Free The Resurrectionist by James Bradley Page A

into weeks her parting words seem more and more likely tocome true. Twice I take myself to the theatre where she plays and, seating myself among the cheapest seats, watch her moving on the stage. Though she is beautiful, there she seems impossibly distant, as if the woman that night in Kitty’s house were made less real by seeing her thus, which saddens me, and so after the second time I do not go back.
    In Charles too I have felt the change grow, the shift in his manner. Perhaps to another it would not be visible. There is much to Charles which is hidden, for all his apparent openness, much he holds close. But as these weeks have passed he has been less himself, his temper quicker, and though he still laughs and sings, he often seems distracted and harder somehow, as if some vital part of him is broken.
    I am sure Chifley senses it too, though I would not ask to know. What it is that binds the two of them I have never understood. Oftentimes they appear not friends at all, but as if they are connected by some deeper need for each other’s company, some unspoken bond of mind and temperament, against which each of them strains and pulls, this strain expressing itself sometimes in wild energy – that intoxicating exuberance they seem able to engender in each other – other times in sniping, silence and something closer to dislike.

T HOUGH F LEET S TREET lies but a hundred yards away, here silence ticks, the rags hung on the lines overhead moving like wraiths upon the occluded air. Not for the first time in these last few minutes I glance back, thinking I hear a sound, straining to make out something through the fog. For a moment I think I see a shape revealed, but almost at once it is gone. With thoughts of thieves I draw my coat closer and turn aside, slipping down a covered passageway. And then all at once he is there, leaning in a doorway.
    ‘These are unfriendly streets,’ he says, straightening to block my path.
    ‘Do you follow me?’ I demand.
    ‘Why should I follow you?’ he asks with his silky laugh.
    ‘That is something I would not know,’ I say.
    ‘How goes the business of your master’s house?’
    ‘The worse for your attentions,’ I reply.
    ‘I am sorry to hear that.’ He smiles, and I feel a twitch of complicity. Shaking my head, I make a noise of disbelief.
    ‘Yet it is said you refused a child.’
    I hesitate, realising as I do my reaction has given him whatever answer it was he sought. For a moment he is silent.
    ‘It ended up on van Hooch’s table,’ he says. When I do not reply he takes a cigar from his case and, striking a match upon his boot, lights it carefully.
    ‘Tyne is not a man to anger lightly. Why take such a risk?’ The smell of the cigar mingles with the sulphur from the match as he draws back on the smoke and lets it coil from his lips. Then with a lazy movement of his wrist he flicks the match away.
    ‘Your master did me a disservice, you know. I came to him as a friend and he insulted me.’
    ‘You threatened him.’
    He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It was he who took what was mine and sought to do me harm.’ I am uncomfortably aware of the passage walls close against us, the low roof overhead stained with soot.
    ‘These troubles of his, they are in his power to prevent. Remind him of that.’
    I nod, and he comes closer, the sweet, throat-searing smoke surrounding us.
    ‘It is said de Mandeville has made a project of you, that he takes you drinking, and to see his women.’
    I do not answer, and slowly he moves past me, until he stands at my back.
    ‘I could help you.’ His voice is lower now, more intimate.
    ‘I cannot imagine how,’ I reply, and he chuckles.
    ‘Come, think upon it. You are an orphan, without property or a name, and already it is said you owe money to the Jews.’
    ‘I am a gentleman,’ I say, the words coming stiff and broken from my mouth.
    ‘You are proud. That is good. But do not let that pride make you blind.’
    I stand,