe the gun belonged to her late husband and is not of angelic origin. Now, is there any other line of inquiry you’d care to pursue with your conspirator?”
The inspector blinked rapidly, mortified. It wasn’t often he allowed himself to be taken by surprise. He turned back to Rendell. “Angel have a name, Philip?”
But Philip’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Field briefly considered picking the young man up by his ears and flinging him about the room but restrained himself. Sir Horace cleared his throat significantly and Commissioner Mayne said, not unkindly, “Charles, there really is no point.”
Field leaned in toward the young man. “Philip, you missed the Queen. Shot twice and missed her twice. Why is that, do you suppose? You were very near to the royal carriage.”
Rendell’s eyes flew open. “Wasn’t the Queen, fool!”
“Yes, it was, though, Philip. It was indeed Victoria, our Queen, at whom you fired two shots.”
“You don’t understand! Now the angel will be wroth with me! He has a flaming sword, you know!”
Field sighed and glanced up at his superior. Mayne, in turn, gave the jailer a nod, and the men filed out of the cell, leaving the prisoner alone. At the door, Field turned back. The bland-faced young man was staring at him, wide-eyed.
“Keep clear of his blade!” he cried. “Once cut, always kept!”
4
Oxford
“A hat’s shape is not the hat, nor yet is the color of the hat, the hat.”
Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, walked beside the Isis with one of his undergraduates, David Gates, a compact, fair-haired and earnest young man of nineteen. The bishop generally was able to convey basic philosophical precepts while thinking of other things altogether, letting his mind and eye wander, unimpeded by the pedagogical flow, which was, after all, to him, old hat. Not so young David, who strained to listen and to understand, his commoner’s gown clinging sweatily to his shoulders. A summer storm threatened, the clouds massing and shifting greenly above Christ Church meadow, the sky swelling with heat.
The son of abolitionist William Wilberforce, Samuel had distinguished himself in the Oxford debating society, leaving university with a first in mathematics and a second in the classics, to begin life as a rural curate. The young Wilberforce quickly attracted attention through his writings, Note Book of a Country Clergyman and On Correcting the Prejudices of the Lower Order of Farmers.
He rose through the ranks to vicar and then to subdeacon. In 1841 Wilberforce was made chaplain to Prince Albert, and his future success was assured. He soon accepted the deanery of Westminster and the Bishopric of Oxford, becoming eventually a peer of the realm. At this time the so-called Oxford Movement was giving birth to itself, with Anglican intellectuals embracing High Church ritual and flirting ever more brazenly with the Church of Rome. Wilberforce himself was High Church but, as a cautious man, not too high.
“The size of the hat,” continued Wilberforce, “the material of which the hat is constructed—these are not the hat. These, we say, are accidents attendant upon the hat; they do not constitute the substance of the hat.” The bishop, glancing into the punt gliding slowly toward them on the river, took note of the young female passenger’s pleasantly shaped bosom (but the shape and size of her breasts are not her breasts).
“Nothing,” said Wilberforce a little distantly, “pertaining to the senses constitutes the substance of the hat.”
“But, sir,” said David, a scholarship student from Orpington, “are the senses to be dismissed altogether? Are the senses useless? Surely not.”
Is that Conrad in the punt with the girl? No. Jenkins? Whoever he is, she’s a delectable catch and seems to be enjoying her champagne.
“Sir?”
Wilberforce tore his eyes from the nearing punt. “Yes, Gates?”
“It just seems to me, sir, that the Church strains to redefine substance merely in order to justify the doctrine of transubstantiation. In order to get the true body and blood, we have to throw out common sense, which feels to me like the rejection of a great gift.”
The imagined nipples of the young punt passenger were fading from the bishop’s mind. Tiresome young man. Wilberforce rubbed his hands together in his signature fashion, as though washing them, preparatory to crushing his opponent. Because of this tic, he was widely known (behind his ample back) as “Soapy Sam.”
“The body and blood are the gifts,” said the bishop. “Compared with the real presence of the body and blood of our Lord, your common sense is a paltry thing.”
There were running footsteps approaching from a distance, crunching on the gravel walk. The men looked up to see an undergraduate hurrying toward them, his black gown flapping behind. David involuntarily caught his breath; it was his friend from Jesus College, Jack Callow.
“I say, David, have you heard?” shouted Jack, and then he recognized the portly, jowly man at David’s side. Jack abruptly slowed his run to a walk. “Sorry, my lord. Forgive me.”
“Heard what, young man?” said the bishop. The two undergraduates stood flanking Wilberforce, glancing at each other awkwardly.
“It seems they’ve gone and tried to kill the Queen again, my lord. This morning, in fact.”
David saw the color drain from the bishop’s face and remembered that the man was, after all, an ecclesiastical adviser to Victoria.
“Sir,” said David, “may I introduce my friend from Jesus, Mr. Jack Callow?”
Jack, tall, fine-featured, with dark tightly curled hair, smiled and bowed. The bishop’s normally powerful voice faltered. “The attempt was . . .?”
“Unsuccessful, sir. Missed the Queen altogether.”
“And the Prince?”
“As far as I’ve heard, sir, yes, thank God.”
The bishop of Oxford closed his eyes, breathing heavily. David and Jack glanced at each other. “Perhaps, my lord, you’d like to sit?” said David. “There’s a bench just here.”
Samuel Wilberforce opened his eyes in time to see the punt with the young woman in it taking a bend in the river. A moment before she disappeared, the woman clutched the side of the punt, shuddered, and vomited over the side. Wilberforce’s head swam.
“Sir?” said David, clutching the bishop’s elbow. “Sir, you’re not well. Jack, fetch assistance!”
“No,” said Wilberforce, urgency in his voice. “I must return to my rooms. There are letters to be written, there are people with whom I must speak!” The man lurched forward unsteadily, sweat streaming down his face. David offered an arm, which the bishop grasped heavily.
“I say,” said Jack, “that’s a nasty-looking sky. We need to hurry along.”
Wilberforce seemed to be looking into a great distance as he stumbled on.
“We shall be raised,” he whispered. There was a flash of white light and a deafening crack of thunder.
“Raised incorruptible!”
As David and Jack struggled to help the bishop across Christ Church meadow, the heavens opened and the rain came down.
5
London
By the end of the day, young Tom Ginty was ready to jump ou
t of his skin. The man with the frozen smile was still there, somewhere, Tom knew it. It wasn’t a matter of seeing the deep-set eyes he knew were watching him; instead, he felt them on his person, as real as importunate fingers, touching him immodestly, intimately, again and again. But as often as he’d wheel about to look, the sensation would vanish.
It was late afternoon and the sky was ominous. Throughout the market people were closing stalls and cleaning them, everyone eager to be off before the threatened storm broke. Tom filled two large pails of water from the pump in the center of the market and carried them on a yoke over his shoulders to the stalls where Jake Figgis awaited him impatiently.
“You took your time!”
“Sorry, sir.”
Tom sluiced water over the butchers’ chopping blocks. He scraped them with a blade and scrubbed them with a wire brush before sluicing them again. Jake, meanwhile, gathered the day’s soiled rags and butchers’ aprons into a bundle for the waiting washerwoman, a maiden of thirteen years who brazenly winked at Tom and made a flirtatious comment about his muscular arms and ginger curls before moving off, her barrow stacked high with the wash she’d be working on until dawn.
“Gentleman was askin’ after you, Tom,” said Jake, changing out of his work clothes and into his street gear.
Tom froze. “Wot?”
“Asked your name, said ’e was kin of your mum.”
“A gentleman?”
“Tall man, big black eyes.” Noting the look on Tom’s face, Jake said, “Oh, you know all about ’im, do you?”
Tom shook his head.
“Never mind, ’e said ’e’d be back for you tomorrow.”
Tom felt ice at his belly. “Did he walk like a lady?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“Did ’e wot?”
“Did the man sort of skate like?”
“Don’t know wot you’re on about, do I? Cheerio, Tom!” Jake chucked the boy under his chin and strode out into the evening.
From Smithfield Market to Cock Lane, where Tom lived with his mother above the Fortune of War, it was only a matter of steps. Tonight, though, it felt like a treacherous distance. Thunder rumbled, ever closer. The golden figurine of the chubby boy at the corner of Guiltspur and Cock, a commemoration of the Great Fire of 1666, was normally the welcome sign that Tom was home again; tonight it accused Tom of nameless sins for which he soon would be punished.
His mother, Martha Ginty, sat him down in the scullery with a glass of beer, a half loaf of bread, and a slice of cheese before hurrying back into the noisy, smoky Fortune of War. When she returned carrying a tray laden with empty tankards, Tom was staring, his food untouched. Martha anxiously clapped a hand to her boy’s forehead.
“Do we have any gentlefolk for kin, Mum?”
“Not likely,” said Martha. “Wot’s wrong wiv you, then?”
“I don’t want to go to the market tomorrow,” muttered Tom.
Martha Ginty’s laugh was a bark. “That’s rich!” By the age of thirty-two, Martha had lost both her husband and her only other child, a girl, to typhoid fever, just two years earlier. She loved Tom, her firstborn, with a ferocity that almost frightened her. But for persons of their class, there were no days off work, sick or no.
Martha gave Tom a gentle cuff, which turned into an embrace. “Now eat up,” she said, “and to bed with you!”
6
Charles Field sat naked in the tin bath at the center of Mrs. Field’s kitchen, scrubbing himself with a coarse brush. Jane Field, fair-haired, shapely, and some fifteen years younger than her husband, poured another kettle of steaming water into the tub. The inspector followed her with his eyes, marveling, as always, that this beauty with cheeks like apples and a keen, often frighteningly independent mind, was his very own wife. He had found her in the Crimea five years earlier, one of Miss Nightingale’s pioneering nurses. Field had been sent out to the famous hospital at Scutari on a bizarre, highly secret mission. The peril from which he had rescued Jane then had left its mark on her; it took persistence and time for Field to win her confidence, and her hand in marriage, but if the inspector was not invariably patient, he was always persistent.
“Used to be only the quality would try to kill a queen,” said Jane. “The nobility and such. It was all very aristocratic and accordin’ to form. Look at Shakespeare! Now you’ve got Islington bookkeepers having a go, what is the world comin’ to?” She leaned briefly into the passage and shouted up the stairs. “Bessie!”
The Fields leased a house at No. 2 Bow Street, a down-at-heels redbrick structure just steps from where Mr. Field had begun his career with “the Runners.” They shared it with a serving girl named Bessie and—to their unspoken sorrow—no children. Jane picked through the pile of her husband’s discarded clothes with a pair of wooden tongs.
“Look at this shirt! Are you certain none of this blood is yours, Mr. Field?”
“My dear, I assure you it’s Little Stevie’s blood alone.”
“We had boys in the Crimea who had no idea they’d been shot,” she said. “There was one who thought he’d barked his shin when half his foot was off.” She leaned out into the passage again. “Bessie! Where is that girl? Sent her out for chops a good while ago, I do hope she’s all right.”
Privately, Field thought it likely Bessie was doing all right by herself with a glass or two of gin on the way back from her errand.
“The bookkeeper said something about a specter haunting us,” he said.
“A specter?”
Footsteps pounding down the steps from the street door announced the breathless appearance in the kitchen of Bessie, bearing small parcels done up in oily brown paper. She was twenty-nine years old, bug-eyed, warty, and, credible rumor had it, had never been kissed. Her apron was half-off and her bonnet half-on, hanks of her hair protruding from the bonnet like the many-headed Hydra.
“Bessie, there you are!” cried Jane.
“La’, Missus, where should I be?” said Bessie in her habitually querulous tones. “If Missus sends me to fetch Master’s chops, wot should I do but fetch ’em?”
Field could smell the gin from where he sat; could it be that his wife did not?
“There, there, Bessie,” said Jane. “No harm done.”
“Shall I not fetch ’em? Some might not, I s’pose,” said the woman, on a rising note, with a hint of hysterics to follow. It was one of Jane Field’s enduring delusions that Bessie was, in fact, a treasure and that the girl was at any moment liable to desert the household for a better position elsewhere.
“No, my dear girl!” cried Jane. “O’ course you give satisfaction! Don’t she, Mr. Field?”
“It’s not unheard of,” said that gentleman quietly.
“There’s chops ’ere,” said Bessie, “and a nice piece o’ fish, but do I get any thanks for my trouble?”
“Nonsense, puss,” said Jane, taking the parcels from her and sniffing each in turn. “Mr. Field met the Prince today, Bessie—Prince Albert, as ever was! Now what do you think of Master, and ain’t you pleased to be in his service?”
“I ’ope I know my place,” said the serving girl, “and any respect wot I owe the master.”
Field pulled his knees to his chest. “Mrs. Field, if we could perhaps move things along? I’ve had rather a long day and I’m hungry.”
“Of course. Bessie, take Mr. Field’s soiled things and put them in the copper to soak whilst I get started on these chops—there’s a good girl.”
Perhaps they’re right, thought Field. Stevie had any number of mortal enemies. It all could have been a bizarre coincidence and Stevie’s murder nothing to do with the insane man who tried to kill the Queen.
The sizzle and smell of the frying chops comforted him. He closed his eyes and dozed.
Late that night, the newly refreshed detective lay back in his bed, exulting in the comfort of the bedclothes. Jane yawned and settled in close by his side.
“I imagine,” Mrs. Field said, “that poor deranged man was just one of
them new communist fellows, that’s all.”
“What’s that, my dear?” Field said.
“Well, it’s their motto, isn’t it? Or something like it?”
“What motto? Whose motto?”
“You know.”
“I assure you, my dear, I have no idea.”
“The communists.”
“Communists? Mrs. Field, what’s this about a motto?”
“They’ve got it printed on the broadsheets they pass out at market, don’t they. “There’s a specter hauntin’ Europe!’ it says across the top, big as brass. ‘It’s called communism!’ Good night, my dear.”
She passed quickly from consciousness to sleep, but Detective Inspector Field was suddenly awake and staring as lightning and thunder broke loudly over the city.
7
The lamps were dimmed; the royal servants banished. The two men stood at a wall of windows in the darkened room, watching the storm. Sudden, stabbing blue light created momentary vistas, disappearing in an instant. The lengthy silence between the men accentuated the sound of the rain pelting the windows and running in orderly channels across the roof beneath them.
“She is very strong.” Prince Albert’s voice was low. “I asked her if she would be able to sleep tonight, and she said, ‘Why ever would I not be?’”
His companion, Sir Richard Owen, renowned professor of anatomy and one of the principal natural historians of the age, shook his head in wonder. A flash of lightning was followed almost immediately by a deafening peal of thunder: for less than a second, every tree in St. James Park was revealed.
“What can explain it? She is benevolent and good-hearted. As far as I can tell, her subjects love her. Why should these devils wish to harm her?”
Sir Richard Owen pursed his lips and shook his head sadly, mutely grieving the inexplicable wickedness of the world.
“Of me,” said Albert with a rueful laugh, “the people are not so fond.”