Stoker descended in silence, feeling his way down the handrail of the open iron staircase. He was wary, but unafraid. He had right on his side, and the physical authority to ensure that any intruder would be left in no doubt of it. To make doubly sure, he was carrying a heavy wooden belaying pin from the theater’s rigging, courtesy of the flymen.
Up above, muffled by the thickness of the theater’s floor, the thirty-piece pit orchestra could be heard playing Sullivan’s second-act prelude. Down below him, somewhere deep in the basement area, he could see a glimmer through the maze of gas pipes that told him someone had set up a lamp.
He couldn’t see the lamp itself. Mostly he could see the shadows that it cast up the walls. He reached the bottom of the staircase and started toward the source of the light, moving carefully in the darkness. There must be no commotion that might be heard from above; any moment now, the prelude would end and, since this was not
Something caught at his foot. He started back a little, and then crouched down and felt around ahead of him. Something, perhaps one of the costumes from the rack beside him, lay in a heap on the floor. Picking it up with care between finger and thumb, he raised it into the dim light.
It appeared to be an extremely grimy set of combination underwear. Wincing, he let it fall and then wiped his hand on his side. All his senses were telling him that the grime was not stage dirt.
Some tramp, then. Out to steal. No one stole from the Chief. Stoker kicked the foul clothing aside and strode around the rack to the other side, where the lamp was burning.
The lamp had been set up beside an ornate full-length mirror. The mirror was dulled with wax for use onstage, but a patch in the middle of the glass had been scrubbed clean to make it reflect again.
Before it stood a man. He was knotting a tie. As he stood there, he shifted his weight and flexed his shoulders a little, as if enjoying the very fit of the suit of clothes he wore. He was clean-shaven, and his wet hair was freshly combed.
In as bold a voice as he dared with the stalls directly above them, Stoker said, “Those are stage properties that you are wearing, sir. This is neither an old-clothes shop nor a public bathhouse.”
The man jumped in surprise, and then turned to face him.
“I’m sorry, Bram,” he said. “I was desperate to regain a little dignity. This is not a way I would normally choose to conduct myself.”
Stoker peered more closely in the bad light.
“Tom Sayers?” he said.
The man acknowledged himself to be the same. He said, “Half an hour ago, you wouldn’t have known me at all.”
Stoker hardly knew him now. He was shocked at how gaunt and hungry-looking the former prizefighter had become since last they’d met. He said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m in hiding, Bram. You must have heard the accusations.”
“I doubt there’s a single theatrical who hasn’t. You’re the talk of every green room in England.”
As he was saying this, Stoker glanced back toward the stairway. Sayers noted the action, and quickly raised his hands as if to show that he meant no harm.
“Don’t bring others, Bram, please. You’re one of the most loyal men I ever met. I’m begging you to extend a little of that loyalty to me, at least until you’ve heard my side of it. I know we’re not friends. But are we not fellows in our trade, you and I?”
Stoker looked him over. The suit was a few years out of style, but Sayers had been lucky to find it. Most of the Lyceum’s stock was for the classical repertoire, or for historical subjects.
Stoker said, “How have you been living?”
“Nights in ditches, a few fights for money in fairgrounds. Since I reached the city, I’ve been sleeping on a rope in the Minories. If any man in London can help me to unravel this, it’s you. And if you won’t help me…then let them hang an innocent man, for what can he care if his last hope has left him?”
Stoker considered the fugitive for a moment, and then he glanced upward. The second act was under way; no clear words could be heard, but Stoker could hear the swoops and cadences of Irving’s unique delivery of the dagger speech. Irving did not play Macbeth as a man wracked with doubt, or as a good man turned bad by an ill-timed prophecy. He played him as an arrow of evil, a man who had always been set to hack his way to the crown. For him, the witches merely opened the door that he’d been seeking.
Stoker said, “Stay down here. There’s to be a private supper on the stage after the audience leaves. I expect you’ll be hungry—I’ll bring you some food when I can. Don’t make a sound until I come to you.”
TWENTY-ONE
At around two-thirty on a cold winter’s morning, Tom Sayers woke for no reason. It was probably too cold to rise but he threw back the covers and rose anyway, hoping to shake off his melancholy frame of mind and then, after a look at the moon and a few minutes of night and silence, to return to the warmth of his bed and find sleep again.
He was in a temperance hotel, the General Gordon, which stood on a corner of one of the main streets in Spitalfields. When he looked out of his second-floor window it was through the gilded wooden “A” of the hotel’s name, the letters of which ran the full width of the building’s frontage. He was registered here as John Thurloe, a cabinetmaker seeking employment. He’d inquired about a room to let, and been offered “a part of a room”—which, he soon discovered, meant that he had it to himself but had to vacate it by seven in the morning, whereupon the bed would be taken by a young woman who worked all night in a bakery. At seven in the evening, she would leave for her work and the room would be his to return to.
There was no moon. Just a dense, dark cloud pressing low over the roofs of the houses. Any lower, and it would descend into the streets and become a fog. These were mean houses, row after row of them: the City of Dreadful Monotony, London’s East End.
Stoker had been cautious toward Sayers that night in the theater, but had not betrayed him. Three hours of suspense had ended in relief. Sayers would not have been surprised to see the acting manager return with the police instead of a basket containing half a loaf, a decent slice of ham, and six hot potatoes wrapped up in a napkin.
In between gorging on the food and washing it down with beer, Sayers had told his story. He later learned that Bram Stoker did not simply take him at his word, but over the next few days found ways to raise his name in conversation with a number of people they might have in common. Music hall managers, players, booking agents… none had any special knowledge that enabled them to declare Sayers innocent, but all, without exception, had expressed astonishment at his apparent guilt.
It was no public trial, but coupled with what Stoker had seen of James Caspar on the railway platform in the Midlands that night, it had supported the fugitive’s story and tipped the balance in his character’s favor. Staggering, insensible, disgrace-bringing, blood-puking Caspar…Sayers could see that Stoker’s was a world of little shading, where those who stayed true were all pure, and those who’d been tainted were damned.
Thank the Lord.
As Sayers had expected, the death of Caspar had been added onto his own list of crimes. There were those who would add him to the suspects’ list for the recent string of slaughtered East End whores as well, despite the fact that he’d been begging food and shivering in the hedgerows of Oxfordshire at the time of their murders.
He could have found somewhere safer than this to hide, but he’d tried in vain to find anywhere in London that was cheaper. Stoker had let him take clothing from the Lyceum’s stock and had given him money to help prevent him from starving, but he could hardly expect the Irishman to keep him like a dependent. He’d gone along to his Brixton house quite early one Sunday morning, but had found new tenants in residence—his lease had been paid to the middle of the year, but it seemed that in the light of his supposed crimes the landlord felt no duty to honor it.
