The Bedlam Detective

by Stephen Gallagher

  After the talk, tea was served. Some women left early. Many of those who stayed behind were young and single and fired up by what they’d heard. Usually Evangeline would have been an eager contributor to their conversations. But tonight, it was as if she hadn’t the heart or the energy to join in. Instead, she offered to help with the refreshments.

  At one point she set an empty cup on a table, forgot that it was there, and knocked it to the floor with her sleeve only a moment later.

  “What’s the matter?” said her earlier companion from the back row. She was a Yorkshirewoman, and her name was Lillian. She worked in the drapery department of Derry and Toms department store, over on Kensington High Street.

  “Just tired,” Evangeline said.

  Lillian cocked her head in the direction of the doors. “Go on, then,” she said. “I can manage here.”

  “No,” Evangeline said with a half-serious smile. “This is all the fun I ever have.”

  At nine o’clock they set about collecting and stacking chairs; most of those remaining began a halfhearted effort to help and then discovered the time with surprise.

  Emptied, the big room took on a more melancholy character. It was said that when Tussaud’s had vacated these rooms for its new premises, the entire move had been carried off in a single weekend. Sheeted figures on the floor, when prodded, had proved not to be the mannequins they appeared, but exhausted members of the staff.

  “Now go,” Lillian urged her when the stacking was done. “I’ll stay and find the caretaker to lock up.”

  So Evangeline went, thinking wistfully of her rooms and her bed and a novel from the Boots circulating library. Out into Baker Street, past the studios of Elliot and Fry, the Court photographers next door, imagining as she always did the great and the good who daily crossed the pavement she was passing over now. Usually she’d have a companion for her journey back to Holborn, Lillian or a lady whose husband worked in the advertising office at the Daily Mirror building and supported their cause. But in the lady’s absence, tonight Evangeline walked out alone.

  There was some traffic on Baker Street, much diminished at this hour. So much had changed in the few short years since she’d come to London. Most of the hansoms were disappearing, supplanted by motor taxis. Horse wagons were still used for deliveries, but fewer of those as the months went by. Where would all the animals go? Wherever they went when their usefulness was done, she supposed, only not to be replaced. Theirs would not be a happy fate. Grace Eccles couldn’t take them all. It would be the tanner’s knife and the bone merchant’s cauldron, rather than grazing out their days in a field.

  And in a moment that struck her as both absurd and sincere, God grant them Grace, she thought.

  It was then that she heard a man’s voice call out, “There’s one of them.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  After a long wait for his train in Walton Station, Sebastian walked home from Waterloo. There were no messages at the pie stand, but he stopped and exchanged a few words with a couple of cabmen. By now Sebastian was a familiar enough figure to have earned himself a nickname; to the cabbies he was the Bedlam Detective.

  Walking on in the late-evening darkness, he thought about trick films and puppets. Something had been said about the tinker having puppets. About how children would bring him rags, and he’d make the puppets dance for them.

  But a trick film? That seemed like the least likely explanation of all.

  Frances was sitting before the fire, her clenched hand raised to touch her lips, gazing into the flames. The room smelled of coal smoke, along with the ever-present smell of moldering wallpaper that hung around the suite of apartments. She didn’t seem aware of him at first. He stopped to look at her; and in the second or more before she registered his presence, he had the sense that her innermost thoughts would be within his reach, if he were only to ask.

  But then she looked at him; and when their eyes met he smiled briefly and found some reason to look away as he spoke to her, much as he always did.

  “Where’s Robert?” he said.

  “In his room,” she said, “reading the book you gave him.” And then she returned her gaze to the flames.

  Robert said, “I can’t do what you asked for.”

  “That’s all right,” Sebastian said. “I know it was difficult.”

  “It’s not a matter of being difficult,” his son said. “You asked the wrong question.”

  “Did I,” Sebastian said.

  Usually as tidy as a bug collector’s cupboard, Robert’s room was in some disarray. But it was disarray with a purpose, as Sebastian could see. Spread out across the bed were a dozen or more of his magazines, arranged in some kind of significant order. Some lay open, others had pages marked with slips of paper. There were books close to hand as well, and he had a notebook in which he’d been writing. Sir Owain’s memoir carried even more annotation slips. By the looks of it, Robert was still only halfway through.

  Sebastian said, “And what question should I have asked?”

  “It’s not a matter of where truth ends and fantasy begins,” Robert said. “You should have said where fact ends and fantasy begins. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

  “Isn’t it the same thing?”

  “No, it’s not. Mother’s like a spring flower. That’s not strictly a fact. But it is true.”

  The phrase sounded familiar. “Where’d you hear that?” Sebastian said.

  “I heard you say it once.”

  And it was true, he had. He remembered now. In another life entirely.

  Robert went on, “In the book, the narrator’s party is dogged by all these various trials and they see terrible destruction along their way. He listens to the stories of the natives and draws conclusions about the causes. He imagines these great creatures and then he looks for the evidence. What you’re calling his fantasies are actually how he pictures his fears. So they may not be factual, but to his mind they represent the truth.”

  “Read on,” Sebastian suggested, picking up one of Robert’s older dime novels and looking at the cover. “He becomes more explicit.”

  “I hope he does produce some monsters,” Robert said. “A dinosaur or two can gee up a tale no end. There’s not a single one in Along the Orinoco, and it’s all the poorer for it.” He looked up. “Will there be dinosaurs?”

  “Not exactly,” Sebastian said, and held up the story magazine. It was issue number 130 of the Frank Reade Library, dated April 3, 1896. Authorship of Along the Orinoco was credited to “Noname,” as well it might be; a glance inside showed the lines to be brief, the language vigorous but rudimentary.

  “Where did this one come from?” he said.

  “I brought it with me. From home.”

  He meant Philadelphia. Laying the magazine down again, Sebastian said, “I can see you’ve been researching the subject.”

  “You said you’d pay me a shilling or two for an opinion,” Robert said, reaching out and returning the issue to its proper place in the order. “If I don’t put in the effort, how else am I going to form one?”

  “All I’m trying to resolve, Robert, is whether the man who wrote that story believes it to be his actual experience.”

  “You want to know if he’s intending fiction or deception.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is this for your Lunacy work?”

  “It is.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Because I can no more trust in his answer than I can believe in his book.”

  Robert turned around and reached for a bound volume that lay on top of a stack of others on his bedside table.

  He said, “This one’s called Among the Indians of Guiana. It’s exploration, not fiction. Mister Everard Im Thurn says of the Guiana Indians that they make no distinction between their dream lives and waking lives. If a man dreams of being hurt by his neighbor, he’ll go round and punch him the next morning.”

  “Trust a savage not to understand the difference.”<
br />
  “They don’t believe there is a difference. But their thinking is quite sophisticated. In their world it’s the spirit that’s responsible for the deed, not the body. And the spirit can live in all kinds of forms and cross from dreams to life and back again.”

  Reaching into his pocket, Sebastian said, “So a man gone native may lose his sense of what’s real. That’s worth a shilling.”

  “I don’t want it,” Robert said. “I haven’t earned it yet.”

  “But you’ve given me something that I can tell Sir James. Does this Mister Im Thurn have anything to say about the state of mind of a man who sees monsters?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s half the fun of a lost world. The Indians say that every inaccessible place in their jungle is inhabited by monstrous animals. They say there are huge white jaguars and eagles on the plain of Roraima, high above the Amazon. And down by the rivers there are monkey men and water beasts. It’s like Challenger’s world in the serial I’m collecting. That has dinosaurs.”

  “Have you not yet reached the episode with the nest of monsters? Or the sea serpent that pursues the rescue boat?”

  “No,” Robert said. “But don’t spoil it for me.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  "There’s one of them.”

  She was just making the turn into Paddington Street. Lights burned in some of the upper windows, but the pavements were empty. It was now almost half an hour after nine o’clock. She looked back and saw a group of three men. They were crossing Baker Street toward her.

  “Oi,” one said. “Miss. You. Come here. I want to talk to you.”

  As they passed under a streetlamp, their foreheads and faces lighted up like bone and their eyes were plunged into deep shadow. They wore cheap suits, and cheap boots. The one who’d spoken had a lock of hair in his buttonhole, worn like a trophy.

  “Not tonight,” she said.

  She turned away and put on speed.

  “Don’t you walk away from me,” she heard. “I’ll bloody teach yer.”

  She could hear their boots on the pavement. She glanced back and saw the three of them striding after her. The foremost of them, the one with the lock of hair on his lapel, was balding and had a wide, dense mustache over a weak chin. His two friends were giggling behind, and one was checking behind them to see if anyone was watching.

  She looked ahead and saw that the short length of Paddington Street was empty of people.

  She broke into a run, to reach the next corner before they could reach her. If she could get around the corner they’d be seen, and she’d be safe.

  But the next street was empty as well. There was a dray pulling along at its far end, but it was heading the wrong way. Right behind her and even closer now, she could hear the delighted snorting of her pursuers at their own outrageousness as they flouted all that was holy. For she was only one of those suffrage hoydens, come from the place where they were known to gather, alone and fair game for any sport.

  She saw the etched glass and dim yellow lights of a public house, and in that she saw sanctuary. Without any hesitation she slammed open the doors and fell inside.

  She looked around. She was in a small snug with aged woodwork and gleaming brass, and room for about a dozen men. She saw old men, bearded men, men squat as toby jugs, some with caps, some with pipes, all with stolid, phlegmatic expressions as if their lives had run out early and they wished nothing more than to sit out the rest of their days in silence, right here, with little to say.

  “Hey, Captain,” one of them called out. “Woman on the bridge.”

  And another one added, “She’s out on her own.”

  Any hope of sanctuary was dashed by the appearance of the landlord, all brawn and shirtsleeves and red-faced perspiration. His eyes were hard and his face was set.

  “Come on, you,” he called from behind the bar. “Out.”

  “I’m being followed,” she said.

  “I don’t care what you are,” he said, speaking over her and shouting her down. “No women in the snug.”

  “Nor gentlemen either,” she retorted, whereupon with a “Why you-” he threw back the counter flap with such violence that she felt a sudden and genuine fear for her safety, even more immediate than the threat she’d felt on the street. She dashed through into the adjoining public bar rather than face him down.

  It was as if the world had tipped and turned over in the space of a minute, and she’d fallen into London’s shocking through-the-mirror counterpart. From the public bar she came out into the street and almost collided with a night-patrolling constable.

  She stopped. Relief flooded through her like a laudanum rush.

  The policeman looked at her and then at the public house behind her and said, “What’s this?”

  “Ask the roughs who decided to chase me,” she said.

  He didn’t look around. “Where?”

  She was gathering her breath now. “Back on the street,” she said. “They were waiting around outside the Portman Rooms. I was at a meeting there. I made the mistake of coming out alone.”

  Now he looked around. But pointedly. Suddenly she didn’t like the way that this was going. He was a big man, as all of London’s policemen tended to be. And he had a country accent, as so many of them seemed to have. There were very few sharp-witted cockneys walking the streets for the Metropolitan Police, but there were a great number of these slow-moving, blue-caped and helmeted oxen.

  He said, “Where are they, then?”

  A glance, and then she said, “Gone.”

  “Gone, are they?”

  “They chased me from Baker Street.”

  “If they ever existed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no man safe from your kind,” he said. “Is there?”

  She was shocked.

  She said, “Is this how you respond to every woman who asks for your help?”

  “There’s women and there’s women,” he said, glancing down at her coat. “I know where you’ve come from. And I know what you are. So move on. Go home to your husband. If a woman like you can get one.” He leaned forward slightly. “Whore.”

  He said this last word low, and between his teeth, so that even if anyone had been standing close, they’d be likely to miss it.

  As fast as the relief had run through her, she was now flushed through with ice.

  “What did you call me?”

  “I called you nothing,” the policeman said, straightening up again. “You must be hearing things.”

  She glanced down and realized what he’d been looking at. Her suffragette pin with its green, white, and violet colors. Some wore amethyst and pearls. Hers were paste.

  She walked, unsteadily, the rest of the way to the Underground station, knowing that the constable was following and watching her from a distance, but taking little comfort from the fact. His presence might deter anyone from approaching her with ill intent; but were they to do so, he’d probably turn away.

  Her train carriage on the return journey smelled of sweat and leather, like cooking bones. She caught herself shaking, and made herself stop. The short walk home was a new trial.

  Safe in her rooms, she did not burst into tears as she was thinking she might, but was violently sick into the basin from under the washstand. Her landlady was partially deaf and unlikely to hear. Evangeline sank to the floor by her bed, hugging the basin, teary and miserable with the vomit searing her sinuses, and sat there without any sense of the passage of time. It might have been for minutes, it might have been an hour.

  Eventually she rose, and cleaned everything up, and washed her face in cold water.

  With her self-control regained, Evangeline looked to her future. Fear would turn to anger. Perhaps not tonight, but in time. She would take care not to be caught so again. She would continue to wear the badge of her belief, though not, out of prudence, at her place of work; if its significance were to be understood, her dismissal would probably follow.

  She undressed and put
on her nightgown, and then quickly climbed into her cold bed and shivered under the layers of heavy blankets until her own body heat warmed the space she lay in and made it into a nest. She told herself she was safe. She’d felt threatened, but she had not been hurt. She tried to compel herself to appreciate the difference.

  Eventually, Evangeline slept. Inevitably, it was troubled sleep.

  She had a nightmare of her childhood, the first in a very long time.

  Grace was screaming, and Evangeline could not bring herself to turn around and see why.

  That was all.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lying in their bed and watching the lace patterns cast across the ceiling from the streetlamp outside, Sebastian sensed that Elisabeth had an inclination to talk. So he stirred a little, to signal that he was wasn’t asleep.

  “Are you awake?” she said.

  “I suppose,” he said.

  “Frances tells me that Robert’s teacher has been talking about finding him employment again.”

  The last time he’d raised the subject, she’d had no enthusiasm for it. But now her tone was optimistic.

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  Sebastian said, “I wish someone could say where he’d fit in. I know he’s good for something. If I didn’t know the boy was troubled, sometimes I would think him a genius.”

  “He’s no longer a boy.”

  “If he were merely slow, employment would be no problem. There’s many make a living with a shovel or a broom that can barely speak their own names.”

  “He isn’t slow.”

  “Anything but,” Sebastian agreed.

  After a moment, Elisabeth said, “I do have a strange feeling that all’s going to be well.”

  Given her recent moods, Sebastian was surprised to hear this. “What’s caused that?” he said.

  “Nothing I can begin to explain.”