The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (63 page)

The blow left him half senseless, knocking him onto his face on the floor. He lay writhing. I stepped across, thinking to give him another one, a sort of cricket swing to the cranium, but he was already down and I couldn’t bring myself to do it—something I’m happy about today, but which took all my civilized instincts at the time.

The door lay open before me, and I was out of it quick, bolting for the stairs, throwing the post onto the floor of the hallway, and wondering about Higgins sneaking around like that. He wasn’t expected; that was certain. He had seen them both go out, perhaps, and had crept in, no doubt searching for the very notebooks that they were off ransacking my room for. They weren’t in league, then, but were probably deadly enemies. The Pules would take good care of him if they found him on the floor of their room.

I peered cautiously down the dark and empty stairwell, and then leaped down the stairs three at a time toward the second-floor landing, thinking to charge into the foyer at a run, knocking down anyone between me and the door and maybe shouting something clever at the landlady to regain some lost dignity. I fairly spun around the baluster and onto the bottom flight of stairs, straight into the faces of the two Pules, who puffed along like engines, coming up, she holding the revolver under her shawl and he going along before, both of them with a deadly resolve.

“Here now!” piped the son, clutching my arm in the devil’s own grip.

“Hold him!” she cried. “
We’ll
make him sing! Up the stairs, Bucko!”

I kicked him on the shin as hard as I could, my momentum lending it some mustard. He howled and slammed backward against the railing, nearly knocking his mother down. He didn’t let go of my arm, though, but pulled me over with him, both of us flailing and rolling and me jerking free and scrabbling back up toward the landing like an anxious crab, expecting to be shot. I was on my feet and jumping up the stairs three at a time toward the third floor, listening to the curses and slaps and yips behind me as Mrs. Pule rallied her son.

There was no shot, despite the way being clear for it and the range close, but I ducked and danced down the third-floor hall anyway, trying to convince myself that she was loathe to fire the gun in public and bring about the collapse of her plans. I should have thought of that an hour ago, when she collared me at the window, but I didn’t, and wasn’t convinced of it now.

I blasted past the room again, its door still open and Higgins on his hands and knees on the floor, ruminating. The sight of him brought the Pules up short as they came racing along behind me, and for the moment they let me go in order to attend to him. I headed straight toward a French window, grappled with the latch, pulled it open, and looked out, not onto three stories of empty air, thank heaven, but onto a little dormer balcony. There was a hooting from the open door of the room, and a grunt, and then an outright shriek, as the Pules visited the sins of Jack Owlesby onto the head of poor Higgins.

I closed the window behind me, although I couldn’t latch it. In a moment they’d be through it and upon me. Without a bit of hesitation I hoisted myself over the railing, swinging myself down and in, landing on my feet on an identical balcony below and immediately crumpling up, my ankles ringing with the impact. I was up again, though, climbing across this railing too, and clutching two handfuls of ivy tendrils with the nitwit idea of clambering down through it to safety like an ape in a rain forest. I scrabbled in the vines with my feet as the ivy tore loose in a rush, and I slid along through it shouting, landing in a viney heap in a flower bed.

The window banged open upstairs, and I was on my feet and running, trailing vines, wincing at the pain in my ankles, but damned if I’d let any of it slow me down. I expected a shot, but none came—just a litany of curses cried into the night and then cut off abruptly when a voice from a window in a nearby house shouted, “Wot the hell!” and the strollers down along the street to the pier began to point. Mrs. Pule, blessedly, wasn’t keen on calling attention to herself just then.

I ran straight toward the gap between the two houses that would lead me to the seawall, not slowing down until I was there, clambering over the now-damp stone and jumping to the shingle below, where I found myself slogging through ankle-deep water, the tide having come up to lap against the wall. I nearly slipped on the slick stones, and forced myself to slow down. There was no sound of pursuit, nothing at all, and the wild sense of abandon that had fueled my acrobatic leap from the top balcony drained away, leaving me cold and shaking, my shoes filled with seawater.

I climbed back over the wall and tramped along to the Crown and Apple, up the backstairs to find the door unlocked. I slipped into my room, dead tired and even more deadly thirsty. In fifteen minutes I strolled into the dining room in
dry
shoes, feeling tolerably proud of myself, and there sat St. Ives and Hasbro, stabbing at cutlets and with a bottle of Burgundy uncorked on the table. It did my heart good, as they say.

***

“Not with a revolver, she didn’t,” said St. Ives. “You were too far away for anyone to have brought off so close a shot. My guess is that it was a Winchester, and that it was your man Bowker who fired it. Clearly they and the Pules are working at cross-purposes, although both of them chase the same ends—which have little to do, I’m convinced, with drawing ships to their doom. That’s a peripheral business—quick cash to finance more elaborate operations.”

St. Ives emptied the bottle into Hasbro’s glass and waved at the waiter, ordering a second bottle of wine and another pint for me. I’m a beer man generally; red wine rips me up in the night. St. Ives studied his plate for a moment and then said, “It’s very largely a distraction, too, the ship business, and a good one. Godall seems to think that the Crown is on the verge of paying them what they ask, in return for their solemn assurance that they’ll abandon the machine where she lies. Imagine that. Those were Parsons’s words, ‘Their solemn assurance.’ The man’s gone round the bend. Now that we’ve found the machine, though, they’ll wait on the ransom. We’ve accomplished that much. The Academy has the area cordoned off with ships and are going to try to haul it up out of there.”

St. Ives drained his glass, then scowled into the lees, swirling them in the bottom. “If I had half a chance…,” he said, not bothering to finish the sentence. I thought I knew what he meant, though; he had harbored a grim distrust of the machine ever since Lord Kelvin had set out to reverse the polarity of the earth with it. What were they keeping it for, if not to effect some other grand and improbable disaster in the name of science? I half believed St. Ives knew what it was, too—that there was far more to the machine than he was letting on and that only the principal players in the game fully understood. I was a pawn, of course, and resolved to keeping to my station. I’m certain, though, that St. Ives had contemplated on more than one occasion going into that machine works up in Holborn and taking it out of there himself. But he hadn’t, and look what had come of his hesitating. That’s the way
he
saw it—managing to blame himself from a fresh angle.

I tried to steer the subject away from the business of the machine. “So what
do
they want?” I asked.

“The notebooks, for the moment. The damnable notebooks. They think that they’re an ace away from immortality. Narbondo very nearly had it ten years ago, back when he was stealing carp out of the aquarium and working with Willis Pule. He was close—close enough so that in Norway Higgins could revive him with the elixir and the apparatus. For my money Narbondo was pumped up with carp elixir when he went into the pond; that’s what kept him alive, kept his entire cellular structure from crystallizing. Higgins’s idea, as I see it, is that he would revive the doctor, and the two of them would search out the notebooks and then hammer out the fine points; together they would bottle the Fountain of Youth. How much they know about the machine I can’t say.

“Higgins had been tracking them—the notebooks—and he wrote to Mrs. Pule, who he suspected might know something of their whereabouts, but his writing to her just set her off. She came around to Godall’s very cleverly, knowing that to reveal to us that the notebooks existed and that Narbondo was alive would put us on the trail. She and the son merely followed us down from London.”

It made sense to me. Leave it to St. Ives to put the pieces in order. “Why,” I asked, “are they so keen on killing
me
,
that’s what I want to know. I’m the lowly worm in the whole business.”

“You were available,” said St. Ives. “And you were persistent, snooping around their hotel like that. These are remarkably bloodthirsty criminals. And the Pules, I’m afraid, are amateurs alongside the doctor. Higgins didn’t have any idea on earth what it was he was reviving, not an inkling.”

St. Ives pushed his plate away and ordered a bit of custard. It was getting along toward ten o’clock, and the evening had wound itself down. The beer was having its way with me, and I yawned and said that I would turn in, and St. Ives nodded thoughtfully and said that he’d just stroll along over to the icehouse in a bit and see what was up. I slumped. I wasn’t built for it, not right then, and yet it was me who had found out about the business up in Norway. I was pretty sure that I understood the icehouse, and it didn’t seem fair that I be left out. “It’s early for that, isn’t it?” I asked.

St. Ives shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“I suggest a nap. Just a couple of hours to rest up. Let’s tackle them in the middle of the night, while they sleep.”

St. Ives considered, looked at his pocket watch, and said, “Fair enough. Stroke of midnight. We’ll be across the hail, just in case anyone comes sneaking around.”

“Knock me up with fifteen minutes to spare,” I said, getting up. And with that I toddled off to my room and fell asleep in my clothes.

***

The night was howling cold and the sky clear and starry. There was a moon, but just enough to hang a coat on. We had slipped out the back and taken my route along the seawall, none of us speaking and with the plan already laid out. Hasbro carried a revolver and was the one among us most capable of using it.

Absolutely no one was about. Lamps flickered here and there along the streets, and a single light glowed in one of the windows of The Hoisted Pint—Willis Pule turning Higgins into an amphibian, probably. The shadowy pier stretched into the moonlit ocean, and the icehouse loomed dark and was empty in the weeds—very ominous, it seemed to me.

We wafered ourselves against the wall and waited, listening, wondering what lay within. After a moment I realized that Hasbro was gone. He had been behind me and now he wasn’t; just like that. I tugged on St. Ives’s coat, and he turned around and winked at me, putting a finger to his lips and then motioning me forward with a wave of his hand.

We crept along, listening to the silence and ducking beneath a bank of dirty windows, hunching a few steps farther to where St. Ives stopped outside a door. He put a finger to his lips and a hand on the latch, easing the latch down gently. There sounded the hint of a click, the door swung open slowly, and we were through, creeping along across the floor of a small room with a broken-down desk in it.

Some little bit of moonlight filtered in through the window—enough to see by now that our eyes had adjusted. Carefully, St. Ives pushed open another heavy door, just a crack, and peered through, standing as if frozen until he could make out what lay before him. He turned his head slowly and gave me a look—just a widening of the eyes—and then pushed the door open some more.

I caught the sound of snoring just then, low and labored like that of a hibernating bear, and when I followed St. Ives into the room, both of us creeping along, I looked for Captain Bowker, and sure enough there he was, asleep on a cot, his head turned to the wall. We slipped past him, through his little chamber and out into the open room beyond.

It was fearfully cold, and no wonder. Great blocks of ice lay stacked in the darkness like silvery coffins beneath the high ceiling. They were half covered with piled straw, and there was more straw littering the floor and a pair of dumpcarts and a barrow and a lot of shadowy odds and ends of tongs and tools and ice saws along the wall—none of it particularly curious, considering where we were.

St. Ives didn’t hesitate. He knew what he was looking for, out and I thought I did too. I was wrong, though. What St. Ives was after lay beyond the ice, through a weighted door that was pulled partly open. We stepped up to it, dropping to our hands and knees to peer beneath it. Beyond, in a square slope-ceilinged room with a double door set in the far wall, was a metal sphere, glowing dully in the moonlight and sitting on four squat legs.

It’s Lord Kelvin’s machine!—I said to myself, but then saw that it wasn’t. It was a diving bell, a submarine explorer, built out of brass and copper and ringed with portholes. Mechanical armatures thrust out, with hinged elbows so that the device looked very jaunty, as if it might at any moment shuffle away on its piggy little legs. We rolled under the door, not wanting to push it open farther for fear of making a noise. And then all of a sudden, as we got up to dust ourselves off, there was noise to spare—the rattling and creaking of a wagon drawing up beyond the doors, out in the night.

A horse snorted and shook its head, and there was the sound of a brake clacking down against a wheel. I dropped to the ground, thinking to scramble under and into the ice room again before whoever it was in the wagon unlocked the outside doors and confronted us there. St. Ives grabbed my coat, though, and shook his head, and in a moment there was a fiddling with a lock and I stood up slowly, ready to acquit myself like a man.

The doors drew back, and between them, pulling them open, stood the remarkable Hasbro. St. Ives didn’t stop to chat. He put his shoulder against one of the doors, pushing it fully open while Hasbro saw to the other one, and then as St. Ives latched on to the harness and backed the horses and dray around and through the doors, Hasbro clambered up onto the bed, yanked loose the wheel brake, and began to unlatch a clutch of chain and line from the post of a jib crane bolted to the bed.