Beneath London (27 page)

“Your room is all atanto, gents,” she heard Billson say as she ascended the stairs, and then she heard Smythe call for a bottle of Champagne for the lady. In her room Alice pushed the dresser in front of the door connecting her room to that of Hillman and Smythe. She prepared herself for bed and then knelt at the bedside and prayed that Langdon was alive and well. She let the prayer rest in her mind as she fell asleep.

* * *

S
ome time later, Alice awoke in the moonlit room, unsure of the time and of what had awakened her. Then she heard a soft knock on the door, and she slipped from the bed and walked to it, seeing when she did that the key that had been in the lock earlier lay on the floor, where it had apparently fallen out of the keyhole – a strange occurrence, but no less strange than this midnight visitor. There was another tentative knock. She picked up the key and unlocked the door, opening it a crack and peering out into the dim hallway, seeing a girl dressed in a long black skirt, with glass bangles on her wrist and an embroidered velvet cap. Recognizing her but confounded by her presence, Alice swung the door open, and the girl, holding a finger to her lips, slipped into the room.

“Theodosia Loftus!” Alice whispered. “What on earth…?” But abruptly she knew what on earth, and her heart filled with gladness. “Is he
alive
?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Theodosia said, a smile on her face to be the bearer of good tidings.

Alice sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed and wept. Theodosia put her hand on Alice’s shoulder and said, “The Professor found us on the Heath, ma’am, near Wood Pond, past suppertime. He’d come up through the cellar of the old manse and out through the well on the green that’s hid by a copse. He was put through some difficulties underground, in the caves as he put it – a bruised rib, like as not, and a piece torn half out of his scalp, but we patched him up straightaway, brandied and fed him, and he’s put up at the Spaniards, which I believe you know. He said to say it’s the
very same room
, ma’am, that you’d ken what he meant by saying so.”

“The Spaniards? Indeed I do know it. I’ll go there now. Just you wait for me, if you will, Theodosia.” She rose from the bed, but Theodosia shook her head and took her arm.

“You mustn’t, ma’am. He fears you’ll be followed, and he wants to remain hid until he finds out what’s what. Only you and his friends must know he’s alive for the moment. No one else, for there’s a danger in it, he says. You’re to have patience, he says, for he’ll come to this very inn at two o’clock this very afternoon, if you’ll wait upon him then.”

Alice nearly collapsed from the news. She sat down on the bed again. “Today, you tell me? Is it tomorrow, then? Thank God. I’ll see him this very day!”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said smiling. “It’s well past midnight.”

“Tell me, Theodosia – the older man, Mr. Frobisher, he was with the Professor?”

“No, ma’am. The Professor was alone. He mentioned the man you speak of, but they were separated and the Professor came on alone. He wants to tell you that if they were to search for Mr. Frobisher they could go down below in the same manner that he came up. And he said that he half believes that there was no accident – that it was done a-purpose – and that he means to discover who if he can. They’re to think him dead, do you see?”

“Yes,” Alice said, “quite right.”

“And one last thing I have to say, ma’am, is that the Professor wonders can you ask the police whether the man Harry was murdered.”

“Perhaps it was Harrow?”

“Indeed it must have been. That’s all…”

But just then there was a low voice in the hallway – Tubby’s voice.

“Peeping at keyholes, are we, Mr. Hillman?” Tubby said, clear but low, as if he was averse to awakening anyone.

Alice and Theodosia sat stock-still. Alice realized abruptly that the door key was in her hand now, and she remembered that it had been lying mysteriously on the floor. Someone – Hillman – must have pushed it from the keyhole in order to peer into the room.

“I suggest that you and I step out into the byway for a brief constitutional,” Tubby said. “I admonish you not to call out. I have a proposition for you, in fact, which one man might make more use of than two, if you catch my meaning.”

“I do not,” Mr. Hillman said, “but I’m a man of business, and I’ll listen to you. Mind your manners, however. And you catch
my
meaning, cully, or else catch my knife.”

Footfalls dwindled away. Alice stood up and walked to the door, where she put the key back into the keyhole. They spoke for several minutes more, and then Alice asked, “Where is your father, Theodosia?”

“With Mr. Billson, in the kitchen.”

“Do they know each other, then, Mr. Loftus and Mr. Billson?”

“No, ma’am. The Professor gave my old dad a note, you see – so that Mr. Billson would know us. We were in luck that he was still up and about, and it was easy for us to slip in quiet like. He knows some of what you know, ma’am, does Mr. Billson.”

“I see. Go then, Theodosia. You and your father have a long trudge back to the Heath. I thank you with all my heart. If you see my husband give him my love ten times over, and tell him that we’ll carry on at our end as best we can, including looking into Mr. Harrow’s death. Tell him that I feared that something was afoot and that I saw an explosion that collapsed the embankment before he was trapped underground. He must be on his guard.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell him those things if I can.”

“Be off now, and come visit us in Aylesford. I’ve framed the picture you painted and hung it in the parlor. I treasure it.”

Theodosia nodded and shook Alice’s hand as if they had just made a bargain. Alice unlocked the door to let her out. The hallway was empty, and she watched until Theodosia had disappeared down the stairs before she shut and re-locked the door, wound a woolen scarf tightly around the doorknob and the key, and then wedged a chair under the knob. She returned to bed and pulled the covers up to her chin, her fears swept away. She said a quick prayer of thanksgiving, shut her eyes, and found that her mind was turning on the Spaniards and on the lovely time that she and Langdon had spent there – a time of great happiness, and not the last such time, by Heaven.

When she was halfway between sleeping and waking she heard what might have been a drawn-out shriek. Now the night was silent, however. She listened to that silence until she heard footfalls passing by in the hall. A door opened and shut – Tubby’s door, it seemed to her. Alice considered that he had been in a deadly mood this evening, quite at the end of his rope. She had seen him in a deadly mood before, and she wondered whether Mr. Hillman was lying incoherent in the alley. Then she discovered that she was indifferent to the fate of Mr. Hillman, and she fell asleep.

TWENTY

D
awn was two hours off when Beaumont crept from his room and down the stairs to the fourth floor hallway. The night watch had made his rounds, and the house was quiet. Early morning was the best time of day to be out and about in secret, Beaumont thought, too late and too early both. He knew the lay of the house by now and the habits of many of the people in it, although he could not make out the ways of Mr. Klingheimer, who might be seen coming in or out through any door at any moment, upstairs or down, day or night. Beaumont walked lightly along the hallway carpet to the picture on the wall that hid the key to the lock in Clara’s door.

He took out of his pocket a double-sided, hinged key-mold filled with clay and opened it in his hand. He moved the picture aside, removed the key to Clara’s room from its niche, laid it onto the bottom bed of clay and closed the hinged box, smashing the upper bed of clay around the key until the excess was forced out of the division between the two parts of the mold. He cleaned off the bead of extruded clay and pocketed it before opening the box, removing the key, cleaning it on his trousers, and putting it back into its niche. He swung the picture over it, listened for a moment to the silent house, and then, with the mold safely stowed in his coat pocket, went straightaway down the stairs. Beaumont had long been a collector of keys, and he knew a man along the river who could fashion a good brass copy as quick as you like. The man wouldn’t mind being called out of bed at such an hour, either, if he was well paid for his trouble.

When Beaumont reached the bottom floor landing, he stopped again to listen, hearing quiet footfalls for a brief second and then silence again – the sound of someone crossing a short expanse of floorboards and then stepping onto a carpet. He removed his hat and peered past a newel post to have a careful look. It was Mr. Klingheimer, out and about, just then disappearing down the short hallway that led to the cellar stairs. He was going in to flap his gab at Dr. Narbondo, perhaps – a one-sided conversation, which suited Mr. Klingheimer, who was tolerably fond of his own voice. Beaumont had heard him at it before, talking away six to the dozen with great amusement, laughing even, while Narbondo watched silently through green eyes.

He hurried on his way again, around a turning and down the long hallway to the red door that led to the alley. He reviewed the lie that he would tell Mrs. Skink, but when he entered the final hallway and the red door lay ahead, she was nowhere to be seen. The curtain was drawn across her closet, and he heard the noise of her snoring. It seemed a shame to wake her, and there was no real need to make the sign of a Z on the chalk-board that meant Mr. Filby Zounds had gone out.

It was the work of a moment to step up onto the stool and fetch the key from the pitcher in order to make another impression in a second clay mold, and then to open the Chubb lock and the padlock before returning the key to the pitcher and going out, closing the door silently behind him. He heard the lock clank, however, perhaps loud enough to awaken Mrs. Skink, and so he hurried away up the alley toward the river. Soon he was lost in the foggy early morning darkness, glad to be quit of the house, if only for a short time.

* * *

F
inn woke up fast from a deep sleep, sitting bolt upright in his bed in the utter darkness, his heart racing. His mind was off kilter from a waning dream about Duffy’s Circus, where he had been an acrobat for many years. It was the usual dream in which he failed to catch the rung and fell, always sure to jolt awake at the moment he hit.

He heard someone speaking, very nearby. It came to him that it was early morning and that it might be Beaumont, come down to the cellar. But surely this wasn’t Beaumont’s voice. Mr. Klingheimer had said that Narbondo was to be taken away this morning to the mysterious Dr. Peavy’s, which might explain it – men setting out to load Narbondo’s cart onto the van. It was strangely early, however, and the house was still apparently asleep. There were no kitchen noises from overhead, no sound of anyone working in the lift-shaft, nothing but silence roundabout save for the voice of one man talking, as if to himself.

Finn stood up, put on his shirt and vest and shoes, and then opened the door a crack. The furniture-filled storage room beyond was dark, but the door on the far side of it was open onto the storeroom. He picked up his creel and put on his jacket in order to carry everything with him in case he had to bolt. He went out then, closing the door to his room and following along the edge of the furniture, listening to the cheerfully animated voice – almost certainly Mr. Klingheimer. He was in the laboratory, where the machinery whirred and ratcheted. The foul smell of the mushrooms was heavy in the still air. Finn stopped beside a wardrobe cabinet. He carefully opened its door, willing the hinges to silence. He climbed in, closing the door so that he was completely hidden. Even if Klingheimer walked into this very room, he wouldn’t see anything amiss. He settled in to listen.

“I am certain you would make a joyful noise if only you could, Doctor,” Mr. Klingheimer was saying, “and I apologize for Dr. Peavy’s very necessary experimentation. Rest assured that the man is a medical electrician of the first water and is under strict orders not to damage your… faculties, which I have need of. Now, be so kind as to blink if you understand me. A flicker of the eyelids will suffice.” There was a pause, and then Mr. Klingheimer resumed: “You do not wish to blink, I see, although I believe that you can hear and see me well enough. You cast a baleful eye upon me a moment ago, an eye filled with evident distaste, and yet I am the very man who released you from your fungal servitude in the underworld.