A Soul of Steel (49 page)

“Is something wrong?” I asked finally. I am ever blunt.

“Only that I expected my returning home to answer questions instead of pose them.”

“Do you mean that you will not... rejoin your family, and resume your place in society?”

“What is that ‘place’?” he asked, his voice bitter. “What is ‘society’? I do not ‘fit’ any longer. I do not recognize my own, and they do not recognize me.”

“You must allow some time.”

“Perhaps I will return to France.”

My heart leaped up, as if a poor dray horse had bound ahead when its only lot was to plod.

“France?”

“And then—”

He said no more, for the horse suddenly did hasten under the quick flick of a whip. Our hansom was spinning faster along the dark thoroughfare. Quentin was leaning against his window, his face brushed with the yellow rays of the sidelight and his hair riffled by the increased wind. We lurched to our left.

“We must have been traveling South Audley Street,” Quentin murmured. “Why would we go left, then? Ah, I remember now. We must make a jog and go down Hamilton Place before we arrive at Hyde Park comer and proceed east up Piccadilly.”

“Oh, then that is the park.” It unfolded rapidly on my side of the street, a blot of darkness lit by such distant gaslights that they winked like tiny stars.

“We are at Stanhope Gate,” Quentin pointed out with amusement, his features catching the glimmer of a passing gaslight.

A whip snapped in the darkness and our cab veered abruptly right.

“Quentin!” I exclaimed as the sudden turn tossed me against his side.

Moments later we were rattling under that so aptly named keystone into Hyde Park itself, into the deep velvet darkness.

He had caught me firmly and did not let go, and well it was, for the poor horse had been whipped to a frightful pace. Its hooves tattooed a rapid clickety-click like a railroad car as we shot straight ahead at the heart of darkness, the wind raking into our faces.

My heart played a staccato tune, not helped at all by Quentin’s unflagging grip upon my person; totally necessary, of course, given the wild progress of our vehicle.

Suddenly we veered right again, the cruel snap of the whip answered by the hooves’ frantic speed. I was struck with a flare of fury at our driver for abusing the poor beast so. Quentin’s gloved hand tightened on my shoulder.

“He is taking us along the Serpentine!” he said. “This is not the way to the Strand, but its opposite.”

Our speed had pressed me against Quentin, and his window was now my window. I saw the water, glimmering like buoyant diamonds in the vague light. We lurched left again. I was slammed against my own side of the hansom, Quentin pressing me close to the tufted upholstery.

“This is mad,” said he, rising in his seat to rap frantically on the ceiling. “Stop it, man! Stop this race at once! You are going in the wrong direction.”

The water on our left flickered like dying embers as we careened past, then winked out. For a moment we rode in total darkness, silent and bewildered. Then the hansom tilted violently left again. Quentin and I were again tossed like dice in a box against my side of the hansom.

I glimpsed an ironic address in the fleeting light of a corner gaslight: Stanhope Terrace.

“Bayswater Road,” Quentin gasped, straining to see. “We are bound west from London. What deviltry is this—?”

Gaslights sped by, precious smudges of light in an on-rushing blackness. The hansom's sidelights illuminated only our own worried faces washed in a harsh yellow glare resembling a Paris painter’s impression of a bistro.

I had no doubt been bruised by the jostling, but felt nothing but a sense of wild, untrammeled danger. Quentin was wrenching the mechanism that opened our half-door.

“It is damned difficult—or stuck somehow,” he said.

His language did not shock me, only the bouncing of the well-tried springs, the pounding of the runaway horse.

“The driver must be mad,” he said again.

“Or stricken,” said I, thinking of Jefferson Hope.

“Dead,” Quentin speculated with a grim look at me. “Stay here,” he ordered.

Where did he think I would go?

He leaned back in his seat and kicked both feet at the half-door. It remained shut.

“I’m going atop,” he shouted, turning to face me, then sitting on the half-door while gripping the top of the hansom, thus riding backwards in the streaming wind.

I nodded then, assurance being all I could offer, and clung to the seat with one hand.

Slowly, Quentin vanished above as if being devoured by a rather dilatory dragon. It was awful to watch: first his head and shoulders rising out of sight, then his trunk and finally his legs.

I cast an anxious glance out the window. Our speed made observation nearly impossible, but I saw warm tavern lights wink by and the occasional wagon. We rattled through terra incognita now. My poor mind could not even conjure what lay beyond this outskirt of London besides utter dark and empty wilderness.

We climbed a hill. We passed under another, more ancient gateway than the one named Stanhope near the comer of Hyde Park. We were far from such civilized venues now, hurtling into nothingness.

Thumps above indicated Quentin’s presence. Still our horse’s wild race continued. I was tossed from window to window and saw nothing I recognized, saw nothing, in fact.

Ahead unwound a tunnel of darkness, and then within it, an arrow of tiny lights, gaslights beaming through heavy mist under a boiling charcoal sky lit by a suddenly revealed full moon. I saw towers. Soaring, churchlike towers. And flying buttresses. A bit Romanish for my taste, but any port in a storm of this proportion.

The thumping aloft doubled, and redoubled. I could hear reins slapping, and the horse screamed like a woman. Then the hansom veered and jolted over some obstacle, creaked, swayed, stopped. ...

I swayed with it, clutching at anything and finding only the fastened half-door, which never gave.

Rudely tossed and turned, beaten and bruised, I finally sat still in my seat. My bonnet had fallen onto one ear. I could hear the horse gasping like a giant bellows.

For I moment I did not move; then 1 struggled upright. There was no other course but to climb over the half-door as Quentin had done. I did so, my skirts catching on the impediment. I tugged and they would not loosen, so I tugged again until I heard the rip of cloth. I clambered over until I was snagged again, and further ripped my dressmaking.

At last I desisted. I was hopelessly snagged, but at least I could see ahead. Then I regretted even that. My place of sanctuary, my “church,” was no refuge. The twin towers that drew me repeated into the distance, mere architectural decoration on the supports of a bridge. The flying buttresses were the bridge’s spans, upheld by wrought-iron bars.

Gaslights lit the way across, reflecting on the night-damp paving stones. On either side a body of water, so broad that it must be the Thames, shimmered like Irene’s most lavishly bejeweled black velvet evening gown, reflecting the sad, drowned face of the moon.

Quentin stood beside the stalled vehicle, his top hat fallen away. The driver had dismounted, too: a bulky silhouette blocking the river’s glitter, he still wore his battered top hat. The long pointed line of his whip seemed to pierce the churning gray clouds.

Quentin glanced back to assure himself of my survival. Then he spoke to the driver. “You are quite, quite mad.”

A voice spoke that I thrilled to recognize. “No, only damned inconvenient to those who thwart me.”

“You are a long way from the jungles of India, Tiger,” Quentin said in a tight, careful voice.

“And you are far from the forbidding steppes of Afghanistan, Cobra,” Colonel Sebastian Moran answered with a guttural laugh quite awful to hear. “They are hunting old Tiger because of you. You took that damned paper nigh ten years ago, and now they have hung me with it. I told you then and I tell you again that it is not profitable to meddle with a tiger.” “Let the lady go.”

“You let her go, if you survive to do so.”

They spoke of me, but I was miles removed from their calculations. I was a distant pawn upon a board that had broadened to encompass two continents and ten years. I could do nothing but watch.

“What will revenge gain you?” Quentin asked, moving carefully away from the hansom.

“Satisfaction,” Tiger articulated so precisely that he hissed like a great cat, or a snake.

“Small meat for one used to triumph.”

“It was that meddling detective! Did the fool think that I would not see his hand in this—and yours?”

“And mine,” Quentin agreed calmly, “no thanks to your efforts.”

“I sent a snake to catch a snake. Pity it didn’t work.”

“Your emissary killed on one occasion, but not me.”

“A greater pity.”

“Will you shoot me?” Quentin asked coolly.

“I would not waste a bullet on such poor game,” Tiger snarled.

Those words acted as a signal, for then Quentin knew that a pistol was not pointed at him.

He leaped—one shadow pouncing on another. Tiger and Cobra, snake and mongoose, Moran and Stanhope. These words were symbols of the elemental battle unfolding; even I knew that, even as I knew I was powerless to prevent or alter one bit of it. Oh, for Irene’s wicked little revolver! Oh, for Irene, or Godfrey!

Tiger’s long agile whip lofted against the boiling sky like black lightning. It cracked and then struck Quentin. I recoiled, but he did not. He advanced on Tiger, shadow stalking shadow until the spitting whip was too close to snarl, a scuffle, and then it rose... in Quentin’s hand.

He advanced like a madman himself, cracking the whip until the poor stalled horse trembled in its traces, wielding the lash with a demonic energy that drove the figure of Tiger back against one looming gatepost of the bridge.

Tiger leaped onto the stone dais some four feet up and crouched at the foot of a leafy stone scroll as high as a man. The whip danced in the air beside him until he scrambled up the carved scrolls to the next level.

“This is the way to train a cat,” Quentin announced, himself a shadow that leaped lithely atop the first level.

And so they progressed, ever upward on that strange man-made mountain. Perhaps the gatepost was not so very high. It seemed Mount Everest to me, and both men like quarreling fallen angels contending against a murky, ill-lit sky.

The gatepost ended in a three-pronged bloom of ironwork across the way, etched against the cauldron of the pewter sky. I watched them labor upward in their common enterprise of individual destruction.

My heart had long since left my body for my throat. I was aware of nothing but the contention so near and yet so far. Around them the thin sinuous line of the whip wove like a script. Quentin wielded it, for emphasis rather than defense. It was as if he would drive Tiger back to Afghanistan, back to the past to undo the waste of Maiwand, undo the deaths of countless men. He seemed to me at that moment an avenging angel, a Michael to a Lucifer. One must fall, I knew that. Yet, for all my worry, it was a thrilling scene.

And then one figure leaped suddenly down a notch on the face of the gatepost. The whip lashed out one final time—upon the tried horse’s haunches—as Quentin cast it away.

“Go!” Quentin shouted.

Whether he addressed me or the horse did not matter. The poor beast sprang forward as if released from the gates of hell.

“Go, dearest Nell!” I heard these extraordinary words end as if choked off.

Still standing at the half-door like a charioteer, I looked back to see the figure of Tiger leap down on Quentin’s silhouette. They struggled just beneath the gatepost’s crest. For a moment both men teetered under the impact of their clash and then... and then they fell. Against the ghastly, moonlit clouds above the silver river, their silhouettes hung larger than life, the fleeting moments of their plunge stretched into a dreadful, false eternity.

I saw them both: together yet separate, falling... oh, falling. By some divine blessing, in those horrific seconds the lovely lines of Lucifer’s fall from Milton’s
Paradise Lost
flared into my brain like a burning brand even as I watched:

From noon to noon
he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer’s day; and with
the
setting sun

Dropp'd from the zenith like a falling star.

I’d memorized those lines at my father’s school table, as well as the sad plaint from Isaiah: “How art thou fallen from heaven, o Lucifer, son of the morning?”

Two men fell, my becalmed heart accompanying only one. Then I recalled that “Lucifer” meant light, despite the name’s dark associations, and thought it bitter irony that one man’s light must die in order to snuff out another’s darkness.

At the last, I briefly saw them diminished, as birds or bats against the lowering clouds at the horizon. Then they plunged together into the glittering moonlit maw of the Thames and the black waters below.

My driverless hansom cab bolted on, its impetus pushing me back into the seat. I do not believe that I screamed; the situation was beyond such trivial measures. The hansom rattled across the empty bridge, spans and bars and proud towers flashing past me.... I heard nothing and saw very little.

I returned to the hotel in the Strand at two the following morning. A kindly fruit vendor bound for Covent Garden had come upon my vehicle and taken charge of both the winded horse and myself. Godfrey was in the lobby waiting. I managed to stammer out some version of the events before he whisked me to the Norton suite and plied me with brandy.

They both had been mad with worry at our long absence and Irene, he said, was out interrogating cab drivers. I never asked in what guise she undertook this assignment. I barely remember her coming in, though someone bundled me into bed, for that is where I awoke the next day.

When we three met again in the morning, I related the circumstances more coherently. My friends instantly realized that any action was useless, that both men had plunged together into the swift current, and perished.