The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  Lean and hollow-cheeked, and on their feet for hours (lighting the lamps through the evening, extinguishing them partly at midnight, partly at dawn, and repairing them through the day), they now filed into the Central Office Muster Room (where they reported every day and were fined severely if late), and Groves watched them sag onto benches and slouch against walls, grateful for any opportunity to rest. He recognized Angus Norton, the ancient and unofficial chief of the tribe; Pat Kemplay, who sang arias on his beat with the authority of a celebrated tenor; and even Herbert Cieslak, the little Polish lamplighter who once had helped him apprehend a thief (“The Courtesan’s Music Box”). With the others he was less familiar, though he recognized some of them by appearance and sensed that they had stiffened defensively under his gaze. Raggedly dressed in sooty overalls, holland jackets, waterproof capes, and threadbare trousers and caps, and pale to a man, they possessed, for all their lowly status, a curious tribal dignity, which they brandished like an impenetrable shield. These were men practically unblemished by scandal, for all their noctambulations; men who cherished their work, for all its miseries; men who were in temperament seemingly incapable of rash anger, for all their sleepless nights; and men who were almost universally regarded with affection, especially by the children, who hugged at their heels trilling, “Leerie, Leerie, light the lamps, long legs and crooked shanks!”

  As such Groves found it difficult to believe they might be guilty of murder, or indeed much of anything sinister. Physically they did not seem powerful enough to inflict bestial blows, and in intellect they lacked the facility to escape with preternatural guile. On the other hand, he had been in little direct contact with them for many years, and certainly he had been informed of a stewing tension in their ranks. These were, after all, increasingly uncertain times for leeries. The evil electric light—which already blazed through the boulevards of Paris and the theater districts of London—was incrementally creeping north. In Birmingham factory workers toiled through the night under suspended arc lamps. In Sheffield a sporting club had conducted a football match in its horrendous glare. At the Edinburgh International Exhibition some months earlier a display of Jablochkoff candles had the ladies unfurling parasols to shield their eyes. There were seventeen electric lights already suspended over the platforms of Waverley Station, and Princes Street itself—where gaslamps were spaced in such proximity that a man could read a newspaper as he strolled—had been strung, for a three-month trial in 1881, with electric lamps so radiant that Edinburgh had been proclaimed “the land of the midnight sun.” The advantages of such light, as those of a “progressive bent” were apt to point out, were manifest: it was more powerful, more reliable, cheaper, and less polluting. The gasworks required to feed the old lamps were themselves considered dangerous, with suggestions in alarmist newspaper editorials that a single explosion in Holyrood might level the entire city like some latter-day Pompeii. In the hunger for change, for some sort of perceived advance, no one seemed to acknowledge that the new light, even shaded in alabaster globes and mounted on gallowslike brackets, was severe to the point of offensive and offered no hint of the fluttering flame that had warmed the heart of man since the days of the Neanderthals. And now, in its annihilating glare, the cheerfully whistling leerie, patroling his well-worn paths with aplomb, for the first time was forced to contemplate his own extinction.

  Groves watched Leonard Claypole, the Town Council’s formally dressed Inspector of Lighting, call the assembly to order and solicit reports on breakages and the installation of new lamps. One of the leeries reported troublemaking near the iron foundry on Salisbury Street, the panes smashed with well-targeted stones. Another suggested the gas supply in the vicinity of the Royal Horse Bazaar was becoming dangerously unreliable, and with the winter now hardening, and with it an inclination to heavy frost, the pipes might require cleaning or even replacing. There was a general grumbling about the new move, advanced by some of the papers, to have the residences of all the city’s Knights of the Realm signposted with ornamental lamps, as already existed outside the residences of the Lord Provost, the bailies and police judges (ornamental lamps were more delicate, difficult to clean, and a magnet for vandals). And there was much pugnacious chatter about the inequitable designation of beats since the introduction of the newer, diamond-headed lamps, serviced with a smoldering pole, in which the younger leeries had taken to specializing, without acknowledging that they took altogether far less time to light than the whale-oil globes that had been around since the dawn of streetlamps. With these lamp types frequently intersecting, and the beats accordingly, it had been openly recognized by the Town Council, forever seeking to cut expenses, that the younger leeries were more efficient in their duties, and this provocative acknowledgment had in turn raised the hackles of the more senior lamplighters. The speed of lighting patrols had always been regulated by a tacit consensus, and it was considered insurgent to execute one’s duties with a swiftness that threw the rest of the tribe into unflattering contrast. But now, with the specter of electricity bringing with it the prospect of a dwindling population, some of the more cavalier leeries seemed to be going out of their way to impress the lighting inspector with their productivity.

  Ornamental lamps, the threat of electricity, and the inevitable emergence of self-interest: these were what constituted seething tensions in the tribe of lamplighters. But were they enough to turn one of them into a brutal murderer of professors, colonels, lighthouse keepers, and entrepreneurs? Groves had no idea why Evelyn might indict one of their trade, but he suspected some manner of hoodwinkery, generated for reasons best known to the waif herself.

  When Leonard Claypole turned the floor over to him he stepped forward to a ripple of murmurs. “Good day to you, gentlemen,” he said, standing before a large ordinance survey map with beats marked in loops and circles. “I have no intention of detaining you as I see it is already darkening outside”—near the winter solstice, streetlamps were lit as early as two-thirty—“but it has often been the case that your type has proved helpful in assisting the forces of justice in their duties, and you must have heard of the terror that has blighted this city in recent days. I ask you now to consider if you have seen any person or beast roaming the night streets who in some way might have raised your suspicions?”

  He narrowed his pale eyes and conducted a sweeping gaze of the room.

  “Nothing at all?” he asked.

  Not even a blink.

  “No mysterious figures? Stealthy types in capes?”

  “There’s always those,” offered Billy Nichol.

  “I mean figures of a peculiar size,” Groves said, and could not resist the description used by the Waverley Station witnesses. “A dark force?”

  Silence.

  “No savage beasts? Wild animals?”

  “Saw a couple of Americans th’ other night,” someone piped up, and there was a swift volley of guffaws, promptly stifled by Leonard Claypole with a stern warning.

  But the amusement lingered in the form of grim satisfaction: it was the Americans of the Brush Electric Light Company who had erected the arc lights in Princes Street with the intention of decisively establishing the superiority of electricity over gas. Failing to account for the virility of Edinburgh’s breezes, however, their delicate carbon contacts had dislodged on the night of the very first demonstration, resulting in a humiliating blackout and hasty summoning of the lamplighters: a moment toasted long into the night in the leeries’ favorite howff. Famously persistent, however, the Americans had struggled on through a largely unsuccessful three-month demonstration and still had not the good grace to depart, their engineers continuing to toil away in some steam-driven plant in Market Street, fully confident of eventual success.

  “Aye,” Groves acknowledged, as though sharing their amusement. “What about a young lass, then, with clipped dark hair—a slip of a thing, usually dressed in black? Anyone fitting this description you might have deemed unusual?”

  The men shrugged
.

  “She might have been in the company of another. One who was doing her bidding.”

  Nothing.

  “And none of you have any regular association with such a lass? None of you has had cause to give her grief, or earn her spite?”

  Not a word.

  Groves sniffed. “Surely, though, you have read of the victims so far. Has any of you had cause to dislike any of them? To wish them ill? Or to inflict some harm upon them with dark powers?”

  There was a collective creasing of brows as the leeries belatedly realized that they themselves had not escaped suspicion, though they were unsure what to make of it.

  “Then that is all I can now ask of you,” Groves concluded. “But you should prepare yourself for more questions before this nasty business is through. I ask you to be especially sober, and look about you with clear focus, because you never know what your eyes might chance across. And you cannot discount the possibility that you yourself could be savaged one night and carted to the mortuary, think of that. These are dark days, gentlemen, and you would be advised to be wary. And if you are hiding some secret, concealing it under your hats, then be assured that Inspector Groves will find it in you like a tick in a dog and cut it out with a blunted knife.”

  He lacerated them all with another slitted glare, but most of them were staring at the floor with their customary dim-witted expressions, as though they tolerated such rebukes every single day. Which, considering the reputation of the choleric Claypole, was highly probable.

  It was much as I thought, they were of no help to me, nor could I see in any of them animal malice. Pringle reported that none of them seemed shaken or pale as I spoke, neither were any of them angry, and I left convinced that the lamplighters had no reason to be slandered by the Evelyn woman, they knew nothing of the murders, and the only demon they knew was the Yankee.

  Chapter XIV

  CANAVAN PLUNGED into the Old Town after an exhausting night of debate in front of McKnight’s crackling fire. The Professor’s newly stated theories were convoluted and riddled with gaps—the Professor himself was happy to concede as much—and so bizarre that he dared not broadcast them beyond the ears of close friends. But as McKnight himself had observed in his own defense, there are crucial points in history when events and extrapolations coalesce in such a tempest that theories once deemed incredible suddenly burst into the form of revelations, and men once dismissed as insane take on the aura of prophets. Not, he hastened to add, that he had assumed any transcendent mantle. It was reality that would bear him out, he said, if indeed there was any reality left to do so.

  They had parted friends, as always, but Canavan was still troubled by the enthusiasm with which the Professor had seized upon his explosive theories, like a reckless boy stumbling across a keg of gunpowder in an abandoned fort. Nor was he convinced that the man, for all his repeated assurances, really had the welfare of Evelyn as his primary concern. There were times, indeed, when she seemed little more than a hideously deformed patient, to be analyzed, sampled, and exhibited with the same sort of procedural insensitivity exercised by the lecturing doctors of the Royal Infirmary.

  “Never forget we’re talking about a young woman, not a crocodile,” Canavan said sternly at one stage.

  “Evelyn? A woman impossible to dislike,” McKnight agreed. “And I have never said she is guilty of anything.”

  “But your theory is based completely around her guilt.”

  “My theory transcends such traditional notions.”

  “Aye, but you must accept we haven’t yet reached a stage when such theories can be used in any court, no matter how profound and admirable they might be.” Canavan had actually clenched his fists, he was so earnest, and he hoped the Professor had not noticed.

  His knuckles were still white now, his muscles still tight, and for all the heavy chill and the hoary hour he could not bring himself to rest, returning home by the most circuitous of routes and all the time warding off the cold with the one phrase he had retrieved from the evening to warm the chambers of his heart: a woman impossible to dislike.

  He had been captivated by her immediately, of course. From the moment he stepped into her room with a strange rush of familiarity, to the way she repeatedly glanced at him, hunting for security, he had been at the mercy of forces more powerful than rationality. It was not romantic love, exactly, or not in the guise in which a man might usually recognize it. This woman was no unearthly beauty—no Emily Harkins—and his feelings were untainted by the madness of lust. Rather, it was the overpowering sense of understanding, and a deep conviction of tragedy, along with a corresponding desire to comfort and defend her, which in Canavan was a drive infinitely more powerful than carnal desire. He was staggered by the force of such emotions, as always, but also fearful of his inability to match them with any sort of security beyond his considerable physical strength. And that he was destined to protect her was practically incontestable: it was a vision as clear to his heart as anything he had seen with his eyes. And if his first task in its sovereignty was to clash sabers with his good friend Professor McKnight, in order to protect her against a most astonishing assault…then so be it.

  “She hides something,” McKnight had declared, pacing restlessly in front of the glowing hearth. “You must surely have noticed the transparency of her answers concerning her departure from the orphanage. You might say she was ostentatiously evasive. As if she were peeling away a bandage and practically inviting us to attend to the wound. And it’s this wound, I advance, that is the key to unlocking the code of her unconscious.”

  “Some atrocity, I suppose you believe.”

  “Do you not find it conceivable?”

  Canavan paused. “What I find inconceivable,” he said, “is the ability of a young lady to perform a revenge of such brutality, even in her imagination.”

  “But she has openly admitted to just that—it’s common knowledge.”

  “She’s admitted to nightmares, which are not the same thing.”

  “Ah, indeed,” McKnight said happily, as though arriving exactly at his destination, and he turned to his friend with a mischievous gleam. “Would you care for a deductive argument?” he asked, for all the world as though he were offering a cup of tea.

  Canavan felt a curious sense of dread. “I’m always ready for a deductive argument,” he said stiffly.

  McKnight smiled. “Very well, then,” he said, and inhaled, as though to snare inspiration from the air. “The major premise: Dreams are entirely subjective, since by their nature they can be perceived by one person alone. The minor premise: Nothing that cannot be perceived objectively—that is, by more than one consciousness—is real. And the conclusion: Dreams are not real. How does that strike you?”

  “Very solid,” Canavan conceded. “Though I fear you’ve set it up specifically to be demolished.”

  “Wise fellow. For I now ask you: Is the minor premise really valid? Evelyn, you’ll recall, has insisted that when she dreams she is no more than a God’s-eye observer. She dreams what others might see awake, at precisely the same time that she is dreaming. Her only part is to reimagine streets with the utmost vividness and accuracy. Waverley Station, for example, was reconstructed from the highest rafter to the deepest speck of soot. So perhaps in Evelyn we have discovered one who does not dream subjectively but objectively.” McKnight shrugged. “And if this is so, then the argument is unsound. Because either dreams are not entirely subjective or Evelyn’s dreams are not dreams at all.”

  Canavan frowned. “So what’s your conclusion, then?”

  “Well,” McKnight said, “I find it impossible to believe that anyone, let alone Evelyn Todd, has no dreams. Nor do I believe that any traditional dream can affect objective reality. But then Evelyn’s dreams, as we’ve already observed, are not at all traditional. There is practically no appreciable difference between them and reality. And this acknowledgment allows me to draw my conclusion in one particularly challenging logical deduction.”
/>   “I wait breathlessly.”

  “The major premise,” McKnight said, “is simply this: Evelyn’s dreams are no different from reality. You can argue degrees if you like, but I ask you to accept it here on the balance of evidence. For the minor premise, on the other hand, I will accept no challenge: Evelyn’s imagination is able to distort her dreams. This, of course, is an understatement, and is as true of anyone as it is of Evelyn Todd.” He smiled. “And the ultimate conclusion? The point to which logic has led us irreversibly?”

  Canavan had a fair idea but did not feel moved to contribute.

  “Evelyn’s imagination is also able to distort reality,” McKnight finished victoriously, and Canavan could only scoff.

  “Aye,” said the Professor with an acknowledging chortle. “An outlandish statement in any other circumstances, I’ll admit that. But I would not say it were I not convinced of her exceptional imagination and the exceptional suppression of the same.”

  “You have no evidence that she ever had a great imagination.”

  “My evidence is in the very stoutness of her denial. In her discomfort at the very invocation of the word imagination. And in bookshelves that are laboring under the weight of so many academic texts that they are almost ready to collapse. These are the signs of one who has endured a serious punishment, or has been deeply branded with dogma and corrective measures, and has engineered traps and barbs to repel all accusations of weakness and depravity.”

  “Your own bookcases strain under the weight of academic texts.”

  “Naturally. I am a musty old professor, long lost to hope.”

  “So you think it’s improper for a young lady to take an interest in the reality of the world, is that it?”

  “On the contrary, I find it most admirable. But for one of her age to impose such a severe discipline that even her dreams are drained of any threatening color or emotion…I certainly find that indicative of some unnatural repression.”