The Vanishing Man

by Charles Finch

  Without showing any of this feeling—he hoped—he turned to Bonden. “Lead the way,” he said.

  They boarded an omnibus bound east. They passed the trip in silence, until at last Bonden signaled, when they were in Eastcheap Street, that they should disembark.

  It was an insalubrious, swarming stretch of London, families stacked too close together, pawnbrokers next to rag shops, prostitutes out in plain sight even at this early hour. Unaccompanied children ran to and fro.

  They turned off Eastcheap and into Pudding Lane. This was the heart of where the Great Fire had raged in 1666, and all the buildings were of the last hundred years or so, some of them tilting oddly, jury-rigged, no doubt unsafe.

  The fire had incinerated thirteen thousand buildings, Lenox knew—all slums, skirting up only toward the edge of Mayfair.

  “Do you know how many people died in the fire, out of curiosity?” Bonden asked.

  “I do, as a matter of fact,” said Lenox. “Six.”

  “Ha! Yes, that’s what they say up Parliament way. More like six hundred, they’ll tell you here. The bodies weren’t found, that’s all.”

  Lenox was about to answer that he doubted that when they stopped. Bonden acted out his usual small performance—leaning against a building, producing his tobacco, acting busy—and Lenox followed his example.

  They were opposite a small yard, mostly in disuse. In it was a lone woman. She looked up at them, without recognition, for a beat—large, faded eyes, strong cheekbones, hair in a bonnet. Then she turned back to the yard, where a small row of lettuce plants grew; she was plucking paltry leaves from them, brushing away dirt. She put what she had retrieved in her apron and then went with a small pail of water to some kind of bare-limbed tree that Lenox could have told her from this distance would never flower or fruit again.

  “That is Mrs. Lila Wallace, relict of the late Alec Wallace, a carthorse driver. Two children. He was murdered seven months ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Money? A bar fight?”

  “Not money, not a bar fight. He was shot in his own rooms.”

  Lenox crossed his arms. “Does she need money?”

  “No, she manages.”

  “What point are you making, then, Mr. Bonden?”

  “None at all, Mr. Lenox. I had it in mind to offer you a trade.”

  “What sort of trade?”

  “I will teach you what I know if you help me find out who killed her husband. It is a matter of some interest to me. She is my cousin.”

  “She didn’t recognize you.”

  “Nor did you.”

  Lenox looked across the way again. “Yes, true. But why don’t you solve the case?”

  “I don’t have your gift.”

  “You!”

  Bonden nodded, pipe now in his mouth, in place of the West End cigar. “I can find things; I can watch. But you can ask questions—and your name, your face, your manner, gain you admission where I could well be denied.”

  “This is a genuine offer?”

  “It is. You know how to be active. I can teach you how to be … perhaps not passive, but certainly quiet. There is a great deal of power in quietness, Mr. Lenox. And not only quietness of voice but of body, of posture.”

  “I see.”

  “And together perhaps we may give my cousin some peace.”

  At that moment something overcame Lenox. The lesson was there, whether Bonden intended it or otherwise: that crime happened indiscriminately, or if with discrimination, then with discrimination against the poor. He must redouble his efforts. No more dukes for a while; the Yard could help him or it could not.

  But there was the potential all around him to do something useful in the world, just what his father had always emphasized, and Bonden had articulated something that Lenox had known but never conceded to himself, or even considered especially.

  It was that he had a gift for this. What was he thinking? He wouldn’t have traded places with Sir Thomas Clapton.

  “You have a bargain,” Lenox said. “Thank you for taking me on as a pupil. I am full of effort, even if I am a slow fist sometimes.”

  Bonden nodded. “Good.”

  “You will have to wait two days to begin, however. Perhaps three.” He didn’t like to say that Lady Jane’s garden party was to take place in two mornings. “I must go to Kent to see to a few remaining pieces of business.”

  They shook hands—and it was left to Lenox, as Bonden strode off, to determine how to return, handkerchief across his nose, to his own part of London. In any event he had his next case. He was already wondering if he and Graham had clipped anything from the newspapers about Mr. Alec Wallace, or whether the Yard had made any headway on the matter at all.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The duke’s carriage was so large that it took up a lane and a half of most roads, a marked inconvenience when passing anyone other than perhaps an exceptionally thin adolescent on a donkey. Lenox would have preferred the train but had to admit, by the third church they visited, that it was a comfortable conveyance, four seats wide, well ventilated, with a compartment beneath their feet where a large slab of ice cooled the carriage, leaving a trail of water droplets in the dust behind them, fairy-tale fashion.

  It was a company motley enough for Shakespeare’s own enjoyment. There were the duke, Lenox, and Graham, of course, but with them as well were two learned gentlemen. One was Sir Charles Locke Eastlake, the only person other than Queen Victoria whom Dorset had told about the portrait. He was a middle-aged fellow with lank, curled brown hair who had, for reasons known only to himself and his valet, worn a heavy flannel suit and was now perspiring at rates of almost indescribable speed and volume. Lenox tired of him after, oh, five minutes of travel—he was pomposity itself—but fortunately the near closeness of apoplexy quieted him somewhat.

  That left old Duncan Jones, quiet and benevolent, whom Lenox had coaxed from the British Library with some of the story.

  Dorset hadn’t been happy, but Lenox had asked for and received the favor several days before, the permission to bring a friend. A duke could not go back on his word.

  They had been to three of the five churches that Lenox and Graham’s research had turned up: St. Wistan’s, St. Aethelstan’s, and St. Bartholomew’s. The first churchyard had been tiny and offered no probable candidate; the second was large, but the rector informed them that nobody had been interred there until the 1790s. The last was middle-sized, and they had gone tombstone by tombstone and found nothing except a Mary Swindle, buried in 1844 beside her husband, Samuel Swindle.

  This left two churches, St. John’s-upon-Wold and St. James’s.

  They were headed now for the latter, having stopped at an inn to order food. Eastlake had drunk so much water that he looked half drunk when they were again seated in the carriage, his eyes closed. The duke, meanwhile, was equanimity itself. One would never have guessed that the week before he’d been locked in the Tower of London.

  The general conversation had been only polite until now. Lenox and Jones had been seated next to each other, and talked a great deal privately.

  As they had reseated themselves, though, they had ended up in opposite corners, and Lenox said, hoping to make the last few hours of this task more pleasant, “Do you believe that Shakespeare was a Catholic, Mr. Jones?”

  The old Yorkshireman considered the idea carefully. He was a pleasure to have brought, Lenox was glad to observe, slow but certain in his motions, deferential to the duke but his own man, polite to Graham.

  “It’s a vexed question, I fear,” he replied. “The—”

  “OPINION IS DIVIDED.”

  Eastlake managed to eject this judgment before sinking back into the cushions. He wasn’t a large or overweight gentleman—it was surprising that he should be quite so red—but the effort of a day out of the dim corridors of his museum seemed too much for him.

  “Sir Charles is quite correct,” Jones said politely. He wait
ed a beat to see if the other man would go on, but it wasn’t even clear that he was conscious. The duke looked at him with disgust. “My personal belief is that Shakespeare was irreligious. Coleridge says it well: ‘Shakespeare is of no age—nor of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.’ There is certainly a great quarrel with God running through the plays.

  “On the other hand, it seems definite that John Shakespeare was Catholic, and I think it would have appealed to William in more than one way to remain a Catholic.”

  “How’s that?” asked the duke.

  “Well, Your Grace, he was mischievous, for a start. He was not Marlowe, who lost his life in a cheap tavern over spying—”

  “CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,” said Eastlake forcefully.

  “I am quite aware of him,” said Dorset with irritation.

  “He was Shakespeare’s only real peer,” said Jones, “but died at twenty-nine. Shakespeare’s rebellions were much subtler, as befits a country boy. Marlowe had been at Cambridge.”

  “What was the other reason?” asked Lenox.

  “Ah! Well, his father, you know, the great life force that never left Shakespeare. Evidently a man of tremendous charm. Long after his father’s disgrace, William paid an immense amount of money to buy back all his father’s lands in Stratford and more. And he finally obtained a coat of arms for the family, something his father had fought in vain to accomplish for many years. It meant that they were a family of gentlemen at last.”

  “You think he would have been as loyal to his father’s religion as to his aspirations, then,” Lenox said.

  “ROT,” said Sir Charles.

  They all looked at him expectantly.

  “How so, Eastlake? Speak up,” said the duke, his scorn undisguised.

  “HATED HIS FATHER.”

  Jones tilted his head. “There may be something in what Sir Charles says. I have always thought it curious—and this is a personal theory, not an academic one,” he added, though his clear blue eyes, buried in crow’s-feet, sparkled, “—that Falstaff might have been based on John Shakespeare.”

  Probably no character was closer to the hearts of Englishmen than Falstaff, the witty, obese, drunken, zestful, devious, cowardly best friend of Prince Hal.

  Indeed, it was Graham, now, who said, “Falstaff!”

  The democratizing effect of their hours in the carriage could be seen—nobody thought twice about Lenox’s valet interjecting. “Yes,” said Jones. “To begin with there is his name—Sir John Falstaff. John! Can we consider that an accident? After William’s son, Hamnet, died, he wrote his saddest play, Hamlet. He obviously cared about names.

  “Then there is that ‘Sir,’ a title no character in all of Shakespeare deserves less. If John Shakespeare was a chaser after titles and coats of arms, it might be a mockery of his father, that. But what I like best of all is the name—shake, speare; false, staff.” He looked around hopefully. “Do you see the echo?”

  “Yes,” said Dorset, unexpectedly.

  “Shakespeare was highly conscious of his own name. Sometimes he was called Shakeshaft. Falstaff! It seems more than a coincidence to me. And his father was a drunk, made great sums of money and lost them, beloved, loathed—a man not unlike Falstaff. Is there a more conflicted portrait in Shakespeare?”

  They all glanced simultaneously at Eastlake, but he had gone as pale as Banquo’s ghost and, as if sensing their gaze, finally loosened his tie. His relief was palpable. “Ah,” he said. “Good God. That is better.”

  “It is an interesting argument,” said the duke.

  Jones nodded his thanks. “I have considered sometimes that Falstaff makes more direct Catholic references than almost any other character—the catechism, the ecce signum…”

  He would have gone on, but at that moment the carriage drew to a stop.

  And Lenox knew before he had set a second foot on the ground that this was it.

  St. James’s was a tiny crumbling church with a peaceful grassy churchyard next to it, shaded by an enormous flowering oak. The sun struck the tree in different places, so that it was dark green in some, golden in others. There was a deep feeling of serenity here, of eternity. Perhaps of God.

  “Sir,” said Graham, and pointed.

  One of the few dozen tombstones in the churchyard had recently had its dirt turned over. Dorset glanced at the grave and then broke into a hard walk. Lenox followed him. Behind them, Graham—good soul—stayed with Jones, who trailed more slowly, using a silver-capped cane.

  The duke fell to his knees at the tombstone. “Mary!” he cried, and indeed the name was there on the tombstone, faint but legible: Mary Pike.

  He dug with his hands, though the driver had gotten down from the box with the trowel, spade, and shovel the duke had specifically ordered brought.

  After only a short time the duke brought up a dark mahogany box, battered and scored. He brushed the dirt off the top.

  But why was it still here, Lenox wondered, if it had been dug up so recently?

  The answer came: The duke pulled from the box, which was lined with some sort of crude tin, a single aged sheet of paper and a letter on fresh blue paper.

  He studied the sheet, as Lenox looked over his shoulder.

  Campion

  As it hath on two occasions beene publicly acted, by

  the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain,

  his servants

  Written by Wm. Shakespere

  Printed by Iames Roberts, 1599

  “The authentic title page of a quarto, or the best imitation I have ever seen,” Jones said softly. Both Dorset and Lenox looked back. The old scholar looked like a man gazing into the face of an angel. “Campion. A Catholic martyr. Roberts would have happily printed off five or ten copies for a playwright who had given him so much worse. He was a broad-minded man. They performed it, I would guess, for highly select audiences.”

  “But where is the play?” asked Dorset.

  Lenox pointed at the letter in his hand and said, cursing himself for having told her she got the clue wrong, “Your daughter has it.”

  The duke looked confused; then realization dawned on him. He opened the letter.

  9 June 1853

  Father,

  Here is the title sheet. The remainder of the play will be yours when you receive, with her husband, at a ball of the usual sort at Dorset House,

  your loving daughter,

  Mrs. Isaac Walters

  So the play was with Lady Violet.

  All of them reacted differently. The duke looked stunned, there on his knees, unmoving. Lenox himself felt a kind of stupor. She had pieced together the clues; he had been beaten.

  He gazed at the ground. Shakespeare’s own hands must have turned over this earth once. Only after a moment, because of that stupor, did he appreciate the final trick of the thing, whether it was intentional or not: pike, Mary Pike’s last name, was another word for staff; or spear.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  After they had all returned to the carriage—it was Graham, good fellow, who thought to smooth the earth above Mary Pike’s mortal remains back into tidy order—the duke asked if they would do him the favor of a few minutes’ silence.

  The few minutes extended past an hour. Sir Charles Eastlake fell into a peaceful sleep, his face a less alarming color now that he had removed his tie and jacket. Jones watched the golden evening light, as old men will; Lenox read on in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Occasionally he looked up and thought about Campion. A hundred years hence, would the play be performed on the great stages of the world, between runs of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream? It was this that they were all no doubt wondering: the immortal preciousness of what Lady Violet Walters, as she must now be called, had carried away so fecklessly, tearing a title sheet from it as if it were a common newspaper. Sublime arrogance.

  Just after the carriage had stopped to let Jones off in Bloomsbury
(Dorset had the grace to take each of them directly home) and the driver had opened the door, he said, “Lenox has not confided your circumstances in me, Your Grace. But I hope we may see the play. Fifteen ninety-nine! He never had a year when his genius reached a higher pitch—and if it was only performed twice, this may be the only copy, fair or foul, we have any chance of seeing.”

  The duke only nodded. “Thank you for your knowledge and your civility today, Mr. Jones. You have been an admirable addition to the party.”

  The scholar touched his hat. “Your Grace.”

  Now only Lenox, Graham, and the duke remained. (They had dropped Sir Charles off first; one could only imagine that it would take him weeks to recover from his bid at fashion.) Lenox was about to speak when the duke asked him abruptly if he was free to dine at White’s on Monday, three days hence. Lenox said he was. The duke then tapped the carriage door with his cane.

  “Take these gentlemen home,” he said to the driver. “I shall walk.”

  They watched him go in the gloaming, spine stiff, hands clasped around the cane behind his back, his top hat adding a foot to his imposing height, his swallowtail jacket lending a formality to his passage through the throngs. Nobody glanced at him: the third man in all the land, probably; and now a witness to his own death, father-in-law of a gamekeeper, father of a murderer and her accomplice, husband to a wife indifferent on all accounts, and accidental traitor to his family’s great secret pride and duty.

  It was possible to have sympathy even for a duke.

  “Rum day,” said Lenox as the carriage stirred into motion.

  “Among the rummest, sir,” said Graham.

  Lenox laughed. “Three years ago I thought a case such as this one would reach its conclusion and every last string would be tied off. As if I were delivering a fruitcake in brown paper on Christmas. But what do we have now? A lost play still lost, a death unpunished, a father and son who have lied to each other, a father and daughter who may never speak again. It is thoroughly unsatisfying.”