By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Sir?

  —then where the hell is she?

  Blackwell nodded. I was thinking, sir, rather: whose body is it, then?

  William fumbled for his pipe. Well, he said. That too.

  Robert was folded in his shirt sleeves over the railing when William came down to the porch from the sickroom. As his brother straightened and turned, his straw hat snared in the low-hanging oak twigs and he plicked it thornily free. The screened door banged shut. Summer hummed in the green. A dappled light was filtering through the leaves across his face and William saw how his brother had aged. He had shaved his moustache since the winter and his great round cheeks looked tired and when he smiled his lips were thinner, his jowls slacker. William had still not washed the travel dirt from his neck or wrists but Robert came across and hugged him with a great fierce embrace all the same. He could smell the expensive perfumed aftershave at his brother’s throat and feel his brother’s shoulder blades oaring under the tailored cotton of his shirt and when he stepped back he saw a grey streak of dirt imprinted on his brother’s stomach. His waist had thickened.

  When did you get in? Robert said. His voice was low, sombre, as if at a sickbed.

  William shrugged. Are you here alone?

  For now. I need to go back to New York tonight but I’ll be back Monday. I didn’t want to bring the children yet. I didn’t know what sort of condition he’d be in.

  William nodded, squinted. The air was hot, still, rising up out of the ground. New York, he said after a moment.

  Robert belled his tongue against the wall of his mouth in a gesture William recognized from their father. That mess in Hoboken with the postal employee. Our operative thinks he’s found a way through it. I take it New Mexico was a success.

  I didn’t have to kill the fellow, if that’s what you mean.

  Robert smiled. That’s what I meant.

  The porch boards creaked under their weight. William was still gripping his brother’s wrist, staring with the sober affection of an older brother who did not see as much of the younger as he would have wished. Even as a boy Robert had displayed an inky smartness William had lacked. He would as soon read as ride, would help his older brother with his schoolwork. He had graduated from Notre Dame’s business college then slipped to the New York office with George Bangs and started plotting to open further branches, to widen the watchman patrol in its lucrative ordinariness. William, held up in Chicago under their father’s brooding eye, famous for his drinking, gambling, camaraderie with thieves into the late hours at Mike McDonald’s saloon, understood none of that. In contrast his brother was calm, cool, all profit and calculation. It had ever been so. As a boy in the summers William would wander down through the rapids in the small river below their house seeking some crooked boulder to perch upon in his hunt for the biggest trout. Robert, quiet, stolid, would in the meantime dip current-side to a proven eddy and haul out a half-dozen smaller trout. But his brother also was a man of great physical courage and together they had ridden several times the outlaw trail with loaded rifles and there was no man William would rather have at his back.

  Robert was fumbling now at his pockets, as if looking for something. You’ll keep him alive until I can get back? he said.

  William grunted. I’ll just tell him we found a lead on Edward Shade.

  Edward Shade. Good lord.

  There was a sound behind them. Their mother had drifted to the screened door and stood blurred in the cool of the kitchen, hands shielding her eyes. You boys hungry?

  We’re fine, Ma, William said.

  Bobby?

  Robert glanced back at her then reached up and disentangled his hat from the oak leaves. Some of that cold chicken sounds good, he called, raising his eyebrows at William as he spoke. His eyes were anxious but he smiled a low smile and shook his head and added in a conspiratorial whisper: Hell, Willie. Edward Shade? He gave a quiet laugh. You know talk like that could lead to a full recovery.

  He was thinking of that afternoon as he returned through the rain to his hotel. Thinking of his brother, of the summer’s red sunlight flush on his wrists, of how much he wished their father had lived to see him close in on Edward Shade. A dip in the footway outside his hotel had turned into a black puddle and a crossing sweep stood next to it, brushing the water away as William approached and splashed through and went inside. It had been a strange finding of Shade and even now he lacked any evidence beyond his own conviction. But that conviction was like steel. Never mind Charlotte Reckitt. He did not know if Blackwell would prove correct in his investigations but in the end it did not matter. She would turn up one way or another. They always did. In the hushed lobby the concierge saw him and waved him over. A package was waiting. It was heavy and he felt the weighted slide of articles within and he stared at it a long moment before deciphering the scrawl.

  It was from Sally Porter.

  He made his way back up to his room and shut and locked the door and left the key in the lock and then he began to strip himself from his clothes. The maid had been in and a washtub stood half filled with water that had cooled but there was a ceramic jug of hot water stoppered up beside it on a stand and a stack of folded towels and a bar of Pears soap. He stood holding his trousers in one hand bare-legged but still in his stocking feet and he stared at the water. Then he went back into the front hall and took the package from the pier table and went into the sitting room and sat half naked with his white knees shining in the gloom.

  He cut the string carefully with a knife and poured the contents onto the writing desk and withdrew the letter. The familiar slanting hand, the cramped spidery scrawl of the housekeeper Sally once had been. He sifted through the objects, a steel belt buckle, the snub-nosed twists of two bullets, a creased and folded Civil War photograph from Cumberland, 1862. William saw his father at the centre, he saw Benjamin Porter as a young man at its edge. It was an image of the agents of the Secret Service of the Potomac. He opened the letter grimly.

  Dear Billy;

  I am writing this to you now Because I believe you should know the truth of Edward Shade no matter how strange the fashion of it seem As it mattered to your father it is not Surprising it should matter to you. He would not have wanted it that way but we do not always see eye to eye with our kin & I know that now my Mr Porter is gone bless his Soul. But I shall be straightforward with you as God is my witness and hold to my own Conscience if not to his. You do not get to choose the pattern if you do not make the quilt.

  Yes I knew Edward Shade. He was an Agent for your father in the Secret Service during the war which I suspect you know & not what you came to me for But I will tell you what I know & I hope it will help you to put some of this behind you. Lord knows your father did not ever manage it & my Mr Porter was loyal to him to the last.

  You will see his Reproduction in the photograph I include it here for You to Know him. It is not a good likeness I am sorry to say.

  He held up the photograph and stared from face to face. In the front row, at one edge, a young man crouched, a boy yet, his face blurred and eaten by time. He could make no detail from it.

  Edward being small & quick etc & having no other object in view But his activities for your father was an ideal operative he was a strong boy of fourteen when I knew him. I should not call him a boy. He was smart & likeable both & he had a gift for accents. Your father I think liked to think of him as a kind of adopted son or that is how it seemed to me Took him under his wing tried to teach him his Letters etc. My Mr. Porter liked to say your father saw Something Of Himself in the boy. They both had tempers I can assure you that. But he always was proud of you & Robert this had nothing to do with that.

  It was in the second year of the War just before the Peninsula campaign & the Union poor were then dying by the Hundreth under the guns of the Enemy No you had not come up from Notre Dame yet I do not believe. The sight of it was v. dispiriting etc. Your father approached us & relayed that the General (that is McClellan who as you know your father Love
d more than any other man) was in want of reliable Information behind the Confederate lines. As we were a small group that he trusted & as Edward was one of us When he volunteered I was present & I heard it myself what some folk said later about coercion is a lie. No I did not like it at the time as Edward seemed v. young to me But it was not my place to say. 12th April being a new moon on that night my Mr Porter & me guided Edward down through a dry creek past the sentries & Mr Porter gave him the horse & carriage we were riding on & sent him on his Way we returned on our own two feet through enemy country two Negroes in the Confederate south on our way to Fort Monroe & that was a walk I do not care to remember.

  Five weeks after he crossed over the reports ceased. As that was the onset of a cold spring & as we heard nothing more Your father may he Rest In Peace grew v. agitated & anxious & sick etc. On 1st July he sent a Virginian operative south to inquire after Edward I did not know the man well But what I knew I did not like. Ignatius Spaar was his name I believe you knew him some He was not a regular operative & he never told a story about himself that was not flattering. Well it is perhaps not kind of me to write that. That summer the Army of the Potomac was pushed off the Peninsula & it was a bad season to be issuing an operative we all of us considered it ill-timed even your father. When that Virginian too disappeared after reaching Richmond I don’t believe your father was under any Illusions he had received not more than two reports before the operation went cold. In August Washington informed him both men Shade & that Virginian Spaar had been arrested by the Confederate Secret Service & were being held in a military prison.

  He wet his lips. Spaar and Shade? He thought of the spirit Ignatius whispering to Foole at the seance and he thought of Spaar during that terrible retreat in the Peninsular Campaign. Straggling through thigh-thickened mud, the rain lashing their hands and throats. Spaar had vanished into the treeline at Malvern Hill and William had always believed the man captured and killed by Confederate forces. Sally’s account did not make sense. Unless Spaar had deliberately cut their balloon loose, had brought them down behind Confederate lines on purpose in order to get nearer Richmond. He furrowed his brow. Richmond. Where Shade was.

  Billy I do not like to write about that time it is painful even now to think what that poor boy suffered. Maybe your father felt so too & that is why he did not speak of it to you. I always did Respect & Love your father he was a man of Principle & Feeling but when he heard about Edward he did not come out of his tent for several days. Were you on the front lines then? If so then you will recall how much thinner he had become & weaker etc & how there was in him a new & destructive choler I have seen it since but not v. often. Your father wanted to send a small raiding party consisting of his own operatives behind the lines to rescue his agents But the General was opposed to it & Washington refused to negotiate the exchange.

  I have always believed it was this even more than the General’s renunciation of his command which embittered your father to the War. No man escaped unscathed it is True & True too the conflict was already felt by him to a personal degree as I know you were brought in to run the lines. But Edward when he volunteered had asked only one assurance in exchange for his service & that was to be returned whether alive or dead to the north If dead to be buried there If alive well it does not matter does it. Your father made him that vow I watched them shake hands there was a lantern burning in the tent it was v. solemn & moving a sight etc.

  When in the event that hostilities ceased at last your father’s v. first action was to journey south through the devastation into Richmond & there begin investigating the circumstances of Edward’s disappearance. My Mr Porter & me did not travel with him at that time instead we remained in Baltimore as there was much to be done in regard to a ring of stock thefts. But your father wrote almost daily. He had little hope of locating Edward alive after so long a period He knew after all We all did How pestilential the conditions in those prisons. After several weeks he found a marked grave in the Confederate Army Cemetery in Richmond. It contained the remains of the Virginian operative, Ignatius Spaar. The inscription told of his Great Sacrifice for the Confederacy.

  Your father dug up the Body and Removed the bullets I send to you now they were in the Virginian’s Remains it is clear he was Shot & Executed as a Spy. No we could not then and I still cannot now make Sense of the inscription Perhaps it was a cruel kind of joke. That happened in the War you will remember. Death became so common.

  Now Billy you asked about Edward Shade. I did not answer you not truthfully. Edward survived the war. In sixty-six your father come home one night and ate with your mama in the kitchen like they did always do. When he gone on up to his study he found a boy was waiting there to shoot him dead & that boy was Edward Shade. I should not call him a boy he was a man by then. I do not know just what transpired between the two of them that night but there was a struggle, your father he fought Edward down & he took his revolver. Edward got out through the window. Six times your father shot into the night & six times he missed. Your father bless his soul was many things but he was never a poor shot.

  If all that is not enough to make a man like your father crazy then I do not know what would do it. He did not ever much talk about that night with Edward in his house holding a loaded gun on him.

  As your father knew that if Edward did not die in that prison it could only be by turning on the Virginian he had sent down & Betraying him to the Confederates it is not surprising your father felt Betrayed himself. I do not know what else Edward could have confessed to as I do not know which secrets he carried in him but certainly he knew enough to make his life worth the Preserving.

  Edward disappeared. No we did not ever hear from him again. There was that nonsense later about the breakins, the senator’s residence, the stolen items posted in packages to your father but I do not believe that was the doing of poor Edward.

  Your father thought to the End of his Life that Edward would turn up again. That is what he was looking for. I do not know if it was Vengeance or Love in your father all those years perhaps both. My Mr Porter & me we have been on the private payroll of your father some thirteen years to the day with one overriding purpose & one only We were to collect & report back on Edward Shade & to apprehend him if possible. To this end we have lived in San Francisco New Orleans Paris & London that last being six years now. Those reports being uncertain at best nevertheless Allan did not ever stop his belief in Edward’s existence.

  What do I believe? I believe Edward is dead. I expect he is lying in an unmarked grave somewhere out west or maybe in South America. I believe your father felt grief & guilt & anger & that anger kept him from Seeing the Truth of It. I believe you Billy would be wise to let the matter lie & go back to Chicago.

  What I have written here is the Truth God bless.

  When you read this I will be gone from London I shall look up my Sister in California if she is still Alive & God willing.

  I remain, your loving, etc.

  He set down the letter and rubbed at his face. The sharp stubble burning his palms, his thoughts slow. She had said nothing to him that morning of his visit, only to confide such details now. What had altered in her? If what she wrote was true, then the man Foole had not lied to him, not entirely, when he told of his father holding a gun on Shade at his house. William got to his feet and crossed the room and crossed back. Ignatius Spaar had spied for his father and laboured as an aeronaut in deep cover and his father had never once told him. He had for many years after the war lived with a crippling guilt about Spaar’s disappearance. His father had known the truth of it and never said. He felt a sudden unexpected fury. And Shade? Shade had betrayed them all.

  He ran his fingers lightly over the papers. He tried to imagine Sally Porter labouring over the letter, writing him the truth as she knew it, pouring sand on the wet ink and lifting the pages and reading them over with care. He thought of the regret she must have felt at deceiving him that morning. The bath in his bedchamber was cooling. Go on find you
r sister, Sally, he thought. Find your blood and make your peace. Outside the rain was rattling the windows. He heard the maid knock with two soft knuckles at the locked door and then call in to him but he did not answer and after a time she went away.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  In the morning a black regret overtook Foole. He paced the cluttered aisles in the Emporium considering Farquhar, the painting, Pinkerton, while the old floorboards groaned underfoot. His knuckles were cold but he did not request a fire. Fludd had warned him against approaching the detective but he had not listened and nothing had come of it but complication and misfortune. So. And Molly had stared at him reproachfully when she learned what he had kept from her. But it was not his past or not only that. He was never one to wallow in his own mistakes but still he did not like making them and he felt now only shame and disgust at having done so. He tugged at his whiskers, he glowered. If you do not like your situation, he told himself angrily, then change it. A weird bright rain had started to fall when he went into the foyer and found Fludd huge and shadowy and disapproving in the white backlit glow of the windows.

  I want you with us at the gallery, Foole said and his voice was curt. Change your coat.

  Fludd set his hat on his head. Aye.

  Molly, he shouted.

  But when he turned around she was breathing hard at the foot of the stairs and her foot was resting on a crate of Namibian war rattles and she was looking at him in alarm. He corrected her ribbons and adjusted the lace in her cap and he gave her pink dress a hard appraising glance. She had done her hair in ringlets despite the shortness of it and the effect was strange though suitably innocent for his purpose. Fludd came back downstairs dressed in a faded black morning suit with scuffs on the elbows and the trousers high on his ankles as if he had bought it from a dead man and he had coloured his beard and stained the moons of his fingernails like a labourer not used to daylight on a weekday. Foole grunted his approval then took the bowler from the big man’s hands and gave him a battered silk hat. He withdrew from his billfold several pounds and passed them across to Fludd and then he leaned out into the hall and called for Mrs. Sykes.