by Steven Price
Couldn’t you have left? he had asked.
Many did.
But then your uncle came.
Then my uncle came, she nodded. Yes.
By late afternoon the light had snuffed slowly out as if a fist were closing over the sun and Foole felt himself borne aloft into a murky orange darkness. He recalled passing the toll booth, handing the three pennies around to the driver’s hand with a dread growing in him. He recalled the lakes of muck in the streets, the deep slow pushing through of the wheels in the water, the cold rub of the leather seat under him. In Bond Street carriages banged up against each other and he saw an old woman struck into the mud as the fog came on.
It was not nightfall. He had forgotten about them, these London particulars. Fogs that came on without warning, thick as night, brown and choking.
Gaslights burned weakly in the shopfronts. Foole climbed down from the hansom on Piccadilly, stood shivering at the curb. He could not catch his breath. There were linkboys in the streets carrying torches to see their way and they moved like faint red horrors through the mists. He fumbled along the shopfronts, losing his footing on the tin cans of a milkwoman huddled out of the way. He could hear the grind and sizzle of a hot-potato stand nearby and smell the roasting chestnuts there but did not see it. When he held his gloved hand up before his face it looked ghostly in the haze.
He coughed and stumbled on.
How long did he wander. He felt something squelch underfoot and then a clattering roar whooshed past. Then brown fog. Then he was leaning against a lamppost as a gaslighter in a rubberized cloak banged his ladder against the crossbar. Get off with ye, he muttered. Then fog again. Some figure knocked him roughly down, ran past.
He was uncertain which street he had turned up. He paused, understanding he must find someplace to wait the fog out. At a broad stone stair he turned, and ascended, the granite balustrade brushing his gloved fingers.
He found himself blinking in the sudden warmth of an art gallery. Women in elegant frocks seated at the far wall drank from bone china and men in waterproofed coats leaned on their sticks at the tea counter and because he could not bear the lilt in their voices he turned and passed a watchman and went in among the paintings.
Later, much later, he would wonder at the unlikeliness of finding it. Such a painting, at such a time. He would wonder had he read about it in the Times, perhaps, on that journey to London. Or overheard some rumour in the streets. He had no recollection of paying the entrance fee though he must have done so. He remembered walking, yes, as if borne along by some current of light, he remembered the feeling of being not right in his skin. Everywhere were crowds murmuring amongst themselves, ladies in their kid gloves, gentlemen in their brushed top hats. He slipped into a secondary gallery and crossed the room and without pause, as if drawn to the thing, he went towards one wall where the crowds had gathered thickest. A window overlooked the street and the orange fog moved down below him and the lamplight in the room fell leeched and sickly across the waxed floorboards and it seemed to him that a hush had settled over everything. He was aware of the blood in his head. He stood jostled, and lonely, staring at the people around him, and then the crowds seemed to part before him and he stepped forward in his grief and he lifted his eyes and he saw the painting.
Charlotte.
He stepped forward, the blood thick in his ears. Of course it was not of her. He knew this. Seeing the crust of yellow paint where a brush or palette knife had streaked her throat. The wash of blurred soot where her hair was lost to the gloom. As he leaned forward he could see the red underpainting around her eyes, its eerie shadow like a world just beyond the visible. He had not lived his life by art. But he felt the gooseflesh rise on his neck, his arms. The woman in the painting stared out at him with Charlotte’s face, Charlotte’s eyes, in a haze as if through some atmospheric disturbance, her hair a bleed of colour, her face lowered. Her stare was lifted and sharp and held his in a harsh vortex of silence as if she were waiting for him to speak some answer of great moment. But it was an answer to a question left unspoken and to which he could say nothing, only nod miserably, and turn, it seemed always, away.
He had all those years ago in Brindisi failed her. That was the truth of it. He had left Port Elizabeth three weeks after the heist and journeyed north, overland, into Africa, the uncut diamonds hidden under a false panel in his trunk. He had filled that trunk with ostrich feathers and taken the slower eastern route, cautious, thinking of Charlotte as he went. She would be waiting for him in Brindisi before the month was out and it was her he moved towards. Then he got sick. At Maputo he understood he could not go on and he risked a berth in a Belgian trader sailing north along the coast past Zanzibar. In Djibouti he found passage to Italy. By the time he was offloading in Brindisi he was so weak he could hardly stand. He had been travelling almost seven weeks.
He had made his rendezvous on time but Charlotte was not at the Adelphi when he drifted, feverish, in. He feared something had happened to her. He made inquiries in his broken French but no one had seen her. Nor was there any packet of money waiting, a telegram, anything. Foole in his sickness understood Martin Reckitt had learned of their tryst and kept her from him, the diamonds, all of it. He was light-headed, starving. He had neither shaved nor washed in a long time. The hotel bill rose. He sent a confused telegram to Fludd in London but wrote out the wrong address and it never arrived. The weeks passed. One day as he stumbled through the port on his way to the customs house he collapsed against a pillar and could not get up. In the sun the marble was hot on his neck, the sky very blue. There were dogs and donkeys and carts pushing through the crowds. It was then he felt a hand on his shoulder and through the haze of his fever he looked up and saw Martin Reckitt.
It was no dream. The old thief took him in his arms and supported him and led him to his hotel. Reckitt nursed Foole back to strength. On the second day Reckitt picked up the diamonds in their black felt bags from the customs house where Foole had stashed them. Still he stayed. Fed him, washed him. Sat with him in that miserable blank hotel room with his shirt off in the heat and squeezed a rag of water at Foole’s lips when he could not drink. Murmuring the while about trust and betrayal and the seducing of his niece. He should have slit Foole’s throat. He should have left Foole in an alley to rot. Reckitt had been a priest or almost a priest once and perhaps there was some last grudging mercy in him as he saved Foole’s life. Foole would remember little of that time. He would remember asking after Charlotte. Was she ill also, was she in some trouble? Had the Boers interrogated her in Cape Town?
Reckitt had leaned over him in the wavering heat, his skin flushed. Charlotte’s in England, Mr. Foole, she’s well enough. Reckitt poured out a glass of water. I take it she never told you.
He struggled to rise. Told me what?
A viciousness in the old thief’s eye. She’s to be married. In the new year.
Foole fell back, tried to speak, slept again. In the morning when Foole opened his eyes Reckitt had taken the diamonds and settled the hotel bill and disappeared. There was no farewell. That day at noon the hotel staff turned Foole out into the street, still weak, not a shilling to his name. Reckitt was already sailing for England, already sailing towards his own fate, the diamonds discovered in his luggage, the old thief apprehended and condemned to twenty years in Millbank.
But on that first night after Reckitt’s departure Foole had sat shivering under the broken column marking the end of the Via Appia, knowing none of that yet, confused, hurt. Peering uphill at the lone café still open until the lights were snuffed and then wandering down among the small fishing boats overturned along the beach, the sand cold and hard-packed under his feet. In the morning he had trudged up to the steamship offices and watched the young clerk open for the day but something had held him back, he did not go in. Instead he had gone in and out of artisan shops while musicians piped faintly down through the narrow crooked streets, eating the cold folded pastries the old men threw out by the dozen
at the end of each day, thinking, crazily, that if he waited long enough Charlotte just might come to him. It made no sense. But somewhere that mercurial creature he had fallen in love with was moving through the world, in counterpoint to him, and he could not accept that the future he had imagined, throughout his long dusty overland trek through Africa, fevered, dreaming of their nights in Port Elizabeth, was no longer possible.
His own earliest memory was not of water but fire. Perched in an underground room on a cracked axlewood table, small legs hanging over the edge into emptiness, shirt unbuttoned while a huge fire whooshed and crackled behind him. The glow of the flames gleaming in the polished wood. There was a man with discs in front of his eyes and these discs burned with the flames also. He knew his father stood somewhere in the shadow but he would not approach though Foole cried. The man before him was bald and his four front teeth were gold and a sheen of sweat stood out on his flickering brow as he leaned in, pressed his ear to the boy’s chest, tapped two icy fingers on his back. In his other hand a scalpel glinted and the man looked at Foole and asked where it hurt. He would remember that fear, the absolute certainty of it, like a thing he could hold on to and slip in a pocket. There was a dish with smears of rice paste half visible beside his thigh. The man said to him: I should just cut it out of you, neh? And be done with it, neh? He held the scalpel between his thumb and forefinger the way Foole had seen adults hold writing utensils and this somehow frightened him more. The man said: I can hear it in your chest, bolly. Right there. And he tapped Foole once over the heart. And all at once he could feel it too and though he did not know what it was he would imagine it there for years, alive, writhing in him, its little jaws working, eating his life from the inside out.
EIGHT
On the third afternoon when the fog had thinned but not yet lifted William Pinkerton went back to Blackfriars. He stood with a hand at the railing where Charlotte Reckitt had fallen, he crouched low in the muck and studied the bollards, he leaned out over the span in the high cold air seeking some evidence of her escape. A tangle of clothing, a scrabbling of mud on a stone. Anything.
He could feel the hems of his trousers clinging in a cold wet crust to his ankles and he would stop now and then and shake out a leg not caring how it must look. Then he would move a few feet farther along the bridge, the grey street slime squelching under his boots. The river was high and the colour of burnt cork and he watched the steamer ferries vanish through the fog. A notion was forming in his mind that he could not shake. He knew Charlotte Reckitt’s body lay in pieces on Frith Street and yet he knew too that a man saw only what he looked for and he scowled and stared out at the drifting fog but could not make sense of it. The hell with it, he told himself. The woman was dead.
Curling his bruised hand into a fist as he did so.
What was it had happened? He stood in the chill, struggling to remember, passing a sore hand across his eyes in the afternoon light. The night had been cold. He had felt the frost on the bridge setts under his shoes, the slide and rasp of it. He remembered there had been night watchmen blowing their whistles somewhere behind him but he had not known if they were pursuing him, or Charlotte Reckitt, or some other. He remembered Charlotte across the footway, running for the railing, climbing high upon it and turning to glare back at him, breathless. The wind crackling her skirts whitely out from under her coat, the shape of her boots, a flash of stockinged ankles. Her hair in her eyes so that he could not make out her expression. He had lunged towards her and she had let go with her fingers and leaned back into the darkness with the shell of one ear visible and plunged straight-backed with arms outspread and then like that she was gone.
He awoke the next day before dawn with a fierce ache blooming behind his left eye like a sunrise of blood and the pain worsened in the bad air. He dressed with one hand on the towel rail to steady himself and went down for a breakfast of rashers and eggs and two cups of strong black tea without lifting his head to the day. Then paid and went out into the street and hailed a hansom for the wet docks at Wapping in the jostle and crush of the morning hire.
The day was a thin fog, a greying of the light as if tinted by a fine dusting of coal, and he turned up the collar of his topcoat. The hansom rattled on. Wapping was grim with its accidental courtyards and crooked alleyside shops. A stink of tan, tallow, gutted fish, rotting vegetable peelings oozed up from the open gutters. He saw windows packed with brass sextants and chronometers, sailors’ compasses held open with their small paper tags dangling dustily in the cases. Sailmakers by the dozen with ropes and lines of tar coiled on tables and at each corner the slop sellers with their hammocks and oiled wetcoats and red or blue flannels knotted and swaying in the door frames. Waggons rolled past loaded with reeking mounds of pure. In the crowds newsboys were hollering out word of the Fenian bombing from the day before and he heard the driver in back clear his throat and spit and snort and vacate his nostrils.
Transport the lot of them, the driver hollered at him. Australia ain’t too rough for their like.
William said nothing.
The driver said some word more that he did not catch then creaked back on his bench.
He rubbed two fingers at his temple to ease the ache. He saw girls in the streets bareheaded and leering never mind the hour and sailors in loose jackets and pantaloons. There were customs officers in brass buttons and blue coats and inked sailors with hoops in their ears and others with coloured wrappings on their heads. Wiry boys slipped barefoot between the carts despite the cold, lifting what little they could. When the hansom had come to a halt William got down and the driver gestured with his whip to the south, to the tall iron gates of the London docks standing wide there. He could see masts by the hundreds rising in the grey beyond like the stark spines of some ravaged forest.
One and six, the driver grunted.
William looked at him, his voice was soft. How much again?
The driver cleared his throat, squinted up at the sky as if anxious for rain. Call it a shilling, he said. Special, like, for you, sir.
William nodded. He gave the man one and two. For your trouble, he said.
More and more often now William stared into mirrors and his father stared back. Never mind his father had stood barely five foot eight in stocking feet and at forty weighed 165 pounds to William’s 225, never mind his apelike arms that dangled near to his knees. For his father too could wrap himself round a barrel of molasses and lift it four feet onto a flatbed without strain. William remembered how the old man would oil his hair flat and how in July the heat would stand it out upon his skull in thick black curls. Scottish to a fault. He scorned anything not seen with his own eyes, not weighed in his own fist or poured through his fingers. He drank eight glasses of water a day and forced the same upon his family. Never touched a drop of liquor not even cold ale in high summer. Ate potatoes in their jackets with relish. For thirteen years he drove his children seventeen miles to church over dirt roads with his back rigid and his face unsmiling but one Sunday when the pastor spoke in defence of slavery he stood up and put on his hat and walked out and he did not ever go back. William feared him and loved him and loathed him every day of his life yet too not a day passed that he did not want to be him. His father was not a man of great physical beauty but the conviction in his fists could sway any man living. He had been a cooper when he came to America and then a lawman and when he set out as a private detective there was no such thing anywhere in the country and he became something else entire, a thing unstoppable and elemental and terrifying.
He woke throughout his life to a recurring illness which left a smell of burning in his nostrils. On such mornings he would squint out at the world under blood-coloured eyelids and speak to no one. The Scot in him distrusted doctors, the frontiersman in him blended his own medicinal drinks. Myrtleberry, celery, radishes, warmed milk. Other, fouler beverages. His beard he would trim with a pair of barber’s shears kept handles-out in a Mason jar on a shelf near the rain barrel. Beside the bar
n a piece of mirror had been fastened with rope and nail and he would wash himself there in any weather for modesty. He slept when it grew dark and rose when it grew light and walked his daily constitutional come snow or shine. In the unheated house when the door banged shut William would kick off his sheets, shake his younger brother awake, and together they would start their chores. If there was a vanity in his father then it came from a love of what physical power could do. He had trained under a pugilist in the Glasgow slums and he took William on his eighth birthday to a warehouse on the Chicago docks to see Tom Heenan fight Johnny Roberts. Heenan was the taller but young still at that time and not yet a champion and when he struck Roberts down in four the riled crowd stormed the ring with knives and chains. William’s father had held him against the far wall and insisted he watch the brawl. It’s never what happens, lad, his father had murmured. Watch now. It’s who it happens to. That’s what matters.
