Inspector of the Dead Read online

  “Frequently. The privations that our soldiers endure, the terror that grips them as they wait for yet another battle—these sometimes cause even the bravest of men to be paralyzed. But I never expected it from Colonel Trask. The other men considered him an example of what they ought to be.”

  Dr. Snow removed his stethoscope from the colonel’s chest. “His heart continues to race.”

  “Perhaps laudanum will help,” De Quincey offered.

  “No, Father,” Emily said.

  “I agree with your daughter. Combined with the chloroform, laudanum might kill him. Keep someone with him at all times,” Dr. Snow advised. “I’ll return in the morning.”

  “Mr. Russell, your familiar face might be the reassurance that he needs. Until he wakens, would you kindly wait with me in the next room?” De Quincey asked.

  “For a man such as the colonel, I can’t refuse.”

  “And Joseph,” Emily asked, “would you please stay so that I might ask you something?”

  Becker looked surprised, both by the request and by Emily’s use of his given name, which attracted the notice of everyone except Emily’s father.

  “Of course,” he answered, uneasy.

  “The screams come from this way!” Ryan yelled.

  Accompanied by the wavering lights of numerous police lanterns, he hurried through the fog-shrouded maze of the Seven Dials rookery.

  Sir Walter’s screams became more desperate.

  Ryan charged along a lane that was so narrow it scraped his shoulders. A drooping overhang forced him to lower his head. He squirmed over timbers that propped up listing walls, the entire district in danger of collapsing.

  The screams stopped.

  A nearby voice startled Ryan. “Never saw so many bobbies come in here in me life.”

  “But how many’ll get out?” another voice wondered in the darkness. “This one over here looks like the peeler who arrested me last year.”

  “Warm-lookin’ coat he has.”

  Ryan heard a faint scuffle.

  “Here!” a constable shouted, pointing.

  Ryan charged down steps and kicked at a door, the wood so decayed that it crumbled off its hinges. In shadows, what looked like dogs raged over a struggling figure.

  But they weren’t dogs.

  Ryan waded into the chaos. As constables struck with their truncheons, he pulled away a ragged man, then another, a frantic boy, a snarling woman.

  Police lanterns revealed Sir Walter trembling at the bottom of the pile. His boots, frock coat, and waistcoat were gone. His face had claw marks.

  “There’s more coming all the time!” a constable warned from the doorway. “This lane will get us out! But you’d better hurry!”

  Sir Walter whimpered when Ryan reached for him, seeming to fear that Ryan was another attacker. His walking stick lay on the dirt floor, blood on its knob showing that he’d tried to defend himself.

  “Stop Sir Walter! He tried to kill me with his walking stick!” the man at the top of the staircase had shouted.

  What else might he have done with it? Ryan wondered.

  He grabbed it and dragged Sir Walter from the building. He flinched when a rock struck a wall next to his head.

  Something rumbled.

  “They yanked away a timber support!” a constable shouted. “The wall collapsed! The lane’s blocked!”

  “Climb over!” Ryan ordered.

  A rock hit his shoulder, but the pain of it didn’t worry him as much as a different pain. The effort of chasing Sir Walter had strained the scar on his abdomen. He struggled over the collapsed wall, the frenzy of police lanterns guiding him.

  “Faster!” Ryan yelled to Sir Walter, who shivered uncontrollably.

  More rocks hurtled toward them.

  “You can push us around outside, but in here, we do the pushin’!” another voice jeered. “This is our world!”

  “Give us a shillin’!”

  “Give us a pound!”

  “Give us ever’thin’ you have!”

  Pulling Sir Walter with his left hand, Ryan used his other hand to keep a tight grip on the walking stick, although what he really wanted to do was press his fingers over the strain in his stomach.

  With a startling bang, a board landed next to Ryan, so close that he felt a rush of air. The pursuers had climbed to the roofs and were hurling down whatever they could find. Bricks, roof tiles, and even dead rats cascaded into the alley.

  Ryan saw the deeper shadows of a recessed doorway. Despite his throbbing abdomen, he raised a boot and kicked at the barrier, hearing a satisfying pop as the door’s latch disintegrated.

  “This way!” he yelled, pulling Sir Walter through the opening.

  Constables followed, their lanterns revealing a cluster of faces so accustomed to permanent darkness that the lights agonized them, making them raise their arms to shield their eyes.

  Ryan tugged Sir Walter along a cluttered hallway, managed to avoid a gaping hole, crashed against another door, and burst into a farther alley.

  Amid cascading debris, the passage widened. As a rock struck Ryan’s back, he hurried through an archway and entered a street, the rocks, bricks, and roof tiles now clattering behind him.

  Sir Walter slumped against a wall. Ryan slumped next to him, holding Sir Walter’s walking stick.

  Constables struggled to catch their breath.

  “Inspector, the front of your coat has blood on it,” one of them said.

  As De Quincey, Russell, and the porter left the bedroom, Emily adjusted the blanket over Colonel Trask. She dimmed the lamp and sat in a chair. Despite the reduced light, her blue eyes were intense.

  Becker stayed in the room as Emily had requested. Self-conscious, he sat opposite her.

  “Joseph, what I wish to ask you about is Newgate,” she said.

  “An unhappy subject.”

  “Indeed. After you searched Newgate’s records, you reported to Sean, Commissioner Mayne, and my father about what you found. You told them why the boy’s thirteen-year-old sister smothered her younger sister and her ill mother and then hanged herself. The expression on your face made clear that the motive was disturbing. Please tell me what you told the others.”

  Becker glanced down at his hands.

  “I proved that I’m steady,” Emily said. “Please don’t isolate me.”

  Becker looked away.

  “I wasn’t aware that we had secrets,” Emily said.

  “It’s better if you don’t know. This isn’t something for men and women to discuss.”

  “Joseph, do you wish to be my friend?”

  “I am your friend,” Becker said.

  “Not if you treat me as something less.”

  “I think of you as something more. I’m a policeman so that others can have a pure life, even if mine is in the gutter.”

  “But I have the right to choose to be told,” Emily said. “Why did the thirteen-year-old sister do these things, Joseph?”

  “Don’t make me answer you.”

  “For the sake of our friendship you must.”

  Becker took a long moment to respond. “Do you insist that the difference between men and women is not as great as society maintains?”

  “Yes.”

  “You insist on never being sheltered?”

  “Yes.”

  Becker breathed deeply. “Then in friendship, I shall tell you. Death in Newgate is common, but these three deaths were so unusual that they prompted an investigation.”

  “What did the investigation reveal?”

  “A sergeant and one of the Newgate guards…” Becker chose his words carefully. “…took advantage of female children who lived with their parents in the prison.”

  “Oh.” Emily’s voice sounded hollow.

  “The mother was too deathly ill to defend her daughters. The older daughter fell into such shame and despair that she…”

  Emily didn’t speak for a long moment. “Were the sergeant and the prison guard punished?”
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  “Yes, they were sentenced to the hulks.”

  Becker referred to decommissioned navy ships that served as prisons along the Thames, their congestion and filth so intense that cholera and typhus were constant threats.

  “Until the horror that I saw at the Grantwood house tonight,” Emily said, “I never wished to have the physical strength and coarseness of a man. But now, if I could personally punish the man responsible for those murders, if I could have caused pain to the sergeant and that prison guard, I…”

  “That is why men wish to raise women above them. I’d hoped to shield you from these emotions. I’m sorry, Emily.”

  She stood and walked over to Colonel Trask, who murmured in his chloroform sleep. She rested a palm on his forehead. “He isn’t feverish.”

  She returned to the chair. “Joseph, I have something else to ask you.”

  “It can’t be more uncomfortable than the last question.”

  “Why were you surprised when I said that I considered becoming a nurse?”

  “I was wrong,” Becker said. “This is a different way of feeling uncomfortable.”

  Emily waited for an answer.

  “I suppose I…It’s so new an idea…I…May I ask you a question?”

  “There are no barriers between us,” Emily said.

  “Have you not considered perhaps…”

  “Joseph, please say what you’re thinking.”

  “…accepting a husband?” Becker spoke as if the subject had weighed on him for a long time.

  Emily blushed. “Now I am surprised.”

  But in a way, she wasn’t. For several weeks, she’d had the sense that this conversation was inevitable. Late at night, after descending to the ballroom of Lord Palmerston’s mansion and compelling her restless father to go to bed, she had lain in her own bed and wondered what she would say if either of her cherished new friends—or even both—asked that question.

  “Accept a husband? With Father as my responsibility, how can I assume another?”

  “Being a nurse wouldn’t be a responsibility?” Becker asked.

  “It wouldn’t require me to give up my independence.” Emily suddenly realized how important that was to her.

  “But marriage wouldn’t need to take away your independence,” Becker assured her.

  No, this was certainly not how she’d imagined that a proposal would occur.

  “Joseph, you know very well that in marriage, a wife surrenders everything. She no longer has control over her choices or even over the children she bears. She becomes her husband’s property.”

  “That’s the law,” Becker acknowledged. “But a marriage doesn’t need to follow the law. With the proper kind of husband, a wife could have all the independence that she desires.”

  “Including the choice of being both a wife and having a profession?” Emily asked.

  “Again, with the right kind of husband.”

  “What you are saying is far beyond anything that I imagined a man would ever think,” Emily said.

  Now it was Becker who blushed.

  “Joseph, there’s something I need to tell you. Because you were honest with me about Newgate, I shall be honest with you about myself. I said earlier that I wasn’t aware that we kept secrets from each other. In fact, I do keep a secret. It’s something that anyone who feels close to me must eventually find out.”

  “I don’t wish to pry,” Becker said, puzzled.

  “All my life, because of Father, I have fled debt collectors. Seven weeks ago, I told you how my mother and I and my brothers and sisters lived apart from Father because bailiffs constantly watched us. I sneaked out back windows, squirmed through holes in walls, and climbed fences. I reached whatever building in which Father hid, bringing him food, ink, and paper. He gave me manuscripts to take to his publishers, who were also being watched by our creditors. Again, I sneaked through holes and over fences. I brought back money, a small portion of which Father kept, and took the remainder home to mother.

  “In Scotland, for a time Father took refuge in a compound that was like the sanctuary of churches in the Middle Ages. Debt collectors were forbidden to enter. On Sundays, the law permitted Father to leave the compound and visit us, as long as he returned there before sunset. But Father’s sense of time is different from everyone else’s, and each Sunday, as the sky darkened, he ran breathlessly from us, hurrying to return to his sanctuary while the debt collectors snapped at his heels. Once, when we lived near Edinburgh, he was forced to flee all the way across Scotland to Glasgow, where he took refuge in the observatory there. Often we fled cottages in the middle of the night because we didn’t have the money to pay the landlord.”

  Emily went over to Colonel Trask, felt his forehead, and returned to the chair. She felt an ache in her eyes and hoped that she wouldn’t weep.

  “Two of my brothers escaped, one moving to South America, the other to India. Of my two older sisters, one married as soon as she could and moved to Ireland. The other is engaged to a military officer and will soon live in India also. The responsibility for taking care of Father is mine. Indeed, that responsibility has been mine for a long while. Without my presence, I fear that his opium use will soon kill him. At night, as he leans over a lamp, writing to try to pay our bills, I tell him, ‘Father, you set fire to your hair again.’ Thanking me, he swats at the embers in his hair and continues writing.

  “It’s not as if he hasn’t tried repeatedly to banish opium from his life. I’ve been with him on several occasions when he managed to reduce his intake from one thousand drops of laudanum to one hundred and thirty and then eighty and sixty and then none at all. For a day and a week and sometimes several weeks, he functioned without opium, and then suddenly he wailed, claiming that rats gnawed at his stomach and his brain. The torture that afflicted him was unbearable to witness. In the end, the anguish was too much for him, and he relapsed. People say that he is weak for not mustering the strength to overcome a habit. But I believe that it’s more than a habit. I wonder if someday we might learn that it’s possible for a drug to control someone’s mind and body so completely that only death seems to offer a release from its domination.

  “I can’t walk away from anyone who endures that much anguish, Joseph. Yes, a caring husband would allow his wife to bring her father into his home, but as long as Father lived, he would be more important to me than my husband. I devote myself to Father not merely from duty, not merely because I love him with as full a heart as a daughter should have—but also because, heaven help me, despite his faults Father is truly the most fascinating man I have ever met. The remarkable thoughts he puts on paper, the incomparable words that he uses to express them—do those thoughts and words come from opium or does opium hinder them? Would they be even more brilliant without the drug? I don’t know. But I do know this.”

  Emily looked plaintively at Becker.

  “I’m exhausted. The day on which, to my everlasting grief, Father shall leave me forever, I cannot imagine suddenly binding myself to yet another person. Do I truly want to go to nursing school? I have no idea. I’ve devoted myself to Father for so long that I haven’t the faintest notion of what freedom is or of what I wish to do afterward. This much I can tell you. Father has so influenced me with his unique ideas that few men would tolerate my own unique ideas.”

  “I not only tolerate your ideas—I admire them,” Becker said.

  Emily thought a moment. “I believe you do.”

  In the adjacent office, Becker heard the murmur of De Quincey speaking to Russell.

  “As you note, you have a responsibility to your father, but sadly he will not always be with you. Perhaps one day, if I earn more as a detective and save much of what I earn, we can again have this conversation. Meanwhile”—Becker smiled—“if you choose to become a nurse, I’m confident that your service to others will be fulfilling.”

  Colonel Trask murmured in his sleep.

  “Our voices disturb him,” Emily said.

  “I�
�d better go out and join your father,” Becker told her.

  “Thank you for being my friend, Joseph.”

  Emily kissed him.

  In Colonel Trask’s office, William Russell drank from a brandy flask and continued to tell De Quincey about the war.

  “After the Battle of Inkerman, military commanders discovered that I was a reporter for The Times. They ordered their officers to stay away from me. Lord Raglan himself refused to allow me to use the military telegraph and also refused to allow military ships to take my dispatches to the civilian telegraph lines on the Turkish mainland. That’s how I met Colonel Trask. One night he found me in a tent, where I was drinking brandy with some officers who despised Lord Raglan sufficiently to disobey him and speak to me. After I acquired the information I needed, the colonel discreetly led me away and indicated that he had heard about my difficulties in sending reports. He offered his own vessel to transfer my dispatches to the Turkish telegraph.”

  “His own vessel?” De Quincey asked.

  “With his vast resources, the colonel sent it back and forth, repeatedly delivering my dispatches, then returning with the food, clothing, and tents that our soldiers desperately needed.”

  “A hero in many ways,” De Quincey said.

  “We met privately at numerous times. He told me about the accumulating Russian victories. He informed me about the increased incompetence of our English officers. Thanks to him, I learned that Lord Raglan still thinks he’s fighting the Napoleonic Wars. He can’t remember that the French are now our allies and keeps calling them the enemy.”

  “Your descriptions of the colonel’s exploits were so detailed that you must have observed him in combat,” De Quincey said.

  “Many times. He expended all his ammunition and that of dead soldiers around him. He charged up a blood-drenched slope, with only the bayonet on his musket as a weapon. Other soldiers, spurred by his example, joined him, relentlessly fighting continuous onslaughts of the enemy, overcoming one after the other, winning the day for England. On another occasion, I saw him lead a desperate charge through mist and smoke, saving the queen’s cousin when his unit was nearly overrun by the Russians. The fighting became so primitive that I saw the colonel hurling rocks at the enemy. In close combat, he kicked and even bit.”