Stokers Shadow (8 page)

Silver ridges, like mermaids' fins, rise and fall as the sunlight dances over the water's surface. The weight of his father's hand on his shoulder provides the profoundest comfort to William. Father can make everything right with the world, he thinks
.

He knows his father can dispel all fear and worry, unpick and untangle every dark chain, lock and puzzle that childhood nightmares can devise. His father is a wise magician, a weaver of tales and an important man who is revered and looked up to. When William is afraid of school, afraid of leaving the certainty and warmth of home for some bleak unknown place, his father tells him stories of valiant knights who go in search of their grail. Then William feels the safety of virtue closing like armour around his chest and shoulders and warming his heart. He knows that the fire of uprightness will burn for him through any desolation
.

And here on the balcony of his home overlooking the Thames, William is in paradise. The constant rippling sunlight on the water's surface sends eddies of optimism through his spirit
.

“You see this river, my boy?” his father says. That voice with its curious balance of great strength and gentleness acts as a balm for William; it tells of mightiness stooping to nurture; it tells of power all-knowing, all-seeing, all-forgiving
.

“You are watching the busiest waterway in the world,” his father continues, and William peers over the balustrade to see the white linen-like sails pointing into the rich blue sky, and the industriously churning wheels of the steamboats. “You see the schooner with the long white sail?” William fixes upon the vessel which closes upon a ramshackle wooden pier, and the men throwing ropes as thick as dungeon chains upon the board. “That ship is carrying woven silks from Arabia.”

William stares enthralled, wondering why the men do not look like Sinbad with white turbans and shining trousers. He looks at the white pinnacle of the vessel's sail and imagines the sandy peak of one of the great pyramids
.

“Those barges by the eastern dock haul a thousand spices into the heart of our Empire.”

William follows his father's pointing finger, settling on the tied-up vessels bobbing upon the tide below the dark wood-shuttered warehouses on the south side. His mind follows his father's weaving descriptions, and he conjures the most glorious colours of silk and ruby and emerald from the scattering gold of the sun. “I want you to remember always,
my boy,” his father continues, “that if you are brave, fearless and forthright in life, you may choose your destiny from the infinite possibilities you see before you.”

The promise is overwhelming; the beauty of the world and his place in it is simply overpowering. William closes his eyes in ecstasy
.

T
HE WASTE PAPER
dances a little circle in the tiny alcove courtyard where no sunlight penetrates. William watches, trying to re-conjure the magic of the memory. He wonders about last night; whether he would have seen the figure in the garden once more if he had reached the window before Maud called out. Maud had forgotten about it, thankfully, by breakfast. She clearly thought his belief in the watcher was a mere delusion spilling over from his dreams.

Now that the tide of boyhood memories is flooding over him, William finds he wants to believe in his father's ghost, or at least in some faery spirit that may choose to have pity and rekindle his withered soul. He had always felt that belief in the supernatural was the last refuge of the desperate, the final piece of driftwood at which to lunge before sinking finally into blackness. Now he is prepared to acknowledge his desperation.

William lifts his gaze from the dingy corner with the waste paper now scraping near the gutter grill. Above, a triangle of bright sunlight turns the grey stone almost gold. The tiny courtyard has no apparent purpose and was built entirely enclosed from any street. Only near midday does sunlight creep upon the upper reaches of its well-like depth. And the
light here intensifies even further now as though released suddenly by the passing of a wispy cloud. William stands. Called by the cumulation of spirits which have gathered lately to haunt him – his father, his own boyhood, the lavish fantasies of youth – he feels himself drawn away from the office, the accounts that await his attention and all other composite parts of the dreary straitjacket of routine he has fashioned for himself. He sets forth to meet the sun.

M
ARY FEELS LIKE
a convict escaped into paradise. She has broken the shackles and defied authority – possibly. The rules which govern her are so vague and changing she isn't even sure whether or not she is allowed to leave on her own impulse. In any case, for the first time since her arrival, no one, except herself, knows where she is and no set tasks and timetables are before her.

And the strangest thing is she can think of nothing more daring to do with her unexpected freedom than to duck into the library and read some of her favourite new book, Dracula, which she has brought with her in her cloth bag. For a while the scent of leather and wood, and the library sounds – muted footfalls, soft whispers and the creaking of chair and table as the elderly man opposite her strains to read his text – seem both comforting and appropriate. But soon a feeling less savoury pervades her chest. She reads of Lucy's death and Dr. Van Helsing's plans to save her soul from the torment of living death. She reads of his sharpened stake and his instructions to all the young heroic men who have formed a brotherhood. And somehow it all seems less satisfying to Mary than the earlier
part of the story when she followed the young man, Jonathan, on his quest into strange and foreign lands.

The elderly man opposite begins to wheeze and his chest makes crackling noises like a bonfire in the rain. Mary glances up, unsettled, seeing huge saucer eyes magnified through finger-thick lenses. Suddenly, she feels reined in, strangulated by the man's infirmity. She starts resenting the bleakness of her refuge and the ineffectual modesty of her rebellion. Her own chest begins to feel constrained like one of the vampire's victims.

She looks around, wanting to throw off the feeling. Rays of sunlight from the high windows intensify. Mary watches as the bright rays land upon a distant bookshelf. Little spots of gold appear on the faded spines. It is as though the aged gilt lettering is being awoken after a hundred-year sleep. Mary lets a new feeling flood into her. The ground beneath her begins to rumble from an underground train. The floor shakes harder, dust flying off the nearest bookshelf. The old man opposite takes out a handkerchief and wipes his nose.

She is here in London. What will she decide to do? She makes up a list in her mind: Marble Arch, London Bridge, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, St Paul's. She remembers her arrival – it seems like years ago now although it is still measured in days. She remembers the swooping pigeons and the vast, ornate station. The infinite promise of that moment comes back to her, asking her the simple question: “Why not?”

Mary returns the book to her cloth bag and looks into her tiny leather purse to double-check the presence of two shillings, a threepence, and two pennies – all she has left from
her journey. She rises from her seat tingling with both pleasure and fear.

Outside the library, she tries to get her bearings. She is on Ebury Street. If she turns left, and instead of going back to Mrs. Stoker's house, keeps on in the same direction, she will reach Buckingham Palace in less than thirty minutes, then Green Park in another five and then Piccadilly.

She sets off. A breeze sweeps past, playing with her hair, scattering small leaves and brown paper about her feet. The air smells of soot and diesel, mixed with earthy, natural scents. Newspaper vans and omnibuses thunder past, their huge wheels spinning, exhaust pipes coughing out dark smoke.

Soon the streets change, becoming wider, busier and more commercial. As the buildings become loftier and more ornate, with lions' heads, dragons' heads, griffins' talons and angels' wings carved into the stone, she begins to feel light and impervious to fear. Her expectation for unseen hands to reach out from doorways and correct her erring path begins to fizzle away into the sunlight. Maybe Mrs. Stoker won't even notice. Maybe it isn't even against the rules. She is less convinced by this second thought than by the first, but she has counted the cost and taken her risk and now she is enjoying the crime.

Shiny wrought iron spikes to her left herald what Mary knows to be the Buckingham Palace grounds. The young women who pass her now are in the highest of fashion, with loose-fitting dresses, falling necklines, braidless hair and a carefree nymphlike manner. The way they walk is different too – gliding and effortless. Around the square outside the Palace and along the Mall, they float past in groups, linking arms with
each other like wild spring flowers turned into necklaces. Or sometimes a young woman will hold onto a dark-suited man, her spindly arms pulling at him possessively – an odd and almost indecent reversal of protector and charge. These creatures revel in the early fall, laughing at the first falling leaves and the hint of pre-decay richness which wafts and billows between Green Park and St. James and along the tree-lined promenade which leads to Admiralty Arch. Mary watches these amazing, confident women; she sees the light touch of a youthful white hand upon a shawl or shoulder fur, an action claiming the luxury of the moment rather than warmth. She is drawn by their confidence. Yet she is dimly aware there are multitudes of greyer people on the street who are less noticeable and more like herself.

Mary continues under the grand porcelain-white arch and into Trafalgar Square with the giant black lions and the towering obelisk. The great commander, Nelson, seems to sail along in the air under the white passing clouds and Mary feels dizzy when she tears her eyes away and looks back down into the square. She sits down on the broad paw of a lion, feeling at one with the crowd from whom shouts and exclamations come without shyness or reserve. The thunderous square with its teeming life and pigeons merge in Mary's mind with the shingle and rock beaches of her home in summer, where children dance circles on the shell-littered shores, dodging gulls and loading buckets and pans with nature's bounty. There, too, the divisions between people seem to dissolve and the group is like one many-headed being, unified by the experience of the magical season. Although she misses Anne and her mother,
she feels them in the strangers who absentmindedly press by her shoulders, and she is thrilled that such innocence and joy can be found in the very heart of the famous forbidding city.

The sun becomes stronger as Mary moves away from the lion, her protector. She goes to a stall and buys two postcards from the man in the checkered cap in the newsstand who can't stop talking even between customers. She will write to them both tonight she promises herself, and she will describe how she spent the afternoon. She passes by the National Gallery, thinking she ought to go in, but then decides it would be sacrilege to turn from the sun and the teeming multicoloured life around her. She turns into a quieter lane and then sees a figure in shiny black – the same colour and pattern as the spikes forbidding entry into the Palace grounds.

Then she gasps out loud as she reads the name: Sir Henry Irving. Her heart leaps with serendipitous delight.

That the whirlpool of experience around her should suddenly hone into this pinprick of coincidence! She gazes at the austere figure, its thin face, hawklike nose and black, expressionless eyes. Mary thinks of Mr. Stoker's sad, grey eyes and how as a child, and perhaps as a very young man, he must have beheld the flesh and blood version of what now stands before her. That the invisible strands of fate should have woven all these things – the book, Mr. Stoker, Mrs. Stoker and this statue – together all in the space of a few days seems marvellous to Mary. And it sends her mind reeling through time and space, to all the other things in life that had once seemed beyond her touch yet which, in fact, could easily lay before her in this new universe of the possible.

She remembers the crockery from this morning – the wild and exciting representations from all corners of the globe. Images flit before her of the Eastern-looking arcs and buttresses and the exotic swirls in stone that have come before her eyes even in her short walk so far; London it seems to her now, must be centre of the world. She determines to dive even further into its riches.

W
ILLIAM STARES INTO
the jar of spiced whole mangos before him, and feels a curious empathy for the fruit trapped against the preserving glass. He picks it up. Maud appreciates it when her pantry is stocked with unexpected pleasures. She enjoys asking Ruby to put exotic delicacies out on the table with the cold meat. But William is really on a quest of his own; he wants to find symbols of escape in the exotica he knows to be hiding in even the most conservative parts of the city, like here in the Piccadilly shop where the hidden joys of the Empire are collected and sold in neat, colourful packages. He wonders why he should have thought of food, particularly – he has also visited the Twinings tea shop in The Strand – and supposes it to be because the scents can escape from the packages, forming invisible wings of fragrance to carry him to the far lands of his imagination.

William's eyes skim away from the whole fruits to the pickled lime with the label decorated with red and yellow Persian designs. He imagines himself just for a second in an Eastern bazaar, his ears assailed by a reedy wind instrument and the frantic shouts of merchants. Fantastic coloured spices pile up on makeshift wooden stalls and trembling scales.
Women of great beauty and dubious reputation await assignations under pillared archways.

With a flush of embarrassment – especially as the features of the first woman he visualizes are a darkened, Eastern-tinged version of Mary's – William catches the eye of a young male server, uniformed in a turquoise waistcoat and breeches. The boy looks away suddenly.