a few words with the constable out there before going upstairs again. He tried sitting to read, found his eyes not focusing on the page, got himself water, then thought about a drink of some sort and rejected it. The arm hurt, but not unbearably; Bernat had brought him a black silk bandanna for a sling, and it eased the pain.
He got a lantern from the old kitchen, climbed back to the bedroom, legs a little rubbery, got the Colt and then went on up to the next floor and then the attic. ‘Getting back on the horse,’ he muttered to himself. The attic was deeply shadowed. He shone the feeble light around, feeling unsteady, hating his own nerves. The skylight had been re-glazed and nailed shut. The Flobert pistols were put away. The dumb-bell and the rowing machine looked like grotesque animals, casting huge shadows. He shivered.
Back on the floor below, he locked the attic door and went down to his bedroom and undressed and got into his bed and tried to go to sleep. Fifteen minutes of racing brain later - worry about Atkins, a new awareness of his arm, visions of the attacker’s mad eyes, his smell - he was dressing to go out. The after-effect of the laudanum, he supposed, was an insomniac tenseness and sense of hurry. And, perhaps, dreams. The idea of repeating the nightmare about his wife decided him that he wouldn’t sleep yet.
Doing buttons one-handed was difficult, and he was tempted not to put his left arm through his coat sleeve, but he made himself do it, hearing his grandmother’s voice, ‘If it hurts bad, it must be good for you.’ He put the arm through Bernat’s black sling. A necktie gave him far more trouble and he finally abandoned it, pulling the tie through itself and letting it bulge above his waistcoat like a stiff ascot.
‘The glass of fashion,’ he muttered, aware for once of where the quotation had come from. He put his right arm into the sleeve of an overcoat, drew the left side over his sling and buttoned a button to hold it, then pushed the Colt revolver into the right-hand pocket. It made a mighty bulge, but he wasn’t going without it. He might be getting back on the horse, but he was nonetheless afraid that his attacker would come back.
‘Going out, sir?’ the constable said again, exactly like the first time. He was an older man than the first, heavily jowled and pretty well girthed. He sounded parental, as if Denton was to account to him for his movements.
‘Tired of being cooped up.’
‘Wet, sir.’ The damp air had by then produced a fine drizzle. He moved past the constable, waiting to be stopped - the idea was absurd, but Denton felt as if he were doing something underhanded - and moved away as quickly as his still-wobbly legs would allow. Walking lasted only as far as the corner; he knew he couldn’t make it much farther.
He went by cab to Mrs Castle’s famous house, commended to him by Harris, the house otherwise known simply as Westerley Street. Other houses stood in Westerley Street, but only the one was known by the street’s name; more than one of her clients, drunk or sober, had said that it must be awkward actually to live in that street. But all the cabs knew the way, and they all knew what a man meant if he said ‘Westerley Street’. Denton had no idea what they thought if a woman said it.
As higher-class houses went, it was a little shabby, but that seemed to be a sign of its authenticity. Mrs Castle herself was always soberly and tastefully dressed, if not in fact sober and tasteful; she always had champagne at hand and loved to talk politics or racing or what she called ‘sosigh-tih’. A certain shabbiness of speech, as well - the odd dropped H, the even odder dropped final G - went with the patchily worn carpet or faded chair. It was said that she had been the mistress of a personage, had chosen to be a madam rather than a milliner afterwards, knew that the best houses were sometimes the worst kept and kept hers accordingly.
‘Well, sir, it’s you,’ a big man said as he opened the door to Denton.
‘Hello, Bull.’ Fred Oldaston had fought bare-knuckled as the Lancashire Bulldog for fourteen years and had been the first Englishman to take Denton into a public house. He had