“Well, I tried, but — ”
“Let me finish. That was my impression then, but as I listened to your report to Sir John, I was struck by what you had accomplished with your investigation. You’d made it your own. You brought important information to him. He knows it, and will use it, though he would not let you see that.”
“But why?” I interjected. “Why is he so guarded with me? Why will he show no enthusiasm — no satisfaction even — for what I bring him? No matter what it may be, he always gives me the feeling that somehow I have fallen short. Wasn’t it so today?”
He conceded it was so. But then he continued: “I had a teacher at the University of Vienna, a teacher of anatomy, which for one who wishes to be a surgeon, is probably the body of knowledge most important of all. His name was Grabermann, which translates roughly as gravedigger, if I’m not mistaken. In any case, I was quite certain that he was digging my grave for me. Though I tried to please him, studied tirelessly for his lectures, and answered all his questions correctly, I was constantly exposed to the bite of his sarcasm. He never accepted what I had to say without some belittling comment, and sometimes such were tossed out quite gratuitously. His object? Well, I never could quite grasp what was his object. And so, you can imagine my surprise when I heard from one of my friends, also a medical student, that he had heard our Professor Grabermann commending me to another member of the medical faculty as ‘the most knowledgeable and promising of all his students.’ I was astonished, so much so that when his course of lectures in anatomy was done, I went to him and asked him how I might reconcile his treatment of me with his opinion of me. He thought that very bold and said so, but because it was bold he responded. ‘My dear young fellow,’ said he to me, ‘I kept returning to you for answers to my questions for I could be sure that you would give me the right answers. Yet I could tell that you wished most of all to please me with the answers. You sought my approval, where as my personal approval had nothing to do with the subject of anatomy, nothing at all. And so, Herr Donnelly, I derided you, made sport of you before the class so that you might understand that anatomy was all-important and my approval, nothing.’ “
He peered at me. There was something challenging in his look.
I said to him, “I think I understand, sir.”
“Do you? Well, let me put it plain. I think you are more interested in pleasing Sir John than you should be, or you need to be. Sir John, on the other hand, has noted this, and he seems to withhold his approval for just that reason. He wants you to — ”
Just then the door did interrupt us. Annie was on the other side, pushing against it, returning from Mr. Tolliver’s stall in Covent Garden with a cut of meat judged worthy. Having bumped us out of the way with the door, she begged pardon and hurried past. Something seemed to be troubling her.
Mr. Donnelly and I did not resume our talk. With Annie gone, he held the door open for himself and smiled a goodbye smile at me. “Well, I’ve talked quite enough,” said he in farewell. “Let us leave it that you’re doing well, very well. Don’t worry that Sir John may not be pleased. Please yourself.”
And having said what he had intended, he departed, leaving me to reflect upon it.
The dinner, which was intended as something of a celebration, seemed hardly that, for Annie was ominously quiet throughout. She had cooked with her usual skill, no doubt of that — the beef roast that she had selected was perfectly prepared, with abundant dripping for the potatoes and carrots. Yet our group, which Sir John called his “family, ” was such that when one member was downcast or out of sorts he (or in this case, she) could bring down the rest. Not even the bottle of claret that Sir John had opened helped much to enliven the feast.
When we were done, Annie cleared the table and volunteered to do the washing up. Though Lady Fielding at first offered objections — (“She’s done enough cooking the meal, don’t you think?”) — Sir John overrode them and sent Clarissa and me down to the cellar in search of John Abernathy.
“Who is this fellow, Abernathy? ” she asked, eager to hear the worst. “How many did he murder?”
“Perhaps none, or so he claimed. Yet he was a dedicated and most active thief; what Bunkins would call ‘a village hustler,’ always on the scamp.”
“Ah, that’s flash-talk, surely. You must teach it me.”
Just then I threw open the door to the cellar. The profound darkness before us was rather intimidating, even to me; it inspired a wail of dismay from her.
“Oh, Jeremy,” said she, “must we? I had forgotten how frightening it can be down there. There are rats — or some such creatures that patter about in the dark.”
“Well, you must have been down there quite some time — long enough to change the files around, as I understand.”
“Yes, but I was with Annie most of the time — no insult to you intended, Jeremy — and she propped the door open.”
“Well, I can do that,” said I, and set about to do so. “And I’ve got a lighted candle. Here, I’ll light yours for you. That should give us as much as we need.”
And so, thus equipped, we descended the stairs, I in the lead, Clarissa behind, and each of us bearing candles burning bright; the open door also shed a bit of light below, but only a bit, for darkness had long since fallen on London.
Clarissa’s improvement of the filing system used by the Bow Street Court was simple enough, though there could be no doubt that it had made it much easier to find specific cases. Previously, individual cases were simply filed under the date upon which they were heard. Clarissa’s innovation was simply to list under the date the names of all those whose cases were inside the date folder; it was no longer necessary to look inside each folder to see which cases had been heard upon that day. It was a wonder to me that the files had not been changed in this way long before. That suggested to me what I had long suspected: that the files were very seldom consulted; for the most part, they were stored and forgotten.
In this way, Clarissa and I were able to go quickly through the files for 1760, the year designated by Maude Bleeker as the one in which her Johnny Skylark appeared before Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Court.
“What did you say this fellow’s name was?” Clarissa called to me from one end of the year’s files.
“John Abernathy.”
“I have it here,” said she, “ — tried on September 27th.”
“Really? Why, that was indeed quickly done.” Working from the beginning of the year 1760, I had myself only reached the middle of March.
“Shall I remove the case file from the folder?”
“No, I think not. We — what happened?”
What happened was this: Either I had not propped the door properly, or someone had, out of ignorance or malice, kicked away the brick that I had used. The door shut of a sudden with a great bang, thus creating a great draft which swept down the stairs and blew out our candles, plunging the cellar into complete darkness.
A scream rose in her throat, which she barely managed to stifle. She made her way across the few steps that separated us. “Yes,” said she, “what did happen?”
I started to explain when a sudden scurrying of tiny animal feet sounded quite near to us. Just as sudden I ended my explanation, that I might better listen. Clarissa, on the other hand, let forth the scream she had only moments before stifled. She stood so close and screamed so loud that I was near deafened. Then did she throw her arms about me, pressing herself to me tight, squeezing me with all her strength, which was considerable. (She was no longer the frail little runaway from the Lichfield poorhouse.)
“Come along,” said I, “let go, and we shall find the stairway.”
“I’m afraid,” said she. “I do so hate those things.”