Captain Powers and Bill Kraken: Stolen Emerald and Pursuit

The relationship between Captain Powers and Bill Kraken is shaped by a stolen emerald: Kraken took it from Captain Powers, then found himself pursued by the consequences of the theft. The jewel is not merely valuable property. It is Jack Owlesby’s inheritance, a source of danger for those trying to recover it, and, in Kraken’s imagination, a possible means of returning to Captain Powers’ shop after having left it by the window.

The Theft and Its Confession

Kraken’s account of the theft is both an admission and an excuse. On hearing that Jack is the Lord Mayor’s nephew, he recognizes the emerald as Jack’s inheritance, describes it as a great jewel, and acknowledges that he has pinched it. He blames drink and the blow to his forehead, where a freshly healed cut remains. His explanation does not undo the theft, but it frames the crime as a lapse he can confess rather than a matter he has resolved to put right.

The emerald’s importance is made painfully concrete by its ownership and value. Kraken understands that it belongs to Jack’s future, while Captain Powers later regards it as essential to Jack and Dorothy Keeble’s livelihood. Their different positions converge on the same object: Kraken possesses what the others have reason to reclaim.

The Emerald and Captain Powers’ Pursuit

The stolen jewel continues to bind Kraken to Captain Powers even when the Captain is not present. Kraken remembers that he stole it from the Captain and that Ignacio Narbondo had left it casually beside the aquarium. The memory anchors his fearful vigil among the corpse and detached skeletal hands: his theft marks the point at which his former life, associated with Paracelsus and another age, gave way to the present danger.

Captain Powers, meanwhile, learns from Theophilus Godall that Kraken had been a prisoner in Ignacio Narbondo’s laboratory and escaped. Godall had followed him across London, lost him in Limehouse, and failed to recover the box. The Captain and Godall decide that they must enter the building themselves. They reject involving the police because it could expose Nell, provoke questions about the emerald’s ownership and history, and draw suspicion onto people they consider innocent. Godall therefore sketches Narbondo’s cabinet and the courtyard opposite while Nell supplies details of the laboratory. The intended recovery is a covert operation, not a straightforward appeal to law.

Kraken’s Attempt to Return

Kraken’s own route back begins with an image from Ashbless. Reading the biblical image of the rejected stone becoming a cornerstone, he sees himself as someone who has never fitted into the ordered lives of other people. He then asks, in practical terms, how he might become that cornerstone and regain entry to Captain Powers’ shop by the door, after once leaving through the window. The emerald seems to him the only route back.

That recognition does not immediately amount to a clear plan for reconciliation. Kraken understands that recovering the jewel will almost certainly mean destruction, but judges that prospect less odious than the alternatives he faces. Weary from wandering through London, he nevertheless sets out north from Westminster Bridge toward Soho and Pratlow Street, driven by a sudden, possibly fleeting resolve to settle a score with himself. His movement toward the emerald is therefore also an attempt to confront the deed that severed his connection to Captain Powers’ world.

An Unequal, Unresolved Bond

The evidence presents the relationship less as a sustained personal exchange than as an asymmetrical bond organized around possession and pursuit. Kraken’s confession makes Captain Powers the person from whom the emerald was stolen; the Captain’s decision to retrieve it makes Kraken’s act a threat to Jack and Dorothy as well as a private loss. The shop doorway gives the conflict a personal contour: Kraken imagines the jewel as his only means of entering again, while the Captain’s party plans to recover it without bringing the police into the matter.

The accounts do not establish a direct reconciliation or the outcome of Kraken’s attempted return. Instead, they leave the two men oriented toward the same object from opposite sides: Captain Powers acts to restore the inheritance to Jack and protect those connected to it, while Kraken turns toward the jewel as a possible passage out of guilt and exclusion. The emerald makes their connection both material and moral, keeping the theft—and the possibility of answering for it—open.