The Kingdom of Bones (16 page)

TWENTY-TWO

A
t this point in his long tale, the battered prizefighter paused, and Sebastian began to think that he might not continue. Outside the tent, some kind of an argument was going on. By the sound of it, the stakes were to be pulled and the booth taken down as soon as the park closed for the day. The billboards outside might promise an exhibition of the Noble Art, but the reality of it had too quickly degenerated into scrapping and riots. So now the show folk were being moved on, and in future Willow Grove would stick with its more respectable entertainments.

Sayers listened for a few moments and then said, “They’ll soon be calling for me. Everyone is expected to pitch in on a teardown.”

But he made no move.

Sebastian said, “So, after all the time that had passed, and everything that had happened…you still harbored strong feelings for Miss Porter?”

The boxer in the dirty robe turned his head slowly, and looked at the detective. Then he looked away again.

“I knew what a man in my position ought to do,” he said. “Walk away, close up his heart, forget the life he’d once had, and try to make a life elsewhere.

“But I also knew what that would mean. It would mean living as one haunted for the rest of my days. A rootless, aimless man with my heart and mind tied up in a secret past that I could never discuss or reveal.

“And that was only a part of it. Because to walk away then would be to abandon Louise to her fate.”

“She shoved you in front of a train.”

“A measure of how far she’d been misled. Make no mistake, Inspector Becker, my eyes were opened. All of my romantic illusions now hung in tatters. But you can imagine my dismay on finding that the framework on which they hung remained as strong as ever.”

Sayers went on, “In those first weeks after I reached London, I saw Louise only once. Bram arranged it for me. He may not have shared my certainties, but he was my rock from the day I confided in him. I could have asked for no better friend.

“No man of his honor would ever knowingly give shelter to a criminal, but he saw no evil in me. He could see, however, that as far as any living man could be, I was in hell. He thought that for me to see her might bring some relief.

“The death of James Caspar had forced Whitlock to cancel the rest of the provincial tour and make an early return to London. Rather than see the company split up, he engaged a replacement juvenile and took whatever dates he could find in town at short notice. One of these was at the Middlesex Music Hall on Drury Lane. I don’t know if you’ve ever been—it used to be the Mogul Saloon and has the decor of a Turkish palace. I had to take care because many of the names on any music hall bill were likely to know me on sight. On this evening there was Nelly Farrell, who’d been with us on the bill in Salford. Daltry, Higgins, and Selina Seaforth had a comic boxing act that I’d helped them to stage. James Fawn had a drunk act. I’d lent him two pounds once, and he’d been avoiding me ever since.

“I couldn’t risk being recognized, so I stood at the back of the gallery to watch.
The Purple Diamond
played in the middle of the evening, and it did not go well. Caspar’s replacement was an inexperienced boy in a crepe mustache. There was some new business with a clay pipe that didn’t come off. Caspar had been no great actor, but at least he could look the part by just standing there.

“The entire company seemed without spark. Only Whitlock stood out, and he played his role with a kind of suppressed fury, as if he was about to turn on the audience at any moment. The first few scenes were received in silence, as if everyone feared he might do exactly that. But then after a while someone called out something disrespectful, and for the rest of the piece it was ‘Come on Edmund’ and ‘Give us a dance.’

“I watched Louise closely whenever she was on the stage. I had eyes for no other. I mean it as no criticism when I say that as an actress, she is artless; what I mean is that her very soul is what you see. Her nature shines through her roles. Except that on this night, I saw a woman whose thoughts were elsewhere. She ran through the lines and the moves, but it was not exactly a performance—it was more like a polite but unenthusiastic reading of the part.

“I began to dread her song at the end. I began to hope that Whitlock might have cut it. They cheered at the final scene, all right, but it was not a healthy response. There was a note of derision in it. I wanted to leave as soon as the curtain fell, but I could not. It would have felt like a betrayal. Whitlock brought her out and gave her the briefest introduction and then left her to it, alone and unsupported. She looked so fragile and I had to grip the rail before me, to prevent myself from leaping up and calling to her.

“Despite my apprehension, the audience behaved. Only when she faltered did they begin to whisper. The whispers grew to a rumble of concern, as she lost her way in a song that she must have sung on a stage more than a hundred times.

“Our company’s musical director was down in the pit with the house band. I saw him mouthing the words from his score as he conducted, trying to prompt her. But I don’t believe that memory alone was her problem.

“After a while, the one we called the Silent Man opened the curtains and reached for her arm. He led her off and she went with him like a child. The band struck up something jolly and the chairman banged his hammer and started talking up the next turn as if nothing had happened.

“I rushed out into Drury Lane and around to a spot from where I could see the stage door. I cannot tell you how I felt. It was as if something was swelling and about to burst within me. I wanted to go to her, but I dared not. I remembered her terror at my last appearance.

“After a while she came out with Whitlock, and they got into a carriage together. She had his coat around her shoulders. I was able to follow the carriage on foot for a distance—long enough to observe that it was heading into the area around Marylebone High Street. Whitlock had kept a set of apartments there for longer than anyone could remember, and lived in them when the company was not touring. When he was at home, the Silent Man and his wife served as housekeepers.

“I went out there the next day, and contrived ways to observe his building without drawing attention to myself. I did not dare to get too near, but I could not keep myself away. I needed to know if Louise was his guest, and that she was well. I saw the Silent Man go out in the morning, and return in less than half an hour. I saw no sign of Louise until the afternoon, when a cab drew up and waited until she and Whitlock came out to it. He wore a dark suit, and she a veil.

“Their journey was a brief one, down Wimpole Street and into Henrietta Place, and I had no trouble keeping the cab in view. They went into a house with a brass plate alongside the door, one among many—these were the streets where the city’s wealthiest doctors lived and kept their consulting rooms. I had a premonition even before I walked past and read the name on the plate.

“This was the home of a physician well known in theatrical circles. I had heard it said of a number of actresses that they had gone to him for their ‘irregularities,’ always said in such a knowing way that I had been sure it was a code for something more, and eventually, without ever pressing for the knowledge, I came to understand what it was. Although a specialist in chest and voice complaints, this man had a sideline in dealing with the inconvenient unborn.

“Whitlock was compelling her to it, of that I’m sure. She could not have gone on to serve his purpose otherwise. I did not stay to watch them come out. I could not bear to.”

He looked at Sebastian then. The detective had not moved, nor made any sound that he was aware of.

Sayers said, “I know what you probably think of me. That I am one of those men who worships a certain kind of woman and thinks himself a knight of old, a hero in his own eyes and therefore, he imagines, in hers.

“There was a time when this might have been true. That time ended as I walked the streets in the hours following my discovery. I did not flee the abortionist’s doorstep through anger, nor through jealousy. I began to understand the true nature of my feelings when I realized that I wept for her distress, and not my own.

“I have learned that a man who offers his worship to women fails to realize how wearisome that gift soon becomes. Mere worship is a trinket to them—nice to receive, but one to pop in a drawer and forget.

“It would have been so easy for me to imagine her defiled, and to make her an object of my anger or even drive her from my thoughts. But in the course of those next few hours, I came to realize that there would never be anything I could not forgive her.”

Sayers paused for a while. He folded his scarred hands and rested his lips against them. He did not look up, and Sebastian began to wonder if his story had come to a premature end.

But then Sayers said, “I did not see her again for a while. My money was getting low and I had to take casual work in a fruit broker’s on the docks, or else be turned out of my lodgings to live as so many had to…moved on by the police all night, and sleeping in public parks by day. Once a week, I would meet with Bram Stoker, unless he was away from town on Irving’s business.

“It was Bram who showed me the lines in
The Era
announcing Miss Louise Porter’s retirement from the stage. There would be no farewell performance, no benefit night. From that time onward, she was rarely out of Whitlock’s company. He became her guardian.

“Although hardly of the top drawer of society, Whitlock had an ‘in’ to many a fashionable gathering. That is the peculiar thing about our profession: You can be born the son of a costermonger, but play a few kings and it sticks to you. I’ve even seen a clown talking to a duchess, where the duchess was the one making a fool of herself.

“Whitlock was escorted by Louise wherever he went, and the way he dressed her and presented her, you would have taken her for some foreign princess and the highest-born woman in the room. She was pale and beautiful, and she rarely spoke. Old rakes and young men would vie for her attention; Stoker said that there was always a group of them around her, and that she only ever half listened and seemed to be looking beyond them as if through cloudy glass. This made them see her as some kind of goddess of ice, and they competed for her attention all the more.

“Stoker said he saw it differently. He said that to him it was as if the very soul had died in her.”

Sayers hesitated. First he seemed about to say something more; but now he seemed to be done. Then he started to rise.

“The rest of it,” Sebastian said quickly.

“You know the rest of it. You were there.”

“Only for a part of what happened. Good God, Sayers, you can’t stop now. This is the very thing I came back here for.”

Someone outside was calling a name. The name was not Sayers’ own, but it caused him to look up sharply.

“I’m needed,” he said.

“I don’t care,” Sebastian said. “If I let you out of my sight now, then you’ll vanish with the circus and I’ll never know the truth.”

“You have most of it.”

“I want it all.”

Sayers gave a resigned sigh, then started gathering together his few possessions from the makeshift table.

“Then we must move to another place,” he said. “Or they’ll have the tent down around us.” He went over to his steamer trunk and raised the lid. A shabby but serviceable suit of clothes lay folded on top of the contents.

“You say that after persuading her to lose the child he became her guardian,” Sebastian said, rising from his chair, “and that she served some purpose for him. Is it your belief that she became his mistress in return?”

Sayers was stowing his few trinkets and taking out his street wear. He paused in what he was doing, as if the suggestion was an unexpected one that he had never considered before.

“No,” he said.

“Then…”

“There is much more to it than that,” Sayers said. “The sorcerer had lost his apprentice. He had been grooming Caspar to take over the Wanderer’s role, but now Caspar was gone. He needed new cover, and time was getting short. His deal with darkness was about to expire. From his increasing desperation, I would not have been surprised to learn that his doctors had put a number on his days.”

Sayers let the lid of the trunk fall with a bang.

“Louise was not his mistress,” he said. “She was bait.”