The Kingdom of Bones

The picture was a head-and-shoulders sketch in charcoal and oils, possibly a preliminary rough for a full theatrical portrait.

Mathers said, “The portrait is dated seventeen-seventy-five. The actor is not named, but does he look familiar?”

“It could well be him,” Sayers said, peering more closely and having to move to keep his own shadow out of the way. “I believe it is him, Bram.”

“His very last mistake, I imagine,” said Mathers. “A Wanderer would soon learn to permit no record of his image.”

To Sayers’ eye, the sketch showed a younger but no less magisterial and cynical Edmund Whitlock. The hair was brown, the face tauter and unlined. Given the freedom of the artist’s hand, there was scope for saying that there was merely some physical similarity across a century’s gap. But Sayers’ first instinct had been to recognize the face as that of his former employer.

Stoker, who seemed to have been hoping for something more persuasive, was clearly less convinced.

“A resemblance,” Stoker conceded.

Sayers said, “You brought me to this threshold. Can you not cross it with me?”

“At heart, I’m a rational being,” Stoker said. “I’ve always placed my trust in science and nature.”

“Yet you’ll publish fairy tales. You have friends”—this with a glance toward Mathers—“who’d raise the devil if they could. And do your best to talk Irving into Faust and The Flying Dutchman.”

“No one talks Irving into anything,” Stoker said. “A man can disagree with his friends. And one does not have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost story. I’m prepared to believe that Whitlock charts his life by the symbols in which he places his faith. But this…this is the point at which men are seduced into co-opting history to support the impossible.”

Mathers, who had been inspecting the tag on the portrait before returning it to the stacks, now joined them and said, “But do you believe in evil, Bram?”

“As an abstraction, yes.”

“What exactly do you think it is?”

“A word that describes a condition of the human soul.”

“Not a force in itself? With its own life and substance?”

“No.”

“My considered understanding is that evil lives,” Mathers said. “It moves. It finds places to show itself whenever it can. A being can be emptied and shaped into a vessel to hold it. We have a term for such a person. We call them…godless.”

Sayers said, “But how can even a godless being defy the very processes of nature?”

“By embracing the idea that one is cursed, lost, beyond the very sight of one’s creator,” Mathers said. “Cruel deeds are the means of ritual affirmation. Evil enters the vacuum from where man’s natural spirit has been driven. And, of course, in a vacuum…”

“There can be no decay,” said Sayers, with the wonder of discovery.

“He ages slowly,” Sayers said excitedly, as they walked along London Road toward Forest Hill station. “But he ages. He’s flesh and blood like the rest of us, Bram. Cut off his head and he’ll streak down to hell like a comet.”

“Speculation,” said Stoker.

“Think of it, Bram. He cannot hold off damnation forever. But he can escape it by influencing another lost soul to take his place. Caspar was to be that soul. He’ll seek another.”

“And you believe you’ll stop him?”

“I care nothing for Whitlock or his future! I think only of Louise in his foul company. I’d go straight to hell myself to make her safe.”

At this, Stoker took his arm and stopped him so that he could look him in the eyes.

“I can smell the gin on you,” the Irishman said. “Edmund Whitlock is no more than an ordinary man, seduced by a legend. Be very careful, Tom.”

Sayers pulled his arm free.

In an uncomfortable silence, the two men walked on toward their train.

TWENTY-FOUR

As soon as he received Edmund Whitlock’s telegram, Sebastian Becker sought permission from his superiors and then caught the next train down to London. By this time, Whitlock had wound up the Purple Diamond company and was playing a fifteen-minute sketch titled He Knew It, All Right. It was a four-hander he’d revived from some fifteen years before, inexpensive to stage and for which he could reuse props and costumes from the last production. He’d sold the Purple Diamond sets and the rest of the properties, and used the proceeds to pay off the cast.

Some thought it an odd choice. It was a comic piece set in a draper’s, with no songs and no girl. Four skilled comedians might have carried it off, but Whitlock held an open call at which every dodgy character from the twilight fringe of the theatrical world turned up. Of the three that he cast, one had the nasty ticket-of-leave look of a man who’d spent time in prison—hardly the type for a draper’s boy—while another was regarded with wariness by all the chorus girls. No one could give a specific reason for it, but if this man happened to enter a room where one of them was alone, she would quickly find some excuse to leave.

So the sketch, as they performed it, was no better than passable. Some suggested that Whitlock had taken a big step down in the world and was showing desperation, although others reckoned that he hardly needed the money. He was said to own property, and had been coining it in as an actor-manager for longer than anyone could actually remember.

Sebastian caught up with him during the first house at Gatti’s Music Hall in the Westminster Bridge Road. Whitlock’s little troupe was playing the sketch on three bills in the same evening; from Gatti’s they’d go to the Canterbury, then to the Camberwell Palace, then back to Gatti’s for the final show. Gatti’s had only two dressing rooms behind its small stage, one shared by the men and the other by the women, so they met in the manager’s office.

Whitlock was in full makeup and a draper’s apron, his costume for the skit. He said, “We’ll be following the Coulson Sisters in about ten minutes’ time. I am at your service until then.”

“Your telegram said you had letters to show me,” Sebastian said.

“I have.” The actor-manager reached into his waistcoat behind the apron and brought out a small bundle of assorted and very cheap-looking papers. “I’ve been keeping them about me. I would not want Miss Porter to see them.”

“Weren’t they addressed to her?”

“They were, but I recognized the hand. So I intercepted them. She is suffering enough distress without having to bear the ravings of a lunatic.”

The clock on the manager’s wall ticked the minutes away as Sebastian read the first of the notes, and then the next.

“Hard enough for you to read such a personal tirade,” he commented after a while.

“I’ve been reviewed by Shaw,” Whitlock said. “Believe me, those letters are nothing.”

Sebastian glanced up. “Do you have the envelopes?”

Whitlock made a sign of regret. “There were no postmarks,” he said, “but the content alone proves that Sayers is here in London. If I were you, Inspector, I would investigate the public houses around St. Martin’s Lane.”

“Why so, sir?”

“They’re a home to the boxing fraternity. And one sniff at the paper should tell you those letters were written on a beer-stained table. You’re far away from your own territory, Inspector Becker. I suggest you share this bounty with your brothers in the Metropolitan Police. Or else how effective can you really hope to be?”

“As effective as my dedication can make me, Mister Whitlock. I must keep these, and study them further