‘That’s Lobsang for you. He was always quick off the mark.’ Joshua rummaged through his memory. ‘He told me about some of it. Percy Blakeney. Thomas the Rhymer. Some kind of small-time thief called the Passover—’
‘His agents found traces of him in Somerset, yes. And some of the individuals Lobsang identified led me, one way or another, to the conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy?’
‘Joshua, I found roots of all this going back to the nineteenth century. There was an incident in 1871 when the official organization, such as it was, was terminated.’
‘What organization?’
‘Steppers, Joshua. A kind of league of natural steppers. At that time they called themselves the Knights of Discorporea. They’d been operating for some decades before they were shut down. The surviving records were judged to be of scientific interest and were stuffed down here rather than being destroyed – luckily for us. But there was one more significant meeting, in 1895. And that’s where the modern world was shaped – and your own life.
‘All of that explains why your father did what he did. Doesn’t justify it, doesn’t excuse it, and there can be no forgiveness for the way he abandoned your mother. But it does explain it. I will tell you all you want to know – well, all I can – but I wanted you to see this final piece of the jigsaw for yourself.’
‘I don’t understand any of this, Nelson.’
‘Read this.’ And he tapped the volume on the table.
Joshua pulled off his gloves and, reluctantly, picked up the book. Leather-bound and with smooth, creamy paper within, it must have been expensive once. He opened the cover to reveal a page bearing an inscription in an elegant but hard-to-decipher copperplate handwriting. He read the inscription, and his breath, which had been frosting in the cold air, caught in his throat.
MY ELUSIVE LIFE
BEING A FULL ACCOUNT
BY
LUIS R. VALIENTÉ, ESQ.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY BELOVED FAMILY
‘Take your time,’ Nelson said. ‘We can stay here as long as you need.’
34
THE CARD, INVITING Luis to lunch at the Drunken Clam in Lambeth, was dated the previous day – October 15 1895 – and was anonymous, signed only as by a ‘fellow traveller’.
Of course it was from Oswald Hackett. Even a quarter-century after that fateful encounter with Radcliffe in the dungeons of Windsor Castle, no matter how he had hidden his past – even to the extent of changing the family name – Luis had always known that Hackett would be able to find him, that such a summons would come. That his past would catch up with him some day.
And of course he felt compelled to attend.
It wasn’t hard to get away. Since the death of his wife Luis had lived alone, and his son and daughter, both grown, had long flown the nest, Ella to a comfortable marriage, Robert to take up engineering for which he showed an unusual aptitude, marrying somewhat later in his life. So Luis travelled to London by train from Bristol, where his financial interest in various steamship companies was based – controlled by means of a layer of company holdings under a false identity, and with no trail back to initial investments under his own name before Radcliffe’s attempted entrapment of the Waltzers in 1871.
Indeed, Hackett had insisted that their birth names should not be used at this meeting. Luis had even considered going in disguise, cropping his whiskers or shaving his head or some such, but when he contemplated the prospect it seemed an absurdity for a man in his seventies. No, he was going to London for lunch with old friends at the Drunken Clam, and he’d defy any man who challenged him otherwise.
And if Radcliffe’s successors caught up with him at last, then to the devil with it all, for he’d had enough of skulking.
His train was delayed.
And then, once he’d arrived in London, he couldn’t resist a stroll around some of his old haunts. Oxford Street was now a grand thoroughfare lined with fine, spacious shops; Fleet Street a medieval alley chock full of traffic; Covent Garden Market crowded with more than a thousand donkey barrows, he estimated, and women with loads balanced precariously on their heads, its cobbles slick with crushed leaves; and at last Lambeth’s New Cut itself, with the costermongers in their corduroy clothing, and soldiers strolling with uniforms casually unbuttoned, and coachmen in their livery and tradesmen in their frock coats, the street packed as ever with stalls and vendors of fried fish and hot potatoes, and beggars and entertainers, even street mummers – and, yes, with shoeless children, as much as it had ever been – as if the great reforms of the age, in education and public health and trade unionism, had been but fantasies.
Distracted by all this, he was a little late getting to the oyster-house.
The other two were here before him, and they stood to greet him. Both had aged well enough, Luis supposed. Fraser Burdon, who was about Luis’s age, was as whip-thin and fit-looking as ever, with a leathery tan that told of years spent in warmer climes. Oswald Hackett was a decade older, in his eighties now, and it showed; Hackett had fattened up, was as bald as an egg, and could stand only with a stick, but he lumbered to his feet to shake Luis’s hand.
Then they sat. Luis observed two books sitting on the table before Hackett, one an academic tome he recognized, the other a novel he did not, with a fawn cloth-bound cover featuring a sketch of an idealized sphinx.
A waitress briskly took their order.
Hackett grinned, showing bad teeth. ‘Let’s introduce ourselves, gentlemen. Maybe we ought to write our “names” down; at our age it’s going to be easy to forget. And by Christ, sometimes I forget who I was … My name is Richard Foyle.’
‘Woodrow Boyd,’ said Burdon. His accent had a new twang to it, and Luis studied him curiously; maybe he had moved away from the old country – permanently to America, perhaps?
Hackett prompted Luis. ‘And you, sir?’
‘John Smith,’ said Luis.
Hackett snorted laughter. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, you almost deserve to be hanging by your thumbs in some cellar under Whitehall. Now, I know you both have children, Mr Smith and Mr Boyd. What have you told them of your, ah, past indiscretions?’
Luis said softly, ‘I took each of mine aside at their age of majority and told them the lot. Seemed to me the best way to equip them to protect themselves in future, and their own children who may be blessed with our strange faculty – or cursed. As to the name, it’s not an issue for Ella, who’s married now. Robert, though, insisted on reverting to the old family name. Proud of the family origins, he says. The young! What can one do? In any case I have a close friend, a lawyer; we cooked up a story about an adoption, and so that’s all above board.’
Burdon said, ‘But it leaves you damned exposed, man. If anybody’s still on our tail after all these years, which I doubt. I’d condemn you if not for the fact that my middle ’un is going down the precise same route. There’ll always be Burdons.’ He turned to Hackett. ‘It’s probably a risk for us to be gathering here in London – indeed, in one of your old haunts, if I remember your anecdotes correctly. Maybe you should get to the point.’
Hackett said, ‘Let’s get to the oysters first, for here they come …’
The service in the Clam was as brisk and friendly as ever, Luis thought, and the oysters just as relishable, even if, half a century later, the prices would have shocked the Great Elusivo.
Burdon, however, tried one and all but spat it out. ‘My God. How can you eat these things? As if the Thames is one great mucky spittoon and I just took a mouthful of phlegm.’ He tapped Hackett’s book. ‘This is a volume of Darwin’s Origin of Species, is it not?’