Murder As A Fine Art Part 48

"Nothing about politics?"

"No, Your Lordship. Is there something specific that occupies your concern?"

"Brookline was privy to numerous confidential discussions. It would be unfortunate if he had broadcast their contents." Palmerston's eyes relaxed. He changed the subject. "Becker, you're shivering."

"The water was very cold, Your Lordship."

"Will it make you feel warmer if, with Commissioner Mayne's approval, I promote you to the rank of detective?"

Becker looked as if he didn't believe he'd heard correctly. "Detective?"

"Stand before the fire." Palmerston motioned to a nearby servant. "Bring Detective Becker dry clothes and a blanket. Hot tea for everyone."

The servant departed.

"De Quincey," Palmerston asked, "why are you walking in place? Your face shines with sweat."

"With Your Lordship's forgiveness..." De Quincey pulled a bottle from his coat and swallowed from it.

Palmerston looked horrified. "Is that...?"

"My medicine."

"You're pathetic."

"Quite so, Your Lordship."

"Aren't you worried about ruining your health?"

"After a half century of laudanum, my health was ruined long ago, Your Lordship."

"And aren't you ashamed of setting such a poor example to your daughter?"

"On the contrary, I set an excellent example. Emily's daily experience with me teaches her never to touch a drop of this evil substance."

Palmerston, whose riches came largely from the opium trade, considered the word "evil" in reference to the drug. Briefly his eyes hardened again.

"Yes, well, I summoned all of you so that I might do something that a man in my position almost never does-admit a mistake. You have my regret that I misjudged Brookline and misjudged you. If there is anything I can do to express my grat.i.tude for your help, you need only ask."

"My daughter and I find ourselves without lodgings, Your Lordship," De Quincey said promptly.

Palmerston was surprised by the quick response.

"Colonel Brookline arranged for our previous accommodations," De Quincey elaborated, "but the a.s.sociation is so disagreeable that I'm afraid neither my daughter nor I could sleep peacefully under that roof."

Palmerston made a calculated decision. "The two of you shall remain here under my protection. Perhaps you'll think of something else that Colonel Brookline said about me. If there's nothing further..."

"Actually, Your Lordship..." Emily, who'd been silent, stepped forward.

"Yes, Miss De Quincey?" Palmerston looked uneasy, as if sensing what was about to happen.

"An undertaker needs to be paid sixteen pounds for funeral expenses involving the first set of victims."

"Funeral expenses?"

"In addition, my father made promises to a group of beggars on Oxford Street. For their considerable help, they were guaranteed an abundance of food throughout the next year."

"Beggars? Food?"

"I myself promised one of them-a boy with acrobatic capabilities who was wounded-that his tuition and board would be paid at a commendable school."

"Tuition? Board?"

"Also, I promised a group of privately employed ladies that they would be taken to a farm where they could become healthy in clean air, growing vegetables."

"Privately employed ladies?"

"Prost.i.tutes, Your Lordship," Emily explained.

"Detective Becker, is this young woman always so forthcoming?"

"I'm pleased to say that she is, Your Lordship."

Emily concealed a smile, but not enough so that the new detective failed to notice it, concealing his own smile.

"I grant your requests on one condition," Palmerston p.r.o.nounced. "An exceeding number of newspaper reporters wish to speak with all of you. You shall make clear that all the efforts to save the city were coordinated through my office and that I myself personally directed the unmasking of Colonel Brookline."

RYAN LAY ON A BED in a servant's room in the mansion's attic.

Emily tried not to show how alarmed she was by his pallor. De Quincey and Becker stood on the other side of the bed.

"Dr. Snow told me that your wounds do not appear to be infected," Emily a.s.sured him, hoping that her brightness didn't sound forced.

Ryan's eyelids flickered. Slowly he focused on his visitors.

"Are you in pain?" Emily asked.

"No," Ryan managed to say. "Dr. Snow gave me laudanum."

"Be careful not to become habituated," De Quincey cautioned.

"I would laugh," Ryan murmured, "but it might tear my st.i.tches."

"Ah, I detect a smile," Emily said victoriously.

"Despite the circ.u.mstances, I admit I enjoyed meeting you and your father, Miss De Quincey."

"If that is intended as a good-bye, it is premature. You have not seen the last of Father and me. Rather than return to debt collectors in Edinburgh, we plan to stay in London a while longer."

Ryan considered her statement and nodded, surprising her. "Good. London will be more exciting for your presence."

Emily felt warmth in her cheeks. "Excitement turned out to be a dubious experience. Father and I look forward to the humdrum of resuming his discussions with booksellers and magazine writers."

"Surely you can spend your time to better advantage," Ryan found the strength to say. "London has greater attractions than magazine writers."

"Yes, I heard so much about the famed Crystal Palace that I am eager to see it," Emily enthused. "A gla.s.s structure so tall that full-grown elm trees decorate its interior."

"It is indeed a marvel. After the Great Exhibition three years ago, it was disa.s.sembled at Hyde Park and rebuilt at Sydenham Hill."

"I volunteered to escort Emily and her father there," Becker said happily.

"How thoughtful," Ryan muttered. "I would have been pleased to volunteer as well."

"Your convalescence frustrates you, I am sure," Emily noted. "That is another reason Father and I decided to stay in London."

"Another reason?"

"Dr. Snow has obligations that prevent him from visiting you as often as he would prefer. He taught me to administer treatment to you in his absence."

"Since we are not related, the intimacy might be uncomfortable for you, Miss De Quincey. I fear I will be a burden."

"Nonsense. Given what Florence Nightingale has accomplished for nursing in the Crimean War, it's obvious that an injury has greater priority than false modesty. Women will soon have a profession to pursue besides being a servant, a shopgirl, or a governess."

"One thing I have learned from my experience with you is to appreciate new thoughts. I shall be grateful for the attention, Miss De Quincey."

"Please call me 'Emily.' Detective Becker learned to do that. After everything that we have been through together, why do you insist on being formal?"

"Detective Becker?" Ryan looked at him, puzzled.

"My stature has risen," Becker explained. "I owe it to the opportunity you gave me and look forward to many more adventures together."

"I believe I have experienced sufficient adventures." Ryan's eyelids began to droop.

"Weariness makes you say that," Emily decided. "You and Detective Becker are men of action if I ever saw them. We shall let you sleep. But in your hazy condition, perhaps I can persuade you to tell me your first name."

Ryan hesitated. "Sean."

"And what is my name?"

"Miss..."

"Please try again."

"Your name is Emily."

"Very good." She looked at Becker. "And what is your first name?"

Becker hesitated also. "Joseph."

"Splendid."

Emily looked from one man to the other. Becker seemed only a little older than her twenty-one years, a tall, strapping, handsome fellow with solid manners, and a slight scar on his chin that somehow made him more attractive. In contrast, Ryan was almost twice her age, theoretically too old to be considered as anything but at best a brother, and yet the lines of experience in his face made him oddly pleasing to look at, not to mention that his confidence and even his gruffness were appealing.

What strange thoughts, she told herself, but as Emily did with all new concepts, she refused to suppress them.

"Sean and Joseph." She touched their hands. "I believe we can finally declare that we are friends."

"There is no such thing as forgetting," De Quincey said with a smile. "But for a change, this is one circ.u.mstance I shall happily always remember."

POSTSCRIPT.

IN 1886, SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS after the Ratcliffe Highway murders, employees of a gas company tore up the paving stones at the intersection of Cannon and Cable streets to dig a trench for a pipe. Six feet down, in the middle of the crossroads, they found a skeleton with a stake through its left rib cage. At first, the workmen suspected that they had discovered evidence of a long-ago murder, but a police investigation determined that the skeleton belonged to John Williams, a suspected killer who had hanged himself before he could be declared guilty of brutal slayings that had paralyzed London and all of England three quarters of a century earlier. People walked away with arm bones, leg bones, and ribs as souvenirs. The owner of a tavern at Cannon and Cable streets displayed the skull on a shelf behind the bar.

No one knows what became of it.

AFTERWORD.

Adventures with the Opium-Eater.

FOR TWO YEARS, I lived in 1854 London. Charles Darwin prompted me to do it, or at least a movie about him did. It's called Creation, and it dramatizes Darwin's struggle to complete On the Origin of Species. If you're a Christian fundamentalist, you probably wish that his struggle had persisted. Darwin's wife certainly did. She believed that his theory of evolution was blasphemous and urged him not to continue. Meanwhile he suffered from extreme guilt because he might have been indirectly responsible for the death of his favorite daughter, having sanctioned medical treatment-hydrotherapy-that possibly aggravated her lingering illness.

These multiple pressures made Darwin chronically sick with headaches, heart palpitations, and stomach problems, rendering him barely able to function. But here's the point. Darwin wasn't aware of his guilt, both about the death of his daughter and about how his research was harming his relationship with his wife. We post-Freudians understand the link between the mind and the body, but Darwin's persistent health problems were a medical mystery in Victorian England of the 1850s.

The turning point of the film occurs when a friend visits Darwin and tells him, "Charles, people like De Quincey believe we're influenced by thoughts and emotions we don't know we have."

Thoughts and emotions we don't know we have? Sure sounds like Freud, but Freud's theories about the subconscious weren't published until the 1890s, forty years after Darwin's crisis. In fact, De Quincey's theories about what he called the separate chambers of our minds (he invented the term "sub-conscious") were initially developed in the 1820s, seventy years before Freud.

Something in me came to attention. De Quincey? I remembered a long-ago course in nineteenth-century English literature in which a professor mentioned Thomas De Quincey not as a precursor of Freud but as a notorious drug abuser, the first to have written about that forbidden subject, in his scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The professor referred to De Quincey dismissively as a footnote in literature and went on to praise the usual greatest hits of the Romantic and Victorian eras.

Curiosity compelled me to go to the bookshelf on which, like a pack rat, I still kept my undergraduate textbooks. Given what the professor of my youth had said, I wasn't surprised that De Quincey was scantily represented: ten pages in a thousand-page anthology. What did surprise me was that while only a portion of one of his essays, "The Mail-Coach," was included, those few pages were the opposite of what my professor had led me to expect. They were spellbinding.

With rare vividness, De Quincey described riding next to a mail-coach driver as their vehicle hurtled along a dark road. They both fell asleep. Waking, De Quincey saw a shadow approaching him. The shadow became a carriage speeding around a curve, a man driving, a woman listening to something he was telling her. De Quincey tried to waken the mail coach's driver, without success. The carriage sped closer. De Quincey struggled to take the reins from the driver, again without success. The carriage raced nearer. The ma.s.sive size of the coach left no doubt that a collision would destroy the carriage and its occupants. At the last moment, De Quincey roused the driver, who gasped at the danger and turned the coach enough that it only grazed the carriage and yet caused sufficient damage that the woman, aware of how close she came to dying, opened her mouth in a silent scream.

That resembles a scene from a thriller, but in actuality it's part of an essay about the English mail-coach system, which (I found out later when I acquired a full text) expands into a discussion about the subconscious and the nature of dreams.

I was hooked. I bought a copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Reading that 1821 memoir, I felt that the little gentleman was speaking directly to me as he recalled the death of his father and the abuse he suffered because of his indifferent mother and his four guardians. His escape from school, his winter on the cruel streets of London, his relationship with his beloved Ann, their tragic parting, his first experience with laudanum... De Quincey's description of these events gripped me.

I learned that he created a further sensation with his essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," the third installment of which was the most blood-soaked true-crime narrative written until that time, describing at length the notorious Ratcliffe Highway multiple murders that terrorized London and all of England years earlier, in 1811. It's as if he was actually there, I thought. And that's when the idea for Murder as a Fine Art came to me. The third installment of that essay was published in 1854. De Quincey was living in Edinburgh at the time. But what if someone lured him to London, promising news about Ann? What if that person used the third installment of the "Murder" essay as an instruction manual, replicating the original Ratcliffe Highway killings? What if De Quincey became the suspect? What if...?