City of Light (City of Mystery) (40 page)

Henry was there, of
course.  He was too young to know what he was seeing, too young to tell anyone
if he had.  Ian had smeared honey from their picnic on the boy’s fingers and
given him a feather, which was his standard means of keeping the child
entertained.  Henry had sat on his little blanket rapt with concentration,
peeling the feather first from one hand, and then from the other. 

But alas, he had
tired of his game before they had tired of theirs.  At some point they had
looked over and he had been gone, his little blanket empty, his cup overturned.

Ian had screamed. They
had both sprung to their feet, rushed instinctively toward the water.  Even
before they arrived at the riverbank, Charles had convinced himself that the child
must have drowned.  The parson had instructed him in a rather convoluted type
of theology during their own afternoons together, but even without this private
tutoring, the majority of the citizens of Manchester carried a most literal
fear of God.  In a place where pleasures were so few, it was easy to convince
the populace that these pleasures could only be purchased at a great price. 

But there was a
miracle.  Henry’s dress saved him.  His toddler’s dress, so full that it had
formed a sort of bubble, just enough to keep him aloft as he bobbed there, near
the shoreline, caught in the reeds.

Ian had plunged into
the water and seized the child.  As he held his brother to his naked chest, he
turned back toward Charles, his face full of fear and relief and another
emotion which was not so easy to read, a type of wonderment.  And there, from
the high bank, Charles had heard himself calling out promises.  That he would
protect Henry and Ian.  That he would get them out of Manchester and protect
them both for the rest of their lives.

The tragedy was that
he had meant it.  Charles saw himself as stronger and smarter and he honestly
believed he could deliver them all.  When the other boys hurled their slurs at
Ian, Charles had silently vowed that someday he would take his revenge.  Especially
on the ones who liked it and said they didn’t.  The ones who would pull Ian
into an alley, have their pleasure against him, and then, just when it was
finished, spit in his face. 

Charles Hammond and
Ian Newlove had both known what hypocrisy was before they reached the age of
fifteen, but perhaps Charles understood it better, for he had wrestled with the
hypocrisy of his own heart.  A lucky toss of the genetic dice had left him with
broad shoulders and a firm chin; otherwise, he would be suffering the same
indignities which were daily heaped on Ian.  The indignities that Henry someday
too would suffer.

Through the years
that followed, Charles’s hasty promise to protect them would inform every
detail of their lives.  Against all odds, he had gotten them out of the hellish
streets of Manchester and into a life of money, security, power, and prestige.  This
transition had required multiple levels of deception, each painstakingly built
one within another, like the ever-narrowing chambers of a fort.  His marriage
to Janet, for example.  She was the one thing Mancunians hated and feared more
than homosexuals – an intellectual woman - and thus she had been more than
happy to take his name and the humble cottage his parents had left him.  The
title of man and wife, unearned as the words may have been, shielded them both
from speculation and besides, he had grown fond of her.  Janet was the one who
had first taught him French.  Charles had succeeded even in exacting an almost
Biblical revenge against a certain type of man, the ones he would always privately
think of as “the boys in the alley.”  He had made those unholy bastards pay,
and before this business was over, they would all pay even more.

But Charles had
failed in his promise as well, which is why he now sat in his nightshirt, pulse
pounding, his mouth sour with an alcohol-induced sleep. 

He could close his
eyes and be right back there, on that particular summer day.  The birds, the
trees, the dappled sunlight, the hallelujah of Ian’s single gasp.  He suspected
the memory had frozen in Ian’s mind as well.  Only Henry was unaware of the
birth of the bond they all shared, taking the older men’s careful care of him
for granted, growing ever more spoiled and petulant with each passing year.  He
alone did not carry the memory of that moment when Ian first realized that his
brother was gone, the moment when a moan of pleasure had turned into a shriek
of despair.  How they had seen the blue dress floating and slid down the bank in
terror, only to find Henry perfectly fine, his hands still smeared with honey,
bouncing and gurgling among the reeds.

When Ian had turned
towards him, the child in his arms, Charles had known exactly what he was
thinking.  That their moments of joy had very nearly caused the baby’s death,
that their wretched and unnatural desires had prompted God’s swift retribution.
 But Ian had been wrong. They were merely children, after all.  This was before
ambition and rage had hardened in Charles’s chest, fusing a diamond in the
place where his heart should be.  Before Henry’s sticky fingers moved from
feathers to everything in sight, long before Ian would become Isabel.  It would
take seventeen more years before the culmination of their sins would fully
overtake them.  Seventeen more years until Henry would once again go down to
the water. 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Paris

12: 25 PM

Geraldine and Emma
were at 2158 in their step count when they saw Tom and Trevor walking toward
them on the bank.

Oh God, Emma
thought.  The game is up.

But Trevor did not
seem angry or indeed even surprised to find the women there. “We need to
confer,” he said in greeting, just as nonchalantly if they were all sitting
around Geraldine’s table at one of the Tuesday Night Murder Games. 

A single look had
told Trevor that Geraldine needed a proper sit, and so he pretended exhaustion
himself.  It didn’t take much pretending. With the men virtually pulling
Geraldine, they climbed the bank to the sidewalk above and found a pair of benches
on the street.  When they had all settled in, Trevor began.

“Chin up, everyone,
because I think we’re much closer to finding Rayley than it seems,” Trevor
said.  “This latest telegram from Davy has changed everything.”  He produced
the rumpled paper from his pocket and read the brief message to Geraldine and
Emma.

“The timeline,” he
said, looking up as he finished, “strongly suggests that The Lady of the River
is Henry Newlove.  He must have come here at Delacroix’s request, or should I
say Hammond’s, just after the Cleveland Street raid.”

“Obviously,” said
Emma. “For he was dressed in his work garb when he was killed.  But why was he
killed and by whom?  Delacroix, or should I say Hammond, had reasons to dispose
of Patrick Graham, but why would he drown one of his own employees, his long
time second-in-command?”

“For simplicity’s sake,
let’s agree to call the man Delacroix,” said Trevor, “and I have no idea why he
might have turned on Henry or if he is even the one to have done the deed.  But
the fact that Henry Newlove, a known boy-girl and about eighteen years of age,
arrived in Paris the day before the Lady of the River was found cannot be coincidental.”

“That’s one piece,”
Emma said.  “And here’s another.  While Gerry and I were walking the bank we
encountered a prostitute wearing an obviously expensive outfit in various
shades of plum, just as Rayley had described Isabel’s clothing on the day they
climbed the tower.  The woman told us she had gotten these clothes from a
client in payment, who in turn had gotten them in a trade for his own.  He had
swapped his own workman’s clothes for those of a beautiful woman he met in a
bar.  Are you still following me?”

Tom and Trevor
nodded.

“The woman in the
bar had been weeping,” Emma continued. “She was carrying a suitcase, and was
most certainly Isabel Blout.  The bar was called The Laughing Woman, if you’d
like a further piece of irony in our little story, and it’s located here, in
the river district.”

“So we’ve drawn
close to Isabel too,” Tom said. “She’s somewhere in this very ghetto, dressed
as a man.”

“It all leads me to
wonder,” said Emma, “is it possible that Isabel and Rayley are together?  Based
on the fact they disappeared the same morning, many people have assumed as much
and we’ve been the only ones to discount the idea.  Perhaps we discounted it
too quickly.”

Tom frowned. “Are
you suggesting that if she is free, then perhaps he is too?  And merely in
hiding?”

Trevor was already
shaking his head.  “Rayley wouldn’t hide.  I know the man.  No matter how acute
the danger, he’d find some way to get a message to us, or at least to Rubois.”

“I agree,” said Tom.
“In fact, that’s how I think of him, as the sender of messages.  But if Isabel
is indeed still in Paris, that gives us another person we must find as soon as
possible.  For it strikes me that she is in as much peril as Rayley.”

“May I speak?”
Geraldine suddenly said.

Trevor was surprised
by the meek request. “Of course.”

“Do you remember our
conversation on the crossing?  We were discussing Shakespeare, and Tom said
that since the female parts were played by men and that since the plays often
had a woman pretending to be her brother, that what you had in the end was a
man playing a woman playing a man.”  Geraldine looked around the group.  “I
believe that is precisely what we are dealing with here.”

Tom grimaced. “I’m
afraid you lost me on one of those turns.” 

“I’m still with you,”
said Trevor. “In fact, I’ve been thinking along the precisely same lines ever since
we got the telegram.  Davy’s message had two parts, did it not?   And the
second may be just as pertinent as the first.  Let’s consider this new and
surprising fact that Henry had an older brother, apparently the most persuasive
of all the boy-girls.  A paragon in fact, for Ian Newlove somehow managed to
avoid growing more masculine with the passage of time and even ultimately
married, or at least pretended to marry, a man.  So, we must ask ourselves,
where is Ian now?”

“It’s hard to fathom
but you must be right,” said Emma.  “Ian is Isabel.”

“But that’s
impossible,” Tom said, looking from one to the other. “Well, isn’t it?  Isabel Blout
has been accepted into the best homes in London for more than a decade and is
known far and wide as a seducer of men.  For God’s sake, she was even painted
by Whistler…”  He trailed off thoughtfully, then looked at Trevor.  “You saw that
something was off the morning we viewed the portrait, didn’t you?  You called
her out even then.”

“I assure you that I
didn’t foresee all this,” Trevor said.

“But you said she
wasn’t beautiful,” Tom said.  “You kept looking at her foot.”

“Poor Rayley,” Emma
murmured. “I don’t suppose he knows.”

“I think it’s rather
safe to say he doesn’t,” said Trevor.

“But of course her
husband must have,” Tom said questioningly, looking directly at Geraldine.
“What was George Blout’s part in all this?  Or was he merely history’s biggest
fool?”

Geraldine shook her
head. “From the very beginning, I’ve told you he was a confirmed bachelor.”

“Yes, you certainly
did,” said Trevor, slumping back against the bench with a sigh.  “But I’m
afraid none of us really understood what you meant by the phrase.  I was
picturing a retired military man who liked to sit in stuffed armchairs and
sputter on that women will never get the vote.  I didn’t grasp that you were really
saying George Blout was homosexual.  Frankly, Gerry, that would have been a
helpful thing to know.” 

“Oh dear,” Geraldine
said.  “I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.  It was just a rumor, you know, and then
he married a beautiful young girl and the rumor stopped.  I always suspected
that he was using the marriage to hide behind, as untold numbers of homosexuals
have undoubtedly done for centuries. Until just a few minutes ago it had never
occurred to me that George had found a way to actually marry a boy.   It was
something you said, Emma dear, about wondering if Isabel would be able to wear
men’s clothing more effectively than you had.  And the thought just leapt there,
fully formed in my head, that of course she would be able to pass as a man,
because she was one.”

“She not only is
one, but she is most likely Ian Newlove, Henry’s missing older brother,” Trevor
said.  He shook his head.  “God, but the bloody pronouns are a muddle.   Calling
her Isabel, seeing her as the woman she has played for so many years, will
probably take us closer to the truth.  The question now becomes, does Isabel
know that her brother is dead?  He was never displayed at the morgue and the
French police did not release the fascinating fact that the body pulled from
the Seine was actually a male dressed as a female, so the newspapers made very
little of the incident.  Just another suicide in the Seine.  Small print on a
back page.”

They all sat for a
moment in silence.

“She must have
learned something,” Emma finally said, “for literally overnight she went from a
carefree woman who was flirting with Rayley to one who was begging for help. 
Something scared her.”