TWENTY-THREE
In sixteen acres of Southeast London’s Forest Hill stood Surrey House, the residence of Quaker tea trader Frederick Horniman. Originally the family home, it had come to hold so many objects, books, and pictures gathered in the course of Horniman’s travels that a few months ago he’d thrown a part of it open to the public, by appointment, so that anyone with sufficient interest could come in and view his collections.
Sayers and Stoker were met at the gate by a man with a strong-looking frame and a starved-looking face. He wore a brown velveteen coat, and Stoker introduced him by the name of Samuel Liddell Mathers.
“You’ve the hand of a boxer!” Mathers said as they shook, and Sayers gave Stoker an uneasy glance. “I box every evening myself,” Mathers added.
Stoker returned the look with a slight shrug and a raise of the eyebrows, as if to say, I told him no such thing.
They walked up the circular driveway to the square-set, ivy-covered house. It was shabby and rambling and comfortable. Mathers led them around to a side entrance, where he produced a key to let them in. The house was mostly dark, and the furniture sheeted—the Horniman family was not at home. The two men followed their guide through the kitchens to a door that opened onto a stairway, which in turn led down into the cellars. The house had electric lighting but the cellar did not, and he stopped to light a lantern before carrying it ahead of them to show the way.
As they descended, he said, “The place is full to bursting point. This is where they keep the pictures no one cares to see.”
Sayers said, “Do we have permission to be here?”
“I’m a friend of the daughter. We both belong to a little order of Christian kabbalists. Bram picks our brains every now and again, but he refuses to join us. Don’t you, Bram?”
Stoker, at the rear of the party, said, “You know my interests have been entirely academic.”
“Really,” Mathers said. “This might end your sense of detachment.” Whereupon, he winked at Sayers.
He had Stoker hold the lantern while he looked through a stack of unframed pictures that were being stored side-on. He knew what he was looking for, and it took him a while to find it. Finally, he drew one of them out. It was mounted in cards and protected by a large sheet of paper that he lifted and flipped back.
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.