by Jon Clinch
And Marley has never been in a hurry to divest himself of a profitable enterprise.
* * *
Suspecting that Balfour will detect his hand in the burning of the Mariel, Marley goes to him directly. Not at his office this time, but at home, in that grand house along the riverfront into which he saw him disappear on Christmas Eve. He goes on a Friday evening, around suppertime, trusting that he will find him there with Fan and the child and that their conversation will thus be conveniently limited to generalities and coded signifiers. It’s best not to go too deeply into the details. It’s best not to make or accept or even suggest any promises, however vague they may be in outline.
When he arrives, however, he finds his quarry alone.
“Come in, come in!” shouts the captain, as if Marley’s surprise visit is exactly the delight he has been dreaming of. He has a fire roaring in the hearth and a glass in his big right fist and an open bottle on the kitchen table. He takes Marley’s cloak and finds him a glass. “You’ll permit an old sailor his ration of gin, won’t you?”
“How could I do otherwise?”
“And you’ll accept one of your own?”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” says the dutiful Marley.
As he pours, the twinkle in Balfour’s eye suggests that the ration presently dwindling in his glass is his second or third of the evening.
“At the close of the week,” he says, “I like to indulge in a little taste of shore leave.”
“Your wife doesn’t mind?”
“My wife doesn’t know.” He clinks his glass against Marley’s and they both sit. The room is warm and Marley’s forehead is damp and Balfour’s cheeks are pink. “She dines on Friday evenings with her mother, now that the old woman finally trusts her to raise the child without her assistance. Between you and me, I thought she’d never go home.”
Marley raises his glass. “Then here’s to your mother-in-law. May she ever know her place.”
“Amen.”
“How old is he, now, the child?”
Balfour narrows his eyes. He is an experienced drinker, a seasoned Royal Navy man through and through, and if Marley thinks he will work some cozy angle upon him with the help of the gin he is mistaken. “You didn’t come here to talk about Freddy.”
“No. No, I didn’t. Not at all.”
“You came to talk about that burned ship.”
Marley smiles. “I see that you’ve consulted the newspapers.”
“Quite the opposite. The newspapers have consulted me.”
“I see. And you have told them…?”
“Considerably less than I know.”
“They say the Americans are conducting an investigation.”
“So they are. The Americans have jurisdiction, of course. The ship is theirs.”
“Was theirs.”
“Was.”
“So—the Americans have jurisdiction, and the British have… what?”
“Information.”
“Information which you are keeping from the Americans?”
“Information which I am keeping from everyone.”
“From me? From a man who is like family to you?”
“Do not press me, Jacob.” He coughs into his fist. “More gin?”
Marley shakes his head. “The truth is, I did not come here to interrogate you—”
“A wise decision.”
Marley grins like the friendliest dog in the district. “I came to make a confession.”
“That you burnt the Mariel. Or, more correctly, that you hired the work done.”
“Precisely.”
“By certain gentlemen who are now awaiting trial in Newgate.”
“They are?”
“They are.” Balfour stands and goes to pour himself another drop. “A trial will bring everything out,” he says when he returns. “Including your connections.”
“Not so long as I have no connections.”
“Might it only be so, Jacob. Might it only be so. As I said, I possess information that I am doing my best to keep from everyone.”
“I remember well. That case you keep with you at all times. Those documents.”
“You have not aided your cause by committing a grievous international crime, or by endangering the lives of my men and yours…”
“I regret it.”
“… or by sending your hirelings off to prison for life.”
“Should you choose to press the charges.”
“Jacob, you are testing me.”
“That was never my intention. You advised me to clean my house—”
“To make things right, not to make them look right. You’ve been doing far too much of that all along, I’m afraid.”
Marley manages a look that’s regretful, apologetic, and more or less endearing at the same time. “Forgive me,” he says.
Balfour slams down his glass. “God may forgive you. As for me, I will merely provide a bit more time to clear up your affairs. The men of the Mariel are to be tried in four weeks. Upon that occasion I shall either find you clear of your interests in these matters or see you in court.”
“And how shall I prove my newfound innocence?”
“Documentation,” says Balfour. “Preferably of the genuine variety.”
* * *
Only four weeks, thinks Marley as he regains the street. It is impossible.
Only four weeks to bring down the efforts of a lifetime, untangling a vast webwork of commercial ties both real and convenient.
Only four weeks to pauperize himself utterly by trading in the slaving business for lowly rum, sugar, and cotton.
Only four weeks to sacrifice his rank, his security, and his very future at the feet of that great grinning Captain Harry Balfour, who has already stolen his one true love.
The man is heartless.
If only, he thinks, if only it were possible to tie the whole business back to Scrooge. Such an arrangement would serve Harry and the inconstant Fan and even old Ebenezer himself properly. Let Balfour pursue charges against Stitch and any such disreputables as he may have brought on to assist in burning the ship, only to discover in the end that the trail leads not to Marley but to his own brother-in-law! There would be poetry in it. But no. Tying the slaving business to Scrooge would require truly parting with it himself. He would lose everything in the process, and he has no intention of taking matters that far.
He shakes his head and plunges along the night-lit streets of London, his mind churning. He tries reconstructing his conversation with Balfour, and each time he goes over it the implications grow worse. It is possible, after all, that Balfour has had until now little or nothing to tie him to the Mariel—much less to her destruction. If he was bluffing all along, working strictly on suspicion and conjecture, has Marley just confirmed everything?
Dear God, that could be the case. He has been most poorly used, tricked and cheated and manipulated into confessing crimes perhaps even greater than Balfour suspected at the outset.
The man is a devil. His promise is not to be relied upon, and his word is not to be trusted.
Marley must devise some means to subvert him. He has four weeks.
* * *
“Madeline ain’t in tonight,” says Mrs. McCullough.
“That’s fine,” says Inspector Bucket.
“She’s been poorly.”
“I’m not here for Madeline.”
Mrs. McCullough looks a little crestfallen. Madeline does seem to be his favorite, after all.
“I’m here for Mr. McCullough.”
She lifts an eyebrow.
“Where will I find him?”
She smiles her feline smile. “That would depend on the contents of his purse. If he has a penny to spend, he’ll be at the Fox and Hare. If he hasn’t, he’ll be at the graveyard. He’s been pursuing the resurrection business of late.”
“An ugly trade, stealing bodies.”
“He’s only making the best of that for which the deceased lacks further use, I’d sa
y.”
“Say what you like.”
“It’s better work than some he’s taken.” She moves close and whispers into the inspector’s ear, her breath stinking of tobacco and poor dentition. “Seeing as them involved is already dead, I mean.”
The inspector cares little for the difference. “Which way to the graveyard?” he asks, and she advises him, and he goes.
McCullough proves to be there indeed, and the instant he detects movement at the gate he drops his shovel and draws a flintlock navy pistol. It gleams in the moonlight, an untrustworthy thing of French origin no doubt purloined from the corpse of some veteran of that country’s revolution. It’s possible that he has just this minute acquired it from the grave at his feet, and that it is therefore rusted tight or at least empty-chambered, but Marley doesn’t risk either possibility.
“McCullough!” he calls, making himself visible in that same pale light. “Fire on me, and your wife loses her protector. As do you.”
The resurrection man gives a nervous laugh and tucks the pistol into his belt. “Forgive me, Inspector. I thought you was the law.”
“Don’t test me.”
“Ach,” says McCullough. “No harm done.”
Marley opens the gate and enters and draws near. McCullough has raised an impressive pile of earth, his work filling the air with the scents of dampness and decay. Down in the hole a roughly made coffin is peeking through, and the grave robber works at one end with the tip of his shovel to begin prizing it open.
“Leave that one where he lies for now,” says the inspector.
“She,” corrects McCullough, laying down his shovel. “Poor thing died in childbirth.”
Marley scoffs. “Man or woman,” he says, “it makes little difference to me.”
“I suppose not. Seeing’s she’s dead and all. “For he knows the habits of Inspector Bucket.
“Come,” says Marley. “Sit.” He leads the way to a pair of upright gravestones, side by side, upon which they settle like a couple of gargoyles.
McCullough takes out his pipe and fires it up. The stink of it is appalling.
Marley sneezes, recovers, sneezes again. “Mrs. McCullough seems quite pleased with your new line of work.”
“Oh, she is. Most definitely. It’s less risky, for one thing. And always cash on the nail.”
“I see.”
“There’s nothing like a cash business,” he goes on. “I tell me customers, If you can’t pay for the body, I’ll find someone who will.”
“An excellent principle.”
Smug and self-satisfied, McCullough sucks upon his pipestem.
“All the same, do you ever miss the old trade?”
McCullough gazes dreamily through the smoke. “It was a trifle more exciting, I’ll grant you. It really got the old heart pumping.”
“No doubt.”
“Made a man feel alive.”
“It would, that kind of thing.” Marley permits the idea to suspend itself there in the graveyard miasma for a moment. “Perhaps,” he says after a while, “you would consider one last commission.”
“I might,” says McCullough. “If the terms was right.”
“Cash on the nail, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You’re no fool.”
“I ain’t.”
Marley takes from his pocket a handful of gleaming Spanish dollars.
McCullough’s eyes go wide.
“Do you suppose you might be at liberty next Friday evening?”
* * *
He waits until the woman and child have made their exit. The inspector was imperative on that subject. There must be no witnesses, least of all these.
Once they are gone, whisked away by a hired carriage bound in the direction of central London, he approaches the house as bold as you please. He is no picklock, this McCullough, but his employer possesses a broad knowledge of criminal activity and has instructed him in the basics of the trade. The work goes easily enough. Perhaps he has discovered the makings of a new career, should the resurrection business take a turn for the worse.
Within the house he waits again. The inspector, who seems to know everything, is acquainted with the arrangement of the downstairs rooms and has instructed him as to where he should station himself—just beyond the kitchen, in the shadows of the dining room—so as to surprise the gentleman when he arrives. The gentleman in question is known to take a drink or two of gin on a Friday evening, and McCullough is left to his own judgment as to whether or not the man shall be permitted to do so now. Any gin not drunk by the gentleman, of course, shall belong to McCullough when his work is done.
An hour ticks by, according to his repeater. He is to wait no more than two hours altogether, abandoning the work at that point and exiting through a rear passageway rather than risk meeting the woman and child upon their return. Soon enough, however, the gentleman arrives. He admits himself through the front door—McCullough has forgotten to turn the lock but the gentleman in his urgency seems not to notice—and hangs up his hat and coat on a peg in the front hallway before stepping into the kitchen.
McCullough generously permits the gentleman a single tot of gin, which he takes at the kitchen table. Twice he turns to peer into the dining room as if he has detected some unknown presence there, as if he has felt the weight of McCullough’s very gaze upon his neck, and twice he returns to his drink.
Rather than risk discovery upon a third such occasion, McCullough rises from the shadows with his revolver drawn and places a ball in the nape of the gentleman’s neck from close range. The inspector has called for the use of a knife so as to lessen suspicion—no powder blast, no evidentiary ball—but he seems to know little about the difficulty of killing a man up close. Willing nonetheless to meet the inspector halfway, and fully satisfied that the gentleman is indeed dead, McCullough excavates the flattened ball with a spoon and places it in his pocket. When his work is accomplished and he has a moment’s leisure, he will flat-arm it across the Thames and count how many times it skips. The spoon he will keep, for it seems the purest silver.
Right now, though, with the gentleman’s leather case securely tucked beneath his arm, he draws a carton of lucifers from his waistcoat and fulfills the last of his obligations by setting the place on fire.
Thirty
Marley hates a funeral, but attending Balfour’s is the least he can do.
As he makes his solitary way along the wet streets to Greenwich, he ponders the contents of the coffin. There can’t have been much left of Balfour but scorched bone, identifiable amid the wreckage only by its sad presence. The place went up like a tinderbox and burned straight to the ground with little in the way of interference by either God or man.
He enters the chapel like a condemned prisoner, his shoulders hunched and his downcast face set in a credible mask of misery. Clad in his customary black he blends with the other mourners on this rainy afternoon—a sluggish and damp and ashy lot pooling in this glorious place like something that has failed to find the drain.
The music is somber, the atmosphere is chilly, and in the vast chamber Balfour’s coffin seems inconsequential, dwarfed beneath the grand tableau of the shipwrecked St. Paul. The contents of the box, thinks Marley, must be very nearly weightless, a dusty, disarticulated, and horrifyingly gape-jawed monstrosity that would shock these grieving naïfs and send them shuddering into the street. Pity the pallbearers. They will need to exercise caution in making their way down the aisle and out the chapel door, lest the bones get to rattling and unnerve the mourners. Ashes to ashes.
Marley endures the obsequies and then lingers in his pew, head bowed as if in prayer, while the others begin to file out. He desires to place himself just so within the slow-moving river of them—not too early and not too late but somewhere in the middle. He must make himself unremarkable, just one more sympathetic soul come to mourn the tragic loss of a good man. He shall not have many such opportunities to persuade Fan that he has changed.
&nb
sp; Ebenezer is first in the receiving line, a breakwater against the assault of too much emotion, followed by a gray-visaged brother of Balfour’s and then by Mother Scrooge and finally by the widow herself. The widow Fan and her five-year-old Freddy, erect at her side as a steadfast tin soldier. The boy seems drained of all emotion, borne up to his full height by sheer will, while his mother seems on the brittle edge of every kind of collapse.
Marley practices on Scrooge, exercising upon him the look he will give the rest of the family, a look that says he has hollowed himself out so as to accept into his own voided soul the overflow of their desolation. I am wholly at your service, his steadfast gaze and his shuddering exhalations say. Let dear old Jacob help.
He actually flings himself upon Balfour’s unsuspecting brother, clapping the fellow powerfully and repeatedly upon the back like an ancient companion reduced to wordless grief. The brother stiffens at first but weakens as Marley persists. Ultimately he gives in, his cheeks bathed in tears drawn forth by the assault of counterfeit sympathy.
Mother Scrooge is an easy mark, for she has considerable history, right or wrong, as a partisan of Marley’s. He permits himself to call her by that very name—“Mother Scrooge,” he whispers in her powdered ear—in a manner that asserts his right to do so not via Fan or Ebenezer but by dint of his own long and almost filial connection to the woman herself. As a result she nearly refuses to let him go, and yields him up only when the individual preceding him in line, a high-ranking naval officer apparently accustomed to delivering bad news (his consolation has about it a professional quality), has finished with Fan.
As the officer moves away, Marley takes a scant half step toward her so as to maintain a decent and respectful distance. He stands bereft and alone, shaking his head in stunned amazement, wringing his hands as if to cleanse them of every wrong he has ever committed. “Dear, dear child,” he says.
“Jacob.” Her face crumples, and she extends to him her innocent arms—for that is what convention requires, that is what ordinary people do under circumstances as terrible as these. Thus, and thus compromised, she unwittingly invites him in.
