WILLIAM DAVEY
I had sent John Jackson a telegraph message from Edinburgh with the time that my train would arrive at King’s Cross Station. Amusingly, it was due to come during the early afternoon of All Fools’ Day.
John had been my partner as a mesmeric lecturer and co-author for fifteen years before James Esdaile took his own life. He had been clerk of the Committee’s plenum since the mid-1840s, when I had concluded that Horace Eden—who had been Quillinan’s amanuensis—was far too much of a crazy old fool for my tastes. Jackson was less old; he was also less crazy. Still, most of our colleagues called him “the cripple,” just as I was called “the lacemaker” to our more well-born members. They knew he was my trusted friend, but it was clear that they thought his brain limped along with his leg.
As the train slowed to a stop on platform 9, I saw Jackson waiting among the crowd. He was watching for me—he had news to convey, but the newspapers I had read en route had already notified me. I now waited for an explanation.
“Welcome back, Will,” he said to me, as I found him on the platform. “You heard the news from Manchester.”
“About Braid, yes. I assume that we have some report of the event.”
“We certainly do. There are all sorts of rumours, but Bray is in the city and has some details. You’re not going to like it.”
“Oh, I’m not?”
“No.” Jackson stopped walking, standing beside a pillar to get out of the press. “You should know, Will, that Dickens is demanding an emergency meeting because of it. He doesn’t know you’re here—but that can’t remain secret for long.”
“Since you came here to meet me.”
“I come to King’s Cross often enough, as all of my friends in the Committee know.” He smiled, stretching the muscles in his lamed leg. “I come to commune with Boudicca’s ghost.” He stomped on the platform, and then led the way onward through the crowd.
Charles Bray was waiting in a private room at the Vienna, a small cafe near the British Museum. He was a middle-aged man, thin almost to being gaunt. When we entered, he looked up with an expression that mixed fear and hunger; he had some sort of drink in front of him that had a cloying, sweet smell. He began to rise from his seat.
“Davey,” he began, “I—”
“Wait,” I said. The simplest gesture returned him to a sitting position. Bray was much more a spiritualist than a mesmerist—and more of a crackpot than either. But he evidently had something to say.
I made him wait. Jackson and I took our seats; there was a gin bottle on the table that Bray had evidently placed as far from him as possible—I thought I remembered that he was a temperance man as well.
I took a copy of the Times from my portfolio and opened it on the table. I had carefully marked Braid’s obituary.
“I spoke with Dr. Braid at the Mechanics’ Institute a little over three weeks ago,” I said to Bray. “I directed that he be left alone. Who violated my order?”
“Reverend Davey, the circumstances of Dr. Braid’s death are somewhat complicated.”
“That is not what I want to hear.” I slammed my palm on the table, directly over the obituary. Glasses and the gin bottle jumped an inch. Bray jumped at least two inches. “He was to be left alone. Nothing is gained by his death. Nothing at all. Who—is—responsible?”
Bray summoned up all of his energy and some amount of his courage. I didn’t know how much he had of either. “It was not a simple matter of roughing him up with a cosh, Davey. Dr. Braid was killed by his daughter. He was killed by Ann Braid.”
“He’s opaque to mesmeric attack. What could she possibly—”
“She reached beyond nightfall, Davey,” he whispered. His hand shook slightly as he raised his glass and drank from it. “She summoned chthonic beings to induce apoplexy. She stopped his heart.”
The silence in the room was profound—as if someone had draped a cloth over the proceedings. And in that moment, I cursed myself for a fool and cursed my own arrogance and cursed Ann Braid, who truly had no interest in making a good marriage and turning her attention to giving her father a house full of beautiful grandchildren.
I had been shown this outcome and I had not seen it for what it was.
That is not why I am here, the Levantine had said to me on the platform at Oxford Road Station in Manchester.
And he and his fellow stoicheia had told me one other thing.
We are everywhere, they had said.
I might have come close to being killed on that train platform—or it might have been just an illusion. But the chthonic being had told me the truth. It had not come to Manchester to give me an “object lesson;” it had come because it had been summoned by Ann Braid.
While I was on the train to Leeds, thankful to have escaped with my life, it was in the process of stopping James Braid’s heart.
“Where is she now?”
“This is clearly something she planned for some time,” Bray said. “Braid may have been opaque to mesmeric attack, but the structure of the Mechanics’ Institute was—”
“Where. Is. She.”
I was letting my anger get the better of me. But Charles Bray—an effete, middle-aged ribbon factory owner from Coventry—happened to be the bearer of evil tidings.
“Trafford. She is in a small private sanitarium. There was—as I understand it—some backlash.”
“Explain.”
Bray did not immediately answer, but took another drink from his glass. I looked across at Jackson; he had heard some of this before, I expect, and rather than soften the blow for me or make Bray’s life easier, had chosen to make him explain it all.
I was glad to count John Jackson as a friend, because he could be a heartless enemy.
“It is my understanding,” Bray said at last, “that Miss Braid summoned, or arranged to summon, more than a dozen chthonic and possibly other spirits—perhaps including photic ones, since there was evidence of some amount of fire at Braid’s office—and used them together to kill Dr. Braid. When they had finished, a few of them turned on her and were only stopped by the actions of their—colleagues. Miss Braid was affected by the encounter.”
“How so?”
“I understand that she has lost the ability to walk.”
“You have the name of this sanitarium, I trust.”
He reached into his watch pocket and drew out a small visiting card, pushing it across the table at me. “This is the place.”
“I shall go there tomorrow morning. She waited—she waited until I was out of the domain. She may have even been in Manchester when I was there, preparing these pleasantries.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Bray didn’t look up at me again, but said, “No. Forget it, Davey. Forget that I asked the question.”
There was no way to avoid the trouble that Dickens might cause if I simply decamped for Manchester; it was far better to simply confront him. I would have liked to have that meeting take place on neutral or favorable ground—Vernon’s rooms, or one of the law offices or medical offices of a Committee member, for example—but that was not to be. Instead, I was obliged to accept his invitation to come to Tavistock House—anything but neutral ground.
I arrived there in the evening, in the rain—fitting, actually: Dickens had written rather disparagingly about London rain in Little Dorrit: how it did nothing but stir foul smells and clog the gutters. Tavistock House had been the author’s family home, and he often got up amateur and semi-professional plays on its stage. He was done with that now, as he was largely done with his family.
A servant met me at the door, which was protected by a brick overhang to keep out the weather, and admitted me to a parlor. I had not been in the house for some time; it seemed to me that many of the furnishings and knick-knacks had been removed, giving it the look of a place scarcely lived in.
I was kept waiting ten minutes or so until the great man swept in. He had the look of someone who had a considerable amount of other business and had no interest in departing from it for very long.
“Reverend Davey,” he said. He looked at me, then peered out of the window onto Tavistock Place, where the rain was fiercely assaulting the cobblestones. “Have you been offered tea or something else to drink?”
“I have not. But I am not in need.”
“Very well.” He led us to two deep armchairs. The fire had been banked, and there was a chill, slightly damp air in the room. “Let me get directly to the point.”
“Please do.”
“I am very disturbed by the events in Manchester, Davey. Very upset indeed. This is not at all appropriate for our organization.”
“Doctor Braid’s death came as something of a shock.”
“I cannot see how it should be that much of a surprise. It is high time that the brutes be removed from the Committee—indeed, it may suggest that we are conducting ourselves in a completely inappropriate manner.”
“I do not take your meaning, sir.”
“Oh, you don’t. Truly. Well, let me clarify it for you.”
He rubbed his chin, below his dense beard. I had known Dickens for twenty years, and when I first met him he was clean-shaven and rather unprepossessing, except for an intense gaze and a deep, powerful voice; now he had more the look of the Swiss mesmeric impresario Lafontaine—more heavy-set and bearded. The voice, however, and to some extent the gaze, still remained.
“I would be obliged.”
“Organizations such as ours take their cues from their leadership. Your demonstrations—if I may call them that—are taken as indications that force and intimidation are the order of the day, and that the ends will justify the means. This must stop, sir. This is not the way.”
“Sometimes,” I answered carefully, “‘demonstrations’ are necessary.”
“Carlyle tells me that you even resorted to such behavior in Edinburgh. In public. Surely it is not necessary every time.”
“I think we are agreed on that point.”
“Then why in God’s name did you permit this to occur? Braid was not an advocate of the Art, but he was a public figure, a man of standing. It wouldn’t do to simply dispense with him.”
“How do you think he died, Mr. Dickens?”
“I assume that it was no sudden fit. Men such as Braid do not jump—they are pushed.”
“He was killed by his daughter,” I said simply.
Over the next few seconds, Dickens’s expression moved from hauteur to disbelief to surprise, and then began to verge into disgust.
“How?”
“She reached beyond nightfall,” I said. “She summoned—from what I understand—a number of stoicheia and overwhelmed him.”
Dickens sat silently for a moment, then said, “I think, therefore, that this only reinforces my intentions. I shall resign from membership, Davey. Effective immediately. You may consider yourself informed that all of my support, including financial support, will cease.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” I answered. “What do you intend to do?”
“Do? I don’t see as it is any of your business.”
“I would not dream of prying into your private—affairs,” I said, and saw Dickens scowl; his quite public divorce from Catherine was still a current topic at that time.
“Then I see no need to discuss it with you.”
“As you wish,” I said. “But I will ask you to keep in mind that the Committee does not look kindly upon attempts to establish rival organizations—and I do not look kindly upon them either.”
“I am a public figure. You would not dare dictate to me.”
“James Braid was a public figure,” I retorted, but both of us knew that it was not the same.
“And it astounds me that you would dare to assault him.”
“Ann Braid’s actions were not at my direction, Dickens.”
“Is she not in your control, Mr. Chairman? Will she then come after me with her—nightfall allies?”
“I do not expect her to do anything of the sort, at least at present. From what I understand, she barely survived this event.”
“You are sure of that?”
“I am.”
“Then I expect that you will have no more such trouble in the future.” He stood, and I followed. “I do not intend to remain in residence here in London much longer. I have very little affection for this house after all—I shall remain at Gad’s Hill instead. You may convey my regards to our—colleagues.”
“I shall do that, sir,” I said, not sure what else to say.
He walked me to the door, not even troubling himself to call a servant, though the butler was already nearby with my coat and hat.
“You know your way out,” he said, and without another word, turned and walked up the stairs.
I thought about framing a reply, but instead shrugged on the coat and took my hat and umbrella.
I know my way out, I thought to myself as I descended the stairs to my waiting carriage, wondering all the way if it were actually true.