The Wanderer (25 page)

After that, things just got worse and worse: the shipbuilding industry grew rapidly, but, as it did, wages fell and conditions deteriorated; the slum landlords raised rents; and there was a run of very cold winters, putting coal at a premium, and several wet summers in a row, leading to poor harvests that pushed up the price of bread.

Then, one day, a few weeks after his ninth birthday, Duncan came home from the laundry where he’d been put to work, found the door forced, left hanging off its hinges. His father, who’d been introduced to the writings of Marx and Engels by students who drank in the whisky shop he patronized, had been agitating fellow workers, advocating a suspension of labour in protest over low pay, long hours. Thugs in the pay of the owners had broken in, made, of the flat, a shambles: Duncan’s parents sprawled in pools of slowly clotting blood in the living-room, face down, skulls pulped – a sturdy pick-handle, one end grisly with hair,
bone, blood, and matter, split halfway along its length, had been thrown down on the bodies; his older sister, who’d been bathing in their tin tub, had been brutally raped, beaten, then drowned – Duncan gazed down at her once beautiful face, now swollen, livid, through the water, through drifting ribbons of blood and filth; his younger brother, only one year old, lay where he’d been sleeping in his cot, belly opened with a long knife, guts hanging like streamers from the mobile Duncan’s father had rigged up from battered pewter scraps and twine – finally Duncan broke, howled.

(Looking about me, I realized the rest were, if harrowed, rapt, also bemused, curious, as I was; well all except Elliot anyhow, who, lapping distractedly at his ale, seemed barely to be listening at all. Now I understood the butcher’s strange preamble.)

Duncan joined a gang of homeless street urchins who slept in an abandoned hotel, the Great Eastern, a building whose respectable, foursquare exterior hid a riot of squalid life. They ran errands for petty criminals, snatched purses on Sauchiehall Street and in George Square, sold their bodies. Life was a terrible weight. Most, it crushed. Duncan proved tougher, bore it up. Though it nearly broke him many times and would have in the end.

Then, around the time of his fourteenth birthday, he’d forgotten the exact date, but knew the month he was born in, one of the other urchins gave him a stolen pack of playing cards. He decided to teach himself a few simple tricks. He found he’d the knack for it. After some weeks practicing his sleight of hand, his act was good enough to take onto the streets. He set up his stall, a packing crate draped with an old blanket, on St Enoch Square, next to the colourful tents of the fortune tellers. He rigged games of Blackjack and Find the Lady, fleecing drunks and gullible yokels in town for market day, and performed conjuring tricks for small change. He did well, his income soon enough to allow
him to pay rent on a tiny bedsit in Maryhill, and buy a booth and a costume of top hat and tails. By his twenty-third birthday, he was a well-known figure on Glasgow’s streets, always surrounded by a throng making fevered and ill-advised bets on the turn of the cards, and was living in relative comfort in newly prosperous Kelvinbridge. He enjoyed many of the pleasures a modicum of wealth could buy, including some that were more or less illicit, opium, gambling, and the rarer types of bawd.

Finally, though, his renown proved his undoing; the gamers began to shun him. Soon he was struggling to pay the bills of his various creditors, some of whom were low types, and was in fear of being dragged into a dark close, having his legs broken, or worse. He realized he’d have to find another way to make money, decided he’d turn his hand to spirit channelling; it was potentially lucrative, and something for which his showmanship and sleight-of-hand skills suited him well. He sold some of his furniture and part of his wardrobe, he was foppish, had a lot of clothes, and put the money to buying the tools of that profession: a spirit cabinet with velvet drapes, which he had specially constructed for him; a mechanism for tilting tables; and a complicated contraption of spring-loaded rods, fishing wire, and hooks, that strapped to the forearm, was concealed by the shirtsleeve till extended, and would, in an ill-lit room, allow him to give the impression certain objects were floating in the air; among sundry other things. He also had a craftsman, who made props for the theatre, fashion for him a cunning Cartesian devil in the form of a goblin bobbing in a carboy of dusky spirit, blinking its sorrowful eyes.

In his spare time, he practiced those skills he knew would be essential, but which he didn’t already have: mimicry, ventriloquism, and escapology, this last for use in spirit-cabinet channellings.

The most enjoyable of his preparations was that of choosing a spirit guide. He decided to invoke Jean-Paul Marat, physician
turned seditionist and hero of the French Revolution, who’d actually visited Scotland in 1774. Marat’s death had been appropriately bizarre and brutal. He’d contracted a virulent skin disease hiding in the sewers of Paris, the worsening torment of which finally forced him, in June 1793, to retire from the Convention, spend his days at home soaking in a medicinal bath, swaddled in bandages steeped in soothing calamine, the only course he had found to bring any relief. Then, on the 13
^th
July, he was visited by a young woman, Charlotte Corday, who claimed to have information regarding the whereabouts of a group of Girondins who’d fled to Normandy. Marat agreed to an audience and Corday was brought to where he lay in his tub. But Corday, who’d Girondin sympathies, and was a little awry, after a fifteen minute interview drew a kitchen knife from her corset, stabbed Marat in the heart. Duncan spent many hours perfecting the nasal accent he’d employ.

It occurred to him that what could be offered to the senses, especially what could be seen, as sight was generally thought the most trustworthy of them, was more likely to be believed, and that some external manifestation of the supposed ectenic force, as a kind of plasma, would help snag the sceptical. He tried different substances, rejected cheesecloth and butter-muslin as unconvincing, finally settled on having a vial of Scarab Dust, a sweet effervescent powder for children, concealed in his shirtcuff, and to pour it into his mouth, at a moment when attention was averted, stir up, with his tongue, lots of white froth, slobber it, snort it from his nose. Of course, it couldn’t be moulded, form shapes, but in the dark he trusted the sitters’ imaginations would do the work. And it would be gone, leaving only a damp sticky trace, by the time the lights went up.

Duncan thought that he was known to many as a card sharp and conjurer would be a hindrance, but belief in spiritualism was then so widespread and fervent in Glasgow society that few questioned whether the prodigies of his séances were real or
faked.

He often began sittings by passing around the Cartesian devil in its jar. He told how he’d come across a treatise on the creation of a homunculus in his readings of alchemical works, one that disdained the wonted absurd esoteric recipes: take the root of a mandrake sprung from seed spilled by a man hanged, leave it weltering in a posset of curdled milk, honey, and goat’s blood, and a dwarfish living human will finally grow therefrom; take a hollowed-out gourd, fill it with the sperm of a man, sew it into the womb of a horse, and allow the whole to fester, and from this putrefaction will spring a tiny person of incorporeal aspect, which, if fed daily on the Arcanum of human blood, after forty days has passed will gain solidity…No, this formula was far less recondite, and, in its simplicity, had about it an air of verity. So Duncan duly attempted it. That it was indeed a true method could be seen from the strange creature it bore. No, he didn’t feel at liberty to divulge it. Were it to come into the hands of the unscrupulous, or irresponsible, the results could be most terrible.

Then, the mood set, Duncan would begin the séance. His rites took one of two forms, depending on the circumstances, his assessment of the credulity of the gathering, and his mood. If he was feeling cautious, he’d make use of the spirit cabinet. He’d request his host bind his hands tightly with rope, then enter the cabinet, have the curtain drawn behind him. Then he could communicate with the spirits hidden from leery peering. He’d free his hands from their bonds and retrieve, from a concealed compartment in the heel of his right shoe, a Jew’s harp of unusual design, whose keening, most sitters would take for the cries of the anguished dead. When bolder he’d begin with the spirit cabinet, but then join his sitters at a table, channel in full view. He’d ask all to clasp their neighbours’ hands, and, by a wile, a secret trick of mediums, keep one of his free. He could then manipulate his mechanisms, tip the table, snuff candles, scrape chalk down a slate, cause ladies’ gloves to dance in the air, and
also sprinkle the sherbet into his mouth.

Research was also key to the illusion of communication with the dead. Duncan pored over the obituaries every day, put it about that he’d pay serving staff from the households of Glasgow’s great and good for any intimate details of their masters’ lives, no matter how insignificant, ensured he knew all about the deceased relatives and friends of those likely to attend one of his séances.

It wasn’t long before he’d risen to a position of eminence among Glasgow’s mediums, was in great demand. He was shrewd and his fakery, subtle; his choice of spirit guide also played a part in his ascent, for there was something of a fad for rebellion among the aesthetic and decadent rich at that time. His lifestyle was one of flagrant debauchery by then.

But the period of his success was only to last a season. Not even a year passed between his quitting his booth on St Enoch Square and the last séance he conducted. It was held at the town house of a woman of noble lineage, a marchioness. This residence was one of a number of stolid buildings of reddish stone that crowned a hill in the city’s West End. Before ringing the bell, Duncan stood looking at the prospect from the portico, of Kelvingrove Park and, beyond, the pall of smoke that hung over the Clyde Shipyards. He felt a pang of mingled rage and sorrow.

On being shown through to the dining room by a fawning butler, Duncan found there were twenty guests at the party that evening. Seven had expressed cynicism on the subject of communication with the dead and, on Duncan’s arrival, were politely asked, by the marchioness, to absent themselves, go through to the drawing room.

That left thirteen to take part in the channelling. There was the marchioness herself, a plump dowager, who wore a shapeless floral-print dress, had strings of pearls around her neck, and whose sagging face was larded with powder; Douglas
Kilbride, a wealthy aristocrat and fanatical collector of antiquities; Joseph Lister, whose recent innovations in sterile operating conditions were just then earning him the acclaim of the medical community; Lady Alicia Hitchman, a young heiress, whose large brown eyes, set in a face of unparalleled comeliness, had been the cause of many duels between rivals for her affections; the inscrutable Mr Lodge, whose tales of travels in the Far East, of encounters with tattooed savages, of bizarre flora and fauna, man-eating pitcher plants, death worms, hulking apes, had caused a sensation; Jacob Bridges, a young man who’d been discovered ten years earlier in the Trossachs by a pig farmer, apparently feral, gibbering and acting like a wild thing, and who, having been taken in, tamed, and educated by a prominent Glaswegian philanthropist, was at that time prized at dinner parties for his callow, candid observations; Claire Turner, the socialite, whose wit had snared many men, and whose skeins of blackmail, though well-known, were too snarled to untangle, and would provide her with a healthy income into her dotage; Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, the famous architect, whose favouring of the classical style had earned him his sobriquet, a courteous, slightly deaf, elderly gentleman; Heather MacLellan, widow of a wealthy mine-owner; Allan Pinkerton, the renowned founder of America’s first detective agency, who’d returned to Glasgow, the city from which he hailed, for a brief sojourn following the War of the Rebellion, a sullen, taciturn man, who wore a full unkempt beard; Augustus Kellner, poet and petty dissident; a man calling himself John Walker, a friend of Kellner’s, who wore a tousled periwig, ill-fitting clothes, and had an alcoholic’s florid skin and bloated features; and Rebecca Graves, wife of wealthy liberal advocate Herbert Graves, who’d turned to superstition on the untimely death of her son.

(Upon hearing the description of John Walker, Elliot inexplicably grinned broadly.)

The séance began in the usual way with a round of introductions,
then Duncan began his patter. He explained the spirits’ reluctance to manifest themselves in bright light and the dangers of interfering either with himself, after he’d entered his trance, or with any ectoplasmic manifestation. Afterwards, he had one of the servants turn the gas lamps low, requested the group clasp hands. After urging calm, no matter what might take place, he closed his eyes, threw back his head. Ten minutes of tense silence followed, then, at what he judged the right moment, he began moaning, a low lamentation that mutated into half-formed words in English and French. He opened his lids, stared blankly up at the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, began to speak in the accents of his control spirit.

‘It seems that in death, as in life, I’m to have no peace. For what purpose have I been called forth today?’

The marchioness answered.

‘We wish to speak with the spirits of the dear departed.’

‘Is that so? There are a number of souls here who wish to make themselves known.’

‘Yes?’ Rebecca Graves asked, slightly frantic.

‘But why should I offer you salve? Have I ever found an unguent to soothe this infernal itching?’

The persona Duncan had created for his guide was cantankerous; he’d realized pliancy would draw suspicion.

‘It would be a great comfort for us to speak with those souls,’ Heather MacLellan said, a slight break in her voice.

‘Of that, I’ve no doubt,’ Duncan replied.

In a way, he enjoyed these moments of cruelty. His hard childhood had left him with little empathy for the rich, those who’d always enjoyed every privilege, knew nothing of suffering.