I turned back towards the gates to see a hearse pulled by four horses – ostrich-plumed and richly caparisoned – enter the grounds, followed by two mourning coaches, and a number of smaller carriages swathed in rich black velvet. I counted four mutes in their gowns, and a little group of perhaps half a dozen pages. A moderately expensive affair, I reflected, in spite of Mr Trendle’s plain theology.
A small knot of villagers, not of the family party, followed the procession a little way behind. I scanned this group closely, moving nearer, and as quickly as I dared, to try to make out my man.
The cortège entered through one of the arches of the Chapel; the coffin was removed by the bearers and taken inside; the mourners descended and followed the doleful burden.
I had stationed myself a short distance off. His mother – there – for sure; a slight figure holding for support the arm of a tall younger gentleman, perhaps his brother. I did not detect a wife or children, for which I was grateful. But the sight of his poor mother unnerved me momentarily, as I saw again in memory the rictus smile that her son had given me as I had withdrawn the knife from his neck.
As the members of the family party took their places in the Chapel, I surveyed the accompanying group for a second time. Jukes must surely be amongst them, though his distinctive squat figure was not apparent to me. Then the thought struck me that he might have sent an agent; unlikely as it seemed, I swept my eye once more over the onlookers, and moved closer, until I became a part of the little crowd.
‘Were you acquainted with Mr Trendle, sir?’
The plaintive enquirer was a little person of some rotundity, who gazed up at me through pale grey-green eyes from behind a pair of gold spectacles.
‘Slightly, ma’am,’ I replied.
My companion shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘Such a wonderful man – wonderful. So good and generous, so adoring of his mamma. You know Mrs Trendle, I dare say?’
‘Slightly.’
‘But perhaps not her late husband?’
‘No, indeed.’
I did not wish to keep up the conversation, but she came back again.
‘You are of the Chapel, perhaps?’
I replied that I had known the deceased only through business.
‘Ah, business. I do not understand business. But Mr Trendle did. Such a clever man! What the dear people in Africa will do without him, I cannot think.’
She continued her lament for some time, expounding in particular, with a curious kind of wistful relish, upon the wickedness and certain damnation of the person who had thus deprived the Africans of their great champion.
Eventually, unencouraged by any response from me, she smiled faintly and waddled away, her fluttering mourning clothes making her seem like a great aggregated ball of soot that had escaped from the prison of fog that still lay in a dark looming bar across the murmuring city at our back, pressing down on the poor souls beneath like the weight of sin itself.
No sign. Nothing. I moved about the crowd, anxious to be part of it, but wary of any individual contact. When would he come? Would he come?
In due course, the Chapel bell tolled out, and the coffin, followed by the mourners and their attendants, was carried back out to the awaiting hearse. Slowly, the procession wound its way to the place that had been prepared.
The ceremony of interment was duly performed by an elderly white-haired clergyman, accompanied by the usual displays of grief. I found myself unwillingly regarding the coffin as it was lowered gently into the receiving earth, the last mortal home of the unfortunate Lucas Trendle, late of the Bank of England. For I had put him there, and for nothing he had done to me.
The party began to disperse. I looked once more at his mother, and at the gentleman I had seen accompanying her earlier. From beneath the rim of his hat peeked a narrow curtain of red hair.
Eventually, I was left alone at the graveside with the diggers and their assistants. Of Fordyce Jukes there was not a trace.
I waited for nearly an hour, and then made my way back towards the Egyptian portals, with darkness coming on. The gatekeeper tipped his hat as he let me through a smaller side entrance. I took a deep breath. The wretched Jukes had played me for a fool, sending me all the way out here as a prank, for which he would pay dearly when the moment of reckoning came.
But then, just as I was passing beneath the deeply shadowed arch into the outer world, I felt a tap on my shoulder as a person – a man – pushed past me. I had instinctively swung to the left, towards the shoulder on which I had received the tap; but he had gone to the right, quickly becoming absorbed in a remaining group of mourners standing just outside the gates, and disappearing into the deepening gloom.
It had not been Jukes. He was taller, broader, quick on his feet. It had not been Jukes.
I returned to Temple-street, dejected and confused. As I passed through the stair-case entrance, the door of the ground-floor chamber opened.
‘Good evening, Mr Glapthorn,’ said Fordyce Jukes. ‘I trust you’ve had a pleasant day?’
*[‘Death is certain’. Ed.]
*[The Wandering Jew of legend. Ed.]
*[The monumental gates, in the Egyptian style, that lead into the cemetery. Ed.]
*[Isaac Watts (1674–1748), the Dissenting divine, poet, and hymn-writer. The cemetery, laid out on the former Fleetwood-Abney estate, had been opened in May 1840. Ed.]
6
Vocat*
The conviction that Fordyce Jukes was my blackmailer would not leave me; and yet he had not been at Stoke Newington, nor had any attempt been made by any other person or persons to make themselves known to me – except for that tap on the shoulder, that unsettling sense of gentle but firm pressure deliberately applied. An accidental brush by a hastily departing stranger, no doubt. But not the first such ‘accident’ – I still thought of the incident outside the Diorama. And not the last.
Why had Jukes sent me out to Stoke Newington, if he had not intended to reveal himself to me there? I could reach no other conclusion but that he was biding his time; that the second note, summoning me to the interment of my victim, had been designed to apply a little additional twist of the knife, which I would repay with compound interest. Two communications had been received. Perhaps a third would bring matters to a head.
I kept a close eye on Jukes from that moment on. From my sitting-room window, if I placed my face close against the glass, I could just see down to where the stair-case gave onto the street. I observed him carrying in his provisions, or passing the time of day with the occupants of neighbouring chambers, sometimes taking his mangy little dog out for a walk by the river. His work hours were regular, his private activities innocent.
Nothing happened. The expected third communication did not come; there was no soft knock on the door, and no indication of an unravelling plan. Slowly, over the following days, I began to gain ground on my enfeebled self, and, with returning strength and concentration, emerged one morning after a sound night’s sleep – the first for a week or more – to rededicate myself to the destruction of my enemy.
Of his history and character you shall know more – much more – as this narrative continues. He was ever in my mind. I breathed him in every day, for his fate was anchored to mine. ‘And I shall cover his head with the mountains of my wrath, and press him down, / And he shall be forgotten by men.’ This is an untypically fine line from the epic pen of P. Rainsford Daunt (The Maid of Minsk, Book III); but there is a finer by Mr Tennyson, which I had constantly before my mental eye: ‘I was born to other things.’*