The Bedlam Detective (20 page)

There was some traffic on Baker Street, much diminished at this hour. So much had changed in the few short years since she’d come to London. Most of the hansoms were disappearing, supplanted by motor taxis. Horse wagons were still used for deliveries, but fewer of those as the months went by. Where would all the animals go? Wherever they went when their usefulness was done, she supposed, only not to be replaced. Theirs would not be a happy fate. Grace Eccles couldn’t take them all. It would be the tanner’s knife and the bone merchant’s cauldron, rather than grazing out their days in a field.

And in a moment that struck her as both absurd and sincere,
God grant them Grace
, she thought.

It was then that she heard a man’s voice call out, “There’s one of them.”

A
FTER A LONG WAIT FOR HIS TRAIN IN
W
ALTON STATION
, S
EBASTIAN
walked home from Waterloo. There were no messages at the pie stand, but he stopped and exchanged a few words with a couple of cabmen. By now Sebastian was a familiar enough figure to have earned himself a nickname; to the cabbies he was the Bedlam Detective.

Walking on in the late-evening darkness, he thought about trick films and puppets. Something had been said about the tinker having puppets. About how children would bring him rags, and he’d make the puppets dance for them.

But a trick film? That seemed like the least likely explanation of all.

Frances was sitting before the fire, her clenched hand raised to touch her lips, gazing into the flames. The room smelled of coal smoke, along with the ever-present smell of moldering wallpaper that hung around the suite of apartments. She didn’t seem aware of him at first. He stopped to look at her; and in the second or more before she registered his presence, he had the sense that her innermost thoughts would be within his reach, if he were only to ask.

But then she looked at him; and when their eyes met he smiled briefly and found some reason to look away as he spoke to her, much as he always did.

“Where’s Robert?” he said.

“In his room,” she said, “reading the book you gave him.” And then she returned her gaze to the flames.

R
OBERT SAID
, “I can’t do what you asked for.”

“That’s all right,” Sebastian said. “I know it was difficult.”

“It’s not a matter of being difficult,” his son said. “You asked the wrong question.”

“Did I,” Sebastian said.

Usually as tidy as a bug collector’s cupboard, Robert’s room was in some disarray. But it was disarray with a purpose, as Sebastian could see. Spread out across the bed were a dozen or more of his magazines, arranged in some kind of significant order. Some lay open, others had pages marked with slips of paper. There were books close to hand as well, and he had a notebook in which he’d been writing. Sir Owain’s memoir carried even more annotation slips. By the looks of it, Robert was still only halfway through.

Sebastian said, “And what question should I have asked?”

“It’s not a matter of where truth ends and fantasy begins,” Robert said. “You should have said where
fact
ends and fantasy begins. If that’s what you wanted to know.”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“No, it’s not. Mother’s like a spring flower. That’s not strictly a fact. But it
is
true.”

The phrase sounded familiar. “Where’d you hear that?” Sebastian said.

“I heard you say it once.”

And it was true, he had. He remembered now. In another life entirely.

Robert went on, “In the book, the narrator’s party is dogged by all these various trials and they see terrible destruction along their way. He listens to the stories of the natives and draws conclusions about the causes. He imagines these great creatures and then he looks for the evidence. What you’re calling his fantasies are actually how he pictures his fears. So they may not be factual, but to his mind they represent the truth.”

“Read on,” Sebastian suggested, picking up one of Robert’s older dime novels and looking at the cover. “He becomes more explicit.”

“I hope he
does
produce some monsters,” Robert said. “A dinosaur or two can gee up a tale no end. There’s not a single one in
Along the Orinoco
, and it’s all the poorer for it.” He looked up. “Will there be dinosaurs?”

“Not exactly,” Sebastian said, and held up the story magazine. It was issue number 130 of the Frank Reade Library, dated April 3, 1896. Authorship of
Along the Orinoco
was credited to “Noname,” as well it might be; a glance inside showed the lines to be brief, the language vigorous but rudimentary.

“Where did this one come from?” he said.

“I brought it with me. From home.”

He meant Philadelphia. Laying the magazine down again, Sebastian said, “I can see you’ve been researching the subject.”

“You said you’d pay me a shilling or two for an opinion,” Robert said, reaching out and returning the issue to its proper place in the order. “If I don’t put in the effort, how else am I going to form one?”

“All I’m trying to resolve, Robert, is whether the man who wrote that story believes it to be his actual experience.”

“You want to know if he’s intending fiction or deception.”

“Exactly.”

“Is this for your Lunacy work?”

“It is.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Because I can no more trust in his answer than I can believe in his book.”

Robert turned around and reached for a bound volume that lay on top of a stack of others on his bedside table.

He said, “This one’s called
Among the Indians of Guiana
. It’s exploration, not fiction. Mister Everard Im Thurn says of the Guiana Indians that they make no distinction between their dream lives and waking lives. If a man dreams of being hurt by his neighbor, he’ll go round and punch him the next morning.”

“Trust a savage not to understand the difference.”

“They don’t believe there
is
a difference. But their thinking is quite sophisticated. In their world it’s the spirit that’s responsible for the deed, not the body. And the spirit can live in all kinds of forms and cross from dreams to life and back again.”

Reaching into his pocket, Sebastian said, “So a man gone native may lose his sense of what’s real. That’s worth a shilling.”

“I don’t want it,” Robert said. “I haven’t earned it yet.”

“But you’ve given me something that I can tell Sir James. Does this Mister Im Thurn have anything to say about the state of mind of a man who sees monsters?”

“Oh, yes. That’s half the fun of a lost world. The Indians say that every inaccessible place in their jungle is inhabited by monstrous animals. They say there are huge white jaguars and eagles on the plain of Roraima, high above the Amazon. And down by the rivers there are monkey men and water beasts. It’s like Challenger’s world in the serial I’m collecting. That has dinosaurs.”

“Have you not yet reached the episode with the nest of monsters? Or the sea serpent that pursues the rescue boat?”

“No,” Robert said. “But don’t spoil it for me.”

T
HERE’S ONE OF THEM.”

She was just making the turn into Paddington Street. Lights burned in some of the upper windows, but the pavements were empty. It was now almost half an hour after nine o’clock. She looked back and saw a group of three men. They were crossing Baker Street toward her.

“Oi,” one said. “Miss. You. Come here. I want to talk to you.”

As they passed under a streetlamp, their foreheads and faces lighted up like bone and their eyes were plunged into deep shadow. They wore cheap suits, and cheap boots. The one who’d spoken had a lock of hair in his buttonhole, worn like a trophy.

“Not tonight,” she said.

She turned away and put on speed.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” she heard. “I’ll bloody teach yer.”

She could hear their boots on the pavement. She glanced back and saw the three of them striding after her. The foremost of them, the one with the lock of hair on his lapel, was balding and had a wide, dense mustache over a weak chin. His two friends were giggling behind, and one was checking behind them to see if anyone was watching.

She looked ahead and saw that the short length of Paddington Street was empty of people.

She broke into a run, to reach the next corner before they could reach her. If she could get around the corner they’d be seen, and she’d be safe.

But the next street was empty as well. There was a dray pulling along at its far end, but it was heading the wrong way. Right behind her and even closer now, she could hear the delighted snorting of her pursuers at their own outrageousness as they flouted all that was holy. For she was only one of those suffrage hoydens, come from the place where they were known to gather, alone and fair game for any sport.

She saw the etched glass and dim yellow lights of a public house, and in that she saw sanctuary. Without any hesitation she slammed open the doors and fell inside.

She looked around. She was in a small snug with aged woodwork and gleaming brass, and room for about a dozen men. She saw old men, bearded men, men squat as toby jugs, some with caps, some with pipes, all with stolid, phlegmatic expressions as if their lives had run out early and they wished nothing more than to sit out the rest of their days in silence, right here, with little to say.

“Hey, Captain,” one of them called out. “Woman on the bridge.”

And another one added, “She’s out on her own.”

Any hope of sanctuary was dashed by the appearance of the landlord, all brawn and shirtsleeves and red-faced perspiration. His eyes were hard and his face was set.

“Come on, you,” he called from behind the bar. “Out.”

“I’m being followed,” she said.

“I don’t care what you are,” he said, speaking over her and shouting her down. “No women in the snug.”

“Nor gentlemen either,” she retorted, whereupon with a “Why you—” he threw back the counter flap with such violence that she felt a sudden and genuine fear for her safety, even more immediate than the threat she’d felt on the street. She dashed through into the adjoining public bar rather than face him down.

It was as if the world had tipped and turned over in the space of a minute, and she’d fallen into London’s shocking through-the-mirror counterpart. From the public bar she came out into the street and almost collided with a night-patrolling constable.

She stopped. Relief flooded through her like a laudanum rush.

The policeman looked at her and then at the public house behind her and said, “What’s this?”

“Ask the roughs who decided to chase me,” she said.

He didn’t look around. “Where?”

She was gathering her breath now. “Back on the street,” she said. “They were waiting around outside the Portman Rooms. I was at a meeting there. I made the mistake of coming out alone.”

Now he looked around. But pointedly. Suddenly she didn’t like the way that this was going. He was a big man, as all of London’s policemen tended to be. And he had a country accent, as so many of them seemed to have. There were very few sharp-witted cockneys walking the streets for the Metropolitan Police, but there were a great number of these slow-moving, blue-caped and helmeted oxen.