The Mist in the Mirror (6 page)

For a second, his eyes narrowed and he shifted his fat little body in the chair. I thought that he was going to tell me something, make a revelation, but he did not; he merely said again, ‘Leave be.’

I smiled. ‘I have made my first arrangements. I plan to visit Vane’s old school. I gather there are some papers, letters and so forth and all his travel writings in manuscript in the library. I intend to take my time in consulting them.’

‘You are not a stupid man, Mr Monmouth, not an impulsive young hothead. Why behave as one?’

‘That is to insult a guest. You have been hospitable, Mr Beamish, but …’

‘But you intend to go to hell in your own fashion.’

‘Oh come, man!’

‘It is evil of which I speak, Monmouth, wickedness, things best left concealed, undisturbed. Whoever is touched by Vane suffers.’

‘Mr Beamish, the man is dead.’

‘Ah yes.’

‘Then of what do we speak?’

‘You may ask, you may ask.’

For a split second then, looking into his face, hearing his soft, silken voice in that gloomy room, I was gripped by a cold, dreadful fear. It entered like a splinter of ice going to my heart and I now know that it never truly left me and will not, for the rest of my days. I know that, however vague and odd the tales Beamish was concealing from me, there was some dark truth underlying them, some story of human depravity and misery. Whether he had anything to do with them, whether he had in fact known, or at least met Vane, I could not tell.

Perhaps I could have heeded his words then and put Conrad Vane behind me, and I am sure that it was not mere cussedness and strong will that influenced me. I was not, as Beamish had correctly remarked, a hot-headed young man, I was calm, thoughtful, sober and middle-aged and I wanted a settled and reasonably quiet life. Yet the more he had spoken of Vane, the more fascinated I had become.

But the flash of intense fear I had felt was fleeting and, when it left me, I looked down at the pots on the table, felt my stomach lined and full with warm, comforting food, pie and potatoes, pudding and ale, and the real, straightforward, everydayness of those things banished into dreamland any hints of other, more shadowy and sinister matters.

The thought of Snecker’s mutton pies and ale caused me to dismiss Mr Beamish’s warnings and, indeed, to laugh at them.

I thanked him for the dinner, bade him good-day and left. Once again, Shove was nowhere to be seen and the shop was dark and deserted.

I went out quickly and down the steps onto the cobbles, now slippery with rain, of Crab Passage.

But I could not shake off Mr Beamish. The picture of him, hands folded complacently over his belly, and the gleam in his small eyes, remained with me all that day and at night he appeared in my uneasy dreams, smiling faintly. I lay awake in the dark early hours, too aware of his closeness.

It was some while before I remembered that I had not seen the boy again.

But Beamish’s warnings did not go home, I dismissed them irritably, though from time to time I rehearsed the phrase ‘leave be’ and wondered what lay behind it.

I was never a stubborn man, young or old, but I was a firm and determined one. All my life, so far as I could remember, I had done what I had set out to do, made my own plans and followed them through and been answerable to no one. Besides, as I had hinted to Beamish, what else was there for me? I was, I confess, still out of place in London and isolated too, without a home, family or friends. I was used to that and did not feel unduly troubled or unhappy, but I needed a purpose, and exploration into the life of Vane was giving me one, for the time being. If I abandoned that, I was uneasily aware that all round me lay vacancy, a pointless, unfocused existence into which I
might fall as into a pit. Until now, I had always had an aim, if only a simple one – the next place to make for. I was afraid to lose it and, in losing it, lose also the assurance of my own identity.

None of which I thought through as logically and clearly as I have now set it forth; I only glanced against it and cast a frightened look over my shoulder, as it were, before veering away.

I was beginning to feel less at ease in the Cross Keys Inn, too, and had certainly never felt very welcome there; it was a temporary resting place and, besides, too far out to be convenient. At night, if I did not go walking, because I was tired or the weather was poor, I lay on my bed reading or sat alone and entirely unregarded in the tap room below. In other inns and chop houses about London I struck up conversations, made occasional acquaintances with whom to pass the time of day. Here, I did not. It was an unfriendly place, the customers surly and suspicious, closed in upon themselves and preoccupied with their own affairs. It had served its purpose well enough but I should leave without sentiment or a backward glance. And, although I had never caught sight of the woman in the room beyond the bead curtain again, the thought that I might do so left me apprehensive.

I planned to look for lodgings, either in the city, perhaps in the vicinity of the Law Courts, or else in the congenial neighbourhood of Chelsea, for I had acquired a great affection for London’s river, and it would please me to live beside it and become familiar with it in all its phases and aspects.

But, first, I had to keep a second appointment.

I had been in London for almost three weeks, and growing used to it. I daresay that I thought myself by now an urbane and civilised gentleman, but in truth I was a stranger and a foreigner still, in all but a surface veneer of new
experience, a man who, for all of his adult life, had travelled in wild, remote and primitive places and lived in cities that bore little relation to this one, whose manners, customs and peoples were different indeed.

I fancied that I had become indistinguishable from any other English gentleman, for so I imagined myself to be, when everything about me, I now realise, must have proclaimed my strangeness.

Once or twice, in the east and in India, I had visited a gentlemen’s club, and sat in bamboo chairs under a fan, or else out on a verandah, and drunk whisky and talked with Englishmen, tea planters, civil servants, army men, government officers, so that I assumed that I would feel at home as well in the Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall, as anywhere.

But standing before its great stone pillars, gazing up a flight of steps that led to the entrance door, on that cold December morning, I felt desperately uncertain of myself, and by the time I had summoned up my courage to walk up to that door, my confidence and ease, my blithe assumption of the manner of a London gentleman, had quite evaporated.

At the sight of the vast marble hall and rising staircase, and the glimpses through open doors to formal, panelled rooms beyond, such rooms as I had until now only read of in stories, I all but turned tail and fled. But before I had time to do so, or to gather my wits, I heard a strong Scots voice behind me.

‘Mr James Monmouth, I am sure.’

I spun round.

The Reverend Archibald Votable was a man well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and slightly stooping, handsome, in a florid way, with a jutting brow and dressed in clerical collar and black suit.

His appearance sorted well with the surroundings but his manner was direct and affable, though he looked at me keenly, both as we shook hands and when we were sitting
over glasses of madeira before a somewhat reluctant and smoky fire.

I began to feel a little more assured, and at ease with him, too; he was a man who invited confidence.

‘As I said in my letter to you some months ago, I understand that the school has papers, manuscripts, letters even, bequeathed in some way from the estate of Conrad Vane. He was a pupil, I know.’

‘He was.’

‘It would be of great help to me and great interest, if I might consult them.’

He sat, fingertips together. There was no one else in the room, and it was hushed, there were no voices or footsteps, only, at odd moments, the hiss and spurt of the fire.

‘I would be glad to hear more about you first, Mr Monmouth.’

Readily, easily, I began to speak, going back to those early days with my Guardian in Africa, re-living my young manhood and then re-visiting, one after another as I spoke, those countries in which I had travelled. My glass was refilled but I only sipped at the sweet wine, I was heady enough with memory and the excitement of recounting my story.

He listened without interruption, eyes for the most part steady on my face, and when at last I had finished, with my arrival in England on that wet night only a few weeks before, he did not speak for some time but looked away from me towards the fire to which a shambling, ancient servant in a baize apron now came, somewhat ineffectually, to attend.

When he had gone and the room had settled back into its church-like hush once more, Mr Votable said, ‘I must make it clear at once that there is no bar to your visiting the school and looking up whatever material there may be relating to your subject.’

I thanked him.

‘I did not wish merely to hand your letter over, and put the business out of my hands from the beginning. I wanted to meet you, Mr Monmouth, to hear what you had to say, discover what manner of man you are. You seem to me to be an honest one.’

For a moment, he had slipped into a schoolmaster’s tone.

‘What reason do you have for wanting to research into the life of – this man?’ I noted that he did not speak the name.

‘I have no more to add to my letter,’ I said. ‘I have followed in his footsteps for some years, I have read his own accounts of his extraordinary, pioneering travels and explorations. I became interested – for no clear reason that I can give you. But Vane exerts a peculiar fascination upon me – I suppose it has become an obsession, and something to fill what has been a life rather empty of people. Vane became a hero to me.’

‘You might find a better.’

‘I now gather from other sources that there are rumours of some … unpleasantness attaching to his life. A scandal?’

‘I think not in any usual sense.’

‘I have therefore become all the more intrigued.’

He said quietly, ‘Then I have no doubt that you will proceed, no matter what I may advise, and in spite of any admonitions. That is the way of human nature.’

‘But I am not reckless or stubborn, Mr Votable, and I would be glad to be told more. I would be grateful for your advice.’

‘Then I will give it. Be wary. Such stories – rumours maybe, as I have heard – relate to a time long ago. I had no connection with this man. I only know …’ He fell silent.

‘Sir?’

‘No. It is nothing. I will not frighten you with dead men’s tales.’

‘I am not easily made afraid.’

‘Be wary.’

‘But of what? Pray at least be clearer with me. Wary? Of some dreadful danger? What risk am I taking?’

‘No, no, no.’ He made to sound jovial, dismissive of my fears. ‘There is nothing … so definite, it will all be coincidence and idle talk.’

‘Then why make mention of it at all? Why warn me?’

He stood up. ‘Because you are honest, Mr Monmouth. Honest … and innocent.’

I left him on the steps of the building, an august, commanding figure. I imagined how a small, recalcitrant boy might feel, sent to stand quaking before him. He had given me an introduction to the school archivist and told me to make arrangements directly with him, once the term was over. There was a set of guest rooms, he said, which I would be welcome to make use of. I got the impression that he was wanting in some measure to retract his words of caution and the hints he had given of something untoward relating to Vane and his life. But it was curious that both he and Mr Beamish – and I trusted the purity of the Reverend Mr Votable’s motives more than those of the sinister little bookseller – had tried to warn me away from anything to do with him.

I had not travelled in countries where magic and superstition, legend and myth were powerful without learning to respect the human reaction to those things. Nevertheless, I fancied myself a sober, rational, level-headed man, able to separate reality from fancy, as well as anyone else of vaguely scientific bent.

I had liked Votable, I was grateful to him for his invitation and, for all it had been veiled in oblique warnings, I fully intended to take it up.