The Resurrectionist (17 page)

A
COLD NIGHT
, ice seizing on the branches and the windowpanes. By Brookes’s house we part, Lucan’s money in my hand. I would have opium, but it is late, and my supplies are low. In my head is the rushing of my blood, all about the moving-through of things. Tonight we took four, slipped from a pauper’s hole in Blackfriars, their limbs icy from the enclosing earth. They are cold, the dead, colder than the air, colder and heavier than the earth.

I should go to Arabella but last night we quarrelled: no great thing, but painful nonetheless. She guesses where it is I go now, how my money is made, but she will not speak of it, will not question me. Sometimes she seems to be made of silences, of those things she does not say. Often now I feel unwelcome in that house, as if they hung back from me, almost as if they were afraid of me.

‘Why does your woman stare at me so?’ I asked her, for as I came in Mary did not rise, just sat before the fire.

‘Hush,’ Arabella said.

I looked at Mary’s face, and then back at Arabella, feeling the way they were joined against me.

‘Always she watches me,’ I said, ‘as if I were a monster.’

‘You mistake her,’ Arabella said – ‘Does he not?’

A moment too long, then Mary slowly nodded.

In the kitchen Graves is awake, seated with Rose, the woman who was there the night Lucan brought me here. Though they are not man and wife she shares his bed, but on what terms I do not know. As I enter she juts her chin out in my direction.

‘Why, it’s pretty boy,’ she snorts, her voice too loud, her head spilling back to bounce on Graves’s shoulder, loose with drunkenness. I am seized with the desire to strike her, to send her tumbling to the floor. Graves bites his lip, his crossed eyes alight.

‘Sit, sit,’ he says, standing and pushing back a chair.

I draw it back and sit. Rose snorts again, fighting to keep her head upright. Moving too quickly, too eagerly, Graves takes a glass and fills it for me.

The liquor is hot to the throat, but I drink it anyway, feeling Graves’s pressing gaze and Rose’s anger. There is something heady in Graves’s company, some sense he urges one on with his attentions; and so, despite his manners and appearance, I take the drinks he offers and share in his amusement with Rose’s befuddlement. Come five, and we begin to beat a tune upon the tabletop, singing with voices loud and hoarse, calling on Rose to dance, and as I watch her lurch here and there about the room, her arms held high above her head, lost in some imagining of her own desirability, it pleases me, as it pleases Graves.
And later, in my darkened room, the sound of the city awake. The seconds slipping, one upon the next and then the one before. On my fingers and my lips the taste of Arabella, the smell of the earth. If I close my eyes I can feel her here, feel her in my arms, shadow with weight, dream made flesh. It is the opium, I know, and yet not. And then somewhere I sleep, and dream.

N
EARLY DAWN, THE NIGHT
already drawing back. Craven and I have been to Camden Town, where the air was still and clear, caught as if waiting. All night something nagging in my head.

Graves is seated by the fireplace, his face delicious with anticipation. At first I do not understand, and so I stop. Even then it is not him I notice first but Walker, seated in the corner. And then I see him, seated to one side of Graves, his face lit by the light of the lamp which stands on the tabletop. Caley.

‘Prentice,’ he says.

At first I cannot speak, the presence of him there like something sick inside of me.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘Did you think I would rot forever in that prison cell?’

I shake my head. Then he puts a foot upon a chair and pushes it out so I may sit.

‘Drink with us,’ he says.
Their conversation is of everything, and nothing. A man who broke his neck falling down Foster’s Stairs, a woman who bore a child though her husband was these last ten months in Newgate Gaol, a gang who snatched an infant from a mother’s house in Bloomsbury. Caley is made different by his months away: thinner of course, and paler too, but that is not the whole of it. There is something newly wild in him, a fragility of mood. Graves sees it too, and hangs upon Caley’s words with some unhealthy exhilaration.

Dawn is long past by the time I push back my chair and rise. Outside the grey world all awakening. In my room I fall upon the mattress, my body light with opium and exhaustion. And when I awake they are gone again, and the house is still once more.

Never once does Caley speak of the thing I know is on his mind, the thing that brings him here.

T
ONIGHT THE THREE OF THEM
are already gathered close, laughing, Bridie seated on the carriage-bench, Lucan and Craven lounging by the door. As I approach, they fall quiet, as if they spoke of me. Lucan does not greet me, just lets his eyes meet mine then move away, gesturing to Bridie to move the carriage off. A little thing perhaps, but something hardens inside of me. And in that moment I think I understand, think I perceive Caley’s purpose in revealing himself to me. He offers me complicity, a secret knowledge all my own that Lucan cannot touch.

Something has altered, something has changed.

We go to Bethnal Green, where the tree leans low over the graves. The coffin lid already broken, my hook clatters loosely into the space below.

At first Lucan just stands staring, Craven too. This cannot be, for we call this yard our own.

Craven pushes me aside. Kneeling, he shines his lantern first into the musty passage we have made, then at the heaped earth atop the grave, seeking some sign of how this might have come to be. His narrow face clenched tight, he looks up and gestures to the nearest grave.

‘Check it,’ he hisses.

Taking up the spade I back away and do as I am bid.

The soil is loose, and I dig quickly down, the breath coming loud in my chest, the muscles in my back and legs hot with coursing blood. And when at last I strike the coffin top my spade falls through the broken board into the space below, just as with the first.

‘This is no accident,’ says Craven.

Slowly Lucan turns the lantern back and forth, searching the ground. The beam picks out a pale point amidst the broken earth. A shell, round and smooth, left by some friend or relative, positioned so its disturbance will be a sign if the grave is tampered with. Slowly he kneels down and takes it in his hand.

‘No,’ he says, ‘no accident indeed.’

Suddenly something shifts inside me, and I understand who is responsible and why. My heart skitters, my body growing light.

The shell still lies in Lucan’s hand. With a careful motion, he reaches out and places it back upon the piled earth and rises.

‘Fill them,’ he says.

To Kensington, where the leaves lie deep upon the graves and the cows can be heard murmuring and lowing in their sleep beyond the wall. From a tomb beneath a granite slab, the body of a gentleman, one leg missing from the knee.

Then back through the silent streets, his body bound and0trussed upon the floor. The whole way Lucan barely speaks.0Beside him in the darkness of the carriage I feel something0like vertigo, giddy and sick. At Blenheim Steps we wake0Brookes and sell to him, then make the split, and with money0in my hand I leave them there, eager to be away.

Back in the close the drive is dark, the windows shuttered against the fog. From within voices, low and indistinct, Graves’s snuffling laugh. Lifting my hand, I find the door locked, silence falling within as I rattle.

‘Who’s that?’ calls Graves.

‘Gabriel,’ I say.

The bolt slides back to reveal Graves’s cross-eyed face, the door opened just enough to admit me.

The lights are low, and Caley sits with Rose and Walker.

‘Why, prentice,’ he says, ‘I had not thought to see you back so early.’

Muddy footprints mark the floor, and through the half-closed door to Graves’s room I see the bundles bound and tied.

‘You have been at work,’ I say.

Caley lifts his eyes to me.

‘And if I have?’

By the fireplace Graves draws back his seat, his lips parted in a grin of anticipation.

At last I shake my head. Taking up a bottle from the table Caley passes it towards me.

‘Drink with us,’ he says.

F
OR THREE DAYS
the bodies lie in Graves’s room, half covered with a canvas sheet. Caley seems not to care what happens to them, happy instead to let them lie and spoil, their flesh eaten by the rats that rustle in the walls and ceilings. I would think them forgotten, save that on the third day I pause to look at them, and see Caley watching me from his chair. He bites his lip.

‘Why do you not sell them?’ I begin to ask, but his manner stays my tongue.

Once, long ago, lost in some childish game high in the loft of the barn, I saw the son of the groom slipping in below. Myself seven perhaps, or eight. Something in his manner, some quality of quietness making me fall still.

Though he was known to me and I to him we were not friends. His father was a serving man, and mine a gentleman, a distinction which made me a lonely figure amongst the
children of the house.

Slipping into one of the stalls he unfolded a chaff bag from his chest. In it a half-grown cat I knew as the cook’s, a quick ginger thing with a coughing, broken purr. It shook its head as he set it down, the motion kittenish, its body all legs and tail as it started away from him. A hand outstretched and it drew closer, sniffing, then slid its head along his hand. Slowly he let his hand run down its back, once, twice, until it came closer again, and coiled about him, tapping at his arms with its paws.

He was so still that when he closed his hand about its neck the cat seemed to think it mere accident, only growling and moving as if to shake him off. But he did not let go; instead he tightened his grip, forcing it to the floor. Even now the creature seemed not to understand, but I did, my heart tripping as he pressed it down. Lifting a hammer from the bag he raised it, letting it hang for a moment in the air, his arm suspended before he brought it down upon the cat’s head, striking hard, first once and then again.

This done he laid the hammer down, leaning back upon his feet as if waiting to see what the cat would do. At first it did not move, its head bloodied and broken, but at last it tried to stand. It moved unsteadily, its movements jerky and uncoordinated, dragging itself away from him. He let it go at first, waiting until it was almost at the entrance to the stall before stepping after it and prodding it so it fell again. Again it tried to stand, and once more he prodded it, and then again, each time blocking its escape. Finally it hissed at him, and tried to bite, its teeth closing on his exposed leg and drawing blood. With a curse he drew back his hand, and swinging back the hammer he struck the cat hard from the side, knocking it across the stall. Around and around they went, he blocking its route, moving faster and faster, until at last he lifted his foot and stamped on it, first once, and then
again and again, his face pale with savage glee, over and over. And all the while I did not move nor make a sound. Not because I was afraid, because it was not fear I felt, nor anger, but rather something closer to desire, a feeling secret and horrible and wonderful that filled my hands and chest and groin. Only when he was finished, and the cat was still, its body smashed broken did he stop. And then, and only then, did he turn, look upwards to where I lay, his eyes meeting mine. His freckled cheek was splashed with blood. I could not move, nor look away. He did not speak, nor did he have to, for I realised in that moment he had always known I was there. And then he smiled, and all at once I understood the part I had played in this thing, the heat I felt not that of fear but recognition.

Sometimes now I cannot bear her touch. Like a sickness, the knowledge of those others who have touched her, the lies she has told, is always there; it whispers in my ears and follows me through my sleep. And when I hold her in my arms I am filled to overflowing with my loathing, not just for her but for myself, for all of this.

T
WICE MORE IT HAPPENS
, bodies taken that we thought our own. Each time the work done carefully, so we know it is not simply thieves or amateurs. That Caley is responsible I am certain, and though I do not know where he conceals them he is ever here, and so I suppose they must be too, hidden in some quiet room.

There is some power in his presence, I see that now. Not just in the way he bends Graves to his will or the way Walker submits to him, but in the way his temper fills the room. They are frightening, his moods, and all of us are afraid of them. Always he dares me to strike back at him, to test his mettle, each time I choose silence it seems a victory for him.

Though I am a fool for it, I find a sort of savage glee in seeing Lucan cuckolded thus. That he knows not who is responsible is plain enough, it is in his looks and his words and all that he does, though never does he lose control or give himself away. In another man this might be admirable, but as I watch him taunted by Caley’s acts I find nothing to
like in it, instead I find only contempt for him and all he has made of me.

We have been in Whitechapel, then Clerkenwell. Two smalls, a mouthful of teeth, no great pickings, but Lucan will not make the split. Instead he delays, finding reasons to keep us in his company, though I am irritable and out of sorts, and would have my medicine. Here and there the bakeries are opening, and at Lucan’s bidding we buy bread. Still warm with the oven’s heat, but my stomach is colicky, and I cannot eat.

Then, out of the mist, a carriage looms. Its driver has laid planks across the mud so a woman might board. She is small, her face obscured by her coat’s hood. But as we pass, she turns, and I know her, not by her face but by the way she holds herself. Her pale face meeting mine.

Opposite me Lucan leans his head back against the carriage wall, his hooded eyes dark.

‘A man should be careful his tastes do not outstrip his means,’ he says. Craven starts to laugh. Staring back I hold Lucan’s gaze, wishing only that I might wipe his smile from his face, from all of them.

Tenderly she opens my hand.

‘How came you by these?’ she asks, touching the broken skin on my knuckles.

‘An altercation,’ I reply. ‘Nothing.’

‘And this?’ she asks, touching my ribs. A bruise, mottled green, and purple.

‘It is the work,’ I say, ‘no more.’

‘The work,’ she echoes, her judgement hanging in her words. Though she does not move I feel the way she pulls away.

With a sudden surge of anger I push her from me, harder than I had meant to, and she stumbles back. Something flares in me, to see her fall, some pleasure, and for a moment I stare at her, exultant.