The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (17 page)

He leered momentarily at his reflection in the unlit window of a hatter’s shop and pulled the bill of his cap down over his left eye, considered it, then cocked it back onto his head with the air of a man satisfied with himself and faintly contemptuous of the rest of the populace.

Beside him materialized the face of a grinning woman. She’d been there for a bit, he was certain, but he’d just that moment focused on her. He winked. In his coat pocket, such as it was, lay a tin flask of gin he’d bought from a river vendor under Blackfriar’s Bridge. It was two thirds empty—or one third full, from the long view. It was a good night for optimism. Kraken winked at the reflection again and held the bottle aloft, raising his eyebrows in a silent query.

The woman nodded and smiled. She hadn’t, Kraken noticed, any front teeth. He poured a warm, juniper-tinged trickle down his throat, smacked his lips, and turned, handing across the flask. What were a few teeth? Several of his own were gone. She wasn’t, taken altogether, utterly unappealing. That is to say, there was something about her, in the pleasant pudding of her cheeks, perhaps, or in the way she fleshed out the tattered merino gown she wore so thoroughly—almost as if she’d been poured into it from a bucket. A large bucket, to be sure. She’d seen better days in some distant time. But haven’t we all, thought Kraken, buoyed by the Socratic wisdom of the London Philosophers.

The woman handed the tin back empty. She had a nose like a peach. She caught Kraken’s forearm in the crook of her meaty elbow, pinioned it, and hauled him away down Regent toward Leicester Square in a fit of romantic cackling, lifting the lid from the pea pot and plunging her free right hand in among the peas. Let her eat, thought Kraken generously. He patted her arm.

“Do you know anything about the stars?” he asked, settling on an appropriate subject.

“Heaps,” she replied, dipping once again into the peas.

“There aren’t but a few,” said Kraken, gazing heavenward. “Sixty or eighty. The heavens are a great mirror, you see. It’s a matter of atmosphere, is what it is, of the reflected light of the sun, which…”

“A looking glass, is it? Heaven?”

“
In a manner of speaking, miss. The sun, you see, and the moon…”

“A bleedin’ looking glass? The moon? You’ve been suffern’, love, haven’t you?” She steered him down Coventry past a line of cafes. Kraken searched for the right words. The concept was a broad one for someone less schooled in the scientific and metaphysical arts than he. “It’s astronomy is what it is.”

“The moon’s nothing but astronomy,” agreed the woman, prying among her remaining teeth for a peapod string. “Drives them all mad.” And she indicated with a sweep of her hand the entire street.

“The ‘
spiritus vitae cerebri
,’”
intoned Kraken agreeably, “is attracted to the moon in the same manner as the needle of the compass is attracted toward the Pole.” He was proud of his storehouse of quotations from Paracelsus, although they were quite likely wasted here. The woman gave his arm a squeeze, screwed her face up awfully so that her eyes seemed to disappear behind the flesh of her nose. She gouged Kraken playfully with a bent finger.

Before them was a lit house, on the door of which hung a sign reading, “Beds to be had within.” Kraken found himself in a state of mingled desire and regret, being dragged up the stoop and finally into a darkened room little bigger than a pair of end to end closets. He stumbled against a disheveled bed and collapsed onto his face, hunched over his peapot, the lid of which sailed off and clattered into the opposite wall.

The bedclothes wanted perfume—a tubful. He pushed himself up. “Miss,” he said, peering around him in the dark. A hand shoved him roughly down again. She was frolicsome, Kraken had to admit. “If you’ve a drop of something,” he began, wondering if he were reading aright the heavy breathing and shuffling behind him. A warm hand grasped the thong round his neck, and, as he once again began to clamber onto his elbows, yanked the peapot from under him—rather roughly, he thought. He collapsed sideways when his right hand flopped up to allow the pot to travel beneath it. He’d have to be a bit more forward. That was the ticket.

He rolled over to have a look at his companion in the moonlight that illuminated the room. A woman of that stature…He anticipated a monumental revelation. But standing over him was a man, slowly chewing at his own tongue. He wore a black chimney pipe hat, smashed in and perched atop his head like a carton. Raised above it was the peapot. “Deener!” shouted Kraken. The peapot smashed down at him. There was a grunt of effort from the man in the hat. Kraken lurched aside, his left hand shielding his face. His wrist snapped down as the peapot glanced off it, smashing against his cheek. Kraken rolled into a wall. There seemed to be nothing in the tiny room but the villainous bed—nowhere to retreat.

The man swung the pot by its thong, bouncing it off Kraken’s forehead and hauling it back for another blow. He seemed to be growling through his gaping mouth, and Kraken noticed in a moment of frozen clarity the droplets of spittle that flew in a little arc as the man’s head was tossed backward with the momentum of his next swing.

Kraken regretted in a mist that his own head seemed to have stopped the peapot very handily, and through eyes suddenly blurred behind a wash of gore from his forehead, he watched with removed wonder as Billy Deener very slowly hauled a pistol from his coat, cocked it, and aimed it.

***

The being confronting a sleepy William Keeble chewed at the end of an ostentatious cigar. Keeble didn’t half like his looks. He liked them less, in fact, than he had when the man had visited him once before. It was his moneyed air that was so annoying—an air that betrayed a sort of Benthamite smugness and superiority, that exclaimed its own satisfaction with itself and its faint dissatisfaction with, in this case, William Keeble, who had been surprised in his nightshirt and cloth cap and so was automatically one down.

Kelso Drake hauled his cigar from his mouth and pried his lips apart into an oily, condescending smile. He wore a MacFarlane coat and a silk hat, both of which had left Bond Street, it was reasonably certain, not more than a week or so earlier. Keeble felt a fool in his cloth pointy-hat—doubly so, for he was wearing the one onto which Dorothy had embroidered a comical face, one eye of which was closer to the sideways nose than was the other, an eccentricity which gave the stitched countenance a look of cockeyed lunacy. Drake wouldn’t understand such a thing. Keeble could see that in a glance.

The industrialist’s desires hadn’t changed. He was prepared to offer Keeble a sum of money—a substantial sum for the plans to the engine, for the patent. Keeble wasn’t at all interested. Drake’s eyes narrowed. He doubled the sum. Keeble didn’t care for sums. Damn all sums. He was suddenly powerfully thirsty. On the hall table sat a walrus tusk, carved into the semblance of the beast that had sprouted it. Keeble imagined twisting its foolish head off and draining the peaty contents. But he’d have to offer Drake a glass, and he wasn’t about to. Damn Drake and all of his affairs. He and his notion of textile mills run by perpetual motion engines made Keeble sick. The idea of a textile mill alone—a mill of any sort—made Keeble sick. Practicality in general made him sick, and the contrived practicality of Drake’s utilitarian vision instilled in him an inexplicable mixture of indifference and loathing that made him long for his bed and a glass with which to chase Drake into nonexistence.

Drake champed at his cigar, rolling it in his mouth, his eyes squinting up into tight little slits. This wasn’t, insisted Drake, merely a casual offer. He had certain methods. He had vast resources. He could exert pressure. He could buy and sell Keeble a dozen times. He could ruin him. He could this; he could that; he could the other. Keeble shrugged in his ridiculous cap. The clock on the wall opposite the hall table suddenly went off, pealing in a sort of doleful, leaden tone, utterly out of keeping with the little clockwork apes who charged grinning out of their lair in the interior and banged away with mallets at a bell-shaped iron octopus.

Drake frowned at it, recoiling slightly. The door opened behind him, and Dorothy, a troubled look on her face, stepped through, stopping in sudden surprise at the sight of the stranger’s back. Keeble motioned with his eyes toward the stairway, but Dorothy hadn’t taken a half step toward them when Drake turned, a broad smile betraying splayed yellow teeth. He clamped his mouth shut at the sight of Dorothy’s involuntary grimace, and bowed slightly, flourishing his hat. “Kelso Drake, ma’am,” he said rolling his chewed cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Very happy to make your acquaintance.”

Dorothy nodded and proceeded toward the stairs, saying, “Pleased, I’m sure,” over her shoulder, impolite as it seemed. Her father nodded his head toward the stairs in quick little jerks, stopping abruptly when Drake turned and looked at him quizzically. The questioning look turned once again into a leer, as if Drake’s face naturally molded itself that way out of long practice. “What was I saying?” he asked the toymaker. “I was momentarily,” he paused and pretended to search for a word, then said theatrically, “distracted.”

“You were just saying good day,” Keeble stated flatly. “You’ve got my answer. There isn’t any room for discussion.”

“No, I suppose there isn’t. I’m averse to discussion anyway. A waste of time. Very pretty daughter, that one. Fetching, you might say. You have three days.”

“I don’t need three days.”

“Thursday, let’s say. And do stay sober. This business will require all of your efforts, regardless of the outcome.” And with that, Drake raised his stick and neatly flipped Keeble’s nightcap from his head, turned, and strode through the yawning door. He climbed into the interior of a waiting brougham and was gone.

Keeble stood still for a moment, as if his blood had solidified. His neck and face were hot. Without turning his head he plucked up the cap from where it had fallen on the hall table. A door shut with a bang upstairs. Had Dorothy listened? Had she witnessed Drake’s departure? Keeble peered up the stairwell, a forced grin stretching his mouth. The stairs were empty. He pulled on the cloth cap and reached for the walrus tusk. There was really nothing to think about. Drake was all bluff. He wouldn’t dare come meddling round again. He’d be sorry for it if he did. Keeble’s hand shook as he drained the tusk, and he set it back onto the table uncapped. What did he care for threats? He stood thinking for a moment then tottered away up the stairs to bed.

FIVE
Shadows on the Wall

The darkness of Hammersmith Cemetery was complete. Not a star shone in the clouded heavens, and the occasional gaslamps that burned in oval niches in the block wall of scattered crypts illuminated nothing but a few befuddled moths that stumbled out of the night, fluttered woodenly around the flame, then disappeared once again into darkness. A heavy river fog lay along the ground, and the old yew trees and alders whose bent branches shaded the grounds dripped moisture onto the neck and shoulders of Willis Pule, who clumsily stamped on the backside of a spade. He pulled the collar of his coat around his neck and cursed. His doeskin gloves were a ruin, and on the palm of his hand below his thumb a blister the size of a penny threatened to tear open.

He looked at his companion’s face. He loathed the man—doubly so for his poverty and stupidity. His face was expressionless. No, not entirely. There was a trace of fear on it, perhaps, a shimmer of dread at the sound of the sudden creaking of a limb overhead, at the sigh of rustling leaves. Pule smiled. He raised his left foot again and brought it down sharply on the spade. It slid off, and the shovel dug in a mere inch or two and canted to the side.

There was something utterly distasteful about this sort of work, but the evening’s prize couldn’t be trusted to the navvy alone. Why it was Pule who wielded the second spade and not Narbondo, Pule was at a loss to say. And if they were found out, there wasn’t a bit of doubt that the doctor and his dogcart would be long gone and that Pule would be left to explain himself to the constable. One day that would change. Pule stared through the gloom toward Palliser Road, but the tree trunks just ten yards hence were dark and ghostly in the fog, and the feeble light of his half-shrouded lantern seemed to make the surrounding headstones and crypts even dimmer and more obscure than they were.

The sudden chiming of a distant clock, low and sullen through the fog, startled him. He dropped his spade. A smile danced momentarily on his companion’s lips and eyes, and then was gone, replaced by the heavy dull slump of stolid indifference. Pule, seething, picked up his spade, grasped it near the base of its ash handle, and thrust it into the dirt. It penetrated several inches and then jammed to a sudden arm-chattering stop against a coffin lid. Pule grunted inadvertently with a thrill of pain and dropped the shovel.

His companion, never missing a stroke, skived the dirt from atop the box, his shovel glancing against the wood and scudding across it. The noises grated unnaturally loud in the heavy silence. Pule let his shovel lie. He’d had enough.

He bent once again over the headstone, cracked to bits years earlier and half covered with moss and mud. Fragments of it were gone altogether. The largest chunk, about a foot square, was cut with deep, angular letters that spelled out half a name—COTE—and below that the number 8 and the vine-draped shoulder of a carven skeleton. The remains of Joanna Southcote lay in the coffin. Her posturing son, himself almost a corpse, would be wild with joy over the worm-gnawed bones within. To Pule, one ruined skeleton pretty much resembled another.

The coffin seemed surprisingly solid for having sat so long in the ground; only one corner, from the look of it, had succumbed to the perpetual dampness and begun to rot, the wood separating into long, mushy fragments along grain lines. Pule’s companion clambered in beside the head end, dug around until he could get a purchase on the edges, and heaved it upward.

Pule grappled with it in an attempt to lever it further up out of the hole. The bottom of the coffin was wet in his hands, and his fingers smashed into clinging bits of mud and bugs. The coffin began to slide from his grasp, then gave suddenly with a sharp crack, the bottom boards splitting down the center and collapsing outward in a spray of debris, covering the face of the man in the hole. From the bottom of the coffin slid the gauze-wrapped corpse, rolling stiffly onto its side. Folds of rotten winding sheet ripped away to reveal long strands of webby hair standing away from a mouldering face. Little pouchlets of flesh hung from cheekbones like fungus on a decayed tree. Ivory bone beneath shone faintly in the lamplight.