1.

Frederick Drayton impressed the superintendent of Broadmoor by an affability at variance with the impertinence he had come to expect of young Americans, especially those whose experience of travel was limited to their own rough shores and the Continent. (The superintendent despised the Continent, by which he meant France; it was, for him, Les Fleurs du mal, although he had never read Baudelaire, nor would he ever.) That Drayton might be otherwise than he seemed did not occur to him. The young man carried, besides, a letter of recommendation from someone of importance in the Home Office, endorsing the bearer as worthy of favor. Lord M—had added a postscript in his own hand: “Do what you can for him, John.”

The superintendent might have wondered at the interest shown in Drayton by so illustrious a person, but curiosity was not among his “gifts”—a convenient absence in a man charged with the disposition of many whose qualifications for admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane were dubious. Nor was the superintendent offended by the twenty-pound note that Drayton had caused to appear, like a conjuror’s trick, on the teak desk this official had purchased while on Indian service in the Punjab, whose allusive carvings some found unsettling. The banknote seemed to have arrived there of its own volition, so suave were the gestures of this good-natured San Franciscan. The superintendent left it undisturbed, while he searched the other’s face for signs of servility or mischief. Finding no sign of either, he put the note out of mind and beyond the reach of any mention, inside a leather-bound inmate census lying on the desk.

“It can be arranged,” he told Drayton with the air of one used to arranging things of greater import than this, a private interview with one of the inmates. “At one time, he was considered the most dangerous man in England,” he added, his gaze shifting involuntarily to Britannia’s portrait. “He was exceptionally vicious.” Again his eyes slid off Drayton’s, onto his own hands, which played with the thin-bladed knife he had employed in opening Lord M—’s crested envelope.

The American nodded his understanding.

“Of course, the atrocities were committed more than twenty-five years ago!” the superintendent declared with an emphasis the young man could not interpret. He put down the knife. It caught the gaslight along its edge in a way that made him stare involuntarily. “He has—I assure you—repented of his past. He has applied himself to his rehabilitation.”

“His behavior—”

“Exemplary.” The superintendent swept the knife away into the top drawer of the desk. “You will be quite safe with him, Mr. Drayton.”

The American nodded a second time.

“If there is nothing else . . .” The superintendent rose from his chair.

“No. Thank you.”

“I must examine the census.”

Drayton stood at the other side of the desk and extended his hand across it. The impulse to draw his finger down the length of a darkly oiled swelling in the wood was almost irresistible. The superintendent seemed unsure whether or not to take his hand—aware of the novelty, perhaps, of such a gesture in a place reserved for the instruction of the asylum’s staff and the admonition of its patients.

He took it, finally, and looked as one released from an intolerable strain.

“I hope everything will be satisfactory, Mr. Drayton.” He let go of the young man’s hand only to take his elbow and lead him to the door. “Please convey my regards to Lord M—, when you see him.”

“I will,” said Drayton in a tone of voice that insinuated an intimacy with the eminent man.

“Tell him that I have been helpful.”

2.

Frederick Drayton feared obscurity and the meagerness of a life spent in the shadows. It was not money he wanted; money, like a prepossessing nature, was only an instrument in the attainment of his ambition. He wished for fame and would not have regretted if a portion of it were infamous, so long as that infamy were not predominant in his reputation. He would not be a murderer or even a thief (except in a small way); but he would not mind that people considered him a roué or a rogue so long as admiration as well as censure were mixed in their regard. Drayton did not care if he ended up excluded from respectable company so long as that company came to see him on the stage; it was as an actor that he first had hoped to step out of the shadows he detested—into the green and garish footlights. But he lacked talent in that direction. He had also attempted a play, which failed and took with it the savings of a spinster aunt, whose distress he ignored. He was not discouraged. Drayton had that quality by virtue of which ambitious men sometimes succeed: a high opinion of himself.

After he had been repulsed twice by the more or less legitimate stage, he conceived an idea of such originality that few would doubt its genius, had they only known the dimensions of his brainstorm. But Drayton was shrewd as well as ambitious, and he concealed his thinking from his friends. He determined to make his name in vaudeville, whose stage, he knew, would be open to the kind of grotesque entertainment he planned: a confession so harrowing as to make Dickens’s public reading of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes a pale piece of fiction, which it was. The confession Drayton had in mind would be the real McCoy—the testimony of a degenerate man—a genuine beast, if beasts may be said to be wicked and perverse.

An idea must have a provenance, and Drayton’s originated in a newspaper article published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terror that reigned in London (so memorably described by Robert Louis Stevenson), whose culmination was the beating to death of Sir Danvers Carew. Drayton had skimmed the account, his mind occupied by the devising of a lampoon that might, with luck, bring him the fame that he demanded. So apparently slight an impression had the item made on him that he left the newspaper on the seat of a San Francisco Traction Company car, which deposited him at his rooming house near the Presidio. It was not until the following evening that the story of Edward Hyde was recalled to him by a conversation overheard in a saloon.

“They say he ate the living hearts of the women he killed.”

“He was a devil.”

“Not even children were safe from his rages.”

“They ought to have hanged him.”

“He’s locked up for life in a lunatic asylum.”

“I still say they ought to have hanged him. Cut off his arms and legs and hung what was left.”

“He is a freak of nature.”

“People would pay plenty to see him.”

People would pay plenty to see him. This observation regarding the public’s inexhaustible voyeurism set Drayton’s train of thought on a new track as he sat over his whiskey and water. He remembered the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from his school days and knew with an impresario’s certainty that it represented a far greater coup de théâtre than the worn music-hall sketch he had been trying to reupholster, in his imagination, with naughty innuendo.

AN EVENING WITH EDWARD HYDE
NOTORIOUS MURDERER
ONSTAGE FOR A LIMITED ENGAGEMENT
PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON

A homicidal maniac reciting his unspeakable crimes, alone onstage in the sickly light of the gas brackets. What a sensation that would be! Nothing could match it for terror and novelty. Drayton would rocket to the empyrean of celebrity, riding such an indecency. For that was what it was—a gross indecency—and Drayton knew it. That—he also knew—was the rancid bait to bring out the public in droves. I will arouse its indignation to fury, will make it howl for Hyde’s blood. The public will be in a frenzy to apply rough justice to his neck, in the alleyway behind every theater at which we stop. My God! he thought. Not even Barnum had offered so complete a provocation to an audience! Everyone who sees the author of such crimes will want to leave his own sins sticking to him like a plaster. They will come—each of them—determined to revile Hyde, to vilify Hyde, to daub Hyde over with their own filth so that they may leave the theater with their souls cleansed.

Drayton possessed Barnum’s dramatic instinct: He knew how to put on a show. He also knew that a spectacle, no matter how original (that is to say, how deviant), is not in itself enough to produce a powerful sensation; there must also be scandal and a counterbalancing redemption—whether for the spectators or for the object of their antipathy is irrelevant.

Yes, that’s the formula! I’ll put the monster on the boards and let them bathe themselves in a virtuous hatred. Unless the monster itself be repentant. Drayton speculated on what effect a contrite Hyde might have on his audience. Would it be more profitable, he wondered, to divert the hot blood of the mob into a channel of maudlin rejoicing for a lost soul? To turn a Roman circus into a revivalist’s tent meeting?

THE ATONEMENT OF EDWARD HYDE
INFAMOUS MURDERER & RAPIST
PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON
FOR THE EDIFICATION OF THE GREAT AMERICAN PUBLIC

Ire or awe, which would be more likely to win an ever-increasing audience—not one, but as many as there are cities in America? And why not abroad? After all, by his public readings the length and breadth of England and America more than by his books themselves was Dickens made famous. By his literary murders—fictions! How much more thrilling the real thing! What if Hyde were actually to strangle someone onstage in front of the astonished crowd? Even if it were only a simulation, such an act would undoubtedly add an unparalleled frisson to the evening for the gentlemen. The brothels will benefit! Drayton was aware that he had felt it himself many times—a prurience aroused by the details of a gruesome murder, especially when the victim was a young woman. He knew himself not to be unique: Why else the nearly universal interest in the Ripper and his Whitechapel Murders?

WITNESS EDWARD HYDE AS HE STRANGLES
A WOMAN ONSTAGE
PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON
FOR AUDIENCES IN AMERICA & GREAT BRITAIN

Drayton was on his fifth whiskey and water when the train derailed. With an involuntary movement of his hand, he knocked his glass to the floor, where it shattered—an apt mirroring of the sudden destruction of his ungovernable thought.

What an ass I am!

What smashed his daydream was the realization of the impossibility of releasing Hyde from his incarceration for a purpose no loftier than Drayton’s own extravagant aggrandizement.

How could he be released for any purpose? The man was dangerous—may be so still. He is confined for life and condemned forever. His remains can never be given Christian burial—Drayton remembered having read that in the newspaper story—nor any other form of interment that might keep open the prospect of resurrection. And I wanted to take him on tour!

And then—he could not help himself, so mercenary a heart was his—Drayton wondered if, when the time came, Hyde’s remains might not be obtained, and at what price.

3.

Hyde did not die upon the scaffold, nor did he find the courage to release himself at the last moment, as Henry Jekyll had hoped during his final hours of consciousness while he waited for his monstrous twin to usurp him. He understood that Hyde was stronger and more cunning in the simplicity of his need, and that he would—when next he arrived within Jekyll’s locked laboratory—remain there. Jekyll expected to predecease his rival by months or years. But the coming of Hyde proved too violent; Jekyll perished in convulsions upon the rack of Hyde, and immediately Hyde followed him. Thus were they both dead within a narrow space of each other—expiring, as it were, “in one another’s arms”—and (this later proved crucial!) officially declared to be so.

The constables shoveled the body of both, rudely, into the back of a van. But before the corpse could enter the dismal precincts of the mortuary to wait upon the inquest into that “strange case,” Hyde woke. Woke from a dream of death or some other counterfeit induced by the doctor’s powerful drug. Unless having died on the instant with Jekyll, he had come back to life, having gone only a little way into the dark and not yet been possessed by its chill rigor. In any event, Hyde returned; and Jekyll, because of a ruined health perhaps, did not. As the doctor had feared, he was supplanted by the other, who has survived him now a quarter century. Had the mortuary van been unlocked (why should a corpse need locking in?), Hyde might have gotten away and continued to prosecute his private war against humanity. But the door was locked, and he did not escape.

When the city understood what Hyde had done—what atrocities and enormities—it screamed for vengeance. It demanded (to speak of the city as the nearly homogeneous thing it is in times of hysteria) the most severe punishments, exacted by means that were extraordinary for their invention and cruelty. Hyde the beast and monster elicited the bestial and the monstrous in everyone who contemplated him. Almost everyone. Some few there were who called for mercy, believing Hyde to have been the unwitting dupe and victim of his creator, Jekyll. Enlightened and forbearing, they spoke of “accidents of birth” and “Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster.” Ironically, it was the law that saved Hyde from hanging. That he had died (ostensibly or in reality) before witnesses and been pronounced dead established a degree of doubt, and doubt gave rise to a faction that declared that a dead man could not be tried. The opposition argued that the fact of Hyde’s death was moot; all that mattered was his present status as a living man. Ultimately, the court decided that a legal pronouncement of death could not be reversed without committing a supreme blasphemy. Thus did Edward Hyde enter the limbo in which he was, legally, neither living nor dead, but in a condition partaking of both. Advocates of either side of the legal opinion were in any case agreed that Hyde must be committed, and for life. (The public could not follow the subtle arguments of the case and, in the end, forgot it.) So Hyde was taken to Broadmoor and left to rot.

During the first years of imprisonment, Hyde raved—raved and rioted in his basement cell, making the hearts of his jailers quake. He was the very coin of evil, with the face and bearing of a beast—malignancy made flesh, affecting them like a cold hand upon the heart. To hear him execrate God turned their bowels to ice. To see him was to look on leprosy. And so Hyde lived, unregenerate, cursing God and Henry Jekyll—God for having given Jekyll life, Jekyll for giving life to Hyde.

Early in his second decade of confinement, Hyde changed. He grew quiet, calm, composed, mild. He became pleasing in his demeanor, so that his outward form seemed, almost, to copy an altered nature. Almost, for the deformity—the most notable aspect of his appearance (a misshapenness that had been thought the visible evidence of an inward corruption)—persisted. It could not be otherwise, for Jekyll’s chemistry had produced the outlines of Hyde’s very form. The skull was too large, as if the fontanelles, which had closed in infancy, had been reopened by a gigantic subterranean strain. The hands, too, were overlarge, pelted and sinewed like an animal’s. The backbone had been violently recast into the likeness of a heavy swag of iron chain, such as decorates a courthouse entrance. And yet, it was possible now for his jailers to look at Hyde without shuddering, because his soul no longer seemed to them repugnant. Even the asylum’s fastidious chaplain, who had fled from Hyde’s insistent blasphemies, would stop to give him the comforts of his Savior, for which Hyde would bless him. Hyde’s reclamation soon came to the attention of the superintendent and then to that of the Home Office, which recommended clemency toward the prisoner. No longer considered dangerous or insane, Hyde was given a larger, more pleasant cell on one of the asylum’s upper floors, with a view of sky and English countryside. He was allowed to take daily exercise on the asylum grounds and given other privileges reserved for the reformed. He would die at Broadmoor: No provision existed for his release. But he might live out his life there in relative ease. The public had forgotten him entirely, in favor of the hated Boer, whose iniquities belittled Hyde’s in the popular press and imagination.

This was the Hyde to whom Frederick Drayton was introduced in the winter of 1900, in Hyde’s bright, if spare, cell, with an aspidistra struggling on the brick sill and a curtain at the window to keep out the morning light. He was not “the child of Hell” Stevenson had promised and that he, Drayton, had been expecting. The man who rose politely to acknowledge his visitor was reserved, remarkably kempt, and almost gentle in his manner. Hyde might have been a caretaker or a gardener attached to some estate.

He looked his age—seventy-five—but no more than that, or less. Drayton had read, in Stevenson’s account, that Hyde’s appearance and vigorousness had belonged to a man much younger than Jekyll, who also would have been seventy-five, had he survived. Apparently, Hyde had caught up with his age during a quarter century of enforced retreat from the world, whose stimulations had earlier excited in him youth and an unnatural robustness. During Drayton’s visit, he kept his hands hidden.

Hyde must have guessed that curiosity (and fear perhaps) had brought the American to visit him. His instincts remained quick. He might have seen in Drayton’s face disappointment, which the young man made an effort to dissemble—not in sympathy for the old man, but because of the duplicity with which he habitually engaged the world. He did not want to put Hyde off! In his mind, Drayton saw the placard he had daydreamed in a San Francisco barroom that announced, in handsome Baskerville: THE ATONEMENT OF EDWARD HYDE. He was versatile and quick-witted and knew that although what was handed him—by fate or accident—might be likely to surprise him, it would not—he swore—defeat him.

“Mr. Drayton, you expected something else?”

“Not at all!”

“The world remembers Hyde the monster, if it remembers him at all.”

“I am glad to see you’re looking—”

“So unlike an animal?”

“Well, Mr. Hyde. Looking so well after your years of hardship here.”

“Please call me Edward.”

“And you, sir, may call me Frederick.”

(Hyde snuffled.)

“I smell winter on you, Frederick.”

“It is cold.”

(A silence ensued, during which Hyde sat down at the oak table.)

“What is it, Frederick, that you want of me?”

“To give you your say.”

(Hyde, perplexed.)

“Your side of it. I hope—with your permission and assistance—to present your point of view upon the stage.”

(Hyde nodded—might even have smiled momentarily.)

“But the stage—I’m afraid—is unavailable to me.”

“I will record you, Edward—your voice. It will be just as if you were there in front of them. The audience. It will be a sen—a most moving testimony to—it will be extraordinary, Edward!”

(Hyde did smile then; but pleased by his own cleverness in so quickly having gained his object’s confidence, Drayton did not see him smile.)

“You intend to take down what I say, then have it read out by an actor?”

“I will record it with an apparatus. It will capture your voice as a photograph does a face.”

(Hyde turned his face and looked outside—at a vast shadow that a sudden wind had caused to slip over the snow beyond the outer walls, blackening it.)

“Science! Of what is it not capable?”

“I have brought it with me—it is in the anteroom! Shall I go and get it?”

“It will be my pleasure.”

(Hyde turned his head toward the window.)

“What’s that you are humming, Edward?”

“A favorite air from Alexander’s Feast. Do you know it? It’s by Handel.”

“No. I’ll get the machine. The spectacle of the Elephant Man will be nothing next to this!”

4.

Frederick Drayton was lucky. Within the very month that he had conceived his plan for Hyde and then realized its impracticability, he had attended a public demonstration of Edison’s newest recording device. The lecturer produced waxed cylinders on which sounds had been previously captured. Drayton listened to a cornet solo by Sergeant Smith of the Coldstream Guards, a bassoon solo entitled “Lucy Long,” and a solo by the English whistler Charles Capper.

Had the Raising of Lazarus been presented upon that little stage with its sad proscenium and tatty drapes, it would not have created a sensation to equal this. Each who bore witness to the miraculous occasion was amazed.

The lecturer predicted that, in a very little while, people would be relieved of the drudgery of writing letters. Instead, he asserted, they would sit before the phonograph and speak their letters into the machine, which would capture not only their words but also subtleties of tone and emphasis. If the subject were droll, one might laugh; and the laugh would go down on wax. And should a sigh or kiss escape while one spoke tenderly of love—these, too, would be inscribed onto the cylinder.

“Thus will you be able to send a laugh or a sigh or a kiss by post!” the lecturer exclaimed, so great was his enthusiasm for Mr. Edison’s device.

The demonstration ended with a recording made three months earlier of “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Rule, Britannia.” It was this last song that brought to Drayton’s mind Hyde and how he might be presented on the stage. Not Hyde himself, to be sure—but his recorded voice amplified by a tundish, just as the music and songs were heard in the crowded hall of the San Francisco Philosophical Society.

If so many thronged to listen spellbound to Charles Capper whistle, what would the voice of Hyde evoke in them? What would they not pay to hear him speak or rage or weep?

Drayton approached the lecturer immediately after the demonstration to discover how he might order a machine of his own. The cost was high, but he soon found a man willing to invest in the enterprise. Two months later, Drayton was in New York City, where, in an afternoon, he learned to operate the phonograph and, with the machine and a supply of waxed cylinders bedded in excelsior, he embarked the following day for England.

5.

Cylinder No. 1: 10 December 1900—3 o’clock in the Afternoon

HYDE: . . . was for me at the start of it.

DRAYTON: You must not turn your head away from the machine when you speak. Aim your voice there, at the tube.

HYDE: I don’t recall much of how it was for me in the beginning.

DRAYTON: Good.

HYDE: I seem to have been asleep far more than awake. Although it was not sleep. There was no refreshment—no waking afterward to a renewal of my relationship to the things of the world, which had been broken, temporarily, by fatigue. There was no sense of waking up from a dream, no feeling of relationship to anything or anyone. It was—it is difficult to say what it was—as if I were suddenly born. Each time. Born anew, without connection or associations. I had little sense of connection even with my former self—for that is what I felt myself to be: something that had been. Something previous. The merest sketch. Opening my eyes, I was left with the sensation of having been, but without memory of what I was. I did not know that I was bad, for the knowledge of my crimes died with me each time I fell asleep. But I tell you it was not sleep! It was a blackness that overtook me, engulfing and profound. It was death—yes, that is what it was like for me at the start! As if I’d died with all my sins upon me and was born again spotless. I did not know that I was bad! If I had known, I might have chosen otherwise. I mean I might have ended it. But the thing was beyond me—beyond my power to change. I was not myself: I belonged to someone else. To Jekyll! Though I did not know him then. My eyes would open on a shuttered-up room with the stink of chemicals in the close air. Later, I understood the room belonged to Dr. Jekyll—was his laboratory. But it was only a name to me then! The man whose space this was, was never there—never at home, always elsewhere, on his rounds or at his club or at the houses of his friends. I’d wait for him in that stuffy, pent-up, dismal place, growing sick and tired and angry. You cannot imagine what quality and depth of anger. Anger is far too weak a word. Rage—I was always in a rage. And he did not come! I would fall asleep—let’s call it sleep, for convenience—and Hyde would disappear—who knows where—until he woke again in the empty laboratory. Later still, my eyes would open elsewhere—in a woman’s room or an alley—and soon there would be blood upon the coverlet or bricks. I was helpless against the raging, helpless to understand it even, and baffled by the absence of the elusive Dr. Jekyll! May I have a glass of water?

DRAYTON: I will call for one. I must change the cylinder, too.

Cylinder No. 2: 10 December 1900—3:30 in the Afternoon

HYDE: I went in search of Jekyll. I hunted him. But in every place he might have been, should have been—he wasn’t. Never was he where they said he was. His man, Poole. His friends Lanyon and Utterson. I broke my stick on the head of Sir Danvers because he knew and would not say! If you are looking for a monster—look at him! At Jekyll! He tormented me so! He hid from Hyde, and Hyde—poor Edward—could not understand who or what he was and why he should wake in that laboratory! There was some vital connection between us, which I could not fathom! He drove me to fury and to madness. To murder—murders that I committed and forgot. Except for the blood on my hands and clothes, my broken stick, I would not have known that I had . . . that I had been where blood’d spilled. Later, I did know. Later, I remembered a little of before—I mean before I woke. I did not dream. Poor Edward has never dreamed—not even here. But I seemed to see on the other side of that engulfing darkness a distant coastline, fogged in at first. Little by little, the fog dispelled. And I saw. But that was long after the beginning. The end—it was—when I seemed not to sleep at all but to be Hyde Hyde Hyde for days on end and never sleep at all. Then I knew the meaning of my bloodstained clothes, the ripped collar, and fingernails which looked like claws that had been trying to tear up the alleyway bricks. Christ, what had I done! And why? I knew it was not Christ who knew, but Jekyll, whom I could not find and hunted days and nights in every street and brothel, museum and music hall. I almost caught up with him one afternoon in Kew Gardens. I rushed at him with my sword-stick, ready to run him through, but he turned—the man turned at the noise of my bearing down on him over the dead leaves—and I saw that he was not the man I wished dead. Surely, you can see why!

DRAYTON (irresistibly): Yes!

HYDE: It was Jekyll who drove me!

DRAYTON: They shall find it out! Edward, you will be vindicated!

HYDE: I wish now that he were alive to see it and be hounded and brought down and called a monster and made to endure a quarter century shut up here!

DRAYTON: They will set you free, Edward! When they hear you speak, they will insist you be released. They will demand it. They will storm the walls and break down the door if you are not! They will love you, Edward, for—

Drayton turned off the phonograph and placed the two waxed cylinders carefully into the rosewood case.

“—your martyrdom. We will make them pay. You will be a free man, and rich!”

He was gripped by an excitement that was part indignation for Hyde and part gratitude for his own good fortune in having found in Hyde so amenable a subject, so very eloquent and moving a victim for him to champion. Drayton sensed a triumph far greater than the one he had first imagined for himself. He saw the headline in his mind that would soon be published through the wide world:

FREDERICK DRAYTON EXCULPATES EDWARD HYDE
INNOCENT VICTIM OF THE INFAMOUS DR. JEKYLL!

He imagined himself to be not only a celebrated impresario but also an exalted advocate. He would become the most famous man in England and a hero in America to all those of his countrymen who despised the cruelties and exploitation of the aristocracy.

Already, Hyde sensed the measure of the other man’s ambition.

“I know of something else the crowd will love.”

Having begun to disassemble the phonograph, Drayton had the tundish in his hands. “What?”

“Jekyll’s formula—the one that gave me birth. It will be—what’s that word you Americans use to describe a remarkable disclosure?”

“Sensation.”

“Yes. It will be a sensation to put Jekyll’s notebook on display. It will tantalize the mob. It’s yours, if you want it—my gift to you for what you intend to do for me.”

“You have it here?”

“Certainly not. It’s hidden in the laboratory. I know where. It must be there still.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s curious, but I know—now—everything that Jekyll knew. I didn’t when I hunted him. But since his death, I have acquired—don’t ask me how—his mind. I know, as well, the impurity that had entered the salt. Because of it, he could not duplicate the original mixture. Because of it, he lacked the strength to keep me out, and so he died.”

“You and Jekyll are the same.”

“Everyone knows that!”

“I had almost forgotten it.”

“I didn’t understand, at first, that the man I sought to kill was myself. And yet—you know—he was really another man. Whether or not we were locked in the same body, Jekyll was separate from me, and he created me, injured me, and hoped to murder me. We might say—for convenience—that although we were the same, he and I were two different men entirely; and I wish to see him in disgrace.”

“Edward, you shall! He will be exposed. Together, we’ll restore your good name and blacken his.”

“The notebook is in the wall behind the laboratory stove. Eight bricks from the floor, seven from the right wall. Poole will let you inside. Lord M—’s introduction will see to that.”

“And the impurity?”

“Cigar ash. A length of ordinary cigar ash that, by accident, had fallen into the salt during its manufacture.”

“I thank you, Edward.”

(Hyde did not take Drayton’s proffered hand.)

Drayton picked up the tundish to place it in the box.

“You might leave it here, Frederick, and one of those waxed cylinders, too. In case I think of something else to say.”

6.

Lord M—’s secretary now removes the second cylinder from the phonograph and lays it in its bed of crimson plush with a tenderness ordinarily reserved for a relic of a dead religion, or a vanished love. Throat dry after so lengthy a narration, he pours water from an earthenware jug (incongruous in the luxury crowding Lord M—’s study); and as he tilts back his head to drink, it is not the secretary we see, but Edward Hyde—the bony knuckles of his throat working obediently to slake his thirst. We shudder as if it were blood he were drinking—as if Hyde himself were drinking it—until the secretary coughs once and the spell breaks like a thread of saliva.

“I can’t say I really understand Lord M—’s interest in Frederick Drayton,” says Roebling, taking from a silver case a Dutch cigar; “why he should have lent Drayton his influence and why he should have bothered to acquire this.” He indicates with a hand that holds a flaming match the rosewood box of waxed cylinders and the phonograph.

“His interest was Hyde,” the secretary says. Roebling is about to ask for an explanation, but a peremptory gesture admonishes him, and indeed all of us. The secretary closes the rosewood box as if to signal his determination to keep the matter dark. “Drayton produced his sensation; the magnitude of its effect exceeded anything he could have foreseen when he conceived of his exploitation of the Monster Hyde. The dimensions of Drayton’s celebrity were enormous. There was not a man or woman in England or America who was not affected by it. I have no doubt they heard the tale in Patagonia, so avid were the journalists to publish details of Drayton’s Grand Guignol.”

“He butchered the poor girl on her wedding night,” Phelps reminds us, who need no reminding.

“He out-Hyded Hyde himself!” says Roebling. “His savagery was worse even than the Ripper’s.”

“We know everything but why,” I say, recalling that the murderer had offered no defense—was, by the time of his apprehension and trial, incapable of reason and coherent utterance, so entirely given over was his nature to the bestial.

“I can hear him howling still inside his cage,” muses Roebling, eyes caught by the barbed light winking on the clock’s brass bezel.

Drayton was each day conveyed to and from London’s Central Criminal Court in an iron cage, where I am told he raged continuously through the two weeks’ proceedings against him.

“His motives are not entirely obscure,” the secretary is saying. “After his sentencing, I spent some hours sitting just the other side of his cage. He had been given morphine and was lucid. That is how I came to know his story.”

“I can’t picture you in the cells,” I tell him, “or think what brought you there.”

“I went as deputy for Lord M—,” the secretary replies, drawing me aside and speaking low. “He could not very well have gone himself, could he?”

“But I do not see why he should have concerned himself at all in the matter!” I nearly shout in my impatience, despising this unnecessary mystery as I would a woman who insists on undressing in the dark.

“We were hoping to discover the whereabouts of the notebook,” he says with an insinuation made more emphatic by a hand upon my sleeve. “Jekyll’s,” he adds in answer to my look of incomprehension. “Do you know?”

“How should I?” I bristle.

“I’ve heard that you’ve acquired some curiosities in the course of your research into people’s Gothic inclinations.” Abruptly, his manner relaxes. He turns to Phelps and Roebling. “Like anyone, we are all curious about evil. Are we not, gentlemen?”

He unties a marbled portfolio and draws out a copy of The Illustrated Police Budget, whose headline shrieks in seventy-two-point Copperplate:

FIEND SLAUGHTERS JEKYLL HEIR DURING WEDDING NIGHT:
HEART TORN FROM BODY FOUND IN NEARBY MEWS

With more reserve, an edition of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper announces:

FREDERICK DRAYTON TO HANG FOR UNSPEAKABLE ACTS

“He wanted to make a spectacle of himself and profit by it,” the secretary concludes drily, like a magistrate at an inquest. “But he could not control his metamorphoses any more than Jekyll could.”

“That bit about the cigar ash was a lie, then?” Roebling asks.

Before the secretary can respond, Phelps says, “I heard that, the moment before he was dropped, he cursed Hyde.” As he speaks, he is impelled to touch with his finger the word unspeakable in the black headline.

“What did poor Hyde have to do with it?” Roebling replies angrily. “He’s banged up for life in Broadmoor!”

“He should be let out!” I cry, seized for a reason I cannot put into words by sympathy for Hyde in his winter—I, who am ordinarily indifferent to the miseries and ill use of others.

The secretary’s voice is like the crack of ice in a river’s sudden thaw. “You must not think to let Hyde loose! You do not know what he is. Not even Lord M—guessed what Hyde . . .” He raises his hands, then lowers them, abjectly, like a naturalist who has been asked to classify something unclassifiable. He opens the rosewood box and lifts a third cylinder from its velvet bed, a cylinder sent to Lord M—“in confidence” by the superintendent of Broadmoor. The cylinder lodged in the machine, Hyde’s voice again leaps out into the room. While it apostrophized him, Frederick Drayton never heard this last recording. (What quality is in that voice to make the heart stand still, to fill its chambers with snow?) Now we all listen.

Cylinder No. 3: 10 December 1900—4:30 in the Afternoon

HYDE: You cannot know all that I have lost—what liberty has been mine in being Hyde! What ecstasy and release! To give way without thought or misgiving to the most amazing impulse! To be incapable of the slightest misgiving. To be incapable of any thought that would check the natural propensity to the exercise of power. Having neither ordinary scruples nor a self-censuring faculty, nor any fear of consequences—acknowledging only his insistent need and contemptuous of any moral imperative that might frustrate its immediate satisfaction. This was Hyde—his glory and achievement. You have yet to discover, Frederick, the perfection of such a state, how harmonious a condition, and how much in keeping with a sovereign nature! Hyde was not the beast they made him out to be—no, but a god, or an angel faithful to his own untrammeled self, with nothing to bind him to circumstances or the provisional universe. To have given way to everything that might afford him pleasure, to have yielded nothing of himself, to have been above all laws and sacred prohibitions—this was Hyde! I say you cannot, Frederick, know what it was like to assume his being. But you will. I know you, sir, and see how willingly you lean away from the common center toward a larger self. Your hunger for celebrity (which is the wish for power over other men, as it hopes to enthrall their imaginations to one’s own)—that is your nature and, as you must know, the instrument of others’ inevitable destruction. It is Hyde who sees Drayton removing Jekyll’s notebook from its lair and yielding precipitately to the seduction of a formula that will make him singular, extraordinary—which is to say, monstrous. Hyde sees Drayton now in Jekyll’s house, captivated by Jekyll’s niece, whom I did not mention (a lovely young woman by all reports)—now circling around her, now seducing her, and soon—in one form of Hyde—destroying her, as he must, as he must. Hyde sees Drayton becoming Hyde, perpetrating his crimes, perpetuating him—extending the line. And Hyde, now grown invisible, will sing—in his winter—his favorite air from Alexander’s Feast, on the occasion of Drayton’s marriage to Jekyll’s niece, followed by her quick obliteration:

Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,
See the furies arise,
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
I, Edward Hyde, swear to it!

7.

Late afternoon, the sun fallen already behind the trees. The pale winter light stops at the window of Hyde’s cell, unfettering shadows from beneath bed and table. The water in the washbowl, black. Hyde at the window, looking with curious intensity at the field beyond the stone walls, where, here and there, stalks stick up stiffly through the snow. The light going, he leans his forehead against an ice-cold pane and shuts his eyes on the world without.

“Edward Hyde,” I say; and in spite of the pains I have taken to rehearse, my voice betrays unease.

He turns; and I seem to hear in that supple movement a commotion that makes me think of the Minotaur, or perhaps of a machine, the single-minded music of its whirring gears.

“Sir, I am at your service,” Hyde replies, suavely, as if the distance traveled from the depths of contemplation to the present moment were no further than the six steps that separate us. This distance between us he closes as he walks toward me. I offer him my hand; he does not take it.

“I doubt you know me, Mr. Hyde. I am a writer, of tales. I wish to write of you—your duress: a serial for The London Magazine and, later, a novel. I’ve already begun it.” I ignore the silent probing gaze, the glint of teeth, the roaring in my ears issuing from a rapidly accelerating heart. Opening my portmanteau, I show him a manuscript. “It will be—I promise you—a sensation!”

He continues to regard me in silence. Suddenly, although his manner seems benevolent, I am afraid. Do I not see a man, not unlike myself, standing on the gallows’ little stage? This is but a momentary impression, which Hyde’s smile and the assurance of Lord M—’s patronage conspire to dissipate. “You will want,” he says, “Jekyll’s formula . . .”

“You know it, then?” Astonished, I nearly shout at him.

Imperturbable, Hyde replies, “I know everything that Jekyll knew.”

“And you will tell me all of it?”

“It will be my pleasure,” says Hyde.

“And the impurity of the mixture?”

Hyde smiles again, leans close, whispering something into my ear.