Interviewing the Dead

by David Field

  ‘Rupert Ambrose,’ came the reply.

  ‘Rupert Ambrose, news editor of the Guardian Post,’ Adelaide announced as she found the card and held it up.

  The buzz of audience excitement grew louder and more expectant as one by one all those who claimed to have seen the ghost were identified. When it came to the final one, instead of requesting his name, Carlyle briefly consulted Adelaide, took the final card from her, held it high in the air and looked down at the only man left standing.

  ‘You, sir, are Ralph Eddington, of the Middlesex Courier, are you not?’

  The man called out his confirmation, then sat down heavily.

  Carlyle lifted his eyes to the remainder of the large and excitedly chattering audience. ‘First of all, is there anyone else who believes that the ghost of Archbishop Becket put in an appearance this evening?’ He nodded through the silence that suddenly descended. ‘You may be wondering how I was able to accurately identify those who had seen the ghost and if you would indulge me for a moment longer, I will explain.’

  He didn’t need to explain to Matthew, whose face broke out in a wide grin as he remembered the fruit cake and thanked God that Adelaide had prevented him from snaffling a piece of it. He also knew why, as Carlyle was in the process of confirming to his avid audience.

  ‘The gentlemen who saw the ghost had previously exchanged a red card sent to them with their invitations this evening for a slice of cake cunningly baked by my daughter. No-one else, you will note carefully. Only those who consumed a slice of my daughter’s cake went on to see the ghost. The reason for that was a very special ingredient baked into the cake. I will not identify it, since it is an illegal substance, but it is one that induces visions in those who consume it. On this occasion a vision of Archbishop Becket and no-one else. And why Becket? Because they had been preconditioned to expect it in the address given only minutes earlier by Mr West.’

  ‘You blaggard!’ shouted a sub-editor of the Daily Chronicle. ‘You drugged us!’

  ‘But all in a good cause,’ Carlyle argued. ‘You see, my researches revealed that this otherwise harmless substance had been slipped in the beer of every person who subsequently saw a horrible vision of a plague victim. This was my way of demonstrating to the entire community, via the good offices of your newspapers, that the returning dead from the plague pit were a cheap and vicious illusion, perpetrated by a man who is now dead. And how did the victims of this cruel imposition all finish up seeing what they took to be a returning plague victim seeking to wreak vengeance of them? They had been preconditioned to see it by the shallow lies of a charlatan posing as a psychic medium who has been exposed and removed from circulation. We have, between us, exposed the entire conspiracy and brought the reign of terror to an end.’

  ‘You expect us to publish the fact that we were the victims of a cheap conjuring trick?’ demanded one newspaper man.

  Carlyle gave him the benefit of a wry smile. ‘A matter for you, obviously, but no doubt your rivals in the trade — particularly those whose representatives here this evening saw nothing — will be only too delighted to cover the story for you, on their front pages. And what were you guilty of, other than graciously accepting the gift of a slice of fruit cake?’

  ‘What about the man responsible for those plague pit abominations?’ demanded another reporter. ‘Can you assure us that he’s dead?’

  ‘Of course,’ Carlyle said. ‘If he wasn’t dead when Inspector Jennings brought his body to my mortuary, he certainly was by the time I’d opened up his skull and found a large hole in his brain.’

  ‘And how did he come by that?’ the same man demanded, and Matthew’s heart leaped into his mouth as he anticipated being exposed yet again as a preacher who had taken the life of another man. But he need not have worried.

  ‘I’m not allowed to disclose that,’ Carlyle replied and fortunately the debate moved on to another topic.

  ‘Is this drug freely available in London?’ someone yelled from a seat further down the hall.

  Jennings stepped forward to the voice box. ‘It was, until my officers took the only remaining supply. Where do you think we got the stuff that was in the fruit cake?’

  ‘What was it, precisely?’ a newspaperman asked.

  Carlyle replaced Jennings at the voice box, and revealed, ‘It comes from an exotic plant growing deep in the south of America. I can say no more than that, except to warn everyone present this evening against even thinking about trying to locate another supply. Quite apart from risking very unpleasant dreams, you’d also be inviting a lengthy prison term. And now I think that concludes the proceedings for this evening.’

  ‘How much did the preacher know?’ called out a young man who Matthew recognised as Timothy Washbourne, who must have accompanied his senior colleague to the event, but who had not been among those consuming the fruit cake. But occasionally vengeance was available to more than the Lord and Matthew stepped back to the voice box and pointed to the questioner.

  ‘More than I was letting on to you when you sneaked yourself into my house by deceiving my sister. This is Timothy Washbourne from the Herald, ladies and gentlemen. He is the living definition of what we choose to call “the gutter press” and if he ever approaches you for a news story, beware of the blatant lies he’ll tell about you. To answer your question this time, Mr Washbourne, I became aware of certain links between plague pit manifestations and a few selected public houses and passed this information on to Doctor Carlyle. It was he who did the painstaking research, assisted as ever by his charming and highly talented daughter. Not for the first time we are reminded that women are held back in this society of ours and without her invaluable contribution we would still be cowering in fear behind locked doors. Good night everyone and thank you for your attendance.’

  19

  ‘You were lucky not to be prosecuted,’ Matthew said as he drank his tea under the gloating smile of Carlyle a week later, as they sat around the mortuary table in the basement of the London Hospital. They were there to read the letter of commendation from the police commissioner brought down by Inspector Jennings, before it was framed and hung in the mortuary. ‘You slipped an unlawful and poisonous drug into the fruit cake of unsuspecting consumers, who went on to hallucinate,’ he pointed out.

  ‘It was I who baked the cake,’ Adelaide reminded him. ‘As you grudgingly announced to your audience, without my baking skills we would have succeeded in demonstrating nothing except your capacity to wheeze on like a steam boiler past its best.’

  ‘As a matter of interest,’ Carlyle said, ‘how easily did it suspend in the fruit mixture?’

  Adelaide said, ‘It took a lot of heavy whisking, but I just pretended that I was working on the face of that obnoxious church minister who Mother always claimed was a saintly man. His facial expression may have been saintly, but according to several of the young girls in the choir his hands were dedicated to other purposes.’

  ‘You had experience of working on the face of a clergyman, of course,’ Matthew grinned, pointing to the purple staining still visible in his healing scars.

  Adelaide replied with mock severity, ‘Had your hands wandered, believe me they would have been cut off.’

  ‘As to the risk of prosecution,’ Carlyle added in answer to Matthew’s original point, ‘we took the precaution of obtaining the police commissioner’s authority for the entire ruse. John here was most persuasive.’

  Jennings blushed slightly, but shook his head. ‘I merely reminded him of our failure to convince the public that “The Ripper” was no more, leading to ongoing fear that he was still among us. We still get suspicious enquiries from newspaper reporters looking for a sensational story and every time a prostitute gets herself croaked some loudmouth remembers the man with the knives. There’s still a popular theory that he was a medical man who went to ground and is still in practice somewhere here in London,’ he added with a cheeky grin at Carlyle, who wagged an admonitory finger at him.

  ‘I
’ve heard that rumour too, along with the equally virulent belief that a surgeon in this very hospital has been known to attack senior police officers, drug them, then administer enemas to them while they’re unconscious.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jennings continued as he choked with laughter, ‘the commissioner was easily persuaded that this particular wave of fear required to be suppressed without any remaining doubt. And I still retain my job; in fact there have been hints of a possible promotion in the offing.’

  ‘I kept my job also,’ Matthew reminded them, ‘which must be accounted another of the Lord’s miracles on this earth. Although my only likely promotion will be to Heaven, at the end of my life’s work. Still, there’s satisfaction of sorts from standing on street corners collecting verbal abuse from passing drunks.’

  ‘So I have to sweep my own floors?’ Adelaide asked with a sardonic smile. ‘Any time you feel inspired, just let me know.’

  ‘Do your superiors not regard you as a modern day Saint Paul the Evangelist?’ Carlyle asked as he lit a cigar.

  Matthew shook his head. ‘They regard me as an even more “turbulent priest” than Saint Thomas Becket and I’m sure that my superintendent would have been delighted to show me the door. But for once the newspapers were my friend and that dreadful Timothy Washbourne apologised in his own way by writing a special feature on “The preacher who stood up against evil”. I’m sure he only did it in order to keep well in with my sister, but it seems to have done the trick and the numbers attending my Bible classes at the Mission have reached new levels. Which reminds me that I must be going.’

  He rose and walked to the door, followed by Adelaide, who laid a cool hand on his wrist.

  ‘Aren’t you staying for some fruitcake?’ she asked.

  Matthew smiled. ‘No thank you, and it’ll be a long while before I’ll feel safe taking afternoon tea in your house.’

  ‘You’d need to be invited first,’ she reminded him. ‘Shall we say next Wednesday at three o’clock?’

  ***

  Want more adventures in Victorian London? Read Death Comes But Twice — Book Two in the Carlyle & West Victorian mystery series.

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  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for investing your time and money in reading this first novel in a new series, and I hope that you feel encouraged to read the remainder when they are released. As usual, I was able to draw on a good deal of historical fact from the period it covers.

  First, a note on the background component of ‘Spiritualism’ and its ongoing popularity even during a decade that saw many of the scientific and technological advances for which the late Victorian era remains famous. There was, interestingly, a close connection between scientific investigation and the possibility of looking beyond the veil of death into the ‘hereafter’. The entire Spiritualist movement was born out of a fascination with the potential of the human brain, after ‘Mentalist’ pioneer Franz Mesmer began to identify a subconscious force inside peoples’ heads. First known as ‘Mesmerism’ and later ‘hypnotism’, the power to induce a trance-like state led to the force thereby unleashed being called ‘animal magnetism’. When, a generation later, the Fox sisters in America began to produce their allegedly ghostly ‘knockings’, imagination ran riot and a fascination with communication with the dead took flight.

  Unfortunately, it proved to be fertile ground for many charlatans and fake mediums, such as the Sarah Gibbons of this novel. Their parlour performances and cheap conjuring tricks became legendary, including the hook under the table described in this story. Scientists began to fight back by exposing these frauds, and among the most determined were the members of the Society for Psychic Research, one of whom was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  If you detected a distinct similarity between the character of Dr James Carlyle and Conan Doyle’s famous fictional character Sherlock Holmes, it is hardly surprising. When Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh University, he fell under the spell of a Doctor Joseph Bell, and gave his character Holmes the same penchant for careful observation and logical deduction that Bell had demonstrated to his students. It was no great stretch of the imagination to reason that an entire generation of medical men would have received the same training from this very real medical pioneer, and thus Doctor James Carlyle was born.

  The other main character in this new series was also typical of his time. There were many itinerant preachers like the main character Matthew West, seeking to bring both spiritual and material comfort to the poverty-stricken residents living in the slums in the East End of London. The East End Mission in Cable Street, Shadwell, really existed, as did the Charity Organisation Society. The ‘Old Nichol’ also existed, one of the black spots in an area of London already infamous for its slums, squalor and crime. I was able to revive, within the pages of this novel, some of the horrors of living within that pestilential quarter that I have featured in more detail in an earlier novel, The Slum Reaper. It was the newly formed Greater London Council that finally brought the old slums crashing down about the ears of the other inhabitants of Bethnal Green, to be replaced by ‘The Boundary Estate’ that still exists as a monument to early public housing.

  The reference to the efforts of the early feminist pioneer Margaret Mansfield to win a seat on the London County Council was also based on historical fact, as was the disgraceful subsequent overruling of her election by the courts. We cannot blame a feisty heroin like Adelaide from having another go, and she will wave her war banner through the second novel in this series, Death Comes But Twice.

  So how much of this story is fictional? There obviously never was a terrified belief that the dead were about to rise from the plague pit at Aldgate, although it is a matter of record that such a pit was created in the northern portion of the churchyard of St Botolph’s and it was referred to by Daniel Defoe in his writings. It then became a matter of urban myth that the pit was desecrated in the 1870s, when an extension to Aldgate was being dug by the rapidly expanding Metropolitan Underground Railway. And an ‘urban myth’ is all that a novelist like me requires to set the imaginative juices flowing.

  ‘Peyote’? Yes, it definitely existed, and like all other available drugs at the time was likely to have found an illicit market among the relief seekers of the East End of London, with their ready access to the London Docks. The medical properties of Peyote are indeed hallucinogenic and it is a natural source of what became better known as ‘Mescaline’.

  Likewise the ‘Elephant Man’, the tragically deformed Joseph Merrick, who died in 1890 after having been given merciful sanctuary inside a special room in the London Hospital, which of course also existed. The story of Saint Thomas Becket’s ghost having demolished a wall under construction inside the Tower of London is one told daily to tourists visiting the Tower even today, although like the other ghosts of the Tower it may well owe more to the former London Tourist Board than to reality.

  With all these true facts available to me, I was able to concentrate on developing the main characters of this first novel in the series. I hope you will be eager to meet them again and see how Matthew West fares in his desire to become better acquainted with Adelaide Carlyle, while her father makes further use of Mathew’s familiarity with the seedier side of the East End.

  I would welcome any feedback and support that you, the reader, can supply. You can, of course, write a review on Amazon or Goodreads or you can contact me online via my Facebook page: DavidFieldAuthor. I’m more than happy to respond to observations, reviews, questions, or anything else that occurs to you, or to join in any ‘thread’ that you care to begin.

  I look forward to getting to know you better online.

  David

  davidfieldauthor.com

  MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD

  The Carlyle and West Victorian Mystery Se
ries:

  Death Comes But Twice

  Esther & Jack Enright Series:

  The Gaslight Stalker

  The Night Caller

  The Prodigal Sister

  The Slum Reaper

  The Posing Playwright

  The Mercy Killings

  The Jubilee Plot

  The Lost Boys

  The Tudor Saga Series:

  Tudor Dawn

  The King's Commoner

  Justice For The Cardinal

  An Uneasy Crown

  The Queen In Waiting

  The Heart of a King

  Published by Sapere Books.

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  Copyright © David Field, 2020

  David Field has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are purely coincidental.

  eBook ISBN: 9781913518707