скачать книгу бесплатно
Twenty-six was a good age to die, he reflected, contentedly fingering the bulge in his pocket. He had the gun. Now all he needed was a suitable spot in which to perform the ceremony. And there was only one possible place.
With the weight of the revolver in his pocket comforting him like a good-luck charm, he descended the grand staircase of the Harrington mansion in elegant Kensington Gore, a stone’s throw from the Queen’s Gate entrance to Hyde Park. He had not intended to cast any farewell glances at the walls of what had been his home for almost three decades, but he could not help feeling a perverse wish to pause before his father’s portrait, which dominated the hall. His father stared down at him disapprovingly from the gilt frame, a proud, commanding figure, bursting out of the old uniform he had worn as a young infantryman in the Crimean War until a Russian bayonet had punctured his thigh; the wound had left him with a disturbingly lopsided gait. William Harrington surveyed the world disdainfully, as though in his view the universe was a botched affair on which he had long since given up. What fool had been responsible for the untimely blanket of fog that had descended on the battlefield outside the besieged city of Sebastopol so that nobody could see the tips of the enemy’s bayonets? Who had decided that a woman was the ideal person to preside over England’s destiny? Was the east really the best place for the sun to rise?
Andrew had never seen his father without cruel animosity in his eyes so could not know whether he had been born with it or had been infected with it when fighting alongside the ferocious Ottomans in the Crimea. In any event, it had not vanished, like a mild case of smallpox, leaving no mark on his face, even though the path that had opened in front of him on his return could only have been termed a fortunate one. What did it matter that he had to hobble along it with the aid of a stick? Without having had to enter any pact with the Devil, the man with the bushy moustache and clean-cut features depicted on the canvas had overnight become one of the richest men in England. Trudging around in that distant war, bayonet at the ready, he could never have dreamed of possessing a fraction of what he now owned. How he had amassed his fortune, though, was one of the family’s best-kept secrets, a complete mystery to Andrew.
The tedious moment is now approaching when the young man must decide which hat and overcoat to pick from among the heap in the hall cupboard: one has to look presentable even for death. This is a scene that, knowing Andrew, could take several exasperating minutes and, since I see no need to describe it, I shall take the opportunity to welcome you to this tale, which has just begun, and which, after lengthy reflection, I chose to begin at this juncture and not another – as though I, too, had to select a single beginning from among the many jostling for position in the closet of possibilities.
Assuming you stay until the end, some of you, no doubt, will think I chose the wrong thread with which to begin spinning my yarn, and that for accuracy’s sake I should have respected chronological order and begun with Miss Haggerty’s story. Perhaps so – but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and this may be one of them.
So, let’s forget about Miss Haggerty for the moment, forget that I ever mentioned her, even, and go back to Andrew, who has just stepped forth from the mansion suitably dressed in a hat and coat, and even a pair of warm gloves to protect his hands from the harsh winter cold.
Once outside the mansion, the young man paused at the top of the steps, which unfurled at his feet like a wave of marble down to the garden. From there, he surveyed the world in which he had been brought up, suddenly aware that, if things went to plan, he would never see it again. Night was spreading its veil over the Harrington residence. A hazy full moon hung in the sky, bathing in its soft glow the immaculate lawns surrounding the house, most of them cluttered with flowerbeds, hedges and oversized stone fountains – dozens of them – decorated with excessively ornate sculptures of mermaids, fauns and other mythical creatures. His father had accumulated such a large number because, an unsophisticated soul, his only way of showing off his importance was to buy a lot of expensive and useless objects. In the case of the fountains his extravagance was excusable, because they combined to soothe the night with their watery refrain, making the listener want to close his eyes and forget everything except their hypnotic burble.
Further off, beyond the neatly clipped lawns, stood the immense greenhouse, graceful as a swan poised for flight, where his mother spent most of the day marvelling at the exotic flowers that sprouted from seeds brought back from the colonies.
Andrew gazed at the moon for several minutes. He wondered whether man would ever be able to travel there, as had the characters in Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac’s works. What would he find if he did manage to land on its shimmering surface – in an airship, or shot out of a cannon, or with a dozen bottles of dew strapped to his body in the hope that, as it evaporated, he would float up to the sky, like the Gascon swashbuckler’s hero? Ariosto the poet had turned the planet into a warehouse where lunatics’ reason was stored in phials, but Andrew was more drawn to Plutarch, who imagined that the moon was where dead people dwelled. Andrew liked to picture them living at peace in ivory palaces built by an army of worker angels or in caves dug out of that white rock, waiting for the living to receive their safe-conduct to death and to carry on their lives anew, exactly where they had left off.
Sometimes he imagined that Marie was living at that very moment in one of those grottoes, oblivious to what had happened to her, and grateful that death had offered her a better existence than life. Marie, pale in that white splendour, waiting patiently for him to decide once and for all to blow his brains out and come to fill the empty space in her bed.
He stopped gazing at the moon when he noticed that Harold, the coachman, had followed his orders and was standing at the foot of the stairs with a brougham at the ready. As soon as he saw his young master descending the flight of steps, the coachman rushed to open the carriage door. Andrew had always been amused by Harold’s display of energy, considering it incongruous in a man approaching sixty, but the coachman clearly kept in good shape.
‘Miller’s Court,’ the youth commanded.
Harold was astonished by his request. ‘But, sir, that’s where—‘
‘Is there some problem, Harold?’ Andrew interrupted.
The coachman stared at him for a moment, his mouth hanging ludicrously half open, then recollected himself: ‘None whatsoever, sir.’
Andrew gave a nod, signalling that the conversation was at an end. He climbed into the brougham and sat down on the red velvet seat. Glimpsing his reflection in the window, he gave a sigh of despair. Was that haggard countenance really his? It was the face of someone whose life had been seeping out of him unawares, like a pillow losing its stuffing through an open seam.
In a certain sense this was true. Although his face retained the harmonious good looks he had been born with, it now resembled an empty shell, a vague impression in a mound of ashes. The sorrow that had cast a shadow over his soul had taken its toll on his appearance: he could scarcely recognise himself in the ageing youth, with hollowed cheeks, downcast eyes and unkempt beard, who stared back at him in the glass. Grief had stunted him, transforming him into a dried-up, sullen creature.
The brougham rocked as Harold, having overcome his astonishment, clambered up to his perch, and took Andrew’s attention away from the blurred face sketched on the canvas of the night. The final act of the disastrous performance that had been his life was about to begin, and he was determined to savour every moment. He heard the whip crack above his head and, caressing the steely bulge in his pocket, he let himself be lulled by the vehicle’s gentle sway.
The brougham left the mansion and went down Carriage Drive, which bordered the lush vegetation of Hyde Park. Gazing through the window at the city, Andrew thought that in less than half an hour’s time they would be in the East End. This ride had always fascinated and puzzled him in equal measure: it allowed him to glimpse in a single sweep every aspect of his beloved London, the world’s greatest metropolis, the giant head of an insatiable octopus whose tentacles stretched over almost a fifth of the Earth’s surface, holding Canada, India, Australia and a large part of Africa in its vice-like grip.
As they sped east, the salubrious, almost countrified atmosphere of Kensington soon gave way to the crowded urban environment of Piccadilly, and beyond to the Circus, where Anteros, the avenger of unrequited love, is firing an arrow into the city’s heart. Beyond Fleet Street, the middle-class dwellings seemingly huddled around St Paul’s Cathedral gradually came into view, until finally, once they had passed the Bank of England and Cornhill Street, a wave of poverty swept over everything, a poverty that people from the adjoining West End knew of only from the satirical cartoons in Punch. It seemed to pollute the very air itself, as it mingled with the stench rising from the Thames.
Andrew had last made this journey eight years earlier, and had known ever since that, sooner or later, he would make it again, for the very last time. Hardly surprising, then, that as they drew nearer to Aldgate, the gateway to Whitechapel, he felt slightly uneasy. He peered warily out of the window as they entered the district, experiencing the same misgivings as he had in the past. He was overwhelmed, again, by shame because he was spying on an alien world with the dispassionate interest of someone who studies insects – even though, over time, his initial revulsion had turned into compassion for the souls who inhabited this place, where the city dumped its human waste.
Now it seemed that there was every reason for him to feel compassion still: London’s poorest borough had changed relatively little in the past eight years. Wealth brings poverty in its wake, thought Andrew, as they crossed the ill-lit, rowdy streets, crammed with stalls and handcarts, and teeming with wretched creatures whose lives were played out beneath the menacing shadow of Christ Church. At first he had been shocked to discover that behind the dazzle of the city’s façade there existed this outpost of hell where, with the Queen’s blessing, human beings were condemned to live like beasts. The intervening years had made him less naïve: he was no longer surprised that, even as the advances of science were transforming London – and the well-to-do amused themselves by recording their dogs’ barks onto the wax-coated cylinders of phonographs or conversed via telephone under the glow of Robertson’s electric lamps – Whitechapel had remained immune to progress, untouchable beneath its rotten shell, drowning in its own filth.
A glance was enough to tell him that crossing into this world was still like sticking his hand into a hornets’ nest. It was here that poverty showed its ugliest face, here that the same jarring, sinister tune was playing. He observed a couple of pub brawls, heard screams from the depths of dark alleyways, glimpsed a few drunks sprawled in the gutter, gangs of street urchins stripping them of their shoes, and exchanged glances with a pair of pugnacious-looking men standing on street corners, petty rulers in this parallel kingdom of vice and crime.
The luxurious brougham caught the attention of several prostitutes, who shouted lewd proposals to him, hitching up their skirts and showing their cleavage. Andrew felt a pang of sorrow as he gazed upon this pitiful spectacle. Most of the women were filthy and downtrodden, their bodies bearing the mark of their daily burden of customers. Even the youngest and prettiest were stained by the misery of their surroundings. He was revisited by the agonising thought that he might have saved one of these doomed women, offered her a better life than the one her Creator had allotted her, yet he had failed to do so.
His sorrow reached a crescendo as the carriage rattled past the Ten Bells, emitting an arpeggio of creaks as it turned into Crispin Street on its way to Dorset Street, passing in front of the Britannia pub where he had first spoken to Marie. This street was his final destination. Harold pulled the brougham up next to the stone arch leading to the Miller’s Court flats, and climbed off the box to open the carriage door.
Andrew stepped out, feeling suddenly dizzy. His legs were shaking as he looked around him. Everything was exactly as he remembered it, down to the shop with grimy windows run by McCarthy, the owner of the flats, which stood beside the entrance. Nothing he saw indicated to him that time also passed in Whitechapel, that it did not avoid it, as did the bigwigs and bishops visiting the city.
‘You can go home now, Harold,’ he told the coachman, who was standing at his side.
‘What time shall I fetch you, sir?’ asked the old man.
Andrew didn’t know what to say. He stifled a laugh. The only thing fetching him would be the cart from the Golden Lane morgue, the same one that had come there to fetch what was left of his beloved Marie eight years ago. ‘Forget you ever brought me here,’ was his reply.
The sombre expression that clouded the coachman’s face moved Andrew. Had Harold understood what he had come there to do? He could not be sure, because he had never given a moment’s thought to the coachman’s intelligence, or indeed to that of any servant. He always thought that at most they possessed the innate cunning of people who, from an early age, are obliged to swim against the current in which he and his class manoeuvred with ease. Now, though, he thought he detected in old Harold’s attitude an unease that might only have come from his having guessed Andrew’s intention.
And the servant’s capacity for deduction was not the only discovery Andrew made during that brief moment when, for once, they looked directly at each other. Andrew also became aware of something hitherto unimaginable to him: the affection a servant can feel for his master. Although he saw them as shadows drifting in and out of rooms, according to some invisible design, only aware of them when he needed to leave his glass on a tray or wanted the fire lighting, these phantoms could care about what happened to their masters. That succession of faceless people – the maids whom his mother dismissed on the flimsiest grounds, the cooks systematically impregnated by the stable boys as though conforming to some ancient ritual, the butlers who left their employ with excellent references for another mansion identical to theirs – made up a shifting landscape that Andrew had never taken the trouble to notice.
‘Very well, sir,’ murmured Harold.
Andrew understood that these words were the coachman’s last farewell; that this was the old fellow’s only way of saying goodbye to him – embracing him was a risk he appeared unwilling to take. With a heavy heart, he watched that stout, resolute man, to whom he would have had to relinquish the role of master if they had ever been stranded on a desert island, clamber back on to the brougham and urge on the horses, leaving only an echo of hoofs as the carriage was swallowed by the fog that spread through the London streets like muddy foam. It struck him as odd that the only person to whom he had said goodbye before killing himself should be the coachman, not his parents or his cousin Charles. Life was full of such ironies.
That was exactly what Harold Barker was thinking as he drove the horses down Dorset Street, looking for the way out of that accursed neighbourhood, where life was not worth thruppence. But for his father’s determination to pluck him from poverty and secure him a job as a coachman, he might have been one more among the hordes of wretched souls scraping an existence in this gangrenous patch of London. Yes, that surly old drunk had hurled him into a series of jobs that had ended at the coach house of the illustrious William Harrington, in whose service he had spent half his life. But they had been peaceful years. He could admit as much when he was taking stock of his life in the early hours after his chores were done and his masters were asleep; peaceful years in which he had taken a wife and fathered two healthy children, one of whom was employed as a gardener by Mr Harrington.
The good fortune that had allowed him to forge a different life from the one he had believed was his lot enabled him now to look upon the wretched souls of Whitechapel with a degree of objectivity and compassion. Harold had been obliged to go to Whitechapel more often than he would have liked when ferrying his master there that terrible autumn eight years ago, a period when even the sky seemed at times to ooze blood. He had read in the newspapers about what had happened in that warren of Godforsaken streets, but also he had seen it reflected in his master’s eyes.
He knew now that the young master had never recovered, that those reckless excursions to pubs and brothels, on which his cousin Charles had dragged them both (Harold had been obliged to remain in the carriage, shivering with cold), had not succeeded in driving the terror from his eyes. And that night young Harrington had appeared ready to lay down his arms, to surrender to an enemy who had proved invincible. Hadn’t that bulge in his pocket looked suspiciously like a firearm? But what could Harold do? Should he turn around and try to stop him? Should a servant step in to alter his master’s destiny?
Harold Barker shook his head. Maybe he was imagining things, he thought, and the young man simply wanted to spend the night in that haunted room, safe with a gun in his pocket.
He left off his uncomfortable broodings when he glimpsed a familiar equipage coming out of the fog towards him. It was the Winslow family carriage, and the bundled-up figure on the box was almost certainly Edward Rush, one of their coachmen. To judge from the way he slowed the horses, Rush appeared to have recognised him, too. Harold nodded a silent greeting to his colleague, before directing his gaze to the occupant of the vehicle. For a split second he and young Charles Winslow stared solemnly at one another. They did not say a word.
‘Faster, Edward,’ Charles ordered his driver, tapping the roof of the carriage with the knob of his cane.
Harold watched with relief as they vanished into the fog in the direction of the Miller’s Court flats. He was not needed now. He only hoped that young Winslow would arrive in time. He would have liked to stay and see how the affair ended, but he had an order to carry out – although he fancied it had been given him by a dead man – so he urged the horses on, and found his way out of that dread neighbourhood where life (I apologise for the repetition, but the same thought occurred to Harold twice) was not worth thruppence.
Admittedly, the expression sums up the area’s peculiarity very accurately, and we probably could not hope for a more profound appraisal from a coachman. However, although his life is worthy of recounting – as are all lives upon close scrutiny – the coachman Barker is not a relevant character in this story. Others may choose to write about it and will no doubt find plenty of material to endow it with the emotion every good story requires – I am thinking of the time he met Rebecca, his wife, or the hilarious incident involving a ferret and a rake – but that is not my purpose here.
And so let us leave Harold – whose reappearance at some point in this tale I cannot vouch for, because a whole host of characters will pass through it and I can’t be expected to remember every one of their faces – and return to Andrew, who at this very moment is crossing the arched entrance to Miller’s Court and walking up the muddy stone path to number thirteen while he rummages in his coat pocket for the key.
After stumbling around in the dark for a time he found the room, and paused before the door in an attitude that anyone seeing him from a neighbouring window would have taken for incongruous reverence. But for Andrew that room was infinitely more than some wretched lair where people who hadn’t a penny to their name took refuge. He had not been back there since that fateful night, although he had paid to keep everything exactly as it had been, exactly as it still was inside his head. Every month for the past eight years he had sent one of his servants to pay the rent, so that nobody could live there: if he ever went back he did not want to find traces of anyone but Marie. The few pennies were to him a drop in the ocean, and Mr McCarthy had been delighted that a wealthy gentleman and obvious rake should want to rent that hovel indefinitely – after what had taken place within its four walls he very much doubted that anybody would be brave enough to sleep there.
Andrew had always known he would come back, that the ceremony he was about to perform could not have been carried out anywhere else.
He opened the door and mournfully cast an eye around the room. It was a tiny space, scarcely more sophisticated than a barn, with flaking walls and a few sticks of battered furniture, including a dilapidated bed, a grimy mirror, a crumbling fireplace and a couple of chairs that might fall apart if a fly landed on them. He felt a renewed sense of amazement that life could take place somewhere like this. Yet had he not known more happiness in this room than in the luxurious Harrington mansion? If, as he had read somewhere, every man’s paradise was in a different place, his was undoubtedly here. He had reached it guided not by a map, charting rivers and valleys, but by kisses and caresses.
And it was a caress, this time an icy one on the nape of his neck, which drew his attention to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to fix the broken window to the left of the door. What would have been the point? McCarthy belonged to that class of people whose motto was to work as little as possible, and had Andrew reproached him for not replacing the pane he would have argued that, since Mr Harrington had requested everything be kept just as it was, he had assumed that included the window glass. Andrew sighed. He could see nothing with which to plug the hole and decided to kill himself in his hat and coat.
He sat down on one of the rickety chairs, reached into his pocket for the gun and carefully unfolded the cloth, as if he were performing a sacrament. The Colt gleamed in the moonlight that filtered weakly through the small, grimy window.
He stroked the weapon as though it were a cat curled up in his lap and let Marie’s smile wash over him once more. Andrew was always surprised that his memories retained the vibrancy, like fresh roses, of those first days. He remembered everything so vividly, as though no eight-year gap stretched between them, and at times his memories seemed even more beautiful than the real events. What mysterious alchemy could make these imitations appear more vivid than the real thing? The answer was obvious: the passage of time. It transformed the volatile present into a finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas that was always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes, and only made sense when one stepped far enough away to admire it as a whole.
Chapter II
The first time their eyes had met, she was not even there. Andrew had fallen in love with Marie without needing to have her in front of him, and to him this was as romantic as it was paradoxical. The event had occurred at his uncle’s mansion in Queen’s Gate, opposite the Natural History Museum, a place Andrew had always thought of as his second home. He and his cousin were the same age, and had almost grown up together; the servants sometimes forgot which of them was their employer’s son.
As is easily imaginable, their affluent social position had spared them any hardship or misfortune, exposing them only to the pleasant side of life, which they immediately mistook for one long party where everything was apparently permissible. They moved on from sharing toys to sharing teenage conquests, and from there, curious to see how far they could stretch the impunity they enjoyed, to devising different ways of testing the limits of what was acceptable.
Their elaborate indiscretions and more or less immoral behaviour were so perfectly co-ordinated that for years it had been difficult not to see them as one person. This was partly down to their sharing the complicity of twins, but also to their arrogant approach to life and even to their physical similarity: both boys were lean and sinewy, and possessed angelic good looks that made it almost impossible to refuse them anything. This was especially true of women, as was amply demonstrated during their time at Cambridge, where they established a record number of conquests unmatched to this day.
Their habit of visiting the same tailors and hat-makers added the finishing touch to that unnerving resemblance, a likeness it seemed would last for ever, until one day, without warning, as though God had resolved to compensate for his lack of creativity, that wild, two-headed creature split into two distinct halves. Andrew turned into a pensive, taciturn young man, while Charles went on perfecting the frivolous behaviour of his adolescence. This change did not alter their friendship, which was rooted in kinship. Far from driving them apart, the unexpected divergence made them complement one another. Charles’s devil-may-care attitude found its counterpart in the refined melancholy of his cousin, for whom such a whimsical approach to life was no longer satisfying.
Charles observed with a wry smile Andrew’s attempts to give his life some meaning, wandering around in disillusionment, waiting for a flash of inspiration that never came. Andrew, in turn, was amused by his cousin’s insistence on behaving like a brash, shallow youth, even though some of his gestures and opinions betrayed disappointment similar to his own. Charles lived intensely, as though he could not get enough of life’s pleasures, while Andrew could sit alone for hours, watching a rose wilt in his hands.
The month of August when it all happened, they had both just turned eighteen, and although neither showed any sign of settling down, they sensed this life of leisure could not go on much longer, that soon their parents would lose patience with their unproductive indolence and find them positions in one of the family firms. In the meantime, though, they were enjoying seeing how much longer they could get away with it. Charles was already going to the office occasionally to attend to minor business, but Andrew preferred to wait until his boredom became so unbearable that taking care of family business would seem a relief rather than a prison sentence. After all, his older brother Anthony had already fulfilled their father’s expectations sufficiently in this respect to allow the illustrious William Harrington to consent to his second son pursuing his career of black sheep for a couple more years, provided he did not stray from his sight.
But Andrew had strayed. He had strayed a long way. And now he intended to stray even further, until he disappeared completely, beyond all redemption.
But let us not be sidetracked by melodrama. Let us carry on with our story. Andrew had dropped in at the Winslow mansion that August afternoon so that he and Charles could arrange a Sunday outing with the charming Keller sisters. As usual, they would take them to a little grassy knoll carpeted with flowers near the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, where they invariably mounted their amorous offensives. But Charles was still sleeping, so the butler showed Andrew into the library. He did not mind waiting there until his cousin got up; he felt at ease surrounded by the books that filled the large, bright room with their peculiar musty smell.
Andrew’s father prided himself on having built up a decent library, yet his cousin’s collection contained more than just obscure volumes on politics and other equally dull subjects. Here, Andrew could find the classics and adventure stories by authors such as Verne and Salgari, but still more interesting to him was a strange, rather picturesque type of literature many considered frivolous: novels in which the authors had let their imaginations run wild, regardless of how implausible or often downright absurd the outcome. Like all discerning readers, Charles appreciated Homer’s Odyssey and his Iliad, but his real enjoyment came from immersing himself in the crazy world of Batracomiomachia, the blind poet’s satire on his own work in an epic tale about a battle between mice and frogs. Andrew recalled a few books written in a similar style, which his cousin had lent him; one called True Tales by Luciano de Samósata, which recounted a series of fabulous voyages in a flying ship that takes the hero up to the sun and even through the belly of a giant whale; another called The Man in the Moon by Francis Godwin, the first novel ever to describe an interplanetary voyage. It told of a Spaniard named Domingo Gonzalez who travels to the moon in a machine drawn by a flock of wild geese.
These flights of fancy reminded Andrew of pop guns or firecrackers, all sound and fury yet he understood, or thought he did, why his cousin was so passionate about them. Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles’s soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into seriousness or melancholy, unlike Andrew, to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbued with the absurd solemnity that the transience of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.
However, that afternoon, Andrew did not have time to look at any book. He did not even manage to cross the room to the bookshelves because the loveliest girl he had ever seen stopped him in his tracks. He stood staring at her, bemused, as time seemed to congeal, to stand still. Finally he managed to approach the portrait slowly to take a closer look. The woman was wearing a black velvet toque and a flowery scarf knotted at the neck. Andrew had to admit she was by no means conventionally beautiful: her nose was disproportionately large for her face, her eyes too close together and her reddish hair looked damaged, yet at the same time she possessed a charm as unmistakable as it was elusive. He was unsure exactly what about her captivated him. Perhaps it was the contrast between her fragile appearance and the strength that radiated from her gaze; a gaze he had never seen in any of his conquests. It was wild, determined, and retained a glimmer of youthful innocence, as if every day the woman was forced to confront the ugliness of life, and yet, curled up in her bed at night, still believed it a regrettable figment of her imagination, a bad dream that would dissolve and give way to a more pleasant reality. It was the gaze of a person who yearns for something and refuses to believe it will never be hers, because hope is all she has left.
‘A charming creature, isn’t she?’ Charles’s voice came from behind him.
Andrew jumped. He had been so absorbed in the portrait he had not heard his cousin come in. He nodded as Charles walked over to the drinks cabinet. He himself could not have found a better way to describe the emotions the portrait had stirred in him, the desire to protect her mixed with the admiration he could only compare – rather reluctantly, owing to the inappropriateness of the metaphor – to that which he felt for cats.
‘It was my birthday present to my father,’ Charles explained, pouring brandy. ‘It’s only been hanging there a few days.’
‘Who is she?’ asked Andrew. ‘I don’t remember seeing her at any of Lady Holland or Lord B rough ton’s parties.’
‘At those parties?’ Charles laughed. ‘I’m beginning to think the artist is gifted. He’s taken you in as well.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Andrew, accepting the glass his cousin was holding out to him.
‘Surely you don’t think I gave it to my father because of its artistic merit? Does it look like a painting worthy of my consideration, cousin?’ Charles grabbed his arm, forcing him to move a few steps closer to the portrait. ‘Take a good look. Notice the brushwork: utterly devoid of talent. The painter is no more than an amusing disciple of Degas. Where the Parisian is gentle, he is starkly sombre.’
Andrew did not understand enough about painting to discuss it with his cousin, and all he really wanted to know was the sitter’s identity, so he nodded gravely, giving his cousin to understand he agreed with his view that the artist would do better to devote himself to repairing bicycles. Charles smiled, amused by his cousin’s refusal to converse about painting – it would have given Charles a chance to air his knowledge – and declared: ‘I had another reason for giving it to him, dear cousin.’
He drained his glass slowly, and gazed at the picture, shaking his head with satisfaction.
‘And what reason was that, Charles?’ Andrew asked, becoming impatient.
‘The private enjoyment I get from knowing that my father, who looks down on the lower classes, has the portrait of a common prostitute hanging in his library.’
His words made Andrew reel. ‘A p-p-prostitute?’ he stammered.
‘Yes, cousin,’ replied Charles, beaming with content. ‘But not a high-class whore from the brothels in Russell Square, or even one of the tarts who ply their trade in the park on Vincent Street, but a dirty, foul-smelling draggletail from Whitechapel upon whose ravaged loins the wretched of the earth alleviate their misery for a few meagre pennies.’
Andrew took a swig of brandy. There was no denying that his cousin’s revelation had shocked him, as it would anybody who saw the portrait, but he also felt strangely disappointed. He stared at the painting again, trying to discover the cause of his unease. So, this lovely creature was a vulgar tart. Now he understood the mixture of passion and resentment that the artist had so skilfully captured in her eyes. But Andrew had to admit his disappointment related to a far more selfish logic: the woman did not belong to his social class, which meant he could never meet her.
‘I bought it thanks to Bruce Driscoll,’ Charles explained, pouring more brandy for them both. ‘Do you remember him?’
Andrew nodded unenthusiastically. Bruce was a friend of his cousin whom boredom and money had made an art collector; a conceited, idle young man who had no compunction in showing off his knowledge of painting at every opportunity.
‘You know how he likes to search for treasure in the most unlikely places,’ his cousin said, handing him his glass. ‘Well, the last time I saw him, he told me about a painter he’d dug up during one of his visits to the flea markets. A man called Walter Sickert, a founding member of the New English Art Club. His studio was in Cleveland Street, and he painted East End prostitutes as though they were society ladies. I dropped in there and couldn’t resist his latest canvas.’
‘Did he tell you anything about her?’ Andrew asked, trying to appear nonchalant.
‘About the whore? Only her name. I think she’s called Marie Jeanette.’
‘Marie Jeanette,’ Andrew murmured. The name suited her, like her little hat. ‘A Whitechapel whore …’ he whispered, still unable to get over his surprise.
‘Yes, a Whitechapel whore. And my father has given her pride of place in his library!’ Charles spread his arms theatrically in a mock-triumphant gesture. ‘Isn’t it absolutely priceless?’
With this, Charles flung his arm around his cousin’s shoulders and guided him to the sitting room. Andrew tried to hide his agitation, but could not help thinking about the girl in the portrait as they planned their assault on the charming Keller sisters.
That night, in his bedroom, Andrew lay awake. Where was the woman in the painting now? What was she doing? By the fourth or fifth question he had begun calling her by her name, as though he really knew her and they enjoyed a non-existent intimacy. He realised he was seriously disturbed when he began to feel an absurd jealousy towards the men who could have her for a few pennies when to him, despite his wealth, she was unattainable. And yet was she really beyond his reach? Surely, given his position, he could have her, physically at least, more easily than he could any other woman, and for the rest of his life. The problem was finding her.
Andrew had never been to Whitechapel, but he had heard enough about it to know it was dangerous, especially for someone of his class. It was not advisable to go there alone, but he could not count on Charles accompanying him. His cousin would not understand him preferring a tart’s grubby charms to what the delightful Keller sisters kept hidden beneath their petticoats, or the perfumed honey-pots of the Chelsea madams with whom well-to-do West End gentlemen sated their appetites. Perhaps he would understand, and even agree to go with him for the fun of it, if Andrew explained it as a passing fancy, but what he felt was too powerful to be reduced to a mere whim.
Or was it? He would not know what he wanted from her until he had her in his arms. Would she really be so difficult to find? Three sleepless nights were enough for him to come up with a plan.
And so it was that while the Crystal Palace (which had been moved to Sydenham after displaying the Empire’s industrial prowess) offered organ recitals, children’s ballets, ventriloquists’ acts and the possibility of picnicking in its gardens with dinosaurs, iguanodons and megatheriums reconstructed from fossils found in the Sussex Weald, and Madame Tussaud’s deprived its visitors of sleep with its famous Chamber of Horrors (in which madmen, cutthroats and poisoners huddled at the foot of the guillotine that had beheaded Marie-Antoinette), Andrew Harrington – oblivious to the festive spirit that had taken hold of the city – put on the humble clothes one of his servants had lent him, and examined his disguise in the cheval glass. He gave a wry smile at the sight of himself in a threadbare jacket and trousers, his fair hair tucked under a checked cap pulled low over his eyes. Surely, looking like that, people would take him for a nobody, possibly a cobbler or a barber.
Disguised in this way, he ordered the astonished Harold Barker to take him to Whitechapel. Before leaving, he made him swear to secrecy. No one must know about his expedition to London’s worst neighbourhood, not his father, not the mistress of the house, not his brother Anthony, not even his cousin Charles. No one.
Chapter III
In order not to draw attention to himself, Andrew made Harold pull up the luxurious carriage in Leadenhall, and continued alone on foot towards Commercial Street. After wandering a good way down that evil-smelling thoroughfare, he plucked up his courage and entered the maze of alleyways that made up Whitechapel. Within ten minutes, a dozen prostitutes loomed out of the fog to offer him a trip to Mount Venus for the price of a few pennies, but none was the girl in the portrait. Had they been draped in seaweed, Andrew might easily have mistaken them for faded, dirty ship’s figureheads. He refused them politely, a dreadful sadness welling up in him at the sight of those scarecrows, hunched against the cold, who had no better way to earn a living. Their toothless mouths, attempting bawdy smiles, were more repulsive than desirable. Would Marie look like that outside the portrait, far from the brushstrokes that had transformed her into an angel?
He soon realised he was unlikely to find her by chance. Perhaps he would have more luck if he asked for her directly. Once he was sure his disguise was convincing, he entered the Ten Bells, a popular tavern on the corner of Fournier Street and Commercial Street, opposite the ghostly Christ Church. When he peered inside the pub, it looked to him the sort of place whores would go in search of clients. As soon as he reached the bar, two came up to him. Trying to seem casual, Andrew refused their propositions as politely as he could and offered them a glass of stout. He explained he was looking for a woman called Marie Jeanette. One of the whores left immediately, pretending to be offended, but the other, the taller of the two, accepted a drink. ‘I suppose you mean Marie Kelly’ she said. ‘That dratted Irishwoman, everybody wants her. I expect she’s done a few by now and is in the Britannia – that’s where we all go when we’ve made enough for a bed and a bit more besides so that we can get drunk quick and forget our sorrows.’ She spoke with more irony than bitterness.
‘Where is this tavern?’ Andrew asked.
‘Near here, on the corner of Crispin Street and Dorset Street.’
The least Andrew could do was thank her for the information by giving her four shillings. ‘Get yourself a room,’ he recommended, with a smile. ‘It’s too cold out there tonight to be traipsing the streets.’
‘Why, thank you, mister. You’re too kind, I’m sure,’ said the whore, genuinely grateful.
Andrew said goodbye, politely doffing his cap.
‘If Marie Kelly won’t give you what you want, come back and see me,’ she added, with a flash of coquettishness that was blighted by her toothless smile. ‘My name’s Liz – Liz Stride. Don’t forget’
Andrew had no problem finding the Britannia, a seedy bar with a windowed front. The room was brilliantly lit by oil lamps and thick with tobacco smoke. At the far end there was a long bar, with a couple of private rooms to the left. A crowd of noisy customers filled the large main area, which was cluttered with tables and chairs, the floor strewn with sawdust. A fleet of bartenders in filthy aprons squeezed their way between tightly packed tables, juggling metal tankards brimming with beer. In the corner, a battered old piano displayed its grubby keys to anyone wishing to enliven the evening with a tune.
Andrew reached the bar, which was laden with large jugs of wine, oil lamps and plates of cheese cut into huge chunks – they looked like bits of rubble from a tip. He lit a cigarette from one of the lamps, ordered a pint of beer, and leaned discreetly against the bar, surveying the crowd and wrinkling his nose at the strong smell of sausage that emanated from the kitchen. As he had been told, the atmosphere was more convivial than it had been at the Ten Bells. Most of the tables were occupied by sailors on shore leave and local people dressed as modestly as he, although he also noticed a few groups of prostitutes busy getting drunk. He sipped his beer slowly and looked for one who fitted Marie Kelly’s description, but none did.
By his third beer, he had begun to despair, and wondered what on earth he was doing there, chasing an illusion. He was about to leave when she pushed her way through the pub door. He recognised her at once. There was no doubt about it: she was the girl in the portrait, but more beautiful still for being endowed with movement. Her face looked drained, yet she moved with the energy Andrew had imagined from seeing her on canvas. Most of the other customers remained oblivious to her. How was it possible for anyone not to react to the small miracle that had just taken place in front of them? Their complete indifference made him feel he was a privileged witness to the phenomenon.
He recalled when, as a child, he had seen the wind take a leaf between invisible fingers and balance its tip on the surface of a puddle, spinning it like a top until a carriage wheel had put an end to its dance. To Andrew, it had seemed Mother Nature had engineered that magic trick for his eyes alone. From then on he was convinced that the universe dazzled mankind with volcanic eruptions, but had its own secret way of communicating with the select few, people like himself, who looked at reality as though it were a strip of wallpaper covering something else. Taken aback, he watched Marie Kelly walk towards him as if she knew him. His heart started to pound. He calmed a little when she propped her elbow on the bar and ordered half a pint of beer without glancing at him.
