Dave Hoing, author of “Edward Deare”, is retired from the University of Northern Iowa, where he worked for 40 years. His mystery story was published in Crimewave and then selected for the best-of-the-year anthology “The Interrogator and Other Criminally Good Fiction” (alongside Joyce Carol Oates, David Morell, and Lee Child.) Two of his flash fiction pieces were nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
*****
In 1897, four years after stowing away on a train and absconding from London, the man calling himself Edward Deare appeared in a moving picture unseen by the public. The feature, called The Miller and the Sweep, was a 49-second regurgitation of an old music hall routine. It was one of the earliest cinematic efforts by pioneering filmmaker G.A. Smith.
The man calling himself Edward Deare had loved the routine on stage in the ’80s, back in London when he was still going by his real name. In the act rival suitors vied for the affections of a housemaid. The contest always devolved into a hilarious physical confrontation of pratfalls, slide whistles, and crashing cymbals. The men’s impeccable timing was always rewarded with raucous laughter and applause.
However, respected as G.A. Smith would become, his choice to leave the girl out of his moving picture production was curious. On stage she had provided the impetus for the fight.
The man calling himself Edward Deare had loved the routine on stage in the ’80s, back in London when he was still going by his real name.
Here’s how Smith’s version went:
The miller, dressed in all white, walks toward the camera. He lugs a sack of flour over his shoulder. The chimneysweep, in all black, crosses from left to right, carrying a bag of soot. The two collide. This sets the miller into a rage, and the melee is on. They both swing their respective bundles at each other, resulting in the miller being dusted with black soot and the sweep with white flour. After briefly wrestling each other to the ground, the sweep chases the miller off camera. Inexplicably, they themselves are then pursued by a mob.
Finis. No resolution. No one wins because there was nothing at stake.
But that’s the way G.A. Smith had chosen to tell the story. He’d advertised for actors in broadsides pasted to walls all across Brighton. The man calling himself Edward Deare happened to be in that city at the time. Having no dignity to preserve, he’d answered Smith’s call. Surprisingly, he was cast in the roll of the miller.
It was foolishness to show his face where he might be recognized. “Edward Deare” was not his birth name, nor even his first pseudonym. He was more infamous for the previous one, but his face could only be connected with his real name. To a lesser extent he’d encountered troubles under that name as well, which was why he’d fled London after escaping a lunatic asylum.
Appearing in The Miller and the Sweep was not without risk. He justified it because in 1897 the “flickers” were not yet the sensation in England that they were in France. With no certainty the new art form would ever catch on, no auditoriums had been built to accommodate large crowds. Moving pictures were still being displayed in individual kiosks, where they could only be seen by one person at a time. Furthermore, since there were no closeups in the film, identification would have been difficult. The chance was miniscule that one of the few constables or doctors who knew him would waste their time on a 49-second photographed version of a music hall gag.
Still, his not-irrational mistrust of others caused him to regret his decision to audition. He lay low throughout the rest of the summer, pestering G.A. Smith via letters. When would The Miller and the Sweep be available for public viewing? Would it be displayed only in Brighton, or would it have broader distribution in, say, London?
He never received a direct response, although Smith posted more broadsides announcing that the same title would be rephotographed in September. No reason was given. Perhaps the original print had been lost or damaged. In any case, by that fall the man calling himself Edward Deare had departed Brighton, and thus was unable to reprise his role.
Despite disappointment in his first cinematic effort, he was sufficiently intrigued that he knew he would seek a career in that line of work if careers in that line of work ever became financially viable.
*****
The child who would grow up to call himself Edward Deare was born in 1863, the son of Polish immigrants. He was never clear if his parents had emigrated before or after his birth, but his earliest memories were of the Spitalfields district of London. Having learned English from people who spoke it badly, in his childhood his pronunciation was so heavily accented that he was nearly unintelligible to all but the most patient of native listeners.
With his father unwilling to work, the family moved around frequently to avoid creditors, from Spitalfields to Aldgate, Shoreditch and probably other places they didn’t stay in long enough for him to remember. Due to his father’s indolence, once settled in Spitalfields his mother accepted whatever honest employment she could find. Her options were limited, and when selling flowers and doing other people’s laundry was insufficient to meet their needs, his father beat her until she agreed to entertain occasional nighttime visitors for purposes other than conversation. Once she had acquiesced, he also beat her, and then again after every visitor, taking whatever money she had earned.
The future Edward Deare was too young to prevent it. Although revolted by his mother’s plight, he was paradoxically drawn to the brutality of his father’s strength.
He dreamed that one day he would be that powerful.
When his father wasn’t beating her, drinking himself insensate, or sleeping, he was out picking pockets or trying to elicit pity by pretending to be a lame beggar. In those days, at any hour in that part of London, there was never a shortage of people on the street to hustle, or to be hustled by.
One evening when the coal smoke and river fog were especially thick, his father came home bloodied and bruised. He claimed he’d been accosted by members of the Nichols gang. The gang usually avoided men, even genuinely lame beggars, preferring easier marks who knew better than to resist, whores they could relieve of their nightly pittances. This was the reason his mother entertained visitors in their home and not in the dark crevices of the city outside their two-room dwelling.
And yet she was assaulted and robbed anyway, not by the Nichols gang but by her own husband.
Now miscreants had done to him what he did to his mother nightly. The future Edward Deare derived pleasure from that.
His mother risked a satisfied smile. His father unleashed a torrent of blows on her that left her unconscious. Immediately thereafter, unfulfilled, he burst out the door frothing with rage. He did not return.
The future Edward Deare never learned what became of him, no visits, no letters, no chance meetings on the street. For her part his mother did not lament his absence. Instead, she reduced but did not eliminate the number of nighttime visitors. With one less mouth to feed, she could afford to be more selective.
For a short while the two of them led a difficult but mostly stable existence. He stayed with her even after he had achieved his majority, a time when most young men would have struck out on their own.
He loved his mother and did not hate his life, but at length a darkness crept into his thoughts, unbidden but not entirely unwelcome, darker even than his attraction to his father’s power. By the time of his mother’s messy death in 1887, he knew he would one day give in to these disturbing stirrings, an inevitability that would materialize only a year later.
*****
Actors were rarely credited in those early films, and the man calling himself Edward Deare never received a single billing, even later when his costars, the director, writers and cinematographers had the honor of being featured in the opening titles. He was not handsome, so he never got any major roles after The Miller and the Sweep.
In all his years in motion pictures he had but one line of dialog, which was not accorded an intertitle, so only lipreaders knew what he had said. It was a medium shot in a film whose title he had forgotten. By that time—1915, 1916?—he’d been involved in so many productions it was impossible to keep them all straight.. He would always recall the line, though: “And you, sir, are a villain!”
He was a failure in the moving picture business, if success was defined by financial gain. But he truly loved the work, and as the years passed he lost his fear of being noticed by the authorities in London. Stouter and more grizzled, he became virtually unrecognizable as the young man on so many wanted lists. His fear was replaced by exhilaration that his likeness, anonymous though it was, would be preserved down the generations. No one in his family had ever had a still photograph made of themselves, let alone a moving picture, so he was thrilled that people would be able to see him long after he was dead.
Perhaps they’d wonder at that man in the background, an extra as they would become known. Who was he? What was his life like?
If they only realized! His first, more notorious pseudonym had been bestowed upon him a few years back by an enterprising newspaperman trying to rustle up more sales. The name became a sensation. Since then the public had been rife with speculation about him, but they had no face to put with their curiosity, just a blank picture frame with a question mark in the center.
Films would be his way of thumbing his nose at all those who had sought him out. In a century he would still be laughing at them from hell. The joke would last until the final prints of his films crumbled to dust.
Here I am, you witless bastards, cavorting before your eyes this whole time, and you didn’t even know.
The man calling himself Edward Deare did not regret the misdeeds of his youth. He looked back wistfully on those days when he was an enthusiast with a grievance and a plan.
Now, he had little of the will and none of the energy left to pursue those interests. An unsurpassable last act, along with maturity and prudence, had a way of cooling the blood.
He would just have to take solace in the fact that his image danced across screens for all the world to watch in slack-jawed ignorance.
*****
When the future Edward Deare was sixteen, he found employment in a slaughterhouse. It was hot, nauseating work that left him spattered head to toe in blood. He saved up to buy leather gloves and an apron to protect his clothes, but that did nothing for his exposed skin. Until he had learned the proper method of killing the beasts, their arterial blood would shoot up to his forehead, then dribble all the way down onto his chest, beneath his shirt and apron. It was sticky and rancid and difficult to remove after it had dried.
Nevertheless, once he lost the pity he felt for the animals, he began to enjoy his work. The wages were good, for that part of London in the ’70s. He was grateful to be able to help out his mother and himself, but there was something more. The cattle came in wide-eyed, lowing in terror, knowing their fate was upon them without knowing what that fate was. He was able to end their fears with a sharp-edged mercy. He savored the sight of their eyes relaxing into peacefulness and then slowly losing their light.
*****
Around this same time, walking home from the slaughterhouse on an early Friday morning, he came upon a scandalous publication in a waste bin on Montagu Street. Called The Pearl, the magazine carried the outrageous price tag: £25! Even with his job that was an exorbitant fee, far beyond his means.
He had heard rumors of the journal’s existence but didn’t believe the government would allow such a thing. Even if it slipped past their watchful eyes, he never imagined one would fall into his lap, so to speak.
And yet here it was, having been discarded in the waste bin. Its cover and title were plainly visible, so it must have been very recently deposited, or someone would have discovered it before he did.
This copy was crumpled and stained. It must have been owned by some well-to-do West-Ender slumming in the area, as well-to-do West-Enders were wont to do then. Even here, to be caught with such a scurrilous publication meant opprobrium and possibly arrest. The man—for it must have been a man—probably was hiding it in a pocket inside his coat. Perhaps it was dislodged and fell to the ground when others were nearby. The West-Ender, too flustered to simply replace it in his coat, furtively stuffed it into the waste bin and scurried away.
The man’s bad fortune was an adolescent boy’s gift from heaven—or more likely, from a location less suited for angels. The future Edward Deare squirreled himself into the doorway of an abandoned building, hidden by the shrinking shadows of the rising sun. Once his eyes adjusted, there was just enough light to read.
He opened its pages with the greatest of anticipation. Nor was he disappointed.
The publication was packed with tales, poems and illustrations of the most graphic kind, depicting explicit sexual acts. The nouns included gutter terms for private anatomy that would make a Frenchman blush. And the verbs, the adjectives!
With good reason, none of the titles carried a byline, but by all appearances many of the entries had been penned by women—at least the use of first person to detail the contours of their bodies would indicate as much. The revelation that a woman could enjoy such things added a level of excitement beyond depictions of the acts themselves.
Reading The Pearl produced in him a heretofore unknown reaction, quite beyond his control. Fortunately, there were no witnesses as the stain spread out in his trousers.
Beyond the kind of sex he’d heard about, nearly every story also depicted scenes involving rods and cattails applied viciously to naked buttocks. At sixteen he could never have conceived of people doing this, except perhaps in a milder form to punish a recalcitrant child. True, his father had brutalized his mother with regularity, but that was with closed fists, not weapons that could slice through flesh, leaving trails of blood and welts.
The sheer number of times these whippings were described implied that it was a common practice. Astonishingly, both the abuser and the abused enjoyed it, more so even than the normal intercourse. Usually a woman was on the receiving end of the lash, with her tormentor being either a man or a woman, or both.
The future Edward Deare snapped shut the pages of the magazine and tried to catch his breath, but it was too late to prevent a second reaction, stronger than the first, so overwhelming he nearly swooned.
*****
As soon as moving pictures were invented, it was inevitable that some enterprising entrepreneur would think to make visual records of real people doing what The Pearl could only represent with printed words and crude illustrations. Was it not human nature to peek through keyholes? Surely such flickers would bring in far brisker business than a miller and a chimneysweep fighting. Of course, it would also attract the law, so the venue would have to be chosen carefully.
The future Edward Deare would later learn that moving pictures had come into being around the same time he was at the height of his activities under his first alias. He didn’t know about film then, nor would he have been interested if he had. He was too busy pursuing his heart’s desire in real life.
But afterward, after his escape from Colney Hatch in 1893 and the train out of London, he became intrigued, and not for any reason involving pornography. That a machine could make stationary pictures move as if its images were alive was astounding.
It took him four years of drifting and eluding constables before he would find himself in Brighton as the lead in The Miller and the Sweep.
*****
He had fled Brighton, too, shortly after appearing in the film. In retrospect, he realized it had probably been unnecessary, but with London still fresh in his memory, he was easily spooked. Any long glance or double-take from a stranger brought on the jitters, particularly if that stranger wore a badge and carried a bulls-eye lantern.
That’s what had happened in the fall of 1897. Someone had taken a good hard look at him. Terrified he’d been unmasked, he boarded the first train out of town.
As a result he spent three more years on the run. He even made a brief sojourn to Paris, where he was enthralled by a demonstration of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph machine. If his fascination with moving pictures hadn’t been cemented before, it certainly was then.
But despite the innovations being achieved by the Lumières and the illusionist Georges Méliès, he returned to England shortly thereafter. It was not distaste for the French people or culture, but his inability to speak the language. For some reason being surrounded by what were to him foreigners made him more uneasy than the possibility of being recognized. He himself was a Pole, but his English had improved dramatically, and England was after all the only home he’d known.
By 1900 he was back in Brighton, a seaside city he found breathtaking in its beauty. His fire for cinema stronger than ever, he was delighted to find that G.A. Smith was still there, operating his own film studio. When he got wind of Smith’s next project, As Seen Through a Telescope, he immediately auditioned.
Predictably, Smith had forgotten him entirely. It didn’t matter. The man calling himself Edward Deare got a part anyway, although it wasn’t as one of the main characters. As Seen Through a Telescope was the second of his three appearances in a Smith production. The plot was simple. An elderly gentleman focuses a telescope halfway down the street, where a fellow is helping his wife tie her shoelaces. The old man is obviously fond of a shapely female ankle. When the couple continues toward the old gentleman, the husband pauses to slap him across the head, knocking his hat off. Moral of the story: don’t admire the shapely ankle of another man’s wife.
A quick viewing of the one-minute feature seemed to show only those three characters, but a closer inspection revealed a horse, carriage and driver well in the background.
The man calling himself Edward Deare was that driver. He remained so distant in the frame that his face could not be seen. For his own amusement, knowing he was impossible to identify, he openly carried a long straight dagger in his right hand, a gesture to sentimentality.
It was the first time he mocked the authorities, the first time he thought, Here I am, you witless bastards, cavorting before your eyes this whole time, and you didn’t even know.
It would not be the last.
*****
He was arrested in London in December of 1888, not because of anything he’d done under the banner of his sinister nickname, but because he knew he’d never have need for that moniker again. His last time was his last time. The experience had been so satisfying, so utterly complete, that he knew he’d never reach that level of satiety again. His masterpiece had been achieved, the coup de grace that topped off his work. It would be pointless to try to replicate it. That being true, he lost a bit of the urge after that night, as if every compressed demon in his being had been vanquished, freeing him to be someone else.
It was a good feeling, because there was no longer a chance of him being caught red-handed, which was the only way the authorities would have nabbed him.
But it was also distressing that the mission he had so reveled in had come to an end. A month after the climactic denouement, with a growing melancholy upon him, he made the rounds of his favorite pubs. When beer was unable to assuage his dejection, he sought out an opium den. That quite successfully obliterated the sadness, as well as his reason, his sense of self, and any emotional control he may have had left. Howling, babbling, laughing, crying, he stumbled through the streets straight into the arms of a disapproving constable.
The future Edward Deare was behaving like a lunatic, a condition that persisted long after the beer and opium had worn off. Accordingly, he was deposited in the Colney Hatch asylum. Of course, they didn’t know who they’d caught. To the authorities he was just another deranged but harmless nuisance.
Of the Colney Hatch experience, he remembered walking freely into the opium den and waking up four and a half years later in a locked room.
Most people confined in that place left it in a wooden box. But not him. When his reason returned, so did his feral intelligence. It was a relatively simple thing for him to devise and execute an escape plan, and by the autumn of 1893 he was on his way out of London.
It was then that he would adopt Edward Deare as his second, more mundane, pseudonym. He had no particular reason for choosing Edward Deare, other than he liked the sound of it. Edward was a sturdy British name and Deare had a nice ring, as if a sophisticated lady might say to him, “Now, Edward, dear.…”
*****
Back in that shadowed doorway when he was sixteen, The Pearl in his hands and his trousers wet with his own emissions, the future Edward Deare was confronted by a woman who was neither sophisticated nor a lady. He tried to hide the magazine behind him, but she had already seen.
“What have you got there, you naughty lad?” she teased.
The future Edward Deare found it inconceivable that she knew of the publication. She not only couldn’t afford it but she probably couldn’t read.
“Nothing,” he said.
Noting his soiled trousers she laughed, “An exciting bit of nothing, what?”
“It ain’t what you think,” he stuttered, but the evidence was there. This woman would know the difference between piss and male discharge.
“Is that The Pearl?”
“You can read?”
“I know the cover. Now, for a thruppence what say you read it to me? Between me and them squirm stories perhaps we can restore you to your recent glory.”
The future Edward Deare was not at all experienced in these matters, but the event had already occurred twice in a short period of time, and he doubted he could muster a third round. “I’ve no money,” he said.
“I reckon you do,” she said. “Gloves, a leather apron, and blood all about? The slaughterhouse, I’ll wager. Were you not paid for your labor this morning?”
“That’s only once a week.”
“Is it not Friday? Come, come.”
The future Edward Deare saw whores on the street every hour of the day and night, but none had ever propositioned him. Did that mean he was now a man? With little hope of recovering his virility, he nevertheless fished three pennies from his trousers.
She slid the coins into a pocket in her shawl.
“What shall I read?” he said.
The woman nestled down next to him and stroked his leg. She smiled at the large round stain of his expenditure. “Whatever caused this. Read that one to me.”
The future Edward Deare did just that. He blushed to speak out loud vulgar words she must hear and use every day, sputtering through the account of rods and cattails.
She raised her eyebrows. “That’s what you like, then?”
Obviously he had enjoyed the story. Very much. But what about the real thing? If so, in whose place would he like to be, the master or the victim?
Well, it was his father’s power he had envied, not his mother’s meek nonresistance. The thought of a lash cutting through his own flesh did not appeal to him at all.
“I do not want it done to me,” he whispered, less ashamed than he thought he might be.
The woman stood up, not in fear, anger or shock, but in finality. “Then I’m afraid, lad, you’ll need much more than a thruppence.”
*****
In March of 1887 the future Edward Deare returned from work in the morning to find a man exiting their home. He was carrying a small leather satchel. Though his mother had not entirely abandoned inviting visitors in, he’d never known her to entertain them so early in the day. He didn’t approve of her affairs, but he didn’t interfere.
The man stopped him with a hand on his chest. “You are her son?” he said.
“I am.”
“My name is Dr. Tharp. Let me put this to you bluntly. Your mother is with child. She will be forty-seven years old when it is born. I need not tell you how very dangerous childbirth is to a woman her age. It is likely neither she nor the infant will survive.”
His mother knapped? He didn’t even know she could still conceive. “How is this possible?” he said.
“She has not undergone the change yet. Considering her choice of amusements, it’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner.”
“I don’t want to lose my mother.”
Dr. Tharp patted him on the shoulder. “Talk to her, young man.”
“What can she do?”
The doctor nodded grimly. “There are options,” he said, and walked away.
Inside, the future Edward Deare’s mother was leaning against a table and sobbing. When she heard him enter, she sniffled and wiped away her tears and snot.
“Is it true?” he said in English.
“Unless the doctor is mistaken,” she answered in Polish. She sat down and gazed at him with something like defiance.
“The baby will kill you,” he said. “I wish you had not let Father convince you to … do what you do.”
“Father?” she laughed. “Do you believe the man who abandoned us was your father? How do you think you came into being?”
He blanched and struggled to avoid vomiting. “What are you saying?”
“He was neither your father nor my husband. And these men I entertain are not my first experience in that profession. In Poland … well, times were difficult there, too.”
“My God, Mother.”
“God had nothing to do with it. The man you thought your father was intended to be just another zloty in my pocket, but after our dalliance he chose to stay. He was no worse than any of the others, so why not?”
The future Edward Deare found himself too weak to even stumble to a chair. Leaning his back against the wall, he collapsed to the floor. “So at twenty-four years of age I shall have an infant brother or sister?”
“That,” his mother said, blowing her nose on her sleeve, “is yet to be determined.”
*****
The third and final G.A. Smith production in which he appeared was called A Visit to the Seaside. Made in 1908, it was photographed using Smith’s own invention, Kinemacolor, the first fully color moving picture not painted by ladies onto each three-centimeter cell of the film.
The man calling himself Edward Deare had two scenes in that one, including a medium shot. In the first scene three men stand arm-in-arm on the beach behind a lady wearing a white coat and red polka dot hat. He was the shortest of the men, the one on the left with a beard and an unruly lock of hair hanging down his forehead. That was the first and last time he had sported a full beard, although he’d had a mustache since he was old enough to grow one. His face was visible, but the shot was too brief to pick out identifiable details.
The second scene, however, was the medium shot. He was one of dozens of men wearing black coats and white straw skimmers. He passed in front of the camera, but remained in profile, so again he remained anonymous.
He had not stayed in Brighton the whole time between As Seen Through a Telescope and A Visit to the Seaside. Sometimes restlessness and sometimes flashbacks to his more nervous days had sent him scurrying.
He even returned to London for a time, earning a little money by doing what he knew best, carving up cattle in slaughterhouses throughout the East End. That never lasted, though, as the film industry kept calling him back. In his travels he met and occasionally worked with such cinematic innovators as Cecil Hepworth, Walter Booth, and James Williamson.
Unlike G.A. Smith, they were so taken aback by his homeliness that they declined to put him in front of the camera at all, even in the most minor of roles. Instead, he helped with makeup, wardrobe, props, even background paintings. More often than not, though, he was little more than an errand boy, fetching tea and lunches for the crew, and chasing down errant pages of scripts.
He even returned to London for a time, earning a little money by doing what he knew best, carving up cattle in slaughterhouses throughout the East End.
He was never allowed to crank the cameras, let alone direct the actors. Nor did he ever attempt to write a screen play. His reading skills had been excellent since he was a child, and his verbal English was entirely competent by that time, but his spelling and grammar were terrible. It was for that reason he had never kept a journal to list the titles and dates of all the productions with which he had been associated.
That was all right. No one would ever read about him anyway.
At least not under his real name nor as the man calling himself Edward Deare.
*****
The first woman, he would later learn, was named Mary but went by Polly. As he himself would in a few years, she had an alias. But on that August night the man who would call himself Edward Deare was using his birth name. It wasn’t until after the second woman, almost to the third and fourth, that the newspaperman would anoint him with the sinister moniker that struck fear into the heart of the country.
Having gone in to work early the previous night, he’d left at three o’clock a.m. instead of six. En route to the home he still kept after his mother’s death, he had encountered Polly on the street. She was obviously a whore, but a nondescript one. She may have propositioned him—he couldn’t recall—but that’s the night everything started. She didn’t remind him of anybody, except perhaps the whore who’d teased him about his reaction to The Pearl. That woman had done him no harm, and neither had Polly, but for some reason this chance meeting stirred his dark thoughts into action.
Thus did his work begin. Ironically it ended with another Mary, in November of the same year. She was his tour de force, an effort so all-encompassing that he no longer felt compelled to continue.
And then came the December melancholy and his relocation to Colney Hatch.
*****
It was 1887. The future Edward Deare sat at the table while his mother groaned in the only other room in their dwelling. He found her distress disturbing. For years she had endured without a peep the beatings of the man he had called his father.
A few moments later the midwife, a middle-aged woman, burst through the door and hurried toward the exit. She was clutching a red-soaked bundle of cloth and weeping hysterically.
“Forgive me,” she cried. “I’ve been a midwife for twenty years but.…” She didn’t finish the sentence until she was out of his hearing. She fled the premises and disappeared into darkness.
Alarmed and terrified, the future Edward Deare rose and crept into the room. His mother lay silent on the bed. She had rags stuffed between her legs, but blood had soaked through and stained the mattress. There was an overpowering stench both familiar and strange, blood and bodily excretions, and something else.
“Mother?” he said.
Her eyes were open, not in fear of her fate but, like those frightened cattle in the slaughterhouse, peaceful and without light.
*****
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