The Lamplighter (32 page)

“Your days at the orphanage, Evelyn…what do you see?”

“A parcel…tightly bound.”

“But I seek to invoke specific memories, Evelyn.”

Nothing.

“Do you recall the Incident of the Chalk?”

Nothing.

“Do you remember anything at all to do with chalk?”

Evelyn's face was completely unmoving, as though she had not even heard the question.

McKnight breathed out. “It is important that you transport yourself back to those days, Evelyn. There must be atmospheres, episodes, incidents, and emotions that we can attempt to unlock.”

No response.

“Do you not remember enthralling the other girls with your fantasies? Do you not remember those bitterly cold nights when the only warmth was generated through the power of your imagination?”

Total blankness.

“This is disappointing, Evelyn. I believe you agreed to this process with the understanding that you would hold nothing back. That there would be no barriers. I will not insist, nor will I drag anything from you forcibly, but I remind you that we cannot succeed without your full cooperation. If you understand me now, I'd like you to respond with a single nod.”

There was a long pause, but at last she did so.

McKnight cleared his throat. “Do you remember the chalk?” he asked again.

Nothing.

“Do you remember the girls there?”

Nothing.

“Your friends? The governor? The ones who came to claim you?”

No answer.

McKnight sighed. “This is most disheartening, Evelyn.”

“I never met him directly,” Hettie Lessels insisted. She had a moistened rag she was using as a handkerchief and she was unfurling and twisting it incessantly. “He did all his dealings with Lindsay and Smeaton, not me. He did not want to be known, and he was a cagey one, that much was plain. He did his business and then he was gone.”

“And what business was this?” Fleming asked.

“They…they would not tell the likes of me.”

“They must have told you something.”

“Nothing.”

“Come now, madam.”

Groves, feeling uniquely authoritative, interjected again. “No one is holding you accountable,” he said. “And Mr. Ainslie is already dead. So please, you may proceed, and hold nothing back. It will all come out eventually.”

She looked up at him with an air of struggling remorse. And in truth she wanted so desperately to purge herself, to lay herself bare, whatever the consequences.

“What did they tell you about Ainslie?” Groves went on. “It is clear that you know more than you have said.”

Lessels hesitated, overcoming a final surge of resistance. “Only that…”

“Aye?”

She squeezed her rag. “Only that he came back from Africa with…”

“With what?”

“With a way of snaring the de'il himself,” Lessels said, and quivered at the memory.

The Reverend Smeaton and Colonel Munnoch, sitting in the parlor of the latter's Moray Place abode, observe the visitor with disapproval: a cocksure type, irreverent, insubordinate—his military discharge has been noted—and done up in a burgundy frock coat like a brothel proprietor, he represents in many ways everything they most despise. But he may nevertheless serve a purpose.

“Lieutenant Colonel Hammersmith made a complete recovery,” Ainslie says. In his hand he has a glass of fine scotch that he is swilling appreciatively, having always had a fondness for whisky. “I made it back to the coast and fed him a mixture of grass and berries in the guise of an Ashanti restorative, the one we had been sent to find, but it was only a pretense. In point of fact, his health was restored by a far greater power, as a form of payment—a pact, if you will—for my performance with the pipes.”

“And what sort of payment was this,” Colonel Munnoch observes, stroking his mustache, “when you were out on your heels not one year later?”

“It drew me certain privileges, for a time. But very soon the army had nothing to offer me. I had developed more ambitious plans, you see, of a more personal nature.”

“You headed back into the jungle?”

“And I played the pipes some more.”

“For the fetish priest you speak of?”

“For the lodger in his mind. The one who walks in his dreams.”

“The wee fellow—the naked imp you saw on the tree trunk?”

Ainslie raises his glass and takes a sip, as though to fortify himself. “That was one of his incarnations, aye.”

Smeaton sniffs, vaguely unsettled. “And how, sir, are we to accept that you would even recognize the one you indicate? Are you a churchgoer, by any chance?”

“A man does not need a bank account to recognize a financial institution.”

Colonel Munnoch grunts at the man's impertinence. “So he appeared to you in person, you claim, when this fetish priest dreamed?”

“Several times.”

“And what…what was he like?”

Ainslie stares into the whisky. “A rather agreeable fellow, I would have to say. A weary old soul, worn out by past revelries. In other circumstances I believe we might have got along famously.”

Smeaton and Munnoch glance at each other, unhappy with this sympathetic assessment. “And what did the Lord of Lies say to you?” the Colonel inquires pointedly.

Ainslie smirks and stares at the two men steadily. “He said that he was tired of residing in the old man's imagination. And that he was hunting for a room with a more interesting view.”

Canavan cleared his throat. “Try the third person.”

McKnight glanced at him at first doubtfully, but then remembered her habit of objectifying herself in her dreams, and looking back at Evelyn, he decided that it could do no harm.

He stared again into her eyes. “There is a little girl, much like you, Evelyn,” he said. “She is in the orphanage. Do you recognize her?”

Blankness.

“I believe she is holding something. A piece of chalk. Do you see it?”

Evelyn's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“You see the girl, Evelyn? The girl? Do you see her?”

Nothing.

“I know you see her, Evelyn. What is she doing?”

Evelyn trembled.

“Does she cry? Does she sing? Does she remember anything?”

Evelyn gulped and her pupils contracted as though at a burst of light.

“She remembers something?” McKnight said hopefully. “What is it, Evelyn? What does she remember?”

“She remembers Leerie,” Evelyn said.

“Think of it, gentlemen,” Ainslie says, enjoying the righteous gleam on their faces and rueing the time he has wasted in not returning to Scotland earlier. “The devil. Lured into an empty vessel. Trapped inside and completely at your mercy. I leave it to your own imaginations as to what you might do with him.”

“I never liked him.”

“You have said that, madam,” Fleming said impatiently.

“He was a swindler, he saw only ways of making gain. And if that meant practicing his craft on the very de'il, then so be it, he could not be stopped.”

“Aye…”

“There was a lass, she played his wife. A comely type, a lady friend from the theater. The type a man might grieve over and do everything to save. They painted her up to look ill.”

“To look ill? Why?”

“As part of the pact.”

“With the devil?”

“Aye—with the de'il. The de'il was supposed to cure her, but did not know he was being duped.”

“Because she was not in fact ill?”

“Ye do not have to believe me.”

Groves interjected. “I believe you.”

But Fleming had a more cutting tone. “And what was this mysterious woman's name, madam?”

“I canna remember her name.”

Fleming nodded skeptically. “Aye.”

“I never met her at all.”

“Aye.”

“She stayed at the lodge for a time, and when she played her part she was gone.”

“What lodge was this?” Groves asked, fascinated.