Beneath London (47 page)

Miss Bracken smiled and nodded, and then whispered to Finn as he helped Clara up onto Ned’s saddle, “I believe that Mr. Beaumont proposed to me.”

“I believe he did, ma’am. I
thought
he was sweet on you.”

“He’s a good man, despite his awful hat. He killed Smythe, and for that I’m grateful – grateful to be alive, I mean. I abhor violence, of course, unless the dirty pig deserves it, which men so often do. I don’t include you, Finn, nor Mr. Beaumont.”

Clara sat easily atop Ned Ludd, her hand curled in Ned’s short mane. Beaumont slung the flour sack, knapsack, and the can of lamp oil over the back of the saddle, and Finn moved straightaway down along the tunnel into the darkness, holding Ned’s reins and carrying one of the lanterns, Beaumont coming along behind with the second lantern. Miss Bracken, carrying her bag, walked beside Beaumont when the trail was wide enough.

Some fifty feet farther along and thirty feet below ground, they came to a door set into the rock, cleated with iron. There was a heavy wooden bar leaning beside it. A ribbon of iron ran along the top and bottom sides of the bar. “Now that the tunnel’s blocked,” Beaumont said, “they’ll come from inside Narbondo’s house, through this here door, like they
been
doing, given it ain’t barred.” With that he picked up the bar and settled it squarely into iron brackets on either side. “That’ll thwart them for a time, the reptiles.”

They went on, Beaumont and Miss Bracken chatting amiably in low voices, Miss Bracken quizzing the dwarf, and he growing more and more voluble. They traveled into the depths, the steep trail zigzagging for a time, passing the first small fields of luminous fungi, which amazed Miss Bracken, who said cheerfully that the smell reminded her of her dead husband, after he’d begun to stink. Finn heard Beaumont mutter something and then laugh, to which Miss Bracken giggled and then said, “Oh, you are a
wag
, sir!”

A dark shape the size of a moderate pig moved across one of the green fields, going away from them at a good pace, its shadowy form vanishing the instant it moved out of the green toad light, as Beaumont called it. They paused to listen from time to time, but there was no sound of pursuit, no sound at all, for that matter. Finn began to feel at ease for the first time that day, and he considered putting his hand on Clara’s hand where she held onto Ned’s mane. He made up his mind to do it, and laid his hand on hers, squeezing it lightly. “We’re going to be all right,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and patted his hand in return.

Beaumont told them of a fine great pig he had shot below ground some years back, that he had butchered and hauled to the surface on his back, selling it in Smithfield, but leaving much of it below, the pig being so hugeous, with tusks ten inches long. Miss Bracken said that it was a stupendous tusk to be sure, and that she had heard that men of Beaumont’s persuasion, dwarfs that is to say, often had tusks of a similar length.

Finn didn’t attend to Beaumont’s reply, but said to Clara, “I brought you a gift. Not rightly a gift, but you gave me
Black Bess
, and… Hold your hand out, if you will.” He fetched the carved owl out of his pocket. “Here.” She took it from him and ran her fingers over it. “Do you know what it is?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s an owl. And very real seeming, too. I can make out the shapes of things, you know.”

“How does that work – your elbow? Do you know?”

“I do not. I don’t use it much at all, only when there’s need. Do you know how your eyes work?”

“No, they just do,” Finn said. “When they’re open.”

“Yes. That’s the way of it with me. I could see, you know, when I was a girl, and I remember colors and light. There’s no more color or light, just shapes. Light doesn’t matter to me. Night and day are the same. This is a good owl, Finn.”

“I’ll take you to see him, the real owl, he and his mate, when we’re home. Would you like that?”

Clara said nothing, but sat very still now, her face blank.

“I didn’t mean
see
,” he told her, thinking that he had blundered – perhaps he was too forward. “I meant…”

“
He’s coming
,” she said aloud. “Mr. Klingheimer is at the gate. Along with others.”

“Is he?” Beaumont said, not questioning Clara’s knowledge. “Can you say how many?”

After a moment she said, “Four.”

“So
soon
,” Beaumont said. “And it was me who told Klingheimer that I knew the way below ground to Margate. A man’s mouth is best off closed lest there’s something to eat or drink.”

“What’s to do?” Finn asked. “We can’t fight. Can we outrun him?”

“No. I have a hut down below that my old dad built. There’s food and a rifle. It’s backed against a cliff, so they can’t get around behind us.”

The path ahead angled sharply downward, zigzagging again. Finn kept up a steady pace; glancing back he saw that Miss Bracken was coming along at an easy gait, holding on to Ned Ludd’s tail. Finn strained to hear any sounds of their followers, but aside from their shuffling and the clopping of Ned’s hooves, there was still nothing but the close, silent darkness surrounding them. The trail turned again, between walls of stone that rose precipitously on either side. The air was cool and smelled of water now, and Finn thought he could hear the sound of it not far off – an underground river, perhaps.

“How did you know that Klingheimer had followed us?” he asked Clara. “There was no sound of it.”

She was silent for so long that Finn wondered whether she was simply declining to speak, but at long last she said, “Dr. Peavy put Mr. Klingheimer’s blood into me, and mine into him. He meant for us to be married. That’s what he said.”

She fell silent again, unable to continue, perhaps. Finn reminded himself that she was given to silence, and he let her be. After a moment she said, “I’ll die before I’ll go back.”

“I won’t let them take you back,” Finn said, hoping when he said it that it wasn’t just bluff. He heard her weeping quietly now – thinking of her mother, perhaps, and of being torn away from Hereafter Farm, and of the way Klingheimer had used her – putting his blood into her. Finn could think of nothing further to say, and so he once again put his hand upon hers where she held Ned’s bridle, and let it lie there.

As if from a great distance now came a sound like a kettledrum being beaten. The sound seemed to be tumbling down toward them from above – a low, “boom… boom… boom…” at measured intervals.

“They’ll be through the door quick,” Beaumont said. “Step out hearty now.”

The wall at their left side fell away now, and the sound of falling water was very loud, although the lantern light wasn’t strong enough to show it. Far below them lay a cloud of green light, like a meadow – masses of toadstools, no doubt, with dark geometric shapes among them. How far off it lay, Finn couldn’t tell, and there was nothing for it but to go on. The lantern showed a flat place ahead, and then the first of what appeared to be stone stairs leading ever downward.

THIRTY-SEVEN

T
hey went by way of Lazarus Walk, St. Ives anxious to see what Klingheimer’s lair looked like, and also on the off chance that something was afoot. It could be that Finn and his comrades had been apprehended. In that case they would have to act immediately, possibly violently. But the house was largely dark, and there was nothing stirring.

Alice and Mother Laswell had summarily dismissed St. Ives’s suggestion a few minutes back that the two of them retire to the Half Toad in order to be out of the way of danger. “You want watching,” Alice said to him. “It is unbelievable to me that you walked straight into this Doctor Peavy’s hospital and begged him to cut off your head.”

His parry was to say that she oughtn’t to have walked into the dead house without Kraken at her side, but she dismissed that also. She had no notion that Mr. Lewis had sent her into danger. This was spoken as if in good humor, both of them loathing a public squabble, but St. Ives knew that for Alice this was no laughing matter, although it had turned out well so far, thank God.

He held the cage that housed the head of Sarah Wright, which was covered with a cloth through which its handle protruded. It didn’t bear looking at. What he intended to do with it, he didn’t know. Klingheimer understood the head to be alive, and although St. Ives for the most part had no regard for what Klingheimer claimed to understand, he himself had seen the eyes and mouth move. St. Ives had to suppose that the head was alive in some sense of the word. When he took it out of Peavy’s asylum, he had committed himself to keeping it so. It was a cumbersome thing to carry, and now that it was disconnected from the dripping elixir, there might come a time when it – when she – must be allowed to expire.

The wagon drew up to the back of Narbondo’s house. Again, all was quiet, the gate shut. Hasbro made a back for Bill Kraken, who stepped up and scaled the wall. There was the sound of Bill dropping to the ground, and then, as the rest of them climbed down out of the wagon, St. Ives heard him say something about “these here stones,” followed by the thumping sound of heavy objects being pitched aside. The gate swung inward now, and they went through in a body, Hasbro driving the wagon in behind them.

St. Ives saw that Klingheimer’s carriage stood in the yard, moonlight shining on the glossy coats of the horses, and that a heavy crowbar lay beside the wall, and the lock on the gate had been pried off. Klingheimer would not have needed to pry off the lock in order to get in. It stood to reason that Finn had got into the yard before Klingheimer did, and that the lot of them were underground. They pushed the gate shut and secured it with stones once again. St. Ives dusted his hands and then picked up the cage, seeing that Mother Laswell was giving him a significant look.

“I’ll carry her, Professor,” she said to him. “Sarah Wright was my friend, and her business is my own and no one else’s. You’re correct in supposing her to be alive, or something close to it. I can feel her mind turning. She’s searching for Clara, I believe, and might well be a lodestone in the underworld. In any event, I won’t abandon her. Good or ill, what happens to her will be my doing.” She looked steadily at St. Ives, evidently meaning what she said, and he handed the cage to her with a sense of relief.

He took in the heap of rubble where Klingheimer was evidently opening a passage to the underworld, and he wondered who had collapsed the corner of the house in order to block it. Unless it was accidental, it was no doubt Finn’s work, he and the dwarf.

“There ain’t no time to dig through that there rubble,” Kraken said. “Them others knew it and didn’t try, for there stands their coach, and them villains ain’t a-standing with it. There’s another way in, and they took it.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “There are secret passages in the house. The dwarf took Eddie and me through them, under the road and up again into the Cathedral from behind. The passages are quite deep. I counted twenty-six steps downward before we arrived at a landing.”

“Fetch out three of those lanterns from that tool pile, Bill, if you would,” St. Ives said, “and anything that might make a useful weapon.” St. Ives rescued a pole some two-meters long from the debris pile that would be useful as a walking staff and weapon both. He stepped up the several stairs and tried the rear door of the house, which was locked tight.

“Stand aside,” Tubby told him. He carried the crowbar now, which he jammed in beside the door, leaning hard into it. There sounded a sudden creaking and rending, and the door tore open and banged back on its hinges. In they went, Alice and Hasbro carrying lanterns. Kraken held a small sledge-hammer of the sort that Thor might have carried. It wouldn’t be easy to wield – quickly tiring – but it would only require a single blow to crush a man’s head. Tubby carried his cudgel. Mother Laswell dug the pistol from out of her bag and gave it to Hasbro, who was the deadliest shot among them.

“Five rounds in the cylinder,” he said to St. Ives.

They lit the lanterns, pulled the door closed behind them, and followed Alice through several rooms into the center of the house, where a broad stairway ascended toward the second story. Despite the Turkey carpets and ancient furniture, the shuttered house had the air of a mausoleum about it. The back of the stairway was paneled with age-darkened oak, and there was no sign at all of a hidden door until Alice pushed on the edge of a panel midway along it. The panel shifted inward, and Alice slid it fully open.