The Kingdom of Bones

before I decide what best to do.”

“As you wish,” Whitlock said. “I feel I have done my duty.”

Sebastian moved to put the letters safely inside his coat. “Rest assured, Mister Whitlock,” he said, “I shall have him.”

“Then I am certain we can all sleep safely in our beds.” Whitlock rose and put out his hand. “Tell me, Inspector. What exactly do you believe you are pursuing? Some man, or some fiend?”

“I do not believe in fiends,” Sebastian Becker said as he took the actor’s hand and returned his grip. Whitlock held on and looked into his face for a time that bordered on the uncomfortable.

Then he said, “Quite right,” and released him.

A boy looked into the manager’s office and said, “They’re playing out the Coulson Sisters, Mister Whitlock.”

“You must excuse me,” Whitlock said. “I wish you all the success you deserve.”

“Where is Miss Porter now?”

“She is a guest at my apartments,” Whitlock said, as he followed the boy out of the door. “She no longer has the heart to perform.”

He paused.

“Nor for anything, much,” he added, and then he left the room.

The actor had gone off without leaving him an address, but it was the work of only a few minutes for Sebastian to find what he needed in the manager’s files. Whitlock was still onstage when Sebastian left the theater and walked in the direction of Waterloo Station, hoping to pick up a cab to take him back across the river. Perhaps Whitlock had been expecting him to go straight to the boxing dens on St. Martin’s Lane rather than seeking out Miss Porter, who had, after all, had no knowledge of the letters that Sayers had intended for her.

But Louise Porter was some essential factor in the prizefighter’s mystery. In all that he’d done so far, he seemed to care more for her wellbeing than for his own survival.

In everything he’d done, that was, apart from killing her beloved.

Whitlock’s housekeeper said nothing, pretended not to understand anything that Sebastian said, and seemed determined not to admit him until there was the call of a young woman’s voice from within, which she understood well enough. Louise Porter received him in the parlor, that little-used, overornamented, excessively proper space set aside in the Victorian household for the sole purpose of making an impression. She was in a dark dress. It was not formal mourning wear, but she moved and spoke like one recently widowed.

Sebastian asked her to look at one of the letters. It hardly mattered which one she chose; they all said more or less the same things.

She glanced through one, then another. She seemed unsurprised by them.

“These are the milder ones,” she said. “There have been others. These omit the strangest claim of all.”

“Mister Whitlock thinks you know nothing of them,” Sebastian said. “He thinks he intercepted every one.”

“Everybody wants to protect me,” she said.

“So what is ‘the strangest claim of all’?”

“Tom Sayers would have me believe that my former employer and present protector is a devil in human form. One who has turned from the face of God and now seeks to avoid just punishment as his days approach their end. He says that my late fiance was being made ready to replace him.

“I ask you, Inspector Becker. As we speak, Edmund Whitlock is running from one music hall to another, in costume, to perform a piece of nothing before a pack of drunkards. If they should laugh at his antics, then that is the most he can hope for. And he is not a well man. If such is a reward of long life and good fortune, I call it a poor sort of bargain.”

“Tom Sayers is quite mad.”

“Will they still hang him if you catch him?”

“I cannot say. How will you feel if they do?”

She looked toward the window. The main curtains were tied back, and a streetlamp outside could be seen through the lace. “They should spare him,” she said. “He believes I’m worth saving. What better proof of a man’s lack of reason?”

Sebastian said, “Is there anything more you can tell me?”

She looked down.

“Hell is not a warm place,” she said. “It is a place where ice becomes ashes.”

Sebastian waited, but that was all she had to say. Nonplussed and a little disturbed, he got to his feet.

“Then,” he said, “I’ll thank you and say good night.”

She rang for the silent woman to show him out. Somewhere in another room, a small dog started to bark at the sound of the bell. Louise Porter raised a hand to her head and settled into the attitude of the irrevocably depressed.

She said, “Tom Sayers does not understand. Even if Mister Whitlock were a demon, I would not care. I care for very little, these days.”

Sebastian could think of nothing else that he could say to her, other than “I am so sorry, Miss Porter.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as he waited for the silent woman to appear.

Looking down, he noticed a stack of engraved postcards, freshly cut from the printers’, on the side table at her elbow. He saw the word discretion in flowing script. Obeying the impulse that it inspired, he slipped the topmost card from the pile. He flipped it up so that it was hidden by his sleeve as the mute woman came in.

It was still in his hand when he reached the street. Under the lamp, he looked up at the parlor window, but saw no one there. He raised the card to the light. It was a formal invitation and it read, In the presence of Miss Louise Porter. Selected gentlemen of discretion only. That was all. Below it was a time— midnight, two days hence—and an abbreviated address.

Selected gentlemen of discretion only. The phrase seemed to have something decadent about it. Almost an air of degeneracy.

How strange, he thought.

How very, very strange.

Over at the Lyceum, the so-called Scottish Play was still running. Its critical reception, though generally positive, had been qualified; William Archer had written to the effect that Irving had managed to “keep a rein on those peculiarities of gesture and expression which used to run away with him.” Ellen Terry’s Lady Macbeth had been greeted with similarly faint praise, and she was rumored to be considering giving up her part.

But as Bram Stoker knew, those rumors were false. The voices of the critics were drowned out by the voice of the public, every night. The company played to capacity houses. Ellen Terry swore that she would not budge an inch in her reading of the role. Sargent was asking to paint her in character, all dark red hair and a dress that glittered blue and green with real beetles’ wings. The advance bookings were tremendous, even by Lyceum standards.

When Stoker left the theater late that night after another full-house performance, he did not go straight back to Chelsea and his Cheyne Walk home. He walked instead the half mile or so to St. Martin’s Lane, where he sought out a yard close to Leicester Square. He paid sixpence to the doorman of a sporting public house there, and received a metal token to be exchanged at the bar for beer or grog. Intending to take advantage of neither, Stoker climbed the stairs to the upper room.

Over at the bar sat the broken-nosed owner with his bullnecked friends, ex-fighters all. In the early part of the evenings when the room was full, any two of them might strip off their shirts and don gloves to spar for a while, before taking up a collection from the crowd. Around the walls hung the portraits of boxers long dead: lumbering Bill Neate; Bob Gregson, “the Lancashire Champion” Jack Randall versus Ned Turner. Alongside them hung an engraved picture of the owner himself in a posture young, fierce, and challenging, while his older and even uglier modern-day self nursed a gin just a few feet away.

In this company, it was plain that Tom Sayers, alone at a table and some distance from the bar, had managed to escape their common disfigurements due to the brevity of his fighting career. His nose was straight and his brow unscarred. His ears resembled ears, and not bloated fungi.

He looked up sharply as Stoker came in. Stoker was in no doubt that he would have an escape route planned,