“We’ll walk a bit now, and I’ll see if you’re one that I like enough.”
“You among all the birds can pick and choose,” I said. “Perhaps my luck is to be the chosen tonight.”
We fell into an easy rhythm, and for a second, as we passed along the way, I saw us as a perfect couple, he of property, she of beauty, both of style and wit and grace, and thought how London rewards such worthies, and how at a certain point I was convinced, goddess on arm, that such was my own destiny. Alas, and bitterly, it was not to be, and that outcome carried with it the mallet of melancholy. But this melancholy, like a headache, passed as we approached the structure around which I had planned tonight’s infamy, and in time we came under the shadow, had there been a sun or a moon bright and well placed enough, of that large entity.
She stopped as if she had made up her mind. “You smell good,” she said. “If it’s something you’d be wanting, I could provide, I think, if only for my dying mother.”
“I am happy to keep Mum alive another night or so.”
“And it’s not without considerable cost. I’m told I’m selling something above common, far above common.”
“Far, far above common.”
“I don’t do this all the time, you understand.”
“Nor I. It’ll be an adventure for both of us. Did I hear a figure mentioned?”
“Five, I think, would put me in the mind.”
Five! And it wasn’t pence she was talking but shillings. Good Christ, she thought highly of herself. But she’d read my want, my cleanliness, my prosperity, liked my smell since I’d bathed in anticipation, so she’d set the market to the customer. It was pure Bentham.
“That lightens my purse considerably,” I said. “But I shall happily meet the tariff on the condition that, for our privacy, it’s the building beyond us that contains our assignation. Having you in it makes it worth the five. In fact, I’ll give you six, my dear.”
She looked, reading the place up and down. It was a fragile moment, for some would panic at the prospect and others blush. But this Juliet was a bold young woman. “Six, then, for the Church.”
I pulled a crown from my pocket and fished the coinage of the rest and pressed it all into her hand. She tucked it in some pouch beneath her petticoats. “Then leave us proceed, sir,” she said.
We advanced up the stone walk. The spire of St. Botolph’s rose above us. It was not the loveliest church in London, or even Whitechapel, appearing prosaic next to the Methodist adoration of deity that propelled Christchurch to such height and glory, but it was not without its merits. It had been called the prostitute’s church, for it was on an island, surrounded on four sides by street or walk, and they could be in constant orbit and impervious to the reach of the rozzers. Its steeple was a pile of size-descending boxes, as a child might assemble from blocks of wood, each with its note of decoration, one being a Roman clock, another a square window, the third an arched window of louvers, and above that a cupola festooned in urns of some sort. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t lovely at all, and it was rather close to Mitre Square, which lay a bit down the street that we had just left. Still, I hadn’t come for the sightseeing, as there wasn’t much of a sight to see. I had come for the blasphemy.
We stood in the shadow of the great thing, though at that hour there was no shadow, and after a second, we rose up the steps and entered, there to be greeted by an Anglican goodbody of minor capacity, who greeted us with a nod, saw that we were of bourgeois and not of street, and let us pass, as would happen in any church, town, city, pub, restaurant, fancy house, factory, or office in Britain, so enamored of the bourgeois was this country.
Did I feel God’s presence? Since there is no God, I could not, don’t you see? If there were, surely He would send a bolt from the blue to electrify me into bacon grease before letting me enter His house holding in mind what I held in mind. Not being there, He did nothing. We entered the nave and walked down the center aisle, feeling the marble serenity engulf us, hearing our footsteps echo against the polished stone flooring. We could see the crossing ahead under the circular gulf that allowed the steeple, saw the lectern to the right at the epistle side of the holy space, and turned left from the altar—rather prim, I might add, lacking the theatricality of the papist version—and headed into the north transept, where indeed there was privacy. It was dark, the stone carried a bit of the night’s chill, and from here the ever burning candles had distilled their light to flickering on the stone wall.
We stopped. We looked. All was quiet; no other churchgoers interrupted our concentration. It was the time. It was the place.
“Forward, or would you be of the backward persuasion, sir?”
“Why, it is your angel’s face that I’m paying for, dear girl, as all men and all women are pretty much the same to the anterior. I need to see it as I work and enjoy its passion, for its passion will enable my passion.”
“Then I’ll arrange meself as you yourself make ready.”
She smiled, showing perfect white pearls, and I do believe a trace of anticipation leaked from her large gray eyes. She was not scared, she was not quick, she was not desperate, she smelled of flowers and powdered sugar, her breath was sweet as I neared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jeb’s Memoir
First I had to sell Mr. O’Connor on letting me take a few days off to work on some “ideas.”
“Ideas?” he said. “Heaven forfend reporters start having ideas.”
“Sir, I have made acquaintance with a brilliant man. I feel he may have insights of some help. I would be remiss if I did not pursue them. And the paper will be to the profit if he is even half correct.”
“Gad, professors now. Careful he doesn’t try to slip his woodpecker into your bum, though even a homosexualist would be hard pressed to find such a scrawny rat as you worth a tup. Still, they do have odd tastes.”
“Sir, I assure you, no such possibility exists.”
“Who would this genius be?”
I told him.
“That one? Then it’s your sister’s bum I’d worry about, give him that much.”
“You know Professor Dare?”
“A few years ago, I played the bright London scene, trying to scare up investors for this enterprise. At that time, I saw him quite a bit with a lovely girl on his arm. Handsome couple they were, quite mysterious but also somewhat enjoying their mystery. I do remember a reception at an embassy one night, they were much amused by some Hungarian professor who kept chasing the gal about, so smitten he was. I could see they enjoyed the game, and the little Magyar was hopeless in his romantic silliness. It was like watching a terrier attempt to mount a Great Dane. So no, he is a brilliant man, that I give you, and a charmer, too. I’d just, as principle among them folk, be sure to keep my hand on my wallet.”
After receiving that lukewarm blessing, I was off, with the proviso that if I heard of another Jack action, I’d find a telephone cabinet, get the details, and decamp posthaste.
But disappointment lurked ahead. It turned out rather too swiftly that I was no detective. I could make no headway, not with my sister Lucy trilling away in the studio and Mother watching me like a hawk about to pounce upon and devour a mouse. I retreated to my old haunting grounds, the reading room of the British Library, thinking its intellectual solemnity might inspire or provoke me.
Alas, even surrounded by the ghosts of Britain’s great writers and thinkers, I was all dried out. I was a pickle absent the brine, a desiccated raisin. No ferment, no bubbles, whatever inappropriate metaphor one could create, they all applied to me. My brain was bereft of electricity. I tried many things: I wrote on a big yellow tablet in Pitman’s shorthand “Jack” and then listed at speed all the theories I had heard from both high and low, from copper and reporter, from harlot and poet, and all seemed gibberish. I thought one might inspire something, but it didn’t. How did he move, how did he disappear, what were his attributes? Whatever I tried, my dim mind could not find its genius, if it had any; in the end, it merely revealed its fraudulence. My performance suffered from the want of energy and impetus.