A Sunless Sea (5 page)

“Is that how you think of yourself: the daughter of a criminal?” he said with far more edge to his voice than he had meant to.

“We were talking about you,” she responded. “You are here; I did not come to you.”

That also hurt, although he should not have expected her to come to him. Right or wrong, it was always the man who pursued—except perhaps with Hester. If she had quarreled with someone she cared for, whether she had been right or wrong, she would have sought them out. He knew that from the past. Was he unfairly comparing Margaret with her? Hester had faults as well, but big, brave ones, never a pettiness of mind. He was the one who had not been daring enough for her. He should not be petty now.

He took a deep breath. “I came hoping that if we spoke, we might heal at least some of the breach between us,” he said as gently as he could. “I have no idea what the future will bring, and I was certainly not trying to make excuses for it. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone else—”

“Which is as well, because you can’t!” She cut across him. “Not to me, or to my family.”

He kept his temper with difficulty. “I was not thinking of you as someone else.” They were both still standing, as if physical ease were impossible. He thought of asking if he could sit down, or even simply doing it, but he decided not to. She might take it as an implication that he thought he belonged here, and that he saw it as a right, not a privilege.

“How were you thinking of me, then?” she asked.

“As my wife, and—at one time at least—also as my friend,” he said.

Without warning the tears filled her eyes.

For an instant he thought that there was hope. He started to take a step toward her.

“You threw that away,” she said quickly, raising her head a fraction, as if to ward him off.

“I did what I had to do!” he protested. “Everything the law allowed me, to defend him. He was guilty, Margaret!”

“How often do you repeat that to yourself, Oliver?” she said bitterly. “Have you convinced yourself yet?”

“He admitted it to me,” he said wearily. They had been over all of this before. He had lived out the whole wretched tragedy for her—Ballinger’s desperate fight for life, then finally his admission of guilt. He had given her few details, to spare her distress, and her knowledge of details that were ugly and cruel, things she need never know.

“And that’s enough for you?” She flung the words at him like an accusation. “What about the reasons, Oliver? Or didn’t you want to know them? Can’t you for once be honest and stop hiding behind the law? Or is it all you know, all you understand? ‘The book says this! The book says that!’ ”

“That’s not fair, Margaret,” he protested. “I can’t work outside the law—”

“You mean you can’t think outside it,” she corrected him, her eyes burning with contempt. “You are a liar, perhaps first to yourself; you can consider actual morality when you want to. You can for Hester. You’ll bend all your own precious rules when she asks you to.”

“Is that what this is?” he said with painful understanding. “Jealousy of Hester, because you think I would have done differently for her? Can’t you understand that she would never have asked me to?”

Margaret gave a harsh, bitter laugh. The sound of it lacerated the last of his emotions. “You’re a coward, Oliver! Is that why you care for her so much? Because she’ll fight the battles for you, and never expect anything of you but to follow? What about Monk? Would you fight for him?”

He did not know how to answer her. Could any of what she said be true?

“Did you ask my father why he did all those things you accused him of?” she went on, perhaps sensing her victory. “Or did you not want to know? It might disturb your comfortable world of right and wrong where everything is decided for you by generations of lawyers from the past. No need to think! No need to make any difficult decisions, or stand alone. Certainly no need to take any dangerous action yourself, question any of your own comfortable certainties, or risk anything.”

At last he was angry enough to reply. “I’ll risk my own safety, Margaret, but not anyone else’s.”

Her eyes widened in amazement. “That man, Mickey Parfitt, he was filth!” she said with scorching contempt. “Worse than vermin. You know what he did.”

“And the girl?” he said quietly.

“What girl?” She looked blank.

“The girl he killed as well?”

“The prostitute!”

“Yes, the
prostitute
,” he replied coldly. “Was she vermin, too?”

“She would have had him hanged!” she exclaimed.

“So that justified him killing her? That’s your courage, your brave morality? Personally deciding who lives and who dies, rather than leaving it to the law?”

“He had reasons, terrible choices to make.” Now the tears ran freely
down her cheeks. “He was my father! I loved him.” She said it as if that explained it all. He began to realize at last that for her, it did.

“So I should forgive him, no matter what he did?” he asked.

“Yes! Is that so difficult?” It was a challenge, demanded in fury and despair.

“Then what a pity you did not love me also.” He said the words so softly, they were little more than a whisper.

She gasped. Her eyes went wide. “That’s not fair!”

“It’s perfectly fair,” he replied. “And since I cannot place your family before what is right, then perhaps I did not love you, either. That seems to be your conclusion, and by your way of measuring love, you are right. I am sorry. I truly believed otherwise.” He stood still for a moment, but she did not say anything. He turned to leave. He had reached the door when finally she spoke.

“Oliver …”

He stopped, then looked back at her. “Yes?”

She made a helpless little gesture with her hands. “I thought I had something to say, but I don’t.” It was an admission of failure, a closing of the door.

The pain overwhelmed him, not for something lost so much as for the fading of a dream that had once seemed completely real. He walked out of the room.

The parlor maid was waiting in the hall, as if she had known he would not be staying. She handed him his coat, and then his hat. Mrs. Ballinger was not in sight, and it seemed faintly ridiculous to go looking for her to tell her he was leaving. It would only embarrass them both. There was nothing to say. Better simply to go.

He thanked the parlor maid and went out into the darkness. The air was cold now, but he barely noticed. He walked briskly until he came to the nearest cross street where he could find a hansom to take him home.

R
ATHBONE WALKED INTO HIS
own wide, gracious hall to be told by Ardmore that there was someone waiting for him in his withdrawing room.

“Who is it?” he asked with some irritation. Whatever it was, he was in no mood to deal with it tonight. Even if some client had been arrested and was in jail, there was nothing he could do about it at this hour.

“Mr. Brundish, sir,” Ardmore replied. “He says he has something of great importance to give you, and he is unable to return in the morning because of other commitments. I explained to him that you were out, and that I did not know at what time you might return, but he was adamant, sir.”

“Yes, you did the right thing,” Rathbone said wearily. “I suppose I had better go and take delivery of whatever it is. What is it, do you know? A letter of some sort, I suppose.”

“No, Sir Oliver, it is quite a large parcel, and from the way he carried it, it seems to be of considerable weight.”

Rathbone was surprised.

“A parcel?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like me to bring whisky, sir? Or brandy? I offered him both earlier, but he only accepted coffee.”

“No, thank you. It will only incline him to stay.” He was aware it sounded ungracious, but all he wanted was to accept the package and see the man leave. And very possibly, Brundish was as keen to get to home as Rathbone was to be left in peace.

He walked into the withdrawing room and Brundish rose from the chair he had been sitting in. He was a stocky man dressed in a striped suit. He looked tired and a little anxious.

“Sorry to call at this time of the night,” he apologized before Rathbone had a chance to speak at all. “Can’t come tomorrow, and I needed to … deal with this.” His glance slid to the box on the floor beside his chair. It was approximately a foot in height and breadth, fifteen inches long. It appeared to be some kind of case.

“Deal with it?” Rathbone asked, puzzled. “What is it?”

“Your legacy,” Brundish replied. “From the late Arthur Ballinger. I’ve been holding it in trust for him. At least, I held the key and the instructions. I only retrieved this today.”

Rathbone froze. Memory came flooding back. Ballinger’s message
to him: that he had bequeathed him the blackmail photographs in a final irony as bitter as gall. Rathbone had assumed it was a dying joke, a threat empty of meaning.

He looked now at the case sitting on the beautiful carpet (another choice of Margaret’s), and wondered if that was really what was in the box: pictures of men, important men, powerful men with money and position, indulging in the terrible vice that Ballinger had photographed and with which he had then blackmailed them. At least his blackmailing had usually been for good; Rathbone thought of the judge who had been disinclined to close down a factory polluting the land and causing terrible disease. The threat to make public his taste for the violent sexual abuse of small boys had changed his mind.

Each member of that hideous club had had to pose in a picture so lewd, so compromising, that the publication of it would ruin him. After this initiation, exercise of the vice was relatively free—until Ballinger needed their help in some favor or other.

Only after some years had it degenerated into payment with money rather than action. And then—when possession of the riverboat on which it had all taken place had satisfied Ballinger’s own power for gain—finally to murder.

Rathbone did not know beyond doubt of Ballinger’s guilt in, or even his knowledge of, the murders of the boys grown too old to please the tastes of such patrons, or too unwilling to be coerced anymore. He preferred to think that of those additional crimes, perhaps Ballinger was innocent.

None of this Margaret believed, and she had never seen or even imagined the pictures. Rathbone would fight with everything he had in order that she never did. Such things seared themselves into the mind and could not be erased. Rathbone himself still woke in the night soaked with sweat when he dreamed of them, of going into the boats themselves and feeling the pain and the fear drown him, like filthy water closing over his head.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I suppose you have to leave them here?”

“Yes,” Brundish replied, his brows lifted slightly in surprise. “I assume
from that remark that you do not wish for … whatever it is?” He pulled a small sheet of paper from his inside pocket. “However, I need you to sign this to confirm that I have delivered it to you.”

“Of course you do.” Wordlessly Rathbone took the paper over to the writing table in the corner, picked up a pen, dipped it in the inkwell, and signed. He blotted the signature lightly and handed the paper back.

After Brundish had gone, Rathbone sent Ardmore to fetch brandy, then he dismissed him for the night and sat in the armchair thinking.

Should he destroy them, now, without even opening them? He looked down at the box and realized it was metal, and locked. The key was tied to it on a ribbon, presumably by Brundish. He would have to open it and take them out before he could destroy them. Inside that box they were invulnerable, probably even to fire.

What else would destroy pictures? Acid? But why bother? Fire was easy enough. There was a fire in the grate now. All he needed to do was pile more coal on it, get it really hot, and he had the perfect method. By morning there would be nothing left.

He bent down and took the key, put it in the lock, and turned it. It moved easily, as if it were well cared for and often used.

The contents were not only paper as he had expected, but photographic plates, with paper prints beside, presumably duplicates used to prove their existence. He should have foreseen that. These were the originals from which Ballinger had printed the copies he had used to blackmail people. He had nearly said “the victims” in his own mind, but these men were not the victims. The true victims were the children, the mudlarks, orphans, street urchins taken and kept prisoner on the boats.

He looked at the pictures one by one. They were horrific, but obscenely fascinating. He barely looked at the children—he could not bear it—but the faces of the men held him totally, however much against his will. They were men whose features he knew, men of power in government, in law, in the Church, in life. That the sickness ran through them with such power that they would stoop to this shook him till his stomach clenched and his hand holding the plates trembled.

If they had paid prostitutes, or even done such things with adult
men, or other men’s wives, it would have been a private matter that he could perhaps shut out of his mind. But this was entirely different. This was the rape and torture of children, and—even to the most tolerant—it was a bestial crime. To the society in which they moved, which respected them and over which they had power, it was a sin beyond forgiveness.

The plates were glass. They would not burn. The fire in the hearth, however hot, would not be enough.

Acid? A hammer and blows violent enough to smash them to rubble? But should he? If he destroyed this evidence, then he was complicit in the crimes they had committed.

Should he take them to the police?

But some of those men
were
police. Some were judges, some advocates in the courts. He would overturn half of society. And if word of his possession got out, perhaps he would not even survive. Men had killed for infinitely less.

He was too tired to make any irrevocable decisions tonight.

He closed the box and locked it again. He must find a safe place to keep it until he could decide. It must be somewhere that no one else could find it, or ever think to look.