The flyblown mirror above the washstand returned a face Edgar Vane had long ceased to recognise. It was a good face, he supposed, if one overlooked the pouches beneath the eyes and the tightness about the mouth that came from too many suppers of bread scraped with dripping. The garret room in Mincing Lane stank of boiled cabbage and defeat. Spread across the sagging cot were the instruments of his ruin: a final demand from a tailor in the Strand, a pawn ticket for a dress suit he would never redeem, and a letter from the manager of the Prince Albert Theatre terminating his understudy contract with two lines of regret. He crumpled the letter and tossed it into the empty grate. For fifteen years he had given his voice, his limbs, his memory to the stage, playing fops and footmen and the occasional second gravedigger, and the stage had given him nothing but a diction too refined for the docks and a wardrobe fit only for the rag-and-bone man. The gas jet sputtered, and Edgar studied the stranger in the glass. The stranger stared back with the same grey eyes and high forehead, a slight asymmetry in the right brow that gave him an air of permanent, weary inquiry. Somewhere in that tired arrangement of features, he had always been told, lay the makings of a leading man. Yet he had never led anything but a procession of failures.
It was not the mirror that altered his course but a damp Tuesday in November, when he was dodging a bailiff in the alley behind the King’s Arms. He had ducked into the public bar, collar turned up, and was pressing through the smoke towards the side exit when a gnarled hand fastened on his sleeve. A very old, very drunk solicitor in a stained stock squinted up at him, and to Edgar’s astonishment the man’s face crumpled into a wet, apologetic reverence. “My lord Ashworth,” the man slurred, struggling to rise. “Forgive me, I did not see you. Your lordship honours this wretched house.” Before Edgar could shake him off, the fellow pressed a grimy calling card into his palm, begged a thousand pardons, and collapsed onto his elbows. Edgar fled into the rain, but he kept the card. He also kept the name. Lord Julian Ashworth.
The next morning, pretending a scholarly interest in maritime commerce, Edgar inveigled his way into the reading room of the Aurelia Gazette. He spent three days sifting through back issues, his fingers black with ink, until he had assembled a portrait of the man he had been mistaken for. Lord Julian Ashworth, forty-three, sole proprietor of Ashworth Mercantile, a shipping firm that had weathered the war by transporting grain and munitions and had come out of the peace with a fleet of twelve steamers. His country seat was Ashworth Grange, a modest estate in the Chiltern foothills; his town address was a set of chambers in Albany he had not visited in seven years. The newspapers yielded a single photograph, taken at a charity function for disabled seamen in 1919: a tall, stooping figure half-turned from the lens, one gloved hand resting on an ebony cane. The caption praised his generosity. The photograph made Edgar’s throat go dry. The profile, the set of the shoulders, the distinctive inward tilt of the chin when reading—these were his own. A double, nature’s freakish forgery. He ordered more coffee and began to take notes with a hand that trembled less from the caffeine than from the dawning of a monstrous possibility.
He apprenticed himself to Lord Ashworth’s life with the discipline of a character actor given the role of a lifetime. He read every line of shipping news until he could distinguish a steamship from a schooner and hold a passable conversation about freight rates and boiler pressure. He haunted the public gallery of the Commercial Court, where Ashworth occasionally appeared to swear affidavits in disputes over cargo, and he studied the man’s movements as though learning choreography—the deliberate, slightly dragging gait, the habit of pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger when listening, the soft West Country vowels barely audible beneath a patina of public-school drawl. He obtained a sample of the signature from a clerk’s file and copied it two thousand times on cheap foolscap until the looping J and the sharp terminal stroke were bred into his muscle. He followed Ashworth at a distance along Bond Street, noting the cut of his coats and the particular shade of his kid gloves, and he practised that walk—head forward, right arm swinging a quarter-inch wider than the left—in the empty hours before dawn, when the rats were his only audience. He was a shadow fashioning itself into a man.
The England of 1925 was a country carved in two, and Edgar Vane inhabited the wrong half. The war had promised a levelling, but the levelling had gone the way of all promises, and the old hierarchies had snapped back into place with a vengeance. A man born in a Stepney tenement could not, by honest effort, become anything but a Stepney tenant. The West End glittered with cocktail parties and electric light; east of Aldgate pump the gas lamps burned dim and the children ran barefoot. Edgar, who had spent his life dressing other men’s words in other men’s clothes, understood with terrible clarity that he would never cross the gulf. What he proposed was not a crossing but a substitution. The ethics troubled him less than the aesthetics: a poor play, he sometimes thought, when a man’s only reason for murdering another is that he cannot afford a decent dinner. He had read enough crime fiction to know that the best villains were motivated by thwarted passion, by vengeance, by the desire to recover a lost inheritance. His own motive was merely poverty, the most pedestrian of sins. Yet he could not bring himself to discard the script. Instead he told himself he was engaging in the greatest performance of his career, and the greatness would redeem the shabbiness of the plot.
His opportunity came in late January. Posing as a journalist for the “Aurelia Commercial Review,” a periodical he had invented and had stationery printed to substantiate, he secured an interview with Lord Ashworth at the Grange. The house was Georgian, symmetrical, of honey-coloured stone, set back from a gravel drive flanked by bare chestnuts. A butler of the old school admitted him to a library that smelled of beeswax and pipe tobacco, and there, in a wing chair by a low fire, sat the original of his mirror. Ashworth was thinner than Edgar had guessed, the skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, but the resemblance was otherwise uncanny—right down to the tiny scar on the left earlobe that Edgar had noted in the photograph and had recently duplicated, with some discomfort, using a razor and a steady hand. They talked for forty minutes about tonnage and tariffs, and Edgar filed away every intonation, every turn of phrase, every incidental gesture. He learned that the staff consisted of the butler, a cook, and a housemaid, all of whom had served the family for years but would obey, without question, any instruction that came in their master’s voice. He learned that Ashworth’s closest living relation was a second cousin in Montreal who sent a Christmas card once a decade. He learned, above all, that the man was profoundly, almost pathologically, solitary—a recluse whose sole companions were a decanter of single malt and a shelf of first editions. It was almost too neat, Edgar thought, as though Providence had designed the role expressly for him.
On a bitter February night, with the roads glazed in frost, Edgar enacted what he had rehearsed. He had dispatched a telegram to the butler, typed on Ashworth’s own machine during a moment of distraction, granting the staff a fortnight’s paid holiday. Then he arrived at the Grange in his journalist persona, carrying a Gladstone bag that held not a notebook but a bottle of chloroform and a length of sash cord. Ashworth received him without suspicion; the lonely, Edgar understood, are grateful for any company. In the library, while the kettle sang in the kitchen, Edgar pressed a saturated handkerchief over the man’s face and held it there, counting silently backwards from a hundred. The body went slack. He wasted no time. The cellar had a disused wine vault, its entrance hidden behind a stack of packing cases, and into that stone silence he lowered the figure that had once been Julian Ashworth. He mortared the vault door shut with a trowel he had brought for the purpose, hid the fresh mortar behind a rack of empty bottles, and scrubbed the cellar floor with vinegar until no trace remained. By dawn, the house was immaculate, and its occupant had vanished.
For the next three days, Edgar existed in a limbo of his own making. He burned his old clothes, his identity papers, every letter and photograph that connected him to Edgar Vane. He soaked the ashes and flushed them into the river. Then, dressed in a suit ordered by post from Ashworth’s own tailor, he boarded a Channel steamer at Folkestone, lingered a single night in a Boulogne hotel under the name J. Ashworth, and returned to Dover as the master of Ashworth Grange. He telephoned the Aurelia agency and engaged a new staff—a different butler, a cook from a reputable firm—explaining that his previous servants had decamped during his travels. The story held. He had spent months learning to manage a shipping firm, and the directors, accustomed to a silent and absent chairman, accepted his decisions without query. He signed documents with the flourish he had practiced, and the signature matched. The mechanics were flawless. He had executed a perfect crime, and the performance had scarcely begun.
Yet the stage felt hollow. A week after his resurrection, Edgar—he still thought of himself as Edgar, though the name was now a secret—sat in the library wing chair, a glass of Ashworth’s cognac at his elbow, and tried to savour his triumph. The fire crackled; the leather-bound books gleamed; the world outside the mullioned windows was still and silver with moonlight. He had everything he had ever wanted, and he found it tasted of nothing. The gowns were silk but the part was empty. He had studied Ashworth’s habits, but he had not studied his soul, and so there was no soul to inhabit—only a repertoire of gestures. He thought of the character actors he had once admired, the ones who could vanish into a role so completely that the audience forgot the performer. He had achieved that vanishing, but at the cost of erasing whatever had been real in himself. His motive, he saw with sudden clarity, had been not passion, not ideology, not even a specific desire beyond the generic hunger for safety and warmth. It had been the desire to stop being Edgar Vane, and now that Edgar Vane was gone, there was no one left to enjoy the spoils.
A discreet knock interrupted his reverie. The new butler, a correct and colourless man named Grimes, entered bearing a silver salver. “I beg your lordship’s pardon for the late hour,” he said. “A gentleman has called. He gave no prior notice, but he assures me your lordship will wish to see him. A Lord Finchley.” Edgar’s fingers tightened on the glass. Finchley. He had searched the society columns, the shipping registers, the guest lists of every Ashworth function, and the name had never appeared. It belonged to a friendship he could not counterfeit. “Show him in,” Edgar said, rising with the practised languor of a patrician, while behind his calm mask a single question tolled like a ship’s bell in fog: what would a perfect performance do, when the audience demanded a history it had never rehearsed?
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