The Wolfman (4 page)

I
N THE MORNING
, after the woman had left him, there was a discreet knock on the door and Lawrence opened it to see a liveried footman holding a crisp envelope.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” said the footman, “but this was just delivered and it was marked urgent.”

He handed the letter to Lawrence, who grumbled something and thrust a handful of coins into the man’s hand and slammed the door on his grateful smile.

His name had been written on the envelope in a woman’s hand, addressed to him here at the hotel. He held it up to the light and saw that the smudged cancel stamp was for Blackmoor in Northumbria.

Home
, he thought. Or, the place that had been home to him a million years ago. Who there knew he was in London? Ben?

He tore it open and read the single page.

“God . . . ,” he breathed.

Five minutes later found him running for a hansom cab to take him to the train station.

T
he train was old, and though the first class carriage was newly refitted it still creaked and rattled as it rolled across the ancient trestle over a deep gorge cut down into the wild lushness of Northumbria. Some miles back Lawrence had finally managed to find a comfortable nook between wall and seat and sat cross-legged, his traveling cloak shed, his unadorned walking stick beside him on the bench seat to discourage anyone from sitting too close.

Lawrence held a daguerreotype in one hand and for the last quarter hour he had alternately studied it and stared thoughtfully at the rolling hills. In the photograph he and his brother Ben stood beside their mother. It was deeply unnerving in a thousand different ways for him to realize that everyone in that photo was gone in one way or another. His mother, dead all those years ago; and now Ben gone missing. As for himself . . . he had felt absent from reality all his life, more like a ghost haunting the life of some stranger named Lawrence Talbot.

He raised the photo and traced the crenellated folds of his mother’s dress with one fingertip, and then touched Ben’s image, placing his finger over his brother’s heart.

Where are you, Benjamin?

Even if Ben was found hale and happy somewhere—as surely he must—the old photograph was a lie
gouged like a thorn into his heart. In that picture they were all happy, all gathered together as a family. Anyone looking at the picture would see happiness and unity. They would see life and possibilities. All lies. All promises proved false by the unwavering cruelty of circumstance.

“Your mother?”

Lawrence looked up from the picture to the old man seated across from him, the only other passenger in this compartment. He was wizened but looked healthy, dressed in French fashions of the more subtle and severe cut. A moneyed look that Lawrence recognized but did not share. Though he was wealthy himself, his clothing was more flamboyant, befitting a star of the stage; though perhaps a bit too flamboyant for a tragedian. This man had the simple elegance of someone who had possessed money for so long that it had become commonplace to him.

“Yes,” he said.

The man nodded. “My oldest memory is of my mother,” he said, his accent a cultured provincial French. He sat comfortably with his hands propped on the handle of a cane with an ornate silver animal head. A hunting dog or a wolf, Lawrence was not quite sure.

“We have something in common then, Monsieur.”

“In my memory, we are gathering grapes in her father’s vineyard.” The French gentleman smiled wistfully. “It is my Garden of Eden.”

Lawrence felt his defenses falling into place like shutters. He had too much on his mind right now to wander down memory’s pathways with an old French fool. He fitted a polite smile onto his face but offered no comment, not wishing to encourage further conversation.

The Frenchman, however, was warming to his recollection.
“Fathers give us the strength to survive this harsh world, but mothers make it worth the effort.” He nodded, pleased at his aphorism, then raised an eyebrow. “You are paying yours a visit?”

It occurred to Lawrence that truth was often rude, but he could not change the script that the moment had written in his head. “My mother passed not long after this was made.”

“Ah,” said the old man, unabashed by his own faux pas.

“My ancestral home is near Blackmoor,” Lawrence said, surprising himself by continuing to engage this old man. “My father and brother live there.”

“You’re English? Forgive me,” said the Frenchman, “but your accent . . .”

“I’ve been in America for a very long time,” said Lawrence. “A very long time.”

The Frenchman smiled. “Ah . . . a wandering spirit.”

It was casually said, but Lawrence didn’t think it was as casual a remark as it appeared. “Well,” he said diffidently, “not exactly.”

“Ah, a fellow exile then.”

For some obscure reason the comment amused Lawrence and he smiled. “Yes . . . I guess you could say that.”

The Frenchman settled back against the cushions as the wheels clicked along the rails. His long, clever fingers turned the shaft of his cane in a slow circle so that the silver head seemed to search the whole of the room. Lawrence saw clearly now that it was a wolf: fierce and snarling. A beautifully made stick, but somehow repugnant.

The cane made a final turn and as the wolf’s head swung around toward him, Lawrence felt—as absurd as the thought was to his civilized mind—that the eyes of a real wolf glared out at him through the lifeless metal. It required effort to wrench his own eyes away
from the cane and he caught the Frenchman in a split second of unguarded interest, the old eyes keen and sharp, and an enigmatic smile curling the corners of his mouth. Then the moment passed and the old man was just old and wizened and the cane was nothing more than metal and wood.

“A man needs a good stick on the moors,” mused the Frenchman. “I purchased this in Gévaudan . . . oh, it seems like
lifetimes
ago. Isn’t it lovely? The work of a master silversmith, an apprentice of Pierre Germain. Do you know Germain’s work? One of the Rococo artists. Very beautiful art . . . so alive.” He bent forward and offered a warm and inclusive smile. “You would do me a great honor, sir.”

The Frenchman gripped the wolf’s snarling head and with a deft turn of the wrist he released some hidden lock and pulled the head away from the wooden shaft. Not entirely, but enough to reveal a hand’s breadth of a wickedly sharp rapier that was hidden within the heart of the stick.

Lawrence gasped, but the Frenchman’s smile turned genial as he slid the rapier back into place with a quiet click. He took the sword cane in both liver-spotted hands and offered it to Lawrence.

“I . . . can’t,” stammered Lawrence, and in truth he was as unnerved by the look that had been in the Frenchman’s eyes when he said that he’d obtained the cane
lifetimes
ago as he was by the deadly potential of this unexpected gift. “We’ve only just met.” He picked up his own stick—stylish but no match in either form or purpose with the Frenchman’s cane. “This one will do me just—”

The old Frenchman interrupted with a chuckle and a shake of the head. “Nonsense! It would give me great
pleasure to know that my old stick was in the keeping of a civilized man. Besides . . . its heft is somewhat too much for me these days.”

Lawrence opened his mouth to rephrase his refusal, but the old man beat him to it.

“It is one of the few privileges of the old,” the Frenchman said, “to pass on our burdens to the young.”

He held the cane out again.

“
Merci
,” Lawrence said after a long pause. He accepted the cane with a gracious nod.

“From one exile to another,” the old man said softly.

The sword cane was light but solid, the heavy silver head balanced by a thick brass ferrule that showed signs of hard use in rough terrain. The wood was unmarked and lovely, with a tight grain that swirled throughout the polished hardwood. “You are overly kind,” murmured Lawrence.

“Not at all.”

Lawrence picked up his own cane and held it out, intensely aware of how shabby it looked by comparison. “I insist you take mine in trade, then.”

The smile the old Frenchman gave was mostly gracious, but sewn through the wreath of wrinkles on his smiling face were traces of some other emotion; and as he accepted the stick his finger brushed one of Lawrence’s fingers. It was a casual accident, but Lawrence nearly recoiled. The Frenchman’s skin was as cold as the tomb and strangely rough. The Frenchman’s eyes were hooded as he sat back and examined his new stick, a smile of some rare kind trying to blossom on his lips.

The train whistled like a shrieking ghost as it sped along through the tangled vines and twisted trees of Northumbria.

T
he country lane twisted and turned through forests more ancient than any of the races of men—both savage and civilized—who had lived there. Vast oaks with trunks as stout as stone towers; gullies that dropped away into spider-infested darkness; paths that led into the hearts of bottomless bogs.

Lawrence sat in a corner so that he could watch the countryside and have enough light to read and reread the letter that he held between thumb and forefinger. The paper was expensive, the handwriting precise, flowing and emphatically feminine. He read the letter again, perhaps the twentieth time since it was delivered to his London hotel, and his heart hammered as forcefully and as painfully as it had the first time he’d read it.

Dear Mr. Talbot,

I beg you to pardon this overly familiar and desperate appeal.

I believe your brother Benjamin has mentioned me to you in his correspondence: I’m Gwen Conliffe, his fiancée. I’m writing to inform you of your brother’s disappearance. He has not been seen for three weeks now and we fear the worst. I have recently learned that you are currently here in England with your theatre company.

I understand that your schedule takes you back to America soon, but I would implore you to help us find him. Please come to Talbot Hall.

We need your help.

With each line the handwriting had become more passionate, the pen digging more desperately into the paper. The signature was a scrawl and the letter had been hastily blotted before it had been folded. Speed and urgency, he determined. And fear.

Lawrence folded the letter and placed it in an inner pocket of his coat. He rearranged his clothes but his hand lingered over the place where the letter rested. Over his heart.

“Ben . . . ,” he murmured.

For most of the way the hooves of the horses thudded dully on hard-packed dirt, but when they began clattering on stone, Lawrence glanced out the window. He looked out just as the carriage passed under a great stone arch that he thought he would never see again. The massive portal was topped with a hunting scene of snarling hounds on either side of a trapped stag. The words talbot hall were engraved with cool severity into the keystone, but the letters were mostly obscured by tangles of vine. A flock of threadbare ravens were roused from their slumber by the passage and they leaped into the air, salting the afternoon with their rusty protest. A fox with one milky eye watched the wheels roll, its body hidden by shadows thrown by stones long ago fallen from the arch.

Lawrence turned and looked back, trying to remember the arch as it had been and catching only embers of memory that had long since burned away.

The carriage rolled on, moving quickly down a lane once guarded by double rows of beech trees, but scavenger
maples and tall weeds had invaded their ranks and the trees now looked like a line of beggars. The fields beyond, once immaculate and trimmed, had become tangles where crabgrass and wild onion ran rampant. Crass shrubberies of a hundred unnamed varieties now clogged the flower beds and unswept piles of leaves lay in rotting dunes in the cobbled turnaround. Even the stone hounds and wolves that stood like gargoyles on marble pedestals along the drive were gray with dust and strangled by vines.

The carriage stopped and Lawrence hesitated before turning the door handle. Even though he knew that much would have changed since his boyhood, he had never expected this total descent into squalor and dissolution. The house itself had an abandoned air about it. Most of the windows were dark, a few had cracked panes, and from one empty frame on a top floor Lawrence could see finches flutter in, one after another, carrying twigs and worms.

“ ’Ere you go, sir,” said the driver, hopping nimbly down. He cast an appraising eye at the hall but kept his own counsel as he pulled Lawrence’s expensive steamer trunk out of the boot. He carried it to the top of a flight of heavy stone stairs and left it standing on one end beside the door, then retreated hastily to the carriage. His charge had not yet emerged, so the driver folded down the wrought-iron step and opened the door. “Talbot ’all, sir.”