Andrew understood that these words were the coachman’s last farewell; that this was the old fellow’s only way of saying goodbye to him – embracing him was a risk he appeared unwilling to take. With a heavy heart, he watched that stout, resolute man, to whom he would have had to relinquish the role of master if they had ever been stranded on a desert island, clamber back on to the brougham and urge on the horses, leaving only an echo of hoofs as the carriage was swallowed by the fog that spread through the London streets like muddy foam. It struck him as odd that the only person to whom he had said goodbye before killing himself should be the coachman, not his parents or his cousin Charles. Life was full of such ironies.
That was exactly what Harold Barker was thinking as he drove the horses down Dorset Street, looking for the way out of that accursed neighbourhood, where life was not worth thruppence. But for his father’s determination to pluck him from poverty and secure him a job as a coachman, he might have been one more among the hordes of wretched souls scraping an existence in this gangrenous patch of London. Yes, that surly old drunk had hurled him into a series of jobs that had ended at the coach house of the illustrious William Harrington, in whose service he had spent half his life. But they had been peaceful years. He could admit as much when he was taking stock of his life in the early hours after his chores were done and his masters were asleep; peaceful years in which he had taken a wife and fathered two healthy children, one of whom was employed as a gardener by Mr Harrington.
The good fortune that had allowed him to forge a different life from the one he had believed was his lot enabled him now to look upon the wretched souls of Whitechapel with a degree of objectivity and compassion. Harold had been obliged to go to Whitechapel more often than he would have liked when ferrying his master there that terrible autumn eight years ago, a period when even the sky seemed at times to ooze blood. He had read in the newspapers about what had happened in that warren of Godforsaken streets, but also he had seen it reflected in his master’s eyes.
He knew now that the young master had never recovered, that those reckless excursions to pubs and brothels, on which his cousin Charles had dragged them both (Harold had been obliged to remain in the carriage, shivering with cold), had not succeeded in driving the terror from his eyes. And that night young Harrington had appeared ready to lay down his arms, to surrender to an enemy who had proved invincible. Hadn’t that bulge in his pocket looked suspiciously like a firearm? But what could Harold do? Should he turn around and try to stop him? Should a servant step in to alter his master’s destiny?
Harold Barker shook his head. Maybe he was imagining things, he thought, and the young man simply wanted to spend the night in that haunted room, safe with a gun in his pocket.
He left off his uncomfortable broodings when he glimpsed a familiar equipage coming out of the fog towards him. It was the Winslow family carriage, and the bundled-up figure on the box was almost certainly Edward Rush, one of their coachmen. To judge from the way he slowed the horses, Rush appeared to have recognised him, too. Harold nodded a silent greeting to his colleague, before directing his gaze to the occupant of the vehicle. For a split second he and young Charles Winslow stared solemnly at one another. They did not say a word.
‘Faster, Edward,’ Charles ordered his driver, tapping the roof of the carriage with the knob of his cane.
Harold watched with relief as they vanished into the fog in the direction of the Miller’s Court flats. He was not needed now. He only hoped that young Winslow would arrive in time. He would have liked to stay and see how the affair ended, but he had an order to carry out – although he fancied it had been given him by a dead man – so he urged the horses on, and found his way out of that dread neighbourhood where life (I apologise for the repetition, but the same thought occurred to Harold twice) was not worth thruppence.
Admittedly, the expression sums up the area’s peculiarity very accurately, and we probably could not hope for a more profound appraisal from a coachman. However, although his life is worthy of recounting – as are all lives upon close scrutiny – the coachman Barker is not a relevant character in this story. Others may choose to write about it and will no doubt find plenty of material to endow it with the emotion every good story requires – I am thinking of the time he met Rebecca, his wife, or the hilarious incident involving a ferret and a rake – but that is not my purpose here.
And so let us leave Harold – whose reappearance at some point in this tale I cannot vouch for, because a whole host of characters will pass through it and I can’t be expected to remember every one of their faces – and return to Andrew, who at this very moment is crossing the arched entrance to Miller’s Court and walking up the muddy stone path to number thirteen while he rummages in his coat pocket for the key.
After stumbling around in the dark for a time he found the room, and paused before the door in an attitude that anyone seeing him from a neighbouring window would have taken for incongruous reverence. But for Andrew that room was infinitely more than some wretched lair where people who hadn’t a penny to their name took refuge. He had not been back there since that fateful night, although he had paid to keep everything exactly as it had been, exactly as it still was inside his head. Every month for the past eight years he had sent one of his servants to pay the rent, so that nobody could live there: if he ever went back he did not want to find traces of anyone but Marie. The few pennies were to him a drop in the ocean, and Mr McCarthy had been delighted that a wealthy gentleman and obvious rake should want to rent that hovel indefinitely – after what had taken place within its four walls he very much doubted that anybody would be brave enough to sleep there.
Andrew had always known he would come back, that the ceremony he was about to perform could not have been carried out anywhere else.
He opened the door and mournfully cast an eye around the room. It was a tiny space, scarcely more sophisticated than a barn, with flaking walls and a few sticks of battered furniture, including a dilapidated bed, a grimy mirror, a crumbling fireplace and a couple of chairs that might fall apart if a fly landed on them. He felt a renewed sense of amazement that life could take place somewhere like this. Yet had he not known more happiness in this room than in the luxurious Harrington mansion? If, as he had read somewhere, every man’s paradise was in a different place, his was undoubtedly here. He had reached it guided not by a map, charting rivers and valleys, but by kisses and caresses.
And it was a caress, this time an icy one on the nape of his neck, which drew his attention to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to fix the broken window to the left of the door. What would have been the point? McCarthy belonged to that class of people whose motto was to work as little as possible, and had Andrew reproached him for not replacing the pane he would have argued that, since Mr Harrington had requested everything be kept just as it was, he had assumed that included the window glass. Andrew sighed. He could see nothing with which to plug the hole and decided to kill himself in his hat and coat.
He sat down on one of the rickety chairs, reached into his pocket for the gun and carefully unfolded the cloth, as if he were performing a sacrament. The Colt gleamed in the moonlight that filtered weakly through the small, grimy window.
He stroked the weapon as though it were a cat curled up in his lap and let Marie’s smile wash over him once more. Andrew was always surprised that his memories retained the vibrancy, like fresh roses, of those first days. He remembered everything so vividly, as though no eight-year gap stretched between them, and at times his memories seemed even more beautiful than the real events. What mysterious alchemy could make these imitations appear more vivid than the real thing? The answer was obvious: the passage of time. It transformed the volatile present into a finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas that was always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes, and only made sense when one stepped far enough away to admire it as a whole.
Chapter II
The first time their eyes had met, she was not even there. Andrew had fallen in love with Marie without needing to have her in front of him, and to him this was as romantic as it was paradoxical. The event had occurred at his uncle’s mansion in Queen’s Gate, opposite the Natural History Museum, a place Andrew had always thought of as his second home. He and his cousin were the same age, and had almost