By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  That isn’t his real name, Foole said with a smile. It can’t be.

  She smiled vaguely.

  A short cleanshaven man with a birthmark covering half his neck came out, still struggling into his frock coat. How can I be of help, then? he said.

  Mr. Crooke?

  Aye.

  We wrote ahead, Charlotte said. We were told a carriage was for hire.

  The man grunted. One surely is, ma’am.

  But what he presented to them was not a carriage but an open waggon with an ancient ship-ribbed mare attached and Foole took one disgusted look at the condition of its wheels and turned to go.

  Suit yourself, the man Crooke said. But you’ll find no other. Folks round here don’t hire out what they need theirselves.

  Foole tipped his hat. We’ll find another. Charlotte?

  But Charlotte had walked over to the shaggy mare, set a hand on its flank. Pay the man, she said. We’ll take this one.

  They loaded their trunks into the bed of the waggon and set off by early afternoon on the Midhurst road. The going was slow in places with the churned mud frozen into ragged crests in the ruts. They were in West Sussex, in the middle of the western Weald, and passed alongside stands of oak and rolling hills marked with medieval boundary stones and all of it blue and gloomy where a cold winter mist hung low to the ground. Swirling up around the creaking of their waggon’s wheels then coalescing and closing up in their wake as if they had never been.

  At Midhurst they got down into the biting chill and unhitched and fed the miserable creature in the yard of an inn. The ground was barren, snowless, hard. In the common room they called for a glass of porter and two hot ciders and stood with their hands to the fire, speaking to no one. Then they harnessed their mare and climbed back up and crossed the River Rother and rode the three miles south into Heyshott. The village looked gloomy, deserted. They passed St. James’s Church and its spindly tombstones and the small unfenced green where a lone dog trotted past and they drew up outside the Unicorn pub. Both Charlotte and Foole took note of the ebony carriage next to the stables, with its royal insignia and its barred windows and its twin lanterns already lit in the failing light. That would be the prisoners’ transport.

  Charlotte rummaged in her trunk and took out a thick wool coat and a pair of men’s breeches and stiff new boots and stuffed them all into a long satchel and then they went inside. They took a table at the back of the room. The pub was crowded, smoky, a low orange wood fire burning in the grate and Foole looked at Charlotte but she seemed distant, watchful, cold. The prisoners were not, of course, among them.

  I don’t see him, Foole said.

  Charlotte did not answer but got to her feet and stood waiting and after a moment a guard in a red coat and brass buckler and wearing a truncheon at his hip came over to their table. He held a half-full tankard in one fist and he nodded soberly to the two of them.

  You lot down from London, then? he said pleasantly.

  Charlotte studied him with a cold eye. Sit, Mr. Bailey, do, she said.

  I allowed it was you, the man said, lowering his voice. We’re just to changing the horses now.

  Charlotte had taken from inside her coat a small felt pouch and it clinked as she set it on the table. That marks the rest of it, she said.

  Bailey glanced uneasily about, snatched it up, pocketed it.

  Where is he? she said.

  A sly grin. Bein seen to. There’s seventeen of them in the links. Got to be fed the old pease-pottage, a little somethin to wash it down with, quick step to shit-shed. He tipped his hat. Beggin your pardon.

  How will you manage it?

  Oh, run him to the tunny last. How much do he know? He won’t start hollerin up a piece will he? When neither answered Bailey shrugged. Well I’ll manage the count when we’re back loaded. Shouldn’t be noticed until we get to Portsmouth. He gave Charlotte a quick fierce look. And that’s my work in full then.

  Foole frowned. How soon until you depart?

  Bailey shrugged. Quarter of an hour all told. Less. I’m already out the door. You lot don’t leave much margin for error, do you? I was thinking maybe you got cold feet.

  It was a slow road in, Charlotte said. Just get him to the privy, Mr. Bailey. We’ll see to the rest.

  They waited ten minutes and then got up and went out into the cold and walked around the outside of the pub and stood at the corner as the afternoon daylight faded and they watched the guard Bailey frogmarch the prisoners one by one to the outhouse and take them back. They could hear the other two guards barking orders and the heavy rattle of chains and lastly they saw Bailey lead a frail old man out to the privy and enter it with him and the door shut behind them. A minute passed, two. Then Bailey came out alone and slipped back towards the transport and climbed up inside to start locking the leg irons into place.

  Wait, Foole said. He set a hand on Charlotte’s arm.

  She looked at him.

  Wait, he said again. I’ll go first.

  The thick doors of the transport waggon shut, were locked, double-locked, and then the two guards climbed up front and one climbed into the perch at the back of the waggon and the horses were snapped into motion and the transport rolled out at speed.

  He pulled away from Charlotte and crossed the pale clay yard and banged open the door of the rickety wooden privy and there sat Martin Reckitt, frail, confused, blinking in his brown prison issue. He stared up in astonishment.

  You, he said. This is your doing?

  Foole held the door open a crack for light to see by. The privy was narrow, its walls awash in filth and a powerful reek of ancient shit and urine. Martin Reckitt looked grey, his skin bleached of colour, his eyes pale, the only colour the sore red rims around them and the rashes on his throat and the backs of his hands. Foole could see nothing of the dangerous man he had met at Millbank, only a befuddled and miserable creature. He crouched, he studied the chains at the man’s ankles. He knew the locks, double Frobishers now thirty years out of date. They would not be difficult to spring.

  What are you doing? the old man said. What is this?

  How much were you told?

  Reckitt’s head shuddered on his neck, imperceptible, old.

  Kill me quickly, the old man hissed. If you have the nerve for it.

  But just then the door was pulled from Foole’s grasp and he turned in sudden fury but it was only Charlotte, pressing in behind him, and he looked back in time to see Martin Reckitt, open-mouthed, sight his living niece in the flesh. The privy latticed in shadow and light, the three of them crowded inside.

  Martin Reckitt trembled, he leaned unsteadily towards her. And then he embraced her.

  Lord God in heaven, all that is Holy, he murmured. My Lord my God. He turned his face in wonder to Foole and Foole could smell the black stink of the old man’s breath. How is this possible?

  His hands trembling.

  We haven’t the time, Charlotte said abruptly, pulling back. Adam. The chains.

  He made his way back out and collected his small black pouch of picking tools from his trunk and he glanced quickly around him and then returned to the privy. He kneeled in the filth of the floor next to the open hole and he worried away at the fetters and had them off in minutes and he kicked the chains into the pit with a splash.

  Charlotte had opened her satchel and pulled out the clothes and Foole began to help the old man undress. They kept elbowing up against the cold walls and the wood there was slick with some foul matter. The old man’s skin was streaked with grime, a welt of sores in bloom on his belly and his thighs.

  Charlotte, the old man said, unashamed. My little Charlotte.

  Later, Foole said sharply. We need to be gone now.

  The old man pale and eerie in the early gloaming did not look at Foole, might not have even heard.

  Charlotte herself was staring with anguish at her uncle as if at a stranger and then she saw Foole watching and her face closed over and she pushed at the door and was gone.


  They rode out of the roadhouse yard crowded onto the box of the waggon and the tired thin mare straining at her harness and the darkness already descending in the east. A line of bright grey sky almost white in its shining was visible above the western horizon and even as they rode out of Heyshott into the Weald it started to fade and go down.

  Martin sat in the middle, frail, shivering, his face turned towards Charlotte. No one spoke. Foole could not gauge the old man’s expression but he could see the deep frown at Charlotte’s eye where she strained not to look back at him. The shadow road unscrolled before them. Foole did not know what was in Charlotte but he knew it was not joy, not relief.

  At last they could go no farther and they drew the waggon roughly off the road into a stand of oaks and walked some thirty paces farther on and found the remains of an old firepit. Blackened stones, the charred remains of some feral creature. In the twilight Foole collected dead branches and scooped an armful of hay from the back of the waggon and set about lighting a fire. With a sudden whoosh the straw caught and flared and bloomed up into flame. He stepped back, waved the sparks from his face with his hat.

  It’s still got the wet in it, he said. There won’t be much heat.

  Martin said nothing. Foole could not see Charlotte and supposed she had gone back to the waggon to collect some food.

  At least there’s light, he muttered.

  There is always a light, Martin said quietly, if only we cared to see it.

  Foole crouched on his haunches, stirred a branch deeper into the fire.

  We imagine we stand at the centre of the story but we do not, Martin said, peering up at Foole. His eyes reflected the firelight. I see that now. It is not your story, Adam Foole, that you find yourself in. Nor is it mine. It belongs to the Lord and the Lord only and He will tell it as He will.

  Foole saw in the old man’s ravaged face the weight of his solitary bitterness and he understood something had twisted inside the man that could not be sorted out. It was not madness, not exactly, but a kind of warping all the same. He looked up. The last of the day’s light had slipped away.

  We’ll need to find something to eat, he said after a time. How hungry are you?

  The old man seemed not to hear. He was seated on a wind-fallen tree staring into the fire, sloe-eyed, his head trembling on its thin stalk of a neck. It is not my flesh that hungers, he said. I have no words, no words for this, and he held out his clawlike hands to the fire. That is a terrible thing, Adam Foole. To have lived by words and to lose them at such a moment.

  Foole looked at him. What moment would that be?

  But the old man did not answer.

  When Charlotte emerged out of the darkness behind her uncle she appeared like a grey ghost her face bloodless and she wrapped one slender arm around the old man’s forehead and snapped his head back and the other hand inserted a blade under the carotid artery and punched it forward. A black spray of blood crossed the mossy earth and then a sheet of it poured downward out of his throat and over his frock coat and his knees. He gave out a strangled groan and his eyes rolled back in his head and he pitched forward into the dirt.

  Foole was on his feet. Charlotte, he cried. Jesus.

  She stood breathing and she looked up at him in horror and then she started to shake.

  The old man lay face down, his blood steaming out into the frozen earth.

  She said nothing. She stood with the dagger still clutched in her hand.

  Foole stepped back out of the firelight. All at once he understood. You meant this, he said. All this time. This was your intent.

  She stared through Foole not seeing him and then she came to and gave a small shiver and turned away.

  He watched her gather her belongings and stuff them into a small satchel and he followed her down to the hired waggon. She unhobbled the horse and backed it slowly into its harness.

  She paused. He could see her breath in the cold. Five years ago a man approached me in a pub in Lambeth. He thought I was a whore. He said I was the spitting image of a woman he’d once fancied. Turned out that was my mother.

  Foole stood shivering in the cold night. The fire was burning in the trees beyond.

  He told me an account of my father. Said he was a clever man, a good man, fell afoul of very bad people. Said they killed him, ruined my mother. Killed her too, in their way. I went to the old neighbourhood where we’d lived, found others who remembered them. Remembered me. I heard from several the name of the man who did it. There was no mistaking it.

  Martin.

  She nodded. She was starting to shake in earnest now and her eyes looked wild. He did it, Adam, she whispered. He killed my father. He had my mother and me run out of our lodgings. When he came for me in the workhouse it wasn’t mercy. It was revenge.

  You could have left him to rot. You could have left him to die in Portsmouth.

  Would you? Would you have done so?

  Foole pursed his lips. He thought of his own father, he thought of Mrs. Shade. He thought of Allan Pinkerton’s fatherly hand gripping his shoulder. Where will you go now? he said. What will you do?

  I don’t want you to remember me like this, she said. You must think me a villain.

  I don’t.

  You will.

  Her body was trembling violently now.

  Wait, he said. He went back and dragged his trunk down the slope and threw it up onto the bed of the waggon. In the lamplight he opened the lid and took out a heavy blanket and a bag of salt crackers and his black pouch of lock-picking tools and then he shut the lid and stepped away.

  You could come with me, she said.

  But he could not. He shook his head. He studied her shocked face in the faint light, thinking how it was something he would not see again, thinking it was a face he had not ever really seen. Not truly.

  She did not ask him twice. She gathered the reins and turned the horse. As she rode off the single orange lantern swayed and flickered and was gradually lost to view. If she glanced back he did not see it.

  FORTY-TWO

  William and Shore were let into George Farquhar’s upstairs study by a man with fishy lips and bad teeth and the placid cowlike eyes of a born swindler. This man was Farquhar’s butler and William paused and took his measure and then pushed past. The house, palatial and dazzling by gaslight, in the day appeared cold and marbled and forbidding, the polished white columns of the stairwell shining with their own luminescence.

  Farquhar rose from his antique desk and came to meet them: immaculate in a black high-cut suit, a green vest, his slender face both anxious and haughty. Well, sir? And what does Scotland Yard propose to do? He did not extend his hand.

  Mr. Farquhar, sir. You remember Mr. Pinkerton.

  Of course. Your entertainment on Saturday left quite an impression on my wife, sir. On her and me both.

  The study was long, narrow, with deep cherrywood panels in the ceiling and a lacquered oak mantel over the fireplace that gleamed like oil. On the man’s desk stood a tall silver candlestick, branched and ornately carved, inscribed with symbols and all of it wreathed by a silver vine clambering over its seven branches. It looked, to William’s eye, strange and beautiful and exotic.

  You admire it, sir? Farquhar said, catching his gaze. It is a menorah, out of Russia. A Jewish ritual object. Lovely, is it not? I mean to display it downstairs in the great hall. It is very rare.

  The rabbis don’t mind you having it? William asked.

  Farquhar smiled gravely, as if at a witticism. He said, My wife is unwell, sir, or she should be here to welcome you herself. I have been urging her to travel to our house in Yorkshire. Half the household has already been sent on ahead. I cannot think what keeps her here.

  Perhaps when she is feeling more herself, sir.

  Perhaps. This affair has upset her so. Have you seen the newspapers, Mr. Shore? Have you seen what they write about me?

  You mustn’t mind the gossips, sir.

  They claim I am involved, man. They say
I have orchestrated this entire affair. Why? Why, to drum up publicity.

  William grunted. He took off his hat and laid it on the desk and he sat wearily in one of the armchairs, propriety be damned. He said, Mr. Shore tells me you don’t wish to prosecute the thief.

  Thieves, corrected Shore. Be assured, this will prove a crew.

  Farquhar shook his head. I care little for their situation. It is The Emma that concerns me. I would like it returned, Mr. Pinkerton. And I should not care to find my ten thousand pounds taken, without being assured of such an outcome.

  Shore was still standing, uneasy, and only now when Farquhar returned to his desk and sat did the chief too take a seat. It is my job to ensure that does not happen, sir, he said.

  It was your job, sir, to prevent such misfortune from happening at all. Are the streets not safe anymore? I am frankly amazed you would come to our city, Mr. Pinkerton, riddled as it is with such crime. You must think us all barbarians.

  It’s never the city, Mr. Farquhar. It’s always the people.

  The city, sir, makes the people.

  Shore cleared his throat, withdrew a small notebook and pencil. If you’d care to tell us what you’ve heard, sir. Did you say ten thousand? Am I to understand the thieves have been in touch?

  Farquhar nodded gravely. They demand ten thousand pounds, divided equally between notes and open bonds, sir. Yes. A letter was delivered to me this morning, from their solicitor. He carefully shifted the silver menorah to one side of the desk and then he gave Shore a hard look. Is it not rather strange, sir, that they should retain legal representation? Does it not make them vulnerable?

  Vulnerable?

  Why, could you not find them through this man, this— Farquhar rose abruptly, crossed the room, snatched a sheet of paper from a cigar table and scanned it—this Gabriel Utterson?

  Utterson, William muttered.

  Shore gave him a quick look. Gabriel Utterson’s somewhat notorious, Mr. Farquhar. A clever fellow. Not an ethical bone in his body. The problem, sir, is that his actions here are perfectly legal. Everyone is entitled to legal counsel. And unless you agree to press charges, there is no legal ground for the Yard to get involved.