By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  She tilted her face, long earrings clicking.

  Rose, he said. His voice had an edge to it. If this is some kind of glim’s pluck. He stared at her very hard. You know I don’t take well to being rolled.

  She set a cool hand on his arm. She said, In Calcutta our cook used to say, When a voice speaks that has been long silent it is natural to listen. That voice, it is speaking to you now.

  I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.

  You do, she said. The spirits communicate through me, not to me. Gabriel holds the circle together and I am not told what is said until later. A receptive is asleep when it comes over her. So what I tell you about Miss Reckitt, it’s the truth.

  You’re telling me the dead are talking about her.

  Death is only a beginning, she said, meeting his gaze.

  He glanced across at Molly where she stood listening. There was in her face a stubborn dislike that he knew masked fear. She was twisting one wrist tightly in a hand. You’ll let Gabriel know that I stopped in, he said, getting to his feet. Thank you for the sherry.

  As they were leaving, Miss Utterson reached down and gripped Molly’s chin in one bejewelled claw and twisted her face up so that she might stare into it. Foole could see the fury in the child’s eyes. I know what is in your heart, little one, she said to the child. I was damaged also as a girl. The world is not kind to the innocent.

  Molly’s eyes flickered.

  Miss Utterson released her, smoothed her hair. The huge Sikh stood behind them, holding the door, eyes forward.

  Mr. Foole, she said. You will come again I hope.

  He pressed the inside of her wrist to his lips in reply.

  Molly might have ceased to exist. But then the aging memsahib murmured, O do not give your heart to him, little one. She was holding her cool palm to Foole’s cheek as she said this and she did not take her eyes from his.

  Outside in the street he felt strange, broken with light, as if shining with some secret dread. It seemed all who passed in the busy crowds must turn from him and shade their eyes. Molly put a small hand on his wrist and said, O Adam, just because the beaks is lookin for her in the soup ain’t the same as her bein in it. He did not know what to reply. It was a kindness for her to speak so and he found himself overwhelmed by the gesture. He left her at a cab stand in Bishopsgate with a full purse and he adjusted his gloves and stared into the fog and then set out for Finsbury Circus. It had begun to rain a faint brackish rain, more a mist than a rain, and Foole walked through it without regard as the water balled and spattered down the gabardine. At a flower seller’s stall he purchased a clutch of blue irises, as if to disprove Rose Utterson’s words, then changed his mind and started to throw them into the street and then changed his mind again.

  The rain deepened. A hansom took him languidly through the wet and the chill and he watched the horse’s wet haunches slide luminous in the sheeted water. He felt the shake of water from the reins passing through their guides, heard the crunch and splash of wheels on the stone streets. He checked and double-checked the address in Hampstead he had been given. Soon they had left the extinguishing city and were passing uphill through the half-built terraces and the low sky leaned down over the weeded lots and the muck and then they were turning up a lane of expensive new brick houses and the cab drew to a halt.

  Foole studied the high terraced house. Then he got down. His heart was hammering inside him. He stood feeling the rain drip from the brim of his top hat and thought of how she would look as she opened the door, the smell of her hair in the wet.

  The chill fist of petals shone in the light. The first hint something was not right occurred to him when he saw the whited doorstep, the scuffed boot prints there. When he knocked he listened but could hear no answer within. No lights were burning in the windows. He shifted the flowers from hand to hand. After a moment the door rattled and shuddered through its unlocking.

  It opened.

  A stranger in a grey frock coat stood before him, regarding the bouquet in the gloom, his protuberant eyes heavy-lidded and sad. The man was standing with the stiffness of a plainclothes police inspector and then something sharpened in Foole, some pre-shaping of his loss, like the outline of covered furniture in a shuttered house.

  Is Miss Reckitt not at home? he asked.

  The inspector cleared his throat, peered past him at the hansom waiting in the street beyond, settled his gaze on the irises in Foole’s fist. I regret to inform you, sir—, he began.

  And like that a door slammed shut in Foole’s heart.

  All the Mornings in the World

  *

  1874

  SOUTH AFRICA

  They had met on the rooftop balcony of a sunlit hotel in Port Elizabeth and they had disliked each other at once. He thought her sly, watchful. She thought him cold. He took her hand in his and it felt hot, dry, scaled. She winced at his grip. She seemed to him tiny, pale, a theatrical creature insincere in her gestures and he seemed to her abrupt in the brutal manner of American men. A guest was tinking his timid way across the pianoforte in the bar inside and the sound drifted through the slatted windows to where the three of them sat as if it carried through water. He crossed his legs. She smoothed her dress. The third with them was the elder by twenty-eight years and he turned the ice in his glass and smiled, smiled, smiled under the latticed shade of the wickerwork.

  There were whitecaps cresting and unfurling in the stark below, seabirds wheeling in the spray. Adam Foole would remember the sunlight on that afternoon, the white sand beach stretching away to the east like the curve of an eyelid.

  She said her name was Charlotte. She had been an actress on the London stage.

  He said he did not care for the theatre not as a boy not as a man.

  Had he been wiser in matters of the flesh he might have seen the signs and feared the turn his life would take. But what was happening in him had not happened before and so he could not have known to call it by its name.

  He was still young. He had come alone through the Cape posing as an ostrich-feather investor by the name of Bentley then journeyed east to Port Elizabeth where he checked into the finest hotel and waited for his accomplice to arrive. It was a seaport hotel frenzied with the wealth of the diamond trade, set down at the very bottom of the world, and out of this hot crowded stew he rode for days on end, returning from the interior with large purchases of feathers which he then crated and shipped to a rented storehouse in southeast London. That was the peak of the feather boom and no lady’s hat was complete without its long curved ostrich sheen. He opened an office near the docks and hired a clerk and posted advertisements in the local papers seeking inland agents for his business. He was careful to protest loudly the expense of shipping in the lounge of the hotel, in the restaurants overlooking the offshore islands, in the post office itself. He stood several patrons their drinks and spoke of his business partner in friendly terms. He laughed, played whist, smoked late. Ate alone poring over his ledgers in the manner of any sober businessman and in short made himself liked.

  Through all this it was the light that astonished him, the light he expected to remember. The hard flat bang of it like a sheet of tin as it shuddered and recoiled in the roadbeds. When he went out into it his eyes creased at the corners, glistened under the dust in his lashes.

  He had believed his whole life that luck was just such a light and like any light must be accompanied by darkness and he had learned to seek out such darknesses wheresoever they lay. Though inclined to starched collars and tailored suits by nature he was no stranger to the grime of the road and knew the diamond fields in Kimberley had drawn the dregs of the world like soap scum sucked down a drain. Still he was surprised by the feel of that African boom town, how much it reminded him of the borderlands in the United States after the war. He stood on its depot platform watching the hopefuls arrive, their shoes and pans gleaming. He peered over the edge of the great open mine into the emptiness. He walked the main street in the dust and heat ast
onished by the crowds. There were rabbis with their long beards carrying pans and bedrolls on their backs and revolutionaries from Poland and Russians with shovels gripped wrongly in their soft white hands as if they were clutching leaflets or bombs. He saw ex-convicts from the Australias with tattoos on their knuckles and nary a tooth in their heads and he saw veterans of the Crimea with arms missing or loping along on crutches with a fold of trouser pinned up where a leg should have been. He saw bandits out of the eastern Baltics with colourful baggy clothes and pistols over their shoulders and he saw women in varied states of undress draped over the upper railings of rickety wooden saloons. Every man went armed even the street preachers staggering drunkenly on their crates and hollering at the crowds with their fists upturned. What he did not see was the law.

  He waited. He listened. It seemed the diamonds were not transported on the new railway but rather trucked out from De Beers and from the other mines surrounding Kimberley in a convoy of armed coaches moving at speed through the low desert country. They crossed six rivers of variable size by cable ferry and by bridge and stopped only to water their horses. They rode at night with Boer rifles bristling from the windows and men crouched on the springbok perches on a precise timetable marked to coincide with the Port Elizabeth steamers’ departures for England. The diamonds did not stop in any one spot for more than three minutes. At every waypoint a secondary guard recorded their passing and the hour and the minute and nodded to the driver as he clattered by.

  Foole had arranged to meet his accomplice at their hotel in Port Elizabeth five weeks after his own arrival. Fludd had remained behind in London to handle the merchandise when it arrived not least because of his great size and formidable appearance. What was needed, Foole had explained, was a man who could dissolve into the illusion. They had heard Martin Reckitt was, by all accounts, that very man. An aging English thief with a reputation in the flash world for caution, sobriety, elegance in manner, he was gifted in the arts of manipulation. He had quick fingers. He had studied in the priesthood but rather than mitigating his cruel nature his faith had twisted it, augmented it, until whatever viciousness he undertook was somehow made right in the eyes of his god. But although merciless and not to be trusted still Reckitt was a professional, with a reputation at stake, and he would not risk that reputation.

  Foole was livid then to learn Reckitt had brought the girl.

  It is not what you think, the older thief said, adjusting the cuffs of his linen jacket. They were sitting on cane chairs on the hotel balcony under a palm tree, out of the heat. She is my niece.

  She’s a liability.

  She is an asset, sir. You will see.

  Foole followed his gaze. Just inside, under the open windows, a young woman in a green bustle sat on a sofa, her languid hands outstretched to either side, a drink clutched in one and tipped dangerously askew. She lifted her pale face and looked directly at them.

  No, Foole said. Absolutely not.

  At twenty-six he was the younger by decades but there was already in him that heavy iron core that would in time frighten men thrice his age. Get rid of her, he said in his quiet way. Through the open latticework he could see the rooftop gardens in the evening light. A graceful curved path through the leaves. Ladies in white dresses under parasols, hats sculpted with flowers. He closed his eyes, pressed two fingers to his forehead. The air smelled of sap and roses.

  My good Mr. Bentley, Reckitt was saying. You will find she has some rather unusual talents.

  Foole opened his eyes. The young woman had risen and was gliding towards them and as she neared she smiled at her uncle. A wide mouth, big white horselike teeth. A mole at the centre of her brow fouling her expression. Green eyes too wide apart, a sunburnt nose too narrow.

  He watched her fingers crawl nervously around the rim of her glass like the legs of small crabs and then he looked away.

  Much later he would see in her a different creature, a creature of grace. Reckitt would be gone by then, that long dry month after the armed Boers had swarmed the port searching bags, pulling men from steamship cabins. Foole would lie back in the cool of his sheets and trace his palm in and out of the soft pale scoop of her hip. A pitcher of cold water sweating on the washstand across the room. Flies on the chipped blue enamel. The muslin sifting and billowing in the hot noon air. He would be astonished by the heat of what was in him, the pleasure he took from it, this thing he had not known before. He would run his hands the length of her thigh and marvel at the redness of his own scarred skin, the soft crease of her sex tucked away from him like a furrow in velvet. Her green eyes shut fast, as if she slept.

  But she did not sleep. He would lie wordlessly beside her, knowing this, squinting out at the burning hour. The sky very blue, the ocean almost green where the sunlight shafted through it. The long beaches white with a purity that would seem to lift and fade even as he looked out at it, like a dream upon waking. In the heat shimmering up off the rooftops it would seem to Foole that everything, the horses in the dust with their tails switching, the omnibuses stopped and empty, the dusty boardwalks under the porches, all of it trembled. He would lie with one hand on her skin and the other upturned and limp at his side and feel amazed, not quite himself, a ghost.

  He could not get enough of her. It would astonish him, his desire, astonish and frighten him. He had not known such a thing was possible. Some days he would watch her undress, languid, mysterious, as if she were considering each gesture before the doing, one button unfastening, a pause, then a second button, each stay unhooked as slowly as if she moved in her sleep. Layer after layer, lace, crinoline, until the weird skeletal underbones of her dresses were exposed, each article laid out over each with such delicacy, such longing.

  He was running his palm from her hip to her ribs and feeling her stir. Bending down, kissing her collarbone. Are you awake? he whispered.

  Mm, she murmured. She pressed her lips to the pale hairs on his forearm. You taste like salt, she said. She sat up in the sheets and folded her naked back into his chest and he put his arms around her. They sat like that staring out the open window at the impossible blue harbour beyond and he felt a sudden fear, thinking of her uncle.

  We should have had more sense, he said quietly. This is wrong.

  You have your scruples, she said. I like that. A thief with scruples.

  Her head on his chest, her hair soft and fallen across his upper arm like a shadow.

  Everyone has scruples.

  You believe that?

  Just not always in the way people would like.

  She shifted in his arms. The drapes stirred.

  Not everyone, she said.

  He could feel her small ribs swell and diminish as she breathed. In the heat where their skin touched he had begun to sweat.

  She reached around and laid her hand on his chest. You still think you had some say in this, she murmured. You mustn’t feel guilty. It was never up to you.

  He smiled. With her hair loose and her makeup scrubbed away she looked very fresh, very young.

  No? he said.

  You have no idea, she smiled. She ran a finger lightly over his eyelid. You have the prettiest eyes, she said. Did you know that? Like the eyes of a girl.

  He closed his eyes and laid his head back. Prettier, he said.

  All that was yet to come, set out before them invisible and impossible and very real, like a hand opening over them as they slept. Reckitt eyed Foole from the great height of his age as if tolerating an unruly nephew and Foole frowned but said nothing. Years later he would marvel that the man could not have been much older than fifty who at the time seemed to him well into his seventh decade. The loose skin at his throat, the blue veins in his hands, the thorny eyebrows. The wet eyes that followed him across a room. Foole understood Reckitt was dangerous beyond the strict confines of his employment. As was his niece.

  Charlotte he met again at dinner on the second evening. It was a circular table cut from a single piece of African blackwood with himsel
f and the Reckitts and an elderly Frenchman in elegant dress filling it out. A quiet gentleman with thinning flaxen hair and a cleanshaven face like a Protestant minister sat to one side of Charlotte, blushing furiously.

  Charlotte sat among them with her shoulders bare and she laughed and smiled and dazzled each man in his turn. All this Foole watched feeling something ugly and cold and lizard-like flash across his features. He laughed too loudly at her jokes. Nodded too emphatically at her stories.

  She turned from him, of course. And what is it you do, sir? she asked the Frenchman to her right. Her blue silk dress flaring in the gaslight.

  Ah, he said. I am the agent for a diamond buyer in Marseilles, mademoiselle.

  Oh, wonderful, she smiled. How distinguished.

  Mademoiselle is very kind.

  She rested a hand, lightly, on the Frenchman’s wrist. It must be rather exciting, I think?

  It is an exciting country, my dear, Reckitt interjected.

  The Frenchman smiled behind his waxed white moustache. His dinner jacket was a deep black, his collar a stiff and startling white. But it is very tiny in the scheme of the world, non? he said. He shifted in his chair and inclined his head as if to share some secret with Charlotte but he spoke to all the table. It is the question of, how do you say, quality? How do you access the stone? The stone is the stone, yes, but is also more. C’est impossible. He took her hand in his own and looked at it and he said through his dry lips, In Paris there is always the demand for beauty.

  Foole rolled his eyes.

  You must be careful not to lose your head, sir, Reckitt said. You French have a habit of it.

  Monsieur?

  Over beauty, of course.

  Charlotte gave her uncle a look. How dangerous it must be, sir, negotiating such matters here. I cannot imagine it. Are there truly no policemen to protect you?

  Foole darkened. It seemed so clumsy to him, such a dangerous turn. But the gentlemen at the table appeared not to have noticed.

  Ah, mademoiselle, les sauvages have not the interest in the diamond. And the English know they must not harass the compagnie. We have the most reliable legal enforcement one could wish, n’est-ce pas? He winked. L’argent, mademoiselle. Money.