Riot Most Uncouth (15 page)

“Even if you are wrong?”

Knifing laughed his wicked laugh again. “Especially if I'm wrong. When I am wrong, I am at my most compelling. You should keep that in mind, in the event I decide to accuse you of the murders.”

As I tried to formulate a retort, Angus came charging down the alley with the Professor in tow. Both of them were panting loudly and clearly excited.

“Get that creature out of my crime scene!” Knifing shouted.

“There's been another one,” Angus said.

“Another bear?” I asked.

“Another murder,” Knifing said.

“More than a murder,” Angus said, gulping mouthfuls of air, like a hairy grouper flopping upon the deck of a fishing boat. “There's been a massacre.”

 

Chapter 20

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of Life is but intoxication:

Glory, the Grape, Love, Gold, in these are sunk

The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

Of Life's strange tree, so fruitful on occasion!

—
Lord Byron,
Don Juan,
canto 2

It was only when I began preparing this account of the Cambridge murders, nearly a decade after the relevant events occurred, that I finally arranged to meet with Lord Whippleby, the father of the first victim. His fortunes were in decline even before his daughter's death, which was why he had been trying to marry her to Leif Sedgewyck. After the murder, his finances had unraveled entirely; he'd become too despondent to tend to his affairs. I found him residing in cramped London apartments, having leased his lands and his ancestral manse to better-situated tenants.

“So,” he said as I entered his parlor. “The poet has come, at last, to pay me a visit.” His voice was like a sheet of sandpaper being drawn across a velvet curtain.

“I'm really surprised we haven't encountered one another before, at some function or other,” I said.

His laugh was angry and hollow. “I don't attend many social events anymore, Lord Byron. People find my company unpleasant. They believe I am quite mad.”

Whippleby's flesh sagged from his face in loose folds, and his rheumy eyes were set deep in dark-purple sockets. He scratched at the white rats' nest of hair upon his scalp with thin, spidery fingers. Everything about him seemed dried out, as if he'd wept away all his body's vital fluids.

“People believe you're mad as well, of course,” he said. “But your kind of lunacy is so very entertaining, and mine is merely the madness of an old man racked by grief and loneliness.”

“I am writing a book about the Cambridge murders, and I have come to ask if you have any thoughts to contribute.”

“My daughter's death was a kind of entertainment to you, and now you've come to document my suffering so that you can share your depraved amusement with an adoring audience.”

I didn't say anything. He smacked his lips a couple of times to work up enough saliva to spit at me. He failed to do so, and cursed with frustration. “I spent years and no small amount of money trying to establish your guilt or complicity in those crimes,” he said.

“We captured your daughter's killer,” I said. “His punishment was death.” This was not a lie, exactly, but the statement contained a significant omission.

And Whippleby knew there was something wrong with the story; he always had. “I've never been satisfied with your explanation of the events in Cambridge, nor am I satisfied with the man you delivered up as the murderer,” he said. “Even though I've been unable to prove you're a liar, you are a detestable man and I would like to see you dancing upon the air with a rope around your neck.”

I let the insults pass without comment; I knew what had happened to my reputation. My fortunes were in such disarray that I had been forced to sell Newstead to stave off my creditors. The acrimonious dissolution of my brief marriage had left my reputation a shambles. People of all social classes gossiped openly about my affairs with chorus girls and spread the slanderous rumor that I had committed incest with my half sister, Augusta Leigh. This pained me greatly, for Augusta was my only living connection to my father.

“Your own hired man told you the same story,” I said.

“The supposed perpetrator that you and that investigator accused was utterly ordinary; of so little consequence that his death brought me no catharsis or satisfaction. And yet, for years, you've been speaking in public of goblins and ghouls, and the involvement of mystical and supernatural elements in the Cambridge murders. How can you claim that mundane and fantastic explanations for my daughter's murder are simultaneously true? At least one of your stories must be a lie, and if one of them is, then the other might be as well.”

My natural instinct was to be evasive about this subject, yet it seemed atrocious to lie to this bereaved old man. And why was I writing about the Cambridge murders, if not to finally tell the truth about them? I had no interest in continuing to preserve secrets that belonged to the dead.

In light of my own financial ruin and public shame, I was preparing to flee permanently to the Continent, to Switzerland, perhaps, and then to Italy or Greece. Or perhaps I'd go to the East; to Greece, to Turkey, to Rumania, to Transylvania. I was not ashamed; I have never been ashamed. But I was leaving. I had no desire to live anymore among people with the audacity to question my moral character.

With no esteem or fortune left to risk, I was free to leave behind an unvarnished account of the truth about the Cambridge murders, a final volley of ordnance to blast the legs off my enemies and assure that, in my absence, England would not forget me. I had nothing to gain by lying anymore, and nothing to lose by telling the truth.

“During the brief period of my childhood in which I knew my father, he spoke often of the vampires he'd encountered in the East,” I said. “I first involved myself with the murders in Cambridge because the killer's method of draining blood from his victims reminded me of those stories.”

Whippleby's expression softened. “Yes, your father abandoned you when you were a small boy and died soon after, in France.”

“It seems you know a lot about me, Lord Whippleby.”

“You are inextricable from the events in Cambridge, which have, for years, preoccupied me. Yes. I know much about you. I have followed your antics; your rise to fame and your inevitable public shaming. I have studied your poetry. But I have never heard or read anything to suggest that your father was an important piece of the Cambridge puzzle. He left England years prior, did he not?”

“Even famous knaves are discreet about some things,” I said, though I supposed I was done with discretion. “The deepest wounds are the ones we conceal.”

“We are both preoccupied, then. We both grieve,” he said. “A son grieves for a father, and a father grieves for a daughter. But my daughter and your father have nothing to do with one another.”

“There are things I know and there are things I believe,” I said. “Some of the things I know are things I cannot let myself believe, and some of the things I believe are difficult to reconcile with facts. This, I think, is a common human conundrum.”

“You speak of God.”

“No, I'm talking about Mad Jack. And about vampires.”

“John Byron Gordon is dead.”

“I know that,” I said, “but I don't believe it. He cannot be dead. I'm not finished with him yet.” Death was only for the poor and the foolish, Mad Jack said. And Mad Jack was no fool.

Whippleby licked his fingertip and contemplatively stroked it across his mustache. “They say both of us are insane, and perhaps they're right.”

“A woman I once loved will proclaim to all who will listen that I am mad and bad and dangerous to know. I've also heard that I am a drunk and an addict and a sexual deviant. But madness and drunkenness seem to me the only reasonable responses to the desperate reality of the human condition. How else can one dull the pain of past sorrows and quiet the howling inevitability of future grief?”

When Whippleby spoke again, his voice was softer and gentler. His hands unclenched a little. After so many years of hatred, this man would never forgive me, but perhaps we had found a common cause. “If you truly mean to write a full account of the Cambridge murders, you must find out who hired the second private constable. This question has become, for me, an obsession. Both Fielding Dingle and Archibald Knifing claimed to have come to Cambridge on my behalf to catch my daughter's killer. But I swear on Felicity's grave that I hired only one man.”

He waited for me to speak. When I did not, he resumed.

“People have, in the past, suggested that I gave duplicate instructions to two servants, and thus, through my agents, I hired both men inadvertently. For a time, I believed this myself. I was near delirious with grief in the hours and days after I learned of my daughter's death. But I could account for only one servant who had been dispatched on such a task. I consulted my bankers, and only one disbursement was made to compensate an investigator. One of those two men went to Cambridge at my behest. The second went there under false pretenses. The trouble is that I do not know which man I hired.”

“Why don't you simply ask your servant whom he retained?” I said.

“He was killed only a few days after Felicity died, before I learned that a second investigator had gone to Cambridge, masquerading as my agent,” Whippleby said. “My man was knocked down in the street by a speeding stagecoach. The driver was never identified, and I have come to believe my servant's death was not an accident.”

“Does your bank not keep records?” I asked. “Can they not tell you who drew funds on your note?”

He shook his head, and a visible cloud of dust shook loose from his hair and danced in the dim sunlight streaming through his dirty window. The old man's skin was pale as milk, and blue veins rolled beneath the translucent surfaces of his neck as he spoke. Whippleby probably had not been outside in months. “My servant paid cash, so the bank could offer no assistance. I made inquiries into the backgrounds of both thief-catchers. Fielding Dingle was, at least, legitimate, known among the fraternity of professional investigators and respected for his doggedness, if not for his intellect. Knifing, of course, was among the profession's greatest lights. He was a war hero and a personal friend of the King. His reputation was said to be unimpeachable, though I'd call that an overstatement.”

Whippleby paused to pour himself a glass of warm, cloudy gin from a bottle with a crystal stopper. He didn't offer me any, but I took no offense. His stuff smelled like pine sap, and I had a flask of a finer spirit in my waistcoat pocket. I unscrewed the cap and indulged. It seemed rude to let Whippleby drink alone.

“Deceit and disreputability are the thieftaker's apprenticeship. These men are former spies and criminals, ostensibly reformed, but turned to a task only marginally more respectable. I told my man to find me the best one I could afford. I'd think, with my resources, I could have hired a better man than Dingle, but I doubt my coin was sufficient to employ someone of Knifing's eminence, unless he agreed to lower his rate for some reason. In any case, only one of the two went to Cambridge at my urging. The second was acting on behalf of other interests. Of this, I am certain, and for this reason, I have never been able to accept the claim that the killer was some deranged peasant of no particular consequence. Someone must have hired the second man. Something has been covered up, and if you mean to lay down a true account of these events, you must unravel that mystery. I've failed in all my attempts, but perhaps you will succeed where I could not.”

I locked my gaze with Whippleby's; stared into the deep hollows around his eyes and at the pinched, mealy-white flesh of his face. This man was wrecked, and I was partly responsible. I'd told a lie I believed was insignificant; Felicity Whippleby and the other Cambridge victims had gotten a sort of justice. There seemed to be little harm in manipulating a few of the facts.

But this old man perceived the falsehood, and the lie had devoured him. He needed to know what had happened to his daughter, just as I needed to know what had happened to my father. And so, he'd ruined his mind and wasted his vitality trying to unravel a conspiracy I'd been a part of. We had offered the perception of justice, of certainty. And, as Knifing might have predicted, the others bereaved by the Cambridge murders had accepted it and found it comforting. But Knifing had been wrong about Whippleby. What the dead girl's father needed was the truth.

On one level, I had visited Whippleby to find an emotional center for my narrative of the murders. I didn't really know Felicity, and she was already dead when I entered the story. Thus, she was an abstraction within the narrative. The murders and the process of their resolution, to the reader, seemed to merely be sort of a puzzle, and this made everything that happened afterward seem unimportant. I'd gazed upon the corpses with my own eyes and I'd filled my nostrils with the stink of their decay, so the pursuit of justice, as I experienced it, had had an urgency that I failed to convey upon the page.

More than once, in the course of writing my polemic, I'd wished I'd spoken with Felicity's mourners in the days after she was killed instead of running around uselessly in a drunken frenzy. Archibald Knifing, with the assistance of Angus the volunteer constable, interviewed Felicity's close friends and her neighbors in the rooming house to try to reconstruct the events of her final hours. I will admit that it never occurred to me to do so. Just as, only a few years after the installation of gaslights, one can no longer imagine the streets of London dark and empty at night, it seems strange to recall that protocols of criminal detection have been only recently established, and to the extent they existed in 1807, they were certainly unfamiliar to those outside the fraternity of investigators. So, while readers of the mystery stories that now proliferate in the popular press may think it elementary to interview a victim's associates as a first step in investigating a murder, it was by no means the obvious course of action for me in Cambridge.