Portrait of Peril

by Laura Joh Rowland

  He signals the barmaid. She brings me a glass of ale and lingers until he waves her off. “How is Mary, by the way?”

  His charm grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. “She died. In 1875.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry; I didn’t know.” Mr. Cullen sounds not particularly ashamed of his ignorance or saddened by my mother’s passing. “I haven’t seen her since a year or two before then. She told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.”

  I can guess why: I’d come home, and it would have been difficult for her to hide Mr. Cullen and me from each other. Liquor could ease me through this awkward encounter, but I don’t touch my glass. “How long had you known my mother?”

  His eyes avoid mine. “Oh, Mary and I went way back.”

  “How far back?” I want to know whether they were acquainted at the time of Ellen Casey’s murder.

  He acts as if he hasn’t heard my question. “We’d been out of touch. Then I happened to run into her at the train station.” Talking fast, he reminds me of someone frantically shoveling dirt to bury something he doesn’t want anyone to notice. He says with a forced laugh, “Never thought I’d see her again. Small world, isn’t it?”

  “Where did you meet?”

  Mr. Cullen seems glad to change the subject. “In Ely. I was a commercial traveler for Pears. I handled the accounts in that region and visited shops and beauty salons to hand out free samples and drum up new customers. Mary’s father owned the hotel where I stayed. We met, and she took a fancy to me.” He smiles proudly, showing white porcelain false teeth. “I was quite the ladies’ man in those days.”

  That he and my mother both worked for Pears seems a dubious coincidence. I put together what he’s just said with what I learned when I visited Ely, her birthplace, last winter. A local gossip told me she’d refused to name the father of her illegitimate child, and folks speculated that it was someone from out of town. I do some mental arithmetic and leap to a stunning conclusion.

  “Lucas Zehnpfennig was your son?”

  The panic in Mr. Cullen’s eyes tells me it’s true. Raising his hand to shush me, he looks around to see if his friends have heard what I said.

  “You got her with child when she was only fourteen!” I’m too outraged to care that I’m airing his dirty laundry and my mother’s. “How old were you at the time?” I calculate a rough estimate. “Thirty?” I regard him with disgust. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “For God’s sake, keep your voice down!” Mr. Cullen whispers.

  I’ve blamed my mother for her secrets and lies, for Ellen Casey’s murder, my father’s predicament, and my own troubled past. But she started out as an innocent child, and the man sitting in front of me is the root of her evils. “You abandoned her to have your bastard and face the consequences by herself!”

  “I didn’t know she was with child,” Mr. Cullen bleats. “And even if I had known, I couldn’t have married her. I was already married.”

  “Of course you were.” Contempt joins my disgust. “A married man having fun with a vulnerable young girl.”

  “A few weeks after I left Ely, Pears changed my territory. I never went back, never heard from Mary. She didn’t tell me about the boy until weeks after we met at the train station and started seeing each other again.”

  My head is spinning; all these revelations are too much. “What did she say about Lucas?”

  Mr. Cullen squirms. “She said he was in America. She asked me to give her money, for her and the boy.”

  My mother had stopped working at the Pears factory before she fell ill. I thought she was living on her savings, but now I see that she had another source of income. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that my mother moved to Isleworth, obtained a job at the company for which Mr. Cullen worked, and crossed paths with him again.

  “And you paid her because you cared about her and Lucas?” Maybe I’ve misjudged him. “Because you thought you owed them something?”

  He smiles as though he’s eaten something rotten and wants me to think it tastes good. “My wife was still alive then. Mary threatened to tell her everything.”

  My clever, devious mother must have gone looking for him in order to blackmail him. I feel bitterly smug because Mr. Cullen has validated my bad opinion of her; yet I’m appalled because she was even worse than I thought. But something about his story doesn’t jibe with the magnitude of his fear of exposure.

  “You must have had many affairs, and your wife must have known,” I say. His sheepish expression tells me I’m right. “Why was it so important to hide the one with my mother? And why pay her to keep quiet about Lucas? He was a grown man, far away in America. It wasn’t as if he was going to show up at your door, demanding that you take him in.”

  Mr. Cullen mops his perspiring face with his handkerchief. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Please go.”

  Comprehension excites me. “My mother told you about Ellen Casey, didn’t she?” The pressure to confide her secret must have built up in her during all those years until it became intolerable.

  “Oh, God.”

  “That’s what you couldn’t let her tell your wife. What exactly did she say?”

  He gazes woefully at me, like a slapped child. “Don’t make me tell. Please.”

  Dread holds down my triumph, like a heavy net thrown over a flock of birds. “Ellen Casey was murdered in 1866. My father, Benjamin Bain, was and still is the prime suspect. You might have read about him in the newspapers. But he’s innocent.” Desperate for evidence that will exonerate one parent at the expense of the other, I lean closer to Mr. Cullen. “Did my mother tell you what really happened?”

  Mr. Cullen recoils.

  The thing I hunger for, my father’s exoneration, is finally, after all these years, within my reach. I grab Mr. Cullen by his lapels and shake him so hard that the carnation falls out of his buttonhole. “If she told you something that would clear my father’s name, then you have to tell me!”

  The publican calls, “Hey, lady, take your hands off him, or I’ll throw you out.”

  I obey, glad that the publican intervened before my temper overpowered me and I hurt Mr. Cullen and ended up in jail. The odious man is withholding the information that will set my father free and change his and Sally’s and my lives forever.

  Mr. Cullen smooths his rumpled coat, picks up the bruised carnation, and puts the flower back in his buttonhole. His eyes glint with spite. “I don’t think Mary would have wanted her daughter to know about her, but since she’s dead, it won’t matter to her. And you seem more concerned about your father than protecting your mother’s memory. So I’ll tell you: she said she killed that girl. Are you happy now?”

  The relief is so massive, I could swoon. My father didn’t murder Ellen, and I need no longer doubt him. He need no longer live under a false name or sneak around to see Sally and me. We can be an ordinary family, and I can introduce him to Barrett, Mick, and Hugh. I’m already planning a dinner party for him at my house, looking forward to showing him my studio. But there’s still the matter of setting things right between him and the law.

  “I’ll be happy when you tell the police what you just told me,” I say.

  Mr. Cullen combines a laugh with a gasp. “I’m not telling the police.”

  “Why not?” I’m dismayed that he’s balking at this critical juncture. “As you said, my mother is dead; it can’t hurt her.”

  “Because they would want to know why she killed the girl, and the whole story would come out.”

  “What story?” I know, but I want him to say it.

  He clears his throat and looks away from me. “That the boy … that he … took advantage of the girl. Mary only killed her to protect him. Don’t you see?” His gaze pleads with me. “I’ve been hoping to meet the boy someday, but if I tell the police, he can never come back to England.” An odd, shy tenderness inflects his voice. “No matter what he’s done, he’s my son. My only son.”

  I nip his fantasy of a reunion i
n the bud. “I’m sorry, but I have bad news for you,” I say. “Lucas died in 1880.”

  His face falls. “Oh, no.”

  I remember those weeks after my father’s disappearance, when I hoped he would come back, and then my mother’s telling me he was dead, and I truly pity Mr. Cullen. Then he draws a deep breath, as if he’s shed a burden. No matter how much he wanted to meet Lucas, he’s relieved that his illegitimate son the rapist will never disrupt his cozy life. All my sympathy for him vanishes, and I see an advantage for myself.

  “So it doesn’t matter if the police know what Lucas did,” I say. “They can’t punish him.”

  “It matters to me! I don’t want my name dragged through the mud.”

  I’m unsurprised but still outraged by his attitude. “You would let an innocent man be hanged for murder, just to protect your reputation?”

  “Find another way to prove he’s innocent. Leave me out of it.” Mr. Cullen fingers his carnation, trying to mend its crushed petals.

  “You are a selfish, vain, despicable monster. You ought to be hanged!”

  “Aw, I’m not that bad.” He flashes his jovial, false-toothed smile. “When someone’s in need, I’ll give the shirt off my back. Just ask anyone around here.”

  I’m shaking with anger and my effort to contain it. “You owe me more than your filthy old shirt. You ruined my mother when you saddled her with your bastard. And Lucas grew up to be just like you, with a taste for young girls.”

  “It must be in the blood.” He actually sounds proud, a monster who fathered a monster. “Whatever he did, it’s not my fault—I didn’t bring him up.”

  “It’s all your fault!” If he’d left my mother alone, Lucas wouldn’t have been born, and Ellen Casey wouldn’t have been murdered. “I’m going to tell the police what my mother told you.”

  Mr. Cullen chuckles with sly, condescending humor. “Go ahead. I’ll deny I ever knew Mary or met you.” He gestures to his friends at the bar, who are openly, avidly watching us, regarding me with hostile gazes. “And they’ll back me up.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Two hours later, when I arrive at home, I’m still burning with anger at John Cullen. I wish I’d picked up my heavy ale glass and bashed his face, the consequences be damned.

  I find Mick lying on the chaise longue in the parlor, and after I tell him about my clash with Mr. Cullen, I say, “Barrett was right—I shouldn’t be so quick to go on investigations by myself. I should have asked him to come with me. He could have taken Mr. Cullen to the police station and made him confess that my mother told him she killed Ellen Casey.”

  “But you couldn’t’ve known who the guy were,” Mick points out. “You couldn’t’ve known he had a personal stake in protectin’ Lucas.”

  “True.” I sink onto the sofa, my anger at myself soothed a little. But my premature plans for celebrating my father’s freedom have burst like a soap bubble, and I think of him hiding at the Gladstone Arms, afraid that his additional day spent in London will increase his risk of getting arrested. “I’ll just have to find some other way to exonerate my father.”

  “Don’t worry; you will,” Mick says.

  I’m encouraged by his confidence in my abilities and luck, thankful for his companionship. “Any word on Hugh?”

  Mick sadly shakes his head. “It’s like he dropped off the face o’ the earth. Fitzmorris is still out lookin’.”

  We gaze at each other, sharing a terrible thought: what if he never comes back?

  The bell on the front door jangles. “Maybe that’s him, and he lost his key,” Mick says. We run downstairs. Mick unlocks and flings open the door. Outside stands a man wearing a beige mackintosh and black derby, his coat collar turned up and his hat brim shading his eyes so that all I clearly see of his face is his dark moustache and beard.

  “I’m sorry; the studio is closed,” I say, disappointed because he’s not Hugh.

  “Sarah Bain?” he says. “Mick O’Reilly?”

  “Who’s askin’?” Mick says, leery because our notoriety has resulted in strangers showing up at our door, eager for a gawk at us.

  “I heard you’re looking for Lord Hugh Staunton.” His accent is crisp, posh.

  My hope resurges. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “No.” Something in his tone—regret or shame?—tells me that he and Hugh were once lovers. “But I know a place where he might be.”

  * * *

  Past eleven o’clock at night, Cleveland Street in west London is a dark canyon, filled with fog and smoke, between tall buildings. A workhouse anchors one end of the block down which Mick and I walk; at the other end is a hospital. We stop across the street from a four-story brick building, the only one in the terrace with lights in the windows. I shiver in the cold, uncomfortably aware that I don’t belong here, but I couldn’t bear to wait at home while Mick went in search of Hugh. Veiled by the fog, we watch solitary men arrive on foot or in carriages. Each casts a furtive glance around the street before he pushes through the gate and knocks on the door. When the door opens, we hear muttered speech, and then he disappears into the building.

  “Our turn,” Mick says.

  We approach the door, and I pull my scarf up higher around my chin. Light shines through a peephole, and an eye scrutinizes us. I stand as tall as I can in the trousers, coat, and bowler hat I’ve donned for the occasion. It’s not the first time I’ve disguised myself as a man. I’ve fooled people in the past; I only hope I can this time. The man who answers the door is neat and bespectacled; he looks like an office clerk. He waits for us to speak.

  “Abyssinia,” Mick says, using the password Hugh’s friend gave us.

  We’re in. The room resembles a public house taproom, with men standing at the bar and sitting at tables. I expected a band, men dressed as women, and couples dancing, but this house of assignation is quiet, the conversation muted. I don’t get a good view of anyone, because while the patrons eye me, I avoid their gazes, as if that could keep them from seeing through my disguise.

  Hugh isn’t among them. I’m hoping he’s somewhere else on the premises when a youth clad in the uniform of a telegram delivery boy comes up to me.

  “How ’bout a drink?” he says.

  I’ve heard that certain delivery boys conduct business that has nothing to do with telegrams. I’m tongue-tied, far outside my realm of experience. Mick says, “Sorry, he’s mine.” He takes my arm, steers me back to the doorman, and says, “Can we get a room?”

  “Second floor, room three.”

  Mick and I climb the stairs to a passage in which all the doors are open except one, from which we hear thumps and muffled cries of pain. Mick knocks on the closed door and calls softly, “Hugh?”

  There’s no answer. I wring my hands, afraid that Hugh has given in to his self-destructive urges and taken up with someone violent. Mick shouts, “Hugh, it’s me and Sarah. Are you all right?” He twists the knob, pounds on the locked door. “Open up, or I’m bringin’ the coppers!”

  The door opens to reveal a stout, bearded, angry man. I can see the dark hair on his chest, because he’s naked except for a towel wrapped around his hips. “What the hell?”

  Mick and I push past him into the room. It’s hot from the fire in the grate, and the air reeks of male body odor. Stretched out on the bed is a slender, pale-skinned man with blond hair, a sheet covering his loins. His arms and legs are spread, his ankles and wrists tied to the bedposts. A horsewhip lies beside him. Red lash marks crisscross his chest.

  “Hugh!” I rush to him, then stop in my tracks because he’s not Hugh but a younger man, his face soft and pug-nosed.

  “What’s the fuss?” His accent is Cockney, his manner resentful. “It’s just a game.”

  Now I see his erection poking up under the sheet. Blushing hotly, I turn away, ashamed because I intruded on strangers.

  “Sorry. We’re lookin’ for Hugh Staunton. It’s an emergency, and I thought he were in here,” Mick says with more aplomb than I c
an summon. “Either of you seen him?”

  The hairy man shakes his head, but the blond says, “Yeah, I did. Can’t recall exactly when, though. On the Highgate Archway.”

  * * *

  Certain bridges in London are notorious for suicides. The Highgate Archway, in the northern part of the city, is one such bridge. Mick and I run along its top span, calling, “Hugh!”

  A train thundering along the lower span drowns our voices. The fog is so thick, the night so dark, and the lamps spaced so widely that I can’t see more than three feet in any direction. I zigzag from one side of the bridge to another. A horse drawing a carriage gallops toward me, and Mick pulls me clear of its path just in time. The driver curses at me as it passes. Mick and I traverse the entire, deserted bridge, then lean over the railing and look down.

  All we see is dark, swirling mist. How far is it to the road below? Forty, fifty, or sixty feet? Did Hugh, in his troubled state of mind, think that if he jumped off the bridge, he would escape his pain and fly into blissful oblivion?

  “Hugh!” I cry.

  CHAPTER 18

  Where the Clerkenwell House of Detention once stood, now only the high brick wall around the perimeter remains. At seven o’clock on this cold, foggy Tuesday night, Barrett, Mick, Sally, and I walk through the unguarded gate. I’m carrying my smaller, portable camera and tripod; Mick has the flashlamp and trunk of supplies. We find ourselves in a vast, open space, where tall piles of rubble look like mountain ranges on the moon. The massive dungeon, with its central octagonal structure crowned by a lookout tower, has been razed. It seems impossible that an edifice that seemed so mighty and permanent, that once contained thousands of prisoners every year, is gone.

  Mick says, “When we get home, Hugh will be there.”

  Last night, after failing to locate Hugh on the bridge or the road below, Mick and I inquired at the local police station, which had received no reports of a jumper. We checked at the nearest hospitals, where no attempted suicides had been admitted, then went home at dawn. Fitzmorris had just returned, in despair because he’d found no trace of Hugh.