The Eleventh Plague (4 page)

S
EVERAL HOURS LATER
, once night had fallen, the
Silver Swan
set sail, leaving the ragged white cliffs of Dover far behind her. The steamship rode effortlessly across the English Channel, the waves parting for her bows’ blade.

In his single-berth cabin, Cornelius Quaint made a final sweep with his cut-throat razor. He examined his face in the mirror as if it were something borrowed from a complete stranger. It had the usual wear and tear for a man in his mid-fifties, but it did not look too bad. His rugged face was decorated with furrowed wrinkles around his mouth and nose; crow’s feet spread like forked lightning from the corners of his black eyes, and his wavy, silver-white hair swept back from his forehead culminating in a nest of entwined curls at the nape of his neck. It was seemingly immune to any oil or creamed hair product, and Quaint had long since given up trying to tame it.

He dressed for dinner in a black, long-tailed jacket cropped tight to his waist, matching trousers, and a broad-knotted bow tie at his neck. Perhaps a good meal would remove the ache inside him, he thought. He heard the reverberations of song
floating through the wall from the cabin next door and smiled, reminding himself that he was not alone.

Madame Destine struggled with a hairbrush through her long silver-white hair, her thoughts just as entangled as her tresses. Although it was not evident from her outer appearance, inside her head and inside her heart she was in mourning.

Before the elixir had touched her lips, she was in command of a startling array of extrasensory abilities, and chief among them was her clairvoyance. As a sideshow fortune-teller, Destine was gifted with the power to foresee certain events in the future. But as much as the wondrous elixir had given her, it had taken away so much more. She had come to rely upon her clairvoyance but now it had deserted her, purged from her system virtually overnight. Even with Cornelius by her side, Madame Destine felt strangely alone. She had emerged from the cocoon as a butterfly, only to lament the life of a caterpillar.

On the night that the antidote worked its magic, Destine’s mind was bombarded with a barrage of mysterious prophecies, as though her gifts were eager to impart as much information as they could before abandoning her. Destine’s gift had never been entirely reliable, but the lines of communication to the future were degraded, muffled somehow, and they swamped her with mismatched images and disjointed words. But as she had told Ruby Marstrand the night before they sailed, there was one residual vision that remained stubbornly present when all others faded away: ‘The past and the present shall entwine once more. Beware the dawn of the Eleventh Plague.’

As far as she could gauge, ‘the Eleventh Plague’ surely referred to the dreaded poison that she and Cornelius were duty bound to
destroy, yet how it entwined with the past was a mystery, one of many swimming around her head. Her premonitions were often irritatingly mystifying, yet there was no misinterpreting the foreboding that chilled her blood.

Formerly Cornelius Quaint’s governess, he had fondly nicknamed her his ‘compass’. He relied on her to decipher the indecipherable. But he was not one for prophecies and riddles. He believed in the here and now, his feet fixed firmly in the present where he could see things, touch things – hit things. But in truth she was more akin to his conscience, seemingly the only person that he ever listened to (when it suited him, of course). Destine had resigned herself to a life by his side, for ever his guard, and despite having cause to regret her decision on more than one occasion (usually when the man’s bullish bombast got him in trouble with authority in one form or another) she knew that her life would have been emptier without him.

‘It’s gone eight, Madame, are you done?’ called the subject of Destine’s thoughts from the corridor outside her cabin. ‘We’ll have to hurry if we want to make dinner before the galley closes.’

‘
Ayez de la patience
, Cornelius,’ Madame Destine replied, as she straightened the high collar of her long gown, smoothed down the billowing bustle at her rear and took as deep a breath as she could within the whalebone restraints of her corset. Trying to ignore the impatient tapping of Quaint’s foot, she hurriedly arranged her hair into a loose bun at the back of her head, adding a string of pearls around her neck on the outside of her collar.

‘Madame, please,’ moaned Quaint, ‘my stomach thinks my throat’s been slit.’

‘Do not tempt me!’ Destine crackled back. ‘Do you not realise that a true lady must shine like a lamp at all times?’

‘Even if it attracts the moths?’ asked Quaint.

Madame Destine’s brow slowly cleared into understanding. ‘You are referring to the German that we met in the terminal earlier. You cannot avoid bumping into him at some point, you know. There are only so many places that you can hide on a ship this size. I am ready now, are you happy?’ She snatched open her cabin door and stepped into the corridor like an actress making her entrance onstage.

‘You look divine,’ complimented Quaint, stepping back to admire her. ‘I honestly don’t know why you spend so much time worrying, Madame. You’d still manage to look radiant were you to dress in nothing but a potato sack.’

‘Your flattery is most welcome,’ nodded Destine.

‘And well deserved,’ said Quaint. ‘Is that a new dress for the journey I spy?’

‘It is an old dress, my sweet…but perhaps a new
me
,’ Madame Destine answered, as they began a brisk stroll towards the dining saloon.

After a few minutes, a comfortable hush had nestled itself between the conjuror and the fortune-teller as they walked along the carpeted corridors. Madame Destine teased her lips with the tip of her tongue. Even though her clairvoyance had deserted her, she was still in possession of her mysterious sensitivity to the feelings of those around her. At that moment she could read Quaint’s emotions more easily than words on a page.

‘There is something bothering you, Cornelius.’ Destine always had a knack of phrasing each question as a statement of fact. Quaint found this a most frustrating habit – especially on this day, and especially as she was correct.

‘It’s that obvious?’ Quaint asked.

‘Your eyes always did betray you, even when you were a child. That is why you are a poor gambler,’ replied Destine.

‘Madame, I take offence!’ Quaint snapped in retort, stopping dead in his tracks, forcing Destine to do the same. ‘Did I not win the circus from those Prussians in that game of cards all those years ago? Surely that proves that I’m an
exceptional
gambler!’

‘Cornelius, you are a conjuror! You have been making a deck of cards dance to your every whim since you were eight years old. Just because you are a master at outwitting people with your repertoire of card tricks, it does not make you an exceptional gambler – just an exceptional con artist that has never been caught.’

‘Yes,’ said Quaint, soberly. ‘But I do wish you wouldn’t use the term “tricks”, Destine. You know how that frustrates me. It makes it sound as if any old Tom, Dick or Harry can do it. Stagecraft is within a showman’s blood. It’s an art form that takes years to perfect, not something that can be stumbled upon by chance!’

‘I concede, Cornelius, you
are
an excellent conjuror. Your eyes are swifter than a falcon’s, your hands blur with their speed, and your talent for misdirection is second-to-none – such as you are displaying right now, might I add,’ Destine said. ‘Enough diversions – are you going to tell me what is bothering you?’

Quaint sighed, relenting to the Frenchwoman’s assault.

‘I’m just thinking about what I’ve got myself into…and what I’ve got
you
into. The truth is…I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s plaguing my every thought. Everything is so complicated now compared to the old days whenever I would go on one of these capers. When I inherited the circus troupe all those years ago, I didn’t expect them to become—’

‘So much like a family?’ Destine offered.

‘Exactly,’ confirmed Quaint. ‘I know that Butter will do his best to hold the circus together, but I worry about those people
after what happened in Crawditch. Leaving the circus behind was the hardest choice I have had to make in quite some time…now that I know what I have to lose – and especially what I have already
lost…
losses such as Twinkle.’

‘
Oui, mon cher…
I miss little Twinkle’s light also,’ said Destine.

‘I don’t think there will ever be a day that goes by when I will
not
miss it,’ agreed Quaint. His eyes lost their focus, blurring the ship’s narrow corridor into a mire of white-grey formless shapes. ‘God knows how Prometheus copes. He hides it well, but he’s bleeding inside. His room on the train is just next to mine, don’t forget. I can hear him at night. He weeps for her, Destine. Almost every night. I have to resist the urge to knock on the wall to see if he wants to talk. He’ll come to me if he wants my ears. What could I say that would be of any comfort to him anyway?’

‘Prometheus knows that we all cared deeply for Twinkle…I think that is comfort enough, my sweet,’ Destine said, her delicate accent giving her words the ring of wisdom.

‘When I saw her lying there on that mortuary slab it was like looking at a complete stranger,’ continued Quaint. ‘She looked nothing like the young woman I knew. She was always my little star. So full of life. So full of mischief. Of warmth, of love. When she died, it was if a vast abyss had formed inside our family. I just worry that with us gone the abyss might grow ever larger.’ Quaint’s eyes dropped. ‘For that I feel nothing but guilt.’

‘Guilt?’ asked Destine. ‘Do not speak to me of guilt, Cornelius, or have you forgotten that it was my devil of a son that was responsible for everything that transpired in Crawditch? You could not have foreseen his involvement, my sweet – not even I did until it was too late.’

‘Instead of allowing my anger for him to consume me, I should
have
been
there with the people who were in pain!’ Quaint snapped, as a pair of passing passengers stared at him. He led Destine over to the large oval windows and lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper. ‘Where was I when the circus needed me the most, Destine? Was I amongst them, sharing their grief, their pain? No. I was elsewhere. Otherwise engaged. Thundering blindly like a wounded bull headlong into trouble, just like I always do!’

‘But that is the point, Cornelius – your involvement was crucial. That is why you need feel no guilt! Had you
not
become involved, there would have been no one to prevent the Hades Consortium from poisoning the Thames, and then neither you nor I would be here right at this moment risking all to save Egypt, would we? Cornelius, it was meant to be! We are all servants to our destinies, my sweet. You of all people should know that.’

Quaint tore his eyes away from her and rested his forehead against the cold glass of one of the windows. ‘A servant of destiny, eh? That sums me up nicely. Well, let me tell you, Madame, sometimes Fate can be a cruel mistress.’

‘And we could spend all night stood here in the corridor discussing what is fate, what is consequence and what is sheer blind luck, and it would not make the blindest bit of difference,’ Destine said, motioning for them to continue their stroll. ‘I thought you were supposed to be hungry.’

Quaint managed a weak smile. ‘Melancholic thoughts tend to put me off my food.’

‘If that were the case, you would be as thin as a rake,’ said Destine.

‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Madame,’ said Quaint, as he held open the ornate glass doors of the dining saloon. ‘Let’s get a table away from other passengers. Our topic of conversation is one that I’d prefer remained a secret.’

C
ORNELIUS
Q
UAINT DIRECTED
Madame Destine to a table positioned next to a huge oval window etched with images of exotic swans dancing with water nymphs. The room was half-empty and Quaint relished the seclusion. A waiter appeared and assisted Destine with her chair, before hovering over Quaint’s shoulder.

‘May I recommend the veal, sir?’ the waiter offered.

‘You may not,’ replied Quaint. ‘What do you have in the way of game?’

‘Well, we have a nice breast of partridge with rosemary and minted potatoes and a crème brûlée for dessert,’ said the waiter, shifting uncomfortably under the scrutiny of Quaint’s glare. ‘It really is rather delicious, I must say.’

Quaint contemplated the choice. ‘I’ll take it. But just the main course, if you don’t mind. My reputation will be in tatters if I am caught eating crème brûlée.’

‘And for you, ma’am?’ asked the waiter, gladly shifting his eyes to Destine.

‘I will have the salmon in dill and cucumber sauce, with cheese and biscuits to follow,
merci
,’ she replied.

‘Of course,’ said the waiter, who smiled over-sweetly and hurried off to the galley.

He wove through the white-tiled catacombs, past bustling irate chefs and impatient waiters, towards the rear of the galley, to the ice-box, seeking privacy – although not necessarily seclusion.

Heinrich Nadir was waiting for him. ‘Well? What has he ordered?’

‘He went for the game, sir,’ replied the waiter.

Nadir grinned fiendishly. ‘I knew it. See that his meal is swimming in this stuff,’ he whispered, handing the waiter a small, brown-glass bottle with a cork stopper. ‘The entire bottle, mind…I want this man deader than dead.’

The waiter inspected the bottle. The label was nondescript, but he could guess at its contents. ‘Poison? You…you want me to poison him?’ he asked Nadir.

‘
Nein
, I want you to season his main course to suit his damn palette – of course I want you to poison him!’ Nadir snapped.

‘Right then, and…and you’ll pay me what you said, right?’ asked the waiter.

Nadir nodded. ‘I am a man of my word.’

‘Good, because I owe the ship’s card table three months’ wages. This’ll really save my bacon. But won’t it cause a bit of a commotion when the bloke falls down dead at the table? Chef will have bloody kittens!’

‘Do not worry,’ replied Nadir. ‘This particular brand of poison is designed to have a potent but delayed effect. Herr Quaint will be long gone from the dining hall when the poison finishes him off. I will stick to him like glue…and when he is at his weakest I shall strike. I have an arrangement with one of the engineers to dispose of his body in the ship’s incinerator.
Trust me, there is no way that man is going to survive the night.’

The waiter burst through the double doors into the dining hall just shy of ten minutes later. As he locked eyes with Quaint he could not help but curl his lip at him, which thankfully went unnoticed. The waiter laid the plates on the table and uncorked a bottle of red wine.

‘Would you like to sample it, sir?’ he asked Quaint.

‘I would as it goes,’ Quaint replied, eager for the man to leave him in peace. He snatched the bottle from the waiter’s hand, and as the man looked on aghast, he held it to his mouth and glugged heartily, finishing a quarter of the contents with a satisfied belch. ‘I’ll take it.’

With a somewhat discomfited nod, the skinny waiter bowed briefly, before turning on his heel for the galley.

Quaint scowled at him all the way.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that
he
was sweet as well, are you?’ he asked Madame Destine, who was despairing at his lack of manners.

‘Cornelius! First the gentleman in the terminal and now the waiter? Is there anyone that you are not planning to offend on this journey?’ she said.

‘Can I help it if I have a low tolerance for dislikeable little invertebrates?’ Quaint said, grinning like a cat. ‘And speaking of which…’

Destine looked up, just as Heinrich Nadir approached the table.

‘Ah! What a remarkable coincidence,’ Nadir said cheerily. ‘If
it is not Madame Destine and Mister…um…I am terribly sorry, sir, I do not recall hearing you introduce yourself.’

‘That’s because I didn’t,’ Quaint replied, taking a great deal of pleasure watching the flicker of discontent blossom in the German’s eyes.

‘Monsieur Nadir,
do
forgive my companion once again,’ said Destine, jumping to Nadir’s aid. ‘I am afraid that he has a somewhat unique sense of humour.’

Quaint grinned shamelessly as he loaded some partridge breast onto his fork.

Nadir shuffled his feet in quiet disgust. ‘Well, Madame, should your companion not provide suitable stimulation later this evening, I shall be located in the Fountain Room on the floor below this one, starboard side. I do hope that you will consider gracing me with your pleasant company. Until then, I bid you
au revoir.
’ Nadir made a point of sneering towards the conjuror. ‘Enjoy your meal, sir.’

‘I will…once the audience has gone,’ muttered Quaint, his forkful of partridge heading towards his open mouth.

Madame Destine waited until Nadir had left the dining hall before kicking Quaint as hard as she could under the table.

‘Ow! What was that for?’ he hissed, clattering the fork against his plate.

‘Honestly, Cornelius, you are behaving like a juvenile!’ Destine raised her glass into the air, beckoning Quaint to join her. ‘Come, let us enjoy our meal and try to put a smile back on that miserable old face of yours.’

‘You do love a challenge, don’t you?’ said Quaint, chinking his glass against hers.

‘Why do you think I have stayed with you all these years?’ said Destine.

‘My unique sense of humour?’ teased Quaint.

‘Hardly!’ said Destine. ‘I stay with you to keep you out of trouble!’

‘You’re wasting your time. Trouble seems to find me no matter where I go.’

Madame Destine smiled. ‘The story of your life,
n’est-ce pas
?’

‘It’s a page-turner, Destine, what can I say?’ Quaint said cockily. ‘Although of late, I have to admit that the tale seems to have become a trifle far-fetched.’

‘Even for you?’ enquired Destine.

‘Even for me,’ confirmed Quaint.

Destine rested her elbows upon the table and focused her stare at him. ‘And here I thought that I was supposed to be the cryptic one. Would you care to elaborate before our main course gets cold? What is it that plagues your mind? More guilt?’

‘Not this time,’ Quaint replied. He half considered a lie, but he knew Destine better than that. She was too used to his techniques to fall for any bluff. ‘I just don’t know what to believe any more. About what happened to us, I mean. Ever since I drank that elixir, I seem to have found myself with far more questions than answers. I can feel it trickling through my veins sometimes. Especially at night. I know it’s there…that it’s real…but I mean, think about it, Destine. Eternal life? Immortality? It’s the stuff of a penny dreadful, surely. Can it really be true?’

Madame Destine took a brief sip of her wine before answering. ‘Are you asking me if the concept of immortality can be true, or merely our recent exposure to it?’

‘Both,’ answered Quaint.

‘Well, one answer cannot be true without the other. I am afraid that I am not the all-knowing oracle that you often paint me to be, my sweet. Since my clairvoyance left me, I can only give you
my personal opinion rather than a resolution based upon fact. True, immortality is a subject that belongs in the realms of the fantastic…but that does not necessarily preclude it from being impossible.’

Quaint pushed the food around his plate, toying with the vegetables absentmindedly. ‘So there’s no way of knowing for sure if that’s what really happened to us?’

Destine smiled. ‘Only one, my sweet, but knowing how impatient you are, I do not think you will be content to wait until the end of time to see if we are still drawing breath.’

‘Destine, I need to know
now
!’ said Quaint. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not comfortable with the thought of unknown chemicals rushing around my veins. They could be doing anything to our insides. They turned my bloody hair white for starters!’

‘And healed your bullet wound and repaired all your cuts and abrasions too. Cornelius, your point is?’ enquired Destine.

‘My point is that the stuff could be dangerous! What if we both dropped down dead tomorrow?’ asked Quaint.

The Frenchwoman raised an eyebrow. ‘Then you would have received your answer,
non
? And know that your fears were well founded. But what if we are not dead tomorrow? It is pointless to worry about something that you cannot influence, Cornelius.’

‘That’s easy for an optimist like you to say,’ said Quaint, taking his frustrations out on the partridge, reloading his fork once more. ‘I need more proof than that!’

‘Ah! And perhaps therein lies your quandary, my sweet,’ said Madame Destine, circling her fingertip around the rim of her glass. ‘What is proof for one is not necessarily proof for another.’ She cocked her head to the side. ‘Let me put it to you this way: I can feel the change inside my body just as well as you can. I choose to accept that the elixir was genuine, and the antidote
that we consumed somehow awakened the essence that had remained dormant for so long. But that is only what
I
choose to believe. You may choose to believe that it is nothing of the sort. You may choose to believe that the antidote was just that…an antidote that quelled the ravages of the poison just as it was intended to do. That is the simple answer. The one that requires no faith.’

‘So I’m expected to have
faith
now?’ quizzed Quaint, his fork halting in mid-air, inches from his mouth. ‘Don’t get all pious on me, Madame. That’s your answer to everything. That everything has some sort of cosmic meaning, even if mere humans aren’t supposed to know what it is. I’m not talking about a quest for faith…I’m talking about a quest for the truth!’

‘Is that why you are running around the docks night after night? Seeking a fight with the truth? Or is that merely your way of trying to put the theory of immortality to the test?’ asked Destine, a definite barb to her voice.

‘I never even entertained the thought!’ Quaint slammed his fists upon the table and partridge, vegetables and potatoes flew into the air as the plate flipped up, landing with a smash upon the floor. ‘But even if I were, where’s the risk if I can live for ever?’

Although she was positively incensed by his temper, and even more embarrassed by it, Destine reached across the table and took hold of Quaint’s shaking hands.

‘Be careful, my sweet,’ she whispered. ‘Immortality is a very dissimilar beast to invulnerability. You may not be able to die, but you can still be
killed…
and that is a very big difference – especially to one as reckless as you. Anger is never the answer to anything, Cornelius, have I not always taught you that? Together we shall find the answers; together we shall discover the truth…in time.’

‘A coincidental choice of words for an immortal, Madame.’

‘It was?’ enquired Destine, innocently. ‘I had not noticed.’

Quaint’s eyes fell to the mess on the floor. As the waiter rushed over, he gave the conjuror a decidedly distasteful glower. It was not the mess he was worried about – it was the fact that he had tipped a whole bottle of poison onto Quaint’s plate and the man had not even taken a mouthful.

‘It just…slipped,’ Quaint mumbled.

‘Accidents happen; it’s quite all right, sir,’ the waiter said, his expression saying exactly the opposite, as he set to work mopping up the steaming mess. ‘Perhaps I can fetch sir a replacement?’

Quaint waved the man away. ‘I seem to have lost my appetite all of a sudden.’

‘Oh, but really it’s no trouble!’

‘I said
no
!’ snapped Quaint, to the astonishment of the waiter, who scooped the food onto a plate and hurried from the conjuror’s table as quickly as his bony legs could carry him.

He pushed through the double doors into the galley and headed back through the enclosed white-tiled corridors. As he turned the corner, he nearly leapt out of his leathery skin as he bumped into Heinrich Nadir once again, taking root near the ship’s ice-box.

‘Has he finished the meal already?’ Nadir asked.

‘No, sir, I…I’m sorry but there was a problem,’ said the waiter sheepishly. ‘He appeared to get angry at something his companion said…he knocked the plate onto the floor.’

‘Did he eat
any
of it?’ Nadir demanded.

The waiter looked to the floor. ‘No, sir. I don’t believe he did.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Yes, it is! Does that mean I don’t get my money?’ asked the waiter.

‘I meant that’s a shame…for you.’

Nadir slipped a knife from inside his pocket and thrust it into the waiter’s heart. The man wheezed as a deep red stain seeped through his white clothes, and he fell limply to the floor. Looking around, Nadir unlocked the door to the large ice-box and clumsily steered the dead man into it, stuffing his body into the corner.

‘At least the incinerator will feast on one soul tonight…even if it is not my intended target,’ Nadir seethed, dusting off his suit. ‘I can see that killing you is going to cause me some bother, Herr Quaint. Next time I will not fail.’