This was but one small injustice heaped on with all the others, and yet it was the one that he seemed to feel most bitterly.
Down in the street outside the temperance hotel, a police patrol was going by. Patrols in the East End had been stepped up since the White-chapel murders, although there was a rumor—one among many—that the killer was known to the police and had drowned himself. Sayers turned from the window and climbed back into bed. As usual, he tried not to think about the sheets. On the two-relay system, they went unchanged. And this was a comparatively respectable house; at the lowest end of the scale there were lodgings on a three-relay system where not only did the occupants change every eight hours, but the spaces underneath the beds were let in exactly the same manner.
He shuddered, and put his face under the covers, and then slowly started to warm by his own breath as its heat filled the space in which he lay. He was to meet Stoker later that day, in the time between the acting manager’s early Lyceum business and the hour or two he spent at home before the evening’s performance. Stoker had something of interest for him to hear, the message had read. Sayers faced a long walk from the East End into the middle of town, but it would use up his morning and save him some money. He had no idea how long his funds would last, or what new turn his life would take. Something had to happen. Things had to change somehow.
For this life that he had now…what was it? Without home, without love, without friends—without even the name he’d been born with. This was no life at all.
Early in the afternoon, by the iron railings that ran before the British Museum on Great Russell Street, Sayers waited for Stoker to appear. He arrived on foot a little after 2:15, as big as a bear and full of apology. Sayers was nervous, and tried not to show it.
“Come,” Stoker said, using their handshake to pass him a square of pasteboard as they started toward the entrance steps. “Take this and show it as your own. It’s a copy of mine. I had our property man make it. I wrote in a name for you myself.”
It was a reader’s ticket, required to enter the library. They went in through the museum to the open courtyard at the heart of the building wherein the circular reading room stood. Stoker was recognized, and did not need to show his own ticket. And because he was with Stoker, Sayers’ forgery was passed without a close inspection.
It was a vast, airy dome of a room, almost as wide and high as Rome’s great Pantheon, the readers’ desks radiating outward from a central counter like the spokes of a cartwheel. As Sayers followed Stoker, he saw that every position at the long desks was numbered.
In some of them sat old men who looked as if they’d been cobwebbed into place. Here was a young, intense student, leafing fervently through a high pile of journals; there a ginger man of great girth, breathing noisily as he read. At some seats the books were piled high, but with no reader present.
Sayers could only wonder what it was that Stoker had brought him here to see. They’d walked half the circumference of the room before he cut inward and led the way to a spot where one scholar worked alone.
Keeping his voice suitably low, Stoker said, “May I present my good friend, Mister Hall Caine.”
The man looked up at Stoker, and then at Sayers. He was a man of some thirty-five years, balding like Shakespeare, bearded like Christ. He nodded, and Sayers offered his hand. The grip that returned his was limp, and slightly damp.
Stoker said, “Caine knows only as much of your story as is necessary. For the rest of it, he trusts to my honor as I am trusting to yours.” He signaled for Sayers to draw in a chair from an unoccupied carrel, and reached for one himself.
Hall Caine said, “I have some thoughts I can offer you. I know that Bram will not endorse them all.”
“Spin your tale, old friend,” Stoker said. “Let us judge it for ourselves.”
Sayers knew of Caine by name, but had read nothing of his writing. Stoker’s novelist friend had been making notes on unlined paper, in a hand so small that Sayers hardly believed that even its author could read it. He’d been working back and forth through a stack of volumes of various ages. Most had places in them marked by call slips.
He closed and moved aside the book he’d been consulting and then, running his finger down the lines that he’d written, read aloud, “Cartaphilus. Ahasuerus. Salathiel.” He looked at Sayers. “You say these were the words of a dying man?”
“As I heard them.”
Caine reached for another of the volumes and opened it, first at one marked page and then another.
“Over recent months,” he said, “Bram and I have spent time and energy and some imagination in an effort to fit Irving with a part. Most of our subjects have dealt with the supernatural. The Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the Demon Lover…these are themes around which our imagination has constantly revolved. The words you heard from Caspar are all names used by the Wanderer.”
Sayers must have been looking blank.
“A man who trades his soul for prolonged life and forbidden knowledge,” Stoker said.
By now, Caine had found the passage he was looking for. He said, “In the earliest form of the legend, Cartaphilus insulted Our Lord on the way to Calvary and was doomed to wander until Judgment Day. But in later versions, he is shown as a man who has entered into an unholy contract for extended life and fortune. He bore the name of Ahasuerus in Hamburg in 1547. Salathiel came later. Close to seventy years ago, the Dublin cleric Charles Maturin recorded the story of Melmoth the Wanderer.”
Sayers, ever a man of practical mind, said, “Perhaps that’s the explanation for your legend, then. There’s no one man living through all eternity. The role has a different player in every age.”
“That may be closer to the truth than you think, Mister Sayers,” Caine said, and turned the book for him to see. The page carried an engraving of an elderly man, leaning on a staff as he made his way past the crucified Christ in a deep canyon under a stormy sky. Christ looked down, the old man looked up at him; no love appeared to be lost between the two of them.
Caine said, “The Spanish call him Juan Espera en Dios, John who waits for God. He was reported seen in Paris in 1644, in Newcastle in 1790. In fact, there are sightings of the Wanderer going back to 1228. But the names often differ, and the descriptions sometimes change. In Melmoth, we find a possible explanation. There is an escape clause in the demonic contract. If the Wanderer can recruit another to take his place before his long life reaches its end, then he can avoid his fate. All men eventually die, while the role of the Wanderer becomes truly eternal.”
“Take his place?” Sayers said. “How?”
“By assuming the Wanderer’s burden of certain damnation.”
Stoker was less than happy with the direction this was taking.
“Melmoth’s a fiction,” he said.
“All fictions have their originals.”
“And are told through devices. Demons through trapdoors, and contracts in blood. Stuff for the pit and the gallery.”
“And what are such devices,” Caine pressed on, “but outward symbols for a life within? Consider it, Bram. To turn knowingly from the face of God. To hurl oneself into the darkness and certain damnation. Would such an act not create the kind of delinquent soul the tales describe?”
“Embrace damnation?” Stoker echoed. “Willingly? For what conceivable reason?”
“Advantage. Defiance. Self-hatred. Each heart has its own.”
“No,” said Stoker. “No one man can live forever.”
“No one man is required to,” said Caine. “That is my point.”
As the two friends’ disagreement had increased in passion, it had also begun to increase in volume. They were now attracting attention, and none of it was friendly.
Sayers rose to his feet.
“I am grateful to you, sir,” he said, inclining his head toward Hall Caine in acknowledgment of his researches.
“Have I brought you some illumination?”
“I very much fear that you may have.”
Out in the city garden at the heart of nearby Bedford Square, Sayers strode about with such nervous energy that Stoker was hard-pressed to keep up with him. He took no specific path, walked with no specific purpose. The
