The Kingdom of Bones (19 page)

Sayers hadn’t waited. He was away already, looking for his Louise, the woman who’d once pushed him in front of a train and had since grown indifferent to her own fate. How much more dedicated to his purpose could a man be? Sebastian listened, and could hear him calling her name; he also heard something else, from under his feet…a thump, like a slamming door in some other part of the building, but coming from below.

“Sayers!” he called out. “They are under the stage!” But either Sayers could not hear him or was already on his way down there.

Behind the scenery at the back of the stage there was a lifted section of the floor. It was about four feet square, and there was a ladder going down into the darkness below it. Without any hesitation, Sebastian descended.

There was lighting down here: a few weak electric bulbs casting a dim yellow glow, enough to move around by but nothing more. The underside of the stage was a maze of wooden beams and cross bracing, as if the floor above was built to support far more weight than could ever be required of it.

“Sayers!” he called up the ladder. “Did you hear me? Whitlock is trying to reach the orchestra pit!” He heard a scuffle in response to his voice; the noise might have been made by rats, because the movement that caught his eye was from another direction altogether.

There was Whitlock, clambering through the timberwork toward the front of the stage. He was finding no way through. Those who had sealed the theater to protect the mysteries above the stage had taken similar care to protect the further secrets below it. Now Sebastian understood the reason for such a complicated understructure. The entire stage floor above them was a grid of squares, any one of which could be lifted to give secret access or escape from a piece of magical apparatus.

Whitlock had a grip on Louise and was dragging the young woman along with him: his one prize, his last asset, his bait. But she was slowing him down. The new dress was so full that it was getting caught up almost everywhere. Sebastian moved to follow, and immediately banged his head on a low bulwark.

The blow was a glancing one and not too hard, but it was enough to disorient him for a few moments. He used his few seconds of unbalance and uncertainty to draw the empty pistol from his waistband.

“Whitlock!” he shouted, and raised the pistol. He held it level as if he would fire. A man might take a while to climb through the understage timberwork to reach a fugitive. A well-aimed bullet would make the same journey without interference.

Had he a bullet. His gun was empty. But Whitlock could not know that for sure.

He saw Whitlock turn his head and spy the firearm. With a terrified jerk, the actor-manager thrust Louise around into the line of fire so that her body shielded his. She had to catch hold of one of the wide timbers to prevent herself from falling.

“You coward, sir!” Sebastian called to him. “You cannot hide behind a woman! Surrender yourself. You have no way out!”

But the move was only meant to buy Whitlock a moment or two of time. He had an escape in mind, and now Sebastian could see what his plan was. Fixed under one of the floor squares was a movable apparatus of pulleys and counterweights. Its purpose became clear as Whitlock stepped onto the platform in the middle of the frame.

“Sayers!” Sebastian shouted, hoping that wherever he was, the fighter might be warned in time to prevent Whitlock from making his way back to the pass door. “He’s on the star trap!”

Whereupon the actor-manager threw a release. The counterweights dropped, instantly speeding the platform and its occupant up toward stage level.

Sayers had heard every call that the policeman had made, beginning with the very first, but had been unable to reply. He dared not take his attention from the Mute Woman. She was before him now, one of Maskelyne’s trick swords in her hand; whichever way he tried to feint or dodge, the blade was there before him. He knew the blade was sharp. She’d cut him once already.

She’d stepped out from a collection of wooden crates and illusionists’ properties, confronting Sayers as he was searching the scene dock beyond the wings. Sayers had never really paid her much attention before now; back in the
Purple Diamond
days, she’d been the sewing woman’s lowly assistant. He’d paid out her wages every week, but had very little to say to her. If asked for an impression, he’d have described a dark-complexioned woman, one who avoided all company and never met one’s eye, a menial worker bundled up in so many layers of old clothes that her shape was indeterminable.

She’d shed her coat, so that she might move with greater ease. Now her eye was fixed on his. Seeing her as if for the first time, Sayers realized that she was far from the bent harridan of his imagination. She was not a young woman, but her frame was trim and strong and she stood and moved with uncommon grace. She held the sword with a confident hand.

Her purpose was plain: She was here to buy time for her master. She would hold Sayers’ attention until Whitlock had escaped to safety, and if Sayers would not be held, then she would almost certainly cut him down. Sayers had made one attempt to disarm her, and was now bleeding freely as a result. She’d backed him out onto the stage, and he dared not turn away. One thrust would end it if he did.

He could hear Sebastian Becker shouting somewhere down below, but it was impossible to be sure of what the policeman was saying. He heard him call out Whitlock’s name, and then he heard his own—Becker was trying to warn him of something. But Sayers dared not move his gaze from the Mute Woman, and she did not take her gaze from him.

What came next was unexpected—there was a rumble of weights and pulleys almost directly under their feet. Neither meant to look down, but both of them did. Sayers knew the sound well. It was the machinery underlying a star trap.

A star trap offered the most spectacular—and potentially the most dangerous—entrance that a performer could make. Coupled with a flash of magnesium powder, it could make a player seem to appear out of thin air. A heavily counterweighted platform shot the actor up from the basement through a star-shaped trapdoor. The trap’s hinged leaves would flip upward, opening like a flower. Once the body was through, they would drop back into place to conceal the point of emergence.

A good star trap took about half a second to do its work.

Half a second was just enough time for Sayers to place his foot upon one of its sections.

The floor jumped. Sayers felt the full force of a body hitting the trap, only to fall back again. Some of the pointed sections flew up. Even the one that he was standing on bounced an inch or two.

Then nothing, until the Mute Woman started to scream.

TWENTY-SIX

C
artaphilus!”
she screamed at the floor.
“Salathiel!”
And she would have screamed more had Sayers not taken advantage of her distraction to floor her with a neat right-cross clip. In some secret and shameful corner of his heart he’d always wondered what it would be like to hit a woman, in the way that the mind tends to dally with the taboos it most ought to shrink from. Like defiling the cross, or dissecting a fairy. It was the thought that could not be entertained, the awe that one sensed before a door that one never dared to open.

Yet when the moment came, it gave him no trouble at all. He responded as he would to any armed man who had cut him and now threatened his life. Only as she hit the floor, with the sword clattering away from her outflung hand, did he recognize the wrong in it. But by then she was down, and he was safe.

He tried to prize open the leaves of the trap, but the stage carpenter had done his work well and they were too close a fit. From the stalls, an onlooker would detect no sign of any device. Sayers crossed the stage to where the sword had fallen, and picked it up. The Mute Woman was stirring slightly, but was no threat to him for the moment. Using the tip of the blade, he levered out one of the star sections and then was able to lift the others and so open up the trap completely.

The first thing that he saw when he looked down was the body of Edmund Whitlock, sprawled across the apparatus. The platform had jammed about halfway up and his limbs were hanging over its edges. There was little blood, but by the look of him his neck was broken. Sayers swung himself down into the hole and, placing his feet with care so as to bestride the body, he lowered his weight onto the platform. With a load of two grown men on board, it slowly descended in its runners. When he could reach the lever that would lock off the counterweights, Sayers secured it.

Whitlock was dead. There was no doubting it now. But where was Louise? When he’d seen the two of them last, they’d been together. He looked around in the gloom of the stage basement, but the only face that he could see was Sebastian Becker’s. The policeman was sitting on the ground a few yards away, with his back against one of the hefty wooden pillars. There was soot and dust everywhere, but he seemed not to care. He was staring at Whitlock’s outstretched body.

“Where’s Louise?” Sayers said. “Becker, where is she?”

Becker didn’t respond until Sayers climbed through the woodwork to where he was sitting. Then the policeman finally seemed to become aware of him, without actually taking his attention from the body.

“I do not know what I saw,” he said.

“You saw a man meet an end he well deserved,” Sayers said. “But what happened to Louise? Was she with him?”

“She went to him,” the policeman said. “He’d flung her aside, but she went to him. She took the blood from his face, and she drew it onto her own. Like tears. I called to her. I would have gone closer, but she signaled me a warning.”

“Against what?”

“I cannot say. But it stopped me as I stood. She took his face in both her hands and placed her lips against his. I do not know if he was dead, or on the point of death. But she drew out his last breath and made it her own.”

Finally tearing his gaze from the dead actor-manager, Sebastian Becker turned his head to look at Tom Sayers.

He said, “It was not physical. Nor material. I don’t know what it was I saw. But I can swear to you, Sayers. I will swear it until my dying day. I
did
see something happen. I swear that something went from him to her.”

As Tom Sayers had been entering the basement through the star trap, Louise had been leaving it by the ladder. Her heart was calm and her head was clear. For the first time in many weeks, she felt that her life now had a shape and a purpose.

What shape, and what purpose, she did not yet know. She merely sensed the presence of meaning, where before there had been none. It flooded her, it filled her. It was as if she began to have an exact sense of her location in the great scheme of things, all the way from the center of her being out past the sun to the cold, cold stars.

She found the Silent Man and his wife on their way to the pass door. They were a sorry-looking pair. It would have been hard to say which of them was holding the other up.

She stopped them and said, “Listen to me. Whitlock is dead. I have bared my soul to God and offered myself for damnation in his place. I believe that God has considered the condition of my soul, and has accepted my offer. I am in hell already. Let Whitlock find peace. As God is my witness, for the things I have done I will not be redeemed. I have opened my heart to the Wanderer’s burden. Will you guide and serve me as you served him?”

They stared. But she did not doubt that they understood. The Silent Man released his wife and took a step closer to Louise. He was studying her, looking into her eyes as if for signs.

She waited, and allowed it. Her dress was torn to the point of indecency and filthy as well, while her cheeks were marked with drying blood. But she stood there, straight and confident and entirely without shame.

After a while, the Silent Man looked back at his wife. She was waiting for his assessment. When her husband nodded, it was as if she filled out and grew an inch or two. The woman’s eyes brightened and her cheeks flushed with life.

“Come,” the man said to Louise, and led the way out of the theater.

TWENTY-SEVEN

W
hen Elisabeth Becker came down early on Monday morning to set breakfast for the family, she was not expecting to find a visitor already at the table. Especially not one who looked like a convict on the run. He sat like one, too, head down with his arm around the plate as if someone might try to reach in and steal his food. He was wearing the pants and waistcoat of a checked suit that looked as if it had once been loud, but had faded to a sludge color as it lost most of its shape.

She stopped in the doorway. He must have heard her breath catch in surprise, because he looked up at her. He’d just shoveled in a good half a pound of pancakes and corn syrup, and he struggled to swallow so he could speak.

“Please,” she said, raising a hand. “Please continue. Don’t trouble yourself.” Then she backed off into their little hallway. She was still moving backward when she bumped into her husband.

She was about to say something, but Sebastian signaled for her to hold it for a moment and then moved her farther down the hallway. She could still see the visitor from here, but they could speak with more privacy.

“Sebastian,” she said, “who is that man?”

The man at the table had grown self-conscious. He tried to carry on as before, but clearly knew that he was being discussed. He’d straightened in his seat and taken his elbows off the table, as if conscious of the need to make a good impression.

Sebastian said, “His name’s Tom Sayers.”

“Has he been here all night?”

“I let him sleep on the divan.”

“Why?”

“He has nowhere of his own.”

It wasn’t exactly the answer she was looking for. She glanced back at the man again. He shifted uncomfortably on his chair.

“He’s the man from the boxing tent,” she said.

“So he is,” Sebastian said, which brought him a stern look.

“Sebastian,” she said, in a voice with a definite edge of warning to it.

“He’s someone I knew in England,” Sebastian said. “We’ve unfinished business. From the old days.”

“He looks like a criminal. Is he?”

“Things aren’t always how they look.”

They went back into the kitchen, and Sayers got to his feet. Sebastian introduced them. Elisabeth told Sayers that he was welcome in their house and then urged him to sit down again and continue.

When Sayers had finished his pancakes he tried to wash the pan, but Elisabeth took it from him. She sent the ex-fighter and her husband out into the garden, where they could sit and talk while the rest of the family breakfasted.

It was more of a brick-paved yard than a true garden, but it supported a couple of flower beds and a Carolina allspice bush right next to the door. They had a water pump and a bird table, and Elisabeth would have planted a cherry tree as well if she’d been able to squeeze one in.

“You have a nice home,” Sayers said.

“Thank you,” Sebastian said. “It’s a little beyond our means, but I do my best to hang onto it.”

Sayers sat on a wrought-iron bench and Sebastian on a chair that he’d brought from the dining room. They continued the conversation that they’d had to suspend the night before.

Sayers had already told Sebastian of how he’d run straight from the theater to the Marylebone apartments that evening, but either he’d reached them too late or Louise and the two servants had never returned there. He’d waited on the street for hours, keeping watch on the building. After a while, he could hear Whitlock’s lapdog begin to bark. He did not know what had happened to it after that night.

“So Whitlock cheated on his bargain in the end,” Sebastian said. “Where his soul is now, we cannot know.”

“Pursuing Louise was like chasing a wraith,” Sayers said. “She changed her name. I imagine she changed her appearance. In Yarmouth, I heard that she had fled to the Continent. The trail went cold for a while after I tracked her to these shores, but in every new town or city I search for signs of her presence. Every now and again I learn something more. I joined that dog-and-pony boxing show because I heard she had come to the East. She is here somewhere. I know it.”

“Still chasing her after all these years? There’s a thin line between devotion and obsession, Sayers. You can easily cross it.”

“You’re probably right. But on that night at the Egyptian Hall, I saw how she’d changed. Her time spent with Whitlock had driven her illusions away. She now understood that she’d no reason to fear or despise me. But instead, she’d begun to despise herself.”

“And in consequence she abandoned all that was proper, and chose a life of moral decay. Haven’t your inquiries confirmed as much? She considers herself lost.”

“She can believe it, but that does not make it true. What I saw was a woman worth saving. She could forgive me, but she would not forgive herself. Tell me, Inspector. Is that the sign of a bankrupt soul?”

“Call me Sebastian,” his host said. “Or Becker, if you must. I am an inspector no longer.”

“I believe that she’s only held to her choice by the life she now leads and the company she keeps. Whitlock’s servants may try to teach her the ways of the damned. But it’s my belief that her nature will temper the excesses of the fiend they would guide her to become.”

“Nature can be beaten,” Sebastian said. “I once had to deal with a man who’d drowned himself. He put stones in his pockets, to make sure that his will to die would prevail over his instinct to survive. If she’s determined to see herself damned, there’s nothing you can do that will stop her.”

“I’ll have to find her to know,” Sayers said.

Sebastian went on to recount his own experiences in the aftermath of that momentous evening at the Egyptian Hall. He’d made the profound error of telling his story in full to the Metropolitan Police, without even thinking of how it might be received. In retrospect, he should have censored himself. They listened attentively at first, as officers to an equal. Then they began exchanging glances. Then they moved to another room to discuss what they had heard.

His account was deemed unsatisfactory. None of the well-heeled witnesses ever came forward. The watchman who’d admitted the audience confirmed that they’d existed, but said that their printed invitations had carried no names. When Sebastian was finally allowed to return home, he was suspended from duty and required to appear before a tribunal.

In the days before the tribunal, Sebastian went back to church. He did not pray, but spent several hours discussing myths and miracles with Father Alexander.

Father Alexander could teach others that Christ had risen, while declining to argue whether an intelligent person should allow that a rotten corpse might reverse its decay, heal its injuries, and clamber to its feet. For the priest, God was not hiding in the impossible tricks, but was to be found somewhere in the act of accepting them.

That was of little help to Sebastian. A readiness to believe in wonders might make the believer holy, but it didn’t make the wonders true.

The tribunal had recommended his dismissal from the force, the reason to be recorded in the remarks column of the police register as “want of sobriety and contradicting himself in his evidence.” Becker’s new superintendent had persuaded the chief constable to amend this to read, “…in consequence of his health.” The original wording would have kept him out of a job in this, his second life. The character of a Pinkerton operative had to be above reproach, with only those of strict moral principles and good habits being permitted to enter the service.

The time came for Sebastian to leave for the office. Sayers went to thank his hostess. He was awkward, she was gracious, and her sister and the boy sat in embarrassed silence while this rough-hewn stranger took up space in their familiar little room.

Then he joined Sebastian and they walked from the house to the streetcar, and rode it into town. The day was warm, and its windows were lowered to let a breeze pass through the carriage as they moved. Sayers sat with his elbow over the ledge and mused, “A Pinkerton man.”

“It’s like being a policeman,” Sebastian said. “Except that people respect you and you make a living.”

“If I walked into your office and asked you to find Louise for me, could you do it?”

“Could you afford us?”

That seemed unlikely. Sayers was patently not prosperous, and the years had not been kind. Steady drinking and regular poundings in the boxing booths had affected his bearing. Sebastian had not actually seen him take any drink during the few hours that they’d spent in each other’s company, but the need would probably catch up with him soon.

Sayers said, “I’ve tracked her up and down this country. She knows I’m looking for her. Once I came this close.” He held up one hand with his thumb and forefinger held barely apart.

Sebastian said, “Do you know how she lives?”

“Performing, singing…in Pittsburgh, she gave dancing lessons. She’s a widow when it suits her. She has an eye on society. I think she’d like to settle in one place. But there’s always some reason for her to move on.”

The streetcar reached Sebastian’s regular stop, and they squeezed their way out through all the standing passengers to disembark.

“Sayers,” Sebastian said when they were on the sidewalk and heading toward the Pinkerton offices, “I’m grateful for the answers to questions that have been haunting me for more than a decade. But this life you still lead is the life I left behind. I’ve no wish to return to it.”

“With such a wife and such a home,” Sayers said, “I’d be astonished to hear otherwise. All you have is all that I envy.”

“Then understand. I’ll see what I can find in the office files. Be our guest for a day or two, and we’ll get a few good meals down you, see if we can put a spring in your step and a shine on your shoes. If you need money…”

“I’ll take no money from you,” Sayers said. “But I’ll be grateful for your hospitality. And if anything in the Pinkerton files can bring me closer to Louise, then I’ll be on my way and you’ll hear nothing more of me. Will I need to pay your employers for the information? That could be a problem.”

“I’m an assistant supervisor. I’m expected to pursue new business. Not everything turns into a paying case. That’s expected, as long as it’s all within reason.”

The building’s war-veteran janitor had brought a chair out onto the sidewalk, pretending to look out for a delivery while he was really just taking the air. He’d seen the slaughter at Antietam, they said. Now he just watched the living go by.

“If anyone should ask you, you’re a client,” Sebastian told Sayers, and led the way into the entrance hall.