By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  At his hotel he rang the bell at the front desk then stilled it and waited. The concierge was a man his own age with a neck too thin for his uniform’s collar. A telegram from Chicago had been misfiled days ago and he now sat himself in the lobby under one of the palms with the roar of the street coming through the opening and closing doors and the cold air in bursts and he opened and read it at once. It began: Mr Pinkerton, sir; man described is Japheth Fludd. V dangerous. 1879: assault of offduty constable, sentenced 5 yrs, Sing Sing. Served full term. Approach with caution. No record of priors. No known aliases. No known accomplices. Employer Fool not known to us (alias?).

  Hours passed, days passed. A tension began to thrum in him, like a rope drawn tight. He ate enormous dishes of roast beef, fried bacon, curried potatoes. He circled the idea of Foole with a languid predatory intent. A red sun sank into the rooftops, the city burned on in the dying light. The man Shade was out there somewhere. He thought of his father, he thought of his wife. What would Margaret say?

  She would tell him: Go on get the bastard and be done with it.

  It was Sunday and he was on his way to Scotland Yard when by chance he saw the Utterson woman again. He stood clutching a paper cone of roasted chestnuts in one hand and did not at first know her and then all at once he did and he crushed the paper without realizing it and changed direction and began to walk behind her. He did not care if she saw him and he walked with his eyes glowering and a cane in his fist like a cudgel.

  It was the first of February, and cold. There was about her now none of the Raj, none of the exotic or otherworldly. Dressed in a mauve dress long out of fashion but elegant still with its declining bustle and long thick skirts. A white hat with thick pelican feathers and purple flowers arranged at one side, a white winter shawl wrapped at her shoulders. Pale kidskin gloves clutching a parcel. This she shifted into one elbow as she gestured to an omnibus heading east and took up her skirts and stepped out into the street and climbed inside.

  He followed.

  Catching the ladder as the vehicle lurched into motion and hoisting himself up onto the freezing roof and sitting astride the bench there. A conductor swaddled in scarf and woollens folded one elbow up onto the roof and William paid him and the man vanished back into the cabin below. The sky was grey, the air bitter on his face. The omni creaked, rolled on towards Bishopsgate. He huddled into himself, fumbled for the chestnuts.

  She climbed down just as the omni turned south and William clambered down after her, his knuckles frozen, his ears chapped. She turned up Gaunt Street threading her slow way home and it was a different borough by daylight, the drab slouching of the shopfronts and the chimneys black in the cold.

  He caught her at the railing of her front steps.

  Miss Utterson, he called.

  He said it only the once. She looked older without the kohl at her eyes, her cheeks raw from the chill. Seeing him something passed across her face and was gone, a kind of impatience, and she glanced up at her house.

  Mr. Pinkerton, she said. How very unexpected.

  A coal waggon passed noisily in the street and a maid with a shawl at her shoulders came down from the next house and ran a few steps after it and then gave up.

  If I could have a word, William said.

  She shook her head and studied the brown paper parcel in her hands as if considering and then she said, I’m rather busy, Mr. Pinkerton. Is it something I could answer briefly?

  William smiled a sharp tight smile.

  I see, she said. Her face had hardened.

  Perhaps we could speak inside, he said.

  Perhaps not. What do you imagine you know, sir?

  I imagine nothing.

  She began to turn away.

  What I know is that Utterson is no longer your legal name. He watched her face as he said it but she betrayed nothing. He said, I know two members of your household staff were arrested for theft in Bombay in eighteen seventy-one. I know the charges disappeared or were made to disappear. That same year your husband relinquished his post in the government and went away and you returned to London alone.

  A sad affair, she said. I fail to see its interest—

  I know, William continued, that your brother represents clients of wealth and dubious character. And that among them is a Martin Reckitt, who has retained your brother at a handsome salary for ten years. I know that his business is not only legal.

  She regarded him with expressionless eyes.

  Miss Utterson?

  Her gloved fingers left four dark prints on the frosty railing, like the marks of a ghost.

  You have my attention, sir, she said.

  I arrived in the year of the Mutiny, she said.

  Sitting with her legs tucked up under her on the low cushions, turning a tiny silver spoon in her tea.

  That was a terrible time. Fear is a terrible thing, Mr. Pinkerton.

  It was a strange room, a room built for heat and pleasure. The drapes pulled back, alabaster moulding on the ceiling. Panels of gold wallpaper afire in the daylight, red fish huge and unmoving in the water at his feet like smooth glittering stones of ammolite.

  It started in the North, she said. I was supposed to have been there. I was meant for Delhi. But when I arrived the most horrific stories were just beginning to reach the South. Englishwomen wandering in the roads without clothes, nothing to eat, drinking water from the ditches. Men cut into pieces in the streets. Babies speared and thrown into the rivers.

  Studying him with eyes black and flat and reflective, obsidian stones, utterly smooth and without depth. The shadows at the edges of the room liquid and slow. He felt his blood thicken, a languid heat rising in him like sleep.

  We heard the most incredible stories. One about a young memsahib, a Miss Wheeler, who was taken from the slaughter at Cawnpore. They had been under siege in the barracks for months. Children were shot going to the well in the yard. Women were dying from disease. At last the survivors were offered safe passage down the Ganges but when they launched the boats the Indians opened fire. Murdered all the men except a single boat, which escaped. The Indians came down to the river and waded in and bayoneted the babies and burned the schoolgirls alive and took the women onto the riverbank to divide amongst themselves.

  William set his tea down on a low table beside his cushion.

  I appall you, she said.

  No.

  No? You are no stranger to atrocities, of course. She nodded. This woman, this Miss Wheeler. She was the daughter of the general defending the barracks and she watched her father be killed. She was taken by a local sepoy, a powerful man. It was said that in the night she rose and took up the sepoy’s sword and sawed off his head and then went from room to room in his house cutting off the heads of his sleeping wife and children and then she went out into the yard and hurled herself down a well. You cannot imagine, sir, the pride we felt hearing that. I think about it now and I feel ashamed, quite ashamed. The Indians were inhuman, absolutely savage. But so were we. Fanning ourselves on our porches while the soldiers stood guard around us.

  She took a sip of the tea cooling it with her tongue and turned the cup in her long pale fingers as if it had no handle. She said, A few years ago an Italian priest who had been in the Raj came here to call. He was returning from his time there and soon to set out for Ireland, of all places. I cannot fathom how they do things in Rome. He told me he had been at the deathbed of a woman in Cawnpore who spoke flawless English and that she confessed she was, in fact, the notorious Miss Wheeler. It seems she had lived all those years in perfect happiness with her sepoy. The sepoy was still alive, so were his wife and children. In fact he had wept at Miss Wheeler’s death and paid for an elaborate funeral. I thought he had made some mistake, that priest. But he had not made a mistake. None of what we had known then was true, you see.

  William felt his eyes grow dark. I have something to ask you, he said. It’s not about the dead.

  Everything is about the dead.

  He was look
ing at her with a fixed intensity, his big scarred hands loose in his lap. He said, softly, How did you learn what he is? Did he confess it to you?

  Who? Confess what?

  The truth of your Mr. Foole, Miss Utterson. His past.

  A doubt flickered at her lips. This is why you have come? She sipped at her tea. Adam Foole is a man of honour, Mr. Pinkerton. His secrets are his own. I would not wish to disturb them. And I should not betray them if I knew them.

  You’ve already done that. I want to know why.

  She narrowed her eyes. You are referring to the sitting? Something the guide said? That was not me, Mr. Pinkerton. A spirit spoke through me. You witnessed it yourself.

  I witnessed nothing.

  She passed a long jewelled finger over her eyes. Adam was kind to me once, a long time ago, in Madrid. I sat for him because I wished to repay his kindness. I wished to ease his grief.

  By deceiving him.

  By bringing him peace. Not all deceptions are false, Mr. Pinkerton. Sometimes it is through untruth that we stand in the light of a greater truth.

  A greater truth, William muttered. When did he first tell you about Shade?

  Shade?

  Edward Shade, yes.

  Who is he?

  William studied her. Perhaps you don’t understand the seriousness of my interest in your Mr. Foole, Miss Utterson.

  She inclined her head. But I do understand your interest in our gathering last Tuesday. You wish to make sense of it, do you not? You wish to know why Adam left the circle in such distress.

  I know why he left.

  I beg your pardon.

  William glared, suddenly impatient. My friends at Scotland Yard do not approve of fraudulent actions conducted in the name of religion, Miss Utterson. It would be a shame if they were to become interested in your activities.

  I think it time you took your leave, Mr. Pinkerton.

  He did not move. I can think of several Agency operatives with experience in exposing carnival frauds, he said. The newspapers find it always a compelling story.

  She studied him a long dignified moment and her face seemed very old to him then, as if she were staring down a century of grievances. She said, gravely, It is not a fraud, sir. You would be acting wrongly in persecuting us. We harm no one.

  He set his hands open on his knees. How is it done? How do you manage it?

  I don’t know what you mean.

  The deceit.

  She regarded him with a wounded expression. There is no deceit. Not as you mean it. I am in a kind of sleep when it occurs. A waking sleep. I do not remember much of what is conveyed. She ran a pale fingertip lightly over the rim of her saucer, frowning. Sometimes, it is true, we must induce a state of wonder in our sitters. Sometimes there is resistance. The circle must be receptive, you see, if the worlds are to align.

  Show me, he said.

  I cannot sit for you. Not at present.

  Show me, he said again, and there was a violence in his tone that had not been there before.

  She began to shake her head but she stopped and looked at him. Show you what?

  The trick. How you do it.

  She held his eye. A long moment passed. Then she rose and led him along the hall and through the parlour and into the seance room. It felt smaller, shabbier in the day. The bare table, the bell box, the chairs tidily tucked up under. The ceiling was low, stained by water. It might have been a storage closet once, it might have been a pantry.

  The summoning is not a trick, she said. That is real.

  The bell in the box, he said with a gesture. Is there a string? Is that how you ring it?

  She hesitated as if arguing something with herself and then she sat down and slowly unlaced her boot. She showed him her toes in their stocking and then she sat rigidly in her chair and raised her leg without altering her body’s position and she held her foot under the middle of the table.

  There is a magnet in the box, she said. I wear a second magnet on my toe. It sets off a contraption that rings the bell.

  That’s why the table is so small. So you can reach the bell.

  Yes.

  That’s why you work in this room. Only a small table can fit.

  Yes.

  William prowled slowly around the table studying the woman seated there. He said, almost tenderly, Is there no truth at all in what you do?

  She looked up at him. All of this is just the theatre, Mr. Pinkerton. We do not believe what we believe for rational reasons. But the spirits are real. The other world is real.

  Who would accept that? Seeing this?

  Sometimes the spectacle is necessary. Sometimes we must be kept in awe in order to find our faith. Is the Christian church any different? Turning wine into blood?

  William set his big fists on the table. Explain Ignatius to me, he said slowly. Why did you choose that name?

  I chose nothing, Mr. Pinkerton, she said, her voice taking on an edge of impatience. He came unbidden. Sometimes a guide can frighten a sitter. Ignatius, I understand, frightened Adam. I do not know why.

  William thought of his own Ignatius, the balloonist Spaar, also a Virginian. He thought of the coincidence in it all. But he knew spiritualists and frauds turned such coincidences to their favour and he did not speak of it. You said Port Elizabeth, he said instead. What happened in Port Elizabeth? What were you referring to?

  Not me, Mr. Pinkerton. Ignatius.

  Who was the she?

  There was something in Rose Utterson’s face, a flare of pleasure, when she said, Ah. But you know the answer to that already.

  Charlotte Reckitt.

  She nodded. Port Elizabeth is where he met her.

  In South Africa? William took a step towards her. Why was he there? What year was that?

  She turned her face away. I’ve said enough, she said. Ask Adam if you wish to know more. His heart is his own.

  This last was said with a wounded dignity and William understood all at once the conflicted nature of her feelings. She was in love with Foole. And yet for all that he did not think she knew the truth of the man. But that would mean some other had indeed manifested in her that night and this he could not accept either.

  He watched her but she did not flinch. At last he said, quietly, Adam Foole’s real name is Edward Shade, Miss Utterson.

  That is nothing to me.

  It’s your Mr. Foole’s deepest secret.

  Hardly.

  But she had spoken this last too quickly, too dismissively. William cracked his knuckles under his thumbs one by one and studied the medium’s still face. My father hunted Shade his entire life, he said. He never found him. He’s the reason I’m in London.

  Your father is?

  Shade is.

  Something stirred in her then. A slow reptilian look from under the woman’s eyelids. You expend your efforts on the wrong pursuits, Mr. Pinkerton. They will not bring you happiness.

  Is that your professional opinion?

  The presence with us that night, the guide spirit. Ignatius. He knew you also. She raised her eyebrows. He sensed a loved one near him, Mr. Pinkerton.

  William shook his head, he studied her with his cold eyes. Be careful, Miss Utterson.

  Death is hardest for those it leaves behind. Have you lost someone of late?

  You know I have.

  Ah. Your father.

  It would have been in the papers.

  She regarded him with sudden pity. Longing is the source of our unhappiness. But it does not need to be. Why not leave this pursuit of Edward Shade, let yourself believe? Your father, sir, is at peace.

  My father. William put on his hat, turned to go, turned back. My father’s not at peace, he said angrily. Not yet. But he will be soon. And you can tell your Mr. Foole that for me.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Foole drifted, half drained, through the days following the seance. He stood in his sleeping robe staring at the winter traffic turning off Piccadilly, he walked his halls in velvet bed slippers, he spo
ke little, he waited. Yes that was the sense of it, waiting.

  As if something were coming.

  Slowly his thoughts coalesced. He dreamed the same dream three nights running, a dream of doors opening upon a solitary figure in a dripping chesterfield, hands clasped at his back. That figure was William Pinkerton. Edward, Pinkerton said. She is here. He would wake startled, glaring at the shapes in his room, recognizing nothing. After the seance he had stormed out into the darkness of Bishopsgate with his frock coat open to the weather and his knotted fingers working at the air. Striding past several cab stands unseeing before at last pausing, retracing his steps, hailing his passage home. Oblivious of the cutthroats in doorways, the drunks wheeling through the unlit streets. Rose’s voice had thickened into the voice of Ignatius Spaar. That was the fact of it. Spaar: aeronaut, spy, victim of Allan Pinkerton’s wartime ambitions, a name mouldering now somewhere in the marshy earth of northern Virginia. Darkly in Foole’s mind the possibilities turned. Rose Utterson and her brother lived capable of any deceit, he knew, even of those they shared affection for, and both were formidable seekers of other men’s secrets. If the Uttersons had learned of his past and set out to ruin him in front of Pinkerton they could not have managed it more effectively. But Foole himself had stared down ghosts in his childhood and he believed in the singular viciousness of the dead. The living, ruthless though they be, were always tempered by self-interest. Rose dared not risk him without risking her brother, herself. Not so the dead.

  He brooded. On the third morning Fludd heard him out, all menace. So Pinkerton knows, the giant said at last, combing his fingers through his beard. He knows, an it were them Uttersons what told it?

  Well. Or Spaar’s ghost.

  Bollocks to that. Fludd rubbed at his wrists in the darkness, as if to ease an ache. You know what needs doin.

  Foole met his eye. Not that.

  Can’t keep smoke in a bottle forever, Mr. Adam. It’s like to get out, one way or another.