Marriage records were eventually sent to the library for safekeeping, but if the dead girl had wedded just weeks earlier, there was a great chance that Arthur might find a copy of her license still at the vicargeneral’s.
Arthur and Bram had worked all this out on the train back in from Blackwall, before Bram had begged off the hunt and returned to his Lyceum, to manage his theater and his actors. He had to round up that godforsaken live horse for Don Quixote. Egos required tending.
On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefolk and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London’s public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dim evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle shell of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleansing glare of the twentieth century.
As Arthur hailed a noisy hansom, he averted his gaze from the New Scotland Yard just across the Thames. Curse them.
The coach led Arthur to Kensington, then turned the sharp right onto Lambeth Road. The Lambeth Palace lay squat and blocky ahead of them, its medieval crenellations anachronistically militaristic in the unfortified modern city. To Arthur, the palace resembled a stout and angry Irishman, ready to pick a fight with the pavilions of St. Thomas’s Hospital to the north. And beside it lay the office of the vicar-general.
The grand entrance to the church office was a series of openings shaped like upside-down V’s, each a few inches smaller than the preceding one. It felt, to Arthur, like entering into a dark tunnel.
Though not a proper church, the building retained that sense of quiet and majestic stillness with which Arthur had always associated both the Catholic and the Anglican houses. He held suspicions toward the church-indeed, any church-and yet he had to admit that he did love churches. Arthur admired anything that connected him with antiquity, that made him feel like a part of the Britain that stretched back over the millennia. He believed in his people and the ideals of their civilization more than he believed in their God. He had more love for the Saxon than for the Anglican.
Arthur was faintly embarrassed by the loud clomps his boots made on the floor as the sound reverberated through the long hallways. Robed friars with thick bellies walked past him and yet didn’t seem to make nearly so much noise as they moved.
The friar who attended the marriage desk looked young enough to be Arthur’s son. His robes were a muddy brown, and his face appeared open and completely unwrinkled, as if the boy were without a trouble in the world. As he looked Arthur straight in the eye, he did not blink or flick his eyes elsewhere in politeness. He simply stared directly at Arthur, holding his position with the certainty and clear head of the resolutely devout.
“Good day, sir,” began Arthur. “I was hoping I might trouble you for a look into your marriage records.”
“Is it your daughter?” said the youthful friar pluckily.
“Pardon me?”
“Your daughter. Don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that you’re married yourself.” The friar smiled and directed his gaze down to Arthur’s gold wedding band. “Most fellows like yourself-older gentlemen, a few specks of salt in the hair-come in here, they’re chasing after a lost daughter. I’m not supposed to let just anyone go digging about in the files, but I tend to make an exception for a kind-looking sort who’s after his darling girl. You’d be surprised at how many come in.”
Arthur thought about this, and decided quite rationally that lying was by far the best approach to take.
“Yes. My daughter,” he said. “She’s gone missing. I fear she’s run off with her beau, a dastardly fright of a man. Nemain-that’s my name. Archibald Nemain. My dear girl is Morgan. Might I give a quick once-over to your records book, to see if she’s come through here to be married?”
“I feared as much,” said the friar knowingly. “Please follow me. We keep the allegations back here.”
The young man led Arthur behind his desk, into a small antechamber of the marriage office. The room was quite cloistered, walled in by massive gray stones. Arthur felt as if they pressed in on him from all sides. He thought of Poe, the sweet horror of “The Cask of Amontillado.”
The room’s only furniture was a massive wooden chest, pocked with two dozen small sliding drawers. Whatever the chest’s original function, it had been at some point more recently converted into a storage space for alphabetically organized wedding allegations-the legal documents that spelled out formally a couple’s intention to marry.
As Arthur surveyed the task before him, the murmurings of a young man and woman came from the direction of the friar’s desk. He left Arthur alone while he went to attend to their certification.
For the better part of an hour, Arthur sifted through the drawers of allegations. At first his hunt was underscored by the excited giggles of the bride-to-be at the friar’s desk and the slow, even responses of her groom, who calmly presented the friar with the necessary details: the couple’s names, their parents’ names, their places of birth and residence, and the signed approval of the bride’s father. After they had left, the friar attended to the further couples and eager young men who entered his office. Some men came to fulfill these duties alone, sparing their fiancées the trouble. Arthur could hear them all come and go like hummingbirds drifting onto a nearby tree-the clicks and clumps of their arrival, the squeaks and cries of their business, the whisks and flaps of their heartened departures.
The handwritten documents before him possessed the romance of governmental bureaucracy. Though each was filled out by the loving right hand of its willing groom, the allegations read less like Shakespeare and more like a will.
“4 October 1900,” began the first of many, “which day appeared personally Thomas Stacey Junior of Morden in the County of Surrey, aged twenty-four years and a Bachelor, and alleged he intends to marry with Mary Beach of the County of Norfolk, aged twenty years, a minor and spinster, by and with the consent of Richard Norris, her uncle and guardian lawfully appointed, she having neither father, mother, testamentary or other Guardian whatsoever to her appointed.” It droned on for a solid page, ascertaining that neither bride nor groom was married prior, and that no other “impediment by reason of any precontract” existed that would hinder their ability to be lawfully married.
Arthur’s mind drifted to his own wedding, sixteen years before- My! Had it really been so long since that sweet August day at Masongill? Arthur had been a poor doctor when he met Touie; poor in both senses of the word. His fledgling practice had yielded but a meager income, though it was only now, years later, that he was able to realize that this might have had something to do with his poverty of talent. He had met his dear Touie-then Louisa Hawkins, a name that now sounded so foreign to Arthur that it might have referred to someone else’s wife- when her brother had come to him suffering from cerebral meningitis and had become Arthur’s resident patient. Arthur had given him a nightly sedative of chloral hydrate, and the man had died within a week. Occasionally Arthur still wondered, as he had at the time, whether the treatment had actually killed him-most likely not, he assured himself. Sixteen years later, Arthur understood that a dose of chloral hydrate did carry certain risks. But his patient had been wasting away in delirious fits-surely some sedative was necessary? What an imprecise science was medicine. It was more an art than was fiction.