The Aylesford Skull (9 page)

SEVEN

HEREAFTER FARM

A
mule greeted them as they walked up the lamp-lit path to the rambling stone farmhouse occupied by Mother Laswell and her people.

“This is old Ned Ludd,” Kraken said to St. Ives, who scratched the mule’s forehead. The creature showed its enormous teeth in a wide grin.

“Named after the leader of the infamous Luddites, I take it,” St. Ives said, thinking of Mother Laswell’s grudge against industry.

“That he is. He’s the guardian of the estate these last twenty years. Mother Laswell has taught him to count, and he knows his letters up to Q.”

“He’s a prodigy,” said St. Ives.

“She trained up a talking chicken, too, although no one who didn’t see it would credit it. One of the help cut its head off accidental like, more’s the pity, and it was eaten with red wine and bacon, in the French manner.”

Other buildings, many of their windows shining with the light of candles or lamps, stood nearby, and past the corner of one of them St. Ives could see the framed glass of an illuminated palm house in which a man nearly as old as poor Shorter worked over a bench of potted plants. Abruptly it seemed to St. Ives like weeks rather than days since he had returned from London, and Aylesford seemed positively like a holiday to him. One heard of lives changing on the instant, but he had always associated the change with tragedy – sudden blindness or a house burning – but this newfound homeliness that had settled upon him was a change of another sort, an unexpected boon.

Hereafter Farm appeared to be a wonder of productivity, with gardens laid out and fruit trees aplenty. Violin music emanated from one of the nearby cottages, played by someone with considerable talent. St. Ives was dumbfounded, although he couldn’t quite say what he had expected to find aside from some caliber of lunacy, which might possibly coexist with its more Edenic virtues.

Kraken led him up onto the broad veranda and into the house, where they were observed by several children peeking out from behind a half-open door, beyond which St. Ives could see shelves of books. The children seemed to be dressed as gipsies, and they studied St. Ives as if he were an exotic species. There was the smell in the air of something baking, and St. Ives was reminded that he hadn’t yet eaten supper. Kraken moved on into a vast, dimly lit sitting room, where a seven-sided table stood in the center of a densely patterned carpet, also seven-sided. If ever a table had levitational powers, thought St. Ives, this one clearly did. Atop it lay a Japanese magic mirror, its handle encased in woven bamboo. The ornamented backside faced upward, so that the several cryptic designs were visible. St. Ives was fond of the mysterious mirrors, as were his children, and in fact had several examples at home, with the oxy-hydrogen lamp set up in his study so that the patterns cast by the mirrors could be marveled at whenever the fit took them. He didn’t count himself among the many who believed that the projections from such mirrors had mystical powers, however, and he very much hoped that he would not be called upon to argue the point tonight.

Around the table stood the requisite seven chairs, the legs carved into the semblance of dragons. The walls, painted a deep blue, were dotted with white stars. Overhead hung an ornate, seven-sided chandelier that must have held a hundred candles, of which twenty or so were lit. Save the chairs and table, there was no other furniture. It occurred to St. Ives that the room would have seen some curious things over the years.

A door opened opposite the one they’d entered, and a woman, no doubt Mother Laswell, swept through it, shutting the door behind her and stepping into the light. She was large and imposing, with a mass of red hair that belied her age, which St. Ives took to be somewhat past sixty. She wore a voluminous, indistinct garment that must have been cobbled together from several bolts of oriental silk. In her hand she held a jewel-studded lorgnette through which she regarded St. Ives, her head tilted back. She had a theatrical look about her, but a good face, St. Ives thought – one that had seen its share of troubles.

“This is the Professor, Mother Laswell,” Kraken said to her. “Him what I told you about. Professor Langdon St. Ives, the great genius.”

“Indeed,” she said, moving spryly into the room. She took his hand, pressed it, and dropped it again. “I’m very pleased that you’ve come, Professor. What I have to say will take time in the telling, and I believe that you have family at home, so I’ll get straight to the heart of the matter. William has informed me that you are familiar with the man who styles himself Dr. Ignacio Narbondo.”

“Yes,” St. Ives said. “I’m not certain that anyone is
familiar
with him, not in so many words. I’m not convinced that he entirely knows himself. But I’ve had...dealings with him over the years.”

“
Dealings
,” she said, as if she didn’t half like the word. “I’d warrant they turned out badly. William told you that he was once my son?”

“I was astonished to hear it.”

“Not many people
have
heard it, sir. I have no occasion to mention it. I myself put him out of my heart and mind thirty years ago, and in those years I haven’t spoken of him save to one person, Mary Eastman, whom he murdered in the churchyard early this morning, although I assure you that there will be no evidence that he committed the crime. I pray that you won’t judge me too harshly, Professor, or think me an unnatural mother. I loved him when he was a child, but by the time he was five years old he had ceased to be a child, and within a very few years he was scarcely human. A human devil, perhaps, and I use the term literally. Will you hear what I have to say?”

“I’d be quite willing. And I don’t set up to judge anyone but myself, ma’am, although I make an exception for Dr. Narbondo. Your description of him is unfortunately accurate. I’m convinced, however, that he will go about his business and that you’ll be quit of him for another thirty years. I’m not sure that I can be of any use to you.”

“I’m not half so certain on either point. But if he has gone off, then the peril is even greater. A glass of sherry for you?”

“I can’t think of anything that would suit me more, thank you.”

She gestured at the table, and St. Ives pulled back one of the heavy chairs and sat down. Almost immediately a girl entered the room carrying a decanter and small glasses without apparently having been called upon to do so.
A hidden bell
, St. Ives thought. Then he saw that the girl was apparently blind, and yet she walked straight to the table without hesitation. Her left arm was awkwardly contorted, held out in front of her and bent sharply at the elbow. She set the tray onto the table, and then, her elbow aimed sharply downward, she poured sherry evenly into the three glasses, her milky eyes staring dead ahead. St. Ives wondered whether the milkiness was caused by some sort of covering – circles of very fine oiled silk, perhaps, or milk glass lenses.

“Thank you, Clara,” Mother Laswell said. The girl curtsied, turned, and walked back out again, straight toward the door, her arm bent in front of her, the tip of her elbow seeming to draw her forcibly along.

“
She sees with her elber
,” Kraken whispered heavily to St. Ives. “I’ve seen her do monstrous strange things for a blind girl. She can play at cards, sir, one handed of course, and shoot a fowling piece into a target. It don’t stand to reason, but it’s what she does.”

Mother Laswell nodded ponderously. “At Hereafter Farm we’ve got no grudge against reason, Professor, as long as it isn’t the only star in the firmament. But there are other ways of seeing, elbows included. As a man of science, a rationalist, perhaps a materialist, you no doubt disagree, but that’s the sort of strange company you’ve fallen in with this evening. I tell you this only because you will naturally have some fundamental doubts about what I have to say to you. I don’t take offense to that. Belief that comes too easily is a shallow and often foolish thing. Stubborn disbelief is much the same.”

“On that point we agree entirely,” St. Ives said, discarding assumptions by the bucketful and wondering exactly what sort of company he
had
“fallen in with.” Not entirely the company he had expected. “I’m anxious to hear you out, Mother Laswell. I have the highest opinion of Bill Kraken, and if Bill tells me that you’ve got something vital to say, I don’t doubt it for an instant. I’m wholly at your service.”

“Thank you, sir.” She sipped the sherry, looking for a moment at St. Ives as if seeing into his soul, before setting her glass down and pointing at the magic mirror lying in the center of the table. “I assume that you recognize this object?”

“I believe it to be a Japanese magic mirror, madam. I’ve studied them somewhat. Wonderful toys. I myself possess several of the objects.”

“And have you come to an understanding of them?”

“Not in so many words, no. I know that they’re fabricated from a cast metal alloy, ground into a lens, and then coated with quicksilver, tin, and lead on the convex surface, which is then polished. How the images on the back of the mirror are projected, however, I can’t quite say.”

“There are those who believe that such a mirror has what might be referred to as spiritual powers.”

“I’m not persuaded of any such thing,” St. Ives said flatly.

“Good for you. Neither am I. And yet there exist objects contrived by man which might... open doors.”

“Keys, for instance,” St. Ives said, smiling at her.

“Just so.” Mother Laswell smiled back at him. “Do you recall hearing of a man named John Mason? It’s a common name, of course. He fabricated Japanese magic mirrors – this very mirror, in fact. Some fifteen years ago John Mason managed to blow himself to pieces when he purposefully detonated the dust in a grain silo.”

“Indeed I do remember him, or at least I remember his demise. He was a colleague of Joseph Swann of incandescent lighting fame. His death was quite sensational.”

“That’s the man. Both of them were photographic chemists, you know. I believe that Swann severed ties with Mason a year or more before Mason’s death. When the police searched Mason’s house, they found a plethora of human skulls and dried bones. The skulls had been trepanned, the interior set with a mirror fabricated very much like the Japanese mirror you’re familiar with, the backs of the mirrors etched with children’s faces so lifelike that they could only have been reproduced from collodion negatives. It appeared as if Mason were attempting to construct a means of projecting an image through the eye sockets of the skull. It wasn’t until the headless remains of several small children were exhumed from graves on Mason’s property that he was revealed as a murderer and understood to be criminally insane.”

“That charge would be difficult to contest,” St. Ives said.

“There we disagree,” Mother Laswell told him, “although certainly that depends on one’s definitions of sanity. Certainly he was no more insane than my late husband, with whom he was acquainted, I’m very sorry to say. Such skulls, or mirrors, call them what you will, come into my story, but not until half the story is told. Here’s the long and the short of it.” She gazed up at the burning candles and squinted her eyes, collecting her thoughts, or perhaps seeing something in the soft haze of the light. The flames flickered on breezes through an open window in the far end of the room.

“The man who calls himself Dr. Ignacio Narbondo,” she said, “is my only living son. His father, who fancied himself a man of science, disappeared out of our lives when the boy was two years old. His father often spoke of going into East India, and would talk about fabulous cities in the jungle as if he were longing to see them. Perhaps he did, in the end. In any event, the boy and I – I won’t utter my son’s actual name now that he has abandoned it himself – took a room in Limehouse after that, in a low court of the worst type, but there was little money to advance ourselves. After less than a year I married my husband’s brother, only to discover too late what sort of a man he was. He brought me here to Aylesford, along with the boy, and I bore him a child whom we named Edward.”

“The boy what you seen in the barn,” Kraken said, nodding to Mother Laswell, who nodded in turn, as if this didn’t surprise her in the least. “And if the boy’s ghost lingers in Aylesford, Professor, so does the Doctor. That’s certain. He was somewhere nigh if Edward’s spirit was in the barn.”