Death In Hyde Park (4 page)

For another moment she clung to the roof, breathless and giddy, the sour taste of fear in her mouth. But since she couldn’t go back, she had to go on. One foot, another foot, another—and in a few minutes she had reached the corner of the building. She looked to her left and saw, with a vast relief, that she had remembered correctly. This building and its four-story neighbor were only a few feet apart, and she was almost within arm’s reach of the iron fire-ladder that was bolted to the other building’s brick wall. Almost. All she had to do was lean out across that horrid, empty space, reach for the ladder, and . . .

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut, her breath coming hard, the blood pulsing in her throat. The ladder was a full yard away, at least a foot out of reach. Only a foot, she thought, paralyzed with fright, but it might as well be a mile. She couldn’t reach the ladder unless she let go of the roof. And no matter how hard she willed herself to relinguish her grip, her fingers clung to—

From the street below, she heard the shrill of a police whistle and more loud shouting, and saw two uniformed policemen wrestling Adam out of the building and into a police van.
Now!
she thought.
It’s now, or not at all!
Closing her mind to her fear, she turned toward the ladder and launched herself across the void, her right hand grasping the rusty iron, her right foot reaching, slipping, leaving her swinging like a circus wire-artist above the emptiness.

And then her right foot found a rung, and then her left, and she was clinging to the ladder, then stepping smartly down, praying that her foot would not catch in the hem of her blasted skirt. A few moments later, she was safely on the sidewalk, to the delight of a strongly-built, dark-haired young man in a coal stoker’s singlet, worn trousers, and a green cloth cap, who had apparently been watching her descend. As she dropped lightly to the ground from the last rung of the ladder, the man gave her a look that seemed full of recognition, and she saw that he had very blue eyes, deeply fringed with black lashes. Then, his eyes still fastened on hers, he grinned engagingly and tipped his cap. His hair was dark, too, tousled and rakish.

Charlotte felt the immediate attraction between them as if it were an electrical charge. But this was no time for such things. She threw him a dazzling smile, put a warning finger to her lips, and disappeared into the crowd.

CHAPTER THREE

 
 
 
Jack London stripped off his coal-smudged stoker’s jacket and splashed water from the basin over his face. Then he put on a clean white shirt and exchanged the clumsy leather brogans for his own soft leather shoes. With a sigh of relief, he pulled out a flask of gin, took a swig, and dropped down on one of the two narrow beds, surveying his surroundings.

The small upstairs room was rudely furnished and uncomfortable, but adequate for his purposes. It had been found for him by members of the Social Democratic Federation in the home of an East End police detective, an irony that was not lost on Jack, who during his vagabond days had developed an intense dislike of all policemen. But he was in something of a dilemma, for his research—he was conducting what he thought of as a sociological study—required him to go about the East End dressed in ragged, dirty clothes, while other business would take him out in his ordinary clothing. A decent landlady would be apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a double life, while lodgings in a house where nobody gave a damn might not be entirely safe. And Jack needed a safe house, a refuge where he could sleep comfortably, work on his book, and go and come as he pleased.

So when the S.D.F. had found him a lodging in the home of Detective John Palmer, known to East Enders as Johnny Upright, Jack had jumped at it. The room—which contained two beds, a table, and two chairs—was at the back of the house and had its own private stair. It was, of course, a far cry from his country home in the Piedmont Hills of California, a large redwood bungalow with a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific Ocean. There, he entertained his artistic friends and lived the lavishly hedonistic life that was entirely suited to a successful writer. If this luxury seemed at odds with his rough, rugged stories of life-and-death adventure in the wilds of the Yukon Territory or his well-known stance as a Socialist who advocated the abolition of the class system—well, so be it. Jack had left school to work in a cannery at fourteen, and had known a decade of poverty since. Now that his writing had begun to bring in money, he deserved (he felt) to revel in his prosperity, although he somehow managed to spend more than he earned and was continually in debt.

But the household in the Piedmont Hills also included Jack’s mother, his pregnant wife Bess, and their infant daughter, a stifling, suffocating responsibility. For a time—wondrous, but far too brief—it had also included the woman he loved, Anna Strunsky, she of the lustrous black hair and black eyes, a radical Socialist from a Russian Jewish family with Anarchist leanings. When Bess discovered Anna and Jack in each other’s arms, however, Anna had packed up and gone to New York, leaving Jack beside himself with lonely desolation.

Feeling trapped in a marriage to a woman he didn’t love, his writing mired in the lucrative but tedious Klondike rut, and (as always) in dire need of money to fund his extravagant life, Jack had jumped at an offer that came in late July from the American Press Association. The Boer War had just ended, and the APA wanted America’s foremost adventure writer to go to South Africa and report on the postwar situation. With enormous relief, he telegraphed his acceptance, packed his bags, and caught a train for New York—only to learn when he got there that the APA had canceled the project.

Having already bought a steamer ticket and not eager to return to Bess and his mother, Jack came up with another idea. An admirer of Jacob Riis’s graphic indictment of the New York slums,
How the Other Half Lives,
he proposed to capitalize on the best-selling book’s success by writing a similar exposé of London’s infamous East End. He would disguise himself as a tramp so he could travel unobserved through the notorious slums. “I shall sink down out of sight,” he had written to Anna during his crossing on the steamer
Majestic
, “in order to view the Coronation from the standpoint of the London beasts. That’s all they are—beasts—if they are anything like the slum people of New York—beasts, shot through with starry flashes of divinity.” He would call his book
The People of the Abyss
.

Of course, the East End wasn’t the only allure. For one thing, Jack had never traveled to England or Europe, and there were sights he wanted to see. For another, the British publishing company Isbister had recently brought out a collection of his short stories,
The God of His Fathers,
and would soon publish
The Son of the Wolf
. Perry Robinson, Isbister’s director, assured Jack that he had many British admirers and seemed anxious to introduce him to the literary community.

Well, Robinson’s introduction—a first-rate champagne supper in one of the best hotels—was over. Isbister had done well by him, inviting a posse of literary critics and several dozen of Britain’s literary lights to meet him. Jack knew the work of several, and particularly admired that of Beryl Bardwell, whose strong women characters reminded him of what he liked to call the “Mate Woman,” women who were filled to the brim with life and refused to be bound by conventional moral codes. Jack had told Miss Bardwell about his plan to go incognito into the East End, and learned to his surprise that she was familiar with the district and had gone there more than once herself, unaccompanied.
¹
Jack’s pleasure in meeting the striking Miss Bardwell and her husband (a baron) was offset, unfortunately, by his disappointment that Rudyard Kipling had declined Isbister’s invitation. That little slight had caused him to sulk all evening.

The Coronation was over, too, several days ago, and Jack had already made two or three extended safaris into the wilds of the East End. A dirty face and a knockabout costume gave him a marvelous sense of anonymity and freedom, while the coins in his pocket and the gold sovereign stitched into the armpit of his jacket made him feel secure. It was true that he wanted to sink down out of sight, but he certainly didn’t want to lose himself in the wretched hell-hole. If he got into a situation that was too dangerous for him to handle, he wanted to be able to buy his way out.

Jack had spent the afternoon in the company of a fiery young Socialist from the S.D.F. and a beaten-down sweat-shop worker who had taken them to Frying-pan Alley to visit the hole in which he worked, an eight-by-seven room that housed five men who spent fourteen hours a day attaching the uppers of shoes to the soles. Outside in the street, a spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, like tadpoles (Jack thought) just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. He reached for a pen and his notebook. He had a hundred impressions to jot down before he forgot them: images of hungry men, damned women, and doomed children, their plight making them stupid and heavy, without hope, without (worse) imagination. There was no question that the East End situation was a bad one, although he had occasionally glimpsed a determined resilience that would not allow these people to be kept down long, given half a chance to better themselves, and to be honest, it was hardly worse than the New York slums. But he had made a reputation as an adventure writer by focusing on the dark and dangerous side of things, on brutishness and inhuman savagery, the more brutish and inhuman the better. Readers expected brutality from Jack London, and that was what
People of the Abyss
would be about: people who had been so inhumanly, so pitilessly brutalized that they had no hope.

But there was one impression that wouldn’t appear in his book. Jack had been walking on Hampstead Road when a police van drew up to the curb in front of a green-grocer’s shop and a half-dozen policemen charged into the building. From the crowd of onlookers he had learned that the raiders’ target was an Anarchist newspaper on the second floor, the employer of the wretched boy who had blown himself to bits on Coronation Day. He watched, interested, as the policemen dragged three handcuffed men out of the door and shoved them roughly into the van. They were in for it, he thought—sympathetically, for he had been roughed up by the police himself, and had spent some months in jail.

At that moment, a bird’s nest fell at Jack’s feet, the eggs smashing on the pavement. He stepped out into the street and looked up to see a remarkable sight: a woman making her precarious way across the wet roof, then leaping nimbly across the gap between buildings to a rusty iron fire-ladder. While he watched, this lithe, strong young woman, her hair loose and wet, swiftly descended the ladder and dropped to the pavement right in front of him, dazzling him with her sudden smile. It was a smile of intrigue and mystery. It reminded him somehow of Anna’s smile, and yet it promised a greater excitement, for the girl seemed to hold nothing back, seemed easy in her body and eager for any challenge, for every adventure that the world might offer. In the long, intimate look they shared (longer and more intimate, perhaps, in Jack’s recollection than in the reality of it) he felt he had found exactly the woman he had been looking for all of his life.

But in the next instant, she had vanished, swallowed up by the noisy, milling crowd. He started to follow her, but she was fleet-footed, and he quickly gave it up as a bad job. He returned to the crowd and learned her name by the simple expedient of asking. Suspecting that she may have been attempting to escape from the police, he inquired of a male bystander whether a woman was connected somehow with the Anarchist paper.

“Connected, is she?” The man gave a snort. “I’d say she’s connected. She’s the bloody editor. Been raided more than onct, too. Damn persistent lot, those Anarchists. Knock ’em down and they come back for more.”

“And her name?”

“Conway,” the man said. “Charlotte Conway.”

Jack had just written that name in his notebook and drawn a double circle around it when there was a tap at the door.

“Teatime, sir,” Mrs. Palmer called.

Jack sighed. He wanted—he
needed
—to write, and his typewriter waited invitingly on the table under the window. He was not getting anything like his daily quota of a thousand words, and he would have to write fast if he intended to take the manuscript back to New York at the end of October. But he was also hungry, and he always wrote better when his belly was full. He put down his pencil and raised his voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Palmer. I’ll be down in a moment.”

Later, when Jack thought back over what happened during his stay in England, he would recall this occasion as vitally important, because it would lead him to Charlotte Conway. When he went downstairs to eat bread and marmalade and drink tea with Mrs. Palmer and her two pretty and flirtatious young daughters, he found that an even prettier and more flirtatious young woman had been invited especially to meet the famous American adventure writer. Her name was Nellie Lovelace, a former resident of the East End and now an actress of some fame. She was starring in a musical at the Royal Strand Theater, and before they had finished their first cup of tea, she had invited him to attend her Saturday night performance.

CHAPTER FOUR