Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Read online

  “I didn’t.” She eyed me frostily, as if it were I who had been avoiding her. “I came with the photographer and Aunt Lexie.”

  “Oh.”

  Our spat of last year she had not forgiven: that ordeal underground, Molly’s gang embroiled. I could see in her face that Ruth still blamed me for letting the truth be hushed up.

  I sat up, blinking. “Glad to see you, is what I mean.”

  She offered me a skewer, white syrup toasted on its end. “Marshmallow?”

  I accepted this olive branch. The sugary confection invaded my rotten Scots gums, and I suffered immediate toothache.

  “My aunt is lolling somewhere abouts.” She glanced around, toying with the ringlets of her dark hair. “You haven’t seen her?”

  She had grown it longer; how fine it looked against her pale neck. “I—ah—I don’t think so.”

  She caught me admiring her hair. Her smile was unexpected beside her brusque words. “Admirable to see you too, hard at work, as always.”

  A typical jibe. I knew better than to protest. Trying to establish my decorum, I reached out my hand. “May I at least escort you home?”

  “No, no. We must dash for the first down train.”

  “The train?”

  “I’m living out of town now, you may recall.”

  “Of course, with the dreaded aunt—”

  “Besides, you have more important people to spend your time with.” And, with that final barb, she was gone. Did she mean Mauve and his cronies? Perhaps she was alluding to the silly girl on my lap.

  Confound her. If only I’d known she was there, we could have had a quiet talk, set aside our disagreements. Now she was vanished away, back to Sussex, and her infernal aunt’s, rendering futile my hopes of rekindling our friendship; for the year before she had been very dear to me, and I to her, I think. Could I pursue her? Too late. Apologise? Too late. As usual, I was always too late.

  THE CARCASS

  On to J.W. Brodie’s bash. I would not have dared to go, except that Felix sought me out to chum him along. When would I ever chat to him again, if I passed up this chance? It was not his celebrity that drew me; I’d known nothing of that before Alexandra spoke of it. It was an inner light. I liked his blindness to social class, his excitable talk.

  As we rolled out of Quarterhouse, the merrymakers pelted each other with snowballs. Down Quartern Lane they tottered, singing a raucous ditty, and up St John’s Street. Felix touched my arm, guiding me up the back lane, a shortcut to Brodie’s place on Corporation Road.

  The snow was dirtier on these alleys known only to locals: a darker world than the Quarterhouse quadrangle. Felix talked of the evening, but with none of Payne’s unrealistic hopes or Mauve’s hyperbole. Promises, collaborations, compromises, even, were worth it, if they aided the needy. His desire to share his good luck was strong enough, but behind it I sensed a sadness. I thought to ask about his injured right hand; but I found myself fretting aloud about the do chez Brodie.

  “I hate these things too.” He laughed. “Brodie will show off his latest contraption, no doubt. Everyone will kowtow, so his newspapers speak well of them. How vexing to know everyone is polite only to get something out of you. All desperate to impress, none daring to speak his mind.”

  A thrush was singing on a pollarded tree as we passed Jerusalem Court. The last autumn leaves rustled in Clerkenwell Green, metallic and dry. On past the house of detention, dark and looming, we reached Corporation Lane. The noisome revellers appeared at the corner. Between us, the Finsbury Bank, and opposite it, a policeman guarding Brodie’s ceremonial portico. But fifty yards from those marble steps, the stinking alley we had negotiated seemed the gateway to an entirely different city.

  But Felix had not made it through beside me. I found him gazing down at a bundle of blankets in the shadow of the prison wall. He was holding his hand to his face, staring at the heap of clothes. He gave an unearthly groan, as if looking into his own grave. I went back, stooped and peered under the blanket: a pitiful excuse for a human being. After the cider and sausages, the stench made my stomach lurch. It was a sight common enough of a winter’s evening, but I reproached myself for not having seen it, investigated before he saw it.

  Did Felix know her? Foolish thought: the face was obscured, wrapped in rags.

  The fallen woman—fallen, indeed—was collapsed in an inhuman posture. Her head was twisted against the doorway of Jenner & Cox, the tobacconists, her arms bent at the elbow, like a conductor poised for a symphony. She was frozen, as if the winds had changed, in this reverent pose. Her clothes thin as paper. Snow on her petticoats. The flimsiest of dresses barely covered her chest, but it was her legs that made one recoil. Nobody could sleep in such an attitude. This was the body of love, tossed on the dust heap.

  I laid my hand on Felix’s shoulder to draw him away. “Felix, sir, I will—”

  “No.” He looked up in a kind of panic, stumbling forward.

  I grasped his arm. “Won’t you come along to Brodie’s? Warm yourself.”

  “You go ahead, Sergeant.”

  I looked at him in dismay. There was nothing to be done for her.

  “Please, see that this unfortunate… I can’t bear—” He reached in his pockets for coins.

  “Not necessary, Felix. I’ll enlist that policeman at Brodie’s and remove the body.”

  “I must… I cannot…” He turned away, overcome, and stumbled down the alley, back towards the haven of Quarterhouse.

  THE SECRET CHAMBER

  I did not mean to stay at Brodie’s bash, only seek help with the corpse; besides, arriving without Felix felt fraudulent. But blasted Jeffcoat was at the door, welcoming me with gruff bonhomie, though Payne’s favoured sergeant knew how I felt about him. He thrust out his knife-blade nose and told me Brodie wanted a word.

  “Brodie can wait,” I said. “There’s a corpse down the road.”

  Jeffcoat insisted he and Darlington would deal with it; I’d done my duties for the night, and Brodie didn’t like to wait. I yielded, unwillingly. Felix had been so distressed, I would have rather kept my promise; but I made sure Jeffcoat had money enough for a cab to the mortuary.

  In the basement, the carousing centred on the billiards table. No sign of the master of the house. I took a whisky, to relieve my mood and the toothache. Such a grand salon, like a gents’ club, where one normally housed the servants: politicos and parasites betting wildly on every frame, duelling over swerve shots and droll ripostes.

  I found myself perusing Brodie’s cabinet of curiosities: arachnids; fossils; a murderer’s skull phrenologically annotated; embryos in aspic. Not a collection for polite company, but acceptable in a gentleman’s rooms. In between the baize-lined cabinets, I spotted hinges. A nice mystery.

  Gabriel Mauve teetered over. The last person I wished to speak to. He launched into an anecdote about a dress house. This particular brothel was popular with men and women, upper-class, married and unmarried. One lady, lacking marital spice, came seeking tastier morsels. She eyed the well-made bed in alarm. Could she truly forsake her vows? With a gentleman unknown? The latch clicked. A glance. A gasp. Mauve nudged my elbow. “The man who had come in—it was her own husband. Can you credit it?”

  I admitted, it was hard to believe.

  “It’s the truth,” he protested. “Every word.”

  “Can you be sure, sir?” A useful preface to the world I was about to enter. “Gents’ clubs are full of apocryphal anecdotes.”

  “I’m sure. Because I was there.” He blinked away a tear. “And it has proven the salvation of my marriage.” He fell, insensible, into an armchair; his wife had told him not to drink, and I could see why. But how could he be sure it was his wife’s first visit to that well-made bed?

  The billiards players grew scarcer, conquered by drink and bankruptcy. A stout-chested man stood by, admiring me as if I were one of his specimens.

  “You like my collections, huh, boy?” J.W. Brodie’s inscrutable expression
I recognised, his ash grey hair and neat moustaches, but his accent took me aback, American twang laced with Old World ice.

  “The casings are superb—”

  “The casings?”

  Not the praise a collector would appreciate. I bit my lip. Before I could revise my sentiment, he burst out laughing.

  “Forgive me,” I said, “if I admire hinges and casements. I’m a watchmaker by trade.”

  “A watch man? Right. I got nothing against tradesmen. My father worked down them Scottish mines. Say, ain’t you Payne’s Scotch boy at Scotland Yard?”

  “You have me.” I was surprised that he should know of me, flattered even. “Watchmaker by apprenticeship, policeman through habit and circumstance.”

  He grinned. “And in this sleuthing capacity, you made a discovery, right?” Our eyes flickered to the hinges. Brodie glanced about. The few gents still on their feet were tight with gin. They were more interested in cannoning balls and spider rests. “Would you care to see my real collection, Mr Scotland?”

  * * *

  Why was I accorded this tour of the inner sanctum? I suppose a man like J.W. Brodie can simply own pieces of the Colosseum, and sometimes wants to show them off. His secret chamber was adorned with photographs: Brodie with Garibaldi, Brodie with the Czar, Brodie with Abraham Lincoln. These were impossible to doubt. Less easy to accept was the scrap of the Turin Shroud, recently returned from analysis at the University of Oxford.

  I resisted touching it. “A forgery, of course?”

  “That’s what they’re telling us.” He winked. “That’s what they want you to believe.” The consummate newsman: no need to lie, just let us believe.

  Brodie showed me a panoply of wonders so strange, I would have doubted them in any other house: Genghis Khan’s scimitar, a first edition of Don Quixote, carnal writings of mediaeval popes. Brodie winked. Now I saw: this wall of his secret chamber was an erotic library. The bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling. If Darlington was hunting dirty books, these were titles I should alert him to: Sodom, The Cockchafer, Le Courrier des Fouteurs Ecclésiastiques, Fanny Hill; and a luxurious black volume titled in a strange language I struggled to decipher: Efliter… Efterces… Eflrcesym, or something like it. The significance of this tome was lost to me, surrounded by so many diversions.

  A novella in a yellow jacket sat wantonly open:

  …au naturel, as the French say. Her waist was little, enhancing the delicious bulge of the minx’s hips and posteriors. Miss Lucy soon gave way to her delight. “How nice! It’s better than the other way, go on.” The duke, exhausted with delight, cried, “Quel plaisir. This must be what the serpent teach Adam and Eve! The forbidden fruit, ma belle Lucy!”

  It was as if Brodie had set up his display to taunt me, to bewitch me. For only then, shaking myself free from the dirty books, did I notice the chess automaton.

  Brodie sat before the cabinet and casually shifted the white pawn to king four.

  The carved wooden face of his opponent inclined slightly, the eyes shifted left, then right, and its wooden arm swung mechanically across the board. It hovered over the pieces. It shifted a pawn.

  I couldn’t help but gape. I was a keen competitor in the Yard’s after-hours league. All chess fanatics had heard tales of this device, though I thought it was long gone.

  Brodie lit a cigar, lapping up my consternation. The New Turk was a miraculous mechanism, by any standards. A machine, idly playing its master at chess. Over the next half hour’s moves—a King’s Gambit, if you are interested—Brodie related how he acquired this machine. In the Turk’s heyday at the Schoenbrunn Palace defeating Beethoven, Goethe and Napoleon, how the press speculated, how the priests damned. The demon had toured Europe, defeated countless English masters, and astonished the States, before falling from public favour. Brodie had purchased it cheap. He showed me a newspaper cutting that declared: TURK DESTROYED BY FIRE IN CHINESE MUSEUM.

  “Nice story.” He grinned. “All the more miraculous for it.”

  Not destroyed, merely damaged. A few repairs and Brodie had resuscitated the marvel. Now the American prodigy Paul Morphy was coming out of retirement to challenge the European masters, Brodie’s newspapers planned to whip up a carnival in which his New Turk machine would challenge the winner.

  “Darn it.” Brodie winced, as the Turk’s mechanised hand planted its rook to the eighth rank. Checkmate on move thirty. “Care to play?”

  I walked all round the machine. Brodie wheeled the cabinet around, opening each panel one by one to display the workings. I am an aficionado of cogs and clockwork. No trickery was apparent: the cabinet was too small for a man; were there a sentient opponent hidden in elsewhere, working it by remote means, I should hear the pulleys and see the strings working the mannequin. No hoax. No tricks. An automaton chess fiend.

  I chose the Evans Gambit, a modern variation. The Turk’s face, rudely carved, suggested archaic wisdom. Ten moves in, I was mesmerised by the movement of the mechanical arm. By the twentieth, my kingside was stymied and my queen disarmed. I gambled on a knight sacrifice, but the fatal blow descended, delivered by his bishop, while castles pinned my king.

  I blinked in wonder. “Let me examine this prodigy.”

  “You got to be kidding, boy. I’m going to lend it around the aristocracy. Our friend Gabriel Mauve, cabinet minister, has asked for it.”

  I made a face.

  “He won’t blab, believe me. He’ll never know how it works.” J.W. Brodie drew on his cigar, eyes twinkling. “If my papers have any influence, it’s a sensation. I won’t have some nickel-and-dime flatfoot explaining how it’s all just levers and pulleys.”

  “Is it all just levers and pulleys?”

  Silence.

  I stared at the Turk’s impassive eyes.

  “Ain’t we all just mechanisms,” said Brodie, “propelled by forces we cannot fathom or control?”

  I shook my head. “It plays so like a man. As if there were a homunculus inside.”

  “A minuscule chess master?” He laughed. “Remind me of that, Mr Scotland, next time it needs repairing. Come on. My New Turk has defeated us both. We may stand to be winners in another respect. Old Payne has dealt you a problematical hand, ain’t he? Count up the capital’s cathouses. Whoa, now. I’d say you could use some help. Junior reporters, maybe, to run a little legwork. Touch of discretion here, blast of indignation there.” He stroked his moustache, looking sideways at me. “We all need help sometimes.”

  “Sometimes we do. If we can afford it.”

  “A murder a day is all I ask.”

  To sell his salacious rags? “I can’t imagine a businessman like you would ask me to break police rules.”

  “I’m not asking you to commit the murders.”

  I looked around his chamber of secrets, gave the New Turk a final glance, and stood up.

  “Come on. You’ve something I want; I’ve something you need. Sure we can come to an agreement, Mr Scotland. Take another shot of whisky, why don’t you?”

  “I’ll be on my way, Mr Brodie.” I looked him in the eye. “I rarely drink much.”

  PART II

  KEEPER OF VICES

  DECEMBER 1863–JANUARY 1864

  Folly, lewdness, sin and minginess

  Bewitch our spirits, and exhaust our sides.

  We cultivate our genial regrets,

  Like beggars nourishing their parasites.

  Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

  A modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him; and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions.

  William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs

  Boldness is one of the most essential qualities in getting women. Not much harm can result from it, if not good. A man can but be refused, and women don’t tell of sexual requests to them. Not one virtuous woman in a hundred would tell anyone but a confidential fem
ale friend if a man said to her, “Oh! I’m dying to fuck you,” and she’d feel in her heart complimented by his desires—though she wouldn’t tell that.

  “Walter”, My Secret Life

  A COMPLAINT, FROM GABRIEL MAUVE, MP

  Your blasted Lawless was so fascinated with the chess automaton. It has nothing to do with it, damn it to hell and back. That’s not been thieved. I can’t understand why he kept poking about at it. Leave off, I told him, and sharpish. Idiot.

  That’s right. It’s not mine. Borrowed from Brodie. Yes, Brodie, the newspaper chappy told me about it at the party last month. He cadged it off some Yankee sideshow halfwit. Oh, he’ll make a killing with exhibition matches next year; chess fever, all right, with Morphy versus the world, Staunton lured out of retirement, don’t you know. But this is all beside the point. My point is that I have been robbed, and your deuced officer wasted precious time on half-cocked queries and pointless cross-examinations of household members, when he could have been hotfooting it after the thieves.

  I am calm, damn you. I’ll tell you when I’m not calm.

  No sign of breakage. Yes, no obvious sign. My Secret Cabinet—I must make a clean breast of it, I suppose—my Camera Secreta is a repository of papers and private artefacts, priceless not only to me but to the nation. I found it open while fetching some literature, after a late night with the Flash Songsters down the Cyder Cellars. No, I don’t know exactly what’s been took. Stop bloody well preaching about your difficulty in catching the blighters.

  The Cabinet. Allow me to explain. It’s a closet, accessed from my office, an old Catholic chapel where papists hid from their just deserts. Large enough to stable a donkey. Thick walls, no window. Dank. Ancient flagstones. Ideal for manuscripts, so Panizzi of the British Museum tells me, of which these bastards have taken several: de Tissot’s L’Onanisme, and Wilmot’s Nymphomania. The door, quite invisible from the house. No, no servants know of the room’s existence; I alone have a key; I never, ever leave it open. My wife? Oh, my wife on occasion I’ve allowed in. For the room’s upkeep, you understand, filing and cleaning. No secrets between spouses. There’s nothing untoward in that, despite your impudent look; our marriage is a modern one, and I will stand no aspersions upon it. Your Lawless fellow spotted the door, I admit, only because I had left it ajar in my distress, which I never, ever do.