The Bedlam Detective

THIRTY-SIX

So that was Wilder’s tale. He walked them out, through long corridors in need of repair, emerging into a part of the college that felt to Sebastian like a massive Roman cloister. Greenwich was a place of tides and fog, and the fog had filled the cloister up while they’d been inside. The air hung still, and in this stillness was a creaking sound. It came from large iron lamps that hung from plaster roses in the ceiling of the colonnade, moving slightly under some imperceptible influence.

Sebastian thanked him, and Evangeline offered her hand and said, as Wilder took it and bowed his head, “Mister Wilder. May I ask-”

“Yes?”

“We were told that injury ended your time at sea. Yet you seem …”

She seemed unsure of how to put her question, but he understood immediately.

“Without any obvious impediment?” he said. “I understand. The air by the river was thick with mosquitoes and biting flies. As we waited for the party to appear, all in our camp were laid low in their turn. My infection took a long time to appear and even longer to leave. Eventually I recovered my strength, only to find that my balance had been permanently affected. Now I can’t take the motion of a boat. Any boat. The sea crossing home was perfect hell.”

“So it left no direct mark,” she said, “and yet it keeps you from the life you wanted. My sympathies.”

“Thank you,” Wilder said, and belatedly realized that he had not yet released her hand. He blushed.

Sebastian and Evangeline went on their way. Sebastian was thinking about those mighty steam cars, their component parts forged in Sir Owain’s foundries and assembled in his shipyards, now swallowed up into the jungle and gone. Somewhere they rusted, the bones of the dead scattered all around them.

But what a sight they must have made as they set off! Like Robert’s dime magazine airships and steam-driven men and ironclads of the plains, made real for this dawning age.

Once he and Evangeline were out in the open, they could see how dense the fog had become. Sebastian offered his arm, and Evangeline took it. With some hesitation, he sensed, but she took it all the same.

As they made their slow way toward the West Gate, Evangeline said, “There’s a photograph of all the expedition members in Sir Owain’s book. His wife and child were not among them.”

“That picture was faked in a studio,” Sebastian said. “Like all the others. If you look closely you can see the same man twice, in different whiskers.”

“So he conjured his dead loved ones all the way out of existence? What did Sir Owain think he was doing?”

“Rejecting the reality of his situation. He finds it too terrible to contemplate, so he’d have us believe in another.”

“That makes him more of a rogue than a madman.”

“It’s madness if he believes it as well.”

As the pillars and wrought iron of the West Gate took shape in the fog before them, Sebastian said, “How goes it with your employers?”

“I’ve been pleading a recurrent indisposition,” she said. “When concern for my health gives way to irritation at my absences, I’ll stage a quiet recovery.”

“I’m surprised at men of the law being so easily misled.”

“The men of the law don’t concern themselves with the likes of me. I only need to fool our clerk. He’s a terrier with the males. But if a woman so much as touches his arm, he stammers. I’ve had him stammering a lot.”

“Miss Bancroft!” Sebastian said, feigning shock and causing her to smile.

Although it was only a short walk to the boat pier, in the fog it was a distance to be covered slowly and with caution. The few people they saw were anonymous shapes, emerging and fading again like hulks at sea. One cart went by, its driver dismounted and leading his horse by the bridle, rapping his way along the edge of the pavement with a heavy staff like a blinded pilgrim. After its passing bulk and the noisy shaking of its iron-bound wheels over stone … silence.

The pier gates were closed and locked, and a notice hung upon them. Wisps of fog curled around it. It was as Sebastian had expected. No steamer captain would take passengers onto the river in such conditions. Disaster was guaranteed.

But Evangeline seemed surprised. “Oh,” she said. “Are we stranded? What are we to do?”

“Don’t be concerned,” Sebastian said. “We can cross under the river and pick up a North Greenwich train.”

“A tunnel.”

“Right there.” He pointed to where, visible on the embankment a few yards away, there stood a round building with a domed roof. It resembled some moon-bound projectile lifted straight from the engravings in a Jules Verne romance, a brick-and-glass bullet seated firmly on the earth.

They went across to the building, which housed lift machinery and a stairway. As they waited in the white-tiled rotunda, Sebastian could see that Evangeline was not happy at the prospect of a descent.

To distract her mind, he said, “We should look for this botanist. Summerfield or Smithfield. Whatever the man’s name is.”

“If he’s alive. And in a fit state to speak.”

The lift arrived from below. Some half-dozen people emerged, but only Sebastian and Evangeline boarded. Early in the morning, the foot tunnel would be choked with a press of workers heading from their homes in Greenwich to the docklands across the river. All would flood back again at the end of the day. The wood-paneled lift was of a size that could carry eighty or more at a time.

The old-soldier operator waited less than half a minute, and then closed the doors. During their fifty-foot descent the cage seemed to falter, like a cart rolling over a bump, and its overhead light flickered. The operator showed no reaction, but Evangeline drew in a breath.

Then the doors opened, and there it stretched before them. The quarter-mile tunnel was circular, lined with white glazed tiles, lit from above by electricity, and fog-free. Because of the way that it angled down under the river and then climbed again after the halfway point, it was not possible to see to its far end. A dozen people waited to enter the lift. More could be seen down the tunnel’s length.

They started to walk. Something in Evangeline’s attitude betrayed her and Sebastian said, “Do shut-in places make you nervous? You should have told me. Take my arm again, if it reassures you.”

“I should not,” Evangeline said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t imagine your wife thinking it proper.”

“My wife’s American. She cares more about the way things are than the way they look.”

“What have you told her about me?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Nothing you need feel uncomfortable about. She works in a hospital. There’s very little she hasn’t heard.”

He wanted Evangeline to think well of Elisabeth, and not to imagine disapproval. He said, “And but for her encouragement I might never have sought you out.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

Evangeline said, “I’d like to meet her.”

“You shall,” Sebastian said. “Look. You can see the tunnel’s lowest point ahead of us. When we reach that, you’ll be able to look up and see the far end of it.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Please. Where did you meet?”

“In Philadelphia. I was working for the Pinkertons then. It seems like a lifetime ago. I was alone in a new city and a long way from anywhere I could think of as home. A woman once told me that a man who can dance is always going to be in demand. So I went for dancing lessons, once a week at the Stratford Hotel. The dancing teacher’s name was Alicia and Elisabeth was her best friend. She played piano for the dancing sometimes. Although her instrument was the euphonium.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s a sound you have to learn to love.”

“And you did.”

“Never quite managed that much.”

At the tunnel’s lowest point, just ahead of them, the slabs gleamed wetly. The tunnel floor was of great oblong slabs of cut stone, closely jointed.

Evangeline said, “What about your son?”

“Robert. How do I describe him? I won’t call him troubled, because he’s a happy young man. He’s bright, intelligent, perceptive, and strange. In a way that endears him to all who know him, and perplexes anyone who doesn’t. And the world is full of people who don’t. But we finally found a place where they would understand him, feed his mind, and show him how to understand others.”

“He’ll have a lot to thank you for.”

“Thanks aren’t required. Although it hasn’t been easy. When we landed in England we had just our rags and our bags, as Elisabeth put it. But we manage. Sir James got me cheap, and he knows it.”

At which point, without any warning at all, the tunnel’s lights failed.