“I am sorry. You’re right. It’s dreadful of me to express it that way.”
“It was not you who wrote the play, however, Louis. Remember that. You neither wrote it nor arranged for the production.”
“Small solace, really. Given who conceived of the creature.”
Two constables approached them, chatting amiably. Stevenson and Symonds nodded as they passed, keeping silent until the footsteps receded behind them.
“So, Symonds. You can well imagine how curious I am about what you had to say. In your last.”
“To be perfectly honest, I half wish I had said nothing.”
Stevenson stopped and turned towards his friend. “We can let this drop. This very moment. If that’s what you wish.”
Symonds looked at him uncertainly and, after a loud sigh, shook his head. “I wish it were that easy.”
“How can I help you?”
“First of all, simply by hearing me out.”
Stevenson nodded, and they resumed their walk. For two or three minutes the writer waited in vain for his companion to say anything at all. Carriages passed in either direction, one of them bearing a quartet of young men who were evidently swimming in alcohol, even at this early hour. Symonds looked over at Stevenson and grinned.
“Wine, women, and song,” joked Stevenson.
“Indeed. Timeless diversions.”
Another minute passed before Symonds spoke again, very quietly. “The information I have could be the end of me, Stevenson.”
“John!”
“One might almost laugh at how absurdly dramatic that sounds. I assure you, though, that I am scarcely exaggerating. Any feature of what I am about to say might end my career or my life.”
“You have long been a true friend,” Stevenson managed to declare as they walked on. “You may trust me to keep anything you say in the strictest confidence.”
“I count on that. Absolutely.”
“I swear.”
“Well, let me begin with this.” Symonds took a deep breath as he reached up with both hands to adjust the brim of his hat. “You know that I have written a book entitled A Problem in Greek Ethics?”
“I do.”
“And you know its subject?”
“I believe I do.”
“That is my Hyde, Stevenson.” Symonds looked sidelong at his friend.
Stevenson felt a bothersome flush spread up across his cheeks, but he nodded reassuringly.
“It has not been…easy.”
“No. It wouldn’t be, would it? And Janet?”
“I suspect Janet knows. I can’t be sure. It is something of which she would never speak.”
“Of course.” If it were Fanny, thought Stevenson, there was no doubt he would hear about very little else.
“I have spent so much of my time away from her and the girls. Research in Italy. Trips back to London.”
Stevenson nodded. As they passed Queen’s Walk, the massive façade of Buckingham Palace loomed up in front of them. Its windows, those that were lit, were distinctly less bright than those of the Athenaeum.
“It is here in London, as you might expect, that I stumbled into my current situation.” He looked to his companion as though for additional reassurance and, with Stevenson’s nod, continued. “There is a certain establishment on Cleveland Street. It’s a place where gentlemen such as myself can go and…avail themselves of the various services offered.”
“I see,” said Stevenson. Where there were appetites, there were purveyors. It was the simplest rule of human economy, and it had no doubt been so from the very beginning.
“There are lads there, you see. As there were lads for the original Athenians. Many of them also work as telegraph boys, as it happens.”
Symonds broke off walking and looked doubtfully at Stevenson.
“What should I say?” he continued, clasping his hands behind his back and peering down at the gravel just in front of his feet. “It is nothing I am proud of, Louis. Or remotely at peace with, as you can imagine. But it involves the very essence of me. The very breath. I might, you know, awake the morning after with the deepest sense of shame and self-loathing. Almost always I do. But in the throes of the night, in the midst of drink and gaiety…it is as though I have been clawing up from the depths of the darkest waters, and I finally break the surface and my jaws unclench and I can pull in a huge and reviving breath. It is—” He paused, shaking his head.
“We all swim in those depths, John. In one way or another. Rest assured.”
“Thank you, Louis. I know that you know that.” Symonds smiled wistfully and walked on. “There are precious few I have shared this with.”
“I understand.”
“I feel perhaps I can speak with you as I can speak with few others. Perhaps none. I expect it has to do with the things we faced together. At Davos. And face still, no?”
Stevenson nodded. “You do me an honor.”
They reached Buckingham Gate and turned back east on Birdcage Walk, passing slowly through the circles of light cast by the gas lamps.
“There is another frequenter of this house on Cleveland Street,” Symonds said quietly. “A man of some stature. It happens that he also belongs to the Athenaeum. Which is at the very heart of the matter for me.”
“That I can begin to compass,” observed Stevenson.
“You can also imagine that, given the nature of the services it offers, this establishment is rather attentive to matters of privacy. The clients rarely see one another, there being a number of entrances to the place. And when they do, the natural supposition is that it is in their mutual self-interest to disclose to no one in the population at large the nature of their custom.”
“Of course.”
“One evening,” Symonds continued, “it chanced that I and this fellow came face-to-face at the door nearest Foley Street—he coming out, I going in. Well, he drew himself up to the full extent of his considerable height and, with a murderous scowl, he looked me dead in the eye and said that if he ever learned that I had breathed a word of this to anyone he would have my balls right off of me, and eat them with my liver.”
“My God, Symonds! Are you serious?”
“I hardly find it something to joke about. Those were his very words. It was like something out of a perfect nightmare, considering the whole of it. It nauseates me even now just to think of it.”
It took Stevenson a moment to be able to go on. “What else can you tell me about the man?”
“Well, he has considerable money and power, having come into a substantial inheritance. Prior to that, he was a surgeon in the army. He served in the Zulu War.”
“A surgeon, you say?”
“I know,” answered Symonds. “Gravely injured in the Battle of Kambula, it seems. I don’t know how he felt about Africa before he served there. I can tell you, though, that I have never heard a man speak so hatefully of the dark people of that continent. I would blush to repeat the terms that he uses, let alone compass the steps he proposes for pursuing Her Majesty’s interests in that portion of the Empire. There has been more than one evening in the Smoking Room when his fulminations have reached a level where one or another of the members has been obliged to ask him to hold his tongue. Or leave the premises.”
“Never you, I trust.”
“Hardly.”
They heard a scuffing of boots ahead and looked up to see a pair of policemen approaching along the walk. It turned out to be the same two they had encountered earlier, circumnavigating the park in the opposite direction.
“We are feeling especially well protected this evening,” quipped Stevenson, as the four men recognized each other. “Many thanks.”
“All in a night’s work,” responded the taller of the two, smiling as they passed.
“Well,” sighed Stevenson as they moved on, “this fellow of yours does indeed sound like an utter beast. Is there anything particular, though, that leads you to think it is his surgical skills that have been on display in the
East End?”
“I believe there is.”
“And that would be?”
“We have a mutual friend.”
“A friend?”
“We share a taste for one of the boys. I would say we share an affection, but affection is something of which I do not believe this man to be capable. A beautiful lad, he is. Handsome. Intelligent. A dear boy. He…he had been with my man just nights earlier. He is far too intelligent to speak of such things under normal circumstances, but what he heard alarmed him so that he felt he must speak of it with someone.”
“And that someone was you.”
“It was. He said that this fellow came in raging drunk and was very harsh with him. He said that he was sick and tired of the place and of all of the precautions he had to take to assure that he wasn’t forever ruined for the kind of thing other gentlemen could do with impunity. When my boy asked him what he meant, he said that a gent with a taste for ladies could find one any time of day right out in the open streets and no one would blink an eye. He said the whores and whoremongers could all go hang, and that the members of Parliament who had passed the Labouchère Amendment could hang along with them. And then came the worst of it.”
“And what was that?” “My lad said he didn’t know what the Labouchère Amendment was, and then my gentleman grabbed him by the throat and said something like, ‘It’s what requires me to fuck you, you ignorant little cunt. And not someone with brains.’”
“My God!” gasped Stevenson. If a true, flesh-and-blood Hyde ever prowled the streets of London!
“And then,” said Symonds with a catch in his voice, “and then he slapped my boy so hard the blood gushed from his nose and he leaned his face in close to him and said, ‘I’ve a knife to cut it out, you know? This city’s sick heart. As you can well see if you have eyes and ears.’”
They walked on in silence, Stevenson’s heart thudding in his chest. It occurred to him with a guilty sort of relief, however, that if this man were indeed the killer of whores—and if it were indeed Mansfield’s, or even possibly his own, Hyde who had somehow encouraged his butchery—he nonetheless had a personal motive that lay well beyond the scope of Jekyll and Hyde in either of its incarnations.
“I hate to say it,” said Symonds, after a good minute or two, “but it is nearly eight. What are you thinking, Stevenson? Can you possibly bring yourself to put food in your mouth?”
“I don’t know. Shall we at least walk to St. Martin’s Lane and see?”
Newsboys were still touting the day’s papers and their details of the latest Whitechapel investigations as the two friends negotiated Trafalgar Square. They found Bertolini’s to be very crowded, but decided at the very least to go in for wine. Stevenson thought at first that Symonds’s grim tale had truly done for his appetite, perhaps for some time; but once they were two-thirds of the way through a fine bottle of Barolo, he found himself more than willing to look at the menu.
As he and Symonds were necessarily seated cheek-by-jowl with other diners in the packed establishment, their conversation turned solely on current personal projects and the latest prime-ministerial gaffes. By the time Symonds had settled the reckoning, it was well past nine o’clock.
“What do you propose to do, then?” asked Stevenson, as they crossed over St. Martin’s Lane and continued along towards the National Gallery.
“I was rather wanting to ask you what you thought I might do. I feel rather shackled.”
“As well you might. The simplest course would be to go to the police. But I’m certain you have thought of that.”
“Of course I have. And it has naturally occurred to me that I have no evidence whatsoever of any tangible sort. Nothing beyond the hearsay testimony of a lad whose standing in a court of law would obviously not be strong. Can you imagine his explaining where and how he came by his information?”
“No,” allowed the writer.
“In addition, I have no way of knowing where an inquiry in which my young friend participates might ultimately lead. I said earlier that the information I thought to pass on to you might be the end of me.”
“You did.”
“Imagine if my connection to this place were to emerge in the press. Imagine the impact on Janet. And on my daughters.”
“It doesn’t bear thinking on,” sighed Stevenson.
“What is more, I really do believe that my vicious gentleman knows no restraints. Were he to discover that it was I who put the law on his trail, I would fear for my life.”
“And well you should, from what you tell me.”
“I am not a coward, Louis,” declared Symonds, stopping short to face his friend. “Nor am I a man of no principle. If the only way of stopping him were to take the matter to the law—and if I could be reasonably certain of an immediate apprehension, trial, and conviction…” He paused. “Then, I might well have the courage.”
“I believe that, Symonds.”
“That said, there is my family. And I have no doubt that other parties—men of status and importance, good men at base—might suffer exposure and ruin. I feel I must not act either rashly or prematurely.”
“Of course not. You are perfectly right in that.”
They passed between the great museum and Nelson’s Column and turned up Cockspur Street. A busy current of pedestrians and carriages still wove its way down into the huge square.
“So,” continued Stevenson, “what to do? It seems beyond denying that this beast has every intention of keeping at it, what with his recurrent butchery thus far.”
“It’s silly of me, I suppose. I feel a bit like an aspirant for a role in a story by Poe. But it has occurred to me that, if I were to have some tangible evidence of my man’s depredations—if he is indeed the guilty party—then I would most likely be closer to knowing the appropriate action to take.”
“Or we would be closer.”
“Pardon me?”
“We would be, Symonds. I don’t mean to leave you alone in this dilemma. Without a staunch companion.”
Symonds peered at him with his mouth agape. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” replied Stevenson, chuckling as his words resonated in his ears. From out of the blue, his exchange with Valentine came back to him. I do. He was about to wed himself to an extremely dubious proposition, but it felt very much like an act of virtue—perhaps as importantly, like an act of contrition. “I owe it to you. And to the memory of another dear friend. Let us consider it a bold new adventure by Symonds and Stevenson, though. Not Poe.” He grinned waggishly, even as his companion sustained his blank stare. “I have been festering in Bournemouth like a weevil in a biscuit, John. Here is the finest summons imaginable to a life of active, as opposed to contemplative, daring. We shall rid London of this plague or die trying.”
“You’re not serious.”
“In my heart and soul, indisputably I am. Let us shake on it.”
Symonds looked down uncertainly, then took the hand extended to him.
“Let us both ponder ways we might manage this,” said Stevenson as they approached the entrance to the club. “Are you free tomorrow?”
“I am. In the afternoon.”
“Let us meet here at two o’clock, then, and consider any options we may have.”
“Upon my honour, Stevenson. You are a man of marvels!”
“Too few of them anything other than confabulations, old friend. But here is real meat to bite into. Besides, I am extremely keen on asking this fellow if he is indeed familiar with my tale of London atrocities. At least with any derivative theatricals.”
Symonds looked at him with concern. “I had hoped to reassure you on that score, Louis. I regret I ever raised the issue.”
“You were merely being a brave and loyal friend, John. I count myself fortunate to have a chance to reciprocate.”
He bid Symonds goodnight and began to walk back towards Piccadilly. A shout from behind made him turn, and he saw the night porter racing after a departing cab, wav
ing a top hat in his hand. Someone, most likely someone drunk on hundred-year-old cognac or obscenely costly port, must have left it behind.
For a moment, as the hansom clattered past, Stevenson stood there and gazed at the elegant façade of the club. Given its luminary membership, it was only appropriate that it should blaze in the London night like a caged sun. Yet there was something profligate about it, too. How many women in Whitechapel might still be alive this night if every street corner in the East End boasted similar means of keeping darkness at bay? And if Symonds was right, one of the denizens of this very palace of light might well be the butcher known as “Leather Apron.”
Stevenson looked up at the statue standing guard above the entrance. The crown of the goddess’s helmet, the tip of her spear, her broad, cloaked shoulders—all of them, backlit by the first-floor windows, glowed against the black London sky. The open hand, though, lay in shadow now, and her features were no longer to be made out.
17
If he be Mr. Hyde …I shall be Mr. Seek.
—GABRIEL JOHN UTTERSON, DR. JEKYLL’S ATTORNEY
The first thing the following morning, Stevenson sent a telegram to Fanny, confirming that something very important was afoot that could keep him in London indefinitely. He considered leaving the message at that—perhaps adding that he was sure she trusted him to honor their welfare as a family in everything he did. When he put himself candidly in her position, however, he realized that, were he to be no more forthcoming than that, she might well be on the next train to the capital with a coil of rope to lynch him.
Instead, he declared that his own abiding welfare and the welfare of many more individuals than he depended on his staying in the city, and he ended with a somewhat coded message: “Impact of play may be amended.” She would certainly understand this as referring to something he justifiably felt he must do—but also something more along the lines of conversations with publishers or theater managers than the scheme he was presently contemplating. He reminded her he could be reached at the Savile, refraining from the addendum that he trusted her not to use that information for anything other than posting a letter.
Seeking Hyde Page 27
