9
Weighty things
WILLIAM DAVEY
I had already been waiting more than twenty minutes at the Weathercock, a mildly shabby coffeehouse on Piccadilly Square, when John Williams Jackson came in from the cold, limping quickly along on his lame foot, clapping his mittened hands to try and dash away the cold and shrugging his shoulders to rid himself of the gray, sooty snow.
I attempted to affect an air of disinterest, but the news that Jackson carried was really too important to bother with that. We were old enough friends that he surely would have seen through it, in any case. I made room for him on the bench, moving my cup and saucer.
John Jackson and I were almost exactly of an age, but he seemed to look older and more worn down. Some of it was due to his lame foot—he had been badly injured when he was thirteen and had limped ever since. But there was clearly more to his appearance than just that: his clothing, while clean and presentable, always appeared just a tad out of fashion and a half-size too small, as if it had been subjected to laundering once too often. The wrinkles in his face, even the ones derived from laughter, were deep creases; he had creaky bones and a raspy cough.
“Glad to have you back in town,” Jackson said, placing his hat on the table in front of him and accepting a cup of coffee from a server who arrived without prompting and vanished quickly at my glance.
“Things took longer than I expected.”
“We have more than our usual quota attending today, even given the weather.” Jackson brushed snow off his hat onto the floor. “A few extra worthies who would like to turn you over a spit.”
“Friends of Ann Braid, I expect.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Engledue is on hand, sharpening his knives.”
“He’s not even supposed to be in England! Bad for a dead man to show his face.”
Jackson sipped his coffee and scowled, then sipped a little more. “It does tend to undermine the illusion, doesn’t it.”
“Indeed, it does.”
“He’s well known, Will, but he’s a crank. Yesterday’s news, even as the former editor of the Zoist!”
“Is there anyone else who qualifies as irrelevant, lying in wait for me?”
“Joseph Baker will be on hand.”
“What in God’s name is he doing here?”
“He’s with the American and his wife. Lorenzo and Lydia. They swept in yesterday—Vernon tells me they’re looking for a house.”
“I’d heard that Lorenzo Fowler was coming to London, but didn’t know he’d be here this soon. That’s unfortunate.”
“You know what he wants.”
“Respectability,” I said. “Re-spec-ta-bil-it-y,” I repeated, articulating each syllable as Fowler always seemed to do in his public lectures, when railing against “intellectuals” in the phrenological and mesmeric worlds.
“That’s right. Spencer Hall and Dr. Elliotson are too smart to let Ann Braid lead them along, and no one listens to Dr. Forbes anymore; he’s practically become a laughingstock like poor old Vernon.”
“ʻPoor old Vernon’ may be a broken man, Johnny, but he’s more canny than most of these poseurs. One of these days, someone will turn his back on him and regret it.”
“Pray for that,” Jackson answered. “But it doesn’t solve the problem. They’re out for your head.”
“If they want my head,” I said, “they’ll have to constitute a majority—well, more than a majority. They have to decide what they would rather do, and which fox they would rather place in charge of the henhouse. But the best approach for me—for us”—I touched the rim of my cup to Jackson’s— “is to determine in advance what bone we would care to throw them. There must be some things we don’t care about.”
“What about D’Orsay? You could give him some freedom in recruiting talent from Cambridge. He’s been pushing for that for more than a year.”
“That’s a capital idea. Alex D’Orsay thinks he will take my seat away some day—let’s find out if he’s a threat, or let him fall on his face. Even Fowler might approve of that. Americans.” I snorted. “Lorenzo Fowler understands who the Chairman is. But giving D’Orsay something to do is a handsome gesture. You’re a genius, Johnny.”
“Ah, that I were. This isn’t like the old days, Will. Fifteen years ago, it was just the lecture circuit and laboring in the vineyards to find new talent. Now—”
“A lot has happened in fifteen years. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“It would make a great book. Maybe Mr. D. would like to take it on.”
“He’d have to write himself out of it. Though I’m sure that even if the average Household Words subscriber never missed him, we’d notice his absence.”
A few decades earlier, England, particularly London, had been swept up in the reform ideas contained in the People’s Charter. When most of Europe was seized by revolution, Chartism was the movement of choice in England—not just for tradesmen and workers, but for intellectuals and reformers as well.
John Vernon had been a part of the inner circle of the Committee for a half-dozen years, offering “mesmeric consultations” to the gentry from his fashionable address on Regent Street. But he had been caught in the backlash to Chartism, spending eighteen months in Newgate Prison and emerging a broken man, dying soon afterward. So went the story.
The Regent Street address was too useful and too valuable to the Committee. John Vernon had been badly done by prison, and was a shell of his former self; his debts had mounted and endangered the house—but at my urging the Committee had done something on both counts. Most people who Vernon had known considered him long dead, a sad artifact of a difficult time. The Chartist movement had largely dissipated, but he had lived on, keeping his quarters and nicely appointed drawing room on the first floor, a few houses up from Glasshouse Street.
We made our way there, walking anonymously among the bustling crowds, bundled and hunched against soot-tinged snow; the bitterly cold wind drove at us. I would have liked a more brisk pace, but Jackson could only move so fast—and I intended that we arrive together.
Let them understand, I thought to myself, that I have received my briefing.
As we approached Vernon’s rooms, I took note of the idlers on Regent Street. The bobbies moved them along regularly, keeping them from staying in one place—not that they were extremely likely to linger, given the weather. But the constables were oblivious to the true nature of a few among that crowd; they did not sense, as Jackson and I did, that those few were stoicheia: elemental spirits disguised as idle hands, itinerants, beggars—the sort of persons that respectable citizens of London walked past every day and certainly would not care to see on Regent Street. I would have disregarded them as well, but for the presence of the stoicheia—they were impossible to ignore, and I could hear their whispering voices in my mind.
Can we help you, sir? What do you want, what do you need?
Where are you going today?
Surely you can find something for us to do.
The last was plaintive, hungry, as if appealing not to intellect but to emotion. I decided that hungry was probably the right word; they must have been like Eliza Esdaile’s chthonic possessor had been, eager to pursue an agenda and consume the victim in the end.
There were almost always one or two, hoping for the chance to get inside the building (and thus within the Committee’s defenses); today there were at least six, possibly seven. One was particularly notable: a short, fairly well-dressed Levantine, who looked uncomfortable and completely out of place among the idlers.
Despite my alarm, I refused to convey any sense of concern. We went past, giving a polite nod to the doorman as we walked into the lobby.
Almost at once, the voices stopped. We brushed the worst of the snow off our overcoats and hats, and slowly climbed the stairs to the next floor.
A servant admitted us to a narrow, short hallway that led to a large drawing room. For a moment, it seemed that the voices from Regent Street had returned: at least a half-dozen conversations gave a background buzz of conversation, rising and falling like ocean waves. We gave up our outer clothing; Jackson waited as I took a moment to stand before a mirror and adjust collar and coat lapels before making my entrance.
Within seconds of my appearance, every conversation save one had stopped. Spencer Hall—slight and mildly effete—had just stopped mid-sentence in addressing Dr. Forbes, whose pugnacious face was more ruddy than usual; the scholar D’Orsay was a bit further away listening to Dr. Elliotson, who appeared to be trying to make a point; Joseph Baker and the Fowlers were over by the fireplace, beneath the looming black-draped portraits of Admiral Ross and George Combe; and Ann Braid, daughter of the famous surgeon and “debunker” James Braid, had apparently stopped a discussion with two men: one had his back turned to me, but the other was the railway engineer Richard Beamish. Miss Braid had just turned to look at the doorway—and me—with an almost palpable hostility.
The only remaining conversation—if it truly could be called a “conversation”—was taking place near the sideboard, where a familiar figure was holding forth to an audience as if he were the only speaker in the room.
“—advantage of me,” he was saying. “I cannot fault the man as a businessman, but I do not see any reason why propriety cannot be observed. It may be his publication, but I daresay no one picks up an issue of it for any reason other than to read my work. If that is not obvious to him, then he is welcome to make any money he can without me. That”—he rapped his knuckles on the sideboard, making a small army of delicate china cups rattle musically—“that is why I have founded my own magazine. It is more work, of course, but—”
At this point he seemed to notice, as if for the first time, that I had arrived. He paused theatrically in mid-gesture and converted his stance to a polite bow in my direction.
“Pray do not let me interrupt,” I said, with what I hoped was the correct minimum of sardonicism.
The other man held my gaze for just a moment, his eyes narrowing and brow pinching, then said, “I was just telling these ladies and gentlemen why I decided to quit Household Words and launch a new publication of my own.”
“Capital,” I said. “What will it be called?”
“All The Year Round,” he answered. “I think it has a certain charm, don’t you think, Reverend Davey?”
“It is an excellent choice, to be sure, Mr. Dickens.”
There was some murmur of approval. Charles Dickens was accustomed to being the most important person in the room—and in this society, at this moment, that cachet had ceased as soon as I had arrived. In the rest of the world, Dickens was respected—even revered; but here he was no more (and no less) than a wealthy patron. My comment was not necessarily backhanded or insulting.
However, in this instance, I was the center of attention. I do not know if he found it insulting, and at that moment I certainly did not care.
The great author had no response; he waited, as everyone did, for me to indicate my intentions. At last, I nodded to Dickens and turned aside to greet John Vernon, who had entered during the exchange. Jackson made his way to the other end of the room; he would want to see which way the wind was blowing.
Conversations slowly resumed, though Dickens’s little audience had dispersed. Only William Engledue remained nearby, and he and Dickens undertook a brief hushed discussion, with the Zoist’s former editor casting furtive glances my way.
“I hope there’s no danger of running out of tea and cakes, Mr. Vernon.”
“I should not think so, Reverend,” Vernon answered. He was a small, hollow-cheeked man, not quite as shabby as Jackson—but still a decade out of fashion. Most took him for a bit of a fool; but I sensed his usual, almost feral, intensity. “Those are not the appetites that concern me.”
“Jackson told me already.”
“Hmm. But did he tell you about that?” He gave a slight nod in the direction of Ann Braid, who was again in deep conversation with Beamish and a younger man—another engineer named Begys—and Alfred Higginson, an impossibly pompous surgeon from Liverpool who was forcefully making some point while making a vigorous chopping motion with his left hand.
“Not a word,” I said. “What am I looking at?”
“Well, I don’t know what Higginson has to do with it—he just barged into that little discussion. But it seems Miss Braid has suddenly taken an interest in railroad engineering. I don’t know what to make of that, but she—oh, excuse me, Doctor Elliotson, I certainly did not mean to step on your foot, sir.”
Vernon danced nimbly out of the way, winking at me. I found myself face to face with John Elliotson, a diminutive elderly gentleman, perhaps the greatest scholar and practitioner of our Art.
“Davey,” Elliotson said. After initially ignoring Vernon, he finally gave him a rather disdainful glance: the doctor, like most of our society, dismissed Vernon as a powerless piece of furniture. For his part, Vernon’s demeanor had completely changed to one of subservience and mild confusion. He slipped away, mingling with other guests.
“Elliotson. Good to see you, Doctor.”
“Spare me,” Elliotson answered. “I should tell you as a friend, Davey,” he added in a barely friendly tone, “that there is quite some dissatisfaction with the way you handled the Esdaile matter. Quite some dissatisfaction.” The little man jutted out his chin. “You are prepared to defend yourself, I assume.”
“I had thought you opposed the action.”
“Of course I did,” Elliotson said, letting his voice drop. “Killing James Esdaile would have accomplished nothing—but there were other alternatives.”
“Even worse ones.”
“Even so.”
“I intend to offer some additional explanation, if that’s what you mean by defending myself. That is what you mean, isn’t it?”
“I choose my words carefully, Davey. As you know.”
“I find that actions speak louder. Does this mean that you intend to challenge me?”
Elliotson did not look away.
After a moment he said, “You know I find politics distasteful, Committee politics even more so. And antagonizing Mr. Dickens is hardly necessary, either. His money helps provide for a lot of this. But I thought you might like to know that you are on unsteady ground.”
“You think so, do you?”
I was not fond of Elliotson, though I respected his genius; but as one of the most senior members of the Committee, his opinions and his insights carried weight. He and Dickens were fast friends, and Elliotson had brought him into our society twenty years ago. The doctor was, in many ways, the father of the English mesmerist movement—he had pioneered many of the methods and techniques in regular use by the Committee—which had, after all, been originally empanelled to investigate Elliotson’s claims for the Art.
“I shall throw back at you what you constantly preach!” Elliotson said at last. “Over my objections, I might add, you were assigned a task enjoying the full confidence of your colleagues. You bollocksed the damn thing up.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Most of us do.”
“Most,” I said. “Isn’t Esdaile dead?”
“Well, yes. As I say, not that it accomplishes anything. Even so, you didn’t do it—he apparently committed suicide, from what I hear. And you didn’t obtain your little trumpery, did you? Or learn where Esdaile put it?”
“I did not. I learned a great deal else, but not the location of the statue. Which, incidentally, I will thank you not to demean, sir. It may be much more important than any of us realized.”
“I doubt it. But we did not expect his—we did not expect her to remain, and yet she appears to be his ‘surviving widow.’ I trust that you have not become distracted in any way.”
I considered my response. At sixty-eight, John Elliotson was among the oldest members in the room, and deserved—and expected—respect, no matter how he conducted himself.
Your time has come and gone, I thought, but let it be.