There was a barber within two blocks’ walk, and a public bathhouse just a couple of streetcar stops away. Sebastian began to offer Sayers money, but Sayers stopped him. He had a stash of bills in a secret pocket of the trunk. His emergency fund.
So Sebastian sent him on his way, waited ten minutes or so, and then went upstairs and performed a thorough search of the fighter’s trunk and suitcase, taking care to note how everything lay and to replace all as he found it.
In the trunk were two stolen Bibles that Sayers had been using to keep newspaper cuttings from all over the country, slipping them between the pages to keep them flat. All of the San Francisco cuttings could be found in Ecclesiastes. The first book of Kings told the story of a cold trail that he’d followed all the way up to Washington State. In the book of Job was a list of all the soup kitchens in Denver.
He would not throw in his lot with Sayers, but he would offer such support as would send him on his way with a goal to pursue. The prizefighter’s reappearance in his life had awakened all of the detective’s turbulent feelings over scenes he’d once witnessed. A rational man by inclination, he’d seen his world upturned by the seemingly supernatural. He wanted his world to make sense again. And if there was a slim chance that the search for truth might turn up some final proof of the occult…well, no man was an atheist except for want of a more convincing alternative.
But an old painting in a museum basement proved nothing. One thing he had learned from the church was that the credulous would co-opt anything to support a belief.
Edmund Whitlock had been mortal. Louise Porter was no more than human. All else, Sebastian concluded, was human psychology, preserved for the ages in tales of wonder.
In the Acts of the Apostles, Sebastian found two yellowing slips of folded newsprint, each with a marginal note that identified their source as the Norwich Mercury of 1891.
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF A CHILD
Taken from the Rows
Man and Woman Sought
The first clipping told of a child’s disappearance in the British coastal town of Great Yarmouth, and of the search that had followed. Eight-year-old Eliza Sewell, a resident of one of the narrow medieval alleys known as the Rows, had been sent on an errand by her mother. Her four-year-old sister was in her charge. The bottle shop was no more than ten minutes’ walk away, but she’d neither arrived there nor returned home. The abandoned younger child had walked into a neighbor’s house, where she said nothing of what had happened. She played with the neighbor’s children and no one raised the alarm until midevening, when the oldest boy took her back to her own home.
Each Row was a close-knit community. Neighbors could, quite literally, lean out of their windows and touch each others’ houses. There was a large turnout of volunteers to join in the search. All that the four-year-old could say was that Eliza had been spoken to by a woman, and had gone off with her. In another part of town, a signwriter had seen a brown-haired child walking toward the docks with a similar-sounding woman and a man. He described the woman as looking like a witch, with layer upon layer of ragged clothes. The man was thin-faced with a shaven head.
The search concentrated around the docks, and the worst was feared. Several shaven-headed sailors were dragged out of public houses, and a Swede who spoke no English was thrown onto the cobbles and beaten.
LITTLE ELIZA FOUND SAFE AND WELL
Discovered in Marketplace by the Night Watch
Mystery of the “Weeping Lady”
The second news clipping picked up the story a couple of days on. Eliza had been found by the late-night police patrol. She was wandering in the town’s deserted marketplace at two o’clock in the morning. By this time, she’d become “Little Eliza” in print and in the public’s imagination, and her fate was the subject of speculation in every backyard and taproom. The reporter’s language was oblique, but Sebastian’s reading of it was that she’d been found barefoot and without clothing.
Under the heading of ELIZA’S OWN STORY, the child’s account was reported. Eliza, though eight years old and unschooled, appeared to speak with the kind of rhetorical flourish appropriate to the middle-aged editor of a provincial English newspaper.
A woman had stopped the two children by the gates of St. Joseph’s Church. She knew Eliza’s name. She said that she was a dressmaker, and Eliza’s grandmother wanted her to have a new dress for the next Whitsun walks. Eliza would have to be measured. Her mother knew all about it, she said. Her sister was to return home. Both would get a penny for being good.
When she turned to go with the woman, Eliza saw that a man had moved in to stand behind her. The woman explained that he was a friend of her grandmother’s. He showed her the pennies. They walked toward the docks and Eliza remembered passing the signwriter, who was lettering gold leaf onto the painted glass of a moneylender’s window.
They took her to a place near the ships and up some stairs into a big dark room at the top of the building, where Eliza described being able to see the big timbers that held up the roof. A beautiful lady was waiting there.
This lady smiled at her and said that the man had two pennies, one for Eliza and the other for her sister. Eliza could have them when she’d tried her new dress on. She couldn’t see any new dress. She didn’t want to take her clothes off, but the woman who’d brought her changed her manner and spoke sharply, and she was frightened.
She did as she was told. Then the beautiful lady asked her if she would like to be clean. Eliza said that she was clean. Bath night was every Friday.
Something in what she said seemed to upset the lady. She stroked Eliza’s hair, and would not look at her. She told the woman to give Eliza her clothes back.
Then it all turned ugly. The man grabbed the lady by the arm and drew her away. They started to argue in low voices, all three of them, and the beautiful lady began to cry. Nobody noticed Eliza creeping away. She got down to the next floor and, when she heard someone coming down the stairs, she hid under some sacks. It was the younger woman, the so-called beautiful lady. She hadn’t entirely stopped crying, but now her face was all twisted and red. She carried a sharpened stick or a pike of some kind, and she went from room to room with it calling Eliza’s name.
Eliza was too frightened to answer. She heard rats in the sacks around her. When the young woman was out of sight, she got out of the pile and hid behind a dresser instead.
The young woman came back. She heard the rats and mistook them for Eliza. She plunged the pike into the sacks, sobbing all the time, and kept on plunging it in until the man and the other woman came. They took the pike out of her hands. The shaven-headed man moved the sacks to look for a body, but found none. They gave up after that. When they led the young woman away, they had to hold her up.
Eliza waited for several hours, and then found her way out of the house and through the empty streets to the market.
An enthusiastic hunt for the three adults was now under way, the report said.
Sebastian returned the clippings to the place in the Bible where he’d found them. Something had clearly gone wrong. The child had never been meant to survive Louise Porter’s attentions, much less be able to tell the tale and describe her to others. The Silent Man and his wife—not so mute, if she’d done all the talking—had set up the child’s fate in a manner so heartless it was hard to imagine.
Louise had wavered, and had to be bullied into seeing it through. But once she got started, she quickly went out of control.
Sayers could idealize her all he wanted. But in Sebastian’s eyes, she was only one act of cruelty away from becoming another James Caspar.
Sebastian took the carte de visite from the mirror. It had been much handled, but carefully preserved. It showed Louise Porter as Desdemona, with her name and the role and the address of the Baker Street photographic studio below the picture. The card was worn around the edges and nearly fifteen years out of date, but Sebastian doubted that she’d have allowed any image since.
He couldn�
�t decide whether she looked disturbingly young, or disturbingly old. The world had changed considerably in the space of fifteen years, and a sepia photograph like this one had the feel of another era altogether. Anyone pictured from those times—babies, even—made him think of them only as those who’d passed by long before. How might she seem now? She’d be well into her thirties. Good Lord, she was practically an old woman!
Unless, of course, life mirrored the legend, and she had not changed in any appreciable way.
There was a knocking at the door. Sebastian quickly restored the fighter’s possessions to their former order and went downstairs.
There on the doorstep stood Mr. Oakes from the office, a parcel of brown paper and string under his arm.
“Mister Bearce has been called to Chicago,” the bookkeeper said. “He told me to deliver the office keys and tell you that he’s left you in charge for tomorrow. I took the chance to bring you this.” He showed the parcel.
“You got my message, then? Assuming that’s what I think it is.”
“I did and it is, sir. I’ve done everything you asked.”
Sebastian ushered him in and led the way through to the kitchen, where he took a knife from the drawer.
“I hope it’s the right one,” Oakes said. “Everything else was either a uniform, or unfit for wear.”
Every Pinkerton office kept a stock of disguises for its operatives. In truth, these days it was more a part of the romance of the company than a feature of its day-to-day running, but there were still occasions when an employee might need to pass as a streetcar conductor or a factory hand, and needed quick access to the clothes to play the part. Sebastian slid the knife under the string and cut through it, and then he unwrapped the parcel on the kitchen table.
When the bundle opened up, it revealed a pair of brogues sitting on a more-or-less neatly folded suit. The suit had belonged to a temporary named Epps, who’d been sent into a construction company as an undercover steamfitter to check on employee dishonesty. He’d been discovered and beaten, and had walked off the job and never returned. It must have been quite a beating to discourage him so; by his clothes, he was roughly the same size and build as Tom Sayers.
“These are fine, Mister Oakes,” Sebastian said. He felt a little guilty. Oakes was going out of his way to please, and although Sebastian had promised to put in a good word about his work to the dreaded Mr. Bearce, he’d so far done nothing of the kind.
“I canvassed all the hotels as you asked.” This was not quite the momentous task for the bookkeeper that it might have appeared. Most of the big hotels in the middle of town had telephones now. “There was a Mrs. Louise Caspar staying at the Walton, but she checked out almost two weeks ago.”
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. The Walton on Broad Street was one of the city’s highest-class hotels. Its outer appearance was that of a grand Bavarian palace. On the inside, the foyer alone was like the vault of a Renaissance prince. For the rest of it, he could only guess. Given his income, Sebastian was never likely to see any farther than the foyer.
He said, “Could they tell you where she went from there?”
“They’d love to know,” Oakes said, and went on to explain that she’d left with her bill unpaid and no clue as to where they might find her. He’d talked to the doorman, the bell-hopper, and the housekeeping staff who’d serviced the room.
“Well done, Mister Oakes,” Sebastian said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re quite the detective.”
“Now you’re mocking me, sir,” Oakes said. “But I’ll let it pass.”
THIRTY-ONE
Bram Stoker sat at a strange desk in an unfamiliar office at London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, writing up the latest set of accounts for Irving’s Dante. Although the Lyceum company was gone and Irving’s tenancy at the Wellington Street theater was no more, Stoker had stayed on as one of the few remaining members of the actor’s personal staff.
He could hear the sound of someone approaching down the corridor. A few moments later, Belmore, the assistant to Irving’s long-serving stage manager, reached in and tapped on the open door to get Stoker’s attention. When Stoker acknowledged him, Belmore came into the room and laid a small envelope on the desk.
“Beg pardon, Mister Stoker,” he said. “Addressed to you and delivered by hand.”
Stoker picked up the envelope. It was, indeed, addressed to him by name. He pinched it between his forefinger and thumb, as if assaying it for density and value.
“Another request for house seats, at a guess,” he said. “Strange how people can be so generous with their praise for the guv’nor while balking at the cost of a ticket.”
“Yes, sir.”
Belmore went off, and Stoker opened the envelope and took out the note inside. It was not a request for free seats. Nor was it an appeal for him to approach Irving to make some public appearance—a common request, whose authors usually presumed that the actor would gratefully bear all expense and inconvenience for the honor of being asked. Instead of either, it was a note from Samuel Liddell Mathers.
Stoker hadn’t seen Mathers in years. They’d met seldom after that night in the basement of the Horniman Museum with Tom Sayers, and not at all recently. He knew that the would-be mystic had landed a fulltime job as assistant librarian at the museum, but he’d argued with the management and the job hadn’t lasted. The last Stoker had heard of him, he was living in Paris. He’d added the name MacGregor to his own and had been seen bicycling through the French capital in full Highland regalia.
The request was for a few minutes of Stoker’s time, at his own convenience. A boy would be waiting to take back his reply. Stoker quickly wrote a response across the bottom of the note, placed it into the neatly slit envelope, and had it taken down to the street.
When he was done with the figures, he locked his notebook away and reached for his hat. He needed to speak to the manager of the Criterion about the arrangements for that evening’s Dante supper. It was an expense that he’d advised against, but Irving had insisted on it. Despite a mixed critical reception, Dante had to be made to succeed.
As usual, Stoker chose to walk rather than take the tram. From Drury Lane he cut through the Covent Garden market, so busy at dawn’s first light, so dead by midafternoon. The gutters were strewn with spoiled fruit and leaves, and a small number of costers threw empty crates around. As Stoker walked down the curving lane of Long Acre past the furniture makers and coach builders that lined it, he reflected that making a success out of Dante would be no easy task. It was an enormous enterprise, with fifty players and more than a hundred nonspeaking spirits to people the circles of hell. It was also a mediocre play in thirteen interminable scenes. It was carried entirely by spectacle and what remained of Irving’s drawing power; but here in the capital, even that power was no longer as great as it once had been.
When Irving had been knighted, some eight years before, the honor had seemed to confer some measure of permanence on that gilded age. In retrospect, it had actually marked the summit from which a descent would soon follow. A disastrous fire had consumed two decades’ worth of scenery and properties in the railway arches at Southwark, wiping out the company’s repertoire of productions and all the future income that would have flowed from them. Uninsured and in debt, Irving had signed control of the Lyceum over to a business syndicate. He was tiring. His health was beginning to fail. And yet, instead of being able to rest on his achievements, he now had to work to survive.
In Piccadilly, amid the white pillars and gilded mirrors of the Criterion’s airy Byzantine dining rooms, Stoker went over the evening’s arrangements with the restaurant manager. A few minor questions arose, and he was able to answer them all. When their business was done, Stoker took out his pocket watch and checked on the time. Then he thanked the manager and left the spacious grill room, descending a short flight of steps to emerge into Piccadilly Circus.
In the middle of the Circus stood the Shaftesbury M
emorial, an ornate bronze fountain topped with a winged figure of Christian Charity. On the steps of its dais, with traffic all around him, Samuel Liddell Mathers waited.
He had not yet seen Stoker, and did not know from which direction he’d be approaching. This was as Stoker had intended. He wanted a moment in which to take a look at Mathers and assess the state of him.
He was, Stoker noted with some relief, dressed more or less normally. Too warmly for the weather, perhaps, in a thick coat that looked as heavy as a Persian carpet—and which might even have been cut from one, looking at it again—but nothing too embarrassing to be seen with.
He raised a hand to draw Mathers’ attention, and having caught his eye he waited as the other man crossed through traffic to join him. They exchanged greetings, and then together they began to walk down Coventry Street in the direction of Leicester Square.
Stoker said, “How is Mina?” On closer inspection, Mathers’ coat was almost threadbare. Mathers himself was quite gaunt inside it.
“She is well,” Mathers said. “As am I.”
“I have followed your progress.”
“Then when you saw my note, you probably thought that I had come to visit London to ask you for money or patronage. Let me assure you that I have not.”
“That’s just as well,” Stoker said. “The great days are gone, Mathers. The Lyceum company is no more. It pains me to say it, but the guv’nor is a lion at bay.”
“If only you’d agreed to join us in those early years,” Mathers said. “Then, who knows. The outcome might have been different for both of us.”
But Stoker was having none of that. “You mean that together we could have magicked away misfortune?” he said. “Be serious, man. I had no inclination to involve myself with the members of any order. Let alone one whose life is a constant squabble over what to call themselves and how to organize. If it’s not money and it’s no other form of support, then what do you need?”
The Kingdom of Bones Page 21
