By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  It wasn’t.

  Shade looked up, his eyes glinting in the shadow. I loved your father, he said quietly. But I was never his son.

  That’s right. You weren’t.

  Shade sighed, he set the photograph on the side table. You’ve been to see Sally then.

  I’ve seen her, yes.

  Shade regarded him carefully. Sipped his drink, said nothing.

  William cleared his throat. Here’s what I don’t understand, he said. Here’s what I haven’t stopped puzzling over, not since I talked to her. My father hired the Porters to find you. Why would he send operatives you had known and would recognize? Why send two Negroes into London, for god’s sake?

  He trusted them.

  He didn’t trust anyone. But he loved them, and I believe they loved him. Yet when they found you, they didn’t report you and even began to work for you. They were my father’s oldest associates, he had helped smuggle them to freedom, they had stood by him during the war, but still they ended up working for you.

  Shade said nothing. His luminous eyes brilliant. A wry smile, soft as velvet, soft as a handshake in the dark.

  They protected your secret, William pressed.

  What can I confess to? I’m a charming man.

  Not that charming.

  Shade shrugged. I paid them well.

  They never cared about money.

  Everyone cares about money.

  William shook his head but ignored this and he said, instead, My father left no file. No reports. Nothing that could be traced back to you.

  Because the Porters destroyed them.

  He never risked his only copy of anything. He kept reports of his childhood medical exams, for god’s sake. He kept dental records on his horses.

  Shade studied him. What are you saying, William?

  William leaned forward and set his glass of port, untouched, on the low steel table. The liquid wobbled into equilibrium. I’m saying you’ve been played, he said.

  A fold of darkness between Shade’s eyes, a crease of a frown.

  All this time you thought you had him deceived—

  Because I did, Shade said with a low ferocity. He never caught up to me.

  He knew you were alive.

  Yes.

  And exactly where to find you.

  Shade smiled a quick incredulous smile.

  All these years you’ve been hiding from him. All this time. And you never realized it. He didn’t hire Sally and Ben to find you. He hired them to watch out for you.

  That’s ridiculous.

  You and your famous luck, William went on. Escaping the police in Montreal just before the Pinkertons arrived. Avoiding prison in Boston and New York. Somehow getting out of the trains before they were searched, crossing the Atlantic how many times without being recognized. You never wondered about it? You never thought it unlikely?

  William rose wearily, he put on his hat and ran a finger along the brim, he pulled on his gloves. The ship’s horn sounded three times, like a warning out of a dream. The daylight darkened imperceptibly. He had crossed to the door of the stateroom and he paused now with his hand on the door and his great bulk looming. He looked back at the thief and was surprised to feel a kind of sadness. He looked at the smaller man’s beautiful eyes and wondered at the love his father must have held for the man. The clean manicured hands, the fold of his pinstriped trousers. A crescent of morning light crossed his cheekbones and whiskers.

  I didn’t come to say goodbye, he said with a frown. I came because I wanted you to know.

  Shade stared at him. The glass of port was very still in his hand. Know what? he said.

  Outside the cold waters ran red in the red light. There were gulls crying and wheeling in the sky and their shadows rippled and cut across the surface of the river.

  William smiled a sly smile.

  That I can find you, he said.

  Epilogue

  *

  1913

  OREGON

  When does a life begin its decline.

  His wife had been dead now nearly eighteen years. He thought of that sometimes with a faded sorrow. His younger daughter had nearly died in an automobile accident in 1905 and the elder had married and moved away. He still wrote both long letters even now though his handwriting had deteriorated to a scrawl and he sometimes burned with a longing to see them again which he felt like a physical pain. It would overwhelm him and leave him gasping. When his brother died in August of 1907 he knew at last he was truly alone. He slept less and less and then he slept too much. His hair greyed and he cut off his moustaches and he changed the cut of his suits to weather the times. His office in Chicago was dark with leather and mahogany and paintings of long-dead thoroughbreds and it began to feel like a room preserved. As the years passed there were fewer and fewer dossiers on his desk each night and slowly he began to slip from the office earlier and earlier in the day. He became a man revered. At banquets he sat in the place of honour. When he rode down to the stables of an evening he still wore his Colt Navy but the chambers now were empty. Shadows lengthened under the oaks. Stars came out. He walked at first slowly and then with a cane and then the heaviness of his flesh began to leave him and his weakened shoulders started to ache. Some black thing was growing in a cavity behind his spine and he felt it like a bruise when he lay down at night and he knew it would one day kill him. In 1896 Shore retired from the Yard haunted yet by the murders in Whitechapel and in 1898 he was hired as Pinkerton’s London agent. John Shore of the indomitable health, ruddy-faced, strong even at sixty, who would not live to see the new century. Somewhere he heard Adam Foole had died a pauper in Genoa in 1893, somewhere he heard Foole had been sentenced to a life of hard labour in Marseilles. That last was in 1896 and he did not believe it. That was the year Japheth Fludd was photographed after a knife fight in Cathay holding his stomach in his hands. The Agency grew bigger. There were invitations to speak in public and the newspapers came to love him. It seemed a world had passed almost overnight into a kind of legend and its survivors few as they were lived now like artifacts of that lost era. The years moved fast, the ocean grew smaller. He marvelled at airplanes with the hunger of a younger man. But he hated the telephone and regarded automobiles with the eye of a skittish horse and he missed the open country. It had been fourteen years since he had last heard the name Edward Shade and that he had whispered to himself. Fourteen years.

  How did he live? He washed his hands carefully in cold water. He ate little. He stopped drinking.

  He lived.

  He was recuperating in northern California when his San Francisco office received the telephone call. An Oregon sheriff described the holdup and the man responsible and the style of it seemed an echo from an earlier life. A man wearing heavy spurs and the outsized and dusty rawhide of another age had walked clinking into a bank in Portland on a Monday afternoon and demanded cash. He was very old and had drawn with difficulty a huge ancient revolver from under his coat and had needed both thumbs to cock the hammer. His hands shook so bad the teller had feared being shot in error. The man was dark and small-boned and shrivelled from the sun and he had very bright very clear eyes.

  I reckon it must be old Bill Miner, the sheriff had said into the telephone. There was a buzz and a click and then a silence. Then he said, If you could send someone up. We heard reports of a camp up in the hills out back of a logging outfit. It’s probably him.

  It was the detail about the eyes that decided him. He journeyed north by special train all that night and was standing in the empty street in Portland as the sun rose the following morning with his nurse at his side holding a blanket around his shoulders. By nine o’clock they were driving into the mountains. A sunlight fell dappled through the high alpine trees and the old detective rode with one hand clutching the edge of the door as the automobile rattled and jounced over the ruts in the road. It was a logging road and dragged clear by rolls of timber and they drove slowly. He was thinking of the different kinds of sunlight and h
ow some carry a sadness in them the way certain wines will do. There was in that high alpine light something that made him think of his earliest years with Margaret when the future seemed a single fixed thing they moved towards together. He was lonely, he was resigned. His heart, he knew, was an unswept room and would remain so until his death.

  There were two men with him one a sheriff and both were younger by four decades at least. His nurse slept in the back seat beside him with a red wool shawl draped around her shoulders and her knees half parted and her head lolling side to side as they passed under the pines. Slats of shadow, slats of sunlight. This was her world, their world. A world of telephones and automobiles and streetcars. A world of barbed wire and moving pictures. The first time he had seen a moving picture it was of Butch Cassidy being pursued by Pinkerton men and he had felt sick and made his slow way up through the smoke to the exit in disgust. His kind was like the horse. There was no open anywhere left for the running now.

  At the edge of a meadow the sheriff parked the automobile and he listened to the engine rattle out and fall still. The sudden quiet in the trees surrounding made him wipe at his eyes. Then the second man gestured at a thin line of smoke rising above the trees and the sheriff nodded. There were low tangled white flowers in the meadow like clover and their boots made no sound as they walked. He leaned on his cane. He felt no need to keep up. The nurse he had left asleep in her seat and he followed the men across the meadow then up through the sparse pines feeling the soft give of the needles underfoot. He was wearing his Colt as he had always done but it was holstered now and he clutched instead in one clawlike fist a folder of Agency documents and clippings. He wore a three-piece suit and a narrow blue tie. He moved very slow.

  Miner had been making coffee. When they found him he was sprawled out on the edge of a wind-fallen log with his hands folded at his belly and he looked to be dead. His grey face upturned and mouth aghast. After a few minutes he awoke and wiped at a line of spittle on his chin and peered about blinking in confusion then sat up and began raking through the coals with a whittled stick. A battered tin coffee pot sat balanced on three rocks. He seemed not to have noticed the three men standing at the edge of his camp.

  William felt a sudden great affection for the outlaw. The old crook had held up his first stagecoach in 1866. He had robbed the famous Del Norte Colorado and crawled on his belly away from the vigilantes who were stringing his partner up by the throat. It was said he had invented the expression Hands up! and that in 1881 he had organized a small outfit of men to knock down trains in Oregon and California. He had escaped from prison that year by scaling the walls barefoot and a trail of bloodied footprints led the guards to a flat stone in the river and no farther. In 1901 he had slipped from two Pinkerton agents over the border to Canada only to be picked up in 1906 by the Royal NorthWest Mounted and tried and sentenced to life. He had escaped one month later. He was ninety-one years old.

  The sheriff tipped his hat back with his thumb. Morning, he said.

  Miner glanced up in alarm, watery eyes squinting. Who’s that? he demanded. Show yourselves.

  The sheriff held his hands out before him and stepped forward. His badge catching the light. It’s all right, he said. Just doing some camping, are we?

  Miner said nothing.

  Aw now, we’re just being friendly.

  You boys best be getting along, Miner said.

  You wouldn’t be interested in us, Bill, the second man said. We’re not worth the robbing.

  Miner glared at them. Who you boys with? he demanded. What outfit you got?

  No one’s with anyone anymore, Bill, William said. He felt so tired. He said, There are no outfits. All that’s finished now. It’s been over for fifteen years.

  Miner furrowed his brow suspiciously. I know you, he said.

  The sheriff had set his thumb on the revolver in his belt but he did not look as if he had any expectation of drawing. He said, You know why we’re here, Mr. Miner. We’ve come to get the twelve thousand dollars back and to bring you in for the robbery of the Northern Securities Bank in Portland.

  Miner grinned. His head was trembling and when he took off his hat he was bald as a tortoise and his scalp looked liverspotted and old. A ring of grime encircled his skull like war paint. Portland, Portland, he said. Isn’t that in Arizona? I just come up here for the camping, Sheriff. There ain’t no law against that now.

  William smiled despite himself. You didn’t rob the Northern Securities?

  No, sir. I never did.

  You didn’t escape from a jail in Vancouver seven years back?

  No I did not.

  There isn’t a bag of money and securities somewhere in this camp if we go looking for it?

  Miner worked his gums and frowned. What’s here is all my own property. You take any of it and that’s called robbery.

  William shrugged tiredly and looked at the sheriff then opened the folder and passed it across to Miner. Photographs, trial transcripts, testimonies from long-forgotten stagecoach robberies. Then he passed across a copy of eyewitness accounts of the recent holdup. The outlaw squinted and shook. He could see the man’s ancient fingers trembling.

  Son of a bitch, Miner said. Look at this. Look at how handsome I was.

  Can you read? William asked.

  I got my letters.

  What’s it say?

  Miner did not answer. He closed the dossier with care. Can I get a copy of this? he said.

  Nobody had drawn a weapon.

  You know, Miner said wearily. I’m getting too damned old for this line of work.

  Later, collecting up the remnants of the old man’s camp. Kicking through the few rags and pans then stuffing all of it into heavy evidence satchels brought along for the purpose. William stopped a moment and took off his hat and stared out at the trees surrounding. He said, I came all this way. He shook his head in disbelief. He said, It was just old Bill Miner after all.

  The sheriff was sifting through the ashes of the fire with a stick and he lifted a scorched tin can that had twisted from the heat then let it fall.

  Who were you expecting? he said.

  He said it casually and William looked at the younger man and his dark eyes were set deep in his weathered face and he felt all at once his years. He was listening to the silence brush against the fir needles and feeling the cold mountain air on his face and hands. It was a good place. In the meadow below their strange new automobile crouched on its wheels like a great black spider. There was a nurse down there wearing a shawl the colour of blood, and an ancient outlaw, and a man of the new breed with neither face nor name. He put his hat back on his head with shaking fingers.

  After a moment the sheriff asked it again. Who did you think you’d find?

  Who did I think I’d find?

  The sheriff met his eye. What were you looking for, Mr. Pinkerton?

  The trees around them were very quiet. He felt a wind on his neck.

  What was I looking for, he muttered.

  He was the oldest son.

  His eyes were failing. His hair had greyed then thinned and he had cut off his moustaches with a razor in cold water one winter afternoon in a hotel room in Gainesville, Georgia. His wife had been dead then half as many years as their marriage had lasted and the pain of it had become a part of him like a badly set bone. He would walk down to her grave on Sunday mornings and clear the dead flowers and fill the porcelain vase with cold clear water then stand reading the inscription and thinking nothing at all. He slept. He did not sleep. He slept.

  He closed his eyes and he saw. A quarter century had passed and still he closed his eyes and saw. Darkness like a fog pouring over frozen cobblestones. The creak of chains sawing from hooks in alleys, eyes in the shadows stagnant and brown as smoke. He could smell the rot around him. A clatter of iron-shod hooves on stone, crowds of men wending between the omnibuses in silk hats and black cloaks and whiskers. He was walking. He was walking with his powerful shoulders set low and his fists
like blocks of tackle and it was dusk, it was night, he could just make out the silhouette standing under the gaslight waiting. The face was turned away but it did not matter, he knew that one well. The battered trunk at his feet, as if preparing for a journey.

  That one had always been waiting. That one would always be.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While several incidents described in these pages can be traced to real places, and real events, this story is a work of fiction. Its characters, both real and imagined, are creations of the author. The gaslit London of its pages never existed.

  There are many excellent nonfiction accounts of the early Pinkerton Agency, the Civil War, and the lives of criminals in Victorian London.

  This is not one of them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due, first, to the magnificent Jonathan Galassi, for his gentle, judicious eye and critical acumen; also to Jo Stewart, Jeff Seroy, Rodrigo Corral, Lottchen Shivers, and everyone at FSG. I am grateful to Juliet Mabey for her grace, enthusiasm and publishing dazzle; also to James Magniac, the talented James Jones, and everyone at Oneworld. I feel deeply lucky for the care and consideration of Kristin Cochrane, Anita Chong, Marion Garner, Aoife Walsh, Kelly Hill (for her gorgeous design), John Sweet, Shaun Oakey, Sharon Klein, Trish Kells, and everyone at M&S. Trident Media has made everything happen, especially Claire Roberts and the stalwart Alexa Stark. John Baker, Jeff Mireau, and the steadfast Jacqueline Baker discussed and improved multiple drafts from the beginning. Ellen Levine, my agent and friend, has been the quiet tidal force behind everything and there would, quite simply, be no novel without her.

  Throughout the editing of this novel Ellen Seligman was a voice of passion and fire. Her intelligence, excitement and insight made themselves felt on every page. She is irreplaceable.

  Above all, always, I owe this life to Esi: my love, my friend, my first and truest reader.

  A Oneworld Book

  First published in Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2016