by Jon Clinch
“I see.” He gives himself a little shake. “Then in the future we shall banish his name as you have banished his person.”
“Thank you.”
“And with apologies for shortchanging my dear old uncle Ebenezer, we shall make do with James.”
1818
Twenty-Seven
Captain Balfour faces a conundrum. It has been creeping up on him for a good long while, and he cannot delay acting upon it forever.
The difficulty began with the arrest of the crew of the slave ship Mariel. Nothing unusual about that—the West Africa Squadron has seized dozens of ships and freed hundreds of captive men, women, and children in the years that they have operated along Africa’s western coast. What makes the case of the Mariel unusual is that while her crew was arrested and her cargo freed, the ship herself was not impounded. Because although the crew was British, the vessel was American.
Balfour has heard rumors about such arrangements, but he has not seen an actual instance until now. The very fact of it puzzles him. The occasional American ship will still smuggle slaves, to be sure, but he can think of no reason one should look abroad for a crew. Experience and character would of course be factors, and the disreputable men of the Mariel are definitely well suited to their trade. They are the saltiest old dogs a person could imagine, and judging by the content of the affidavits they have filed they possess not an ounce of moral fiber to be shared among them. Their testimony is a tissue of contradictions, evasions, and outright lies.
And yet Balfour sees a pattern within it. Many patterns, in truth, with threads that cross and recross one another like the product of a loom.
The Mariel herself holds the key, he thinks. She lies moored now along the Slave Coast, abandoned and empty and utterly unclaimed. She would seem to have no identifiable ownership whatsoever, but Balfour knows that to be impossible. Someone holds her papers and someone profits from her crimes. Exactly what American or Americans this may prove to be is of course no concern of his. He lacks any jurisdiction that would permit him access to such records as the American authorities may have on the subject. Besides, returning the Mariel to her rightful owner is their problem, not his. Still, his curiosity has been aroused.
It was one peculiarity about the first mate’s testimony that did it. The gentleman in question, a Mr. Flee, had a habit of referring to the ship not as the Mariel but as the Marie. His captain, one Jeremiah Grommet, never made the same mistake—nor did any of the other officers or crewmen whose testimony was recorded. The same clerk transcribed all the records, too, in the same hand and in the same volume and over the same period of time. So Flee’s mistake stands out, if a mistake it was.
Perhaps, Balfour thinks, he is the only one calling the ship by her proper name.
* * *
Records show that once upon a time there was indeed a British cargo ship called the Marie, and that she was by all signs employed in the Triangular Trade—at least until the autumn of 1807, when she vanished somewhere off the Antilles. Her insurers contested payment, as insurers will, but in the end a settlement was agreed upon with her owners, the firm of Nemo & Hawdon, based in London. She had gone down with a hold full of rum, and all hands were tragically lost.
Crew rosters are largely missing, however. And what’s worse, the firm of Nemo & Hawdon closed its doors shortly after the settlement was paid out. The cities and towns and villages of England have their share of Nemos and their share of Hawdons as well, but Balfour’s agents cannot find a single one willing to admit the slightest connection with the failed partnership.
One autumn day, on a lunchtime constitutional along the byways of London, Balfour decides to seek out the address of the old firm. It is lodged indelibly in his mind, for he has gone over the details in the case of the Mariel so often as to have learned them by heart. The address is an unlikely one, as it turns out, set in a residential neighborhood that does not promise much in the way of commerce. And yet there it is, a great house set back on a little knoll behind a rotted iron fence. A wagon belonging to a wine merchant is making its way up the dusty approach, and its driver has left the gates open. Balfour will thus be free to draw near to the house without introduction or interference. What a stroke of luck! Perhaps he is on the verge of meeting someone who recollects those two mysterious figures, Nemo and Hawdon. Perhaps the entire matter is about to throw itself as wide open as these iron gates. But as he draws near he takes note of a plaque—just a little slip of tarnished brass, really—set alongside the latch. J. S. MARLEY, it says.
It cannot be. And yet.
He dares not ask him outright, for if the man does possess some connection with the firm in question, it might be a matter that he would prefer to leave undisclosed. If there is one thing Balfour has learned through his years in the naval service, as a seaman and as an officer and now as a student of the particulars of maritime law, it is never to ask a question whose true answer you do not already know.
So he sets his agents to work pursuing other angles and avenues. He sends orders to the captain of a ship now cruising the Slave Coast that the Mariel is to be boarded in secret and examined—her records, her hold, her superstructure, her appointments of every kind—for any irregularity. He sends men to every bank and customs house and courthouse in all of England, with orders to search every ledger and cabinet and scrap of paper for a record of any transaction having to do with the firm of Nemo & Hawdon.
And then he waits.
Twenty-Eight
Madeline hazards an observation from beneath the bedclothes, this being the sort of moment that might pass for tender despite the police inspector’s hard nature. “I appreciate being your favorite,” she says, “but do you know that Mrs. McCullough gives me nothing for my time?”
“Are not my attentions sufficient in themselves?”
“There are attentions, sir, and there are attentions.”
“My attentions shield you from the law,” he says, rising up in the bed to loom over her.
“And that’s a kindness, no mistake.”
“So long as Mrs. McCullough obliges, I shield every denizen of this filthy knocking-shop. Why, in my absence…”
“I know, sir.”
He eases a bit. “Good. The freedom to pursue your work unmolested by the law is a gift beyond price.”
“Yes.”
“And still you would require more.”
“No, sir. Not require. Never require.”
He settles back under the linens. “Good girl.”
She waits. Around them the house is alive with the sounds of lovemaking in a dozen varieties and perversions and simulacra. Bedframes creak and headboards hammer against thin walls hollowed out by the passage of vermin. Women sigh and men groan, and the occasional shout of ecstasy or surprise or agony, feigned or otherwise, lays bare the night.
“Forgive me, sir,” she says at last. “I wasn’t thinking of you.”
He grunts.
“I was thinking of my two little babes.”
“Babes?” He throws back the bedclothes. “They have no place in this discussion.”
She endures the sudden cold. “I know that, sir. I know it now.”
“Mentioning children within these walls is an atrocity,” he says, rising and lurching toward the chair upon which his clothing is draped. “Have you no matronly instincts whatsoever?”
“I’m sorry, Inspector.”
He shivers, not entirely from the chill in the room. “Your own offspring, soiled so utterly…”
Madeline wraps herself tight and whimpers into the stinking linens while he dresses in silence and takes his leave. Once downstairs, he dons his coat, extracts his fees from Mrs. McCullough—“Count that out again, my good lady, and more slowly this time”—and slips invisibly into the street. The nerve of that girl, he fumes. Believing I might owe her something.
* * *
The archives that Balfour’s agents are busy ransacking all around England are chaotic and vast, so it’s no surpr
ise that the first results arrive from the coast of Africa. The boarding and search of the Mariel required only a single night’s time, and although there was little to be discovered in the way of credible logbooks—or any other record-keeping, for that matter—one isolated detail about the ship herself proved not only remarkable but revelatory.
The officer leading the boarding party noted it in the torchlight as their dinghy rounded her stern. ’Tis but a trick of the shadows, he thought, for it seemed a strange shifting in the way the torchlight played across the quarterdeck rail—more precisely, across the weatherworn and half-rotted wooden panel mounted directly beneath that rail. The panel was carved in relief with the ship’s name, Mariel, the word surrounded by shabbily artful clusters of flowers. But as the men drew near, the shadows cast by their torches seemed to crawl weirdly, uncannily, over the letters.
The officer called for them to cease rowing, and they drifted to an unsteady halt on the rolling tide.
He thrust out his hand. “Do you see it, boys?”
“See what, sir?” Each man cocked his head as the mystery expressed itself to him in a slightly different way, depending upon his angle and his distance and his acuity of vision.
“I do, sir,” said one of them at last. “I see it.”
One by one the rest agreed, although not a man could say exactly what it was that he was looking at. The terminal letter of the ship’s name, and the flowers to its starboard side, were apparently not carved into the panel at all—but painted upon it instead. The shadows they cast were fixed and solid in the moving light. It was unnatural. It was a fraud.
“Let’s go, boys,” said the officer. “We have work to do—aboard the Marie.”
* * *
So the sunken Marie has returned—and not as some rum-drunk tar’s tale of a ghost ship, but as a genuine working slaver caught in the act and subsequently abandoned to the mercies of wind and water. Balfour has a fair idea as to why no one has dared claim her. She is a British vessel after all, sailing these years under a false flag, and subject to immediate confiscation should her true owners come to light.
The very idea. He might expect this kind of chicanery from the Americans, but not from his fellow Englishmen.
He issues orders that his agents here at home are to complete their work by year-end, and by the middle of November the results have begun to filter in. They are complex, incomplete, seemingly unconnected. The defunct firm of Nemo & Hawdon left a scattered trail of transactions having to do with a number of ships, not just the Marie. They variously purchased and owned and conveyed shares in several other vessels that also vanished mysteriously in the period just before the government began enforcing the Slave Trade Act. Unlike the Marie, however, the rest of these ships had no troublesome or traceable insurance claims on their records. They simply disappeared.
Balfour thinks he knows where they went.
In addition to buying and selling ships, Nemo & Hawdon also dealt in the raw cargoes of the Triangular Trade—not just men but rum, sugarcane, molasses, and manufactured goods. They transacted business with a wide range of firms, some of which are still in good standing here in London and some of which are as long vanished as Nemo & Hawdon themselves. Among these last he notes a Barnacle & Sons, maritime provisioners; a Honeythunder & Grimwig, engaged in general mercantile; and a Sampson Brass, Ltd., shipfitters. All of these entities are gone, gone, gone, leaving behind only a few records processed by the law firm of Dodson & Fogg—also now defunct—to tie them all together.
Well, there is something else.
All of them, like Nemo & Hawdon, share Jacob Marley’s address.
Moreover, Marley’s own name makes appearances within the collected documents—upon the records of certain transactions (deeds, transfers of property, contracts) handled by that selfsame Dodson & Fogg. The curious aspect is that it’s always Marley himself, always just plain Jacob Marley, and never the firm in which he is allied with Scrooge. The man would appear to be either shielding his partner or defrauding him. Balfour’s money is on the latter.
* * *
He hopes to brave the beast in his lair, but when he goes he finds only the beast’s business partner. He cannot interrogate Scrooge, for if his instincts are correct, the poor fellow knows nothing. Ebenezer hardly looks up from his work when his brother-in-law blows in on the wintry gale. The chamber is frigid despite the single coal dying in the stove, dark despite the single candle burning on the desk.
“Ho, ho, old man!” Harry shouts from the doorway. He strips off his gloves and steps in and thrusts out a hand for Scrooge to ignore. “I keep meaning to bring Freddy around,” he says, “so as to let him spend a few moments with you.”
“No time,” says Scrooge. And then, “Freddy who? Is he by any chance a creditor?”
“He’s your nephew.”
Scrooge’s face is the picture of irritated befuddlement.
“Fan’s son. And mine, of course.”
“Ah,” says Scrooge. “Just so.”
“Then again, you’ll come by the house next week, won’t you? On Christmas Eve? You’ll see him then.”
“If I must.”
“You must. It will do you good to escape this place for a little while.”
“Hmmph. It will just mean more work on the morrow.”
“Not on Christmas, surely.”
“Why not? Does interest not accrue on Christmas? Do naval ships not rust on Christmas? Why should I be the exception? Why should you?”
“Come for your mother,” says Balfour. “Come for little Freddy. He will not be four years old again.”
“And I will not be forty-three years old again—more reason to conserve my time.”
“We shall look forward to your presence.” He shuffles his feet and fusses with his gloves, casting about in his mind for an angle regarding his interest in Marley. In the end, he comes out with it directly. “Before I go,” he says, “do you happen to know where your partner is?”
“Elsewhere.” Scrooge has picked up his pen once more, and his mind is engaged in other matters.
“So I noted. When do you suppose he might return?”
“I have no idea.”
“I see.”
“The man can read. Leave him a message if you must.”
“I shall,” says Balfour. “By God, I shall. Consider it done.”
Later, when he reads the note for himself, Scrooge learns but little. Please call at your convenience, it says in a surprisingly diminutive hand, over Balfour’s signature, naval rank, and office address. There might be something to be made of those details—the mention of his rank, the use of his office address instead of his home—but Scrooge refolds the note and lets it vanish into the storehouse of things he knows but does not need.
* * *
What could Captain Harrison T. Balfour—that’s how Marley’s nemesis signed his cryptic note, not with a familiar Harry, not with a simple Balfour, not even with a terse but nonetheless businesslike Capt. Balfour—what could the man possibly want with him? Between his role in the West Africa Squadron and his success in the battle for Fan’s heart, Marley has at least two perfectly valid reasons to bear him unending malice. Thanks to Balfour’s efforts—thanks to his mere preening presence, damn his eyes—he can neither make an honest living nor pursue the object of his affections.
He puts off the errand as long as he dares, and in the end makes the trip to Greenwich on the afternoon before Christmas. The old pensioners who reside in Greenwich Hospital are preparing for a feast, so the place is alive with music and laughter. Marley passes from hallway to hallway unacknowledged, in no hurry to ask directions from these toothless old veterans with their sunken cheeks and their rheumy eyes and their fixed expressions of dull-witted glee.
Balfour’s office proves to be located in a separate building altogether, and even with that discovery under his belt Marley has trouble locating it. The building is poorly staffed on this day of all days. He succeeds at last, however, and stri
des past the empty desk of some absent clerk in an outer chamber to knock at the door of Balfour’s sanctum.
“Enter!” calls Captain Harrison T. Balfour.
Marley steps in. The room is vast and its furnishings have an understated elegance—everything is polished mahogany, fluted plaster, artfully tarnished gold leaf. It’s all calculated to intimidate, of course, but Marley is immune to such influences. Over the course of his career he has communed with the wealthiest magnates and the lowest slip-gibbets, and in the end he has turned each of them to his use. Let Balfour have his uniform and his accoutrements. None of it will either serve or save him.
“Captain,” he says.
“Jacob.”
“Harry.”
Balfour smiles grandly and rises to his feet. His massive desk is set upon a pedestal, an arrangement that gives him the advantage of elevation. “Sit,” he says, indicating a pair of small hard chairs placed before the desk. “Please.”
The geometry suggests that this is to be an interrogation, so Marley succumbs or seems to. He chooses one of the chairs and settles into it, arranging upon his face a look of meek expectation.
Balfour, however, does not return to his spot behind the desk. To Marley’s surprise he sacrifices his tactical advantage, steps down, and comes around to take the other chair. He angles it to face more toward his visitor, and Marley—his hand being forced—does the same.
“That’s better,” says Balfour.
“Much,” says Marley.
“This office, you know. This rank of mine. It comes with trappings.”
“I understand.”
“Trappings and expectations.”
“No need to explain.” So this, he decides, is Balfour’s game. Establish your power, and then augment it by pretending to throw it away. The man bears watching.
“Thank you so much for coming by,” says Balfour. “I realize now that my request may have been a bit… mysterious.”
