‘To understand the present, Joshua, you must learn about the past. And that’s especially true when it comes to a family history as tangled and as deep as yours. I told you that Lobsang’s work gave me a steer. Why, he’s been looking for evidence of natural steppers practically since Step Day itself.’
‘That’s Lobsang for you. He was always quick off the mark.’ Joshua rummaged through his memory. ‘He told me about some of it. Percy Blakeney. Thomas the Rhymer. Some kind of small-time thief called the Passover—’
‘His agents found traces of him in Somerset, yes. And some of the individuals Lobsang identified led me, one way or another, to the conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy?’
‘Joshua, I found roots of all this going back to the nineteenth century. There was an incident in 1871 when the official organization, such as it was, was terminated.’
‘What organization?’
‘Steppers, Joshua. A kind of league of natural steppers. At that time they called themselves the Knights of Discorporea. They’d been operating for some decades before they were shut down. The surviving records were judged to be of scientific interest and were stuffed down here rather than being destroyed – luckily for us. But there was one more significant meeting, in 1895. And that’s where the modern world was shaped – and your own life.
‘All of that explains why your father did what he did. Doesn’t justify it, doesn’t excuse it, and there can be no forgiveness for the way he abandoned your mother. But it does explain it. I will tell you all you want to know – well, all I can – but I wanted you to see this final piece of the jigsaw for yourself.’
‘I don’t understand any of this, Nelson.’
‘Read this.’ And he tapped the volume on the table.
Joshua pulled off his gloves and, reluctantly, picked up the book. Leather-bound and with smooth, creamy paper within, it must have been expensive once. He opened the cover to reveal a page bearing an inscription in an elegant but hard-to-decipher copperplate handwriting. He read the inscription, and his breath, which had been frosting in the cold air, caught in his throat.
MY ELUSIVE LIFE
BEING A FULL ACCOUNT
BY
LUIS R. VALIENTé, ESQ.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY BELOVED FAMILY
‘Take your time,’ Nelson said. ‘We can stay here as long as you need.’
34
THE CARD, INVITING Luis to lunch at the Drunken Clam in Lambeth, was dated the previous day – October 15 1895 – and was anonymous, signed only as by a ‘fellow traveller’.
Of course it was from Oswald Hackett. Even a quarter-century after that fateful encounter with Radcliffe in the dungeons of Windsor Castle, no matter how he had hidden his past – even to the extent of changing the family name – Luis had always known that Hackett would be able to find him, that such a summons would come. That his past would catch up with him some day.
And of course he felt compelled to attend.
It wasn’t hard to get away. Since the death of his wife Luis had lived alone, and his son and daughter, both grown, had long flown the nest, Ella to a comfortable marriage, Robert to take up engineering for which he showed an unusual aptitude, marrying somewhat later in his life. So Luis travelled to London by train from Bristol, where his financial interest in various steamship companies was based – controlled by means of a layer of company holdings under a false identity, and with no trail back to initial investments under his own name before Radcliffe’s attempted entrapment of the Waltzers in 1871.
Indeed, Hackett had insisted that their birth names should not be used at this meeting. Luis had even considered going in disguise, cropping his whiskers or shaving his head or some such, but when he contemplated the prospect it seemed an absurdity for a man in his seventies. No, he was going to London for lunch with old friends at the Drunken Clam, and he’d defy any man who challenged him otherwise.
And if Radcliffe’s successors caught up with him at last, then to the devil with it all, for he’d had enough of skulking.
His train was delayed.
And then, once he’d arrived in London, he couldn’t resist a stroll around some of his old haunts. Oxford Street was now a grand thoroughfare lined with fine, spacious shops; Fleet Street a medieval alley chock full of traffic; Covent Garden Market crowded with more than a thousand donkey barrows, he estimated, and women with loads balanced precariously on their heads, its cobbles slick with crushed leaves; and at last Lambeth’s New Cut itself, with the costermongers in their corduroy clothing, and soldiers strolling with uniforms casually unbuttoned, and coachmen in their livery and tradesmen in their frock coats, the street packed as ever with stalls and vendors of fried fish and hot potatoes, and beggars and entertainers, even street mummers – and, yes, with shoeless children, as much as it had ever been – as if the great reforms of the age, in education and public health and trade unionism, had been but fantasies.