Carver's Quest (19 page)

Adam took the opportunity to examine the humble surrounds of the reverend’s domain. There was little to see. The walls of the Tabernacle were whitewashed and so too was the ceiling.
Several rows of cheap wooden chairs stood in the centre. At the far end of the room was a long table. He felt the need to make some comment on the bare chapel but could think of nothing to say.

‘Your altar, I presume,’ he said at last, nodding in the direction of the table. It was the wrong remark to make.

‘Indeed not, sir.’ Dwight sounded deeply insulted. ‘An altar is an example of Romish mumbo-jumbo. I will not have one here in my holy Tabernacle.’ He cast his eyes
heavenwards, perhaps, Adam thought, in search of any further popish practices hiding in the upper part of his chapel. ‘That is our table of communion.’

Adam was unsure of the distinction between an altar and a table of communion but he chose to say no more on the matter. Instead, he launched himself immediately on the subject of his visit.
‘I believe you know Mr Jinkinson, Reverend.’

Dwight allowed his eyes to roam around the confines of the building, as though the answer to Adam’s question might be lurking in a corner of the room for him to discover. He seemed to be
debating with himself whether or not to make any reply. The appearance of a stranger dressed in tattered fustian and yet speaking in the accents of the educated classes clearly puzzled him. He was
curious to learn what Adam wanted but reluctant to commit himself too far by admitting too great an acquaintance with Jinkinson.

‘I think I may have run across the gentleman in question from time to time,’ he said cautiously, after a lengthy pause.

‘He is one of your…’ Adam wondered what the correct word might be. ‘One of your flock.’

‘Most certainly he is not, sir.’ The reverend was swift to deny any pastoral connection with the missing man. ‘Jinkinson is nothing but a blackguard and a rogue.’

‘So you do know him.’

Dwight realised that he had now said too much to continue quibbling over the extent of his familiarity with the missing man. He bowed his head to indicate that, although it pained him to
acknowledge it, he did indeed know Jinkinson.

‘Do you have any notion, Reverend Dwight, where Mr Jinkinson might be? His friends have not seen him for several days.’

Dwight made no reply. Instead, he waved his arm towards a long, wooden instrument with a glass front, which was hanging on the right-hand wall of his chapel.

‘Over there is what I call my spiritual barometer, Mr Carver. Come, let me show you how it works.’

Adam could see some kind of dial covered with writing on its front. He followed his host as the clergyman pushed past one of the rows of chairs and made his way towards the wall.

‘When the pointer is directed to the right,’ the reverend gentleman began to explain, ‘it is moving towards glory of the spirit and contempt for carnal lusts. When it is in the
middle, it indicates a soul in a state of spiritual indifference. When it travels towards the left…’ Here Dwight heaved another of his unctuous sighs. ‘It moves through all the
stages of damnation.’

As the two men approached the spiritual barometer more closely, Adam could see some of the gradations on the left. Minus thirty – ‘Visits to the theatre and the pleasure
gardens’; minus forty – ‘Parties of pleasure and drunkenness on the Lord’s Day’. Minus seventy, which seemed to be the lowest point to which a lost soul could sink,
was simply marked ‘Perdition’.

Dwight paused for a moment. Adam wondered if perhaps he was about to tap the spiritual barometer as he might a more conventional instrument before taking its reading. But the minister merely
peered briefly at the dial before carrying on.

‘By my reckoning, Jinkinson has reached minus fifty-five, Mr Carver, and is heading ever downwards. Ever downwards. He is an ancient reprobate. When a soul is so lost, it matters not where
its physical vessel might be.’

‘So I would be right in thinking that you have no notion of his present whereabouts?’

‘For all I know, he may have departed this transitory scene. If he left with his sins still fresh upon him, I tremble for his immortal soul.’

Dwight did not look as if he was trembling. If anything, Adam thought, he seemed rather stimulated by the thought of Jinkinson’s possible damnation.

‘But when did you last see him, Reverend?’

‘In his unrepentant flesh? The day before yesterday. He came with a young woman.’

‘With a young woman?’

‘The old recreant must have added Lust to Gluttony and Sloth in his list of deadly sins. Like the women we saw at the door just now, she was a harlot.’

‘Why did he come here, Reverend? Why should he wish to parade his sins before you?’

‘He came first to the Tabernacle some months ago. In a state of inebriation.’ Dwight twisted his face into an expression of distaste. ‘He wanted to join our congregation. I
told him to return when the light of reason had once more been lit within the darkness of his soul.’

‘And did he come back when he was sober?’

‘He did. And in a moment of weakness brought on by an overabundance of God’s celestial charity, I allowed him to attend our services.’

‘And that was a mistake?’

Dwight made no reply. He returned instead to his spiritual barometer and stared fixedly at it, as if in hope of discovering an answer to the question. Adam began to wonder whether or not the
reverend had quite forgotten him.

‘The Lord demands that we should strive to ignore as much as possible the concerns of our all too perishable flesh,’ Dwight said eventually. ‘Jinkinson did no such striving.
The man was an indurate and incorrigible sinner.’

Were we not, Adam asked himself, all sinners? And was the object of religion not to redeem us from our sins and their consequences? Did missions such as this one not exist to save sinners from
themselves and accept them into fellowship? Yet the Reverend Dwight appeared to have other ideas about the purpose of his Tabernacle.

‘Would I be correct in assuming,’ Adam asked, ‘that it was Mr Jinkinson’s drinking to which you most objected, Reverend?’

From the evidence of his own words and the writing on his spiritual barometer, there seemed little doubt that the minister had a particular animus against alcohol.

‘Strong liquor makes woeful wrecks of men, sir. Ay, and of women, too.’ Fine words, it seemed, rarely deserted Dwight. Perhaps, Adam speculated, they were present even when careful
thought was not immediately forthcoming. The minister was now well launched on the waves of his own oratory.

‘Oh! Thou invisible spirit of drink,’ he roared at Adam, gazing at the young man as though he might be the power he was addressing, ‘if thou hast no other name to go by, let us
call thee Devil.’

Adam prepared himself to endure more blasts of the reverend’s rhetoric but Dwight turned abruptly on his heel and marched towards a door to the left of what he had called his communion
table.

‘I shall be with you again shortly,’ he bellowed over his shoulder as he pulled open the door and disappeared through it.

Waiting for Dwight to return, Adam examined the prints that were hanging on the wall opposite the spiritual barometer. Most were illustrative of the dangers of strong drink. A woman sank to the
floor holding her brow as a bearded gentleman with a glint in his eye drank furiously from a bottle. Small children clutched the legs of their father in fruitless efforts to keep him from entering
a public house. The same father expired in a garret room stripped bare of furniture as wife and children wept in the corner. Death and degradation, it seemed, were the inevitable fates awaiting
those who took too great an interest in the delights to be found in a bottle of gin.

The minister had now re-emerged from whatever back room he had visited. He hastened towards Adam, clutching a bundle of papers in his hands, and thrust them towards him.

‘You will find these of interest, Mr Carver. Would that that scapegrace Jinkinson had taken the trouble to read them.’

Without thinking, Adam took what Dwight was offering him. It was a pile of perhaps half a dozen small pamphlets.

‘Several small disquisitions I have written on the workings of grace,’ the reverend gentleman said, a modest pride in authorship evident in his voice. ‘Privately printed, of
course. But I believe that reading them may help a man take his first uncertain footsteps on the path towards salvation.’

‘You are very kind, reverend.’ Adam could see no option but to take the booklets. He squinted at one of the titles. ‘What We Must Do To Be Saved,’ it read. ‘I shall
lose no time in perusing them.’ He tucked the minister’s literature awkwardly under one arm. ‘But can you tell me no more about the man Jinkinson?’

‘I have told you all I know, sir. The sinner came here. I showed him the light of the Lord. He turned his back upon that light and retreated once more into the darkness. There is no more
to be said.’

Adam fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘Perhaps I can leave you something in return.’ He held out his card to Dwight, one of several he had hidden in the darker recesses of Quint’s
fustian suit before leaving Doughty Street. Dwight took it and turned it over in his hand, as if he had never before seen a calling card and was unsure what it might be.

‘One further question, reverend, and then I shall leave you in peace. Does the word “Euphorion” mean anything to you?’

‘Euphorion?’ Dwight was still twisting the card in his hand. ‘That is Greek, surely?’

‘A Greek name, I think. Perhaps a poet.’

‘I fear my knowledge of Greek is limited, Mr Carver. So, too, is my knowledge of poetry. I have no time to think of dactyls and spondees when unhappy souls come daily to the door of my
Tabernacle in search of spiritual nourishment.’

‘Of course not. I quite understand that you are a busy man, Reverend. I must apologise for taking up so much of your Sunday afternoon.’

Adam, reaching up to doff his hat to Dwight in farewell, remembered at the last moment that he was bare-headed and transformed his movement into an awkward salute. The minister bowed his head
slightly in response. Adam turned and made his way out of the Tabernacle of the All-Conquering Saviour and into Whitecross Street. It had not, he thought, been a particularly successful visit. He
was little more knowledgeable about Jinkinson’s whereabouts than he had been earlier in the day. It was time to make his way back to Doughty Street.

* * * * *

‘What’s the ’oly roller got to say for himself, then?’ Quint asked, as he ushered his master into the sitting room.

‘Nothing very illuminating. He knows Jinkinson and disapproves of him heartily. But he doesn’t know where he is. He believes him to be an awful example of the destructive powers of
the demon drink. The Reverend Dwight has a strong objection to the demon drink.’

Quint grunted and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Another of them interfering bastards as wants to snatch the working man’s beer out of his hands, then.’ He spoke as if the
interfering bastards might be hiding behind the furniture in the rooms, waiting to leap out and seize his tankard. ‘I hate ’em.’

‘Probably. But he is firmly of the belief that he is doing work the Lord has called him to do.’

‘I particularly ’ate the buggers as reckons they’ve got Gawd Almighty on their side.’

‘Certainly Dwight seems to assume a high degree of intimacy with the Lord of Hosts. Like the Prince of Preachers, Mr Spurgeon, he has the habit of addressing Him as if He were sitting at
the back of the meeting room and cheering his every word.’

Quint decided there was no more to be said of the Reverend Dwight. Instead, he handed Adam a letter and a telegram. ‘This ’ere missive come with the one o’clock post,’ he
said as the two men walked into the sitting room.

‘What about the telegram?’

‘The boy brought it about ’alf an hour since. ’E was wanting to wait for a reply but I told ’im you wasn’t around.’

Adam picked up a brass letter opener in the shape of a miniature sabre from his desk and slit open the letter. He began to read it.

‘This is from the stunner who visited us the other week, Quint. And left us so abruptly.’ Adam read on in silence for but a moment. ‘This is extraordinary! She wants to meet me
again: “… affairs to discuss of consequence for both of us.” And – even more extraordinary – she is suggesting that we meet in Cremorne Gardens.’ Adam waved the
letter in front of Quint’s nose.

‘It’s signed “Emily Maitland”. Which I thought at the time was a curious name for a lady who was so obviously from the Continent.’

Quint only grunted in reply, as if both her suggestion of a meeting place and the name she was choosing to adopt merely confirmed suspicions he had held of the woman from the moment he had
opened the door to her.

‘Cremorne Gardens, though!’ Adam looked at the letter again, half expecting to see that he had misread the name of the place where Miss Maitland was proposing to meet him.
‘Does she not know the place? A single lady arranging to meet a single gentleman by the dancing platform at Cremorne Gardens. Does she have no care for her reputation?’

‘Maybe she ain’t got none.’

Adam ignored Quint’s comment.

‘Perhaps, as a visitor from abroad, she has no notion of the impropriety of meeting a gentleman alone in such a place.’

‘Who can tell wiv a foreigner?’ Quint said. It was very clear that the unfathomable ways of those unfortunate enough not to be English held little interest for the manservant.

‘I shall accept her invitation, unconventional though it is. The letter has come from Brown’s Hotel, which is presumably where she is staying. I shall write back to her there and
agree to meet her as she requests.’

‘What about the telegram?’

‘Ah, I had almost forgot it.’

Adam unfolded the telegram the boy had delivered. Its wording was as laconic as such messages tended to be. He showed it to Quint: ‘New developments Creech killing. Request immediate
attendance Room 311 Scotland Yard. Pulverbatch.’

‘The detectives at the Yard keepeth not the Sabbath day, I see,’ Adam said.