The Angel of Highgate (20 page)

After an hour, the door burst open and the four survivors of Fowler’s inquisition spilled out, eager to distance themselves from the blood-soaked atrocity of torn and mortified flesh splashed across the floorboards. Though they were hard, violent men themselves, many of them accomplished murderers and thugs, all were ashen-faced and trembling at the horrors they had been forced to witness.

Mordecai Fowler sauntered out of the room a few moments later, the front of his clothes spattered in blood and gore. He carefully wiped the sticky slime adhering to the small silver spoon on a rag that had once been a piece of Tommy Tailor’s shirt. Then Fowler blew on the spoon until it fogged with his breath and gave it a final polish on his sleeve, smiling at his own upside down reflection in the spoon’s tiny bowl.

As Fowler left the room, the four surviving mobsmen exchanged cowed glances. All knew that there was one less devil in hell that night, for he was walking the earth wrapped in the skin of Mordecai Fowler.

O
nce again, Thraxton sat atop the uncomplaining Emily Fitzsimmons. A lantern borrowed from the sexton hissed quietly on the grave slab next to him. Its shifting glow threw Thraxton’s eerily stretched shadow thirty feet across the ground, where it broke its back over a row of nearby gravestones. Thraxton looked up into the face of a nearby angel. As the lantern light ebbed and shifted, it gave a mock animation to the statue, which seemed to stir restlessly on its pedestal. Although he was wrapped in a heavy woolen cloak, the stone slab radiated cold through his buttocks and the backs of his legs, and he shivered and pulled the cloak tighter about his shoulders.

In the nearby trees, skeletal and bare, a horned owl dropped from its perch and flapped silent and ghostly through the branch tops until it disappeared. Then a moth flitted from the darkness and swooped in spin-dizzy circles about the lantern. Thraxton reached out and snatched it from the air. Although he tried to hold it fast, the moth wriggled between his fingers, skittered across the back of his hand and fluttered straight up into the night. When Thraxton dropped his gaze from the dark sky, a small figure stood in front of him.

He exclaimed, startled. The figure laughed and pushed back a deep cowl revealing features that by now were etched into Thraxton’s being.

Aurelia.

“Strewth! You are as quiet as dust!”

Aurelia smiled, but her eyes were guarded. “I did not know if you would come.”

He leaned forward, an elbow resting on his knee as he looked up into her face, which glowed luminous in the lantern light.

“Dear God. Could you have doubted it?”

Again she smiled, but something about the intensity of his gaze unnerved her and she lowered her eyes. She wore a white flower pinned to her dress—a Night Angel—and now she touched a hand to it. “My mother is waiting for her flower.”

With the softly hissing lantern swinging at his side, Thraxton allowed Aurelia to take his hand and lead him through the jumble of headstones to the darkly wooded spot where the grave of Florence Greenley lay. During the day the spot was deeply shaded. Now, hidden from the wan glow of an orange crescent moon, the grave was pooled in impenetrable darkness. Even with the lantern light, Thraxton stumbled on the uneven ground and wondered at Aurelia’s ability to see in the dark.

“Hello, Mother,” Aurelia said upon reaching the simple headstone. “I have come as I promised and brought this kind gentleman to meet you.”

She looked up at Thraxton and smiled. “My mother says hello.”

Thraxton’s mouth dropped open. He was at a loss. “Ah, er, hello… Mrs. Greenley.”

Aurelia unpinned the flower and her silk dress rustled as she knelt to place the single bloom in the stone urn. Still kneeling, she pressed a hand against the headstone and bowed her head. When she rose a moment later and turned to Thraxton, her eyes held a liquid gleam.

“My mother says you are a kind man. That you have a compassionate soul, but you must first learn to listen to your heart.”

They walked back to the pathway without speaking. Finally it was Aurelia who broke the silence.

“My mother died giving birth to me.”

“How tragic. You never knew her.”

She stopped and turned to face him. “Oh, but I do know her. As I came into this world she left it. But our souls touched in passing. I speak to her every time I come.”

Thraxton looked down at her face, his pulse suddenly racing, his breathing quickened. He slipped his free hand around her waist and slowly drew her toward him. He brought his face close to hers, until all he could see was her eyes. Their mouths moved closer, until they passed the same breath back and forth between them. And then Aurelia slid from his grasp, slippery as the moth. She ran giggling up the path and plunged into the blackness of the huge pharaonic arch that formed the entrance to the Egyptian Avenue.

Thraxton pursued, the lantern held high, footsteps echoing as he ran up the sloping tunnel. The avenue opened out onto the Circle of Lebanon, the ring of catacombs that surrounded an ancient cedar tree.

Thraxton called out Aurelia’s name, but received no answer. He trod around the circular pathway until he returned once more to the Egyptian Avenue where she stood, waiting. “You should be more careful,” he said. “Running in the dark. You will hurt yourself.”

“You sound like my father.”

“Does he know of your nocturnal wanderings?”

She laughed. “If he did he would forbid them. I do not wish you to think I feel ill of my father. In truth, he has devoted his life to me, but I am not one of his flowers to be kept in a hot house. I must feel the night air. And so I steal out, when he is asleep.”

“What you do is very dangerous, Aurelia.”

A look of irritation swept her face, like a naughty child receiving a scolding.

“I have done so for years and suffered no harm.”

“But you are just a young girl and London is such a wicked place.”

Aurelia took a step toward him, her face earnest. “I believe that if you look for wickedness you will find wickedness. But if you look for goodness, you shall find goodness.”

“And the other night? Those Resurrection Men?”

“And you were there to save me.” She smiled. “The world is full of good people.” She reached out and took his hand. Feeling the touch of that small gloved hand with its thin, child-like fingers, a thrill tremored through Thraxton he would not have thought himself capable of feeling.

“Come,” she said. “I will show you.”

W
hile at the cemetery, high atop Highgate Hill, they had been above the fog. Now, as they alighted from the hansom cab, they stepped into the murk of what locals called “a London particular.”

“Whitechapel,” Thraxton noted with growing unease and he looked around at the narrow streets with their dingy, darkened houses. “No place for a lady at any time of day, but especially after dark.” But, before he could change his mind, the cab driver cracked the whip over the horse’s ears, and the hansom clattered away.

It unnerved Thraxton, who muttered, “A bad omen. Even the cab drivers shun such places after dark.”

In answer, Aurelia took Thraxton’s hand. “But there are good people here. Poor people but still good, still kind. You shall see.”

They set off along a narrow street that snaked past crumbling tenements, dilapidated and shoddily built premises in various states of collapse, many spilling their bricks onto the road. Here and there, light glimmered from cracked-pane windows, showing that these ruins were still inhabited. But despite the ramshackle nature of the area, on nearly every corner stood a brightly illuminated pub or gin house bursting with light and raucous laughter. Outside, booze-sozzled men slumped in the street where they had passed out, and wives paced anxiously, hoping their husbands would leave before bingeing away the week’s money. As they passed the nearest gin palace a stout woman stood propping up the wall next to the door, a red feather boa thrown around her neck in an attempt at gaiety. When Aurelia and Thraxton approached she stepped forward into the light. A prostitute. Under the garish make-up, her face—prematurely old in her forties—showed a life of hardship. “Allo, Aurelia, love,” she said in a friendly squawk.

“Hello, Maggie.”

Thraxton felt the woman’s eyes crawl up and down him. Then she turned to Aurelia. “Here, you’re not on the game, are you?”

Aurelia laughed. “No, this is just a gentlemen friend.”

She flashed a gap-toothed grin winking with gold. “I could do with gentlemen friends like him, with them pretty blue eyes and wavy black hair.”

For once, Thraxton was glad of the poor light, for he could feel his face flushing.

“How is your little girl, Maggie? Is her cough better?”

The woman sighed dramatically and grasped both of Aurelia’s hands. “Yes, yes she is, my pet. And Gawd bless you for the money. I was able to take my little darlin’ to a proper doctor. Bless your heart!”

“I am happy to hear she is well,” Aurelia said, smiling. “Take care, Maggie.” She pulled her hands free and strode on with Thraxton.

“You, too, my dear,” the prostitute called after them. “And make sure he pays you up front. It’s the posh gents what are the most apt to do a runner after they’ve got what they’re after!”

They walked on, arm in arm, and Thraxton could not resist shooting a last look back before the fog swallowed the gin shop. “Dear God! You know that woman? She is a common whore!”

“She has four children to feed. Her husband took to drink. He used to beat her and her children. Now she has to survive the best she can.”

Thraxton, who had taken so much pleasure in outraging the sensibilities of the society he moved in, for once had to admit that he was shocked—shocked that such a gentle creature as Aurelia knew and conversed with common street people; shocked that such a vulnerable young woman could walk some of the most dangerous streets in London without fear.

But more surprises were in store for both of them.

* * *

Even though he had lost all sense of direction, Thraxton could tell they were approaching the river, for the temperature dropped and the fog grew so dense that at times they could see no farther than a few feet. Aurelia and Thraxton clung tight together, afraid that if they lost their grip they would lose each other forever. Though their eyes smarted and burned from the fog, there was a sense of the magical about its intimacy, for it seemed at times as though they were the only people in London. Aurelia led them through a Gordian knot of tumble-down alleyways and narrow ginnels that helter-skeltered up and down. Here and there a faint glimmer of light showed at a window. As they passed one, Aurelia drew Thraxton over and they peered in through the grimy glass.

Inside, a young woman sat at a rickety table in a squalid room, her head slumped onto her arms in a state of exhaustion. Atop the table sat a glue pot and a stack of paper matchboxes the woman had been laboriously gluing together by hand. Protruding from beneath the table were the grubby legs of a child, asleep on a pillow, covered by a thin blanket.

“This woman glues matchboxes together,” Aurelia said. “She works fourteen hours a day and earns only a few shillings a week.”

Thraxton bit his lip as he looked in at the pitiful scene. The coal scuttle beside the fireplace was empty. No fire burned in the grate. The room must be as cold inside as out.

On the next street, they stopped at another window. At least here a fire burned in the grate and two smoky candles spilled a dim light. A husband and wife sat at either side of a table sewing gloves. The woman had a young girl, perhaps five years old, pinned to her skirts who was sewing the fingers of the gloves. The little girl yawned, eyes drooping, but every time she started to nod off, her mother gave her a little slap to wake her up.

“Dear God,” Thraxton exclaimed. “That poor child!”

“The lady does not mean to be cruel, but they must eat and they have so little money. My father gives me a small weekly allowance. When I am able I push a few pennies under the door for these poor people. It makes so little difference in my life, yet it can make such a big difference in theirs.”