but, by the look of him, he’d have a struggle to make use of it. Sayers had papers spread on the table, and was composing a letter. A bottle and a glass stood close to hand. The glass was unwashed and the bottle was half empty. Sayers was flushed, and the gaze that he turned on his visitor was unsteady.
“Tom,” Stoker said sadly, and gestured to the bottle as if to say, And this will help you how?
“I know, Bram, I know,” Sayers said. “I’ve had one or two, just to steady me.”
He needed no explanation. Gin dulled pain. It was the remedy for all those whose lives were such that they had no other.
Pulling out a chair to sit down, Stoker said, “Letters are a waste of time, Tom.”
“I can’t get them to her anyway,” Sayers said. “I send the potboy with orders to place them only in her hands. Whitlock stops them.”
“He’s hired the Egyptian Hall for a night.” Stoker slid a printed card in front of Sayers. The prizefighter struggled to focus his eyes on it in the candlelight.
Stoker said, “I know the floor plan of the house. Maskelyne’s rigged it for his magic shows. There’s no easy way to get backstage.”
Sayers would understand what he meant. Most of the major illusionists prepared their venues in the same way; it meant sending in a team of carpenters to panel around the backstage areas, effectively boxing them in. With a boxed stage, no one could get into the secured zone to interfere with apparatus or observe trade secrets.
Still with his eyes on the card, Sayers said, “Who are these ‘gentlemen of discretion’?”
“Well-born young men who’ve already wasted fortunes. They’re the reason why he’s been parading Louise at social gatherings all over town.”
Sayers nodded. “Then I am right. He means to recruit his new Caspar. It’s not just a matter of finding a rake or a dissolute; they’re ten-a-penny, and not fit for purpose. He seeks a Caligula for our age, one who cannot fail to understand the full import of the choice before him. Louise is the bait on his hook. What can we do, Bram?”
Stoker looked at the gin bottle.
“With your head skewed by that? Nothing. I liked your company better when all you could afford was half a bed in a temperance hotel.”
Sayers raised his hands, as if calling an entire crowd to silence.
“Don’t judge me, Bram,” he said. “Please. You cannot know. I pray you never will.”
Stoker was about to say something else, and then changed his mind. He stood up. He left the printed invitation on the table, and threw his sixpenny token down with it.
“God be with you, Tom,” he said, before he turned away and walked back to the stairs.
TWENTY-FIVE
Two nights later, at an hour when most people were thinking of retiring to their beds, Louise descended to the street outside the apartments where a four-wheeler waited. The Silent Man had gone on ahead of them, and his wife accompanied her now. They were to pick up Edmund Whitlock from the stage door at Gatti’s and then proceed to the evening’s destination.
The Egyptian Hall stood in Piccadilly, and had been England’s Home of Mystery for the past sixteen years. It had the frontage of an antique temple, four stories high and with the look of something hewn from the rock of the Nile Valley. Two mighty columns braced the lintel above its entranceway. Two monumental statues stood upon the lintel. All illusion, in plaster and cement. To either side of this slab of the ancient desert continued a row of sober Georgian town houses.
Within the building there were two theaters. One had been taken by Maskelyne and Cooke for a three-month run of magic and deception that still showed no signs of ending, more than a decade and a half after it had begun. The other was used for exhibitions and the occasional show.
A few minutes before midnight, their four-wheeler drew up outside. Edmund Whitlock stepped down to the pavement, where he turned and offered his arm to Louise.
To an observer’s eye, the halls were closed and dark, but a watchman waited to let them in. Louise moved with her eyes downcast, looking neither to left nor right. They went directly backstage, where the Silent Man waited to lead them to the auditorium.
It was an intimate house, with a small stage and a runway out from the footlights across the orchestra pit. The houselights were on and the curtains were up; Maskelyne was between shows, so his sets were half struck and the theater’s back wall was visible. About a dozen figures were out there in the stalls, all male, no two of them sitting together although some were conversing across the rows in raised voices. They fell silent as Whitlock led Louise to the center of the stage, where a chair waited. He left her there and moved to the footlights.
“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice ringing all the way up to the hall’s domed ceiling. “Welcome. I have spoken to each of you in turn before this evening.”
Louise sat on her chair and continued to look down at the stage. Whitlock had taken her to Bond Street the day before, to be fitted for a new dress that the milliners had run up overnight. Her hair had been artfully pinned by the Mute Woman, who had a talent for such. Her face was powdered and her natural pallor relieved by the merest hint of rouge.
Over by the wings, she was aware of the Silent Man easing out of the shadows and into a spot from where he could observe the auditorium.
“I know you are intrigued,” Whitlock said. “I know you will be discreet. And I know the fascination that Miss Porter holds for each of you. Tonight, I offer the chance for one man to pursue that fascination to the full.”
Hearing mention of her name, Louise raised her head to look at him. Slowly. She saw him outlined against the footlights with the pasty gloom of the auditorium beyond. The men out there were but shadows in shadow. The white fronts of their dress shirts outshone their faces.
“Know that I am hiding nothing,” Whitlock was saying to them. “I am damned. I have lived a life beyond the sight of God and it has been…wonderful. To be free of conscience is the greatest freedom of all. Christ hung upon the cross, and I feel nothing for his pain. Guilt does not chain me down. God is not my master. I have no master.”
A voice from the stalls called out, “What of his final retribution?”
“Avoidable,” Whitlock said. “By handing on the gift to another as I offer it to you now.”
From a man somewhere close to the footlights she heard, “There’s always a reckoning in the end,” but Whitlock had a ready reply.
“True, sir,” he said, “but I chose your company tonight because every single one of you is skilled at passing a reckoning on to someone else.”
This caused some nervous laughter, and Whitlock took the moment as an opportunity to turn his back on them and move to Louise.
She looked up at him. “Are we done here, Edmund?” she said.
“Just a little longer,” he said. “Stand up.” He offered her a hand that she did not need, and she rose to her feet. He smiled, and she saw a muscle in his cheek quiver uncontrollably for a second or so. Far from being in full command of the situation, he seemed to be in a state of quiet terror. When he turned again to face the auditorium with her, the telltale sign was gone, masked by the actor’s show of confidence.
He said, “Here is your way in, gentlemen. You can do anything to her or with her. She does not care. There is nothing in her heart.”
Unexpectedly, he raised his hand and slapped her across the face, hard. Her head snapped around. She did not fall.
Out in the stalls, one or two of the young men were on their feet. Any urge to protest was stilled as their attention was drawn to the Silent Man over at the side of the stage. In the emptiness of the theater, the sound of his revolver’s hammer being cocked was impossible to miss. Once it was readied, he held it with the barrel pointing upward, all set to level and fire should it be necessary.
Whitlock said, “What do you say, Louise?”
“Thank you, Edmund,” Louise said.
He turned back to his audience.
“Well?” he challenged them. “I seek a man without fear. And I offer him the world.”
The man just beyond the footlights was on his feet.
