The courtship of Arthur Shaw and Josephine Bradman began conventionally enough-if one didn't count the storm-with an exchange of New Year's gifts. Arthur bought Josephine a pair of gloves that he couldn't afford; she sent him a card that was so forward that as soon as she dropped it in the post she blushed to think of him reading it, and immediately decided to refuse to recall what it had said; indeed, it hardly seemed that it was her hand that had written it. He appeared at her office the next afternoon wearing his least-bad suit. She glanced at him only long enough to decide that he looked very handsome in it; then, as she stared down fixedly at her typewriter in something of an uncharacteristic panic, he started to speak. He was-she could tell-inwardly praying for another storm, so that he could strike a properly heroic figure; while outwardly suggesting-as if the idea had just occurred to him as he happened to be walking past-that from time to time he had a little typing he needed done, this or that, and he was thinking of writing a book, as a matter of fact, possibly about Darwin, or a sort of detective thing; but in any case it wasn't just a question of typing, but rather, since, as she could surely see, words weren't his strong suit, the eye of a poet might ... Almost without thinking she stood, and suggested that they go for a walk to discuss the matter.

The park was full of toppled trees and strewn debris. They didn't mind. As they navigated the treacherous paths her panic evaporated, replaced by a sort of elation. When evening came she pretended not to notice the cold. They talked about everything except business. They talked about nothing. He came again the next day and they took a different route around the lake, and again the day after.

Pa.s.sions that could not be acted upon or even uttered aloud expressed themselves instead through signs and codes. She ill.u.s.trated for him the various meanings that could be found in the folding of gloves, the tip of a hat-brim, flowers. The tapping of gloves on the left hand like so meant: Come walk with me. She'd read it in newspapers and manuals of etiquette. The placing of the folded glove against the left cheek for an instant meant: I consider you handsome. To run one's finger around one's hat-brim this way meant yes, and the other way no. To take off the hat and hold it like so was a sign that was not to be invoked even in jest, except after the most careful consideration. When she ran out of signs she could remember she started making them up, and soon they both dissolved into laughter.

That night she wrote a letter to a friend in Cambridge, asking if perhaps she was going a little mad.

There was no one to tell them to stop, no one to disapprove; no one in all of London, or anywhere else for that matter. Miss Bradman's father was deceased, and her mother had rarely left her bed for the past three years, laid low by nightmares and waking visions of h.e.l.l-fire; she predicted doom and catastrophe so reliably and monotonously that Josephine had long since stopped asking her opinion on most things, and she did not ask her opinion on Arthur.

They walked together in Regent's Park, or along the Embankment, arm in arm, for hours. He cajoled her to read him one of her poems. It was mostly about Plato, and about the soul, and about visions of variously brightly coloured heavens; walking through the white forests of the moon, disputing philosophy with the Cyclops in his cave in a red desert. Arthur had always considered philosophers prior to Newton to be more or less bunk, and Heaven as he imagined it was not very different from the Reading Room of the British Museum, or a holiday in Brighton, or a well-equipped transatlantic liner. The words were good, though. It made him wish he hadn't been such an idler at school. Miss Bradman was actually rather relieved that he didn't know what to say; she didn't trust men with opinions about poetry.

They exchanged letters-mostly about nothing at all, expressed in the most florid and fervent terms that convention and the English language allowed. He addressed her, tentatively, as Josephine. She didn't object. Her friend from Cambridge wrote back to say that it did perhaps sound as if she were acting a little hastily, and Josephine wrote angrily to tell her that it was none of her business after all. They each woke, night after night, thinking of the other, and-as if by some telepathy-knowing that the other was thinking of them.

"Animal magnetism," Arthur explained to his friend Waugh.

"Magnetism, now, is it?"

"Man is a part of nature, from a scientific point of view, and subject to the animal pa.s.sions-"

"Pa.s.sions! Now, that's more like it."

(Waugh spent his father's money fortnightly on a particular prost.i.tute, and called it love).

"I swear to G.o.d, Waugh. It's quite uncanny."

They had dinner with Arthur's rich uncle George, the writer, who p.r.o.nounced Josephine to be a good egg. Arthur's friend Waugh, who thought of himself as poetic-solely, so far as anyone could tell, on the grounds of a fifty per cent admixture of Celtic blood-declared that she was a muse. (She rather resented this.) She told her sister about Arthur, in a letter. Her sister told their mother, who sent a letter, in a scarcely legible hand, warning her of terrible consequences if she didn't repent and leave London at once. h.e.l.l-fire and d.a.m.nation and et cetera; but she was always saying that sort of thing.

"I wouldn't worry about h.e.l.l-fire," said her friend Mrs Sedgley, who had modern views, and believed in the Spirit World, but not in h.e.l.l.

They sat in Mrs Sedgley's parlour, in the big empty house in Kensington she had once occupied with her late husband. Rain pattered on the windows, and Mrs Sedgley's cat Gautama rubbed curiously against Josephine's leg.

"Though a touch of caution might, perhaps, if you don't mind my saying-"

"I have always preserved my independence, Esther."

"Of course."

"Esther," Josephine said. "Do you believe that two people can ... well, that they can share certain thoughts, or dreams, or..." She fell silent, and to cover her sudden embarra.s.sment she reached down to scratch Gautama's ears.

"Am I to understand," Mrs Sedgley said, carefully pouring more tea, "that you and the young man-Arthur-have experienced such a ... phenomenon?"

"I don't mean it in a vulgar sense-that is, a literal sense."

"Certainly not."

"What-colour-am-I-thinking-of, what-card-am-I-holding, and so forth. But rather..."

"In a spiritual sense."

"Yes. Well-yes."

She was in the habit-Mrs Sedgley had introduced her to it-of keeping a journal of her dreams, at least in so far as they had poetic or spiritual significance. Since the night of the storm, she and Arthur had both been visited by dreams of stars, rushing water, roses, and distant mountains-though not always on the same nights-and Josephine had woken on several mornings with ideas for detective stories.

"I don't know." She sighed. "I shouldn't like you to think I'm being foolish."

"Oh, my dear-never!"

They listened to the rain for a moment.

"Certainly"-Mrs Sedgley sipped her tea-"there may be such a thing." She sounded a little sceptical. "Between two sensitive souls, who knows what might be possible? I remember when Thomas and I were young.... What does the young man think?"

"Telepathy, he says, or thought-transference."

"Hmm. He's ... educated in these matters?"

"Not at all. Not until a few weeks ago. But he's taken an interest now. As soon as they reopened the Reading Room he began studying the journals-the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and so on. It's rather flattering."

In a matter of weeks he'd become conversant in the lingo of psychical research, and could happily discuss-scratching his head, puzzled, as if hoping that some rearrangement of the terms might spell out the answer to a question he could not quite define-such arcane subjects as telepathy, and telekinesis, and hyperpromethia (which referred to a supernatural power of foresight), and psychorrhagy (which referred to the breaking free of the soul from the confines of the body).

"A scholar," Mrs Sedgley said.

"He writes detective stories."

"Oh? Does he have a good income?"

She had to admit that he did not, and that it was a source of some concern. The prospect of a literary sort of marriage rather appealed to her; poverty did not; yet the two seemed inextricable from each other.

Mrs Sedgley frowned.

"Is he..." Mrs Sedgley sought with difficulty for the right word. She liked to consider herself forward-thinking and somewhat bohemian, and was reluctant to utter such a conventional thought. "Is he a solid sort of person?"

"Oh, my dear-yes. I can't quite explain it, but I feel he is the most solid person I've ever met; as if nothing else since I came to London has been quite real."

"I see." Gautama jumped up into Mrs Sedgley's lap. "Yes, h.e.l.lo, boy; h.e.l.lo."

"Does it seem hasty? Not to me. It seems that the storm was six months of ordinary life in one night. I think that I love him, Esther."

"Yes, Gautama, yes; there's a handsome boy. Josephine, I think I should like to meet this young man."

London in general was in something of an excitable mood. The flood of fashionable mourning for the late Duke carried an undercurrent of morbid-frankly paranoid-speculation. Though rivers of ink had been spilled on the subject of the Duke's death, the cause remained somewhat unclear. He left no heirs or family. Influenza, the doctors said, but this was widely considered an unsatisfactory explanation. A well-known East End medium declared that the spirits had revealed to her that he'd been murdered-she couldn't say how. She wasn't the first or the last. Fortune-tellers (who were ten a penny in London) unanimously held the Duke's death to be a bad omen. The stars were very bad in general for the coming year.

The police denied foul play. The Duke had been elderly, after all, and frail. Yet rumours persisted. Bombs, a shooting, a poisoning. The body was not displayed. Political motives for the crime-if it was a crime-were hinted at in Parliament, whispered in pubs. The news got out that the police were seeking persons in connection with an investigation; of what, they wouldn't say. The newspapers recalled the deceased's various lifelong occult interests, his fraternization with spiritualists and fortune-tellers and pract.i.tioners of Eastern religions and-well, you never knew with those sort of people, did you? No doubt the great man had been taken advantage of. A man of his breeding had no defences against the low cunning of common frauds. Was there perhaps blackmail involved, or something worse, something the criminal law didn't precisely have a word for? High time to shine a light on that netherworld (said the Bishop of Manchester, in a letter to the Times).

The Prime Minister spoke in Parliament, calling for calm. The Times criticised the failure of officials to make arrests, and hinted at conspiracy so vaguely and with such discretion that no one was quite sure what they were saying. Some American and Parisian newspapers, less circ.u.mspect, called it murder, though they couldn't get their story straight as to method or suspects or motive.

A New York newspaper reported that Dr Arthur Conan Doyle had been invited by the police to lend his expertise to their investigation of whatever it was they were investigating, or weren't investigating. Arthur read it in Mr Borel's shop one afternoon when he went to call on Josephine.

"Can you believe that?" His own detective story had fallen by the wayside, rather. Between the Storm and Josephine, he'd spared few thoughts for Dr Syme in recent weeks. Still, he couldn't deny feeling a certain small pang of jealousy.

Borel glanced at the headline. "I can believe anything, Mr Shaw."

"Well now! Dr Doyle! If that isn't desperation, I hardly know what is."

Borel said nothing.

Arthur returned the paper to the window. "What do you think, Mr Borel?"

Borel removed his spectacles and studied them, sighing, as if examining their lenses for imperfections. "Mr Shaw, I have suffered considerable expenses in the storm."

"I dare say."

"I have borrowed money to make repairs. I did not like to do that. The sum of money that you owe me is now considerable. I do not like to have to remind you."

"I know, Mr Borel. I know. But the fact of the matter is I find myself hard up at the moment. The Mammoth owes me money-and the rent must be paid before all else."

"We must all pay rent to someone, Mr Shaw. I am sorry."

Borel put his spectacles back on and blinked at Arthur as if he were surprised to see him still in the shop. Arthur took this to mean that their conversation about money was over. Borel was a decent enough fellow. He didn't like to rub it in.

Arthur gestured at the newspaper. "What do you think, Mr Borel? Foul play, yes or no?"

"How could I know, Mr Shaw?"

"No smoke without fire. One hopes they'll catch the villain responsible soon; put things back in order."

"One hopes. I think there will be trouble."

There'd already been trouble. In Whitechapel, Jewish windows that had survived the storm were broken by stones. A German bookshop near the Museum was burned, and a Russian businessman was found dead in Notting Hill. The Daily Telegraph hinted that Afghan agents were at work in London, and the Omnibus suspected Indian malcontents. The police raided Limehouse. A lot of Indians and Frenchmen and Irish and sailors and gypsies and fortune-tellers and radicals of various sorts were rounded up and arrested for various petty crimes, but no murderers were discovered by those methods. Astrologers said that the stars promised discord, and that the coming year was a bad one for engagements, business ventures, and childbirth. Mr Borel had forbidden his wife and daughter to go outside.

Josephine and Arthur were oblivious to most of this. London's bad mood didn't infect them. They were suddenly out of step with their times: blissfully, almost sinfully so. They spent the winter walking, and writing long letters, and exchanging cards, flowers, gifts, poems, love-notes. Dearest love. My own darling heart, my only, my fondest, my soul. They compared notes on their dreams, and attended lectures. They made plans to move to the seaside, to Brighton perhaps, where Josephine would write poetry in a room looking out on the sea, and Arthur would take the train into London twice weekly to meet with newspaper editors ... They kissed in Regent's Park by the lake, in the spot where the rotunda had been, under the disapproving glare of police officers.

Arthur proposed towards the end of February, at the edge of a half-frozen pond in the park, the words turning crystalline in the cold air as he spoke them. A mere formality by that point; an inevitability. The main impediment to their engagement was that it took Arthur two weeks to get his foster-father to send him his late mother's ring down from Edinburgh-the old sod dragged his feet, counselling against marrying a clever woman.

In fact, the winter would have been entirely blissful, and quite dream-like, if not for one fly in the ointment; the usual: money.

Several of Josephine's clients, being highly strung types, had fled London after the storm. Meanwhile, the Mammoth had gone silent. A lightning-struck warehouse and flooded printing press had put it out of commission. It hadn't paid Arthur in a month; then two months; then three.

"I should acquaint you," Arthur said, "with the system of my debts."

Josephine frowned. "You have a system?"

"One may regret the necessity but be proud of the engineering. First the Mammoth-a notoriously forgetful beast-pays me late. A tradition of long standing, but my landlord and the grocer, not being literary folk, don't see the charm of it; so to pay them I borrow from Borel, or from Waugh-who has a good inheritance, and, besides, will one day be a doctor. To pay Waugh and Borel I borrow from Uncle George-who is something of a big man in publishing and makes a very good living off comic stories about chaps messing about in boats, and is forgiving of debts, but only up to a point. And so in extremis I borrow from my foster-father in Edinburgh to pay George. The old man is not forgiving. It is for G.o.d to forgive, he says, as if that were the most baffling and ineffable of all His attributes. And then because of the money I send to Edinburgh, the rent is late. And so on."

"A well-oiled mechanism."

"Except that the storm has played hob with it. Sand in the gears. Old Borel has windows to mend, and George has a roof to mend, and Waugh-same boat, Waugh says, same b.l.o.o.d.y boat, old chap. And I wonder if the Mammoth hasn't absconded entirely."

He didn't mention that he had received that morning a letter from his foster-father, expressing disappointment at Arthur's impecuniousness and f.e.c.klessness, and scolding him for his refusal to apply himself to any manly profession. The old man himself had lost a 500 investment in the Annapolis, wrecked in harbour at St. Katharine's, and expected no pity for this, but nor did he plan to throw good money after bad. He said that it was madness for Arthur to think of marriage, his prospects being so utterly, disgracefully bleak.

"Well, then," Josephine said, taking his arm. "We shall simply have to find a new system."

At the end of March, Arthur went to pay one last visit to the Mammoth's offices. He found the door locked and the windows shuttered. n.o.body answered his knocking. n.o.body had answered his letters for weeks. He pried open the letter-box and shouted into the void.

It was drizzling, and he still had no umbrella. He stumbled for refuge into the closest pub, the Moon & Star. Inside it was empty and dark, low-ceilinged. There was a terrible reek of stale tobacco. The man at the bar nodded to him in vague recognition. Arthur couldn't remember his name-big fellow, bald, Tom or John or something of the sort. No doubt Arthur was the last of the Mammoth folk who would ever enter the man's establishment. The storm had been a bad business all round, and it kept getting worse.

They shared a gloomy drink. There was an old newspaper on the bar, and Arthur pored in silence over the employment advertis.e.m.e.nts-G.o.d, could he contemplate teaching? Would Josephine be a teacher's wife, out in the country? The thought of a roomful of schoolboys made him order another drink.

"Impossible," he said.

"Hmm?"

"Oh-nothing."

"As you like, sir."

He pushed the newspaper away. The landlord picked it up.

A story about the late Duke's funeral caught the landlord's attention. A photograph showed the stately procession: the long thin coffin on the great black gun-carriage, the cavalry in their snow-white plumes, and Her Majesty's black and windowless coach.

"Empty, of course." The landlord pointed with a stubby finger at the coffin.

"Empty?"

"You haven't heard? Being a journalist, sir, I would have thought you'd have heard. Everyone says-there was a few fellows in here saying it just the other day; said they heard it from His Lordship's own servant-there never was a body, sir. He burned, poor sod."

"Burned?"

"Oh, it happens, sir! It happens more than you'd think. Spontaneous combustion, they call it. Sometimes a fellow's just minding his own business and whoosh, or he takes a lady's hand or puts on his hat too fast, and up in flames he goes. It's been proved by science. Could happen to any of us, just like that, one day-who knows. Like lightning, if you get my meaning, sir."

"Whoosh. Well. Certainly a theory."

"They say"-the landlord warmed to his theme-"it happens more often these days. Sunspots, or the influence of the stars-"

Bells interrupted. It was five o'clock, and Arthur had an appointment. "G.o.d," he said. "Sorry. Stars, eh? Must run." He drained his drink and hurried out into the rain.

THE.

SECOND.

DEGREE.