By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  They rode slowly and kept to the thoroughfares and were soon lost in the chaos and they made their way south towards the Strand and then they were crossing the Thames under a louring sky while the river traffic slid by underneath.

  There were plumes of brown smoke ahead in the haze of Southwark where the factories churned night and day and they drove east until they reached the Booth Brothers’ Factory gates and there they slowed and came to a halt some twenty paces past. Appleby Barr kept a small shabby office in the rear of the second floor and Foole intended to offer him the entire haul to settle his debts and establish credit and he would take only a small fee in exchange. The ten thousand pounds from the painting’s negotiation would take care of their needs for some time. As he turned to get down Fludd put a hand on his arm. It felt heavy, hot.

  We ought to be careful, Mr. Adam. The bugger’s like to be watched hisself.

  Foole nodded. He has two peelers who stand at the gates taking the measure of anyone who goes inside.

  On his payroll?

  I’m sure. But with peelers, who can say.

  You can’t know his intentions neither.

  Foole paused, studied Fludd’s face. Barr has nothing to gain by complicating his relationship with me, Foole said softly. I’m not anxious in that regard. Wait here.

  He got down and crossed the street examining the faces of the indigent there until he found a particular creature folded upon its haunches. Crouched against the lee of an inner court, in rags twice its size.

  Geoffrey, he murmured.

  The waif cast a mistrustful eye.

  Foole withdrew a guinea from his waistcoat pocket and shuffled over and held it out in a trembling palm. Go on, he said. Take it.

  Why, Mr. Foole, sir, the waif whispered in astonishment. And snatched it quickly up. I been here all mornin like you said to, sir. I seen him go in.

  Was he alone?

  Never had no grippers with him, if that’s your meaning.

  Foole crouched, ancient with pain.

  It don’t hardly look like you at all, Mr. Foole, the boy said in wonder. If I can say so.

  There’s another guinea for you if you do one last thing, Foole said.

  Aye, sir.

  Those two peelers just inside, that you told me about. I want you to call them away down the street in five minutes. Tell them there’s been a carriage overturned. Tell them it looks like a lady is injured. Can you do that for me?

  Eyes like slits. A tooth out in front. Five minutes?

  Foole gestured to the public clock face on the market building opposite. You can count the time, Geoffrey?

  A sudden quick grin through the filth. Aye for a guinea I can, sir.

  Back at the waggon Foole stood with one hand on the footboard and the other on his hip. Fludd was studying the open iron gates of the factory, the yard beyond where barrels swung suspended in nets and stacks of tall crates were just visible. A man in shirt sleeves and a leather apron came to the street and stared west and removed his cap and ran a hand through his hair and then went back inside. Foole knew that yard well, the solid iron doors to the factory beyond, the orphans creeping barefoot among the machinery and sweeping out the corners and the suspended catwalks with the overseers stalking back and forth. Barr had taken the place from the three Booth brothers four years earlier in exchange for a debt and established a front for his activities and he arrived at his office three days a week promptly and sat at his desk going through his ledgers and taking meetings like any good industrialist. There would be men with knives and clubs and others with pistols at the doors and the base of the stairs.

  Ten minutes, said Foole. Then go on inside.

  You ain’t comin?

  He shook his head. I’ll meet you in Newington. Give me an hour.

  You got somewhere more important to be?

  Something like that.

  The giant leaned creaking down. Go on, he muttered, incredulous. You ain’t serious, like?

  There’s someone I need to say goodbye to, Foole said. An old friend I don’t expect to see again. He met his companion’s eye. Mr. Barr’s expecting us, Japheth. I’ve known the man years, he’s in the red.

  He don’t worry me.

  Foole went around back and climbed into the bed of the waggon and opened the crate and sifted through the contents. You did fine, he said, there’s plenty here. He withdrew, at last, a long ornate seven-branched candlestick made of silver. Ran his fingers over the weird symbols at its base, the vined scrollwork in delicate detail flowering the length of the stalks. Glanced around then slid it under the wing of his coat and buttoned himself back up and jumped down.

  A price on the lot of it then? Fludd said dubiously. You want I should drive the bargain?

  Fence it for what you can, Foole said, but don’t drive it. Whatever we lose in the turnover we gain in good grace. There’s no losing here.

  And he reached up and took the man’s hand and then went off in search of a cab. Some twenty feet away he paused and turned back, a strange feeling in him. Fludd was seated in the waggon, shaggy head upraised, fixed and unmoving like a warning from a world that was no longer, about a world that was to come.

  FIFTY

  William had not waited thirty minutes when an old man in a scuffed black suit walked up Penton Place and stepped lightly across a puddle and made his way down towards the terrace house. William knew him at once, even in disguise.

  He waited but he saw no curtain stir, no light go on. No one else came or went. He had seen no sign of the manservant, Fludd. That man had lived a life of brutality and violence but Shade was the more dangerous by half. After a moment William detached himself from the shadow and crossed the street cautiously and went up the steps and banged on the front door with an open hand.

  Shade, he shouted. Shade!

  He kicked at the frame with his boot. When there was no sound from within he stepped back and glared up at the facade. The house stood dark and closed.

  He stood calmly in the front walk and held his Colt out before him and methodically dialed through its loaded chambers knowing they would be watching him and knowing Shade would see the seriousness in him. Then he turned and lazily lifted one elbow and punched in the glass of the sidelight and reached in and unlocked the door.

  He paused then, listening. Glanced back at the street. At last, his fists bared, he stepped inside.

  In the gloom he stood letting his eyes adjust, listening as the grandfather clock clicked down through its registers and the timbers of the house creaked around him. Shards of glass crunched under his feet like frost. The parlour doors stood open. He could make out a mahogany table stained the colour of blood, an empty birdcage, stairs rising into shadow.

  Edward, he called up. I’ve come to talk.

  Stillness and gloom. He held his Colt low at his side.

  Show yourself, he shouted.

  There was the bang of a door closing and William started to move. But something slid flashing past the corner of his eye and he turned and saw the child emerging from the darkness and the child’s low quick hand and then he saw the fireplace poker. He moved before he could stop himself and had the girl by the throat and his hand reached in a crushing grip from ear to ear and he knocked the poker aside and threw the girl backward. She lay crumpled against the wall amid a shatter of debris and her limbs did not look right but her chest was moving. He glanced down at a line of blood welling up from his hand and closed his fist upon it.

  And then he heard a low grunt from the front steps outside, and turned.

  It was the manservant Fludd. He came roaring in out of the grey noon light elemental with rage and a long knife upraised in one fist and William took an unsteady step back but could not find his footing on the broken glass and he lifted his gun and he fired.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Foole heard the crack and shatter of glass in the foyer below and for an impossible moment thought he had imagined it. He was alone in the house but for Molly. He had just peeled t
he disguise from his face and was wiping with a moist towel at the strings of glue on his skin when Pinkerton had started shouting for Shade in the street below. Foole knew no lawful charges had been laid and that meant the detective was acting outside the law and not bounded by its rules and the knowledge of it made him, for the first time, afraid.

  He went at once to the open suitcase and took out his old revolver. It was scarred and notched but he had kept it in good working order since the days of his suffering in Virginia. He checked its chamber, clicked it shut, slipped it into the waistband of his trousers. He picked up the leather satchel with the gallerist’s bonds inside. Then he ran for the servants’ stairs.

  On the first-floor landing he felt something give in his knee and he sucked in his breath but did not slow nor did he make a sound. He paused breathing silently and stared in the gloom but heard nothing and then he saw Molly materialize at the door of the kitchen.

  Adam, she hissed. Go. Now.

  She turned from him, ducked away. He paused, one hand on the balustrade, the other fumbling his old revolver, the satchel tucked under his elbow. He found her again lurking wraithlike at the door to the hall, listening intensely towards the front of the house.

  Edward, a voice bellowed. I’ve come to talk.

  We need to go, Molly, he said softly. He could not make out her eyes.

  Show yourself, Pinkerton was hollering.

  He ain’t interested in no one except you, she whispered. Go on. I’ll slow him down some an then make myself scarce.

  Foole shook his head. But he understood the truth in it and that the child had the steady swift hand of a creature of the streets and that she had never been a stranger to violence. He put a hand on her arm. You know where I’ll be.

  She nodded angrily at the dark scullery beyond. Bloody go, she said.

  When he turned back he caught a glimpse of Molly, pale and ethereal in the gloom, flowing through the kitchen towards the front of the house with a barbed iron poker in one fist. And then he heard the detective huffing and stamping in the hall like a bull and he was opening the scullery door and stumbling out into the cold.

  When the gunshot sounded he slowed at the high edge of the railway cutting and he started to go back but then he stopped. The pain in his knee was savage. He did not hear a second shot. He was standing with his coat open unsure what to do and the fog moving around him and he fumbled with the satchel and took out the revolver and checked its chambers and stared back through the haze and thought he glimpsed, for just a moment, a silhouette staggering out of the scullery door, into the garden. Lifting its face, peering up at him.

  And then the fog closed in and the figure, whatever it was, dissolved again away.

  FIFTY-TWO

  William could not find his footing and he lifted his gun and fired but the bullet passed harmlessly to one side. Then the giant’s huge arm came down. It came down swatting the Colt from William’s hand as if striking down a wasp. Both gun and knife cracked against the floor, skittered off into the darkness. His forearm and elbow were ringing like steel hammered flat and he swung around and tried to avoid the giant’s grip but he could not do so. The man took him in both his arms as if he were beloved, he lifted him from the earth.

  He could feel the great slow power of the giant’s embrace and his vertebrae popped one by one and he could not breathe. A blackness was creeping in at the edges of his vision and he crushed his eyes shut and opened them, a ringing in his ears. He could smell the vinegar stink of the giant’s sweat and the man’s coarse beard scraped against his nose in some demented kind of nuzzle and he could feel the man’s breath hot in his eyes. He thought of Margaret and of his daughters in their spring garden in Chicago among the cherry blossoms and he bared his teeth and he bit with all his strength into the giant’s face and the blood was hot and he came away with a piece of the man’s cheek in his mouth. The man shuddered but did not let go. William drove his forehead mightily down upon the giant’s face and felt the man’s nose split like ripe fruit, both of their faces streaming with blood, and then he was free.

  He slithered to the floor, gasping.

  The giant was on his knees also, cradling his face and shaking his head from side to side. William got unsteadily to his feet. Swayed. Picked up the iron poker where the girl had dropped it and dragged it scraping over the floorboards and lifted his hand and swung.

  He stayed only long enough to watch the giant fall. When he stumbled out the back door and into the garden he saw the figure silhouetted in the fog at the top of the railway embankment and he knew it would be Shade. Then the fog closed in and he stumbled into a run. At the back of the garden he found a gate, a series of in-cut steps beyond. He went up gasping and wiping with his sleeve at the blood drenching his moustaches and his chin, his face dripping like some ghoul just risen, his right arm dangling useless at his side.

  At the top of the stairs he found himself on a high stone wall and he could see into the cutting below. He glanced swiftly along the railway ties where they stretched sleekly out of the earth towards the city itself like an incision but could see no sign of Shade. The stones were slick underfoot and covered here and there in patches of tall grey weeds bending up through the cracks and William stumbled on at that eerie height with the backs of the terrace houses in the fog beyond half concealed and the strangeness of that space as if he were moving through the backstage of some theatrical production.

  Then he saw Shade.

  The thief was not running. He stood favouring one leg and faced William as he approached and the revolver in his hand looked light, warm, as if it were a part of him, some smooth extension of his wrist and not iron but flesh. He raised this part of himself and held it out in a kind of offering of violence and William went very still.

  Are you alone? Shade called.

  William said nothing. He was standing some ten paces away and knew he could not bridge that distance.

  Go back to Chicago, Shade called. This is finished.

  The hell it is.

  William.

  He took a step forward, bloodied palms raised. Tell me about my father, he shouted. What happened between you?

  The cold fog drifted around them, pressing in and pulling apart like a thing alive. Slowly Shade turned his face aside and peered down into the shadows of the cutting below as if listening for a train and after a moment William could feel it also. The low thrumming in the stone underfoot as if the earth itself were set trembling. The distant roar, the far whoosh and in-suck of air.

  Edward, he called. He ran a bloodied wrist over his forehead.

  Whose blood is that?

  That weapon still levelled at his heart. The train grew louder.

  William stared down at his wrist as if only just seeing it and then he looked up in surprise. I didn’t kill them, he shouted. Fludd or the girl. Neither of them.

  Shade said something but the roar of the train drowned out his words and then he shook his head and shouted angrily, This isn’t how your father would have wanted it.

  I’m not doing this for him.

  Shade hollered, Your whole life has been for him.

  And then the train roared up out of the earth black and aflame in a whirlwind of smoke and fury and Shade gave him a strange regretful look and limped to the edge of the cutting. The smoke boiling up around him, the air crackling his clothing into silhouette and curling up around the satchel and its ten thousand pounds and knocking his hat from his head.

  Wait, William cried.

  The thief glanced back once but William could not see his face and then he turned and stepped casually out into the maelstrom and vanished.

  There was neither blood nor carnage. No long drag of a body, no stain or smear on the tracks. Only the man’s hat caught in a tangle of weeds where it had been sucked over. William climbed down and retrieved it and stood with it in his hands staring at the suddenly vacant cutting around him. He could feel the cold crumpling of his shirt where the blood had dried. After a shor
t while he climbed back out and saw the swing of a bull’s-eye lantern in the fog, its beam startling and sliding over the slick stones and crossing and sliding again away. That was a young helmeted constable called in by neighbours who had heard gunshots. A runner was sent, John Shore descended, the vacant terrace house was gone over but no trace of Shade’s destination was found.

  So he’s gone, Shore said. Standing at the precipice of the embankment, banging his hat against his thigh. Edward Shade’s gone.

  William closed his eyes, opened his eyes. And then he was missing Margaret with a passion that left him gutted and trembling.

  I guess so, he said. I guess he is.

  In the end everyone would come to grief, he knew. No one would be spared. There were the dead in his own country too. The following morning he went out to the steamship offices on the lower Strand and purchased a one-way ticket to New York set to depart in ten days’ time and when he stepped back out into the street he was struck all at once by the stark desolate beauty of the city. The clerk who had sold him his ticket had upgraded him from second class at a reduced rate and William had set his gloved fist on the counter and studied the young man and then nodded and thanked him. Over the Thames the winter sky was very blue, very cold. He rubbed his hands, walked briskly. Sat an hour in a café at a table near the steamed-over windows studying a railway timetable, planning a route north. He had ten days before sailing and thought he might go to Glasgow. He wanted away from London.

  At noon he went into a haberdasher’s off Piccadilly and purchased several elaborate hats in the French style for his wife and daughters. They had enormous soft brims and slouching ostrich feathers and he filled out his address in Chicago and instructed the sales clerk to pack them with care. For his brother he purchased a leather-bound set of Dickens. He wrote to Margaret, he wrote to Robert. He sent several telegrams with details of his arrival in New York. He returned to his hotel and slept a dreamless sleep and woke in the evening refreshed. His old steamer trunk he packed slowly as if to fill his hours and his folded shirts he tied with twine and the package with Edward Shade’s measurements and fingerprints he laid between the clothes. He locked the trunk and left the key standing in it, pointing at him like a finger. No he did not believe the thief dead. That night he shaved using hot water from his bath and he dried his face with a clean towel. He wiped his hand across the mirror and stared at his worn face, unsatisfied.