The Kingdom of Bones

to this scene in “the Dream” or “the jewel scene in Faust.” Most of them had toured or played in stock for years. Unless she wanted to be locked into this one play until Whitlock had run it into the ground, her best chance of expanding her professional experience lay through reading.

She held the text up close, and wore a pair of small-lensed, wire-framed spectacles to aid her. They’d belonged to an aunt who had died; helping to go through her rooms after the funeral, Louise had given in to the temptation to try on the spectacles and had been startled at their improving effect. She’d meant only to study the look of herself wearing them in a mirror, having no notion until that point that her power of vision was less than it might be. Now they were a guilty secret. Not just for the fact that she needed them, but because of the embarrassing impulse that had led her to discover it.

At the faint sound of the door hinge creaking, she looked over the top of the book. Seeing Caspar standing in the doorway, she quickly snatched off the glasses and hid them behind the covers.

Caspar seemed not to notice. He was too busy looking downcast.

“Mister Caspar,” she said.

Caspar raised a hand. “I did not know there was anyone here,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Please do not feel you have to leave.”

Caspar shook his sorry head. “I would not inflict my presence upon you,” he said, and he moved as if to leave and draw the sitting-room door closed after him.

“Wait!” Louise said, laying her book aside, and he stopped. “Please explain.”

He made as if to speak, and then sighed and shook his head. “What can I say to you, Louise?” he said. “I am ashamed to be of the same species as a man like Sayers.”

“His crimes are not yours.”

“But I despair.”

“Why?”

Caspar moved across the room to the chair that faced her own. As he lowered himself to sit on the edge of it, he said, “Because all is tainted by his base and perverted passions. What must you think when you look upon me now?”

Louise considered his words, and then chose her own with the greatest of care.

“That there are passions and appetites which are neither loathsome nor unnatural,” she said. “But which celebrate God and the way that he meant us to be.”

He gazed at her with a kind of growing wonder, as if she had shone an unexpected light into his personal darkness.

“I wish I could believe it,” he said.

She grew bold.

“I wish I could persuade you,” she said.

And at that, Caspar somehow managed to give her a fair impression of a man who might be open to persuasion.

Later that evening, high up in the ironwork under one of the town’s many railway bridges, Sayers found himself a spot to settle where no one could steal up on him, nor any bobby’s lantern seek him out. He could look out through the spans and girders across the rooftops of the city: its gaslit streets, its distant chimneys, the caul of smoke that covered its sky and forever blotted out the stars. He huddled there in a coat that stank of the beerhouse he’d stolen it from, and he tried to set aside all inclination to bewilderment or self-pity and address his thinking to the greater problems that faced him.

He was satisfied that nothing in his hand was broken. As far as he could tell, the pain in his arm did not represent a new injury but a reawakening of the old. As such, it ought to fade.

But what to do with himself? Where to go? He’d no friend in this town other than Lily Haynes, and he had no intention of blighting her new life with his problems. He knew that he ought to leave, make a run for London, perhaps, but for one good reason could not bring himself to go.

He feared for Louise. There was a madman in the troupe, and she was close within his orbit. Sayers had no doubt that it was James Caspar who should now be in shackles, not he. The man killed paupers for sport and gratification. It was obvious that young Arthur had spotted the series of fatal coincidences during the months that he’d spent combing local newspapers for notices, while at the same time enduring Caspar’s unremitting and casual abuse. Passing the information to the police had been his revenge. Alas, the act had rebounded upon him.

Becker had spoken of a note, sent backstage by Clive Turner-Smith. It had supposedly been returned to its sender with an inscription from Sayers—the inscription that had led the superintendent to his end. Sayers had seen no such note. Which meant that another had intercepted and responded to it in his name.

Could Caspar’s grip on the boss be such that Whitlock had chosen to hand the policeman’s note to his Leading Male Juvenile instead of his acting manager? There could only be one reason for making such a choice— Whitlock must have guessed the significance of Turner-Smith’s arrival. Which meant that he must already have been aware of James Caspar’s crimes. Thinking back to that tearful display in the lodging-house hallway, Sayers was inclined to think that he had underestimated his employer. Perhaps the man was a greater actor than could be imagined by anyone who only saw him perform upon the stage.

It would not have been impossible for Caspar to keep the appointment in Sayers’ place. He was offstage for most of the second act of The Purple Diamond, apart from one appearance as a mysterious hooded figure outside a window. This was always an occasion for screams from the audience, and cheers when the mystery was explained—but because his face was never seen at that point, almost anyone might have doubled for him. He could easily have left the theater for twenty minutes and returned to pick up his cue. And then later, back at Mrs. Mack’s, he’d need only to choose his moment to hide the slaughtered callboy in Sayers’ room.

The bridge began to shake. Up above, a mighty engine passed over. First came its thunder, filling the archway, and then an aftermath of clouds and cinder sparks falling outside like fairy rain. To the damp and soot of the archway it added a familiar smell, of coal and steam and long journeys and places to be, of schedules and order and purpose. Only a few yards above him was the life he had now lost.

Somewhere beyond his sight, the town hall clock was chiming. The second-house performance of The Purple Diamond would shortly be under way. Sayers leaned his head back against the stonework and closed his eyes.

He’d tried to approach the lodging house, but had managed to get no closer than the corner of the street. From there he’d seen that the police had left a man outside, and so he’d turned up his collar and walked on without stopping. It was the same on Liverpool Street; constables were all around the theater and when the matinee performance was over, cabs arrived to take the women home.

Somehow he had to warn her. She would not want to listen, but he had to make himself understood.

After all, he was, even in his supposed disgrace and enforced exile, the most dedicated of her devoted servants.

Although the matinee had been a strange and muted affair, by the evening word of that morning’s events had spread all over town. By seven, the house was packed and the atmosphere was electric. Clearly, the Purple Diamond company had become a major and morbid attraction.

During the opening turn, Gulliford hovered backstage in his Billy Danson makeup and seemed agitated and almost too distressed to go on. The resident stage manager all but had to give him a shove to propel him out of the wings when the band launched into his walking-on music, but he steeled himself and conjured the nerve, and then off he went.

He would later say that once he was out there, it was as if he’d been handed complete power over some gigantic thousand-headed entity; that he had never known an audience like it, or exercised such control from the stage. The same act that he’d done for twenty years, that had drawn polite applause in Whitehaven and with which he’d “died on his arse” in Glasgow, went over like bread to the starving. They were hungry, they were ready, and they would grab and shake and devour whatever he cared to throw at them.

“Better have your mop ready, Charlie,” he said to the SM as he came off after his comic song to a storm of applause. “They’re wetting the seats.” And then he skipped back on and took another call, more like a big-name headliner than a second-spot man.

The mood stayed up throughout the entire first half of the bill, and when the curtain rose on the opening