by Steven Price
Look at that old lobster, she whispered, shifting her eyes to a table across the room.
He thought at first she was trying to tell him something about the night before. An aging couple at breakfast in the silence of a long and lonely marriage. The man with his red face and thick intimidating whiskers, like a colonial governor, an eyepiece pinched grimly into place. Beside him his wife in maroon crepe, her bloodless lips drawn tight, disapproval seamed into her brow. Hands lost in her lap as she ogled her menu. The man was reading the early edition of the local daily, the paper held stiffly up before him as he crackled the pages.
Charlotte grinned. That’s not his wife. Her name is Mrs. Picquet and she runs the best brothel in Kimberley.
Not really, he said with a smile.
Oh, really. She’s rather notorious, a very wicked woman. His name is Sweeney and he owns a ladies’ boutique here in the city. Très cher.
How would you know this?
She winked.
I’m sure they’re just conducting business, he said.
I’m sure they are, she smiled back. And where do you imagine her hands are right now?
That was how it was. Unexpected, unexplained, sudden and intense as a passing weather system and then without warning calm again. On that morning he had wanted to ask her where she had spent the night but he could not. He felt very young with her and there was no part of him, he realized, that understood anything between them.
They waited. The weeks passed and still no storm came. Huge carapaced insects like creatures out of some lost Jurassic age battered against the drapes, ticked against the lamps. In the mornings he would scoop them into his palm, brush them out the window. The theft of the diamonds began to lose all solidity, all reality, their days seemed to shimmer. Foole had not realized that happiness could be one thing, one thing only, repeated day after day, night after night, into an exhausted wholeness.
They walked the waterfront and rented cast-iron bicycles from a Hungarian at his stall and these they rode tottering and weaving past the omnibuses, laughing crazily at the horses in their traces, their bicycles’ huge front wheels jolting over the uneven roads. They stood in line at the parks and bought French ices flavoured by papaya and threw away the little wooden spoons and instead licked the ices down to their fingers like children. Foole took her to the office he had rented and introduced her to the clerk who organized the feather shipments and while she wandered the small room running her gloved finger over desk and bookshelf and windowsill leaving curlicues in the dust Foole leaned over the accounts and tried not to look at her hips. In the third week he went back into the veld to collect feathers but he did not barter over their quality and the local tribes took his money and regarded him with pity. Are you sick? they asked him and he thought about it and decided he might be. He understood pleasant young Mr. Bentley did not exist and he mourned for him even as he tore that false life open, like a thick envelope, with everything spilling from inside it, everything being both happiness and time.
Then one morning he awoke and saw Charlotte at the window and beyond a roiling black sky. Wrapped in a sheet like a visage of her own death with her arms lost in the white folds and her white face very still, very beautiful, and only her eyes dark.
It’s time, she said.
The storm lifted the roofs from the shanties east of the harbour. A hot wind came down punching loose the porcelain tiles from the central offices and the rain fell slantwise against the windows of the hotel. In the harbour the heavy steamers rolled, bumped in their berths. A rising wedge of water plunged through the middle of the city carrying over the roadbed broken ploughs, pieces of porches, the dipping corpses of dogs, and there were acacia branches adrift and spinning in the eddies. Sodden muck-like rags that once were shirts. Splintered crates. Wheels broken by the current. By the second night the worst had blown past and Foole and Charlotte rode quietly out of town following the same route as before and when they passed through Chinaman’s Gulch rain-blasted now and scoured down to its limestone striations he thought of Reckitt with them on that earlier ride and it seemed to him a journey from another age, another life.
As the night eased into a red backlit dawn they found themselves astride their horses staring down at the outbuildings and rickety fencelines of a waystation tavern. It looked deserted though they knew it would not be and they skirted the property though their horses were tired and they themselves hungry and came back up to the road some two miles farther on. The long yellow grass of the veld stretched out around them, a solitary baobab rising to the east in the grey haze. They heard the river at its height long before they saw it.
The cable crossing itself looked like it had not been tended to in years, its laddered posts weather-stripped and leaning. The cable swayed in the air where it spanned the river and he could see the flat-bottomed ferry on the far side where it swung and dipped and swung in the high water, the cable creaking against its weight.
Are you sure they’ll be able to get through? Charlotte asked him. After this storm?
He got down from his horse and crunched slowly over the stones to the timber that held the cable in place. His back was sore. The air felt hot already. A silted quality to the light made it seem as if they had ridden through a dreamlike blur and he walked now around the posts and rested a hand on an upright and stared down the length of the cable to the far shore. The high water was fast and muddy and dragged at the ferry. He looked again at the flywheel rusting there and he returned to his horse and took from the saddlebags a very old, very sharp knife.
Well, he said. I guess we’ll find out.
And he set to.
It was a barbed knife he had been given in New Orleans by a fisherman there meant for the gutting of fish and he liked it for the size of the blade, the crescent of its cut. He stood on a bite of the cable with one boot fast and he leaned his weight into it then sawed at the slack and slowly the cords frayed and ripped one by one. There was a groan, a sudden cracking as of green wood in a fire. He could feel the tug of the ferry in the high water as he worked and Charlotte was holding the horses steady and when he was through the cable jerked and snaked violently out of his hand and under his boot and into the water, singing as it went. His hand burned. He watched the ferry turn sluggishly into the river and spin downstream until some thirty yards away it ran aground on a sandbar. It bucked in the current and lifted and twisted but did not overturn.
Adam? she called to him. Is it finished?
He kicked away their boot prints in the dust. The earth was already dry as if it had not rained at all and he stumbled down the scree, squatted in the shallows with the river pouring cold over his ankles and he filled their waterskins and capped them and climbed wearily back up. Charlotte was leading their horses out and he rubbed at his face and looked at the waggon ruts and then at the sky.
Within the hour three stagecoaches came banging one by one through the low jacaranda, a cloud of white dust blooming big and bell-like behind them in the morning heat. A Boer sat perched high on the back of each, Winchester repeater upturned on one knee, swaying and jouncing to the ruts, while the drivers gripped the reins in both fists and leaned forward on their elbows. The horses were working hard through the haze of that cut and when they neared the ferry landing they slowed and the guards glanced nervously about. It was still early, the sun somewhere behind them. The first guard got down and kicked at the heavy cable in the dust and stared downriver to where the ferry had run aground. The door of the coach opened and a blond man came down, cracking his back. He walked the length of the traces, checked the stays in the freight webbing on top. At his side a Colt in its holster glinted. He stopped at the back wheel and stared out at the countryside with a hand on the bullets in his belt.
All this they watched over the grassy lip of a dune two hundred and fifty yards away. They had hobbled their horses a half mile back. They had taken off their hats and were shading their eyes and the flies were biting.
Seen enough? Foole sai
d.
Charlotte twisted and slid on her backside down and the dune crested under her like a roll of surf. At the base of the slope she stood, brushed the white sand from her trousers. She was peering back up at Foole with a curious intensity.
Yes, she said. I think I have.
It was dusk when the stagecoaches clattered down past the port to the empty steamer berth and their drivers got down and beat the dust from their hats and the guards from the rear benches made their way into the shipping offices. Their vessel had sailed six hours earlier for England and they were no longer in any hurry. Crowds still pressed through the streets and Foole stood under a creaking barber’s sign at the corner of an alley in a tall silk hat and he watched the guards make their tired way up the street to the post office. Then he turned and walked briskly back to his hotel.
They ate a quiet meal and Foole did not feel the delicious dread he usually felt when a theft began to succeed. He watched her small fingers on the knife as she cut delicately through the steak thinking that all this would soon be finished. He had understood from the first that this was a passing dream and like any dream it must be dispelled sometime but that time did not need to come so soon. She kept her face down, chewed sadly. Neither touched their wine.
They retired early to their room and doused the lights then paced in the darkness waiting for the hours to pass. They spoke of practical matters. How she would get out. Which steamship line to take to London. How much to tip the cab in Cape Town.
Anyone who leaves the country, he reminded her, will be under suspicion. When they ask you at the port, admit that you have heard of the theft. Be agreeable when they search your trunks.
I know how to handle it.
He nodded in the gloom.
You’ll go overland?
Into the interior, yes. He scratched at his jaw, the bristles there like glass. I’m a feather merchant after all, he said. If I can slip over the border upcountry I can sail for Suez from the coast, continue to the Adriatic. Any luck and we’ll find each other in Brindisi and take our time rounding Spain, let things cool off. I’ll be travelling with a crate of feathers, of course.
She did not look pleased. How long do you mean to take?
He shrugged, his eyes small in the gloom. He wanted her to say something that she was not saying but he did not understand it. They had made no promises, he knew. Does it matter? he said.
I imagine not.
He looked at her and she met his eye and they stood like that in the silence. The hotel felt very still.
Give it three months, he said hesitantly. And then: You’ll reach Brindisi before me. Be patient. Look for me at the Adelphi.
The Adelphi.
On the harbourfront. I’ll be there.
She pressed a hand to his cheek in the gloom. She was holding something sleek and warm and when he took it from her he saw it was a small opal brooch. He stepped away from her and held it up to the window. The delicacy of its filigree, the fine lacelike twists of gold in their making.
It belonged to my mother, she said softly. Martin gave it to me when he brought me out of the workhouse. I asked him why he had it and he told me she’d left it with him once as a gesture of trust. He said it was a kind of promise he’d made to her.
Foole closed his hand.
Come here, he said.
Later that night he dressed and took the false keys and folded himself through the window while Charlotte held the sash for him. He crept along the roofline and dropped to a rain barrel in the alley keeping to shadow. He let himself into the post office and stood just within the door listening and then he locked the door behind him. Behind the counter he approached the safe for registered packages. Through the front window a faint greyness drifted in, a different shade of darkness. The safe was a modern cast-iron one built by a respected firm in Baltimore and Foole knew the make well. He had it open in under five minutes and then he sat a moment on his knees with his hands in his lap, peering in at the shelves there. He was thinking of Charlotte. He understood she had already said her farewell. How strange the morning would feel, with her gone and the sun rising as it would over any dawn, the red clouds smouldering out across the sky. There came a sound of footsteps and then a rattle as a hand tried the door and then boots receding along the boardwalk. The night watchman on his rounds. He did not wait long. He took out the three black felt bags and inspected each one and then for good measure removed the small amount of money and government bills from the filing shelf of the safe. Then he closed and spun the latch, locked the building behind him, and climbed lightly back across the roofline to the hotel.
In the morning her trunks were gone.
The swag lay tamped safely deep in his pillowcase and had not been tampered with. He lay a long time in that bed staring up at the ceiling mouldings. He kept expecting the door to open, her to lift the sheet and slip her cool legs into bed beside him. After a while he heard men shouting along the boardwalks, the sound of running feet, then horses moving at speed up and down the roadbed. A police whistle sounded.
He rose and wrapped himself in the sheet and went to the window. The sky was washed pink, the cold rooftops of the city steaming in the early heat. The harbour waters were all shadow, and still, as if the night were coalesced there and sinking deeper. Men in red uniforms were gathered outside the post office and the assistant postmaster with his hair dishevelled was ducking through the door. He turned away.
In the sunlight on the bureau he found her opal brooch. He picked it up. It felt warm. He stood there in the rising of the sun at the bottom of the world and he held it in his fist as if it were her hand, and the heat of it her own.
The Woman in the Thames:
Part Two
*
1885
LONDON
SEVEN
Adam Foole stood shivering on her doorstep in Hampstead, his fists full of irises wilting in the drizzle. He looked at the police inspector and he looked away. You would be, sir, an associate of Miss Reckitt? No he would not. He could hear the cabbie’s mare shake her head at the curb and stamp a nailed hoof and he took off his top hat and felt the cold mist in his hair and he put it back on. He could not clear his head. How long have you known the lady in question? Knowing is such a complicated business. As is the heart. As is the heart. Foole stumbled back, glanced up, nodded politely. I regret to inform you, sir, her body was recovered three days ago at. Yes. We’re not at liberty to. Yes.
He felt a hard anger like a knuckle in his ribs and understood he must hold on to whatever that was. He did not step into the house but turned, hearing his shoes scrape on the desolate stones, and at the curb he climbed unseeing into the cab.
She was no longer young, that was his first thought. Then: There has been a mistake. If I had returned a week sooner she might still be. He remembered the white curve of the African sun like an exquisite scythe on her arm in the furrowed bedsheets. The pale hairs on her leg, glistening with sweat. The languorous whup of the wooden fan turning its blades in the high ceiling and the slatted windows, the hot dust of the street.
The hansom jerked into motion. A shiver of reins in the cold, the mare skidding sharply, then going on.
He had not spoken with her in ten years, true. But he had watched her at a remove, had followed and been informed of her goings-on. For six years the attorney Utterson had written with news of her takings while Foole’s purse permitted it and he had paid the man well for his words. Utterson was sly and troubling both but somehow too a kind of friend and despite Fludd’s warnings Foole had found as the years went on that he came to almost trust the man. Through Utterson he had heard of Charlotte’s affair with a banker in Lisbon and when it had soured he had gone to that city and in October of that year conducted a risky and ambitious heist of bonds meant to ruin the man’s reputation. But instead of selling the bonds back at a profit he had surprised himself and Fludd both by burning them in a grate while the big man knocked over the furniture in frustration. It was always so, wo
uld always be. Through Utterson too he learned of her grift in San Francisco, in 1879, a haul of some fifty thousand dollars. That was when he had understood she was a talent to be reckoned with and when a few days later he learned she had married a man to pull it off he had gone into a week-long rage that even Fludd had not dared to interrupt. Through all of this he had watched and listened but never once approached her and he had found as the years passed that he did not want to do so. Still he would hear that she was in London and go through the streets with one eye open for her drifting figure. Had he thought of her less as the years passed? Each September on the anniversary of their Port Elizabeth heist he would purchase a clutch of irises and walk down to the Thames and stand alone, remembering. And then he would let the fistful fall and watch their stems separate and their petals drift and fill with water and sink.
Her earliest memory had been of water. That is what she told him. Of water warm and silvered in some sunlit green place, water pouring gentle from her mother’s opened fingers.
He thought it strange that this should come to him now. Before her mother had died, before Charlotte had been sent down to the workhouse, she and her mother used to walk in Hyde Park in the summer during church hours and sit on the bank of the lake and watch the swans glide past. That is how she remembered it. She must have been four, five years old. The carved white marble of the swans and the luminous white shine of her mother’s face in the sun. It was a momentary happiness she would carry with her for years and Foole had listened to her tell him this while a sadness ate and ate at his heart. They had been seated at an outdoor table licking flavoured ices in the shade of Port Elizabeth’s railway station and he had asked her in a hesitant voice about her years in the Whitechapel workhouse.
She said all that was another lifetime. She said she had been six when her mother died and two weeks after her body was carted to the mortuary Charlotte found herself delivered perfunctorily to the workhouse gates by a ladies’ aid society member. That lady wore soft white gloves, Charlotte told him, an expensive green hat, a pitying smile. They had stopped in at a bakery around the corner and Charlotte was still clutching the warm bread roll given her. Then a matron came out, a thickset woman with red freckled arms, and she pocketed the warm roll into her own skirts and steered Charlotte down a long hall and through an office and down a second hall. Charlotte without expression told Foole how she was stripped by the matron, doused by buckets of cold water, scrubbed raw with carbolic and a horse brush. That was the beginning of my second life, she said. She slept in a long room with toughened girls four to a bed and in the night under their creaking and coughing would come the scratch of the rats among their shoes and kicked-off blankets. Someone was always ill, she said. A fever would cut from one end of the ward to the other each winter and then begin its way back along the rows come spring. Days were filled picking out oakum with a spike while a matron read aloud from the Bible and meals were endured in silence and that was their true education. The girls were belted on the backs of their hands for infractions, locked in unlighted closets under the stairs. Some nights they were awakened and forced to walk single file with wicker baskets balanced on their heads and should any stumble all were beaten. In the yard during exercise they would stand some days with their foreheads pressed to the cold bars of the fence staring out at the world in its passing. We were all of us waiting, she said. For whatever came next.
