Ruler of the Night Read online

  Carolyn gasped.

  “Keep shaking the mixture until everything blends together. See how it’s thickening into a paste? The phosphorus is safe when it’s combined with the paste. Good. Now come with me. We’ll put some of this paste outside every rat hole we can find. In the night, the bits will give off a green glow without starting a fire. Spellbound, the rats will come to the glow and smell the sugar and the brandy. After they eat this, the phosphorus will burn away their stomachs. In the night, with the numerous glows, you won’t feel alone.”

  “Alone? Of course I won’t. You’ll be with me.”

  The sorrowful look that Thomas had given her filled her with fright.

  “What? What’s happened? What’s wrong?” she’d begged him to tell her.

  A half a century later, Carolyn still recalled the acid feel of her tears after he’d told her that he had to leave.

  Clutching her walking stick, which she needed only as a club, she aimed the lamp and climbed the curved staircase toward another green-glowing saucer. On the next level, where the staircase continued upward, a third saucer dispelled shadows. Her grip tightening on her stick, she climbed toward a fourth glowing saucer.

  Scrittle-scrattle.

  Tension made Carolyn pause. Unlike in that hateful Greek Street house from long ago, here the staircase and the corridors had plush carpeting. The only exposed surface where rats’ claws could scrittle-scrattle was the black-and-white marble floor of the entrance hall, but the sound had not come from that direction.

  No, it came from inside my head, Carolyn decided.

  She resumed her ascent. At the next level, she aimed the lamp along a shadowy corridor and proceeded toward the first door on the left.

  Her bedroom faced Hyde Park. Earlier, a maid had drawn the curtains, turned down the bed coverings, and stoked the coals in the fireplace. After shutting the door, Carolyn set the lamp and the walking stick on a bureau. When she removed her top garments, one fashionable item was missing: a corset. Her waist was so trim that she didn’t need it. Moreover, she disliked being constrained. Similarly, she preferred the freedom of a stiff, flared crinoline rather than the weight of the metal underdress hoop that had been in fashion since the Crystal Palace Exhibition four years earlier. Stripped to her final layer of underclothes, she reached for a nightdress on the bed.

  And froze as she again heard scrittle-scrattle.

  It was only the rustle of my nightdress when I touched it, she tried to assure herself.

  Thomas had written that there was no such thing as forgetting, that the mind was like a page upon which words were constantly inscribed and then erased and then inscribed again. But the earlier words could never be erased totally. They always remained underneath.

  Yes, the bottom layer always remains, Carolyn thought.

  She removed a green-glowing saucer from her closet and set it beside the bureau. Only then did she blow out the lamp and climb into her bed, where she drew its curtains tightly around her. As much as she wanted to see the glow, that would require leaving a gap in the curtains, a space through which something might creep while she slept.

  As a child, she had believed that the scrittle-scrattle of the rats was actually the sound of ghosts, and even now, when her situation had improved so much that she slept on the finest of feather pillows beneath silk sheets and a satin bedspread, she still sometimes jerked awake with a stifled scream wedged in her throat, certain that ghosts were coming to eat her, and in her long life, she had certainly accumulated ghosts, one ghost in particular.

  FIVE

  THE HOUSE IN GREEK STREET

  From the Journal of Emily De Quincey

  I awoke to the sound of someone knocking on a door—not mine but Father’s. Sunlight seeped past the curtain in my room.

  “Mr. De Quincey, you have a visitor.” The voice belonged to one of Lord Palmerston’s footmen.

  “A visitor?” Father’s immediate response told me that he’d been awake in his room for a while. I hoped that he was writing, but I feared that he was pacing to take his mind away from his need for laudanum.

  “A woman, Mr. De Quincey.”

  “A woman? Who on earth…”

  “Her card says Mrs. Edward Richmond.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” Father’s muffled voice responded.

  “She claims that you and she were friends a long time ago.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Does the name Carolyn Brunell mean anything to you, Mr. De Quincey? She wrote that name on the back of the card.”

  “Carolyn…oh my God.” Father’s door banged open.

  Throughout this exchange, I hurriedly dressed, grateful that I didn’t need to bother with a corset or a hoop. I managed to reach Father and the footman as they descended the final section of the grand staircase.

  “Father, who is Carolyn Brunell?” I asked.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He rushed outside into the cold when the footman opened the front door. It had been weeks since I’d seen him move so eagerly.

  In the driveway, I ignored the clatter of traffic in Piccadilly and focused on a woman who stood behind the bars of the gate in front of Lord Palmerston’s house.

  She wore a cape and a hood, but the hood only partially concealed her hair, the most lustrous auburn I had ever seen. It hung loose, framing her features, emphasizing her elegant cheekbones and the unusual brightness of her eyes. If not for a slight amount of gray in her hair, I would not have believed what I soon learned: that she was in her early sixties. She sensibly didn’t wear a hooped skirt but instead one that had a flared petticoat, making her dress the narrowest that I’d seen apart from mine.

  “Thomas?” she asked.

  I have rarely seen Father as dumbfounded as he was at that moment.

  “Is it you, Thomas?” the woman continued. “After so many years, I wouldn’t know unless you told me. Nor would you know me.”

  “Carolyn?” Father seemed to doubt his senses.

  “Do you remember teaching me how to read?” she asked. “Do you remember the Chatterton poems you made me recite to distract me from the rats?”

  Father did something that was unusual for him of late. He laughed. Then he reached between the bars and clasped her gloved hands.

  “‘When a strong tempest rising from the main / Dash’d the full clouds, unbroken on the plain,’” she quoted. “‘Nicou, immortal in the sacred song, / Held the red sword of war, and led the strong.’”

  Father laughed again and continued the recitation. “‘From his own tribe the sable warriors came, / Well tried in battle and well known in fame.’”

  “Chatterton. Wondrous Chatterton,” Carolyn said. “Night after night, you recited him until I knew his verses as well as you did. And in my mind, Chatterton’s red sword of war chased the rats. ‘Well known in fame,’” Carolyn quoted again. “I read every essay and book you published, Thomas. You achieved your goal. You became famous.”

  Father lowered his head. “Many would use the word infamous.”

  Carolyn turned her attention to where I stood behind Father. She never once looked askance at my bloomer dress, as so many people do when they first see me. Instead, she focused solely on my face. “Thomas, your manners have failed you.”

  “Oh.” Father suddenly realized that I was with him. “Emily, this is a friend from long ago, Miss Carolyn Brunell, although I gather that you’re now Mrs. Edward Richmond. Is that true, Carolyn?”

  She smiled and nodded.

  Father continued, “And this is my daughter Emily.”

  “Your daughter?” Carolyn asked with wonder. “I have a daughter also.” She studied my face more intently. “Thomas, she has your blue eyes!” She reached between the bars to shake my hand. “I’m truly delighted, Emily.”

  “And I as well. It’s seldom that I meet one of Father’s friends without already knowing about them.”

  “But Emily, you do know about Carolyn,” Father said. “You’ve read about
her.”

  “I have?”

  “I didn’t mention her by name, but in my Confessions, Carolyn was the ten-year-old girl with whom I shared the abandoned house in Greek Street when I was a beggar in London.”

  “Of course!” I exclaimed. “There was something about the reference to rats that tugged at my memory. You and Father slept beneath a horseman’s cloak.”

  “If I hadn’t been so young, I might blush,” Carolyn told me, “but as Thomas says, I was only ten, and it seemed perfectly modest to sleep with him.” Carolyn pointed toward the bars. “Thomas, is it possible to speak without this barrier between us?”

  “Barrier?” Father was so entranced that only now did he seem to become aware of the bars. We stood at the gate through which carriages departed from Lord Palmerston’s driveway. He turned to the porter. “My good man…”

  After the porter opened the gate and we stepped through it, Father clasped her hands again, peering happily up at her. “It seems that you have grown while I remained the same size. What else have you been doing all these years, Carolyn? How in creation did you know where to find me?”

  “It came as quite a surprise to discover that you lived just around the corner from me,” Carolyn said.

  “Around the corner from you? I don’t understand.”

  She pointed to the left, toward Hyde Park. “Park Lane.”

  Father and I must have looked stunned by the significant address.

  “Yes, Thomas, I’ve come up in the world. No more sleeping beneath a horseman’s cloak, listening to rats in a deserted house.”

  “You married well?” Father asked.

  “Very. And as to how I learned that you were here, one of my acquaintances—your host, in fact—told me.”

  “Lord Palmerston?”

  “As I said, I had the good fortune to come up in the world.”

  Shouting from nearby attracted our attention. A newsboy held up a paper, yelling, “First murder on a train!” People crowded around him, buying copies as quickly as he could sell them. “Respected solicitor brutally killed! Murderer escapes!”

  Carolyn listened somberly to the newsboy’s cries.

  Seeming to imagine the fearful scene, she turned to us and said, “I read that you were in the compartment next to the struggle. Thank God neither of you was hurt. Thomas, could you use a distraction?” She clutched her windblown cape. “Let’s go somewhere that’s warm. After a half a century without seeing each other, let’s celebrate.”

  To my delight, Carolyn took us to the newly opened chophouse in Soho where Father and I and Sean and Joseph had hoped to enjoy ourselves two nights earlier.

  “Everyone tells me that the food here is excellent. Look at the colored glass in those lamps!” Carolyn marveled, pointing with childlike wonder.

  No one seemed to notice my unfashionable clothes or how short Father was. The diners were too busy discussing the murder on the train.

  “Bad enough that we need to worry about collisions and derailments,” a man complained. “Now we have to dread passengers too.”

  “Someone told me that the trains had a lot fewer passengers this morning,” his companion lamented. “It’s a good thing the stock market isn’t open on weekends or the price of my railway shares would have plunged even lower.”

  As with the newsboy’s cries, this conversation made Carolyn look troubled. When she returned her attention to us, she needed a moment before she was cheerful again.

  “Tea for everyone,” she informed our waiter. “Would you like something substantial, Thomas?”

  “Something sweet.”

  “Bring us a variety of confections,” Carolyn told the waiter. “And you, Emily?”

  “Well, since this is a chophouse”—I did my best to sound casual—“I can hardly go away without having a chop, can I?”

  Lord Palmerston’s grudging hospitality was uncertain from day to day. I’d learned to eat when the opportunity presented itself, especially if the nourishment was free.

  “Yes, a chop, and greens, and boiled potatoes, and cabbage,” I said offhandedly. “Oh, and why not bring some cheese and bread and butter?”

  “Indeed,” the waiter said, his expression leaving no doubt that he heard my stomach rumbling.

  Father’s brow glistened with sweat. He clutched his hands to steady them.

  “Thomas, if you feel the need for laudanum, please don’t hesitate on my account,” Carolyn said. “You look as if you’re coming down with typhus. But I suspect the malady is of another type.”

  “You won’t mind?” Father asked.

  “It won’t be the first time I’ve seen someone drink laudanum,” Carolyn replied.

  The waiter brought tea and bread and biscuits. After I poured for Father, he discreetly removed the bottle from his frock coat and added some of the ruby liquid to the steaming cup.

  His right hand trembled when he raised the cup to his lips. He blew on the steam, then took a deep swallow. He waited and drank again. The film on his brow seemed to be absorbed back into his skin.

  “Thomas, if you’ll forgive this question from an old friend, how much laudanum do you drink?” Carolyn asked.

  “Too much.”

  “Are you imitating Chatterton?”

  Father didn’t answer.

  Carolyn looked at me. “As you know from your father’s Confessions, in his youth he attended a school where the headmaster mistreated him. Thomas begged his mother to send him somewhere else, but she refused to believe his accusations. Finally he ran away to London.”

  I nodded.

  “What your father didn’t write in the book is that one reason he chose London was his fascination with the poet Thomas Chatterton, who came to London when he too was seventeen. That Thomas shared a first name with Chatterton wasn’t lost on him. In fact, Thomas wanted to be as famous as Chatterton.”

  Uneasy, I recalled the sad legend of the boy poet. Raised in poverty by his mother and sister, Chatterton had admired stories about knights in the Middle Ages. Exploring a neighborhood church, he discovered old parchments from the 1400s and fantasized about those earlier times until he wrote poetry that sounded as if it had been written back then. Attributing the poems to Thomas Rowley, a name he’d seen on one of the parchments, Chatterton convinced wealthy patrons that the Rowley poems were hundreds of years old. At the age of seventeen, he set out for London to earn fame and fortune. A mere four months later, the city had so crushed him that he poisoned himself. Almost all the great poets of a later generation—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley—idealized him as an undiscovered genius who’d suffered and died for his art.

  “Thomas, do you remember the type of poison that Chatterton used?” Carolyn asked.

  “Arsenic.”

  The reference to the poison made me hesitate before biting into a piece of buttered bread.

  “Do you also remember the liquid that he swallowed before he used the arsenic?” Carolyn asked.

  Father didn’t reply.

  “It was laudanum,” she said. “A half a century ago, following Chatterton’s path, you nearly succumbed to London’s cruelty. But you escaped. And you can escape again.”

  “Would that it were so,” Father replied.

  “Eat a biscuit, Thomas.”

  Father did, and in fact another biscuit after that. He was so delighted to be with Carolyn that his gloom about the laudanum lasted only a moment. I began to see that, in Carolyn, I had an ally.

  “Thomas, would you be interested in going to Greek Street?”

  “Greek Street?” Father asked in surprise.

  “I haven’t seen that wretched house since I was a child, but memories of it never stopped haunting me,” Carolyn said. “Perhaps if I went back there with you, I could banish them. You appear doubtful. Do you truly believe, as I read in one of your books, that there’s no such thing as forgetting?”

  “Like the stars, our memories disappear during the day but come back in the darkness.” Father looked down
at the laudanum bottle he clutched in his lap. “The house won’t help you anyhow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s nothing left of the place. An explosion destroyed it.”

  “Take me there,” Carolyn said.

  Greek Street was in Soho, sufficiently near the chophouse that, in spite of the cold wind, we walked. Learning from Carolyn that she’d been in Italy in December, Father explained about the murders at that time and the killer’s obsession with the house that Father had described in his Confessions.

  Even from a distance, the location was obvious. What had once been number 38 was nothing more than a huge gap in the row of buildings. In the three months since the explosion, the bricks and other debris had been removed, revealing open sky and a courtyard at the back, but the scorch marks on the adjacent buildings indicated the violence of the blast and the resulting fire. A wooden barrier prevented passersby from falling to the bottom level.

  “If the owners of the other properties hadn’t paid their monthly fees to the fire brigade, the entire street might have been consumed,” Father said. “Emily, when I first came here as a youth, I had to knock several times before a nervous-looking man finally looked out at me from behind a curtain, and he wouldn’t allow me to enter until he’d peered up and down the street. I’d been told that he might take pity on me and allow me to sleep there. That turned out to be the case. His name was Brunell. Carolyn, you wrote that name on the card you sent to me. I always assumed he was your father.”

  “If he was, he never admitted it. Once when I did call him Father, he became very angry.” Carolyn raised a gloved hand to her right cheek, seeming to feel the effect of a slap.

  “Brunell was a lawyer who worked for moneylenders,” Father explained to me. “He sometimes used the alias Brown. He came to the house only every few days, to sort through legal documents in a room in the back. He was afraid of someone and gave the impression that he never slept in the same place two nights in a row.”