Glass shattered. A woman screamed. Rachel looked up from the book she was trying to read. Outside in the hallway footsteps hurried past the closed study door. It had just gone noon and Rachel, without an appetite, was alone trying to read without success. Too much on her mind. Dr. Paracelsus and his miracles. Justin. She wore his ring again, the one modelled on that given Lord Essex by Queen Elizabeth.
And she thought of Eddy. Always Eddy.
“Not up here, she ain’t!” A man’s gruff voice came from the top of the stairs.
“Then find the bloody bitch, you stupid bugger! Find her!” The voice of a man not too far from the study door. Neither man was one of her servants. None of them would talk in such disgusting fashion.
She put the book down on the arm of her chair, crossed the study and opened the door.
Hamlet Sproul looked at her. Spitting tobacco juice on the rug, he brought his right arm up, gigantic bowie knife in his fist, then placed the arm around Rachel’s neck, yanking her close to him. She cringed, too paralyzed with fear to scream. “You-you are hurting me!”
“I mean to.” She felt his beard scrape her face and she smelled tobacco and the stink of him and from the corner of her eye she saw the wildness in his bloodshot green eyes.
Sproul whispered. “You cannot give me back what I have lost, so I take what you have and that is your life.”
Rachel heard them looting the house, terrorizing the servants.
Sproul leaned back his head and shouted, “I have her! I have her! Let us be gone from here!”
To Rachel, he said, “Resist and you die here. At best I promise you a little more life but that is all you shall get from Hamlet Sproul, miss.”
Rachel tried to pull away from him. He slapped her hard, driving her into the wall. Then he shoved her ahead of him and she tripped over a body in her way, falling to the floor. When she pushed herself into a sitting position, her hands were wet and sticky with blood. She screamed and Hamlet Sproul laughed.
“And so it begins, dear lady. But you do not die that easily, not until I have had me time with you. Then death will come as a mercy and you will be grateful for it, I assure you.”
He yanked her to her feet. Throughout the house, his men looted swiftly, taking the spoils they had been promised. Sproul had his, now let them get theirs and then it was back to Five Points where no man dare enter, not the police, not the goddam army. Poe’s lady friend would be taken there and never leave, which was her problem. Sproul’s men had only the problem of taking as much loot as they could carry.
TWENTY-SIX
Poe rubbed his unshaven chin. “The practice of magic, Mr. Figg, of sorcery, witchcraft, devil worship and related occult sciences begins with the caveman. It is as old as time. When dinosaurs roamed the earth and men ate their meat raw, blood red and steaming from the carcasses of beasts no longer present in nature’s order, humanity believed in magic, in what has been described as hidden knowledge. You say to me that Jonathan is missing the little fingers on both hands.”
“That ‘e is.”
“On the walls of caves in France and Africa have been found imprints of mutilated hands, imprints dating back to the Pleistocene period, a pause between two ice ages.”
“Older than me gran lived to be.”
Poe’s smile was weak. “I dare say. The hands had first been dipped in some colored substance, then pressed against the cave wall. Joints from fingers, even entire fingers were missing. These mutilations, performed with a stone knife, were offerings to prevent death and keep away evil. We know the truth of this for the custom is still with us in these modern times. Such imprints are to be found in the mosques of Mohammedans in India. The removal of fingers as a method of keeping away both death and disease is also a custom among the Bushman tribes of South Africa, Australia and certain tribes of North American Indians.”
Figg, a half-filled bowl of soup in two hands, paused with the bowl in front of his face. “You sayin’ that Jonathan ain’t got ’is little fingers ‘cause he gave ’em away to some demon?”
“That is correct.”
Mrs. Marie Clemm, Poe’s mother-in-law, inhaled sharply, eyebrows going up, jaw dropping down. “Oh my. Eddy, this is unpleasant to hear.”
However, Poe noticed that she made no move to leave the dinner table.
Tonight in Poe cottage there was a guest-Pierce James Figg, who drank his soup from a bowl-and Mrs. Clemm wanted to enjoy his company.
“Yes, dear Muddy, most unpleasant.” Poe reached across the table to gently pat her large hand. Dearest Muddy. Now she was the mother he needed, the companion and true friend he depended on for sympathy and encouragement. At sixty years old, she was still strong, tall with white hair and a face as plain as unvarnished wood. She wore her one dress, a threadbare, black garment always kept clean and presentable, a minor miracle. It was Poe’s shame and disappointment that he was too poor to give her a better life; it was his good fortune that she was loyal and believed in him.
Poe said, “Please excuse our sad table, Mr. Figg. My fortunes are at their usual low ebb and I cannot afford to dine any better than the lowliest immigrant.”
Figg put down his bowl. “Mr. Poe, the worms would be dinin’ on me tonight, if you had not saved me life. This ‘ere soup and bread tastes just fine, thankin’ you much.”
Poe nodded. “You have performed a similar service for me, sir.” Ironic, he thought, thinking back to the stable where he’d first seen Figg. He’d come down from above, looking more like a gargoyle than an angel and he delivered me from the hands of mine enemies. Last night, while only a millimeter short of being paralytic drunk, I delivered him. And now for the first time since meeting we speak to one another as men, not as antagonist and opponent.
Poe, having saved Figg’s life, sensed the boxer’s increasing respect for him. No more naked and undisguised contempt between the two men; contempt seemed to have slipped from their manner with almost miraculous ease. Figg, Poe noticed, was independent as opposed to surly, a man lacking pretense and pomposity. The boxer was a man of morals and principles, at home with thieves and kings, yet retaining his own integrity and sense of worth. Figg, like Poe, was his own man.
True, Figg was no formal scholar and if he could read, he undoubtedly did so by moving his lips and drawing his finger slowly across the page. Yet despite remaining areas of disagreement between the two men (there were more than a few), Poe reluctantly admitted to himself-he dared not admit it to others-that he was pleased and gratified by Figg’s silent, unspoken respect, this same Figg who not too long ago, Poe had considered as monumentally stupid and bordering on the sub-human.
Poe had told Muddy that the gas which had almost killed Figg last night at the Hotel Astor had also made Poe ill to the point of collapse. Neither he nor Figg had added that two glasses of wine prior to inhaling the gas had almost destroyed Poe’s ability to think, walk, speak and function in any capacity whatsoever. How he’d managed to save Figg’s life eluded him.
Neither gas nor cheap wine were a boost to the health of a man whose thirty-nine years on earth had consisted of bad health in both body and mind, who had been engaged in a lifelong and savage struggle for bread and had thus been doomed to soul destroying poverty, along with lacerations of the mind, heart and soul. Poe needed a day’s rest in his small Fordham cottage and Figg had taken him there on a train which had sped dangerously across ill-laid tracks, somehow managing to avoid an accident, a miracle considering the poor safety record on nineteenth-century American trains.
Poe had slept, a sleep not entirely free from personal demons but it was badly needed rest and the smell and taste of gas had eventually left him. At Muddy’s insistence, he’d eaten a handful or two of food, not enough to cover his protruding ribs with flesh, but he’d eaten. Then it was sleep once more and when he’d awakened Figg had been looking down at him; the boxer seemed surprised that Poe was still lingering in this world instead of floating somewhere in the next.