The Burning Altar Read online

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Lewis, entertained by this sudden plunge into Dumas territory, and the workmen, pleased, said it was very interesting indeed. Ah, people talked about the Phantom of the Opera, but they’d had their own Phantom here in St Stephen’s Road, and there was people as maintained he still walked, although nobody knew what he walked for. Still, it was the kind of thing that would make a good plot for a book if you was inclined that way, or better still, a film. People liked being frightened; they liked to feel their flesh creep, said the workmen cheerfully, switching unwittingly to Dickens, and borrowing the sentiment of the Fat Boy who had expressed much the same opinion and in almost exactly the same words.

  They went amicably back to their work – relaying the entire ground floor it was, and a proper job Sir Lewis was making of it too, not wanting you to cut corners and skimp on timbers, not that he couldn’t afford it. Lewis smiled, tipped the foreman a ten-pound note to buy everyone a drink, and left them to it.

  It was fashionable to complain about poor workmanship and unwilling workers, of course, but he thought the men were doing a good job of the flooring. The ten-pound tip had pleased them, and it had been diplomatic to spend a few minutes talking and drinking a cup of tea with them. In fact he had found the story about the recluse rather entertaining, and the idea of his house having a ghost amused him.

  Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary

  Cheyne Walk, London, November 1887

  Am due to accompany Alicia to Drury Lane this evening, which am not looking forward to since secretly find opera rather dull and would far rather go to St Stephen’s Road Music Hall and be vulgar.

  However, opera is La Traviata, which may be significant, since the story centres about a lady of easy virtue and might persuade my own lady of easy virtue to succumb. According to rumour she’s succumbed to half of London already.

  Father v. boring at breakfast: droning on about tradition and honour, and, Since you came down from Oxford, Patrick, you’ve done nothing but waste your time chasing women, and if that brazen hussy Alicia whatever-her-name-is is any better than she should be, I’ll be extremely surprised . . . He must have guessed what I’m plotting.

  Wonder how private the Drury Lane boxes are?

  Chapter Two

  Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary

  Cheyne Walk, November 1887

  Do not entirely recommend seduction on the floor of a Drury Lane box during Traviata. As the Italian soprano reached her climax, I reached mine – and there is nothing in the least romantic about coming to a violent ejaculation to the strains of a coloratura aria. At least I missed the velvet curtains.

  Alicia to accompany me to St Stephen’s Road Music Hall next week, and will introduce me to Lillie Langtry. Thinks we shall ‘enjoy one another’.

  God help the Prince of Wales.

  Elinor Craven, paying off the taxi outside Lewis Chance’s Chelsea house, thought that this was going to be rather like meeting a legend. It was a bit eccentric of Lewis Chance to be leaving here to live in St Stephen’s Wharf, but if he was as rich as people said, he was entitled to a few eccentricities.

  And you wanted something different, said Elinor’s inner voice, in the sort of tone people use when they are saying: We knew you wouldn’t go through with it! You wanted something different and now you’re within sight of it you’re ducking out, you fraud!

  And this was certainly different. It would not be like anything Elinor had ever done, and it would be light years away from stifling Kensington, where Father’s law friends came to argue with self-conscious wit and to name-drop, and where Mother’s sycophantic admirers gushed over her newest over-sugared romance novel.

  Lewis Chance – Sir Lewis Chance – had no particular reputation for wit that Elinor had ever heard about and he would not need to name-drop because he was a name himself. And whatever else he might turn out to be, Elinor was pretty sure he would not be gushing.

  He received her with understated courtesy in a small study at the back of the house, and seated himself behind a large, leather-topped desk. He wore an ordinary dark suit and a plain shirt, which pleased Elinor, who found male mutton dressed as lamb repulsive and had been fearing medallions and designer jeans. The Times had given Sir Lewis’s age as fifty, and he looked as if he did not in the least mind appearing fifty. He was thin-faced, with dark hair, just greying, and cool grey eyes, and although he was not dazzlingly good-looking, he could probably be called distinguished. Elinor’s mother had said, with one of her irritatingly knowing laughs, that he had had rather a lot of women in his thirties and forties. As if she wants us to think she was one of them, thought Elinor crossly – but her father had said that Chance was rumoured to possess a bit of a gambling streak. ‘Appropriately named,’ he had said, and had gone on to produce a few witticisms, none of which Elinor could remember.

  Sir Lewis – yes, he was rather distinguished – was offering her a cup of tea or coffee, and Elinor, accepting tea, managed to look covertly about her. The small room was conventionally furnished with leather armchairs and rows of books that looked as if they had been bought by the yard by Sir Lewis’s banking ancestors. It was probably unfair to equate financial acumen with dullness. In an alcove at one side of the chimney breast hung a small portrait of a young man dressed in the correct formality of the 1890s, with glossy hair the colour of honey with the sun shining in it and the same appraising eyes as Lewis Chance. Whoever he was, he had certainly been neither dull nor financial.

  Sir Lewis was explaining the details of the post at the newly created Chance Centre.

  ‘And you understand that the position is something of a hybrid, Miss Craven?’

  ‘Secretary, PA, housekeeper.’ Put like that it sounded horribly dull and domestic, so that it was nice of him to call it a position. Within the family it was already being referred to as ‘Elinor’s new job’, midway between deprecatory laughter and despairing shrugs. It did not matter, because she would not be offered it; Sir Lewis would have already made up his mind that she was awkward and stupid. It was infuriating how being made to feel awkward ended in making you awkward. Elinor would probably fall over her feet when she stood up and drop the teacup, or open the broom cupboard in mistake for the way out.

  Lewis Chance was not thinking that Elinor was awkward, although he did think she was brusque. What the Scots called dour. But she had a very beautiful voice to be brusque in. People tended to overlook the voice as a source of attraction. She was no beauty – too stern with those black-bar eyebrows and brooding eyes and square chin, but he was not looking for beauty, in fact it would be safer to steer clear of female attractions for this post. She appeared intelligent and perceptive, and as far as he could tell she had no irritating mannerisms.

  He said, ‘It’s a peculiar mixture for a job, isn’t it? But it’s a peculiar setup. As well as dealing with ordinary administration, I need someone who doesn’t mind mingling a bit with the people who’ll be coming to the centre, because that’ll be unavoidable. You do know we’ll be getting what some people term the dregs of society, do you?’

  ‘Meths drinkers and drug addicts and suicides,’ said Elinor. ‘Yes, I understand all of that. I can cope with it, I think.’ After Mother’s ‘nerve storms’, which generally took place when she could not think up her next plot (it would be unkind to say rehash the last one), wrung-out drunkards in honest need of help would seem almost straightforward. Elinor, who had come prepared to think scathing thoughts about bloated capitalists and slick tax evasion schemes, found herself rearranging some of her ideas. Lewis Chance was not in the least what she had been expecting. The well-mannered philanthropist who provided such good copy for the press was certainly in evidence, and also the eccentric, because only an eccentric would be making plans to live in Canning Town. So far there was no sign of the gambler.

  She said, ‘I’ve worked in a few different types of places.’ It would not be the time to list all of the jobs she had held, but at least she had ac
quired passable shorthand, and rough but workable organisational skills. She could drive competently and operate a computer after a fashion. The family had sighed over her lack of university background but Lewis Chance did not want an Oxford double first to help him run his centre and minister to the raff and scaff who would come to the door.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind helping with the canteen side a bit as well, if you wanted,’ said Elinor, hoping this did not sound ungracious. She was hardly haute cuisine level, but she could whip up a pot of soup or ladle out stew with the best. It was beginning to be a pity that she would not be offered this post, because she was getting quite interested in it.

  And then without the least warning, Lewis Chance said, ‘I think we might give it a try, Miss Craven. When could you start?’

  Elinor stared at him. This, then, was the gambler. He could not possibly have made enquiries about her and he had certainly not asked for any references. She said, ‘Any time. Straightaway if you like.’

  ‘I have explained, haven’t I,’ said Lewis, ‘that it’ll be a way of life, rather than a job? And that it can’t really be nine to five? I’ve turned the upper floors into a couple of apartments – nothing hugely grand, but quite comfortable. I’ll be living there myself for a good bit of the time.’ He smiled suddenly, and Elinor blinked and remembered the rumours about all the women he was supposed to have had. Dozens had Mother said? If he smiled like that at them, it was no wonder.

  ‘My idea is that you have the other flat.’ said Lewis. ‘You would be absolutely private, of course. No questions asked about what you get up to.’

  Earlier on had not been the time to list all Elinor’s previous jobs, and now was not the time to say it was unlikely that she would be getting up to anything, because no one had ever been interested in getting up to anything with her.

  ‘Well, Miss Craven?’ said Sir Lewis, and now the smile unquestionably held the gambler’s glint. ‘Would you object to living in wharfland?’

  Living with a gambler and a womaniser. Quite private with no questions asked, but living in the same house with him. Smack in the middle of one of London’s roughest dockland districts, with tramps and drug addicts and alcoholics queuing up for food and succour every day. Yes, and where a sinister killer was said to walk. Something about Jack the Ripper reborn, the papers were saying, and warning people not to walk the streets alone after dark. You’re mad, said Elinor’s inner voice. You’re asking for fifty different kinds of trouble. Yes, but if I’m mad, so is he.

  ‘Well, Miss Craven?’

  Elinor said, ‘When can I move in?’

  It was not until she announced – half defiant, half brusque – that she was moving out of Kensington and into St Stephen’s Road, that the family woke up to the fact that this was a bit more than just another of poor old Elinor’s dreary make-do jobs.

  Elinor’s father made a few discreet enquiries, because they could not have Elinor, trusting unworldly oddity, getting mixed up in anything at all off colour; frankly none of them could afford it. Elinor’s father certainly could not afford it. He could still remember that very shocking business with Sir Lewis’s father – hundreds of thousands of pounds salted away and probably even now languishing in a Swiss bank somewhere – and everyone knew about the dissolute Patrick and the scandalous account of his travels. There’d been a rumour of some kind of quarrel with Royalty as well – Edward VII they said, though he’d been the Prince of Wales then, not that it made any difference. Elinor’s father had no opinion of people who fell out with Royalty and even less opinion of bankers who got caught with their hands in the till (metaphorically speaking) and then hanged themselves from the light cord in their prison cells, rather than face the consequences. And he was not having any of the family getting drawn into anything that looked all right on the surface but might later blossom into something unsavoury. He reminded his family that his chambers were a touch old-fashioned and that people had been disbarred for lesser offences than innocent associations with fraudulent bankers. More to the point, solicitors were inclined to be fussy where they sent briefs.

  But no breath of scandal seemed to have brushed Sir Lewis’s name, in fact quite the reverse. He appeared to have spent the last fifteen years setting up the blameless and rather prestigious CCT, and if he had dabbled in anything fraudulent or obscene along the way, nobody had ever heard about it.

  In fact it began to look as if Elinor, so far from getting mixed up in anything questionable, was allying herself with a rather admirable organisation, to say nothing of an apparently wealthy knight of the realm. Her father had frequently had occasion to deplore what he had called Elinor’s stubborn streak, but this might be the one time when it worked to their advantage. He substituted ‘single-minded’ for ‘stubborn’ and began to name-drop in Chambers (discreetly, of course). Elinor’s mother, her mind running on similar lines, issued several dinner invitations. It was a shame that Sir Lewis was so busy that he could not accept any of them.

  There was no official opening of the new Chance Centre in St Stephen’s Road, but the old building, restored and renovated, came alive very quickly. The mysterious network that linked the waifs and strays and the gentlemen of the road (more and more frequently ladies of the road as well) had its own methods of communication. Like dropping a stone into a pool and seeing the ripples go out and out, thought Lewis. Like casting a net.

  He began covertly to study the miscellany of people who came to Chance House. He had found Elinor Craven in a conventional fashion: Elinor herself was conventional, although once or twice Lewis had received the impression that beneath the surface she might be very unconventional indeed, which rather intrigued him. He caught himself wondering how she would deal with a difficult or dangerous, or even downright bizarre situation, and thought she would deal with it very well. She was small-boned and not tall – slender ankles and wrists as well, thought Lewis, who approved of fragile looks in females – but there was an impression of inner strength. But what he needed now was someone so utterly different as to be a one-off. A specimen of the type sometimes called sui generis. A creature apart.

  The helpers and counsellors and probation officers were beginning to frequent the place now; most of them would only be around for a couple of hours at a time, giving advice about marriage problems or homosexuality difficulties, and they would probably overlap with one another a bit. The centre would become a little like a small town. Lewis passed them under mental review and discarded them almost at once. All worthy and hardworking and sincere. But all too conventional. All too law-abiding.

  But the midday soup queue yielded a different species. It was already a focal point of the day, and it was presided over by local women who came in to cook vast pots of soup or stew and brew steaming urns of tea. They skimped the scouring of saucepans but they were cheerful and willing, which counted for a good deal. They sang the latest pop songs or TV commercials as they worked, and bandied bawdy remarks with the down-and-outs who entered zestfully into the spirit of it all, because if you could not enjoy a bit of sauce while you queued for your dinner, you might as well curl up your boots and die.

  Lewis took to mingling unobtrusively with this assortment of transients. A good many were recognisable old lags and chronic layabouts or modern-day professional beggars, which was inevitable, but an astonishing number were gently spoken and obviously scholarly: men and women who had found themselves unable to cope with today’s loud practical world and ended up as part of a drifting semi-homeless populace. There were two or three university dons and several teachers, and a handful of what looked to be foreign language students from the nearby hostels and bedsits.

  And there was a thin man with a face like a Reformation martyr who wore an aged herringbone tweed coat that brushed his ankles, and hummed Chopin and ate beef stew with industrious but fastidious pleasure. Lewis studied him covertly, and the gambler’s smile curved his lips.

  Sui generis.

  The thin man sat facing the desk, the trailing sk
irts of his coat disposed negligently about him, his expression unreadable.

  Lewis, his mind working on several levels, thought he was taking one of the hugest risks he had ever taken, but he said, quite calmly, ‘You understand what I’m asking you to do?’

  ‘Certainly.’ The man’s voice was as unexpected as the rest of him. ‘We are meeting each other’s needs. You require a – guardian for what is in the cellars of this house. I am in need of a job. That’s why you approached me. Although what you are offering is not quite what I was expecting.’

  You’re not quite what I was expecting either, thought Lewis, studying the man, thinking it was absurd to trust someone so fully on such a slender acquaintance. I know nothing about him, other than that he looks like the Holbein portrait of Sir Thomas More, or a grave austere Fra Angelico saint. More had been a humanist and a scholar – but he had also been a fanatic, and fanatics could be uncomfortable people. I’m going purely on instinct, thought Lewis. Aloud he said, ‘I don’t know your name.’

  There was a pause, as if the man were considering how to reply. Then he said, ‘I am sometimes known as Raff.’

  ‘Raff? Ralph?’ It was a preposterous name for someone who looked like Sir Thomas More. Lewis said cautiously, ‘Raphael?’

  An unexpected smile showed. ‘How perceptive of you, Sir Lewis. Actually I was baptised Raffael – my mother was an admirer of Renaissance art – but it is not a name that goes down well in Canning Town. Here I am known as Raff.’