The Kingdom of Bones (15 page)

TWENTY-ONE

A
t around two-thirty on a cold winter’s morning, Tom Sayers woke for no reason. It was probably too cold to rise but he threw back the covers and rose anyway, hoping to shake off his melancholy frame of mind and then, after a look at the moon and a few minutes of night and silence, to return to the warmth of his bed and find sleep again.

He was in a temperance hotel, the General Gordon, which stood on a corner of one of the main streets in Spitalfields. When he looked out of his second-floor window it was through the gilded wooden “A” of the hotel’s name, the letters of which ran the full width of the building’s frontage. He was registered here as John Thurloe, a cabinetmaker seeking employment. He’d inquired about a room to let, and been offered “a part of a room”—which, he soon discovered, meant that he had it to himself but had to vacate it by seven in the morning, whereupon the bed would be taken by a young woman who worked all night in a bakery. At seven in the evening, she would leave for her work and the room would be his to return to.

There was no moon. Just a dense, dark cloud pressing low over the roofs of the houses. Any lower, and it would descend into the streets and become a fog. These were mean houses, row after row of them: the City of Dreadful Monotony, London’s East End.

Stoker had been cautious toward Sayers that night in the theater, but had not betrayed him. Three hours of suspense had ended in relief. Sayers would not have been surprised to see the acting manager return with the police instead of a basket containing half a loaf, a decent slice of ham, and six hot potatoes wrapped up in a napkin.

In between gorging on the food and washing it down with beer, Sayers had told his story. He later learned that Bram Stoker did not simply take him at his word, but over the next few days found ways to raise his name in conversation with a number of people they might have in common. Music hall managers, players, booking agents…none had any special knowledge that enabled them to declare Sayers innocent, but all, without exception, had expressed astonishment at his apparent guilt.

It was no public trial, but coupled with what Stoker had seen of James Caspar on the railway platform in the Midlands that night, it had supported the fugitive’s story and tipped the balance in his character’s favor. Staggering, insensible, disgrace-bringing, blood-puking Caspar…Sayers could see that Stoker’s was a world of little shading, where those who stayed true were all pure, and those who’d been tainted were damned.

Thank the Lord.

As Sayers had expected, the death of Caspar had been added onto his own list of crimes. There were those who would add him to the suspects’ list for the recent string of slaughtered East End whores as well, despite the fact that he’d been begging food and shivering in the hedgerows of Oxfordshire at the time of their murders.

He could have found somewhere safer than this to hide, but he’d tried in vain to find anywhere in London that was cheaper. Stoker had let him take clothing from the Lyceum’s stock and had given him money to help prevent him from starving, but he could hardly expect the Irishman to keep him like a dependent. He’d gone along to his Brixton house quite early one Sunday morning, but had found new tenants in residence—his lease had been paid to the middle of the year, but it seemed that in the light of his supposed crimes the landlord felt no duty to honor it.

This was but one small injustice heaped on with all the others, and yet it was the one that he seemed to feel most bitterly.

Down in the street outside the temperance hotel, a police patrol was going by. Patrols in the East End had been stepped up since the White-chapel murders, although there was a rumor—one among many—that the killer was known to the police and had drowned himself. Sayers turned from the window and climbed back into bed. As usual, he tried not to think about the sheets. On the two-relay system, they went unchanged. And this was a comparatively respectable house; at the lowest end of the scale there were lodgings on a three-relay system where not only did the occupants change every eight hours, but the spaces underneath the beds were let in exactly the same manner.

He shuddered, and put his face under the covers, and then slowly started to warm by his own breath as its heat filled the space in which he lay. He was to meet Stoker later that day, in the time between the acting manager’s early Lyceum business and the hour or two he spent at home before the evening’s performance. Stoker had something of interest for him to hear, the message had read. Sayers faced a long walk from the East End into the middle of town, but it would use up his morning and save him some money. He had no idea how long his funds would last, or what new turn his life would take. Something had to happen. Things had to change somehow.

For this life that he had now…what was it? Without home, without love, without friends—without even the name he’d been born with. This was no life at all.

Early in the afternoon, by the iron railings that ran before the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Sayers waited for Stoker to appear. He arrived on foot a little after 2:15, as big as a bear and full of apology. Sayers was nervous, and tried not to show it.

“Come,” Stoker said, using their handshake to pass him a square of pasteboard as they started toward the entrance steps. “Take this and show it as your own. It’s a copy of mine. I had our property man make it. I wrote in a name for you myself.”

It was a reader’s ticket, required to enter the library. They went in through the museum to the open courtyard at the heart of the building wherein the circular reading room stood. Stoker was recognized, and did not need to show his own ticket. And because he was with Stoker, Sayers’ forgery was passed without a close inspection.

It was a vast, airy dome of a room, almost as wide and high as Rome’s great Pantheon, the readers’ desks radiating outward from a central counter like the spokes of a cartwheel. As Sayers followed Stoker, he saw that every position at the long desks was numbered.

In some of them sat old men who looked as if they’d been cobwebbed into place. Here was a young, intense student, leafing fervently through a high pile of journals; there a ginger man of great girth, breathing noisily as he read. At some seats the books were piled high, but with no reader present.

Sayers could only wonder what it was that Stoker had brought him here to see. They’d walked half the circumference of the room before he cut inward and led the way to a spot where one scholar worked alone.

Keeping his voice suitably low, Stoker said, “May I present my good friend, Mister Hall Caine.”

The man looked up at Stoker, and then at Sayers. He was a man of some thirty-five years, balding like Shakespeare, bearded like Christ. He nodded, and Sayers offered his hand. The grip that returned his was limp, and slightly damp.

Stoker said, “Caine knows only as much of your story as is necessary. For the rest of it, he trusts to my honor as I am trusting to yours.” He signaled for Sayers to draw in a chair from an unoccupied carrel, and reached for one himself.

Hall Caine said, “I have some thoughts I can offer you. I know that Bram will not endorse them all.”

“Spin your tale, old friend,” Stoker said. “Let us judge it for ourselves.”

Sayers knew of Caine by name, but had read nothing of his writing. Stoker’s novelist friend had been making notes on unlined paper, in a hand so small that Sayers hardly believed that even its author could read it. He’d been working back and forth through a stack of volumes of various ages. Most had places in them marked by call slips.

He closed and moved aside the book he’d been consulting and then, running his finger down the lines that he’d written, read aloud, “Cartaphilus. Ahasuerus. Salathiel.” He looked at Sayers. “You say these were the words of a dying man?”

“As I heard them.”

Caine reached for another of the volumes and opened it, first at one marked page and then another.

“Over recent months,” he said, “Bram and I have spent time and energy and some imagination in an effort to fit Irving with a part. Most of our subjects have dealt with the supernatural. The Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the Demon Lover…these are themes around which our imagination has constantly revolved. The words you heard from Caspar are all names used by the Wanderer.”

Sayers must have been looking blank.

“A man who trades his soul for prolonged life and forbidden knowledge,” Stoker said.

By now, Caine had found the passage he was looking for. He said, “In the earliest form of the legend, Cartaphilus insulted Our Lord on the way to Calvary and was doomed to wander until Judgment Day. But in later versions, he is shown as a man who has entered into an unholy contract for extended life and fortune. He bore the name of Ahasuerus in Hamburg in 1547. Salathiel came later. Close to seventy years ago, the Dublin cleric Charles Maturin recorded the story of Melmoth the Wanderer.”

Sayers, ever a man of practical mind, said, “Perhaps that’s the explanation for your legend, then. There’s no one man living through all eternity. The role has a different player in every age.”

“That may be closer to the truth than you think, Mister Sayers,” Caine said, and turned the book for him to see. The page carried an engraving of an elderly man, leaning on a staff as he made his way past the crucified Christ in a deep canyon under a stormy sky. Christ looked down, the old man looked up at him; no love appeared to be lost between the two of them.

Caine said, “The Spanish call him Juan Espera en Dios, John who waits for God. He was reported seen in Paris in 1644, in Newcastle in 1790. In fact, there are sightings of the Wanderer going back to 1228. But the names often differ, and the descriptions sometimes change. In Melmoth, we find a possible explanation. There is an escape clause in the demonic contract. If the Wanderer can recruit another to take his place before his long life reaches its end, then he can avoid his fate. All men eventually die, while the role of the Wanderer becomes truly eternal.”

“Take his place?” Sayers said. “How?”

“By assuming the Wanderer’s burden of certain damnation.”

Stoker was less than happy with the direction this was taking.

“Melmoth’s a fiction,” he said.

“All fictions have their originals.”

“And are told through devices. Demons through trapdoors, and contracts in blood. Stuff for the pit and the gallery.”

“And what are such devices,” Caine pressed on, “but outward symbols for a life within? Consider it, Bram. To turn knowingly from the face of God. To hurl oneself into the darkness and certain damnation. Would such an act not create the kind of delinquent soul the tales describe?”

“Embrace damnation?” Stoker echoed. “Willingly? For what conceivable reason?”

“Advantage. Defiance. Self-hatred. Each heart has its own.”

“No,” said Stoker. “No one man can live forever.”

“No one man is required to,” said Caine. “That is my point.”

As the two friends’ disagreement had increased in passion, it had also begun to increase in volume. They were now attracting attention, and none of it was friendly.

Sayers rose to his feet.

“I am grateful to you, sir,” he said, inclining his head toward Hall Caine in acknowledgment of his researches.

“Have I brought you some illumination?”

“I very much fear that you may have.”

Out in the city garden at the heart of nearby Bedford Square, Sayers strode about with such nervous energy that Stoker was hard-pressed to keep up with him. He took no specific path, walked with no specific purpose. The agitation was all, and it threw him this way and that like a dancing flame.

“Something moves in me, Bram,” he said. “It made sense to me. I can imagine it. To dismiss God’s will, and be rewarded for it. What a gift it must seem at the beginning. What a curse it must be in the end.”

“This wasn’t the kind of enlightenment I had in mind,” Stoker said. “Caspar’s was a natural evil, Tom. The rest is mere fancy.”

“Not Caspar, Bram, although I’ve no doubt that he’d have taken over his master’s contract once his education was complete.” He stopped and turned to Stoker.

“Edmund Whitlock’s powers are fading,” he said. “Many have noted it, and Gulliford claimed he was ill. I think it’s more than that. I think he is a dying man, and knows it.”

“And?”

Sayers took a step closer to Stoker, seizing him by both his arms and shaking him once as if to make his point.

“Can’t you see?” he said. “It’s Whitlock!
Whitlock
is the demon! And into that devil’s hands I’ve delivered Louise!”