The Lamplighter (3 page)

He was taken on a tour of all the upstairs rooms, spending well over an hour in Evelyn's bedchamber alone, as outside Ainslie assured Evelyn that all was proceeding well and that shortly they would go on their great journey.

Her door was never locked from that point, but she was discouraged from moving from her bedroom, and even when she did she saw little but closed doors, covered windows, and incongruous furnishings. Her mother was still present and recuperating, Ainslie assured her, though she was too ill to be seen. Water and food continued to be brought up to her with prisonlike regularity, a long-case clock marked the passage of several days with its wheezy chimes, and Ainslie paced around with a bearing of increasing impatience, or perhaps apprehension.

One night the house timbers groaned as though squeezed by some supernatural force. A storm pounded the roof and lightning sprayed through the gable window, expanding and contracting her little room like bellows. A trembling Ainslie entered briefly and lit a candle by her bed, promising that it would soon subside. But the lightning was alarmingly close. The paneling appeared to undulate. An unpleasant odor invaded the room and the air rapidly chilled. Evelyn, with the blankets bunched up around her, watched her breath condense in clouds until she was convinced a spectral shape was sewing together in the air above the bed. And when the candle flame flared and hurled a very human shadow onto her wardrobe she could no longer bear it.

She bolted for the stairs, but halfway down Ainslie gathered her up and attempted to soothe her.

“Eve? What's wrong?” But he himself was shaking.

She told him a man had got inside her room.

“A man?” He exuded fear like a musk.

“In my room!”

“Well…who do you think he might be, Eve?”

She could not answer.

Ainslie forced a laugh. “Then we should find out, eh?”

He braced himself and started carrying her back up the stairs, his heart hammering against her like a fist on a door. Rain was spilling from the eaves and trickling in the pipes. As they inched stiffly down the hallway it was evident from the very quality of light that the room was not empty.

A yard from the door Ainslie crouched down and forced Evelyn to the floor. With stony features he prodded her back toward the room as though offering a lamb to some beast of prey.

Evelyn stared at his averted eyes, inhaled his sickly perspiration, and suddenly saw with great clarity that, whatever this man called himself, he was not her father. That he represented no security. And she understood very clearly, too, that the powdery woman had not been her mother. There would never be any journey, or any freedom.

She was alone, as she always had been, and stepping back with revulsion she was simultaneously drawn to the bedroom as though to a great fatality.

She turned and froze with disbelief when she saw the man, standing on the far side of the bed, his face gilded by the candlelight.

He had a pointed beard, a peaked cap, a blue fustian jacket, and a grey scarf, and his emerald eyes seemed to shine with all the lamps of Edinburgh.

She gasped in astonishment, and his face creased with genuine compassion.

“It's me, Eve,” he affirmed.

His whisper was as light as gossamer, and the sincerity of his affection was manifest.

“It's Leerie…”

He beckoned her forward and she moved trancelike into the room. Ainslie shut the door behind them and twenty years later the streets were red with blood.

December 1886

T
HOMAS
M
C
K
NIGHT
,
Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, had certainly noticed the young lady busily taking notes in one of the rear benches, but he did not stop to contemplate the incongruity, the implications, or indeed to give it much thought at all. He went on lecturing as though in a dream.

“Gentlemen, I want you to look at me now and ask yourselves if I exist. I want you to consider the possibility that I might be no more than a shadow, or something else of completely immaterial value. Not, I hasten to add, because I regard myself as a ghost, or indeed a shadow. In fact, I would be recognized as human in any number of venerable faculties. In Law they would certainly admit into evidence that I am a man, of average height and unremarkable appearance, silver-haired, green-eyed, and spade-bearded. The Faculty of Medicine, were I to surrender my body to its examinations, would certainly attest that my heart pumps blood, that my lungs inflate with air, and that I give every indication of being a living human being. In Science they would draw samples of my blood, dissolve specimens of my flesh in jars, examine them under microscopes, and ascertain that I am a bipedal composition of carbon and water, of the
Homo
genus, and of an age defying calculation. And the Faculty of Divinity might see nothing godly in me, or even saintly, but it would have little difficulty accepting me as a temporal manifestation in which there is nothing fundamentally miraculous.”

His speech was a clockwork mechanism unwinding with great precision and little enthusiasm. Each word, each inflection, and every flash of humor had been so calculated, and delivered with such little variation, that were he to lapse into an unexpected silence or be forced into a hasty departure, a student of a previous year, consulting old notes, might be able to complete his every sentence—the entire lecture.

“No, gentlemen, if I ask you to look upon me as a shadow it is because in this chamber it is our duty to peel away all existing layers of prejudice, strip back all preconceived notions, divest ourselves of all resistance, and cast the withering eye of skepticism on the fact that I exist at all. That the chair in the corner exists. That the room exists. That anything beyond the room exists. And to emerge with the possibility that everything we have established and agreed upon may in fact be a collusion in ignorance.”

There would come a day, no doubt, when he would not need to be present at all. When he would be spared the ordeal of pacing around the room puffing clouds of pipe smoke into the frigid air—the University's gas pipes had clotted, leaving the halls without light or heat—and be replaced by a tin conch projecting his voice with coils and vibrating filaments. When he would not, as today, have cause to envy Professor Egan of Botany, who had repaired to the Tropical Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden, there to lecture his students amid the misted glass and sweating ferns.

“Now in the front row the gentleman with the red hair has little doubt that I exist: he has fixed me in place with his eyes, my voice resonates in his ears, and I exude a certain warmth without which the room might be fractionally colder. And in the middle row the lad in the velvet jacket, being of a more poetical persuasion, has already ascribed to me certain human qualities. Charming? Indubitably. Wise? Without question. Generous? To a fault, gentlemen, though I urge you not to test it. Even tempered? Of course, but only because my placid nature is balanced so precisely with eruptions of unexpected violence.”

But where once he had filled the chamber with laughing throngs, his tone was now too hollow to elicit anything but a token chuckle. He had not even bothered to familiarize himself with the student roll, so that where once his lecture was interpolated with interchangeable names—Aldridge/Devlin/McLaren/Raithby/Scott—he now relied on his weakening eyes and the bridge of his imagination (it did not really matter if that jacket was really velvet). He did not despise his students, but he felt of no use to them. They wanted to see him as an inspiration, a target beyond the travails of confusion and hunger. They were greedy for enlightenment—or at least cap and gown—and all he could offer was despair.

“Now of those two appraisals,” he continued, turning cheerlessly at the end of the platform, “it would be safe to suggest that the one offered by our sentimental, velvet-jacketed friend is a process of induction based on unreliable criteria. Perhaps in appearance I remind him of his favorite uncle. Or perhaps his least favorite uncle. Perhaps my voice evokes memories of another lecturer, or a tradesman, or a doctor, with whom he is already well acquainted. In all instances we can agree that he might well be the victim of a misapprehension based on subjective interpretation. But it is our duty in this chamber to apply the same flame of doubt to the assumptions of his redheaded classmate, gentlemen, and conclude that there is nothing that the senses can perceive objectively, and no object upon which we do not subjectively impose a reality.”

The students, clustered in the benches closest to the door, and itching to spring to freedom as soon as the bell rang, needed no uncanny instincts to sense his disillusionment. In the latest edition of
The Student
they had already registered their bemusement:

McKnight could barely remember it now, but upon first arriving at the University he had felt as though appointed to the Sacred College of Cardinals. They were reorganizing the library at the time, and when asked how much space should be relegated to the works of philosophy he had responded, with the confidence of an astronomer mapping the stars, “One bay for the works already written and sixteen for those yet to come.” But now, an eternity later, he had come to accept that his was a faculty with no exhilarating triumphs, no sacred cities, and no achievable destination.

“Plato introduced the demon of doubt…René Descartes labeled him…Spinoza and Leibniz toyed with him…Hume and Reid with their formidable Scots steel refused to be ruled by him…”

He had reached the meat and bones of the lecture now, a litany of names as endless and exacting as any Genesis genealogy.

“Kant urged us to look beyond logic and knowledge…Male-branche linked belief in the real world to supernatural revelation…Bishop Berkeley suggested that the pillars of existence have become dangerously fragile…”

Hearing the odd fragment echo off the flat walls and curved benches, he raised his eyes to make a perfunctory sweep of the class—it was important at least to pretend he was aware of his students' existence—and noticed, without much interest, that the young lady had shifted forward a few rows and was no longer taking notes.

“Hamilton saw God in the Unknown…the Scots championed the doctrine of the dual existence of mind and matter…the temporal devil…”

It was not unknown for women to attend university lectures, though officially they were tutored only extra-academically, and the voluntary nature of their presence meant that he himself saw few. This one—an ethereal creature, her paleness offset by clothes of clerical black—seemed to have lost interest in his lecture entirely, not that he could blame her, and was staring fixedly out the window.

“The devil of nature…of metaphor…of time…”

He followed her gaze, almost against his will, and noticed some police officers striding across the quadrangle, escorted by an unusually grave-looking Rector. He might have been disturbed, or just plain curious, but he had forced even the most pressing realities into the abstract and found it hard to summon a flicker of concern. And when he turned back he could not even see the young lady herself. She had moved again, or sunk behind another student, or disappeared like an apparition. It did not seem to matter.

“Locke compared the mind to blank paper, which the senses help furnish with words. Hume extended the metaphor with the notion of impressions, in which ideas become like type on a printing press. But it is left to questing temperaments like ours, gentlemen, to wonder how much of that book is autobiographical, how much societal, and how much set and inked by cosmic forces beyond our understanding…”

And how much is simply financial ledgers, medical reports, and documents of title; and how many pages should be squandered on anything less pressing and basic.

“We study no scrolls, we shatter no rocks, we disinter no bodies and plunge into no volcanoes”—he raised his voice irritably because some loudmouth in the corridor was calling for the Chancellor—“and yet we are the greatest adventurers in these halls. We burst through barriers without fear of what monsters might lurk behind. We bring light to the hideous and we digest the unpalatable. And we do all this because we cannot live without the truth. Because we alone, gentlemen, are intrepid enough to unlock the gates of the Unknowable, and courageous enough to allow the stream thus released to carry us to regions that time alone will reveal. And he whose heart quails at the prospect still has the option of returning to the comfortable bosom of illusions.”

And to the bosom of purpose. And contentment. And altruism. Gazing one last time upon the emburdened heads of his students—struggling to work out if the lecture had really ended—he wondered if his adversaries in Divinity were right, and the only victim of delusions was the philosopher who foraged fruitlessly through the Realms of God, seeking something minuscule enough to bring nourishment to his miserable existence below.

“Though it must be admitted, gentlemen…” he added, in a spontaneous coda, “that I find it difficult to question the subjective nature of the cold when my very tongue freezes to the side of my mouth…”

He sighed wearily and, sensing that his students were still unsure if they were dismissed—where once the finality of his tone would have been clear—he added curtly, “Be off with you, then.”

The students rose as one, with a conspicuous relief, and piled around the door.

“And one other thing…” McKnight said resentfully. “One other thing. If I hear any more sniffing in my classes”—he glared at them—

“I will personally wrap my scarf so tightly around the offender's head that I might well obstruct the circulation to his brain….”

Almost immediately he chastened himself—it was the sort of impulsive rebuke that had gone well beyond his control—and retreated guiltily to the antechamber to collect his books and empty his pipe. Emerging a few moments later he again registered the presence of the mysterious young lady, lingering behind to speak to him, to ask him an urgent question (something about the devil; it was as though he could read her mind), and though he actually paused for a second, and almost stopped to accommodate her, he quickly thought the better of it. He avoided eye contact, nodded evasively, and escaped into the corridor without a second glance.

He was threading his way through milling students to his cluttered crow's nest of an office, there to lunch on week-old bread and insipid black coffee, when he was approached by the somber-looking Rector.

“Tom…” the man said, still managing to use his Christian name with some hint of endearment. “Have you heard?”

“Heard?” Moving from place to place McKnight had developed a sort of irresistible momentum, unable to be pinned down or intimately examined.

“About Professor Smeaton? Of Ecclesiastical Law?”

“Smeaton?” McKnight, who had barely slowed, rarely welcomed the name: Smeaton had frequently attacked him at the meetings of the Senatus Academicus for his reported “devout atheism,” for his heretical teachings, and for his indulgence in abstractions no more productive than a child's desecration. “His objection to the Barlow Endowment? Aye, but I expected nothing—”

“No, no, Tom. I mean what happened this morning, at dawn.”

“I heard nothing.”

The Rector swallowed. “He's
dead,
Tom.”

McKnight actually stopped in his tracks and stared incredulously. “Smeaton?” he asked. “Dead?”

“Torn open. As if by wild beasts.”

McKnight frowned. “Where?”

“The body was found in the New Town, by a milkmaid.”

“In which street?”

“In
several
streets, Tom.”

McKnight's frown deepened. “Murdered?”

“Aye. By someone. Some
thing
. The body has already been identified and removed to the mortuary in the Cowgate. The police are with the Chancellor now.”

McKnight set the pipe stem between his teeth.

“There'll be an investigation, Tom. You might be called in for questioning. Formal procedure, you know. For motive, and the like.”

“Of course…” said McKnight, and the Rector, clearly uncomfortable in his presence, set off to inform the others.

Resuming his way up the corridor, McKnight approximated a familiar look of consternation, so that any onlooker would have little doubt that he was troubled by the news. But inwardly, and with an unsettling laceration of guilt, he thought that the murder was the most logical thing he had heard in many years.