By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  She sat back on her bed. She had not poured herself a cup and he saw this with some discomfort. She looked abruptly up at him and said, How long you say you been here? Ain’t you best be gettin on home?

  Well.

  You got you wife to think about.

  Margaret. Yes. And the girls.

  Ain’t right, bein apart like that.

  No.

  Ain’t natural.

  Well.

  You goin to drink that or leave it for the rats?

  He took a sip. The delicate bone cup in his big hand.

  She nodded to herself. Yes sir. A fine heart.

  Not so fine, he said. I’m too good a hater for much. He set his hat on his head, got slowly to his feet. Like my father was, he added.

  She regarded him from the wet creases of her eyes. My Mister Porter always tellin me, you got to shoe a horse, best not ask its permission.

  I beg your pardon?

  You goin to leave without sayin what you come for?

  He was standing between the chair and the door. No, he said. Well. I hate to trouble you.

  She folded her hands at her stomach, leaned back thin in her grey bedclothes. Trouble, she said, turning the word over in her mouth. You know, I goin to be eighty-three years old this year. Ain’t no one left from my life who isn’t dead already. Ever morning I wake up surprised to be seein it at all. But one thing I am sure of is next time you over this side of the ocean I like to be dead and buried as anythin. Aw, now, dyin is just a thing what happen to folk, it ain’t so bad. But you got somethin to ask of me, you best to ask it.

  He regarded her a long moment.

  Go on. Out with it.

  He shook his head. I don’t know how much Ben talked to you about his work. About what he did for my father.

  I read you letter. If you come wantin them old papers they all still there at his desk. You welcome to them.

  Yes. Well. I’ll need to take those.

  But that ain’t it.

  He cleared his throat. After my father passed I found a file in his private safe. Hundreds of documents, receipts, reports. There was a note attached to the cover with Ben’s name on it, and several numbers, and a date. He withdrew from his inside pocket a folded envelope, opened the complicated flap, slid out a sheet of drafting paper. He handed it across to her. She held the paper but did not read it.

  Ben’s name goin to be in a lot of them old files.

  He nodded. The name on this file was Shade. Edward Shade.

  She frowned.

  It was in my father’s home safe. I thought maybe Ben could help me with it.

  A brougham clattered past in the street below.

  Sally? he said.

  Edward Shade. Shoot.

  You’ve heard of him?

  Ain’t never stopped hearin bout him. She cast her face towards the weak light coming through the window. You father had Ben huntin that Shade over here for years. Never found nothin on him, not in ten years. She looked disgusted. Everyone you ask got they own version of Edward Shade, Billy. I won’t pretend what I heard is the true.

  I’d like to hear it.

  It’s a strange story, now.

  Tell me.

  She crushed her eyes shut, as if they pained her. Nodded. This were some years after the war, she said. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Shade or someone callin hisself Shade done a series of thefts in New York an Baltimore. Private houses, big houses. A senator’s residence is the one I heard about. Stole paintings, sculptures, suchlike. All them items he mailed to you father’s home address in Chicago, along with a letter claimin responsibility an namin the rightful owner. Who was Edward Shade? No one knew. No one ever seen him. It was just a name in a letter far as anyone known. First packages come through, you father he return them on the quiet to they owners an get a heap-ful of gratitude in turn. But when it keep on happenin, some folk they start to ask questions. All of it lookin mighty suspicious, month after month. Like he was orchestratin the affair to make the Agency look more efficient. Some daily in New York published a piece all about it, kept it goin for weeks. That newspaper was mighty rough on the Agency. It embarrassed you father something awful, it did.

  I remember something about that.

  Sure. But what else was he goin to do? They was stolen items, ain’t no choice for a man like you father but to return them rightfully back.

  Yes.

  An then the case broke an the whole affair got cleaned up. Turned out Shade weren’t no one after all. It were a ring of bad folk had some grudge against you father. They was lookin for some leverage an if that weren’t possible they was hopin to embarrass the Agency out of its credibility. Edward Shade, that were just a name they made up.

  But he had Ben hunting Shade for years after.

  Right up until the end. You father had his notions.

  None of that was in the file.

  Sally nodded. Worst way to keep a secret is to write it down.

  Ben ever mention a Charlotte Reckitt?

  Sally touched two fingers to her lips, studied him. Reckitt?

  Charlotte Reckitt. In the file on Shade there was a photograph of her. Her measurements were on the back in Ben’s handwriting. There was a transcript attached, an interview between Ben and Reckitt from seventy-nine. In it he asks her about some nail she worked with, someone she couldn’t remember. Ben claimed there were stories about them in the flash houses in Chicago but she didn’t know what he was talking about or claimed she didn’t. He left it alone eventually. Diamond heists, bank heists, forgeries circulating through France and the Netherlands, that sort of thing. According to my father’s notes, he was certain this nail was Shade. In September I sent out a cable here and to Paris and to our offices in the west with a description of Charlotte Reckitt. Shore got back to me in November, said she was here, in London. Where my father had Ben on the payroll.

  Billy.

  Before he died, the last time I saw him, he looked me in the eye and he called me Edward.

  Billy.

  It was almost the last thing he said to me.

  She looked saddened. My Mister Porter got mighty confused hisself, at the end, she said. You know I loved you father. You know my Mister Porter an me we owe him our whole lives. But that Edward Shade, now? You take them papers, go on. You read them an you see. It ain’t like you father made it out to be. He were obsessed with it. Shade were like a sickness with him.

  He studied her in the gloom. I found her, Sally. The woman I was following last night, the woman who took her life. It was Charlotte Reckitt.

  Shoot.

  I talked to her before she jumped, I asked her about Shade. She knew him.

  She told you that?

  He was silent a long moment and then he said, quietly, Not in so many words.

  Sally opened her hands. Aw, Billy, she said. If you huntin the breath in a man, what is it you huntin?

  He said nothing.

  My Mister Porter used to say, Ever day you wake up you got to ask youself what is it you huntin for.

  Okay.

  What is it you huntin for?

  He walked to the window and stared out through the frost and soot on the pane at the crooked rooftops of the riverside warehouses feeling her eyes on him. The sound of her breathing in the darkness there. What are you saying? That Shade didn’t exist?

  She shook her head. There ain’t no catchin a ghost, Billy.

  When does a life begin its decline.

  He thought of the Porters as they had once been and still were in his mind’s eye. The glistening rib cage of the one in the orange lantern light and the rain, wool-spun shirt plastered to his skin, his shoulders hoisting that cart up out of the muck. The low plaintive song of the other as she kneeled coatless in the waters. He thought of the weeks he had tailed Charlotte Reckitt from her terrace house in Hampstead to the galleries in Piccadilly, trailed her languidly down to the passenger steamers on the Thames, watched in gaslight the curtained windows of her house. Hoping for a glimpse o
f Edward Shade. She was a small woman with liquid eyes and black hair and he thought suddenly of how she had regarded him from the steps of that theatre in St. Martin’s Lane, one gloved wrist bent back. The fear in her eyes. Her small hands. She had leaped a railing into a freezing river and they would find her body in the morning or the day after.

  So.

  He would be thirty-nine years old this year and he was already famous and already lonely. In Chicago his wife was dying from a tumour the size of a quarter knuckled behind her right eye though neither he nor she knew it yet. It would be another ten years before it killed her. He had held the rope as his father’s casket went in and turned the first shovel of earth over the grave. That scrape of dirt would echo in him always. Whether he lived to eighty or no the greater part of his life lay behind him.

  When does a life begin its decline? He stared up at the red sky now and thought of the Atlantic crossing and then of his home. The fog thinning around him, the passersby in their ghostly shapes. Then he went down to Tooley Street to catch the rail line back to his hotel.

  His name. Yes that.

  His name was William Pinkerton.

  TWO

  Here is another.

  His eyes would fill with light even after a light was extinguished, like the eyes of a cat. They were violet and hard as amethysts and they liked the darkness. His side-whiskers he wore fashionably trimmed though the deep black in them had long ago bleached to white. Though it had been a bad crossing even during the roughest weather he had sat in the smoking room of the RMS Aurania turning the ironed pages of the Times with a wetted finger. He had been seen thus and thus only by men who mattered. His skin a light brown against the starched white collars, his long fingers. Seen in tailored suits and expensive fitted waistcoats as if a jeweller or industrialist just back from Bombay although in truth he had fallen on hard times and when he crossed his legs he would first hitch a pinch of trouser up his thigh with a worry for the thread. But his cufflinks were emeralds set in gold leaf, his tie pin studded with diamonds. Asked if any line existed between how a man looked and what a man was, he would smile a sad knowledgeable smile, as if he had lived a long time and seen too much of the world for certainties to be conceded.

  Go on.

  No he was no liar. He just was not what he seemed to be. He was travelling with a little girl he would introduce as his daughter. His voice was soft and curiously high. His mother had been born in a narrow house in Calcutta and at thirteen and still unmarried had made her way along the banks of the Hooghly River to the sea. Her burnished skin gleamed in his own face and throat on sunlit days, the shadows around his eyes were the purple of cold-water anemones. He was small the way she had been small, with strong narrow shoulders and thick wrists, and though all his childhood he had heard tales of his Yorkshire father’s great size he had never known anything of it. He had lived among the very poor and the very rich both and he knew which world he preferred. Despite all this he lived with a sharp impatience for anything that broke the moral law for that law he believed was absolute and took the one measure of all who drew breath on God’s earth. No man should embrace violence. No man had a right to hold any other back. Those in need must be cared for. If pressed during a round of whist he might confess that truth in his experience was just a lie refined into elegance and that nothing in this world was sacred though all things in the next world might be. In an age of industrialists and bluebloods he was a self-made man and not ashamed to say it.

  For twenty-three years now he had answered to the name of Adam Foole. He had already made his fortune and wasted it several times over. In certain banks along the Eastern Seaboard his name was now anathema, in others it remained respected, in still others managers would hurriedly unhook their wire spectacles and stand at their desks to consider his newest venture. An elegant club in New York held an oak-panelled room in reserve on weeks when he walked in that city though he had not settled that bill in three years. His business was multifold and various and suitably vague in an age of gentlemen investors and he did not advertise his talents.

  He had been away from England only six weeks and it was a letter in a woman’s handwriting that had drawn him back so soon. On what business. What else.

  No wealth is ever sufficient.

  He stood now at the railing feeling the engines of the ocean liner thrum up through his feet then slowly punch down stage by stage through their gearings. There were others on deck in the cold though not many and all of them stood wind-racked and wrappered in thick scarves or deck blankets emblazoned with the Cunard logo and each huddled with arms at their chests clutching their morning coats closed. He was dressed in last season’s fashions, a double-breasted tweed, a lounge coat buttoned fast, a brown bowler lifting in the wind.

  He felt his whiskers stir and raised his eyes. The sky was overcast but bright off the white hulls of the lifeboats where they hung in their casings above the deck. To the east he could see Liverpool like a smudge of ink against the grey. The factory chimneys, their brown smoke standing off angular in the wind.

  Just then a child came through the saloon doors pulling at the lace of her bonnet, not quite eleven years old.

  For god’s sake, Molly, he called. Look at you. Your boots.

  The soft leather was scuffed with red chalk on the toes and up along the laces as if she had been kicking god knew what. Do I look a sight? she said with a grin.

  Come here.

  Her cool eyes, her freckled nose. She flounced against the railing, folded her elbows over. The wind pressed her dress crackling against her legs and he could see the boyish shape of her hips through it, he knew her buttoned gloves concealed fingernails ragged and bitten. He reached around, tied her bonnet more firmly.

  What’s that smell? she asked.

  Stop squirming. Creosote.

  She mouthed the word.

  Did the porter collect the bags? he asked.

  I left them in the hallway. Like you told me to.

  As I told you to. As. After a moment Foole held out an empty hand and she blinked her dark eyes at it.

  What?

  You know what.

  She frowned and reached into her sleeve and withdrew the five-pound tip he had given her for the porter and she handed it across. I like you better when we’re rich, she said.

  He took it wordlessly. But as she turned to look out at the river something caught his eye and he reached into the folds of her dress, withdrew a small plaster doll. Where did you get this? he demanded.

  She snatched it back, suddenly feral.

  Is that the doll the Webster girl was playing with?

  It’s not.

  He turned and studied the crest of foam unfurling away from the hull and then looked at her again. What’s got into you?

  She don’t know it were me.

  That’s not the point.

  The girl was blushing, she would not meet his eye. You want me to give it back?

  What do you think?

  Then they’ll know it were me what took it.

  He shook his head.

  She was silent a moment and studied her boots in the Mersey’s silver brightness and then she looked at him. Anyhow, she said sullenly. She got lots of others.

  He looked past her. A thin man in a funereal topcoat and black hat had come out and was standing with one hand on the heavy door of the smoking lounge. He squinted into the wind towards them then raised a hand in greeting and let the door swing shut. The whitewashed deck was wide and alcoved with brass spittoons riveted into place and porthole windows gleaming in the grey light and as he approached them his dark reflection passed warpling alongside.

  Molly followed Foole’s gaze over her shoulder then gave him a look and muttered something and then with a sarcastic curtsy she slid away, beating her gloved hand on the railing as she went. Her other hand clutched the doll at the neck as if to strangle it.

  Be at our cabin in ten minutes, he called to her. Molly? I mean it.

  She raised an
arm in the wind without turning round.

  Your daughter? the man said as he approached. A handsome girl, sir. I did not see her on the crossing.

  Foole raised his hands in defeat.

  The gentleman laughed. I have nieces aplenty myself, sir. One can see the breeding at once in her. Her mother is?

  Dead, Foole said quietly. He waved a hand. Time goes on though our hearts may not wish it.

  She must have been a great beauty, sir.

  Foole cleared his throat.

  I mean in her lineaments, the man went on. Certainly your daughter appears to have many advantages. She is an excellent specimen.

  Specimen?

  The gentleman laughed. Forgive me. I have been so long in my work that I lose the language of the everyday. It is a hazard.

  What did you say it was? Phrenology?

  He nodded in satisfaction. Phrenology, sir, yes. The science of human potential. Forgive me, what line did you say you were in?

  I didn’t.

  Clearly not whist.

  At last Foole smiled too, though ruefully. I’d hoped at some point these past days to win some of it back, he said. I’d hoped at least to get close.

  I had been hoping that also for you, sir.

  Wasn’t in the cards, I guess.

  The phrenologist cleared his throat. If I may be so bold—

  Foole reached into his vest and unclipped the chain and held it out, weighing it in his palm. It belonged to my father, he said.

  It is exquisite.

  It was a silver watch built in Philadelphia twenty years past with a single band of copper encircling its face and filigreed with a delicate latticework of gold inlay in the shape of an unblinking eye. At a click the lid lifted and there, etched as if in copperplate, was the inscription: for my son.

  He clicked it shut. If you would be willing, Foole began, I’d be pleased to send you the funds upon my arrival in London—

  The phrenologist held up a regretful finger, the joints crooked and swollen. His eyes had scarce lifted from the watch.

  I am sure I can depend upon you, sir, the phrenologist said. But it is the principle of it, you understand. A man cannot just sit down at a table and outplay his hand without meeting the consequences. The phrenologist was nodding now, sadly. There are always consequences, he went on. That is the point. That is what I wish to impart to you. It is how we keep our honour, sir, here in England.