The Kingdom of Bones (17 page)

TWENTY-THREE

I
n sixteen acres of Southeast London’s Forest Hill stood Surrey House, the residence of Quaker tea trader Frederick Horniman. Originally the family home, it had come to hold so many objects, books, and pictures gathered in the course of Horniman’s travels that a few months ago he’d thrown a part of it open to the public, by appointment, so that anyone with sufficient interest could come in and view his collections.

Sayers and Stoker were met at the gate by a man with a strong-looking frame and a starved-looking face. He wore a brown velveteen coat, and Stoker introduced him by the name of Samuel Liddell Mathers.

“You’ve the hand of a boxer!” Mathers said as they shook, and Sayers gave Stoker an uneasy glance. “I box every evening myself,” Mathers added.

Stoker returned the look with a slight shrug and a raise of the eyebrows, as if to say, I told him no such thing.

They walked up the circular driveway to the square-set, ivy-covered house. It was shabby and rambling and comfortable. Mathers led them around to a side entrance, where he produced a key to let them in. The house was mostly dark, and the furniture sheeted—the Horniman family was not at home. The two men followed their guide through the kitchens to a door that opened onto a stairway, which in turn led down into the cellars. The house had electric lighting but the cellar did not, and he stopped to light a lantern before carrying it ahead of them to show the way.

As they descended, he said, “The place is full to bursting point. This is where they keep the pictures no one cares to see.”

Sayers said, “Do we have permission to be here?”

“I’m a friend of the daughter. We both belong to a little order of Christian kabbalists. Bram picks our brains every now and again, but he refuses to join us. Don’t you, Bram?”

Stoker, at the rear of the party, said, “You know my interests have been entirely academic.”

“Really,” Mathers said. “This might end your sense of detachment.” Whereupon, he winked at Sayers.

He had Stoker hold the lantern while he looked through a stack of unframed pictures that were being stored side-on. He knew what he was looking for, and it took him a while to find it. Finally, he drew one of them out. It was mounted in cards and protected by a large sheet of paper that he lifted and flipped back.

The picture was a head-and-shoulders sketch in charcoal and oils, possibly a preliminary rough for a full theatrical portrait.

Mathers said, “The portrait is dated seventeen-seventy-five. The actor is not named, but does he look familiar?”

“It could well be him,” Sayers said, peering more closely and having to move to keep his own shadow out of the way. “I believe it
is
him, Bram.”

“His very last mistake, I imagine,” said Mathers. “A Wanderer would soon learn to permit no record of his image.”

To Sayers’ eye, the sketch showed a younger but no less magisterial and cynical Edmund Whitlock. The hair was brown, the face tauter and unlined. Given the freedom of the artist’s hand, there was scope for saying that there was merely some physical similarity across a century’s gap. But Sayers’ first instinct had been to recognize the face as that of his former employer.

Stoker, who seemed to have been hoping for something more persuasive, was clearly less convinced.

“A resemblance,” Stoker conceded.

Sayers said, “You brought me to this threshold. Can you not cross it with me?”

“At heart, I’m a rational being,” Stoker said. “I’ve always placed my trust in science and nature.”

“Yet you’ll publish fairy tales. You have friends”—this with a glance toward Mathers—“who’d raise the devil if they could. And do your best to talk Irving into
Faust
and
The Flying Dutchman.
”

“No one talks Irving into anything,” Stoker said. “A man can disagree with his friends. And one does not have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost story. I’m prepared to believe that Whitlock charts his life by the symbols in which he places his faith. But this…this is the point at which men are seduced into co-opting history to support the impossible.”

Mathers, who had been inspecting the tag on the portrait before returning it to the stacks, now joined them and said, “But do you believe in evil, Bram?”

“As an abstraction, yes.”

“What exactly do you think it is?”

“A word that describes a condition of the human soul.”

“Not a force in itself? With its own life and substance?”

“No.”

“My considered understanding is that evil lives,” Mathers said. “It moves. It finds places to show itself whenever it can. A being can be emptied and shaped into a vessel to hold it. We have a term for such a person. We call them…godless.”

Sayers said, “But how can even a godless being defy the very processes of nature?”

“By embracing the idea that one is cursed, lost, beyond the very sight of one’s creator,” Mathers said. “Cruel deeds are the means of ritual affirmation. Evil enters the vacuum from where man’s natural spirit has been driven. And, of course, in a vacuum…”

“There can be no decay,” said Sayers, with the wonder of discovery.

“He ages slowly,” Sayers said excitedly, as they walked along London Road toward Forest Hill station. “But he ages. He’s flesh and blood like the rest of us, Bram. Cut off his head and he’ll streak down to hell like a comet.”

“Speculation,” said Stoker.

“Think of it, Bram. He cannot hold off damnation forever. But he can escape it by influencing another lost soul to take his place. Caspar was to be that soul. He’ll seek another.”

“And you believe you’ll stop him?”

“I care nothing for Whitlock or his future! I think only of Louise in his foul company. I’d go straight to hell myself to make her safe.”

At this, Stoker took his arm and stopped him so that he could look him in the eyes.

“I can smell the gin on you,” the Irishman said. “Edmund Whitlock is no more than an ordinary man, seduced by a legend. Be very careful, Tom.”

Sayers pulled his arm free.

In an uncomfortable silence, the two men walked on toward their train.

TWENTY-FOUR

A
s soon as he received Edmund Whitlock’s telegram, Sebastian Becker sought permission from his superiors and then caught the next train down to London. By this time, Whitlock had wound up the
Purple Diamond
company and was playing a fifteen-minute sketch titled
He Knew It, All Right.
It was a four-hander he’d revived from some fifteen years before, inexpensive to stage and for which he could reuse props and costumes from the last production. He’d sold the
Purple Diamond
sets and the rest of the properties, and used the proceeds to pay off the cast.

Some thought it an odd choice. It was a comic piece set in a draper’s, with no songs and no girl. Four skilled comedians might have carried it off, but Whitlock held an open call at which every dodgy character from the twilight fringe of the theatrical world turned up. Of the three that he cast, one had the nasty ticket-of-leave look of a man who’d spent time in prison—hardly the type for a draper’s boy—while another was regarded with wariness by all the chorus girls. No one could give a specific reason for it, but if this man happened to enter a room where one of them was alone, she would quickly find some excuse to leave.

So the sketch, as they performed it, was no better than passable. Some suggested that Whitlock had taken a big step down in the world and was showing desperation, although others reckoned that he hardly needed the money. He was said to own property, and had been coining it in as an actor-manager for longer than anyone could actually remember.

Sebastian caught up with him during the first house at Gatti’s Music Hall in the Westminster Bridge Road. Whitlock’s little troupe was playing the sketch on three bills in the same evening; from Gatti’s they’d go to the Canterbury, then to the Camberwell Palace, then back to Gatti’s for the final show. Gatti’s had only two dressing rooms behind its small stage, one shared by the men and the other by the women, so they met in the manager’s office.

Whitlock was in full makeup and a draper’s apron, his costume for the skit. He said, “We’ll be following the Coulson Sisters in about ten minutes’ time. I am at your service until then.”

“Your telegram said you had letters to show me,” Sebastian said.

“I have.” The actor-manager reached into his waistcoat behind the apron and brought out a small bundle of assorted and very cheap-looking papers. “I’ve been keeping them about me. I would not want Miss Porter to see them.”

“Weren’t they addressed to her?”

“They were, but I recognized the hand. So I intercepted them. She is suffering enough distress without having to bear the ravings of a lunatic.”

The clock on the manager’s wall ticked the minutes away as Sebastian read the first of the notes, and then the next.

“Hard enough for you to read such a personal tirade,” he commented after a while.

“I’ve been reviewed by Shaw,” Whitlock said. “Believe me, those letters are nothing.”

Sebastian glanced up. “Do you have the envelopes?”

Whitlock made a sign of regret. “There were no postmarks,” he said, “but the content alone proves that Sayers is here in London. If I were you, Inspector, I would investigate the public houses around St. Martin’s Lane.”

“Why so, sir?”

“They’re a home to the boxing fraternity. And one sniff at the paper should tell you those letters were written on a beer-stained table. You’re far away from your own territory, Inspector Becker. I suggest you share this bounty with your brothers in the Metropolitan Police. Or else how effective can you really hope to be?”

“As effective as my dedication can make me, Mister Whitlock. I must keep these, and study them further before I decide what best to do.”

“As you wish,” Whitlock said. “I feel I have done my duty.”

Sebastian moved to put the letters safely inside his coat. “Rest assured, Mister Whitlock,” he said, “I shall have him.”

“Then I am certain we can all sleep safely in our beds.” Whitlock rose and put out his hand. “Tell me, Inspector. What exactly do you believe you are pursuing? Some man, or some fiend?”

“I do not believe in fiends,” Sebastian Becker said as he took the actor’s hand and returned his grip. Whitlock held on and looked into his face for a time that bordered on the uncomfortable.

Then he said, “Quite right,” and released him.

A boy looked into the manager’s office and said, “They’re playing out the Coulson Sisters, Mister Whitlock.”

“You must excuse me,” Whitlock said. “I wish you all the success you deserve.”

“Where is Miss Porter now?”

“She is a guest at my apartments,” Whitlock said, as he followed the boy out of the door. “She no longer has the heart to perform.”

He paused.

“Nor for anything, much,” he added, and then he left the room.

The actor had gone off without leaving him an address, but it was the work of only a few minutes for Sebastian to find what he needed in the manager’s files. Whitlock was still onstage when Sebastian left the theater and walked in the direction of Waterloo Station, hoping to pick up a cab to take him back across the river. Perhaps Whitlock had been expecting him to go straight to the boxing dens on St. Martin’s Lane rather than seeking out Miss Porter, who had, after all, had no knowledge of the letters that Sayers had intended for her.

But Louise Porter was some essential factor in the prizefighter’s mystery. In all that he’d done so far, he seemed to care more for her wellbeing than for his own survival.

In everything he’d done, that was, apart from killing her beloved.

Whitlock’s housekeeper said nothing, pretended not to understand anything that Sebastian said, and seemed determined not to admit him until there was the call of a young woman’s voice from within, which she understood well enough. Louise Porter received him in the parlor, that little-used, overornamented, excessively proper space set aside in the Victorian household for the sole purpose of making an impression. She was in a dark dress. It was not formal mourning wear, but she moved and spoke like one recently widowed.

Sebastian asked her to look at one of the letters. It hardly mattered which one she chose; they all said more or less the same things.

She glanced through one, then another. She seemed unsurprised by them.

“These are the milder ones,” she said. “There have been others. These omit the strangest claim of all.”

“Mister Whitlock thinks you know nothing of them,” Sebastian said. “He thinks he intercepted every one.”

“Everybody wants to protect me,” she said.

“So what is ‘the strangest claim of all’?”

“Tom Sayers would have me believe that my former employer and present protector is a devil in human form. One who has turned from the face of God and now seeks to avoid just punishment as his days approach their end. He says that my late fiancé was being made ready to replace him.

“I ask you, Inspector Becker. As we speak, Edmund Whitlock is running from one music hall to another, in costume, to perform a piece of nothing before a pack of drunkards. If they should laugh at his antics, then that is the most he can hope for. And he is not a well man. If such is a reward of long life and good fortune, I call it a poor sort of bargain.”

“Tom Sayers is quite mad.”

“Will they still hang him if you catch him?”

“I cannot say. How will you feel if they do?”

She looked toward the window. The main curtains were tied back, and a streetlamp outside could be seen through the lace. “They should spare him,” she said. “He believes I’m worth saving. What better proof of a man’s lack of reason?”

Sebastian said, “Is there anything more you can tell me?”

She looked down.

“Hell is not a warm place,” she said. “It is a place where ice becomes ashes.”

Sebastian waited, but that was all she had to say. Nonplussed and a little disturbed, he got to his feet.

“Then,” he said, “I’ll thank you and say good night.”

She rang for the silent woman to show him out. Somewhere in another room, a small dog started to bark at the sound of the bell. Louise Porter raised a hand to her head and settled into the attitude of the irrevocably depressed.

She said, “Tom Sayers does not understand. Even if Mister Whitlock
were
a demon, I would not care. I care for very little, these days.”

Sebastian could think of nothing else that he could say to her, other than “I am so sorry, Miss Porter.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as he waited for the silent woman to appear.

Looking down, he noticed a stack of engraved postcards, freshly cut from the printers’, on the side table at her elbow. He saw the word
discretion
in flowing script. Obeying the impulse that it inspired, he slipped the topmost card from the pile. He flipped it up so that it was hidden by his sleeve as the mute woman came in.

It was still in his hand when he reached the street. Under the lamp, he looked up at the parlor window, but saw no one there. He raised the card to the light. It was a formal invitation and it read,
In the presence of Miss Louise Porter. Selected gentlemen of discretion only.
That was all. Below it was a time—midnight, two days hence—and an abbreviated address.

Selected gentlemen of discretion only.
The phrase seemed to have something decadent about it. Almost an air of degeneracy.

How strange, he thought.

How very, very strange.

Over at the Lyceum, the so-called Scottish Play was still running. Its critical reception, though generally positive, had been qualified; William Archer had written to the effect that Irving had managed to “keep a rein on those peculiarities of gesture and expression which used to run away with him.” Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth had been greeted with similarly faint praise, and she was rumored to be considering giving up her part.

But as Bram Stoker knew, those rumors were false. The voices of the critics were drowned out by the voice of the public, every night. The company played to capacity houses. Ellen Terry swore that she would not budge an inch in her reading of the role. Sargent was asking to paint her in character, all dark red hair and a dress that glittered blue and green with real beetles’ wings. The advance bookings were tremendous, even by Lyceum standards.

When Stoker left the theater late that night after another full-house performance, he did not go straight back to Chelsea and his Cheyne Walk home. He walked instead the half mile or so to St. Martin’s Lane, where he sought out a yard close to Leicester Square. He paid sixpence to the doorman of a sporting public house there, and received a metal token to be exchanged at the bar for beer or grog. Intending to take advantage of neither, Stoker climbed the stairs to the upper room.

Over at the bar sat the broken-nosed owner with his bullnecked friends, ex-fighters all. In the early part of the evenings when the room was full, any two of them might strip off their shirts and don gloves to spar for a while, before taking up a collection from the crowd. Around the walls hung the portraits of boxers long dead: lumbering Bill Neate; Bob Gregson, “the Lancashire Champion” Jack Randall versus Ned Turner. Alongside them hung an engraved picture of the owner himself in a posture young, fierce, and challenging, while his older and even uglier modern-day self nursed a gin just a few feet away.

In this company, it was plain that Tom Sayers, alone at a table and some distance from the bar, had managed to escape their common disfigurements due to the brevity of his fighting career. His nose was straight and his brow unscarred. His ears resembled ears, and not bloated fungi.

He looked up sharply as Stoker came in. Stoker was in no doubt that he would have an escape route planned, but, by the look of him, he’d have a struggle to make use of it. Sayers had papers spread on the table, and was composing a letter. A bottle and a glass stood close to hand. The glass was unwashed and the bottle was half empty. Sayers was flushed, and the gaze that he turned on his visitor was unsteady.

“Tom,” Stoker said sadly, and gestured to the bottle as if to say, And this will help you how?

“I know, Bram, I know,” Sayers said. “I’ve had one or two, just to steady me.”

He needed no explanation. Gin dulled pain. It was the remedy for all those whose lives were such that they had no other.

Pulling out a chair to sit down, Stoker said, “Letters are a waste of time, Tom.”

“I can’t get them to her anyway,” Sayers said. “I send the potboy with orders to place them only in her hands. Whitlock stops them.”

“He’s hired the Egyptian Hall for a night.” Stoker slid a printed card in front of Sayers. The prizefighter struggled to focus his eyes on it in the candlelight.

Stoker said, “I know the floor plan of the house. Maskelyne’s rigged it for his magic shows. There’s no easy way to get backstage.”

Sayers would understand what he meant. Most of the major illusionists prepared their venues in the same way; it meant sending in a team of carpenters to panel around the backstage areas, effectively boxing them in. With a boxed stage, no one could get into the secured zone to interfere with apparatus or observe trade secrets.

Still with his eyes on the card, Sayers said, “Who are these ‘gentlemen of discretion’?”

“Well-born young men who’ve already wasted fortunes. They’re the reason why he’s been parading Louise at social gatherings all over town.”

Sayers nodded. “Then I am right. He means to recruit his new Caspar. It’s not just a matter of finding a rake or a dissolute; they’re ten-a-penny, and not fit for purpose. He seeks a Caligula for our age, one who cannot fail to understand the full import of the choice before him. Louise is the bait on his hook. What can we do, Bram?”

Stoker looked at the gin bottle.

“With your head skewed by that? Nothing. I liked your company better when all you could afford was half a bed in a temperance hotel.”

Sayers raised his hands, as if calling an entire crowd to silence.

“Don’t judge me, Bram,” he said. “Please. You cannot know. I pray you never will.”

Stoker was about to say something else, and then changed his mind. He stood up. He left the printed invitation on the table, and threw his sixpenny token down with it.