Seven Dials (31 page)

Pitt had no answer. They were caught in a morass of facts which made no coherent story, except one of impulse and stupidity, and that was not what he wanted to believe.

“You had better follow it,” Narraway said quietly, already half turning away, almost as if he did not wish Pitt to see any hope in his face. “Be in my office at seven in the morning,” he ordered. “Day after tomorrow.” And he walked away, leaving Pitt alone.

Pitt learned all he could about Arnold Yeats, but it added nothing to his understanding of Lovat’s death, or anything that had happened to him in Egypt, and there was no connection that he could see with Ayesha Zakhari. Nor was there anything in Morgan Sandeman’s military record or his decision to leave the army and enter the priesthood which seemed to have any relevance. The only fact Pitt remarked with any interest was that the friendship which had been close in Alexandria appeared to have disappeared altogether after their return to Britain. But then, had they written to each other, he would not have known.

THE DAY THAT PITT left early to keep his appointment with Narraway, Charlotte also went out, but in the opposite direction. She did not tell Gracie where she was going, because she did not want to place her in the position of having to tell Pitt something less than the truth, should he return before she did.

She caught the omnibus to Oxford Street, and from there walked south as far as Dudley Street. She hesitated a moment, trying to remember exactly which way Sandeman had taken her. It was towards the circle of Seven Dials itself, but not all the way. She started off along Great White Lion Street, and turned left up the alley. It looked different in the morning light, somehow paler and bleaker, as if it were under a layer of dust.

It all seemed smaller.

How many steps had they taken? She had no idea. Anything she thought now seemed too far.

A man bent over with a misshapen body was moving towards her. There was no malice in his face, but something in his lurching gait frightened her. She made an instant decision and started away from him, towards the nearest doorway.

It proved to be a shop of some indeterminate sort. Piles of clothes lay on the floor, smelling stale and moldy. Several boxes perched awkwardly on each other.

“I’m sorry!” she said hastily and backed out, swinging around and almost bumping into a fat woman with a white face and eyebrows so sparse as to lend her expression a bald, surprised air. “I’m sorry,” Charlotte repeated, and pushed past her and outside.

Now she had lost her bearings altogether. She turned all the way around, slowly, and tried another door. She was shivering, although it was not cold. Her hand was raised to knock, then she changed her mind and decided simply to open it. She realized the woman was watching her, standing so close now that if Charlotte were to step back she would bump her. She felt cut off.

She put her weight against the door and it swung open. Relief washed over her as she saw the vestibule and the long hallway beyond. Please heaven, Sandeman was there. If she was caught alone with the woman behind her, there was now no escape. That was ridiculous. The woman was probably coming for help, just as she was herself.

She went so rapidly across the stone floor to the next door she was almost running. She had closed the second door and was starting towards the big fireplace when Sandeman came out of the scullery, his face curious and welcoming, until he recognized her.

“Mrs. Pitt.” He dried his hands on the rough cloth he was carrying. His skin looked red, as if the soap had burned him. “What can I do for you?” His voice had denial in it, and his face was already closed.

She had expected it, and tried to forewarn herself; even so, something inside her sank. She had intended to smile, but it died before it reached her lips. “Good morning, Mr. Sandeman,” she replied quietly. “I have come back to you because circumstances have changed since we spoke before.” She stopped. She knew he did not believe her. For Tilda’s sake she was prepared to tell him more of the truth now, even to add a force to it she would not have before.

“Mine have not,” he replied, meeting her eyes without flinching. She was struck again by the inner strength of him, as if within his mind there were an island of absolute knowledge untouched by the comings and goings of chance or other people’s passions. “I am sorry,” he added, to soften his refusal.

She continued only because it would be absurd to have come this far and then leave again without trying harder than this. “I did not expect you to have changed, Mr. Sandeman. But since I last saw you my husband has returned from Alexandria, and told me…” She stopped. The color had drained from his skin. When she glanced down at his hands, they were clenched so tightly on the rag he was holding that the folded edge of it threatened to leave marks on his flesh.

She seized the chance. “And told me a great many things he learned while he was there regarding Mr. Lovat’s service in Egypt, and other things…” She did not wish to be specific, in case it allowed him to realize how very little she really knew. “Mr. Sandeman, I fear Martin Garvie’s life is in danger. I had a very senior gentleman from Special Branch warn me that I was concerning myself with affairs of great danger and I should leave them be, but I cannot do that when I might have the key to saving someone. I fear they will allow Martin Garvie to be killed because he is of no importance to them.”

Sandeman’s eyes were enormous, as if staring at something that transfixed him. “Special Branch?” His lips seemed dry. “What have they to do with Martin Garvie?”

“You must be aware that Edwin Lovat has been murdered. It is in all the newspapers,” she replied. “And that an Egyptian woman is on trial at the Old Bailey. Even here in Seven Dials the running patterers will be talking about it. It’s a big scandal, because a major politician is involved. It could even bring the government down.”

“Yes,” Sandeman agreed quietly. “Of course I heard people talking about it. But it is another world from here. It’s a story to us. Nothing more.” He said it as if he were trying to believe it himself, pushing it away so it was not his responsibility.

Charlotte felt her brief advantage slipping out of her hands, and she did not know how to get it back. A tiny flutter of panic stirred inside her. She must try something or he would refuse her again and then it would be too late. She remembered what Pitt had said about the fourth friend. “Mr. Yeats is dead too, you know,” she said abruptly.

He looked as if she had struck him. He opened his mouth and drew in his breath with difficulty. She knew she had told him something he had not known, and that it wounded him deeply. There would be time for her to be guilty about it later; now she must drag out of him whatever it was that Martin Garvie had confided in him. She was about to speak, and something in his face warned her to stop.

“How… how did he die?” he asked awkwardly. He was seeking information from her now, and he was aware of the irony of it.

“In battle,” she replied. “In India somewhere. Apparently he was very brave… even reckless.” She stopped, seeing the last trace of color bleach from his skin.

“Battle?” He clung to the word as if it was some kind of desperate hope. “You mean military action?”

“Yes.”

He looked away.

“Please, Mr. Sandeman!” she said urgently. “My husband is clever and determined. I expect he will find out what it is you know, but it may be too late to help Martin Garvie-or Mr. Garrick, if they are together.” She was not sure if that was wise, or if she had gone too far and betrayed her ignorance. She saw the indecision fighting in his face, and her heart knocked inside her in the tension as she waited.

His eyes flickered and he looked away from her, down at his hands. “I don’t think there is much you can do to help,” he said flatly, and there was terrible pain in his voice. “Even if I told you all that Martin said to me, I believe we are all too late.”

The coldness in the room ate into her and she found she was shivering, her body tight. “You think that Martin has been murdered as well? Who next? You?” she challenged. “Are you just going to sit here and wait for whoever it is to come after you too?” Her voice was shaking with anger, and fear, and a sense that she was fighting alone, in spite of the fact that she was so close to him she could smell the carbolic in the soap he had used, even though his hands were dry. She jerked her arm out in an aimless sweep. “Don’t you care enough about these people to want to save yourself? Who is going to look after them if you don’t?”

He looked up at her. She had touched a nerve.

“It’s your job!” she said wildly. It was not fair, and not really true. She knew nothing about him and had no business to make such a statement. If he had been angry with her she would not have blamed him.

“Martin had heard of me,” he said very quietly, but as if deep in thought, not faltering as though he might stop. “I have befriended many soldiers who have fallen on hard times, drink too much because they have thoughts and memories they can’t live with and can’t forget. Or because they don’t know how to fit back into the lives they had before they went to war.” He drew in a long breath. “It may be only a few years for the people at home, whose lives are much the same every day, little dreams. For them the world stays the same.”

She did not interrupt. It was irrelevant so far, but he was feeling his way toward something.

“It isn’t like that in the army. It can be just a little while, but it is a lifetime,” he continued.

Was he speaking about Egypt, about himself, and Stephen Garrick, and Lovat? Of all the lost and hopeless men he ministered to here in the alleys of Seven Dials?

“Martin tried to help Garrick.” Sandeman stared at the floor, not meeting his eyes. “But he didn’t know how to. Garrick’s nightmares were getting worse, and more frequent. He drank to try and dull himself into insensibility, but it worked less and less all the time. He began to take opium as well. His health was deteriorating and he was losing control of himself.” Sandeman’s voice was sinking. She had to lean towards him to catch the words.

“He couldn’t trust anyone,” he went on. “Except Martin, because he was desperate. Martin thought perhaps I could help, if Garrick would come to me… or even if I went to him.”

“Why didn’t you go?” she asked, hearing the edge to her voice she had not meant to allow through.

He was too deep in his own thoughts to be stung.

“Just because he lives in Torrington Square instead of a doorway in Seven Dials doesn’t mean he needs your help any less!” she accused him. “He was obviously in his own kind of hell.”

He looked up at her, his eyes hollow. “Of course he was!” he grated. “But I can’t help him. He doesn’t want to hear the only thing I know how to say.”

She did not understand. “If you can’t help nightmares, then who can? Isn’t that what you do for these men here? Why not for Stephen Garrick?”

He said nothing.

“What were his nightmares?” she prodded, knowing she was hurting him, but she could not stop now. “Did Martin tell you? Why couldn’t you help him face them?”

“You say that as if it were easy.” Anger lay just under the surface of his voice and in the stiff lines of his body. “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Then tell me! From what you are saying, he is sinking into madness. What kind of a priest are you that you won’t hold out a hand to him yourself, and you won’t help me to?”

This time he looked up at her with rage and impotence naked in his face.

“What help have you for madness, Mrs. Pitt? Can you stop the dreams that come in the night, of blood and fire, of screaming that tears your mind to pieces and leaves the shards to cut you, even when you are awake?” His whole body was trembling. “What can you do about heat that scorches your skin, but when you open your eyes you’re covered in sweat, and freezing? It is inside you, Mrs. Pitt! No one can help! Martin Garvie tried to, and it has sucked him into it. When he came to me, his fear was for Garrick, but it should have been for himself as well. Madness consumes not only those afflicted, but those who touch it as well.”

“Are you saying Stephen Garrick is insane?” she demanded. “Why aren’t his family treating him? Are they too ashamed of it to admit that is what is wrong with him?” It was beginning to make sense at last. Many people denied illness of the mind, as if it were a sin rather than a disease. Had it been cholera, or smallpox, no one would have hidden it. “Have they taken him to an institution?” She did not mean to have raised her voice, but it was out of control. “Is that it? But why Martin as well? Why couldn’t he at least have written to his sister and told her where he was?”

His face was filled with pity so deep it seemed the pain of it wounded him as if he would carry it long after he had finished trying to make her understand it. “From Bedlam?” he said simply.

The word struck a shiver through her flesh. Everyone knew of the hospital for the insane that was like a house of hell. The name of it was an obscenity, an abbreviation of Bethlehem, the most holy town, the asylum of dreams, and this was the prison of nightmares where people were incarcerated in the torture of their own minds, screaming at the unseen.

She struggled for a moment to find her voice. “You let that happen to him?” she whispered. It was not intended as an accusation, at least not entirely. She had admired Sandeman; she had seen a compassion in him too deep to believe indifference in him now, for any reason. What she had seen was real, she had felt it in the dignity with which he had regarded the drunken man the day she had found him.

He looked at her with hurt for her judgment of him, and defiance. “How could I have prevented it? We each have to find our own salvation, Mrs. Pitt. I told Garrick what to do years ago, but I can’t make him do it.”

She was about to correct him, say that it was Martin Garvie she was thinking of, then she realized what he implied. “Are you saying that Stephen Garrick’s madness is his own fault?” she asked incredulously.

“No…” He looked away, and for the first time she knew he was lying.

“Mr. Sandeman!” Then she was uncertain what she could add that would help.