Читать книгу The Black Charade - John Burke - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

Our torments also may in length of time

Become our demons.

John Milton—Paradise Lost

It had to be tonight. The pain and fever had become too intense. Tonight he must go through and be cleansed and renewed, before it was too late.

She had promised. He could wait no longer.

He fought down a cough, clutching a handkerchief to his mouth. The attack bent him double. When he stood up, the crumpled whiteness came away red and foul.

It would be stopped. There would be an end to pain. She had promised.

His fingers trembled as he thrust the pin through his silk cravat. At the last minute she might tell him that the time was still not right. She would torment him, as she had tormented him before. There would be some reason, as there had been last time he implored her for speedy release, why it must be postponed. He could not be cheated again. He was ready for the ordeal. If the others were slow, they must wait their turn. For himself it had to be now.

He went to the nursery to say goodnight to the three girls. The low flame of the gas jet on the landing caught a glint from one sleepy eye; a tiny, pale hand lay open on the counterpane.

‘Goodnight, my loves.’

‘Goodnight, Papa.’

His wife came to join him in the doorway, looking uneasily at his face as he turned out of the room. When the door was softly closed, she said, in her tightest little voice: ‘Henry, you’re not thinking of going out this evening?’

‘I have an appointment.’

‘The fog is settling in. In your present condition it’s out of the question for you to leave the house.’

‘I must go. I shall be late.’

‘What would Dr. McLeod say?’

‘Dr. McLeod has said and done nothing to my advantage so far. I shall follow my own course of treatment.’

‘And what has that advantaged you?’ She reached up and turned the gas higher so that she might see him more clearly. ‘You should be in bed. Henry, this fog will...will....’

He knew she had been about to say that it would be the death of him. A commonplace exaggeration, but in this case too close to the truth. Death would come if he did not soon take the essential step to conquer both fog and fever.

‘I have an appointment,’ he said again.

‘They’ll not expect you in such weather.’

Explanations were useless. Of course he would be expected, whatever the weather. The meetings were governed not by the erratic miasmas of London’s smoke and runnels and sewers, but by signs and calculations far more ancient than the city itself.

He blundered his way past her and went downstairs to put on his overcoat, its heavy velvet collar scuffed and shining a faint olive hue. Even this simple movement clutched at his chest again. He gasped for breath, and another searing cough burned up from within.

‘Henry, I insist that you listen to reason.’

Later tonight, and tomorrow, and for all the years to come, she would see her mistake. There would be an end to her whining insistence; a return of the demureness and loving obedience she had shown in the early years of their marriage, before this fiendish thing began to consume his lungs. The pittance from her father and mother, which had kept them going during his illness, had at the same time done them all harm. It was time to set things to rights again. Renewed, he would take his rightful place as head of the household: renewed not in a feeble dream world beyond death, but here on earth.

When he opened the front door, writhing wisps of sour yellow fog curled about the antlers of the hallstand. Before his wife could protest again, a hansom turned the comer of the street and sped towards them. He was glad of the excuse to hurry out into the March chill, raising his cane and shouting—a shout which brought another spasm of coughing upon him.

Stepping into the cab and giving the address, he looked back once. Absurd to feel that this was the last glimpse he might ever have of his wife and home. Absurd, when the truth was just the opposite. After tonight nothing would be changed but himself.

‘Gibbet Wharf?’ said the cabby dubiously. ‘You sure you got the address right, guv’nor?’

‘The bridge above Gibbet Wharf, yes.’

‘Not much of a place to be strolling ’round after dark.’

‘I can take care of myself, thank you.’

The cabby twisted his neck to glance back. If he had any further doubts, he kept them to himself. With a light flick of the whip and a click of the tongue, they were away.

The trim suburban streets ran one into another for ten minutes and more, lit by smears of greenish light on lamp standards almost invisible in the murk. Then even that hazy illumination dimmed. Down some side streets and long terraces there was not the glimmer of a lamp. Occasionally a clear patch opened out, as if some strange ebb had sucked the fog back to the sides of an unsteady square. Once the cabby cursed and tugged his horse to one side to avoid loads of rubble where a new road was being driven through a warren of old houses and alleys. Sputtering oil lamps in a few windows showed that some folk were still clinging doggedly to rooms in buildings which were being eaten away behind them.

At one junction the glare of naphtha lights picked out the stalls of a street market. Voices drifted like the smell of fish and smoke and vinegar, then died. The cab left them behind and went on into yet darker streets. A fire smouldered beside a pile of scattered bricks, urchins dancing in its glow; then that, too, died.

Henry Garston sat well back, his shoulders jolting comfortably against the padded leather.

They jogged under a railway arch, where the tang of smoke and steam became part of the fog, slowed up a long incline, and stopped at last under the shadow of hunched houses and decrepit sheds.

‘Well, this is what you wanted, guv’nor. If you still want it, that is.’

The road humped over a bridge whose iron railing formed also the arch of a low tunnel. Here the dark water of a canal flowed into the open after half a mile underground, still dark until it picked up the reflections of crowded lights on the far side of a wasteland of bricks, splintered wood, and broken glass. Red breath of a main line engine pulsed above the long viaduct, the throb and roar of wheels increasing and then slackening as the train slowed towards a terminus beyond the crowded rooftops.

Five years ago there had been a plan to take a spur from that line across the canal and on through north London to new suburbs in the east. A sprawl of slums packed around cramped courtyards had been demolished, when the company ran into difficulties and, while waiting to acquire fresh capital, found that more prosperous developers had begun to build smart new estates across their path. The railway line was never completed. Now hills and avenues of tall, fashionable houses bordered a gutted, rusty wilderness.

Garston paid off the cabby, who grunted and drove away.

Lights beckoned across the canal. If he continued over the bridge and up that far slope, he knew how dramatically the streets would change. And he knew that there the little chapel was waiting, tucked away in the gloom, one of the few remnants of what had once been a village set well above and remote from London.

Would the others be waiting there for him, to celebrate his ordeal; or was this evening being offered to himself alone?

He did not cross the bridge, but went down the steps to the canal towpath. A dank smell insinuated itself from the tunnel into the fog. He stood on the bank, near the ragged timbers of a wharf, and could just make out a rickety flight of wooden stairs down into the water.

Just as she had told him there would be.

It was all so much darker and colder and fouler than the water in which he had long ago refused to be immersed. He could almost imagine his father and mother, one standing on each side of him at this moment, looking down at that oily flow and asking how he could contemplate such a baptism when he had so contemptuously rejected the white robe and the clean water years ago.

They had been hurt. His earnest criticisms they saw as mockery; his honest disbelief a blasphemy. When the boards in the centre of the chapel were taken up and the tiled symbol of Jordan filled with water, all his friends went willingly in to be taken by the minister and dipped below the rippling surface. Such a different surface from this black one before him now. Yet that other one had been unreal. He had not accepted what they told him about it. This one here had to be real. The promises had to be fulfilled. This time he believed. This time he had to believe.

She had promised.

A great thankfulness caught at his throat, almost as agonizing as one of his coughing bouts. She was there, on the far bank: a more solid shape materialized from the writhings of unstable yellow. He did not speak, but waited, calm now because she was with him. He knew that motionless outline. Even without distinguishing a feature he could tell how she was clad: impenetrably veiled, her cloak hanging sheer and sombre to her toes.

Would she at last show her face when he had reached the far side and been liberated?

She spoke. That unmistakable, hypnotic contralto throbbed across the water.

‘How far will you go?’

‘As far as is demanded of me.’

‘There is no demand. It is for you to offer yourself of your own freewill.’

‘I offer myself.’

‘To the end?’

‘To the end.’

‘You will not turn back?’

‘I shall not turn back.’

‘Then come to me now. Come through.’

He went down two steps. The chill gnawed at his ankles. Water plopped in brief agitation against the landing stage. Ludicrously he felt he should be naked, or at least wearing the virginal white shift which would float out on the surface while the minister gripped him and submerged him and raised him again, accepting and accepted.

The rites of that sect had meant nothing. Here was true meaning—through darkness to light, out of pain into wholeness.

Step by step he descended, gasping against the cold. Then there were no more steps. He lurched out into the canal, gasping as this time he gulped noisome water. He tried to cry out, and swallowed more. His feet were on the bottom, but he could not walk. Trailing weed gripped at his feet. He fought free. When his head broke surface he saw the shrouded figure still there, impassive, waiting for him. He floundered towards the far bank. She made no move; simply waited.

He began to cough, swallowed more poisonous water, and coughed all the worse, swallowed, gasped, waved his arms, and felt the weed and his own dead weight dragging him down.

He had expected immediate release, immediate cool tranquillity. She had promised. Instead there was black terror.

She was waiting. Of his own free will—that was how he must come to her. If he stopped struggling and abandoned himself to the numbing cold and to all that she had offered him, he would drift to her and be cured. Weakness would damn him utterly. Doubt would be death. He tried to give himself to the slow current and to his faith in her. Water closed over his head again, his feet thrashed in the octopus arms of weed. Lights began to prick and explode before his eyes. He seemed to see the lamps above the baptismal cistern in the chapel of his childhood, and their splashing reflections on the surface. If he had submitted then, perhaps he would never have been visited with illness and never been brought to this.

No. He must not waver. He must be strong enough to reach her.

The bank was within reach. He groped for it, missed, and made a despairing lunge. She must have drawn closer while he was floundering in the centre of the canal. Her feet were just above his head. He reached up with one wavering hand. She stooped and gently touched it, and he felt that now was the moment, now she would draw him out.

Pain lanced through his index finger. It was as if she had clamped pincers or her own incredibly iron fingers on his nail and torn it from him. He cried out, sank, and opened himself to the paralysing water again.

When he rose for the last time he seemed to hear her asking again: ‘To the end?’ Because there was no hope now but the promised end and what lay beyond, he said: ‘To the end.’ Now it was only a grotesque bubbling in his lungs, but she would understand. She must understand that he had not faltered.

Her hand was in his hair now.

He would give in. This was the moment. He would close his eyes and miraculously she would draw him out and he would waken on the bank to find that he had honoured the ritual, endured the ordeal, and won through.

There was a last wrench of pain. Surely she had torn a handful of hair from his head?

She had let go, and he was free. Free to sink, and surrender.

* * * *

She pressed the hank of hair in a cambric handkerchief to squeeze out the worst of the moisture. Then she took the little silver patch-box from the folds of her cloak, coiled the hair into it, and dropped the torn nail onto the coil. The lid clicked shut.

She turned and walked back towards the lights of that rising cliff of houses.

At the next meeting the next one must be taken aside and prepared, told that the time was nigh; the next one, so far committed that again there could be no turning back.