“Am I to assume that this represents your mind functioning at its subtle best?”
“Squire, assume that you are still livin’ and that you are a most fortunate gent.”
“’Let there be light! said God, and there was light!’’ Let there be blood! says man, and there’s a sea.'” Poe snorted. “Before you ask, it is a quote from Lord Byron, a poet of some note.”
Figg removed his top hat, running a thick hand over his shaven skull. “Fancied hisself a boxer, Byron did. Never saw a gent what pulled more ladies. Everytime I meets him, he has three or four ladies-”
Poe’s voice was barely a whisper. “You met Byron?”
Figg looked out of his side of the cab at the strolling nighttime crowds. “Tried teachin’ him a wee bit of boxin’, but he had that club foot and he was always eatin’ boiled potatoes drowned in vinegar to give him that pale complexion he thought the ladies all loved, so he didn’t have the strength to-”
“You met Byron?” The English poet, dead for twenty-four years, had been the most dashing and romantic figure of his time, the most controversial poet to emerge from England in this century and he had been a major influence on Poe.
“I see you are impressed, squire. Yes, I met him and a right sorry lot he was, too. Him and me was both young men but he was throwin’ away his life chasin’ the ladies or lettin’ them chase him and he owed money and he gets hisself into some kind of scandal concernin’ his half-sister.” Figg shook his head sadly. “Wasted life, if you ask me. Dies in Greece fightin’ somebody else’s war. Damn stupid, I say.”
“A glorious way to die,” said Poe, eyes on Figg.
“Squire, we all are goin’ to end up as food for the worms but I think it’s better to die fightin’ for somethin’ that’s your own, get me meanin’?”
Poe nodded. This ape sitting beside him with the bulldog face had actually met Byron. And Dickens. Thackeray. Carlyle. Tennyson. And damn little of it had rubbed off, it appeared. He was still rude, crude and not one to take to the palace. Change that. He had been to the palace. Poe shook his head.
“Mr. Figg? Mr. Figg?”
But Figg had slumped down in his seat, top hat covering his face.
“Gots to gets me beauty nap when I can squire, when I can. Long night in front. From the Irishman it’s back to them Renaissance travellin’ players. Wake me when we gets where we’re goin’.”
Poe wanted to talk about Byron and Figg wanted to sleep. The poet sighed. The ape sleeps in ignorance of the greatness around him. He absorbs it not. Surely God is a buffoon to have created so many buffoons in his image.
Poe, shivering in his greatcoat, licked his lips and thought of the taste of gin. And rum. And wine. He hadn’t had a drink in almost two days. Forty-eight hours. His mouth tasted of ashes yet his head felt clear and he was functioning. But he was writing little and giving no thought to his job at the Evening Mirror, or the fifty cents a page he earned there for scribbling anything that came to mind. He smiled. No money, no liquor which was not unusual. Rachel. The thought of her was enough. He smiled again.
The cabdriver flicked the whip and both horses strained against their harnesses. Poe breathed in the cool night air and thought of Jonathan, demons and Dearborn Lapham. And the very dead, still immersed in ice somewhere on this stinking island, Justin Coltman.
TWENTY-ONE
HAMLET SPROUL SAT on the floor, Ida Sairs’ cold hand pressed against his cheek. He had never known such terrible sorrow in all his life. He wept, moaned, rocked back and forth and he vowed revenge.
Jonathan. Mr. Poe. Yes, even the Englishman with the ugly bulldog face, who had climbed down the ladder to kill Chopback and Isaac Bard. Him, too. They would all die for what had happened here this night. Hamlet Sproul would have his revenge for the killing of his boys and Ida. Dear little Ida, who had hurt no man and who had been hurt by all men. Ida, who had brought a welcomed sweetness into the hard life of Hamlet Sproul.
He screamed at the top of his voice, a wordless cry torn deep from his pained soul.
What kind of beast would carve the heart and liver from small boys and a gentle woman? And burn them.
Jonathan. With help from that bastard Poe. This was his vengeance for trying to kill him in the stable. To do this to a woman-
Woman. Poe had a woman. Yes, that was it! Let him feel this same unholy agony that was tearing apart Hamlet Sproul. Let Poe weep and shriek for his dead woman. Oh yes, Poe would die and so would Mr. Ugly Bulldog. And Jonathan. That would not be easy, but anything could be done if a man put his whole self on it and Hamlet Sproul had every reason in the world to put his whole self on killing Jonathan.
He squeezed Ida Sairs’ cold hand again, kissing it and tasting the salt of his own tears. On her dead head and that of his two sons, he vowed to kill Rachel Coltman as soon as possible. And her death would be most unpleasant.
TWENTY-TWO
Five points.
Figg doubted that the devil himself would have the nerve to show his horned head in this bit of hell. The cabdriver, strong on self-preservation, had stopped on the edge of the slum, refusing to go further. So it was step down into mud shoe-top high and with Poe as guide, trek through narrow streets and alleys lacking all gaslight. There was light, if you could call it that. A stub of a candle flickering in a window lacking all glass. A lantern in the hands of passing, hard-faced strangers. A burning end of a cigar in the mouth of a filthy whore calling from a doorway. Small bonfires of trash in the streets where adults and children in rags warmed their hands, their dirty faces blank with despair. The cold night couldn’t hide the stink; nothing but foul air everywhere. Figg walked past rotting tenements worse than anything to be found in London’s Seven Dials slum or even The Holy Land. He and Poe brushed past men, women and children wrapped in dirt-encrusted rags, most of them drunk and surly, cursing each other and anyone unfortunate enough to be near them. Children fought each other over the last few drops in a whiskey bottle. There was less hope here than in the breast of a man standing on a scaffold with a rope around his neck.
And Figg knew what a man’s life wasn’t worth a farthing in Five Points. Keep your eyes open and your powder dry. Figg’s hands were in his pockets around the butts of his two pocket flintlocks. Lord bless and keep the gunsmith.
He and Poe reached the Louvre.
Inside the smell of oil from lamps attached to wagon wheels hanging from the ceiling was heavy in the air. Figg smelled whiskey and sweat from the crowd of people packed on the dance floor and sitting on long wooden benches against the wall. The dance hall resembled a dark tunnel filled with men and women clutching each other and dancing crude polkas and waltzes, the men bearded and chewing tobacco, the women with pinched, somber faces and bad teeth.
Harp, drum and trumpet furnished the music. A tiny woman with a sad face gently plucked the harp strings, her eyes closed as though imagining herself to be somewhere else. The trumpet player was a lad who Figg guessed to be no older than fourteen. From the sounds of him, he hadn’t had the instrument to his lips more than a few times in his life. The drummer was old, small, bald and had only one arm. Pounds that bleedin’ drum like he was shoeing a horse, thought Figg, hands still in his pockets.
He and Poe found a seat on the bench, the wall to their backs which Figg preferred. He turned to Poe. “Ain’t no tables ‘ere.”
“One comes here to dance rather than converse.”