King Arthur's Bones (40 page)

Now he was faced with the task of retrieving the thighbone from her grasp and smuggling her back out of the house without Mrs Stanhope, his landlady, spotting her. He slid from under the bedclothes and, pulling his shirt down to cover his privates, he nervously approached the bawd, who was now giggling and poking at him with the large bone. Malinferno noted, not for the first time, that it was unusually long, and probably had belonged to a man who had stood more than six feet tall when he was alive. And it was all the more capable of braining him if Kitten swung it in the wrong direction.

‘Now, come on, Kit. Don’t be silly. You have to go now.’

‘Not until you have paid me, James.’

‘Joe, the name is Joe. And I have paid you. In advance in the gin-shop where I picked you up.’

The girl poked him even harder in the chest.

‘Yes, but then I didn’t know you was a resurrection man, with bones hidden in your place. You’ll have to pay me to keep my mouth shut now, James.’

Malinferno cringed. Now he was being accused of being a sack-’em-up man himself. And the tart couldn’t even get his name right. He would have to deal with this quickly, or Mrs Stanhope would be woken up by the sound of the altercation. And then he would be out on the street. His landlady did not like women in her gentlemen’s rooms. He turned away from Kitten and began to pull on his long breeches, which had lain on the floor after being cast there the previous night in the heat of passion.

‘Very well, Kit. Whatever you say. But I shall have to pass your name on to Ben Crouch. He doesn’t like people poking their noses into his trade.’

On hearing the name of the legendary leader of the Borough Gang of bodysnatchers, Kitten went limp. She dropped the bone to the floor and scrabbled for her clothes.

‘No, that’s no trouble, sir. I was only joking. You can have this one on me. No need for Mr Crouch to know about it, is there?’

She didn’t wait for Joe to answer but disappeared from his room faster than the rat that had stood on his chest that other morning. The only difference was that Kitten used the door, rather than the hole in the wainscoting. Malinferno breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the long leg-bone.

Once again he wondered how Bromhead could be so uncertain of its origins. Though Joe couldn’t tell a newly buried bone from a pharaoh’s, he wasn’t about to tell Bromhead that. Probably this skeleton was no more than a hundred or so years old. The location of its discovery should have told the antiquarian whose bones they were likely to be. If they had been dug up anywhere on the edge of the Cornish border, then they were probably the remains of some cavalier or roundhead who had met his end at one of the battles of Lostwithiel. By Joe’s reckoning, that put the death in the year 1642 or 1644. There was no possibility that the bones had the age of the few mummified remains from Egypt that Malinferno had had the privilege to examine. But if Bromhead was so deceived as to wish the bones were as old as a mummy’s, who on earth did he think they belonged to?

Malinferno had no more time, however, to ponder the eccentricities of Augustus Bromhead. He had an important meeting with a personage he had long wished to talk to. Someone who had actually been to Egypt and seen first hand treasures of which Malinferno had only heard tell. The problem was the man was French, and England’s recent skirmish with that nation, and Napoleon Bonaparte in particular, had made it well-nigh impossible to speak to Monsieur Jean-Claude Casteix. But now Bonaparte was safely in exile on St Helena, the English mood had changed. Frenchmen were not viewed with such suspicion as before. In fact some members of the establishment had developed almost a fondness for their old enemy, Napoleon. Which suited Malinferno well, because Monsieur Casteix was not only French but a close associate of Bonaparte’s from his Egyptian expedition of 1798. He had been one of the savants who accompanied Bonaparte on his campaign, and he had accumulated a large collection of artefacts. The problem was that, when the French forces had capitulated to the British in 1801, General Hutchinson had cast covetous eyes on the savants’ collection of antiquities. Which had included the Rosetta Stone, reputedly the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics and most Egyptologists’ Holy Grail.

Malinferno had ideas about deciphering the stone, and enhancing his own glory in the field. But first he had to speak to Jean-Claude Casteix, who twenty years ago had refused to be parted from the collection plundered by the British, and who had come to England with it. Today was the day he had finally got himself an interview with the great man, and he didn’t propose to miss it. Despite a sick headache, resulting from his anxious imbibing of too much gin the previous night, he hastened to dress. Though his shirt was a little grubby from the night before, he thought it would suffice if he wore his best double-breasted waistcoat and a clean cravat over it. The problem was his fingers were too shaky to tie his linen in the latest fashion. And when he had managed it, it lay flat and irregular beneath his chin like a soiled napkin.

‘Damn! It will have to do for now. Or I shall miss my chance with Casteix.’

He cast around for his Hessian boots, which had been discarded the previous evening at the height of his passion.

‘Double damn. I shall have to go barefoot if I don’t find them soon.’

He realized it was a clear indication of his anxiety that he was talking to himself in this way, and he resolved to stop up his mutterings. Finally, tight-lipped, he found his boots behind the aged chaise longue beneath the window. For a moment he had an image of Kitten drunkenly yanking his boots off and collapsing behind the chaise longue in a flurry of muslin and bare thighs. His sick headache gave a vigorous twinge, and he closed his eyes on the scene. Sitting down abruptly before his dizzy swoon tipped him over, he took a deep breath and yanked on his boots. At least his tall hat and Garrick overcoat did not require hunting for. They hung in their usual place on the back of the door. He pulled the coat on and slapped the hat rakishly on his head. It was only on an impulse that he then picked up the long bone Kitten had been waving at him and stuffed it in the capacious pocket of his Garrick. No harm in the great savant confirming it as being of no great age. He hurried down the creaky staircase and out into Creechurch Lane.

Young Malinferno’s talk of bodysnatchers had upset Augustus Bromhead. It had taken the rest of the day, and several glasses of dry sack, before he had settled enough to go back to his studies. He had always done his best work at night, when the sounds of London had dimmed to a tolerable murmur outside his ramshackle house in Bermondsey. He was fond of the unfashionable area south of the river for its antiquarian associations. Somewhere beneath his feet stood the foundations of Bermondsey Abbey, and some said the very fabric of his house incorporated parts of the abbey. He fancied sometimes he could hear the shuffle of monks’ sandals as they made their way to prayer. The sound had always been a comfort to him before. Tonight, however, the extraneous creaks and groans of the house and its environs were making him edgy.

‘Damn you, Joe Malinferno, for your scaremongering. How can I concentrate on my task when all I can think about is sack-’em-up men.’

He leaned over his work table and tipped his eyeglasses at a more acute angle in an attempt to read the poorly printed book lying before him. He opened the cover and scanned the title page anew, his lips silently forming the words printed thereon.

Augustus licked his lips at the thought of this old book – an edition of a hundred years ago – telling the stories of the kings of Britain.

‘Now, where was I?’

He skipped over the fanciful tale of the island of Albion, inhabited only by giants before Brutus of Troy came to found a nation on its shores. And ignoring the supposed origins of the name of the very city in which he dwelled as referring to a certain Lud who once ruled there, he again dipped into the prophecies of Merlin. He was particularly taken with certain references, which he could quote by heart that he thought referred to the demise of Napoleon.

‘A bridle-bit shall be set in her jaws that shall be forged in the Bay of Armorica . . . Then shall there be slaughter of the foreigners; then shall the rivers run blood; then shall gush forth the fountains of Armorica.’

He stopped suddenly. His lilting voice had filled the dark chamber in which he sat, but he fancied there had been another sound. Like the creaking of the stairs leading to this room, which was set high in the eaves of the house. He sat in silence, the only sound being that of his own heart thudding in his chest. He essayed a laugh at his fears, but it came out as a nervous squeak. He spoke to himself again to bolster his courage.

‘Hah! I’ll be imagining its old Boney himself come to do for me. Despite his safe imprisonment on St Helena. Just because I can discern his downfall in Merlin’s words, it does not mean he will come to haunt me.’

The ensuing silence convinced Augustus that he was truly imagining things. He turned the pages of Jeffrey’s work and scrutinized the brief sentence that he came back to time and again. Once again it steadfastly refused to give up its secret meaning.

‘The renowned King Arthur himself was wounded deadly, and was borne thence unto the Island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds.’

Behind Augustus’ back the door swung silently open.

Malinferno felt he was in the presence of royalty. Monsieur Jean-Claude Casteix was attired in a sort of antiquated court dress that had gone out of fashion in England with the arrival of Beau Brummell twenty years ago. For a start he wore on his head a powdered wig, no less. His bulky form was clad in a heavily brocaded coat with a long waistcoat under it and satin knee-britches. Below the breeches, his white stockings were suspiciously well filled at the calf, as if faked with padding. His left leg was raised on a small footstool, and he held a silver-topped ebony cane in one hand. The chair he sat rigidly upright in was almost as heavily brocaded as his coat, and he was surrounded by small mementos of his time in Egypt. Malinferno’s gaze was particularly taken by a group of four jars, made of limestone, that sat on the table at Casteix’s elbow. The Frenchman saw Malinferno’s interest.

‘Ah. The canopic jars from the unnamed tomb in the Valley of the Kings.’ Casteix’s speech was still heavily accented, and he gazed fondly at the jars, recalling their discovery, which he had made along with two young engineers, Jollois and de Villiers. ‘They represent the four sons of Horus. Each jar houses parts of the internal organs of a pharaoh.’ He pointed first at the jackal-headed jar. ‘Duamutef contains the stomach. Qebehsenuf, the falcon-headed one, the intestines. Hapi of the baboon head houses the lungs, and—’

Malinferno could no longer resist showing off his own knowledge. ‘And the human-headed jar represents Imseti and contains the liver.’

Casteix tilted his own head, showing evident surprise that the ignorant young Englishman should know so much.

‘I see I must revise my opinion of you, Mister—’

‘Malinferno.’

‘Ah.’ Casteix now understood why he had made the wrong assumption about the youth’s education. ‘Not English, then, but from one of those myriad little states that makes up the Italian peninsula. There is a chance for you after all.’

Malinferno did not choose to correct the French savant. His father had been Italian, it is true, but his mother was English, and he had been educated in England. Still, let the old man think him a fellow foreigner, if it created a bond of sorts between them. Casteix eased the leg that was perched on the footstool and sighed. Malinferno assumed it must trouble him, but good manners prevented him from enquiring of the cause of his malaise. He manoeuvred the savant into reminiscing about his past.

‘The Valley of the Kings, you say. And that was in 1799 . . . ?’

‘Yes, two years before the British soldiers came and plundered our finds. The surrender list included several obelisks and statues, sarcophagi and . . . the Rosetta Stone, of course.’ The old man’s rheumy eyes glazed over once more at the thought of what the French had lost in 1801. ‘If only Napoleon had been there at the time, things might have been different. But we were in the hands of the despicable General Menou. Do you know in what contempt he held us savants? Do you know what he said to the English general when we vowed we would not be separated from our collection?’

Malinferno shook his head.

‘He called us
faiseurs de collections
– collection makers – as if we were nothing more than gatherers of random odds and ends. He said that, if we chose to travel to England with our collections of birds, butterflies and reptiles, he would not prevent us also being stuffed for the purpose.’

Malinferno suppressed a smile at the outraged general’s comments. He could see that Casteix was scandalized still by Menou’s words, even after almost twenty years. Years that Casteix had spent in exile in England along with the treasures that had found their way to the British Museum.

Casteix reflected on the misfortune that had resulted from him making the larger items in the collection his particular study, for they alone had come to England. The smaller items had in the end been left with the others savants, who to a man had carried them back to France in their personal baggage. Casteix alone had spent bitter years in the land of his enemy, becoming ever more and more irascible. Now, though the hostilities between England and France had ceased, he was still not able to return home. He had found himself something and nothing – a traitor of sorts, and now outside the charmed circle of French Egyptologists. His knowledge of value only to this ill-informed Englishman. Or was he Italian? Somehow it hardly seemed to matter.

Malinferno nervously produced the thigh-bone given to him by Augustus Bromhead, and he held it out for Casteix to examine.

‘Monsieur, can you tell me if you think this bone has any age?’