Murder as a Fine Art Read online

  We hired a cab and went to all the landmarks that had been constructed in the decades since he was away: Buckingham Palace, Belgrade Square, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, and the new Houses of Parliament.

  But we never stepped out of the cab, and we never lingered. Even though Father was seated, his feet moved as if he were nervously walking. I had the impression that he selected our destinations at random. Eventually I realized that all the places we had seen had been a postponement, that we were finally proceeding toward what Father needed to see and yet did not want to.

  The cab let us off at Marble Arch, which Father told me is an imitation of the Arch of Constantine in Rome. It apparently was originally white but now is gray from the city’s perpetual soot. As a carriage went through the large central opening, we entered a small pedestrian arch on the left. From a room, a policeman nodded to us.

  “This, too, didn’t exist,” Father said.

  Behind us was the expanse of Hyde Park. Church services having ended, carriages came and went. Families with warm coats strolled among the trees. But Father’s attention was directed ahead of us toward Oxford Street.

  “This street was a colder, harsher place back then,” he recalled, leading me along it.

  Shops and businesses filled each side. The commercial heart of the city, closed for Sunday, seemed unnaturally silent.

  “When I was seventeen and lived on the streets,” Father said.

  He directed a long look toward steps in front of a shop.

  “For five months, most of them in the winter.”

  He studied a bakery, as if seeing it from long ago.

  “It was mostly here. On Oxford Street. Look at that bakery. When I was starving, how I dreamed about bakeries. Did I ever tell you about the skeleton?”

  Coming from Father, the morbid question didn’t seem unusual. “Skeleton?”

  “At the Manchester Grammar School that I attended. A surgeon associated with it had a skeleton hanging in his room. The story was that it came from a notorious highwayman. In those days, before the railroads, highwaymen posed a constant menace. This one had been hanged, and the surgeon had paid the executioner to give him the body since executions were one of the few legal ways for medical students to acquire a corpse for dissection. But it turned out that in the haste with which the executioner cut the body from the scaffold, the highwayman hadn’t quite expired. So the surgeon and his medical students slipped a scalpel into him, made sure that the highwayman had drawn his last breath, and then dissected him. Eventually what was left of the corpse was boiled in lye until only the skeleton remained.”

  Father’s disturbing comments didn’t surprise me, although I was grateful that no passerby was close enough to hear.

  “The way I felt about that wretched skeleton was the way I felt about the school,” Father continued. “The man who taught me Latin and Greek resented how quickly those subjects came to me compared to the difficulty with which he had learned them. His resentment eventually turned to anger and then to physical cruelty. In the end, I begged my guardians to release me from the horrors of that school.”

  Father’s own father, a traveling merchant whom he almost never saw, had died from consumption when Father was seven. The will stipulated that four guardians would manage Father’s life, but they fulfilled their duties so poorly that his education was infrequent and incompetent.

  “One guardian in particular refused. He wanted absolute obedience from me, the same as the teacher did, and this I would not give. So I ran away. I couldn’t go to my mother. She would merely have turned me over to the guardians. So I borrowed a little money from a family friend who sympathized with my desperation. For a time, I stayed at various farms in Wales, but eventually, as my meager funds lessened, I tried my luck here in London. It nearly killed me.”

  The breeze no longer chased the fog. A haze developed, limiting visibility to only a block. The cold deepened, making me grateful that I wore a warm coat.

  Father walked onward, gazing at the stoops and shuttered windows of various shops, seeming to know them extremely well.

  “My few coins meant that I could eat only once a day—tea with bread and butter. Soon I didn’t have money even for that. I begged, but the city has a great many beggars. If not for a man with a house nearby on Greek Street, I don’t know which would have killed me first: the elements or starvation. The man was associated with money lending and shadier elements of the legal profession. His name was Brunell, but he also called himself Brown. He kept on the move to prevent his enemies from catching him. Every night, he slept in a different part of London. In the morning, he went to the house I mentioned, and in the afternoon, he went somewhere else. The house was unoccupied so much that it was at risk of being vandalized, so when I came to him in an effort to borrow money, something about me made him offer a bargain. He allowed me to find shelter there at night in exchange for causing considerable noise if someone tried to break in.

  “The house was shabby. Except for the room in which he kept his papers, there wasn’t a stick of furniture. At night, without candles, it was frightfully dark. I tried to sleep on the bare floor, shivering while I listened to the rats. Their numerous claws scratched across the floors. My illness and hunger, not to mention my festering dreams, allowed me only a kind of dog’s sleep in which I could hear myself moaning. My nerves set my muscles to twitching and my legs kicking, constantly waking me.

  “Fortunately Brunell or Brown or whatever his real name was enjoyed talking about Greek and Latin literature. Each morning, when he came to the house with pastries for his breakfast, he allowed me to eat crumbs while we discussed the Odyssey or the Aeneid. Otherwise, my only food consisted of scraps I begged during daylight from indifferent people on the busy streets. I would have perished if not for a girl who took pity on me, even though she herself deserved all the pity in the world.

  “Her name was Ann.”

  The name came unexpectedly, as if a bell had rung at an unanticipated moment. The cold deepened. I gripped my coat closer around me and was grateful when Father resumed walking along Oxford Street. The fog crept nearer. Visibility was now only three-quarters of a block.

  “Ann was sixteen years old,” Father said. “She was what might be called a peripatetic woman.”

  “You have never shielded me,” I replied. “Say what you mean.”

  Father nonetheless hesitated. “A streetwalker. Ann’s poverty had been imposed upon her because of a legal disagreement regarding money that she inherited from her parents. But others found ways to intercept the bequest, and Ann never received the money. Throughout those winter months, she suffered from a cough, but she treated me as if I were more sickly. I often walked with her on Oxford Street or rested with her under the shelter of porticoes. She defended me against watchmen who attempted to drive me off steps where I tried to rest and regain my strength.”

  Father’s eyes again assumed that far-away look. He stopped and pointed down at where we stood.

  “Our only amusement was to wait for the organ grinder to wheel his instrument onto this corner. The player always pretended that the organ weighed three times more than it actually did. When he turned the crank, he strained his face and breathed with difficulty, making it seem that turning the crank was the hardest job in the world. Ann and I held hands while we listened to the music. People sometimes dropped coins in a cup attached to the organ, and from the way the player expressed his thanks, you’d have thought he’d been given a fortune instead of the smallest coins anyone could spare. For us, those meager coins would indeed have been a fortune. But without food, at least we had music, and I never fail to hear an organ that doesn’t remind me of those evenings, standing near the old oil lamp that used to be here, putting my arm around Ann.”

  Father drew a breath, forcing himself to continue. “One evening when I felt more than usually faint, I asked Ann to take me onto a side street. There, as we sat on the steps of a house, I suddenly grew worse. I’d been leaning
my head against her breast. At once I slipped from her arms and fell. Ann cried out in alarm and ran toward Oxford Street. In less time than I could imagine, she returned with a glass of seasoned wine. It was exactly the right thing to bring. My empty stomach could not have tolerated food. The stimulant gave me enough energy that I was able to sit up. Ann had no reason to expect that I would ever reimburse her, and yet she bought that wine when she barely had enough money to sustain her own needs.

  “How often I think of the speed with which Fortune’s wheel can turn. A few days after Ann brought me the wine, I was begging on Albemarle Street. A gentleman who knew my family happened to walk past and recognized me. At first, he thought he’d made a mistake, so shocked was he by my condition. I answered his many questions, explaining that if he told my mother, she would alert my guardians and they would force me back to that wretched school from which I would again escape. He heard the strain in my voice and promised not to betray my confidence. The next day he presented me with a ten-pound bank note, a sum that I could not imagine.

  “When the man in whose house I took shelter at night learned about my ten pounds, he demanded three of them. I asked him to let Ann stay there also, but he warned that he’d throw me out if I brought a streetwalker inside. I used some of the remaining money—five shillings—to buy food for Ann and me. I spent fifteen shillings (I recall how it pained me to count it out) on clothes that would help me implement a plan that my benefactor had suggested. At the Manchester school, I’d made friends with a boy whose wealthy father admired students with a talent for Latin and Greek.

  “I determined to go to my friend, who was now at Eton, and persuade him to take me to his father, in the hopes of receiving help. With that in mind, I gave Ann two pounds, not only for food but for medicines to treat her cough. At six o’clock on a dark winter evening, she and I walked hand in hand toward Piccadilly. It was my intention to catch the mail coach for Eton.

  “We went through a part of London that no longer exists. I promised her that she would share in any good fortune I met, that I would never forsake her. I told her I loved her, that as much as I didn’t wish to leave her I was filled with hope for our future. Ann, however, was overcome with sorrow. When I said good-bye and kissed her, she put her arms around my neck and wept.

  “I expected to return in a week. The plan had been, in eight nights, at six o’clock, Ann would wait for me near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street, our customary rendezvous. But my efforts at Eton turned out to be so frustrating and time-consuming that it was many months before I was able to return to London.

  “At six o’clock, I rushed to the bottom of Great Titchfield Street. I waited and waited. Ann did not arrive. The next night, I waited. Ann still did not arrive. The next night and the night after were the same. During the day, I went to Ann’s meager lodgings, but none of the streetwalkers who lived there had seen her. Somebody said that the landlord had treated her so badly that she’d been forced to go elsewhere. When I went to other lodgings where streetwalkers stayed, this new group didn’t know me. They considered my recently purchased clothes and decided that I was a gentleman in search of a companion. They offered themselves in Ann’s place. Others suspected that I might have something to do with the law or that I was searching for someone who had robbed me. They wouldn’t talk to me.

  “Day and night, I searched Oxford Street. I spread my search to all the neighboring streets. I waited at our favorite spot near the organ grinder. But with no success. After so many months, Ann had perhaps despaired of my promises and would never return to our rendezvous. Perhaps I passed within a few feet of her but never knew it in the crowded labyrinth of the streets where a few feet can be the equivalent of miles. Or perhaps, in my absence, Ann had succumbed to her dreadful cough. Although I grieved deeply at that possibility, I took comfort in knowing that if Ann had indeed been taken to her grave, at least she would no longer be a victim.

  “In the end, my quest to improve my prospects required me to board another mail coach. Over the years, whenever I returned to London, I never failed to go to Great Titchfield Street at six o’clock. Ann was never there. I always looked for her on whatever other street I happened to be, but she was never there, either.”

  Father’s voice echoed in the fog, the yellow of which had now thickened enough that I could see only five shops away from me.

  “I need to ask you something,” Father said.

  “When haven’t we been able to discuss any topic? What do you need to ask?” I wondered.

  Father continued with difficulty. “Does it trouble you that, at one time, the closest person to me in the world was a streetwalker?”

  I considered my answer. “If it is a choice between remaining alive and surrendering one’s virtue, I can understand the path that Ann was forced to take.”

  “Does it trouble you that I speak about Ann as if she could have been your mother?”

  “All of this happened fifty-two years ago. Mother has been dead for fifteen of those years. It is no dishonor to Mother that you cared for a woman long before you and she were married. What are you leading to?”

  “Leading to?”

  “For a month, you’ve been hiding something. Is Ann the reason you agreed to come to London?”

  Father looked away.

  I didn’t relent. “Initially you were strong in your refusal to come here to promote your writings. Your laudanum and your reluctance to relate to strangers were a sufficient explanation. But then one day you abruptly changed your mind, reduced your laudanum intake, and said that it was essential for you to journey here.”

  “Yes. After the message I received in the mail.”

  “Message?”

  The fog was now four shops away.

  “You wondered how we came to have the benefit of the fine house where we’re staying,” Father told me.

  “Yes, and you answered that you didn’t know.”

  “That is true. I didn’t—and still don’t. The offer was part of the same message. The person who sent the letter didn’t sign it. But the documents for the rental of the house and the hire of Mrs. Warden turned out to be authentic. I didn’t tell you the rest of it because I couldn’t bring myself to relive the darkness of those days. I make a habit of saying that no one can ever truly forget, but in fact, I deluded myself into trying to do just that—to forget.”

  “You said you didn’t tell me the rest of it. Father, what do you mean?”

  He drew a breath, then revealed what he’d been holding inside. “The message I received told me that if I came to London, I would learn what happened to Ann.”

  The statement was so surprising that for a moment I couldn’t speak. I stepped closer. “Learn what happened to Ann? Have you? We’ve been in London four days. Has the person contacted you?”

  “No. It remains as large a mystery as the day I received the letter. I thought perhaps that as I traveled throughout the city, speaking to booksellers and newspaper writers, someone would approach me in the crowd and suggest that we have a private word.”

  “Why would someone go to the expense of leasing a house for us but not bother to contact you about his reasons for bringing you here?”

  “I have no idea. Those days were the worst of my life. And the best. Because of Ann. If things had been different, she might have been your mother.”

  “And it was that difficult for you to tell me?”

  “Perhaps we have not in fact been able to talk about every topic,” Father replied.

  “That will change.”

  “Yes,” Father granted.

  The fog swirled, its chill deepening. I held my coat tighter.

  “Let’s return to the house,” Father decided.

  “In this fog, how can we possibly find it?”

  “The one street in the world I know without fail is Oxford Street. Don’t worry, Emily. We shall make our way home.”

  As a carriage clattered past us, Father led me onward through the fog.

  We
were on the left side of the street. When we came to a major intersecting street, Father said, “If I’m right, this should be Tottenham Court Road. There. See the sign on the wall. Yes, Tottenham Court Road. We’ll go this way. In my youth, I would stand here and imagine walking all the way to where the buildings ended and the trees of the countryside began.”

  Unable to see anything around us, we continued along Tottenham Court Road and then took a side street and another. Father’s earlier reference to the labyrinths of London seemed apt. He had said, “Don’t worry.” In truth, I never worry, except about Father.

  We walked for what seemed to be a mile. Most women in their hooped skirts wouldn’t have been able to go even a couple of blocks. But my “bloomers,” as the newspapers disparagingly call them, give me freedom.

  We reached what Father said was Great Russell Street, and soon, on another street, he assured me, “We’re almost there.”