The Devil's Making (10 page)

‘England', I said, out loud.

‘Englan', she said, in a good imitation.

I said in Chinook that I came from England, the land of the great mother Victoria – and so on. But this was official talk. She said nothing. We kept walking. I told her how on summer nights the nightingale sings from the woods. She asked, how did it sing? I made an attempt to imitate it with whistles. Then I told her about corn crakes, making their sounds from the fields at dusk. I imitated that too. She laughed, and tried to make the same sound – a rasping croak. Then we were abruptly silent. We had embarrassed ourselves and each other. ‘There is nothing to laugh about', I tried saying in Chinook. ‘This is a terrible day'. When I got through this, she said with what sounded like anger, that Wiladzap was alone in the King George House and he must be very tum tum sick. Then she fell silent. We walked on. Was she crying, silently? I could not see, so perhaps I imagined this. But I began to feel almost happy. It was as if we two, one man and one woman, were walking along under the stars in a bubble of our own. I had never taken a walk in the dark with a woman – other than with my mother or a maid when I was a child. But I felt strangely at ease.

The few houses along Cedar Hill were in darkness. We passed the little church on the left. After another half hour or so we entered the thick forest, where the moonlight was muted and patchy and boulders loomed up at us from each side of the narrowing track. A few times when she stumbled I took her arm to help her along. Once she grabbed my arm. Each time we let go at once.

The dirt road became even more bumpy and irregular. This had been less noticeable on horseback. There were occasional bridges across gullies, where we trod especially carefully since there were no railings. We had to walk in single file – Indian file! – with Luskwaas now in front. I could see her hair shining from time to time in the moonlight, but otherwise she was like an undulating shadow, heading on it seemed more confidently than when we were side by side.

We turned right at the fork to Cormorant Point. As the path led through the cedar swamp I could smell the fragrance of the trees – like Lukswaas herself. In Latin they are Arbor Vitae, the tree of life: they resist decay. Eventually we passed the turn off to where the corpse had been found. I could smell the dung left by the tethered horses, and managed to avoid some I could vaguely see. After this faded I became aware of the cedar smell again, of dank smells from the forest, and of Lukswaas in front of me – wood-smoke and, as my nostrils became more finely tuned, a slight animal smell of her chilcat – goat's wool. We turned toward Cormorant Point at another fork in the path, her pace not slackening – I had to almost scramble after her – as we continued down hill. Suddenly I smelled the sea – like smelling the English Channel from the downs of Dorset, not too far from home. Then fresh wood smoke – a strong smell. I no longer had Lukswaas to myself. Moonlight broke through the thinning trees. I strained my eyes ahead for the lights of camp fires and I saw them – and felt sad. Lukswaas held out a hand to slow me down, and stopped, turning to face me. She said ‘Klahowya'. Goodbye.

‘Klahowya', I said.

‘Thank you'. She turned and ran fast down the path to the clearing, calling out. I heard calls in reply. She disappeared. I stood there stunned. Had she really said ‘Thank you'? This could not have happened. I felt a tingle down my spine. It must have been a voice in my head. A hallucination. I shook myself, like a dog out of water, as if waking from a dream. I turned and began my long walk in the dark. I found I was feeling ill – heart sick – ‘tum tum sick'.

6

I only had a few hours to sleep and I kept waking in a state – of ecstasy. My first thought was Lukswaas. ‘I'm in love with her', I realised each time with a shock. At least that must be what I am feeling. Even on my heart-sick way back, stumbling along the path through the forest, although the moon was now higher and shafts of its light through the trees helped me on my way, I was living our walk together backwards. Here is where she said ‘Thank-you' – or did she? Here is where she took my arm. Here we talked of English nightingales and she imitated my imitation of the call of the corncrake. Finally, here we walked up Fort Street almost like a shy couple on our first outing together. A couple. But she is coupled – literally – with Wiladzap. My God! I have to stop this thinking. My task is to find evidence so that we can charge Wiladzap – or let him go. But we won't let him go. On that despairing thought, my body aching from that ten mile walk, I dropped into sleep again. And when I awoke to get up I found myself ravenous for breakfast and concentrated on the case of Wildzap – not on Lukswaas. After all I am well practiced at putting things out of my mind.

*   *   *

The alienist's house was a small, neat, yellow painted box behind a white fence, in a side road off Fort Street between the town and the houses of the rich. A discreet and private place. Comings and goings could be observed by no neighbour, since opposite, on the hillside, was one of Victoria's typical outcroppings of rock and twisted arbutus, impossible to build on or make a garden on. Anyone turning into the street could be taking a way through to the other streets further North. Yet few people would in fact do so. It was not a thoroughfare. During my visit, not a single person passed by, so far as I could tell. There was no sound of voices from the street, or of creaking cart wheels.

I was standing in the alienist's consulting room: a typical small square farmhouse room, with fireplace and two windows, pink curtains hooked back, and a layer of opaque muslin ‘drapes'. I had informed myself that this had been the house of a homesteader who had taken to drink until his wife had forced him to return to England. McCrory had bought it, taking out a mortgage from a Jew whom I would interview later.

On the walls were framed certificates with gothic lettering and gold seals – a licentiate and doctorate in medicine from the University of Virginia, made out to Richard McCrory. Perhaps this ‘Yankee' was in fact a Southerner disgusted by the Confederate loss who had come all the way North and West. There was also a large chart of the human skeleton, and another of the musculature, with all parts labelled although they were of neutral sex –
those
parts were not depicted. Rather pretentious, I thought. A doctor should not need such charts. They must be there to make an impression. Like the porcelain head on a special marble topped stand, with the contour mapping of phrenology: bumps of righteousness, hope, generosity and so on. There was a desk and table oddly bare of papers except for a few journals in two neat stacks:
The Phrenologist,
and
The Zooist
– a journal I had head of. I glanced through one. It was on Mesmerism, put out by the Edinburgh surgeon Eliotson who was well known as the inventor of the stethoscope.

A high bookshelf was crammed full. Herbalist manuals, medical texts, works of Mesmer in French and Latin (these looked in mint condition and I suspected they had never been read), a book on Mesmerism by Eliotson, more copies of
The Zooist,
Herbert Spencer's huge
Principles of Psychology
which I had looked at some years before in Oxford and found unreadable. Galton on heredity. Mill's longwinded book on the rights of women. On the lighter side there were books of travels among the Indians, Eskimo, Australian aboriginals, Maori, Annamese, Javans. A shelf of novels: Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, and many romances of a female kind – odd, since the alienist had no wife – by Mrs Hemans, Aphra Benn, and others whose names were new to me but whose contents, as I rifled through a few, were approximately the same: large eyed heroines pursued by heavy-breathing, fascinating sheiks, rajahs, princes and diplomats. There were of course the inevitable, for an American – even a Southerner – Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson's turgid verse was the only poetry on the shelves. My eye took in a miscellany of religious texts of the evangelistic sort. Finally, on the bottom shelf, on their sides, there were atlases and marine charts of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and the British Columbia coast. I looked through these briefly for annotations or pencil marks, but there were none.

I glanced around the room again. McCrory's Chinese servant, who had let me in, dressed exotically in a blue silk robe, was standing patiently just inside the door. Like one of the Indians in his immobility, I thought, but the face was entirely different in that it had a fixed smile of obsequiousness, which by compressing the cheeks upwards hid the eyes behind narrow slits. Did the Chinese face make the social manners, or the manners the face? I wondered. The kind of thing to interest Charles Darwin. I glanced again at the bookshelves. No, there was no Darwin. No Buffon, or Lyell, or Huxley. The man may have been a doctor but there was no scientific interest except for Galton and Spencer, which any educated man might be expected to have. Perhaps for McCrory, phrenology and Mesmerism were science enough.

There was a long settee of the usual kind, black horsehair – but with exotic red and gold cushions and a red quilt embroidered with gold thread. Near it was a table with the usual paraphernalia of the doctor's office, old fashioned listening horn, stethoscope, auscultator, smelling salts. Where would the man's travelling bag be? Near the desk on the floor. I crouched down and opened it. Listening horn, smelling salts, bandages in rolls, ointments. A small wooden case of surgical instruments: scissors, scalpels, knives, curved scraping-blades.

I turned my attention to the desktop again. The blotting paper pad was spotted and blotched here and there with purple ink, but there were no reversed words such as a fictional detective would have delighted to read with a mirror. There was an elaborate tray for pens and ink, of the latest style, in ormolu and brass, with the usual equipment. The desk drawers were not locked. In the upper ones were notepads, paper, prescription pads, the catalogues of pharmacists in San Francisco. Nothing surprising. I picked up a cheque book from the Bank of British Columbia. Figures but no names on the stubs. I dropped it in my pocket. In the bottom drawer were several small sealed cardboard boxes, and one which was unsealed. I opened it, but did not recognise the articles in it. I picked one out and held it up to the light of the window. It was a rolled round disc of yellowish parchment, dusted with fine powder. I began to unroll it, then stopped. A sheath! I felt embarrassed. I had never seen one of these things before. I put it carefully back in the box, now noticing a discreet label on the side: ‘One doz. A1 quality Lambskin Condoms.' The box contained seven. Condom must be a new word. Absent-mindedly I wondered at its derivation but could think of none. I came back to reality, and tapped the box, looking at the Chinaman.

‘Dr McCrory was not married?'

‘Naw.' The Chinaman smiled more, and bobbed up and down slightly.

‘Did he have a mistress?'

‘Mistress? Lee not know word ‘mistress'.'

At least a thousand of the three thousand Chinese in town were called Lee. I wondered, even, whether his way of talking, with ‘mistress' pronounced ‘mistless', was a self-parody – the stage Chinaman. Not all ‘Celestials' in Victoria were incapable of prouncing ‘r'.

‘Lady friend?' I asked.

‘Naw.' Lee's smile did not budge. ‘No lady friend.'

‘Then why these?'

‘Lee not know.'

I put the box back in the drawer. ‘Show me his bedroom please.'

Lee bowed and led me out to the stairs, stepping aside for me, then following. There were three rooms upstairs, the first with simply a bed and a chair. ‘Guest room' Lee volunteered, but when I asked him about guests he said there were never any. There was a store room, bare except for two steamer trunks. I opened them and rifled through them. More books in one. Clothes in the other: brocaded waistcoats, pantaloons with silk stripes down the sides. The man was a typical American swell. Good quality linen underwear. Silk shirts neatly folded.

In McCrory's bedroom, in a wardrobe, were more shirts, trousers, jackets and coats, and a dozen or so pairs of high quality shoes. The bed was neatly made. A dressing table had a triple looking glass – an innovation I had never seen. My face looked uncouth in profile, my beard scruffy above the unbuttoned neck of my police tunic.

There was a wash-stand with the usual accoutrements: beard-trimmer, brushes, and a hair-catcher made by female hands – the kind of thing wives or daughters gave as presents. I began going through the chest of drawers beside the bed. Underclothes. A pistol: Colt 45, heavy as a rock, loaded but with the chamber opposite the breech empty and the safety catch on. A box of cartridges. He presumably had not felt he needed this on his excursions to Cormorant Point to pick herbs with.…

I closed the drawers, then went over to the window and looked out at the trees across the road. Downstairs I had glanced into the kitchen, laundry room, and the waiting room, which was normal enough, with American reviews and the usual American pirated issues of the
Quarterly
and
Blackwoods.
What sorts of patients did the alienist receive?

‘Why no appointment book?' I said.

‘Appointment book?'

‘Book with list of patients. Where book?' Oh God, I was now talking a kind of pidgin English to Lee.

‘No book.'

‘How did he see patients then? How many a day?'

‘Patients?'

‘Look, Mr Lee, I don't want to waste my time. You'll come to the police station with me anyway, and make a deposition. If necessary we shall find an interpreter. Don't pretend you know less English than you do.' I was surprised at my own rudeness, but told myself that I was tired from my long walk the night before.

‘Lee not pretend,' the man said, still smiling. ‘Lee do best. Dr McCrory not keep appointment book. He see two patients, three patients a day. He know when they come. He keep all in head.' Lee tapped his temple.