By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  He went upstairs, testing each riser to avoid creaks, and on the upper landing he went from door to door. Linen closet, water closet, a study, an unused bedchamber filled with old junk. At last he found the sister asleep in a tiny bedroom, the window blocked out so that the room felt suffused with the horror of her blindness. Foole carefully shut the door. He lifted a tall standing lamp from a pier table and laid it crosswise in front of the sister’s door in hazard.

  At the last door he paused, listening, and heard the slow muffled sounds of a figure beyond. He knew this must be Mrs. Sharper. He opened the landing window, balancing in the sudden cold of the sill. Then crossed in his stocking feet along the roof tiles to the next window. The sash stood open. He let himself soundlessly in.

  He saw her at once, readying for bed. She wore a flannel nightgown streaked with brown at the back and had already unscrewed the wooden fingers and Foole could see the knuckled stumps where she had been carved up. He was thinking of Molly, the sad still centre of her.

  Mrs. Sharper froze. Who’s that? she hissed. Who’s there? She turned her eyes sightlessly in the gloom, her face upraised, as if scenting the air.

  Foole stood beside the windowsill, watching.

  I will know you, Mrs. Sharper said softly. You will rue this trespass.

  A long moment passed in the darkness.

  Her spine was curled, her neck and wrists bone-thin. She looked, Foole thought, frail and mean. Do you come to harm an old woman? she hissed, swift, vicious. An old blind woman? Or do you come to rob me? I warn you, there is a man in the house below.

  Mr. Curtains cannot help you, Foole said.

  Who speaks? A long, slow, calculating pause. You. Mr. Foole.

  You should be more careful.

  Adam Foole, she said, her face twisting. It has been a long time since a man climbed through my bedroom window.

  Molly’s boy, Peter. Tell me what happened to him.

  Mrs. Sharper raised her face and a dry smile crossed her lips. The boy? I do not understand, Mr. Foole. What is he to you?

  Foole withdrew a safety match from his pocket and scraped it alight on the windowsill and then he crossed the room with the flame bending back towards him and he crushed it against the blind woman’s hand. She shrieked, snapped back in terror, clutching the skin to her mouth.

  He shook the match into smoke. Tell me about the boy, he said again, his voice calm.

  We sent him away, she said. For thieving. I know nothing more than that.

  Foole withdrew a second match, struck it alight. A scrape, a hiss of phosphor. The blind woman backed away, bumped up against the dresser. That is not the truth, said Foole. What happened?

  He stole nothing, she stuttered, he didn’t steal from us. Wait.

  You sent him away for nothing?

  We never sent him away.

  Foole stepped closer.

  We never sent him away, she repeated. He died. He was killed. He was struck down by a carriage in the street and we buried him in St. Aldwyn’s. He’s dead.

  Foole held the smouldering match to her face. He’s dead?

  Dead. Yes.

  He was very close to the old woman and the smoke would be in her nostrils, the heat near her eye, but she did not flinch. Why did you lie? he said.

  In the matchlight her face was etched with a vicious loathing, her milky eyes scooped, unblinking. Why? she murmured. The poor girl. You took her from the boy and he was buried three days later. When she came back to us, we knew what it was she sought.

  She’s blamed herself all these years.

  Herself and us.

  Yes.

  But herself less than had we told her the true. That the boy died going out into the streets to the corner where the two of them used to dip. Mrs. Sharper glowered with her wispy hair wild and her dry mouth atremble. We loved that girl, Mr. Foole, she said, as she loved us. You will not understand it because you do not know what it was between us. We let you have her, yes. We allowed it. Because we wished a different life for her.

  Foole remembered their vicious covetousness from that time. You forget how it was, he said. Don’t make yourselves out to be saints. You were well paid for her.

  And what if we were?

  Foole extinguished the match, stepped back out of her reach. That isn’t love. It’s profit.

  Mrs. Sharper’s face was cast into crags of shadow. We must invent our monsters, Mr. Foole, in order to cast ourselves against them. Call us what you will. But the truth? You are no different than we.

  Foole could feel the confusion in his face. He thought of Molly at six years old, sliding like smoke through the streets, the steady sober concentrated grief that was in her when he first hired her.

  You are not her only protector, Mrs. Sharper whispered.

  He had held the girl as she screamed and cried and struggled against him locked in a dream, her tiny body so soft, so thin. He studied Mrs. Sharper’s face as if to seek some semblance there of the conflicted heart but saw only cruelty and the gnarled impress of age. He started to speak and then he did not and after a moment he backed through the darkness to the door, his stockings silent on the floorboards.

  She swung her arms in a slow arc, sensing his withdrawal. It was a kindness, she hissed into the shadows. Do you hear? A kindness.

  Foole slipped his shoes on in the cold outside, his stockings wet, his toes numb. He knew Molly would be asleep when he got back. He would go to her in the morning perhaps, sit at the edge of her mattress, and as she raised her face and stared sleepily at him he would tell her he had been to see the sisters a last time. He would tell her he had learned the truth about her Peter and that she deserved to know the facts of it. He would say Sharper had lied. That Peter had found a protector, a ship’s carpenter, and had travelled to the Continent, and that somewhere in a small mountain village in Austria he was alive and well and learning an honest trade. She would lie in silence listening and he would press his hand into the bedsheets and tell her that there were many kinds of not knowing and that certainty and conviction were not the same thing. He would tell her he had lived alongside Charlotte’s absence a decade now at least and had felt her proximity all that time. And when he got up to go the impress of his hand in the white sheets would remain, fingers splayed, palm open, like a hand extended in offering.

  Edward would think to himself, years after the war, that there are confluences in a life, moments of deep exchange between strangers, when the strands of two different fates draw together and the cutting of one necessitates the cutting of another. Such a confluence had come upon him there in Camp Barry, in 1862, though he did not know it then.

  It was the night before the new moon. Three men in frock coats and top hats came brutally in swinging their lanterns over the faces of the prisoners and he knew at once that it was himself they sought, that he had been betrayed. The man Fisk clawed through the straw and withdrew the bent spoon honed now to a blade and a stout bald sergeant seized Edward by the hair and hauled him sacklike through the gate, outside into the cold. He struggled, kicking, terrified. He understood there would be no trial and he would that night be tied to a stake in the frozen mud, blindfolded, and shot for treason. As he twisted in their grip he glanced back and saw Fisk under the high barred window, a silver outline, eyes hidden in shadow.

  What came to him then, unbidden, was a memory of Mrs. Shade gliding in a mauve dress among the roses at Shade House. He remembered the pale languid turning of her parasol, its Japanese design, the sound of bees in the sunshine. He had been, he understood, happy, and had not known such happiness again. He crushed his eyes shut. Her voice was low, kind. Her fingers were long and thin, the joints swollen. He could not recall her face.

  The men dragged him to a harnessed waggon with a lantern dipping on a cane stalk above the driver and they hurled him onto the flatbed and then all three climbed up with him and the waggon jolted and set off at a fast clip. The men wore their hats low at their eyes and Edward could see nothing in their fac
es and he did not understand where he was being taken. The men swayed and rocked and he drew his knees up to his chest and eyed the passing streets. They rode out towards the gloom of the city and slowed at the camp guardhouse but did not stop and then they were turning along rutted streets and passing abandoned brick houses. No one spoke.

  At a nondescript house with a single lantern burning weakly above the front door they got down and he was taken roughly upstairs to a small sitting room and shoved into an upholstered chair facing an empty desk. It had been a long time since he had sat on something so soft and his skin recoiled at the brush of it. Only one of the men stayed with him. That man’s face was scarred and hard-looking. Edward glanced at the door, glanced at the curtains billowing before an open window. He wondered at the height of the drop, wondered if he could reach the sill without being tackled or shot.

  The door at the far end of the room opened, a bearded man came through. Black-haired like the devil, thick and burly, solid through the chest like a cannon, with eyes small and deep-set with malice. He sat at the desk and took a cigar out of a box in front of him and leaned back and glowered. Edward felt a low thrum go through him, a sudden presentiment of danger.

  This is the lad they call Shade? the man said in a deep Scottish burr. He chewed at the end of his cigar. I understand you’ve been something of a nuisance in the stockade. Escaping and such.

  Edward said nothing. He was neither chained nor handcuffed and he sat with his feet carefully spread and his weight balanced and he felt the coiled tension in his body. He was careful not to look at the open window.

  You’re thinking you can still run, the man said. His eyes flicked up, fixed on Edward’s. You can’t.

  Edward flushed.

  I understand you’ve made escape something of a career, the man continued in his gravelly murmur. How many times have you jumped for the bounty? Three?

  Four, sir, the man in the top hat who had escorted him in said.

  He has no next of kin?

  Not according to his records, sir.

  The bearded man leaned forward, interlacing his thick fingers before him. He had the cigar between his teeth, still unlit, and he said very quietly, My name is Major Allen, son. Do you know what it is I do?

  Edward regarded the Major cautiously.

  I offer people with unusual abilities a chance to redeem themselves. I offer them a choice.

  What kind of a choice? Edward said cautiously.

  Ah. Major Allen held his cigar out at arm’s length, turned it end over end in his fingers, smiled grimly. A choice between living and dying. Tell me. Do you want to live?

  Did he want to live? Years later he would struggle to understand why he had answered as he had, why he had let himself be spared. The debt would in time come to feel Biblical, fated. He had been saved over others by a man who did not officially exist, a thief-taker, the dreaded Eye, a man who wrapped himself in darkness and walked among the enlisted men a ghost, a rumour, feared and faceless and unseen. In time Edward would come to love the shifting nature of the man the way he loved the skin of a river. In time his love would twist and expand into the angry complicated love of a son for a father he had not ever known.

  I want to live, Edward said softly.

  The Major watched him, wreathed in shadow. Nodded.

  He was the civilian head of the Army of the Potomac’s Secret Service, Edward would later learn, a man of unchecked power. His real name was, yes, of course, Pinkerton.

  Allan Pinkerton.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was the last Tuesday in January, 1885, and William Pinkerton stood in the middle of Gaunt Street listening to the drift of footsteps in the darkness. The cabman had found the address with difficulty and he stared now up at the silent house, its weak gas lamps burning a smoky and sinister light. It had been three days since he had accompanied Foole down into Shadwell, three days since Foole had poured out the last of the gin in that tavern and torn the label from the bottle and scrawled out the address to the seance in pencil on its reverse. William had protested but the small man had pressed it into his palm beseeching. The falseness in Foole’s account of the killing of Edward Shade had angered him, true. His father had ever been a man of violence. But he had hunted Shade long after that confrontation could have taken place and if nothing else this alone proved the lie. William had not come this night because the man Foole had begged him. He had come because something remained unfinished between them. He had come because the man was other than he seemed.

  A weak fog crawled over the setts in the street. No one had entered or exited the house since the hansom had dropped him. At last he started across, his ribs still sore, the sticking plaster at the back of his neck scratching. He knew a man usually suspected his own failings in the men he met. His brother Robert trusted no one on the wrong side of the law and thought the difference between right and wrong a clear one. But William knew the law had as much to do with power as rightness. It was built by men for its own purpose, like a steam locomotive, and what was done with it was the work of men who had places to get to and schedules to keep. He thought of Foole. Of course there was a wrong side to the law.

  He sometimes wondered if there was a right one.

  If Shade had indeed survived the war then his father might have found any kind of moment to take justice into his own hands. He knew this. He did not think his father capable of murder but killing was another matter. William’s own war had lasted a meagre six months but had scoured clear any uncomplicated idea of goodness and mercy carried over from his childhood. At sixteen he witnessed the worst the world could do to a person and the sight of that had stayed in him always. It must have been the same for his father. In the early months of the war before the Peninsular Campaign his father would write him letters from Washington. Curt missives sent to his dormitory in Notre Dame with instructions rather than advice. He would sign them under his pseudonym, Major Allen, S.S. of the Potomac. He would explain that the secret to warfare was discipline, that fighting armies rarely engaged but at the moment of contact one side invariably broke and ran. Hold your position, son, and a man will be all right, in life as in war. Most bodies pulled off the battlefield are shot through the back.

  Then in the grim spring of 1862 the character of the war made itself known. William had enlisted by then, was there alongside his father. After Malvern Hill his father never again made such claims. That was a season of evil unbounded. He thought of the balloonist Ignatius Spaar, his scarred visage, the anxious twitch of his eyebrow like a wink that made him seem always to be teasing. The look of the man as he ran low into the trees towards the Confederate sharpshooters. That. And that preacher in the burned hamlet in northern Virginia, a rag on a stick, beseeching the retreating soldiers to lay down their arms. Waving his arms and hollering from the peaked roof of his church. What was it he had cried?

  Repent, boys, repent. For the wrathful Lord sees all.

  He remembered the sound of the rifle. That preacher when he fell fell in a slow silence and landed in the muck with the slap of a wet sack of earth. Eyes rolled up to the sky, arms wide, a burnt hole in his cheek like a kiss.

  Whoever in that long line of soldiers had shot the man did not stop. William himself had trudged past, staring, too tired to care, and he remembered how no other had fallen out of line to bother with the burying.

  He rang the bell.

  A tall bearded Sikh with long indigo eyelashes and a red turban opened the door and let William inside. The house was hushed, cold. He could smell marigolds in the gloom. The Sikh turned wordlessly and moved away with a silent tread in his slippers and after a moment William followed. His own footfalls echoing on the inscribed wood floor. It seemed a third walked with them there and he shivered to feel it.

  No he did not believe the dead did speak. He thought spiritualism a refuge for scoundrels and grift. He had known many professional liars in his time and all had insisted a man must first deceive himself before he can be deceived. The mark, th
ey would grin, must be the most convincing liar of all.

  The Sikh led him past a lighted room with a fish pond and through a beaded curtain and down a second hallway into a parlour. The gas lamps on the walls cast an eerie light and the air was heavy with incense. William noticed this first. Then the gold and red wall hangings with their prints of elephants and tigers. It was a small room made smaller by the plush dark armchairs and the tall row of draped windows. There was a chill in the air. He saw others had already gathered but he did not see Adam Foole.

  At the far side of the room two folding doors of lacquered wood stood wide. A slender woman with long bare arms and heavy bracelets swayed beside them and William knew her at once for the medium. She wore a white fabric wrapped around her in some complicated oriental style and she looked in the dim light very still and very beautiful like a naiad carved from marble. He watched her turn slowly between the two men with whom she spoke and her eyes he saw were outlined in black pencil and her lips were very red and he felt something quicken inside him. Just behind her in the open doorway stood a plump man, straining at his waistcoat, smoking soberly. Every so often this man would touch her arm and murmur into her ear and she would nod without looking his way.

  William felt a presence at his elbow and turned. A lady in a green shawl, a scarlet bustle, mother-of-pearl buttons. She had a thin catlike jaw and prominent teeth and her hazel eyes were large and set wide in her face. Grief had drawn its deep lines like a thumb through soft wax. She greeted William with a quiet smile and held out a gloved hand and he looked at it and then he shook it. She told him she had come to communicate with her daughter. She smiled as she said this. Her daughter had sickened four years ago at the age of eleven and had passed over within a fortnight. She followed his gaze across to an ancient man in a tall worn silk hat seated alone in a corner and she told him that gentleman’s name was Gables. His son was lost in the Crimea, poor man, she said. Oh but he’s been to so many of these sittings. Miss Utterson gets excellent results.