by Claire North
The professor nodded once, still watching his son. Then he took in a long, hard breath, and turned sharply on the spot to look Abbey in the eye. “And have you done it yet?” he asked. “Have you put the shadow on him?”
For a moment I thought Abbey would try to lie, but the truth was too close to his lips now, and he couldn’t hold back the answer. “Not yet. Sister Ellis seems to think there is no justice in it. She believes this very strongly, which is highly frustrating when one is trying to have a clear state of mind. She is less convinced as to whether I should kill you.”
The professor nodded again, head turning to me. “Thank you for protecting my son, Sister Ellis. I did not think that William would find him. Nor did I think him so far gone that he would use a father’s child to murder him. I see I was mistaken, otherwise I never would have let this happen. I am… very sorry for that. I apologise that you have found yourself caught up in this business between us. I take it William has been talking? There is a point, if he stays still for too long, where he really can’t resist the urge. How close is Langa now?”
Abbey’s lips curled in tight, so hard I thought I saw him flinch with the pain of holding back an answer.
“Close,” I answered. “I think.”
“So you are compelled to tell the truth, yes?” Abbey looked away, but even that gesture was twisted in a nod. “Well then.” The professor perched on the edge of his son’s bed, near where the boy’s feet would have been, an old habit from a different day. “You are here to kill me, of course.”
“Yes,” Abbey replied.
“I suppose you’ve tried for long enough.”
“Had to try harder.”
“Do you intend to simply slit my throat, or were you planning a more… complicated procedure?”
“Until you walked through that door, I really wasn’t sure. I’m moving towards stabbing you in the heart and being done with the whole thing.”
“In front of the sister?”
“Yes.”
“Will she try to prevent you?”
“She doesn’t know. She hopes she will, when the moment comes, but genuinely isn’t sure. You should have brought a gun.”
“That thought occurs to me – now. How much does the sister know?”
“Plenty,” I snapped, at these cold, busy men.
“All… nearly all of it.” A stumble, a forced rattle of breath, a thing that had nearly been a lie and that the shadow would not permit.
“Well then.” Albert adjusted his position, hands folded in his lap, hat still on his head. “You’d better tell her the rest.”
Chapter 57
I ran, said the doctor, eyes fixed on his enemy, as the battle sputtered outside. What else was there? Running from the British Empire… it is not so easy. Not a corner of Africa where the Nineteen hadn’t extended a tendril, not a port in Asia where they didn’t have prying eyes. A telegram could be flashed to India, Canada, Australia, the Cape, Malaysia, Egypt, and the authorities would be waiting for me weeks before I arrived. And would the pashas in Palestine really protect me against my former masters? Was it in the interest of the Meiji emperor to anger the most powerful nation on earth? Of course not. Perhaps I could run to my former adversaries? The French would be only too happy to have a truth-speaker, or the Austrians could cheerfully lock me up again. None of these options appealed, so in the end I sailed for Lisbon, and then took the first ship for South America. The United States had already decided that continent was an area of special interest to them, and their growing power and belligerence would, I hoped, keep British interference at bay. I had learnt enough of my craft that I could pass for German or French if I had to, and Mrs Parr’s dwindling gift of money was enough to get me to a place where my medical bag could bring a little income.
Mrs Parr did not make it, if you are wondering. Albert saw her body. He felt deep regret that these things had come to pass, and didn’t attend her funeral. That’s his truth. He still doesn’t understand why she did it; why the batty old woman helped me. He’s very bad with people.
I did not mourn her in any way that society would find acceptable. There was no time, and she would not have approved of wailing and ashes. Hideo died too, in the end. While pouring liquid food down his oesophagus, they ruptured it, flooding his lungs with pea soup, on which he suffocated. But then, Hideo was still a work in progress for Albert. In time he’d do much, much better.
It took just over a month to reach Panama, still then little more than a graveyard for the thousands of men who had tried to build the canal, and fallen to yellow fever. From there I hopped south, until I came to Peru. The country was still teetering from years of war, from bitter violence and devastation, but there was hope in the air too, a new government promising great progress from behind its palatial walls. Ambitious men of class and privilege were determined to forge a new nation state, equal to any in the world, and though they had very few of the resources needed to do this and even less will for this state to serve the whole people, rather than those who owned the most land, doctors and men of foreign currency were welcomed. Though rusty, my ministrations were still superior to those of the quacks selling patent medicines and deceit. The country had its traditional healers, the curanderos and witch doctors of the mountains, who ranged from hideous, wailing predators who sucked on the hopes and fears of dying men, through to individuals who actually had some interesting things to offer, and who knew the best leaves to chew for sickness at height, when to offer a diuretic and when to walk away, and which flowers kept the mosquitoes at bay. All were suspicious of me and my foreign ways, and I did not blame them. Some were actively hostile, and I fled many a place before they could set my bedding alight; others sat with me and talked long and earnestly of vaccination and smallpox, naming the gift of immunity as perhaps the single greatest advancement science could offer.
In this way, wandering the mountains, I hid from my enemies until Langa came, as he always does, shambling across ocean and mountain peak, bringing the dreams of my neighbours and the truth of their hearts to my lips.
He would always come, and South America, though well hidden from the British, lacked that one major resource that I most earnestly needed for my well-being – reliable trains. I needed to sleep, needed to rest. Langa did not. Only by travelling fast could I ever outrun him, and the high mountains wrapped in cloud were no place to be a sprinter.
I headed for the coast, and in Lima secured myself a position as a ship’s doctor on a vessel carrying copper from the mines of South America to the hungry new shipyards of Yokohama. From there I took passage on a ship carrying rice, silk and students to Hong Kong; where Chinese silver and workers fleeing the growing chaos in the south were loaded for transportation to Calcutta; where opium, hungry labourers and cotton was loaded for the East and beyond. In British ports, I barely left the ship. Instead, I asked my crewmates for newspapers and journals, for reports of every nature, which I pored over on the hot, chugging voyage back to Hong Kong for any clues as to the fate of my friends – for the fate of Margot.
I found no mention of her in the press. Nor of the People’s Society. Whatever their fate, they were of no interest to the reporters of The Times or the Gazette.
In this way I lived for over a year, bobbing across the Pacific, ministering almost entirely to inflamed sailor’s genitals on the way. Oh, sometimes there was an outbreak of dysentery, a flurry of fever or a broken limb to liven things up, but for the most part I tended to crabs, pox and various forms of discharge. In time I found myself positions on the larger passenger vessels, where my quarters were upgraded from a hammock in the cloying below-decks heat to a room with a window I could open when the seas were calm, and my clientele to first-class travellers who were evenly split between venereal disease and seasickness, with the occasional boil in need of lancing. My security grew – not quite enough to accept the offer of employment on the New York–Liverpool line, but enough that I was happy to be hired as ship’s doctor on the great vessels
that sailed through the Azores and the Caribbean, or carried hopeful migrants to the colonies of Africa and the southern hills of Kerala. Travelling as much as I did, Langa had no chance of catching me, and for months on end my dreams were free of his shadow, and I knew only the truths that men deigned to speak, and found this to be a revelation.
It wasn’t until the middle of 1904, the year the Russians and the Japanese went to war, that I finally learnt what had happened to the People’s Society. Coming into Charleston one sticky, blazing summer’s day, I took the chance to stretch my legs and see the pleasures of the town. The Civil War had devastated the city, and black hands had helped rebuild it in all its timbered elegance. Industry had come with smoke and iron, then the city had been shattered by an earthquake and rebuilt again by the hands of black men, adding courthouse and post office, white verandas and flower-coated balconies to the genteel houses of the finer sort, and plumbing and the beginnings of electricity to the harder, block houses for the rest. In thanks for their labour, the government of South Carolina disenfranchised the black man, and the white man settled back into a city that felt every bit as polite, ordered and pious as if it had never been burnt to the ground.
It was in Charleston that I saw the hanging of five men and two women of the People’s Society. They had preached the gospel of liberty and equality, of a woman’s right to vote and equal pay for all people. They were dangerous and had been judged, and their execution was needful for the law. The man who pulled the gallows trigger was drunk, visibly swaying on the stage as the nooses were put round the condemned necks. The sheriff had to shout to get his attention, to the booing of the crowd, and he half fell onto the lever rather than pulling it in an orderly manner. Six of the seven trapdoors opened. Three of those who dropped were lucky, and their necks were broken. Three suffocated slowly, gasping, writhing, twitching, eyes popping and tongues licking the air. The last – a woman – stayed where she was, the mechanism beneath the door on which she stood jammed. The sheriff walked over and kicked it three, four, five times with his boot as the crowd hissed and surged and snapped its displeasure, until finally it gave way and she dropped. Someone screamed, and I was grateful that Langa was not there, that I did not know the truth in the hearts of these onlookers, in those who jeered, those who leered, those who laughed at the demise of their fellow man; or those who wept, who curled up inside in horror, those who had never before seen a person die.
I knew three of them by sight: hangers-on in Margot’s People’s Society. I do not think they saw me in the crowd, when they died.
In America, it was easier to find out about the fate of the People’s Society. Sedition would not be tolerated. Anarchists, socialists, revolutionary immigrants with un-American ideas: all were for punishment. Good God, railed the press, was it not a mere three years since the president had been gunned down on this sacred soil? Three years since the blood of patriots had been shed? And for what? For a fantasy? For the delusions of a madman?
We may die, said one woman of the Society as they led her to the electric chair, but our ideas have already changed the world.
If that is so, the judge replied, then it is the duty of every American to change it back.
Chapter 58
The Nineteen caught up with me, of course. It was only fluke that let me escape for so long. I was the doctor on a vessel loaded with families from Guangdong, tired clusters of Irish, Cape British, Jewish and American all drawn to the promise of gold in Australia, when we came into the port that would be called Darwin. Gold had transformed it from a place barely worth consideration to a scrambling destination for eager travellers, shovels in their satchels, reminding me of Kimberley in my long-past youth; and in doing so it had acquired, without my taking note, a telegram line.
The policemen who were waiting when we docked must have received their orders weeks before we arrived. They wore clobbered-together dusty uniform of blue tunic with silver shoulder knots, black buttons and dark blue riding trousers designed to guarantee heatstroke in an Australian winter. Half the police force of the Northern Territories had turned up for my arrival, numbering all of five, the oldest a man in his mid-sixties who had perhaps been assured that this would be an easy retirement, the youngest a boy of seventeen with the beginning of a frail ginger beard beginning to spout beneath his burnt face.
In the rush of gold diggers and immigrants tumbling out of the ship into the half-chaos of the barely functional port of this juddering, stumbling place, I nearly walked straight into my would-be captors’ arms. But I was in no rush to set foot in this provincial outpost, or lose the comfort of the sea air for the blistering dust of Darwin’s unpaved streets, and this reticence saved my life, for the policemen, not quite sure how to manage anything resembling a significant crowd, started shouting and tugging at the off-loading passengers, calling for William Abbey and waving a somewhat unflattering picture that the Nineteen had clearly taken while I was shot and drugged in their care. No one paid the officers any particular attention, and my expression when bleeding out is perhaps less animated than when discussing the treatment of ulcers in unwelcome places.
So it was that, as I prepared to disembark without a care in the world, Lumaban, our disastrous ship’s cook and notably more successful gambler, came to the open door of my little cabin, leant against the frame, watched me scoop up my bag and hat and mused:
“Have you ever heard of a man called William Abbey?”
Lumaban was short, a bullet head on square shoulders, with remarkably soft hands that he secretly rubbed with animal fat from the stove to keep tender. To people he disliked, he pretended not to speak anything but Tagalog and a few colourfully specific words of English. When he won at cards, he crowed in Spanish; when he bullied his crew he could do so in Hindi, Cantonese, Portuguese or Malay, and he had once sailed with a Dutch captain who talked entirely in Christian aphorisms and gruesome curses, which he threw in occasionally because he enjoyed the sound. I had never considered myself close to the man, and always gambled conservatively at his table; yet here he was, saving my life.
I took a moment to close my bag, consider his question. “Abbey?” I repeated, tasting the word for the first time in many, many years. “Can’t say I have. Why?”
A half-shrug, unblinking from the door. “There are some people here looking for him. Policemen.”
“Really? I wonder what he could have done.”
“Not my business.”
“I suppose you’re right. Well. Thank you. I’ll certainly keep an eye out.”
Lumaban nodded once, his job done, and turned away from the door. I counted to ten, then picked up my few belongings, followed him down the hall and stowed away in the captain’s secret stash below decks, where he hid jewellery to bribe bandits, smuggled booze and stolen art.
When, nearly eleven hours later, I felt that the policemen might have given up, I unlocked my cramped limbs and committed myself to the Darwin dusk, cursing my own arrogance and wondering what on earth I was going to do now.
Chapter 59
In Australia, walking the dusty roads from Darwin to Perth, I met Jarli.
The dreams began when I was a week or so out of the city, shuffling with a caravan along a dirt road of rutted dust at an excruciatingly slow, hard pace. The flies clung to every part of us, swarmed in black cloaks across our backs, shimmered in the horses’ eyes, too thick to part. Sometimes the land broke out into beautiful vales of sea-kissed green and stubby trees sagging with fruit; two miles further, blasted animals of bone and balding hide blinked at you from grassland the colour of floorboards.
Jarli was short, walking alone with a metal flask at his hip, a long, straight stick in his hand, a cloth around his waist and a bowler hat on his head. He carried no other provisions, and along his chin erupted a beard of curling dark hair flecked with grey, tangled as tumbleweed. His skin was the colour of sunset and desert shadow, his teeth were dazzling white, and he went without fear where white men would not go.
&nb
sp; This was not a remarkable thing. White men were, in his experience, bizarrely ill-equipped to life in this place, knowing neither the water signs nor the easiest and safest ways to travel.
His mother’s shadow followed him. This was no bad thing either. Her mother’s shadow had followed her, and her grandmother had spent her life with the shadow of her father before. As she lay dying, Jarli’s mother had talked him through the rite he would need to perform to bind her shadow to him for ever, so that he might become the truth-speaker, the master of the corroboree, wandering the songlines until finally he had a child, who he would raise and protect until he died and passed on his mantle.
In this way, he wandered the desert, and spoke the truth in thirteen languages of his people, and a little bit of English too, not that the English were remotely interested in listening to him.
This lack of interest, and the frequent hostility of white men, made him turn away from our shuffling caravan. But his shadow was never more than a day behind, and mine was perhaps four days and closing, and even at fifty yards’ distance there was a calling between us that made him stop, and turn, and seek me out from between the faceless, yellow-dust travellers, and see.
I also looked, and, slower than he, understood.
His astonishment at seeing an Englishman with his condition was palpable even through the distance between us. Of the many remarkable things he had known, this was a thing close even to heresy – but then a truth-speaker has little time for ignoring the obvious that is before our eyes, so with a gesture, he waved me over.
“I’ll catch up,” I told the leader of our convoy, and as people tutted at my recklessness and warned that I would catch a nasty disease, I stepped into the chittering, slithering grass, and walked towards Jarli.
