The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (12 page)

St. Ives came to himself and translated Kraken’s carrying on. He handed across two pound notes and shook his hand. “You’ve done me a service, my man. If this pans out there’ll be more in it for you. Come along to the Captain’s shop on Jermyn Street Thursday evening. There’ll be a few of us meeting. If you can round up more information, you won’t find me miserly.”

“Aye, sir,” said Kraken, rising and fetching up his pea pot. He secured the cloths and tied them neatly about the lip of the pot. “I’ll be there.” He folded the two notes and slipped them into his shoe, then turned without another word and hurried out.

St. Ives’ cigar wouldn’t stay lit. He looked hard at it for a moment before recognizing it as the damp thing he’d pitched at Kraken an hour and a half earlier. It seemed to be following him around. The man without the thumb loomed in toward him. St. Ives handed him a shilling and the cigar, found his coat on the rack, checked the inside pocket for his parcel—actually a sheaf of rolled paper—and set out into the night.

***

Powers’ Pipe and Tobacco Shop lay at the corner of Jermyn and Spode, with long, mullioned windows along both the south and east walls so that a man—Captain Powers, for instance—might sit in the Morris chair behind the counter and, by rotating his head a few degrees, have a view of those coming and going along either street. On the night of the fourth of April, though, seeing much of anything through the utter darkness of the clouded and rainy night was unlikely. The thin glow cast by the two visible gaslamps, both on Jermyn Street, was negligible. And the light that shone from lit windows here and there along the street seemed to have an antipathy to flight, and hovered round its sources wary of the damp night.

Captain Powers would hear the sound of approaching feet on the pavement long before the traveler would appear in one of the two yellow circles of illuminated sidewalk, then disappear abruptly into the night, the footsteps clop-clopping away into silence.

The houses across the street were inhabited by the genteel, many of whom wandered into the pipe shop for a pouch of tobacco or a cigar. It would have been lean times for the Captain, however, if it hadn’t been for his pension. He’d been at sea since he was twelve and had lost his right leg in a skirmish fifty miles below Alexandria, when his sloop sank in the Nile, blown to bits by desert thieves. He had saved a single tusk of a fortune in ivory, and twenty years later William Keeble the toymaker had made him a leg of it, the best by far of any he’d worn. Not only did it fit without taking the skin off that little bit of leg he had left, but it was hollow and held a pint of liquor and two ounces of tobacco. In a pinch he could smoke the entire leg, could press a button at the tip and manipulate a hidden plate, the size of a half crown, which would slide back to reveal the bowl of a pipe. A tube ran up the inside of his pantleg and coat, and he could walk and smoke simultaneously. The Captain had only done so once, largely because of a sort of odd fascination with the idea of Keeble’s having built it. The bewildered stares of passersby, however, had seemed to argue against the wisdom of revealing in public the wonderful nature of the thing. Captain Powers, grizzled from sea weather and stoic from thirty years of discipline before the mast, was a conservative at heart. Dignity was his byword. But friendship precluded him from letting on to Keeble that he had no real desire to be seen smoking a peg leg.

Keeble’s house, in fact, sat opposite Powers’ store. The Captain looked across the top of his companion’s head at the lamp burning in the attic shop. Below was another room alight—the bedroom of Jack Owlesby; and on the left yet another, the bedroom, quite likely, either of Winnifred—Keeble’s wife—or of Dorothy, the Keeble daughter, home for a fortnight now from finishing school.

His companion cleared his throat as if about to speak, so Captain Powers let his gaze fall from the window to his friend’s face. It had the unmistakable look of nobility to it, of royalty, but it was the face of Theophilus Godall of the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Rupert Street, Soho, a face that at that moment was drawing on an old meerschaum pipe. Carved on either side of the bowl was the coat of arms of the royal family of Bohemia, a house long since scattered and flown from a fallen country. The pipe had had, no doubt, a vast and peculiar history before passing into the hands of Godall, and who knew what sort of adventures had befallen it since?

“I was with Colonel Geraldine,” Godall was saying, “in Holborn. Incognito. It was late and the evening had proven fallow. All we’d accomplished was to have spent too much good money on bad champagne. We’d had a pointless discussion with a fellow who had a promising story about a suicidal herb merchant on Vauxhall Bridge Road. But the fellow—the second fellow, that is, the herb merchant—turned out to be already dead. Hanged himself these six months past with his own gaiters, and the first fellow turned out to be uninteresting. I wish I could say he meant well, but what he meant was to drink our champagne.

“Before he left, though, in came two of the most extraordinary men. Obviously bound for the workhouse but neither had any color to him. They had the skin of frog bellies. And they had no notion of where they were. Not the foggiest. They had a sort of dazed look about them, as if they’d been drugged, you might say. In fact that’s what I thought straightaway. Geraldine spoke to the larger of the two, but the man didn’t respond. Looked at him in perfect silence. Not insubordinately, mind you. There was none of that. There was simply no hint of real consciousness.”

The Captain shook his head and tapped the ashes of his pipe into a brass bowl. He looked at the clock under the counter—nearly ten-thirty. The rain had slackened. He could see none at all falling across the illuminated glass of the streetlamp. Footsteps approached slowly, drawing up along Jermyn Street. They stopped altogether. Captain Powers winked at Theophilus Godall, who nodded slightly. The footsteps resumed, angling away across the road toward Keeble’s house. It was just possible that it was Langdon St. Ives, come round to Keeble’s to discuss his oxygenator box. But no, St. Ives would have stopped in if he’d seen a light. He’d have spoken to Kraken by now and be full of alien starships. This was someone else.

A hunched shadow appeared on the sidewalk opposite—the shadow of a hunchback, to be more exact—and hurried past the gaslamp into darkness, but the Captain was certain that he’d stopped beyond it. He had for five nights running. “There’s your man across the road,” said the Captain to Godall.

“Are you certain of it?”

“Aye. The hunchback. It’s him all right. He’ll hang round till I switch out the lights.”

Godall nodded and resumed his story. “So Geraldine and I followed the two, halfway across town into Limehouse where they went into a pub called the Blood Pudding. We stayed long enough to see that it was full of such men. The two of us stood out like hippopotami. But I can’t say we were noticed by any but him.” And Godall shrugged back over his shoulder at the street. “He was a hunchback, anyway. And although I’m not familiar with this fellow Narbondo, it could conceivably have been he. He was eating live birds, unless I’m very much mistaken. The sight of it on top of champagne and kippers rather put us off the scent, if you follow me, and I’d have happily forgotten him completely if it weren’t for your having got me onto this business of yours. Is he still there?”

The Captain nodded. He could just see the hunchback’s shadow, still as a bush, cast across a bit of wall.

A new set of steps approached, accompanied by a merry bit of offkey whistling.

“Get your hat!” cried Captain Powers, standing up. He stepped across and turned down the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. There, striding purposefully up toward Keeble’s door carrying his packet of papers was Langdon St. Ives, explorer and inventor.

In an instant the hunchback—Dr. Ignacio Narbondo—had vanished. Theophilus Godall leaped for the door, waved hastily at Captain Powers, and made away into the night, east on Jermyn toward Haymarket. Across the street, William Keeble threw back the door and admitted St. Ives, who squinted wonderingly at the dark, receding figure that had hurried from the suddenly darkened tobacco shop. He shrugged at Keeble. The Captain’s doings were always a mystery. The two of them were swallowed up into the interior of Keeble’s house.

The street was silent and wet, and the smell of rain on pavement hung in the air of the tobacco shop, reminding the Captain briefly of spindrift and fog. But in an instant it was gone, and the thin and tenuous shadow of the sea vanished with it. Captain Powers stood just so, contemplating, a lazy shaving of smoke rising in the darkness above his head. Godall had left his pipe in his haste. He’d be back for it in the morning; there was little doubt of that.

A sudden light knock sounded at the door, and the Captain jumped. He’d expected it, but the night was full of dread and the slow unraveling of plots. He stepped across and pulled open the heavy door, and there in the dim lamplight on the street stood a woman in a hooded cloak. She hurried past him into the room. Captain Powers closed the door.

***

St. Ives followed William Keeble up three flights of stairs and into the cluttered toyshop. Logs burned in an iron box, vented out into the night through a terra cotta chimney, and the fire was such that the room, although large, was warm and close, almost hot. But it was cheerful, given the night, and the heat served to evaporate some of the rainwater that dripped in past the slates of the roof. A tremendous and alien staghorn fern hung very near the fire, below the leaded window of the gable that led out onto the roof, and a stream of water, nothing more than a dribble, ran in along the edge of the ill-sealed casement and dripped from the sill into the mossy, decayed box that held the fern. Every minute or so, as if the rainwater pooled up until high enough to run out, a little waterfall would burst from the bottom of the planter and fall with the hiss of steam into the firebox.

Darkened roof rafters angled sharply away overhead, stabilized by several great joists that spanned the twenty-foot width of the shop and provided avenues along which tramped any number of mice, hauling bits of debris and working among the timbers like elves. Hanging from the joists were no end of marvels: winged beasts, carved dinosaurs, papier-mâché masks, odd paper kites and wooden rockets, the amazed and lopsided head of a rubber ape, an enormous glass orb filled with countless tiny carven people. The kites, painted with the visages of birds and deepwater fish, had hung among the rafters for years, and were half obscured by cobweb and dust amid the brown stains of dirty rainwater. Great shreds had been chewed away by mice and bugs to build homes among the hanging debris.

The red pine floor, however, was swept clean, and innumerable tools hung over two work benches, unordered but neat, brass and iron glinting dully in the light of a half-dozen wood and glass sconces. Coughing into his sleeve, Keeble cleared a score of mauve seashells and a kaleidoscope from the benchtop, then swept it clean with a horsehair brush, the handle of which was elegantly carved into the form of an elongated frog.

St. Ives admired it aloud.

“Like that do you?” asked Keeble.

“Quite,” admitted St. Ives, an admirer of William Morris’s philosophy concerning beauty and utility.

“Press its nose.”

“Pardon me?”

“Its nose,” said Keeble. “Press it. Give it a shove with your fingertip.”

St. Ives dubiously obeyed, and the top of the frog’s head, from nose to mid-spine, slid back into its body, revealing a long, silver tube. Keehie pulled it out, unscrewed a cap at the end, found two glasses wedged in behind a heap of wooden planes, and from the tube poured an equal share of liquor into each. St. Ives was astonished.

“So what have you got?” asked Keeble, draining his glass and hiding it away once again.

“The oxygenator. Finished, I believe. I’m counting on you for the rest. It’s the last of the lot. The rest of the ship is ready. We’ll launch it in May if the weather clears up.” St. Ives unrolled his drawing onto the benchtop, and Keeble leaned over it, peering intently at the lines and figures through startlingly thick glasses.

“Helium, is it?”

“And chlorophyll. Powdered. There’s an intake here and a spray mechanism and filter there. The clockworks sit in the base—a seven-day works should do it, at least for the first flight.” St. Ives sipped at his lass and looked up at Keeble. “Birdlip’s engine; could it be duplicated on this scale?”

Keeble pulled off his glasses and wiped them on a handkerchief. He shrugged. “Perpetual motion is a tricky business, you know—rather like separating an egg from its shell without altering the shape of either, and then suspending the two there, one a quivering, translucent ovoid, the other a seeming solid, side by side. It’s not done in a day. And the whole thing is relative, isn’t it? True perpetual motion is a dream, although a sage named Gustatorius claimed to have produced it alchemically in 1410 in the Balkans, for the purpose of continually turning the back lens of a kaleidoscope. A wonderful idea, but alchemists tend to be frivolous, taken on the whole. Birdlip’s engine, though, is running down. I’m afraid his appearance this spring may be his last.”

St. Ives glanced up sharply. “Are you?”

“Yes indeed. When it passed five years ago it was low, fearfully so, and far to the north of its passing in ’65. So I’ve a suspicion that the engine is declining. The blimp may well drop into the sea, but I rather think it’s tending toward Hampstead where it was launched. There’s a homing element in the engine; that’s what I think. A chance product of its design, not anything I intended.”

St. Ives rubbed his chin, unwilling to let Keeble’s revelation push him off his original course. “But can it be miniaturized? Birdlip has been up for fifteen years. In that time I can easily reach Mars, Saturn even, and return.”

“Yes, in a word. Look at this.” Keeble slid open a drawer and pulled out a wooden box. The joints were clearly visible, and the box was painted with symbols that appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphs—walking birds and amphibians, eyeballs peering out of pyramids—but there was no sign of a hinge or a latch.