The Kingdom of Bones

Caspar, it seemed, had fared rather worse.

Sayers circled all the way around him at a wary distance. Caspar had rolled over and was trying to crawl. But there was something serious and horrible about the way that he had bent in the middle.

“Caspar!” Sayers said, crouching down before him. Despite his injuries, Caspar was succeeding in starting to drag himself along. He was hooking his fingers into the dirt, like claws.

“Caspar,” he said, “your back is broken. Don’t move, you’re making it worse.”

But Caspar did not seem to hear. In fact, he no longer seemed to be aware of Sayers’ presence at all. It was as if the only thing that mattered to him was somehow to crawl his way back toward the pit village. He moved in sharp, sudden jerks, his nails breaking on the stones, his twisted body dragging behind like a sackful of dead things.

Sayers had to move back as Caspar managed another pull forward.

“Caspar,” he said again helplessly. He was torn between relief at his enemy’s fall, and dismay at the state of him.

Caspar was voicing something as he struggled. The words were unclear to Sayers’ abused ears, but the tone was one of entreaty. He was repeating the same things over and over.

“Cartaphilus!” he seemed to be pleading. “Ahasuerus!” He cried like one who had been abandoned or betrayed.

“What?” Sayers said. “What are you saying, man?”

“Salathiel!”

Another grab at the dirt, another mighty effort to drag himself on. This attempt seemed to run out of steam before it was completed. Caspar did not exactly die. Like machinery running down, he simply stopped. He lay there with his expression unchanged and his eyes wide open.

Sayers laid the shotgun down. Carefully, as if it might discharge again without his intending it. They’d be certain to have heard that first blast, down in the pit village, and they were hardly likely to ignore it.

If he stayed here, it would all be over in a few minutes. No doubt with yet another capital offense to be added to his list of crimes. But what could he do? He’d been running for two days and a night, and that was after fighting his way out of captivity. He could run no more. He could try, but they’d be on him within a mile.

Unless there was some other answer. Something obvious that he was failing to consider.

He raised his gaze from the dead James Caspar to Caspar’s white horse, all saddled and ready to run, fretting unhappily just a few dozen yards up the lane.

“Hey, old sport,” he said. “Come here, why don’t you.” He held out a hand in reassurance as he started walking toward it.

TWENTY

Faith,” Bram Stoker once said, “is to be found more often in a theater than in a church.” And in this last decade of the nineteenth century, London offered no greater Temple of the Arts than the Royal Lyceum, just off the Strand. Leased by actor-manager Henry Irving some ten years ago, it had become, if not a national theater, then the closest thing to it that the nation had yet seen.

It was late in December, the last Saturday night of the year and the first night of Irving’s Macbeth. This was his second crack at the part and was the production for which, some four months before, he had taken his company north of the border to research background and atmosphere.

Stoker stood at the heart of the theater’s empty auditorium and called out to each of the ushers by name, receiving echoing responses from their posts at the different levels of the house. The idea was that his voice would be recognizable to all of them, should he need to give out instructions in the event of an emergency. But in that great, dark, waiting space, there was a sense of something more. As with any ritual, it seemed to evoke a mystery beyond its meaning.

When his inspection of the house was done, he moved out to the upper lobby. Stoker was in evening dress, and it was his custom, on every Lyceum first night, to stand at the top of the wide carpeted stairway and greet the evening’s more prestigious patrons as they ascended.

Promptly at seven-thirty, the Wellington Street doors were opened and in they came—gowned, bejeweled, buzzing with first-night excitement. Outside, three braziers above the theater’s Corinthian portico threw a dancing firelight across the waiting crowds and the arriving carriages. The noisy gallery and the even noisier pit started to fill. In the Dress Circle and the boxes, London’s great, good, and merely fortunately born took their seats under the auditorium’s high gilded ceiling.

“Mister Archer,” said Stoker.

“Mister Stoker,” said the critic from the World. “I have heard it said that your employer is finally beginning to heed the advice that we all keep giving him.”

“You should know that Mister Irving listens to every opinion that is sincerely offered,” Stoker responded diplomatically. Archer had been allowed into the theater for a couple of hours during a rehearsal one night. There he’d been heard to say of Irving, What can I say of his walk? It isn’t walking!

It was true that Stoker’s master was an unlikely looking theatrical hero. With his stick-thin legs and his long, thin-lipped face, along with a style of diction that could be mannered to the point of peculiarity, Irving could more resemble an eccentric country parson than a Benedick or a Hamlet.

Yet he brought to the stage a vital energy like no other since Kean, a presence that raised the pulse and drew the eye to him wherever he stood. He chose his roles with care, and put on plays with a canny blend of intelligence and spectacle that stirred the blood while it satisfied the mind. Irving’s style was not to everyone’s taste, but he drew grudging respect from even his critics…including, on occasions, George Bernard Shaw, who griped at Irving’s artifice but turned up for everything, besotted as he was by the charm of leading lady Ellen Terry.

Like Shaw, Stoker was a Dublin-born Protestant whose passion for the theater had brought him across the water. A civil servant and amateur critic with a few pieces of newspaper fiction to his name, he’d met and been befriended by Irving during the actor’s Irish tours. When offered a position in the new Lyceum venture, he had given up everything and followed with his new wife to London. He’d been Irving’s devoted lieutenant ever since.

At seven-forty, the overture began. For this night only, Sullivan was conducting his own incidental music. Some ten minutes later, the house was stilled and the curtain rose. Stoker went down to the box office to check on receipts and then took a look around backstage, where Irving’s usual army of supernumeraries was assembling for the first big crowd scene. After that, he moved silently into the back of the Dress Circle and, himself unobserved, observed the audience for a while.

Down on the stage, in a setting that re-created a typical main hall in one of the drafty stone castles that they’d visited, Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth was reading her husband’s letter by the light of a practical fire. Over in her regular first-night box sat Irving’s estranged wife, the usual waves of silent hostility flowing from her toward the stage. Stoker scanned the audience for Florence, his own wife; there she was, seated with Sullivan’s working partner, her escort for the evening.

It was at this point that the head usher appeared at Stoker’s side and signaled for his attention.

They withdrew to the corridor behind the circle, where the usher said in a low voice, “Word of an intruder, sir. Spotted backstage.”

Stoker nodded and sent the man back to his duties, before returning to the pass door into the theater’s backstage area. The Lyceum was a tight ship, but because of the large numbers of people working behind the scenes it was sometimes possible for a trespasser to get in. Newspaper reporters of a particular type were a particular problem. But if they came looking for evidence of any impropriety between the actor-manager and his leading lady, they were looking in the wrong place.

A quick whispered consultation with a couple of the flymen sent him in the direction of the wardrobe and property store, down in the basement. Most of the Lyceum’s drop cloths and scenery were now stored in railway arches across the river, but there was much that remained here in the way of cloaks, chairs, goblets, and paste jewelry. There were weapons, there was armor, there was a ship’s wheel from