“But you cannot say her dreams haven’t threatened her. They’ve done nothing but torment her.”
“Aye, but only as a completely aloof observer. And this is the very point: she is so ashamed of her own dreams that she can only bear to appear in them as an objective figure, a person whose movements she observes as she might yours or mine. Further, the reality she has constructed for herself, outside her dreams, is a being so bland that it is incapable of any sort of inspiration beyond sewing dolls for children. And this is an image she guards like a candle flame in a tempest, presenting to the world this upright, pitiable character untainted by a single corruptive notion.”
“Her immense imagination again.”
McKnight ignored the skepticism. “I believe the fortress containing it was formally constructed at about the time of her departure from the orphanage—the ‘parcel tightly bound.’ Perhaps the foundations had been laid prior to this, and I certainly suspect she was reprimanded severely in those days, but then, at some crucial point, a dungeon was built to entomb her imagination so deeply, and under such force, that it has now inevitably protested, slipped through the bars of its cell, and driven violently into the open air, where to Evelyn’s horror and shame it cannot be restrained, and has become manifest as the demon that terrorizes the streets of Edinburgh.”
“This is absurd,” Canavan said.
“Ce Grand Trompeur,” McKnight went on, undaunted. “A euphemism for the destructive demon of the mind. ‘A murderer from the beginning’—a biblical reference to Satan. Don’t you see? The killer is not identifying his victims. He’s identifying himself. In a language that can only be understood through the likes of us. In a language that is inviting us to hunt him down.”
Canavan struggled to protest. “And ‘Persecutor of Innocence’? There are no such references in the Bible.”
“Not precisely. But persecutor and innocence appear independently in practically every book from Genesis to the Apocrypha. And I hardly think it presumptuous to assume that, when we eventually find it, it will prove to be another reference to the devil. All the shameful and undisciplined imaginative inclinations Evelyn has buried, you see, are challenging us to apply to them their proper collective name. And there are so many names to choose from, are there not?” McKnight smiled mysteriously. “Tell me—what do you know of the name Lucifer?”
Canavan was flustered. “I need to know, before anything else, if we’re meant to be dealing with an innocent woman or the devil himself.”
“We are dealing with a human being called Evelyn, and a devil inherent in all of us. A primeval instinct, a fundamental component of evolution. Breathing the atmosphere of an imagination so fertile, and so violently repressed, that it has developed into an incarnation of hate.”
“Absurd,” Canavan insisted. “I say it again.”
McKnight was patient. “And I say again, what do you know of the name Lucifer?”
Canavan sighed. “Lucifer,” he managed, failing to see the point, “is one of the many names given to the devil.”
“I’m sure a good theologian can do better than that.”
“First used by the early Christians,” the Irishman offered wearily, “and later popularized by Saint Jerome. A name generally used to designate the devil as he was before his fall from heaven.”
“Aye—the magnificent Seraph, God’s most brilliant and industrious courtier before the schism: the very icon of unchecked ambition. But you still haven’t defined the name itself.”
“Lucifer appears but once in Scripture, in Isaiah—a translation of heilel, Hebrew for ‘spreading brightness.’”
McKnight nodded approvingly. “And in Latin?”
“It means ‘the bearer of light.’”
“Aye. The bearer of light. The carrier of fire. Spreading the fundamental stuff of the universe.” McKnight raised his eyebrows suggestively. “And so I ask you: Has not Evelyn all but given him his rightful name?”
The lamplighter. Canavan froze with the realization.
He was speechless for full seconds, struggling for an objection and fighting in vain against the implications.
“But…”
But later he would not even remember how he had protested. He vaguely registered McKnight continuing along some tangled metaphysical line, but in truth he found it exceptionally difficult to concentrate. Because for all the current assimilation of philosophy and theology there was still an essential difference between the Professor’s Lucifer—the corrupted instinct—and his own—the Prince of Darkness. Repeatedly the image of Evelyn’s tortured and innocent features returned to him, and again and again he tried to find it absurd to think that this face, which he had already gilded in his memory, might shield some unspeakable evil. But ultimately he was too awed by the revelation to be an effective advocate for the defense, and too staggered by the knowledge that he was no longer denying the possibility of her involvement, and it was indeed just a matter of degree.
“I know what this must seem like,” the Professor admitted generously at one stage. “A wizened old man frayed by cynicism and disillusionment latching on to fantastical theories with the enthusiasm of a doctor testing revolutionary antidotes. But I stand by the logic of my conclusions. It is not my intention to become famous by this announcement, but I will make it cautiously anyway: in the young lady Evelyn Todd I believe we have found a being who is not just another thread in the weave of reality, but one who is able to knit her imagination into its very fabric.”
And it was this last audacious remark that continued to reverberate wildly in Canavan’s mind as he wandered up Chambers Street past the Phrenological Museum, trying to come to terms with its full meaning. Because if Evelyn were truly capable of what McKnight was suggesting, then it made her something more than simply human. This truly was the power of the devil. And the possibility terrified him.
Pausing now at the intersection of Merchant Street and Candlemaker Row, he looked pensively at Evelyn’s darkened garret—not a hint of a glow at its shaded window—and wondered if she now slept and dreamed. Or if both he and McKnight, having introduced themselves into her universe, were now players on her stage and thus subject to her displeasure, and consequently capable of being killed. Would Evelyn herself desire that, even in her darkest realms? What did she make of him? The imploring looks she gave him—the sense of shared communication—surely that was not a figment of his own inadequate imagination?
Standing there, filled with anguish, he suddenly discerned a man lounging against the gates of Greyfriars Cemetery, rubbing his hands for warmth and glancing alternately at Evelyn’s window and the building entrance. That he was a detective, plainclothed like a “beggar hunter,” Canavan did not doubt for a moment. Clearly the police themselves suspected Evelyn of an involvement more substantial than dreams, but without the aid of radical philosophy they were no doubt confused, battling to establish means and motive. The detective’s presence was evidence enough of their intentions, and the man was surely under instruction to follow Evelyn closely were she to strike out on some potentially sinister mission.
Retreating to a dark alcove of his own, Canavan wondered if he had a duty to warn Evelyn or if he had the right to interfere. If McKnight’s theory was fundamentally true then she was guilty at most of harboring an advanced form of original sin, and was no more accountable than Canavan, or the detective lurking in the shadows, or the judge who might send her to the gallows. It was the sort of repudiation of personal responsibility that in the past had always troubled him: the reduction of man to bestial cravings and instincts rather than the celebration of his altruism and integrity. It offered Evelyn the possibility of a moral acquittal—as well, perhaps, as a practical alibi—but in this Canavan found as much dismay as relief. Further, it did not admit the possibility that the devil was an external force, and the corresponding notion that the murders had been committed by a truly separate entity. For why could it not be that the lamplighter was in fact real and that even her unconsc
ious was innocent?
The chimes of the High Street kirks were bruising the midnight air when he noticed a hunched little chimney sweep worm out of the building and shuffle purposefully down the street. Neither he nor the detective paid much notice at first, and it was only when the figure had almost curled around the bend that Canavan was jolted out of his distraction with an unaccountable suspicion. He shot a glance at the still-lounging detective, who remained staring at the building, and then launched from his own hiding place and took off before the sweep was lost to sight.
Rounding the corner into Bristo Place his quarry straightened and darted nimbly across the road, heading rapidly up Lothian Street behind the imposing sandstone bulk of the University. Canavan kept a discreet distance at first, but was soon emboldened when it became clear that the sweep had no intention of looking back or doing anything but moving at a progressively faster clip. When they came into the vicinity of the City Hospital, however, the figure folded into a stoop and resumed its ungainly shuffle past an ambulance wagon, only to unfurl again when they moved into the more desolate region of breweries and glassworks.
Now Canavan was certain that the figure was Evelyn. But he could not imagine her reasons or guess where she might be heading. And his heart was seized with fear.
But if indeed she had a destination at all, she gave little indication. Hunching into her guise only when she passed another figure or a row of residential windows, she performed a swift circuit of the belching gas plant in New Street, cut through the district of foundries and pickle factories, and stopped just twice: near White Horse Close, the departure point for London stagecoaches, and in the proximity of Queensberry House, where she took some time to examine the neighboring buildings and look up at the dim outline of the Salisbury Crags. Then she set off again, without any logic to her progression, taking unexpected detours, crossing the street only to cross back again, and sometimes inexplicably cutting through wynds before doubling back and retracing her steps—this last especially difficult for Canavan, who nevertheless resisted detection. But at the same time she seemed uniquely alert, absorbing the environment with all her senses, and except when shuffling she was as silent as a silverfish.
Turning from St. Mary’s Street into the Cowgate, however, it suddenly became clear that she intended to pierce the slum at its befouled heart, and Canavan was further alarmed. The infamous chasm under the George IV and South Bridges was a magnet for thieves, hawkers, housebreakers, magsmen, cinderwomen, beggar prostitutes, and consumptive, barefoot children. Only the police and terminally bored aristocrats ventured here in darkness, and even then with trepidation. Canavan himself, for all his affinity with the destitute, walked here most infrequently. And yet frail Evelyn now surged west into the squalor without a moment’s hesitation, as though soliciting a secret challenge or willing upon herself some assault, and behind her Canavan primed himself to defend her physically, dreading a confrontation that seemed inevitable.
The street was infinitely squalid, thick with coal dust, rag fibers, gin vomit, and expectoration, its population bunched around sputtering fires, blowing steam off soup and haranguing one another from windows. Yet Evelyn glided through it all with dreamlike ease, summoning not a single sneer or a flicker of acrimony. She raised her head a few times—seemingly to embrace the sight of the jostling tenements and frowning bridges—but otherwise moved so unobtrusively that she might have been a shadow, and with such deftness around obstacles that it was clear this was a journey she had made a thousand times. She traveled to the very end of the street without being assaulted, accosted, or even glanced at suspiciously, and when she at last climbed out of the ungodly pit and made her way back toward Candlemaker Row, Canavan actually sighed with relief.
But, to his renewed surprise, she did not immediately head home. She shuffled again past her building, once more under the eyes of the unsuspecting policeman, and proceeded back up the street to the altarlike parapet of the George IV Bridge. And here she stopped to look down, perhaps reflectively, into the inferno through which she had safely passed.
Canavan watched her from a distance—a sorrowful figure under the reddish lamps, she was moving not an inch, as though transfixed—and quickly the combination of her salient vulnerability, her previous recklessness, and her ultimately angelic passage—not to mention his own deeply stirred protective instincts—combined to intoxicate him, and he could not resist the urge to edge across the road to join her. He hesitated a few yards distant, however, and almost turned away, thinking that he had no right to disturb her private respite, before deciding that, on the contrary, it was important at least to offer her the suggestion of company, the notion of a kindred spirit.
He crept up to the parapet, and when he eventually spoke it was in a whisper of both admiration and gentle rebuke. “There are many reasons for you to be careful.”
She gave no indication of responding at first, so that for a second he doubted he had made himself heard. But just as he was about to repeat himself she snarled a simple “Why?”—as though aware of his proximity from the very start.
He swallowed his unease. She had soiled her face and ruffled her hair, and her voice had affected a surly quality that was even more pronounced, and more incongruous, than when she had turned on McKnight.
“For a start,” he managed, hearing himself as though from afar, “it’s surely unsafe to walk the streets at night.”
“I always walk the streets at night,” she said flatly. Her eyes reflected the Cowgate’s greaselamp glow.
“May I ask why?”
“It’s what he wants.”
He could not force himself to ask why, or who. “There are other matters—”
“I care not for danger.”
He coughed. “Men are watching you.”
“Men are always watching me.”
“Aye.” Canavan was perplexed by the bitterness of her tone. It was such a contrast to that of the frail being he had met previously that he could not fathom from where his attraction had come, and wondered if she was even the same person. “I can protect you,” he heard himself declare heedlessly, to deny his loss of faith.
But she only smirked and for the first time rotated her head to pierce him with a gaze.
“What makes you think that I will not protect you?” she said, and he felt the words seep like chilled water into his heart.
He had tried to offer her a tender gesture, but she no longer required comfort. He had tried to warn her, but she was beyond the need for protection. He had yearned to console her, but she resisted pity. She was an entirely different being…and yet he still could not bring himself to abandon her. He believed in her resolutely, with instincts more powerful than doubt.
He turned to face her again but found that she was staring fixedly into the underworld.
“Oh, look,” she whispered, with an inscrutable smile. “It’s Leerie…”
Trying to interpret her expression, he only belatedly became aware of her actual words. Startled, he followed her gaze into the hushed depths of the Cowgate, and with horror glimpsed what could only have been a huge dragonlike creature slithering into a dark narrow wynd, trailed by a snaking diamond-tipped tail.
Chapter XV
AS WELL AS A MAN whose counsel Groves regarded as far more reliable than that of any richly paid advocate, the venerable Piper McNab had been a devoted Scripture reader and had once suggested to the Inspector that his memoirs might be afforded a veneer of authority were he to number each sentence like a biblical verse. Initially Groves had regarded the idea as extreme, even profane, but the good piper had reminded him that it would scarcely be audacious if the subject itself was weighty enough, and now, well past midnight, hunched over his journal, fighting valiantly to ensnare the words cascading from his mind, Groves began wondering if that which had once seemed a sacrilege might soon constitute a fitting imprimatur.
He had long been aware that the Lord Provost had been taking a more than common interest in the investigat
ion: canceling engagements, making daily inquiries, and at one stage even visiting Central Office to make sure the best resources were available. This when, between his duties on the Town Council, his role as head of the Boards of Sanitation and Kirk Restoration, his honorary status as Admiral of the Firth, and his predilection for unveiling statues of Robert Burns, it was a wonder the man had found time for a single arched eyebrow. But the leeries’ passing reference to his streetlamps, earlier that day, had put Groves in mind of his intention to make a personal approach to the man to assure him that the investigation was proceeding well—as swiftly as could be expected—and the city’s reputation was in sure hands. He had been daunted, however, by the presumptuous nature of such a move, along with the Lord Provost’s redoubtable reputation—he was said to be an impossibly fussy man, particularly sensitive to any potential obstruction to his knighthood—as well as his long-standing acquaintanceship with the Wax Man.
All these concerns were hurdles he would need to overcome before he could make his move with confidence, but returning to the Squad Room he was availed of news that at last established the taint for which he had so long been searching. Courtesy of the Register House curator, this was the discovery that Evelyn had been base-born to one Isabella Todd in Fountainbridge Parish in 1854 (the curator had appended a note explaining that when the father was unknown it was common for the child to adopt the mother’s surname). The district, the year of birth, and the name of the mother now pricked in Groves a dormant memory, which he confirmed through a chance meeting with the Wax Man in the Central Office corridors: Isabella Todd had been a noted prostitute at the Cloak and Sash near the Cattle Market before expiring in one of the cholera epidemics of the 1850s. “Ticklish Todd? ’Course I remember her, Carus. Hammered her half a dozen times myself back in those days, when I had a taste for trollop. She had a daughter some claimed was mine, you know. Same spark, they said, but I never gave it much stock—they said the same to half the men in Edinburgh. She was looked after by the ladies of the Sash for a while, and they doted on her like their own before figuring she was better handed over to an orphanage. Young enough, the wee lass was, to have formed no memories, and they decided they’d tell her nothing of her past. Why, Carus, you old rogue? Is this some nymph that’s now come forward to help you?”
The Lamplighter Page 18
