The Angel of Highgate (8 page)

Still alive.

The woman tugged off one of her black lace gloves. In her haste she dropped the glove as she fell to her knees at the side of the open grave and reached down to touch his face.

The lantern Crynge abandoned in his haste had fallen off-kilter and threw a slanting light across the scene. When Thraxton cracked his eyes, the only thing in his field of vision was the brightly illuminated angel against the backdrop of night sky. His eyes closed drowsily and the next time he opened them he saw the angel step down from her pediment. As she hovered over him the night fell back from her face, revealing startling violet eyes that gleamed wetly, high cheekbones and skin pale as white marble framed by long strands of dark auburn hair. The angel reached down and laid a soft, cool hand against his cheek. “Am I dead?” he whispered. “Surely you are an angel.”

The angel’s only answer was a solitary tear that trickled down her cheek. Thraxton’s eyelids flickered. Darkness was sweeping over him in waves. He flailed against it like a swimmer striking out for a distant shore he would never reach. The image of the angel was the only light in the darkness and he knew that if he lost his grip upon it he would die. But then another wave broke and Thraxton realized he was caught in an ineluctable undertow.

His eyes closed a final time, and in the darkness of the grave he drowned.

T
he laudanum was nearly gone.

Augustus Skinner fumbled the slender, smoke-brown bottle from the bedside table, pressed it to his lips, and gulped the final mouthful. He reached to set the bottle back, but it slipped through his clumsy fingers and toppled to the rug somewhere. He fell back in the bed, his body undulating liquidly in oceanic waves of warmth, his face flushed and perspiring. The wound still throbbed, but the pain was a voice calling his name from a long way away—insistent, but easily ignored.

The physician who presided at the duel, Doctor Silas Garrette, dug the lead ball out a week ago, but infection had set in. He explained to Skinner that—as with wounds the doctor had treated while an army surgeon serving in Crimea—the ball had not been clean and had undoubtedly pushed foreign matter (fibers of clothing, dirt, gun oil) into the wound, which had painfully abscessed and swollen into a red mass the size of an orange, suppurating pus and a sticky red ooze. Now the critic had run out of laudanum, and had dispatched a servant with an urgent summons for the doctor to return. That was an hour ago, but laudanum had the effect of dissolving time as well as pain, and Skinner fell into a chaotic tangle of disturbing dreams.

The knocking forced his eyes open. Part of the dream? No, the knock came again.

“Come,” Skinner called out, eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to retard the giddy, counter-clock revolution of the room.

The knocking continued: a woodpecker hammering on a tree.

Skinner opened his eyes to find the door to his room had mysteriously vanished, leaving six or seven or eight blank walls. The rapping resumed, and this time his eyes followed the sound to its source: a bulge in the hideous yellow wallpaper next to the dresser. But then a hand appeared, pushing through the floral pattern as if moving a branch aside, and then an arm squeezed through, followed by a shoulder and a white top hat as a man clambered out of the wallpaper. He stood for a moment brushing away the detritus of the wallpaper’s floral design from his sleeves, calmly looking down at Skinner.

It was the doctor, Silas Garrette.

Skinner’s mind was whirling from the effects of the laudanum, and he knew he was witnessing a particularly vivid hallucination. He had once visited a carnival—a bit of whimsy where various woodland creatures (rabbits, moles, dormice) had been dressed in the tiny clothes of men and women and posed as if attending a tea party. The doctor bore a striking similarity to one of those figures, as if someone had dressed up a stuffed stoat in a gentleman’s suit, complete with a white top hat and a pair of rose-tinted pince-nez over the beady brown eyes. Skinner’s gaze traced downward, expecting to see a bushy tail protruding from the back of the man’s suit trousers and finding its absence somehow jarring.

“Are you real, sir, or some phantasm conjured by laudanum?”

The doctor touched the brim of his white top hat, but never removed it, despite the fact they were indoors, which struck Skinner as the very height of poor manners.

“It is I, sir, Doctor Garrette. You summoned me.” The physician’s face was like a cemetery statue disappearing beneath a tangle of overgrown foliage: a voluminous pair of bushy mustachios entwined enormous sideburns sculpted like elaborate topiary. The top hat seemed to float atop a hedgerow of frizzy, tightly curled hair, which matched the mustachios in its ersatz, shoe polish shade of brown—a cheap dye job.

“Thank God you have come. The pain…” he sucked in a deep breath and shudderingly released it, “…is worse.”

The white top hat nodded. “I need to drain the pus.”

“Again?”

“It will relieve the pressure. That is why it throbs so. Please turn over.”

The doctor brought the candle closer. Laying face down, prostrate across his bed, Skinner could not see what was happening behind him, but watched as the candle flame stretched the doctor’s gangly shadow across the bedroom wall. Skinner’s face burned with the ignominy of the situation as he lay sprawled in the posture of a naughty boy awaiting a good spanking, the chill of the room raising goose bumps as the doctor lifted his night gown and icy digits palpated his hind quarters.

“The wound needs to be lanced,” Doctor Garrette intoned in a gravely professional voice.

“Laudanum,” Skinner said. “Give me laudanum first.”

The doctor moved to the bedside table where his black Gladstone bag yawned. He reached a hand down its throat and drew out a smoky-brown bottle stoppered with a cork. “This is a very strong tincture of laudanum dissolved in gin,” he said. “I must caution you. It is stronger than the laudanum you buy in the shops. I mix it myself. You are not to take more than a thimbleful.”

Skinner snatched the bottle from the doctor, yanked the cork with his teeth and gulped a mouthful. The inside of his cheeks puckered as what felt like cold mercury trickled down his throat.

The doctor unrolled a leather holster of medical instruments across the bed and drew something out—from the glitter of steel, a scalpel. “Do you require something to bite on?”

“Just cut me, and be done!”

Skinner fixed his gaze upon the yellow wallpaper and watched the doctor’s shadow loom over him, the arm raised, the scalpel flourished. The shadow arm came down and Skinner let out a howl as the wicked keen blade sliced a burning path.

Skinner fumbled the laudanum bottle to his lips and glugged a second mouthful.

“Again, I warn you,” the doctor chided. “An overdose would be fatal!”

“Yes, I heard you!”

The doctor applied a fresh dressing to the wound, which throbbed, throbbed, throbbed with the pounding of Skinner’s heart. Finally the physician finished his ministrations and the critic slumped back into the bed pillows.

“And now my bill, sir,” Garrette said.

“Can’t it wait?”

“I have children. I must think of them.”

“Top drawer,” Skinner waved vaguely. “Take what is owed you.”

Augustus Skinner did not remember the doctor leaving. In truth, he did not remember much else, for the laudanum had taken effect and he felt his body dissolving into a buoyant gas until all that remained of him was a head floating like a cork on a puddle of ether.

T
he Night Hawk is one of the largest species of moth, with a wingspan measuring as much as 6 inches
.

Algernon pondered the illustration. The moth was dark brown in color. Fuzzy antler-like antenna protruded from its forehead. The eyes were gleaming black domes set on either side of the head that seemed to stare out of the page, fixing the viewer with its uncanny gaze.

A loud metallic clang. He looked up from his book. Two young nurses were passing out bedpans and one had just tumbled from the wheeled cart as they pushed it along the ward. He was in the Whittington hospital. When Thraxton had been brought in, no one had known for certain who he was, and so he had been placed in a general ward, along with the common folk and their mundane ailments.

Algernon sat in a straight-backed chair next to the head of the bed, reading a book on moths and butterflies as he kept vigil over his friend. It had been three days by this time, but to the concern of all, Thraxton showed no signs of awakening. He looked down at his friend. Thraxton’s face was almost as white as the bed sheet tucked under his chin—apart from the mark that Snudge’s cosh had left, a livid red welt that ran from cheekbone to temple, and around which spilled waves of glossy black hair.

It was not the first time Algernon had kept vigil at his friend’s bedside. They met as first-year boys at public school. In keeping with a proud school tradition, the younger boys were relentlessly bullied by the older boys, as they themselves had been bullied in their time.

This was just such an occasion.

Algernon had been standing with his classmates in the quadrangle awaiting the school bell when the most notorious bully in school, Tom Bagby, or “Baggers” as he was known, sauntered over dragging behind his usual pack of toadies. Bagby had flashed a cruel smile at Algernon and then, without warning or provocation, drove a vicious punch straight into his face. The blow floored Algernon, and then Bagby leapt on top, pinning the younger boy’s arms as he rained punches on his face and chest. Algernon’s first-year friends, intent only on self-preservation, instantly bolted for cover. As the bully-boy pummeled his helpless victim, Bagby’s cronies cheered and shouted, “Go on! Bash him, Baggers!”

Suddenly a blur of fury and flying fists crashed into Bagby and knocked him tumbling. To the shock of everyone, the figure that scrambled to his feet, small hands balled into trembling fists, was the new first-year boy, who was shorter even than Algernon. Bagby snarled and lunged at the new boy and the fight began. The younger boy fought like a maelstrom, but it was a vastly unfair competition. Bagby was a fifth-year boy, head and shoulders taller, and he was the school boxing champion. He knocked the younger boy down once and then again and then a third time. Still, the new boy dragged himself to his feet each time. A fourth. A fifth. A sixth. A seventh. But despite the fact that his nose dripped blood and both lips were split, the younger boy refused to stay down. As the beating continued, even Bagby’s thuggish friends grew frightened and called for him to stop. Throughout, the younger boy never cried, although Bagby himself was on the verge of tears, for an opponent who refused to give up terrified him. And so the beating continued until a final uppercut knocked the smaller boy to the ground and sprawled him senseless. Then a school master, black robes flapping like the wings of an agitated crow, burst through the melee to stop the fight—as always, too late. The milling mob of boys instantly dilated around the small prone form as the bullies scattered and fled.

The unconscious boy was carried to the school infirmary where Algernon was permitted to keep watch at his rescuer’s bedside. After several hours, the new boy finally cracked open his bruised and swollen eyes, squinted up at Algernon and spoke in a croaky voice: “My name’s Geoffrey.”

“Mine’s Algernon.”

“Did I thrash him?”

Algernon told him that he had indeed triumphed and that he was the talk of the school.

It was the beginning of a life-long friendship.

Algernon smiled, thinking about that time, then drew his gaze back to the book he was reading.

The Hawk Moth is a native of England and Europe, although varieties of the species may be found…

“I saw her, Algy. She was an angel with wings.”

Algernon startled at the sound of Thraxton’s voice.