The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  “Wait, I have—”

  “Glad to have you on board, Dr Abbey. Follow instructions and all will be fine.”

  “I have questions…”

  “Mrs Parr will answer all that; must dash!”

  No sooner was the colonel gone than Mrs Parr had appeared like a rash at my side. “A tailor next, yes indeed!”

  She did not have the bearing of a woman to whom you could object.

  Over the following days, the rudimentaries of spycraft.

  An American thief – he claimed to have quit his profession for a heady life of gambling and high society – taught me how to lift a wallet from a pocket, the quietest way to break a window or force a lock, and when drunk whispered that he knew who had stolen the portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, and I thought perhaps he believed it too, but Langa was far behind and it was not considered of huge importance that I get to the bottom of that matter.

  A Scotland Yard detective by the name of Curry taught me the landscape of rookeries, the tattoos of the dockyard gangs and the haircuts of the Liverpool bully boys. He made me practise fisticuffs in a wooden ring, and announced that I was one of the most feeble fighters he had ever seen. The next day he took me into an alley behind the station house and instead made me practise pushing my opponent’s head into a brick wall, kicking men in the groin and sticking two fingers in my assailant’s eyes.

  “Queensberry rules are for men who can fight,” he explained. “That will never be you.”

  Mrs Parr drilled me on languages, of which it turned out she had a remarkably broad grasp. “Wieder!” she barked, as I stammered through German grammar, Russian nouns, French verbs. “Otra vez!”

  The colonel took it upon himself to teach me how to fire a revolver. It was almost the closest we came to a human connection. “Rum sort of ticket, aren’t you, Abbey?” he muttered at my fumbling aim. “Not the straightest sort of wicket!”

  Most people in the colonel’s world, from empresses to mudlarks, could be defined by their relationship with cricket.

  At the end of it all, there was Albert.

  I met him in a tea room in St James’s, head spinning and fingers stained with chemicals – those for revealing secrets, those for hiding them, a few dozen nitrates in between. He strode in, tailcoat and bowler hat, his small brown beard trimmed to a sharp point, greeted the proprietor by the door with a gloved handshake and a cry of “How is the tea today?”, laughed at some unheard answer, pivoted on his heels, saw me and seemed to know me at once.

  He burst across the floor with far too much energy for a man who’d earned his heady academic title, grabbed one of my hands in both of his own, shook and squeezed and exclaimed, “Such a privilege, such a fortunate privilege!” and ordered scones.

  “You must forgive the colonel,” he explained, hunching in over porcelain plates, crumbs clinging to his beard as his busy, wriggling fingers danced in the air. “He has no imagination, no sense of wonder or purpose. Everyone is in such a tizzy. If the Berlin Conference doesn’t go well, there’ll be war, the war to end all wars – pish, say I. Pish! There is such important work to be done, so much to be learnt, but I am overruled, of course. Always they overrule me.”

  His accent was a clipped thing that I had sometimes heard in the nurses at the hospital, women from the west who’d had the Somerset barked out of them by the Nightingale sisters; or in the men of aspiration who had frequented my father’s circle, desperate to buy with words an acceptance in society that even wealth could not.

  Later – much later – he would tell me that his father was Jewish, from Bavaria, and his mother had worked in a hotel in Newcastle, and they’d made a great deal of money through wise investment, and a bit more through less upright means, and sworn that their son would be accepted even if they were not. Thus, when he was born, they called him Albert, in honour of the Prince Consort, and never really let him understand what it meant to be Jewish; and sent him to a school in Surrey for the children of great men, and told him when the other boys beat him that it would toughen him up, and they were wrong.

  You will not see any sign of Albert’s origins in his children. One generation was enough to scrub clean all that they were.

  “You must be feeling… well, how do I even know what you are feeling? Tell me what you’re feeling, I want to know.”

  My mouth bobbed open and shut like a suffocating fish. In the days since I had arrived back in England, in all the lessons and drilling and secret signings of contracts and deeds, no one had stopped long enough to answer a single one of my questions, let alone ask for my sentiment on the subject. Yet now he sat before me, staring with open, curious eyes, fingers steepled, leaning so far forward that he might topple off his seat into the clotted cream at any moment.

  I mumbled, “I feel… incredibly tired. And confused. And not a little afraid.”

  His smile didn’t flicker. “Of course. Very sensible.”

  “I feel… that I have no idea what I’ve got myself into, and that the promises that were made to me in the Cape – especially concerning understanding my condition – have thus far been entirely unfulfilled.”

  If anything, his smile widened. He opened up his palms expansively, eyes crinkling tight, and declared, “Here I am, dear fellow. Here I am!”

  “Who are you, precisely?”

  “Professor Albert Wilson, of the Nineteen Committee. We are specialists in areas of security international and domestic, including some of the more unusual threats against and opportunities arising for the Empire. Government, of course, but with somewhat more flexible oversight than your normal army rot. Sometimes, to serve Parliament, it’s best to keep MPs out of it. My area of expertise is, shall we say, the study of eccentric phenomena. Do you understand?”

  “No. Not really.”

  A little huff, a little nod; he was used to this not making sense, it was nothing personal. Few things bored him as much as a paper that proved a theorem; it was disproving the world that set him whirling with imagination, fingers dancing as if he could spin a tapestry of the universe. He was a connoisseur of strange happenings, and swore blind that he had once met a man who he then immediately and entirely forgot (I could not see how he could be so convinced of this), and a woman who claimed that she knew the future because she had lived it a hundred times already. In France there was one who had gambled the love of her child on a secret game, another who moved between the mortal bodies of men like air, and one who swore that cities generated a power that the wise could manipulate to achieve miracles. Such possibilities! Such marvels! Think of the truths now held dear that such things might disprove; think of the new questions we might learn to ask!

  “What of my condition?” I mumbled, not a little baffled by his spinning delight in all this. “What of the shadow?”

  “We’ve encountered it before, of course. There are many cultures where you see its emergence. It is possible that there have been practitioners on the British Isles in the past who have understood its secrets and put the thing on people here; but they are long since dead, I fear. Our ancestors were perhaps a little too zealous in the imposition of their beliefs.”

  “Is there a cure?” I asked slowly, and found my hands shaking, recognised with a start all the mannerisms of every patient I had seen at the London Hospital who, knowing already that the hand of death was upon them, still gazed up at the physician for the words of comfort that could never be.

  This being so, I knew Albert’s answer before he gave it. The little leaning-back. The shifting of weight, the smile now that sat only on his lips, not in his eyes. Generous sympathy, a tilt of his head, the truth blanketed in words. “Not that we know of, yet.”

  I have done this. I have told the dying that no, right now we do not have a treatment, but perhaps in time? And I have seen in their eyes the last vestige of light go out, the last glimmer of hope, for they do not hear the caveat, only the truth that matters. There is no cure.

  Langa comes, and there is no cure.

/>   “I… I was told…” I stammered.

  “We know a great deal.”

  “I was told, in London, that you knew…”

  “We know how fast your shadow moves, we know how its behaviour manifests, its effects…”

  “But not a cure.”

  “No. Not that.”

  “How am I meant to live like this? How am I meant to be alive?”

  “We will help; we can keep you moving, keep you safe. There is no one better than the Nineteen.”

  “He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t sleep. He will never not find me.”

  “We are scientists. We study, we learn…”

  “He’ll kill everyone I love.” And it’s my fault. “He’ll kill them one at a time.” And there will be a kind of justice to it.

  Albert’s face was kind, his words slow, gaze steady. Plender did a similar thing, when he lived: a gentle declaration of yes, now, now I will cut your leg off, yes; yes, now, now it is most likely you will die, and I will perhaps kill you, and it is needful, and I am sorry for it, and there is nothing else to be done. I knew it well, and Albert performed it as if he had been working in the hospital his whole life.

  “You’ll need to take trains,” he murmured, “if you want to stay ahead of him. He travels slower than an old man’s walk, but as you say, he never sleeps. He will never stop. If you get injured; if you are stuck in the desert; if you lose your compass – he will come. Be careful of getting caught in a Russian winter. Only take the steamer ship, never anything with rigged sails – you don’t want to risk getting caught in port. If you have to climb a mountain, you will be slower than him, but if you can get down the other side, you’ll outpace him in an hour. He won’t change how fast he moves for snow or sea. Don’t get into trouble with the law. A prison sentence will kill them for sure. What do you know about Nepal? There is a place on the summit of a mountain where there are some carvings that may be of relevance to you. If you can get to it, there are also some caves on the Yellow River I’ve been trying to reach for years. Please don’t kill yourself. Please don’t. I know you don’t know me, but I would be… it would be a great shame. And I do not know what would happen to your shadow, if you die. Perhaps that will be enough to end the curse. Perhaps not. Perhaps not; the evidence is unclear. But I would urge you to run, if you can. Run, and be very, very careful who you love.”

  I stared at my shoes, he at the end of his long, pressed fingers. Finally I said, “If I walk away now, will you let me go?”

  “I will, of course. Of course.”

  “And the Nineteen?”

  “I cannot speak for them. I am just a scientist.”

  I smiled, nodded at the floor. “What should I do?”

  He drew back into his chair, lips thin, unblinking. “The Nineteen will open doors. The monasteries of Nepal, the caves of China… There is no cure now, but think what we can learn.”

  “And all I have to do is be your spy?”

  “Is that so bad? This way, you have a chance.”

  He held out his hand, and it took me a dumb moment to realise that I should shake it. I did, aware of my clammy palm, the strength of his grip, which held a moment longer than it should, and squeezed tight once, before it released.

  The Nineteen never forced me to join.

  No one beat me, imprisoned me, threatened me or my family.

  There was never any other choice.

  Chapter 22

  My first assignment as a spy for Her Majesty’s Government was remarkably dull.

  The Berlin Conference shredded the world like an old curtain, selling the lives of millions without bothering to inform the peoples it bartered away. They said it brought peace, and to Europe it did. Of course, in Africa, it brought only the gun.

  The logic of it was inescapable. Even if France had little interest in the mud mosques of Djenné, it had to plant its flag in Mali before the Belgians could. Though the British were hardly concerned with Sudan, they needed to stake a claim before the Germans, to protect Egypt. What was Morocco, save a territory at threat from the Italians? What were Madagascar, Nigeria, Guinea, Portuguese East Africa, Libya, Eritrea – why, they were all countries that another Great Power might claim if you didn’t claim them first. Peace in Europe hung by a thread, no power ready to move against its neighbour for fear of losing the fight. Conquest, the butchery of the world beyond Europe’s mountains, kept the peace – at least for a little while.

  The peoples of these places were just a footnote, a logistical problem barely worth mentioning. Christianity was an excuse; one devoutly believed by many, but still, a nice sentiment to ease any quibbles of doubt about the massacres that would come. You understand this, I think, Sister Ellis. You understand how quickly truth can become greater than compassion. To the generals our lives are nothing more than lead men moved across a tabletop map, ten thousand, twenty thousand men picked away in a night, for a truth that matters more than their lives.

  It has taken us nearly thirty years to conquer the world, and when there was nothing left to take, it sounded a starting gun whose shot echoed from Verdun to the Somme. That is the truth of it.

  On the ferry from Dover, Mrs Parr spread a map of the world across the table between us. Laying a round, rosy finger down on the Alps she barked, “We think it’s about here. Hard to tell, of course, lacking all the data, but it’s our best guess. It will have started deviating in its course when you hit the west African coast…” her finger traced a loose swing across the sea towards the tip of Spain, “before reverting to a northwards direction as you passed Portugal and headed for Liverpool. If our assumptions are correct, by the time you reach Berlin the shadow should be approximately twenty days behind you. That gives us ten days to settle, then ten days of productive activity. We will rendezvous with the baron in Berlin. Now: you will practise German.”

  “I will practise German,” I intoned.

  “In German!” Sarcasm was as the needle to the castle wall, in the world of Mrs Nellie Parr.

  We arrived in Berlin just as the conference was coming to an end, to pick and gnaw at the last pieces of Europe’s triumph. The city was roaring with new life and power, raised up from the squalid, typhus-swilling slum it had been just ten years ago. Now every part rattled and rumbled with growing strength: the brand-new Reichstag, the wide avenues and electric lights. Every other building was encased in scaffolding as fresh timber and stone were laid; theatres and operas were rushing to this suddenly booming heart of empire, while scientists and philosophers competed to design the most perfect city to capture the Kaiser’s new model state.

  Between black-stone church and whitewashed fresh new mansion, I was dragged from engagement to engagement by Parr, constantly testing me on this new invention or that man’s latest mistress or the rumours concerning his financial affairs.

  Then we met the baron.

  “Terrible place, Berlin!” he roared as we rattled towards yet another ambassadorial affair. “Another St Petersburg – looks very well and good but is still just a man’s ego in a swamp!”

  Baron Cresswood, the fourteenth of that name, was my gateway to those circles within which a mere doctor could not move. Ostensibly a roaming diplomat, whose brief from the British government changed as rapidly as his mood, he had sat in on, as he put it, “Every goddam matter of goddam importance since the goddam Chinese tried to sink the Arrow!”

  He had witnessed Prince Gong, brother of the Qing emperor, sign the Convention of Peking, and felt damn proud to see good British ships sail into Chinese ports with casks of opium, and leave with bales of silver and silk. He had watched the Prussians march towards Paris, and fled from the pestilential Commune that followed before the mob could pluck out his beard. He had been in Alexandria when the Egyptians went mad and chose to renege on their due and needful reparations to British bankers, choosing instead rebellion and absurd independence; and had stood by as the khedive took back his throne with a council of sensible British soldiers, bankers and civil servants
at his back to see that right was done. He had even been, if you believed him, in Washington the day Abraham Lincoln was shot, and while he hadn’t personally witnessed that gentleman’s demise, he had sat by the bedside of his injured Secretary of State, Seward, and read the newspaper to him until he was fully recovered from his wounds.

  The truth, of course, was something in between. He had, through the contriving of his government and a strange fortune, indeed been at or in proximity to nearly all of these events. Even if he hadn’t personally sat by Seward’s bed, he had been careful to deliver letters of news and good wishes, and to enquire politely after his health, which had in his mind become much the same thing. Likewise, he hadn’t seen Prince Gong from the front, but had definitely seen the plaited back of his head – or what he assumed was his head, though it might just have been some other official – and in his mind this glance had grown to absolute certainty. Absolute certainty was the baron’s stock in trade. It was what made him so brilliantly qualified for his position, especially now that I was in Her Majesty’s employ.

  “Some sort of mystic chappie, are you?” he tutted, flicking through the briefing papers that Parr had given him and downing Portuguese port like it was lemon tea. “Yes, well, can’t say I approve of such things, but if the other side will play funny games – mesmers and mediums and whatnot – I suppose we must do our part. Do you do that thing with ecotoplasm, or bend spoons?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, no, probably for the best.”

  At my failure to manipulate cutlery with my mind, he largely lost interest. He had a job to do, and would do it, and if in the process he gained a private physician who didn’t smell too bad and could carry his luggage whenever he decided he was feeling his age, all the better! “You don’t mind, Abbey?” he’d tut whenever I heaved under his bear’s-weight of bags. “Did something rotten to my back in Russia, pulled it I think the day they assassinated the tsar!”