The Pendragon Legend (4 page)

“You’re eighteen, are you not?” I asked.

“I am.”

“On the Continent, young men of your age have a quite
different
idea of adventure.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I was thinking of women.”

“I don’t even think of them,” he replied, faintly blushing. “I’m very fond of them, at a distance. But the moment they approach me I feel a mild horror. I feel that if I took hold of them they would somehow fall apart in my hands. You are a Continental … have you never had that sensation?”

“Not at all. I can’t recall a single woman who might have
disintegrated
in my hands. Why, has it ever happened to you?”

“To be perfectly frank with you, I’ve never risked the
experiment
.”

“Permit me to observe that I think it precisely on account of this seclusion that you feel your life to be uneventful. On the Continent, relations with women are considered to be what life is all about.”

“Then I must repeat the words of Villiers de L’Isle-Adam: ‘Living? Our servants will do that for us.’”

As we left the Savoy I found myself, under the influence of a great quantity of Burgundy, in a thoroughly buoyant mood. It just wasn’t true, I said to myself, that London is boring, and I
congratulated
myself on having met two such splendid young men. It was ridiculous to pass my days surrounded by books. One should live! And I meant this word in its Continental sense. A woman … even in London … would be good occasionally.

At Maloney’s prompting we went on to a night club. These are places where you can actually drink all night, and we availed ourselves of the privilege. One whisky followed another, each with
less and less soda. Osborne was sitting rather stiffly. The general ambience of the place clearly made him uncomfortable, but he was too proud to show it.

Maloney had reached the high point of a yarn in which he had roped a Malay girl to a tree when, just at the crucial moment, ten of her uncles appeared brandishing their krises.

We never discovered what followed, because he spotted a woman at a nearby table, roared out a loud greeting and
abandoned
us. I watched ruefully as he chatted to her on the friendliest of terms. She was very attractive.

“Strange fellow, this Maloney,” said Osborne. “If I came across any of his stories in a book, I’d throw it away.”

“Do you think any of it is true?”

“Oddly enough, I believe a lot of it is. I’ve seen him do some quite unpredictable and crazy things—things that completely defy logic. If I may say so, this whole evening has been entirely typical, though I suppose I shouldn’t talk like this.”

“Tell me, all the same. We Continentals are relatively so much less discreet, we reckon an Englishman can afford to let his hair down once in a while.”

“Well, take this example. Yesterday, Maloney had no more than thruppence ha’penny in his pocket. For weeks, I am quite sure, it’s all he had in the world. And this evening he’s treated us like lords. It seems to me quite probable that last night he knocked
someone
down in a dark street. No harm intended, of course—he just wanted to prove that Connemarans can knock a man down with the best of them. Then he helped himself to the chap’s money, as a way of combining business with pleasure.”

Maloney returned.

“Would you gentlemen mind if my very old friend, Miss Pat O’Brien, joined us? She’s also from Connemara, which tells you all you need to know. She’s in the chorus at the Alhambra. A supreme artist.”

“Delighted,” I said, perhaps too readily.

But Osborne’s face was stiffer than ever.

“Well … er … Much as I admire your compatriots—I’m a Celt myself, of the same stock—wasn’t the general idea supposed to be that this evening was for men only?”

“My dear fellow,” said Maloney, “you’re the cleverest chap on earth and, upon my word, it brings tears to my eyes to think I have such a friend; but it really wouldn’t hurt you to spend ten minutes in female company once every few months. You’d certainly make some surprising discoveries. Not so, Doctor?”

“Without question.”

“Well, if you gentlemen insist,” returned Osborne, with a
gesture
of resignation.

Maloney had already brought her.

“Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” she proclaimed, and sat herself down with the smile of someone confident of
having
contributed her share of witty conversation. Given that it was still summer, I smiled dutifully at the remark. Osborne made no such effort.

“Cheer up, young fella,” the girl said to him, raising her glass; and she sang a little song conveying the same basic idea.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Osborne solemnly declared.

This Osborne is an idiot, I said to myself. The girl was
simply
stunning, in the innocent, rosy-cheeked way which, together with the manly British character, is the finest ornament of these islands.

She certainly enlivened me, and she listened in respectful silence to my fumbling compliments—not something Englishmen
lavish
on their women. With us, if we are even slightly drawn to a woman, we tell her we adore her. An Englishman hopelessly in love will merely observe: “I say, I do rather like you”.

“Come away with me to the Continent,” I urged her in my rapture, stroking her bare arm. “You should live in Fontainebleau and glide three times a day up the crescent staircase of Francis I, trailing your gown behind you. The moment they set eyes on you, the three-hundred-year old carp in the lake will find they are warm-blooded after all. Miss France herself will panic and give birth to twins.”

“You’re a very sweet boy, and you’ve got such an interesting accent. But I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

This cut me to the quick. I am very proud of my English
pronunciation
. But what could a Connemara lass know of these things?—she spoke some dreadful Irish brogue herself. I left her
to amuse herself with Osborne while Maloney and I made serious inroads on the whisky.

By now Maloney was looking, and sounding, rather tipsy.

“Doctor, you’re a hoot. We certainly hit the jackpot when we met. But this Osborne … I’d be so happy if Pat could seduce him. These English aren’t human. Now we Irish … back home in Connemara, at his age I’d already had three sorts of venereal
disease
. But tell me, dear Doctor, now that we’re such good friends, what’s the real reason for your visit to Llanvygan?”

“The Earl of Gwynedd invited me to pursue my studies in his library.”

“Studies? But you’re already a doctor! Or is there some exam even higher than that? You’re an amazingly clever man.”

“It’s not for an exam … just for the pleasure of it. Some things really interest me.”

“Which you’re going to study there?”

“Exactly.

“And what exactly are you going to study?”

“Most probably the history of the Rosicrucians, with particular reference to Robert Fludd.”

“Who are these Rosicrucians?”

“Rosicrucians? Hm. Have you ever heard of the Freemasons?”

“Yes. People who meet in secret … and I’ve no idea what they get up to.”

“That’s it. The Rosicrucians were different from the Freemasons in that they met in even greater secrecy, and people knew even less about what they did.”

“Fine. But surely you at least know what they did in these
meetings
?”

“I can tell you in confidence, but you must reveal it to no one.”

“I’ll harness my tongue. Now, out with it!”

“They made gold.”

“Great. I knew all along it was a hoax. What else were they making?”

“Come a bit closer. Homunculi.”

“What’s that?”

“Human beings.”

Maloney roared with laughter and slapped me on the back.

“I’ve always known you were a dirty dog,” he said.

“Idiot. Not that way. They wanted to create human beings
scientifically
.”

“So, they were impotent.”

We were both thoroughly tipsy, and found the idea hilarious in the extreme. In my hysterics I knocked over the glass in front of me. Maloney immediately sent for another.

“Now tell me, Doctor, how did you get to know the Earl of Gwynedd? He’s very unsociable.”

“I’ve not seen that. I met him at Lady Malmsbury-Croft’s, and he immediately invited me.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I suppose, with all this stuff about alchemy—making gold.”

But I was no longer enjoying the conversation. It was too much like the sort of conversations I remembered from Budapest. I’d lived in England too long. I’d got out of the habit of being quizzed in this way. Interrogated, in fact.

Suddenly I smelt a rat. Drink always brings out one’s basic
character
, and in me it reinforces my most fundamental trait:
suspicion
. Wait a minute. What if Maloney was talking advantage of my drunkenness to winkle some private information out of me? True, I hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of secret I might be
hiding
, but there must have been one. The man on the telephone had also behaved as if I had.

However, I might be able to turn the tables on him. Maloney wasn’t too sober himself: he’d drunk a lot more than I had. Perhaps I could prise out of him what the secret was that he wanted to prise out of me.

With a spontaneous-seeming gesture I knocked my glass over a second time, exploded into a loud drunken laugh and stammered out:

“These glasses … When I grow up I’ll invent one that stays upright. And a bed that automatically produces women.”

I studied him. He was looking at me with unmistakable
satisfaction
.

“You speak true, oh mighty Chief! The only problem is, it’s all gobbledegook.”

“I? What do you mean?”

“All this miraculous Rosicrucian stuff—it’s a load of old cobblers.”

“Never say that!”

“I know perfectly well that you’re a doctor.”

“Maloney!” I exclaimed. “How did you guess?”

“You’ve only got to look at you. And anyway, you say you’re a doctor. You see … you’re not even denying now that you’re an expert on tropical diseases.”

“Well … that’s true. I’m especially fond of the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness.”

“But even more, of that disease with the long name that the Earl of Gwynedd’s father and William Roscoe died of.”

“Roscoe?”

“Roscoe, Roscoe the millionaire. There’s no point pretending you’ve never heard the name. Let me remind you about him.”

“Please do.”

“I’m talking about the Roscoe who was financial adviser to the old Earl, when the gentleman in question was Governor
somewhere
in Burma.”

“Ah, you mean the old Roscoe? Of course, of course—my brain is a bit fuddled; it always is when I’m drinking. You mean the Roscoe who, later on … who went on to … ”

“ … to marry the lady who was engaged to the present Earl of Gwynedd.”

“That’s it. Now it all comes back to me. But why aren’t we
drinking
? Then the poor chap died of the same disease as the old Earl, which was very strange.”

“Extremely strange. Because it was a disease with a very long name, and, for a start, old Roscoe had been back in England for years and years.”

“Yes, true. And yes, that is the reason I’m going to Llanvygan. But for God’s sake don’t tell anyone. But can you just explain this—I’ve never been clear on this one point: what exactly is the link between the Earl of Gwynedd and old Roscoe’s death?”

“Well, it’s not something they’re likely to let you in on. But since you’ve been straight with me, I’ll tell you a secret. Come a bit closer, so Osborne can’t hear.”

“Let’s have it.”

“In his will, Roscoe stipulated that, in the event of his dying an unnatural death, his whole fortune should go to the Earl of Gwynedd and his successors.”

“That’s nonsense, Maloney. They don’t make wills like that in England.”

“It certainly isn’t nonsense. Old Roscoe became obsessed with the idea that his wife wanted to poison him. That’s why he made this secret will.”

“And why the Pendragons?”

“Because he owed everything to the seventeenth Earl. And also, because he’d stolen the man’s fiancée from under his nose he had a bad conscience all his life and he wanted to make amends.”

“So that’s why the Earl is taking an interest in tropical diseases. He thinks there was something fishy about Roscoe’s illness, and that he has a claim on the estate.”

“I think so.”

I had found my bearings. My profound attachment to things out of the ordinary had led me to a great mystery which, who knows, I might be destined to solve—though it rather pained me to think how much I knew about everything but tropical
medicine
. I sensed that the whole business was intimately connected with the telephone call. Something was afoot. The Parcae were spinning their threads.

By now Osborne’s conversation with Pat had come to a
complete
full stop. They were just sitting there, solemnly and in silence. Her face conveyed mild irritation, his total boredom. I got up and went over to the girl, while Maloney started to chat to Osborne.

“So,” I asked her, “how did you find the honourable
gentleman
?”

“Honourable or not, all I can say is that he’s a very odd bloke. I don’t give a toss for titles, but I do expect a man to be polite.”

“Why, was he rude?”

“He certainly was. He went on the whole time about some German called Dante who sent people to Hell. And this colleague of mine, called Lais—Dante wrote that she would be floating about in … I really can’t tell you what. Journalists shouldn’t be allowed to write that sort of thing about a nice girl. But that’s the type he mixes with.”

“I adore nice girls,” I said, taking her hand. “You’re a thoroughly nice girl, I’m a thoroughly nice boy. In this wicked world we should stick together.”

“Yes, I saw at once that you had a good heart,” she replied. To reinforce this judgement I sat even closer and put my arm around her waist.

“I’m as true as bread and butter,” I proclaimed with feeling.