By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Tell it to me one more time, he said.

  Finally a night would come years after the war when he would sleep a long dreamless sleep. When he would not wake with one hand lurching for a pistol and his eyes roving through the darkness. There would be great fields of the ploughed dead by then and half a nation still smouldering in ruins and he would stand at the cold hotel window of a city across the ocean and stare out at the bird-stained horsemen in their stone shakos and marvel at the ancient cruelty.

  The war would end. The dead would not. That was the dawn of industrial war and Edward would understand only slowly that killing on such a scale could be a kind of commerce. When he knew that, he knew some faith in his fellow man had been compromised and he could not come back from it. He would wonder about the boy James Gray from Mrs. Shade’s estate, whom he had not thought of in years. That boy had been two years his elder and ripe for enlistment and he would wonder if his bones lay now in some field of the Ohio rolled in a man’s coat two sizes too big or scattered in pieces under the muck of some earthworks long overrun and gone to grass. He had seen too many dead to think otherwise. But perhaps the boy had gone west. Or died in the poorhouse before the war began.

  On the night of the new moon he and Spaar walked out of their hotel together in the quarter-hour after ten o’clock. They carried nothing but their jackets and they did not slow as they passed through the lobby. They wore their derby hats low. Outside Edward slipped down an alley and entered the rear stables through an unlocked gate in the fence and Spaar took his hand and wished him safe passage. They would rendezvous at the bridge road leading south of the city. As he stepped away he glanced back. Spaar was watching him with a look of murder in his eye.

  Inside the gate he took the sorrel from her stall and walked her to the cart in its corner of the yard and he hitched her into harness and walked her by the bit from the yard talking to her the while in a low voice. In the alley he stood with one hand on her nose and leaned towards her and murmured and when she was calm he climbed onto the cart and set off.

  The streets were very dark, the city unlit. He made his way through the narrow lanes among the houses avoiding the main streets as he could. He carried passes for himself and Lewis and Scully and in the bed of the cart were two rolled bundles of clothes for the spies and a pair of old boots for each. In a quiet side street under a row of linden trees he heard a voice call out to him to hold up and he turned in alarm and saw a cavalry captain approaching him on foot. He thought it strange the man was not on horseback but he did not ask. The captain asked for his pass and Edward handed him the paperwork nervously.

  Where you headed at this hour, son? The captain looked to Edward like the scion of some plantation bloodline playing at war. He ran a gloved finger over his nose, he frowned. There’s a curfew in effect, son.

  Yessir.

  The captain walked around to the bed of the cart, peered into the straw there as if hesitant to touch it. After a moment he took off his white glove finger by finger then turned over the straw and withdrew the bundle of clothes. He held up one of the boots. What’s this?

  Edward shrugged. I’m to shovel the latrines at Camp Lee, sir. It’s a change of clothes for the ride back. You can smell them from here, I reckon.

  The captain stared. Chewed at his lip, flicked again through the papers.

  Edward could smell the fresh soap on the captain’s skin and he saw the man was wearing his dress tunic and had shaved that evening. After a moment the captain grunted and then he handed back the papers and said, All right, son. Go ahead.

  Edward was sweating heavily along his spine as he clicked the reins and went on. He slowed at each crossing and sat listening and then continued on his way. He had been careful to grease the axle of the cart and it rolled with great smoothness through the quiet city. He had given himself twenty minutes to reach the prison and he would slow and open his pocket watch to gauge the time and then go on. He knew Lewis would be working his way free even now and that he would need to make his way soundlessly down two floors to reach Scully before both of them could get out to the yard. That way would take them through two doors and along a corridor frequented by the night warden and once in the yard the two men would need to move some of the trash against the far corner and clamber over the wall into the alley below. All of this would take by Spaar’s reckoning some fourteen minutes.

  He paused, clutching the reins, he rode on.

  When he reached the prison he slowed and got down and walked the sorrel into the alley and he stared at the shadows for some sign. He clicked his tongue twice and listened but he heard nothing. The brick wall of the prison was very tall and lost in shadow and the prison beyond it was a huge blackness against the night sky. He left the sorrel standing with her head down and walked into the gloom with his arms outstretched and calling softly, Hello? Hello?

  There was no one. The alley was deserted.

  He tilted his pocket watch into the weak light from the sky. The half-hour came and passed. Then it was eleven o’clock. Eleven-thirty. Still there was no movement. The sorrel nickered and he stood with one hand on her neck in the darkness. She was long-legged and high-backed and built for running not pulling loads of any weight but a war was on and horses scarce. His thought had been to sacrifice the cart to the weeds once clear of the city. To split up and for two to ride at speed and two to walk overland.

  His eyes were sore and he rubbed them with his thumbs. At the mouth of the alley something clattered like a bucket knocking over and he glared fearfully down into the shadows. His mouth was dry. He understood something had gone wrong.

  At last he could wait no longer. He glanced around a last time then snicked the reins. The cart moved down the dirt alley, the wood creaked quietly, the sorrel’s hooves almost silent in the dust. It was thirty minutes past midnight. He turned his back on the prison, he rode on.

  The narrow lanes were deserted, the leafy trees still, the houses dead.

  They had not come.

  He rode the cart back through the lightless streets listening to the harness jingle. He could not think what had gone wrong but as there had been no ambush he knew it could not be a betrayal. His first thought had been that Scully or Lewis had been transferred abruptly. His second thought was they had been killed. But for all he knew they might have simply been too weak to escape or been caught in the act or even just lost their nerve.

  Spaar was waiting in the darkness at the bridge road and Edward felt a dread settle in him at the sight like a warning of things to come. He slowed but did not stop and Spaar swung up beside him on the bench. He could see in the man’s face that he understood something had gone wrong. He did not ask.

  Spaar got down one block from the hotel and went on ahead. Edward backed the cart into its place in the silent yard and unhitched the sorrel and removed her harness and walked her into the stable. He was afraid now that someone might hear but no lights came on in the windows and if any in that hotel saw they did not approach. When he went up the room was dark but he could see Spaar in his hat and coat seated at the edge of his bed and Edward took the certificates of passage from his pocket and slid them under his mattress. He felt angry and foolish and very frightened. All around them the hotel was still. A faint light was coming in from the street below.

  Well, kid? Spaar said at last.

  He shook his head, the gesture meaningless in the gloom. He said, angrily: I waited in that alley for two hours.

  After a moment Spaar said: We go in the morning. You agreed.

  Now that it had been said aloud it seemed to Edward a terrible thing.

  You gave Lewis the keys?

  Spaar sighed.

  You put them in his hand?

  Lewis and Scully are friends of mine. I don’t like leaving them either.

  Edward bit at his lip. I want to find out what happened. I want to know if there’s another chance.

  He heard Spaar shift on his mattress, kick off a boot, then another. His voice when he spoke
was measured, wary. That’s not what we agreed. I’d guess Lewis thought it would have been suicide.

  He felt he had failed them and failed the Major back at his camp and he was afraid he might start to cry. After a long moment he said quietly: For who?

  Spaar said nothing.

  Edward lay back in the darkness still clothed and feeling a heaviness in his chest and hating himself for it. He thought Spaar unusually pressed to get him to leave Richmond and he did not quite understand why. He shifted onto his side, rucked the pillow up under his ear. You know I never killed no one yet, Mr. Spaar, he said. I guess fate’s been saving it up.

  Spaar was slow to answer. At last he murmured, It’s not worth the saving. Weren’t you at Cheat Mountain?

  Yessir.

  And you still think you’ve never killed anyone?

  Cheat Mountain. Edward ran his tongue over his cracked lips. You didn’t know what you were shooting. You couldn’t see anything for the smoke. It’s not the same.

  Killing’s killing. In the final reckoning, not seeing it won’t work in your favour.

  The final reckoning.

  Yes.

  You mean like Judgment Day.

  You don’t believe there’s going to be one?

  Edward rolled his small shoulder in the gloom, the stiffness in it. I think it’s already come, he said.

  They were quiet a long time then and Edward folded his arms up under his pillow and he stared at the ceiling and he said, You sleeping yet?

  No.

  I keep thinking about Mr. Webster. How he wasn’t afraid.

  What makes you think that? They listened to the sound of footsteps in the street below pass and fade away into the night. Being afraid’s nothing, Edward. It means nothing.

  I know it.

  We’ll be north of the lines this time tomorrow. Get some sleep.

  He closed his eyes and listened to Spaar breathing and he realized he did not trust the man. He opened his eyes. What’ll the Major say when he sees us?

  The Major gave me clear instructions, said Spaar and the reply seemed strange to Edward even then. Go to sleep, Edward.

  He did not think he could sleep but somehow he slept. The night deepened. Sometime before dawn a man crossed the room his bare feet making no sound and a goose pillow clutched in his fists. Leaning over Edward long and willowy and grey as a ghost and then placing the pillow firmly but gently over his face and leaning his weight into it even as Edward began to thrash and struggle up out of sleep.

  Then Edward’s eyes were open, he was writhing and kicking out. He felt something on his chest, the weight of a man’s knee pinioning his arms in place, he could smell the soap on a man’s hands and he twisted to one side and loosed one arm and tore at the pillow. A flat emotionless face. A webbing of scars. Eyes calm, resigned.

  Then Spaar leaned back into the pillow, crushing the life from him.

  Years later he would stand with a dying friend on a concrete breakwater at the mouth of the James and stare out at the whitecaps in the slate ocean as a ferry approached and he would try to account for those days. Seabirds wheeling and crying in the high air. Dazzling in their whiteness. And him leaning with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets and the lower buttons of his frock coat unfastened and the wind whipping his white hair to spume. He was old by then though not in years and stiff with a kind of fascinated sorrow for what he had outlived. The slow unfolding of that night. How he managed to withdraw his pistolet from its hiding place behind the headboard and club Spaar on the temple with the stock. His sudden gasping for air. He had rolled off the bed tangled in the sheets. He remembered the fear, he said. It was like a taste he could not wash from his mouth. The hotel room, he said, was silver and very still in the moonlight like a room underwater. Then he was standing. Spaar had been coming at him with a knife when he raised the gun and fired and when Spaar collapsed he walked terrified over and stood above him and levelled the pistolet at the dead man’s face and pulled the trigger a second time.

  There was the heavy tread of men on the stairs and then a long silence and then his door exploded, the frame splintering and swinging at a crazy angle in to knock the plaster from the wall. A half-dozen Confederate soldiers were shouting at him. In his fear they looked enormous, hulking. The landing beyond was lit by candles and in the eerie light he could see Cashmeyer smoking quietly and other residents standing in their open doors staring wide-eyed in and then he was being struck to the ground by a sergeant and his hands twisted behind his back and his wrists and ankles shackled. His nightshirt was rucked up over his waist. He could not understand how they had arrived so quickly.

  He raised his head. A sticky black pool of blood was seeping across the floorboards, staining the bedclothes in its ink. He saw the clawed hands of Spaar, twisted in death.

  A stew of teeth and brain and bone where the face had been. There was blood on his face but it was not his own.

  He was dragged like a bag of feed into the street and thrown into the bed of a waggon and his skull cracked against the boards and he felt his eyes run. Someone slapped the horse in its traces and then they were moving slowly through the darkness and he could smell the rank vinegar smell of pigs in the wood underneath him but when he raised his head he saw two soldiers squatting on the wooden rails with their rifles standing in their fists and their eyes hard on him. He was thinking of Spaar, he was thinking of Allan Pinkerton. He could make no sense of what had just happened. His eyes were wet from the stink in the wood and he turned his face away.

  They took him to Castle Godwin, its scorched bricks, its terrible slave pens, and he understood as he was punched and kicked from the waggon that they would kill him. But they only held him unsteadily while Cashmeyer unfastened his ankles and frogmarched him across the mud of the yard. There were torches burning in sconces. He could see General Winder standing in a long oiled coat like a whaling captain just come ashore and his white hair was uncombed but he clenched his sharp jaw in disgust and went in before Edward reached him. Inside men were moaning in their cells. There were stone stairs. Wet straw on the floor under barred windows. Doors unlocking, locking.

  Am I being charged? he mumbled. He crushed his eyes shut, opened them, he was coming slowly back to himself. Captain, he said. It was self-defence, sir. The man attacked me.

  Cashmeyer stood him swaying against a brick wall as a soldier unlocked his cell and Edward could see figures moving in the darkness beyond like tall grass in a night wind except there was no wind.

  Cashmeyer’s eyes were lost to shadow. He wants to know the charge, he said.

  One of the soldiers grinned at him.

  Edward bared his teeth in fear. You can’t arrest a man for defending himself.

  You’re not under arrest, Cashmeyer said.

  Edward stared at him.

  You’re not under arrest, he said again. You’re not even here, boy.

  And then someone had taken his arm and shoved him forward and they were locking the cell again and he kneeled there in the faint light with his wrists still shackled. His jailers paid him no mind. He gritted his bloodied teeth thinking of Lewis and Scully somewhere in that prison and that he was closer to them now than he had ever been. He stared with glassy eyes through the bars of his cell, listened to the men around him cough and scratch at their flea bites. Feeling weak and whip thin, a smell of sickness already in his skin. Turning it all over in his heart.

  In the morning they came for him and took him to a stained room with a drain in its floor like an abattoir and there they beat him until nightfall. They cut up his face.

  They did not ask him anything.

  All week they came for him.

  Please, he would say. Please.

  Shut his mouth. Shut your goddamn mouth, boy.

  Please. Please.

  And then the ropes at his wrists would tighten, the crank would click through its gears hauling him again upward to the ceiling, his shoulders cracking under the strain. Somewhere a man was screaming
like a child.

  One night the cell door opened and Mr. Marvell came in and crouched near him and said, You are in a mighty spot of trouble, son. I don’t know as there is anything to be done for you. I’m sorry.

  Edward closed his eyes, stoppered his ears. When he awoke the man was gone and Edward stared at the stone floor where he had been and he could not say if it had been a nightmare or no.

  Was it madness in his thinking, or a new clarity? Through all of this he struggled to make sense of Spaar, of the scarred man’s cold rage. He remembered a conversation between them, crouched in the grass above Camp Lee, the cicadas in song. A warm orange backlit glow seeping down under the rim of the horizon. He had told Spaar he would not go without Lewis and Scully.

  Spaar had sighed, withdrawn a long slow knife from a sheath under his coat. He stood a moment turning it in the light and then said, softly, I can’t leave you here, Edward.

  Edward remembered staring at the weapon, smiling. What will you do? Murder me?

  Spaar’s smile had faded, pity in his eyes. It was the pity Edward thought about now, curled shuddering on a pallet of rotting straw at the bottom of a bleak stone cell. That, and the dead man’s muttered reply: Aw, kid. Just how much do you think a life is worth? No one sends a man into Richmond that they can’t stand to lose.

  A delicate white spider was crouched two inches from his face. It started to move, slowly, away. And at last he understood. He shivered, moaned. He had become a liability. Ignatius Spaar was a man of vicious talents and the Major had sent him to Richmond for a reason and that reason was not to get Edward out.

  Spaar had been sent to kill him.

  He got sick. Two men held his wrist to the arm of a chair and a third put a bayonet blade through his left hand. The week passed, then a second. One afternoon they came for him and he lay feverish and moaning in the filthy straw and they turned him over with their boots and then they went away. A man came to look at him, he pried back his lips, peered into his throat. Unwrapped the bandages from his left hand to look for gangrene. Later a lady stood at the cell bars holding a cloth to her nose and asking him some muffled questions but he could not understand her. Someone had given him a pair of shoes and then in the night some other had taken them from him. He lost count of the days. Some part of him understood that he had vanished and would not be heard from again.