“At the same time you must admit that the occasion of a lady’s
marriage is a very suitable time for her friends and
relatives to make some little effort upon her behalf.”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”
October 21,1900, cont.
The tallest spire of Westminster Abbey pierced into the pale yellow orb of the setting sun as Arthur left Waterloo Station. Late-afternoon traffic flowed across Westminster Bridge like a gushing stream- like the dread Reichenbach itself, pouring pedestrians and clattering broughams east into the dense city center. Big Ben announced five and twenty.
Somewhere in this city hid the murderous husband of “Morgan Nemain,” and Arthur was going to find him. His first stop was the vicar-general’s office, which issued more than two thousand marriage licenses on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury every year. Typically, couples were married by their local diocese, but if the man and woman came from different parishes, then by law only the archbishop of Canterbury had the authority to legalize their union. This in turn meant that if someone was looking to get married clandestinely, the vicar-general’s building near Waterloo was the place to do it. It was an open secret, and a rather public irony, that the most ungodly marriages in society were granted by the church’s most senior office.
Marriage records were eventually sent to the library for safekeeping, but if the dead girl had wedded just weeks earlier, there was a great chance that Arthur might find a copy of her license still at the vicargeneral’s.
Arthur and Bram had worked all this out on the train back in from Blackwall, before Bram had begged off the hunt and returned to his Lyceum, to manage his theater and his actors. He had to round up that godforsaken live horse for Don Quixote. Egos required tending.
On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefolk and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London’s public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dim evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle shell of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleansing glare of the twentieth century.
As Arthur hailed a noisy hansom, he averted his gaze from the New Scotland Yard just across the Thames. Curse them.
The coach led Arthur to Kensington, then turned the sharp right onto Lambeth Road. The Lambeth Palace lay squat and blocky ahead of them, its medieval crenellations anachronistically militaristic in the unfortified modern city. To Arthur, the palace resembled a stout and angry Irishman, ready to pick a fight with the pavilions of St. Thomas’s Hospital to the north. And beside it lay the office of the vicar-general.
The grand entrance to the church office was a series of openings shaped like upside-down V’s, each a few inches smaller than the preceding one. It felt, to Arthur, like entering into a dark tunnel.
Though not a proper church, the building retained that sense of quiet and majestic stillness with which Arthur had always associated both the Catholic and the Anglican houses. He held suspicions toward the church-indeed, any church-and yet he had to admit that he did love churches. Arthur admired anything that connected him with antiquity, that made him feel like a part of the Britain that stretched back over the millennia. He believed in his people and the ideals of their civilization more than he believed in their God. He had more love for the Saxon than for the Anglican.
Arthur was faintly embarrassed by the loud clomps his boots made on the floor as the sound reverberated through the long hallways. Robed friars with thick bellies walked past him and yet didn’t seem to make nearly so much noise as they moved.
The friar who attended the marriage desk looked young enough to be Arthur’s son. His robes were a muddy brown, and his face appeared open and completely unwrinkled, as if the boy were without a trouble in the world. As he looked Arthur straight in the eye, he did not blink or flick his eyes elsewhere in politeness. He simply stared directly at Arthur, holding his position with the certainty and clear head of the resolutely devout.
“Good day, sir,” began Arthur. “I was hoping I might trouble you for a look into your marriage records.”
“Is it your daughter?” said the youthful friar pluckily.
“Pardon me?”
“Your daughter. Don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that you’re married yourself.” The friar smiled and directed his gaze down to Arthur’s gold wedding band. “Most fellows like yourself-older gentlemen, a few specks of salt in the hair-come in here, they’re chasing after a lost daughter. I’m not supposed to let just anyone go digging about in the files, but I tend to make an exception for a kind-looking sort who’s after his darling girl. You’d be surprised at how many come in.”
Arthur thought about this, and decided quite rationally that lying was by far the best approach to take.
“Yes. My daughter,” he said. “She’s gone missing. I fear she’s run off with her beau, a dastardly fright of a man. Nemain-that’s my name. Archibald Nemain. My dear girl is Morgan. Might I give a quick once-over to your records book, to see if she’s come through here to be married?”
“I feared as much,” said the friar knowingly. “Please follow me. We keep the allegations back here.”
The young man led Arthur behind his desk, into a small antechamber of the marriage office. The room was quite cloistered, walled in by massive gray stones. Arthur felt as if they pressed in on him from all sides. He thought of Poe, the sweet horror of “The Cask of Amontillado.”
The room’s only furniture was a massive wooden chest, pocked with two dozen small sliding drawers. Whatever the chest’s original function, it had been at some point more recently converted into a storage space for alphabetically organized wedding allegations-the legal documents that spelled out formally a couple’s intention to marry.
As Arthur surveyed the task before him, the murmurings of a young man and woman came from the direction of the friar’s desk. He left Arthur alone while he went to attend to their certification.
For the better part of an hour, Arthur sifted through the drawers of allegations. At first his hunt was underscored by the excited giggles of the bride-to-be at the friar’s desk and the slow, even responses of her groom, who calmly presented the friar with the necessary details: the couple’s names, their parents’ names, their places of birth and residence, and the signed approval of the bride’s father. After they had left, the friar attended to the further couples and eager young men who entered his office. Some men came to fulfill these duties alone, sparing their fiancées the trouble. Arthur could hear them all come and go like hummingbirds drifting onto a nearby tree-the clicks and clumps of their arrival, the squeaks and cries of their business, the whisks and flaps of their heartened departures.
The handwritten documents before him possessed the romance of governmental bureaucracy. Though each was filled out by the loving right hand of its willing groom, the allegations read less like Shakespeare and more like a will.
“4 October 1900,” began the first of many, “which day appeared personally Thomas Stacey Junior of Morden in the County of Surrey, aged twenty-four years and a Bachelor, and alleged he intends to marry with Mary Beach of the County of Norfolk, aged twenty years, a minor and spinster, by and with the consent of Richard Norris, her uncle and guardian lawfully appointed, she having neither father, mother, testamentary or other Guardian whatsoever to her appointed.” It droned on for a solid page, ascertaining that neither bride nor groom was married prior, and that no other “impediment by reason of any precontract” existed that would hinder their ability to be lawfully married.
Arthur’s mind drifted to his own wedding, sixteen years before- My! Had it really been so long since that sweet August day at Masongill? Arthur had been a poor doctor when he met Touie; poor in both senses of the word. His fledgling practice had yielded but a meager income, though it was only now, years later, that he was able to realize that this might have had something to do with his poverty of talent. He had met his dear Touie-then Louisa Hawkins, a name that now sounded so foreign to Arthur that it might have referred to someone else’s wife- when her brother had come to him suffering from cerebral meningitis and had become Arthur’s resident patient. Arthur had given him a nightly sedative of chloral hydrate, and the man had died within a week. Occasionally Arthur still wondered, as he had at the time, whether the treatment had actually killed him-most likely not, he assured himself. Sixteen years later, Arthur understood that a dose of chloral hydrate did carry certain risks. But his patient had been wasting away in delirious fits-surely some sedative was necessary? What an imprecise science was medicine. It was more an art than was fiction.
Arthur wondered about the marriages whose first beginnings he now drew from the wooden chest and skimmed over between his thumbs. Were they all as happy as his had been, when he saw his bride at the altar, when he exchanged a wink with his crying mother in the audience? What would these passions become in a decade and a half?
Love grew docile with age, like a faithful hound. It became precious and prized, locked away from the world like a jewelry box. Love grew commendably dependable-love was eggs, love was ham, love was the morning paper. He loved Touie as much as he ever had. No. More. He would always love Touie. Yes, since she’d gotten sick, those years ago, they’d refrained from certain intimacies. They would have no more children-but still Arthur could not be happier with his family. He felt as if he’d grown up with Touie, even though he’d been twenty-six when he met her, and she’d been twenty-eight-as if he’d become a grown man right beside her. As if she were the dear sister from whom he kept no secrets.
Well, perhaps one secret. There was Jean…
Three years earlier, he’d met the beautiful and brilliant Jean Leckie, and he’d been clocked clean across the jaw by the sparkle of her conversation, by her immodest wit, by the radiant flourishes of her batting eyelashes. She was young, but she was so wise, so unafraid to think and wonder and express herself as if she were a man. Arthur had never met a woman like her, and he felt quite certain that he never would again. Of course he remained completely pure in his intentions toward her. Their hands would never even touch. He stretched out his chest when he walked beside her, holding his arms behind his back at ninety-degree angles at the elbows. He had taken an oath, the same oath written on the hundreds of papers that lay across his lap at this moment. He would never betray it. But he would continue to see Jean, as much as he honorably could. He would take long walks through the countryside with her. She would cheer him from the stands at his cricket matches.
This, too, was love. And to Arthur’s great surprise, the two loves did not exclude one another. He loved Touie all the more for his loving Jean. He loved them so differently that they magnified one another, that they reflected mirror opposite images of the divine into his bulging heart. He thought that he might pop, sometimes, from the gallons of love that poured into his middle-aged body. The oil and water of separate affections did not mix, but they also did not detonate. They coursed separately and equally through his bloodstream.
How much love could one man store in himself? Did he love more than the fresh-faced grooms who affixed their bachelor names to these allegations? Did he love more than the radiant brides who blushed all the colors of a June rose garden at the thought of becoming the new Mrs. What-Have-You? Did all loves look the same, like plucked and boiled chickens? Or were they different, like corneas, fingerprints, crania?
Arthur thought about the love that had died within the breast of Morgan Nemain. The love that was strangled naked in a filthy Stepney bathtub and left to rot. She had not been dead very long when the boardinghouse proprietor had found her. Her belly might still have been warm to the touch. Her heart had not yet sprouted tiny whitepetal maggots.
Arthur furiously flicked through the allegations for some glimpse of the man who had done this. He scanned the pages for revenge.
Sometime later the friar returned. Arthur did not hear him enter, so engrossed was he in his search for names. The boy tapped Arthur on the shoulder to get his attention, and Arthur jumped up, startled. He held his hand to his chest and took a series of deep breaths.
“My apologies, sir!” said the friar. “I had no intention of startling you!”
“Quite all right,” huffed Arthur. “I had no intention of being startled.”
“How goes your digging?”
“Not well, I fear,” admitted Arthur. “I’ve found no one with the name Morgan Nemain mentioned in any of these documents. She-my daughter-she probably gave a false name.”
The friar nodded knowingly.
“I’m rather hard up for clues.” Arthur had an offhand thought, and he continued with a smile, “You must see so many young men come and go through your doors… You wouldn’t happen to remember the name, or the face, of a fellow with a high whine of a voice. He would have been here two weeks ago Tuesday. Black cloak. Black top hat.” Arthur laughed-would there be any way in which he might be less specific in his description?
The friar made a face as if he’d just tasted sour milk. He stared at Arthur curiously.
“Funny, sir… I think the man you’re looking for asked me the very same question.”
Now it was Arthur’s turn to make an odd face.
“Pardon me?” he said.
“Your fellow. The groom. It was the strangest thing. A man comes in, tight, high little voice, black-on-black clothes, two weeks or so past, like you said. Wouldn’t have thought twice about it myself, of course, except that I felt I recognized him. And he saw that I did, and asked me whether I did, and I said yes. I did, and he said I couldn’t have, that didn’t make sense, and I agreed, and that was that.”
“I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying.”
“I recognized the gent because he’d come in before. Some months back. He’d filled out an allegation, and he’d gone off to be married. Then, a few weeks ago, a fellow comes in looks just the same. I smelled, what, déjà vu, yes? That’s what the French say? I wouldn’t have remembered him, except I get this funny feeling in my gut that I’ve seen him before. I ask him if I have, and he gets just terribly nervous.
“ ‘From when do you think you’d be recognizing me?’ he says.
“ ‘ I hardly know,’ I say. And I have a laugh, jesting with the man. ‘Have you ever been married before?’ I’m kidding, of course-he was young, not yet thirty, how would he have been? But he becomes frightfully agitated. Flops his arms around like he’s a marionette.
“ ‘I am quite certain, my good friar,’ he says to me, ‘I am quite certain that I haven’t the faintest idea to what you might be referring.’ His voice gets so high it’s like he’s playing a William Byrd. Then he goes into it, gives me quite a talking-to. He uses some language which I don’t fancy hearing under this roof, you understand? I would have taken umbrage and caused a stir, for my part, but I am in the service of the Lord. I turn the other cheek. He produces his allegation, I sign in my place at the bottom, and he goes on his way.”
As Arthur listened to the friar’s monologue, he felt a prickly sensation along his spine and a widening of his brow. He felt the intoxicating tingle of discovery.
“Do you recall what name the young man gave?” asked Arthur, leaning forward onto the tips of his toes toward the friar.
The friar looked down. “I don’t, sir, I’m sorry to say.”
Arthur’s mind whirled around like a top, spinning in circles, running through possibilities. “But you say you think he’d been married before?” he asked.
“Well, I hardly thought it too likely at the time, except for the man’s surliness,” said the friar. “But now… Do you think it’s so?”
“I think,” Arthur wanted to say but could not, “that whatever this man did to Morgan Nemain he did to another girl first.”