The Truth of the Matter Read online

The Truth of the Matter

  10 January, 1883

  Sebring Hadley Campbell

  MR Graham

  THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER

  Copyright © 2012 MR Graham

  https://quiestinliteris.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form, without written permission from the author.

  I could barely read the manuscript through the age-stain and mildew and char. It was a manuscript in the most literal sense of the word: merely a collection of papers and scraps of papers, wrapped in brown parcelling, bound with butcher’s twine and sealed in red wax with the image of a scaffold and noose. Lord knows I should have left it alone but I, fool that I am, broke the seal and began to read.

  It was written with a dip pen, in a large, round, masculine hand, blurred in places by what may have been tears. Or perhaps it was written in the rain; I don’t know, but in those places the firm writing becomes more angular and uncertain, as though his hand trembled. I’ve lain awake many a night since I found the thing, wondering if perhaps it could be a work of fiction, and I find I cannot take these words at anything less than face value. I read it again and again, and each time my doubt in its reality faded: there is a credibility in these words of a man long dead, and a note of humanity in his story that cannot be duplicated by the author of fiction. At times, I can even hear his voice, low and calmly sorrowful and a bit mad. Mad, yes, but I believe him.

  I stood atop the roof and watched the foul yellow fog rise stealthily from off the Thames to go creeping outward like a fungus, devouring the City with its pale tendrils – the Leviathan rising from the deep, a ghostly, half-living creature begotten of every rotting corpse and bereaved soul that has come to rest in the sediment of the River over the centuries. I could almost imagine I saw those spirits, moving among the mists, trekking landward with dumb vengeance in their tattered minds and dark mirth upon their sealed lips.

  There was a lantern out upon the water, a fisherman in his skiff returning too late from his daily work. Look out, friend. Be on your guard, lest these silent sentinels catch you upon your way. To my mind, it seemed that perhaps the light was in fact a will-o’-the-wisp, one of those deceivers of the moors and forests. Be gone, Satan! You have no hold over me, and I will not follow your messenger.

  A chill wind moved my coat about me and fluttered my lapels, bringing with it the stench of salt and pitch and decay from the wharf. Anyone who cared to look would be able to see me up here. The complete exposure made me terribly edgy, or at least far edgier than I would have been safely on the ground. Look out, Sebring. Be careful; they might have air rifles.

  Three flashes from across the water: it was time. The trap was sprung, the bait taken, and the police would need our assistance in subduing the prey. And Katherine… Well, that would wait until business was seen to. The clock over the House of Commons struck two as I came down the fire escape and was immediately engulfed in the clammy, roiling depths of the fog. I unshuttered my own lantern and shone its red, diluted light down the alley, making it look as though the clouds surrounding me were made of blood. Again, I saw the faces in the mist, leering grotesquely as they pushed forward to drain the life from my body. Then the breeze shifted, and they were gone, though I fancied I could still feel the phantom eyes upon my back, and it made me shiver.

  “Sebring!” I jumped at the voice from the shadows, not recognising the form that coalesced before me, seemingly birthed from the fog. “Sebring!” it repeated, growing stronger.

  “Clarence!” I exclaimed in immeasurable relief. “Did all go well? Did you find her?”

  He took me by both shoulders with the gravity used to tell a man that he is dying, pushed me down onto a pile of wharf ropes, and sat down beside me. The damp soaked through my overcoat and trousers, raising gooseflesh over my entire body, though the cold was nothing compared to the expression on what I could see of his face. “We found her,” said he, with a weary sigh. “They ruined her, Sebring. They ruined her with morphia. All we could do was to put her out of her misery.”

  I suppose I had expected that. I had known, deep in my heart of hearts, that never again would I see Katherine on this side of the veil, but God! My hopes had been so high! Forever now were her green eyes closed, forever her flame extinguished. I did not cry then, though I have cried oft and bitterly since, both for the loss of my beloved and for the spark which has ignited in me all that is abhorrent and inhuman and cruel. I did not cry then, though perhaps if I had, so much may have been averted, so many matches quenched by tears before they could touch the powder.

  “Rothers?” I asked.

  “Gone when we arrived. They were expecting us.”

  I left then, returning to my apartment in Whitechapel and the quiet solitude it afforded. What else could I do? My life, my hopes were shattered, my fiancée dead, my pride crushed; never had the world weighed so heavily upon my shoulders. Of course there was still the business, the prestige, the higher call to battle and triumph over the criminal forces that skulked in both the dark alleyways and shining halls of the civilised world. There was the money, and moral satisfaction. But what was that to me, without Katherine? What was that to me, now that my confidence in my abilities had been utterly dissolved? For that was truly the last nail driven into my coffin – I had failed her. With all my wits and planning and all of my hired muscle and carefully choreographed operations, I had gotten there too late, perhaps even weeks too late, to judge from Clarence’s assertion that they’d used morphine. If I had only been more diligent in my search, if I’d paid more attention to each detail, if I’d killed Rothers when I’d had the chance, if I’d rushed in with blazing guns rather than plot and scheme for that infernal sting… A million accusations and recriminations flew through my brain, an unceasing flood that threatened to drown me in my own guilt.

  The funeral was three days later, its mortuary bleakness compounded by the drab mediocrity that always follows a case. I barely had the energy to rouse myself from the settee, much less bring myself to summon a hansom and stand in the back of St Raphael’s, singing subdued responses to the priest. For Christ’s sake, Sebring! Put some heart into it! This is for Katherine, whether she may hear or not. She’s in a better place now, isn’t she? Isn’t she?

  It was neither the first nor the last time I’d doubted in the existence or benevolence of the Deity, but this instance awoke in me a morbid irony and prised loose a wild laugh that ripped from my throat and ricocheted around the church like a bullet. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in verdant pastures; he leadeth me beside still waters; he restoreth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… What comes next?

  What comes next? That which had begun as a hysterical tremor of the mind progressed rapidly into a sympathetic illness of the body. I’ve been told that I was carried from Raphael’s and back home, though I recall none of that. It seemed mere hours that I lay bedridden in Whitechapel, with the tears and sweat of fever mingling on my cheeks, but April had become July by the time I rose at last, pale and weak and a good three stone lighter than I’d been before.

  Clarence would come in the early morning and leave shortly after supper, explaining his constant presence with the assertion that he had missed my company during my illness, but I would catch his calculating, worried glances at times, and I knew that he feared I would attempt suicide. He was continually looking up from his book or our game of chess and asking me vague, abstract questions, no doubt under the misimpressi
on that I could not identify his interest as psychiatric.

  In all honesty, I’d contemplated suicide only once, and then briefly. When I took into consideration everything I’d done in my life, I was left beyond a shadow of a doubt with the conclusion that I was hell-bound, so death would be no improvement on current situations. Which is worse: hell on earth or hell in the next life? It might have been a blessing had I been an atheist who could believe that there is no soul, and that consciousness ceases when one has passed beyond the veil.

  Will he not stop looking at me! It is deucedly difficult to concentrate on the board when you stare so, Clarence. Keep your mind and eyes on the game, or I’ll crush you once again. Your queen and both of your knights are currently in dire jeopardy.

  Really, though, chess