Beneath London (14 page)

ELEVEN

“
I
t’s like a holiday,” Mother Laswell said, speaking to Clara, but trying to convince herself. “We’ll do nothing but read novels and take the air. I’ve packed
Nickleby
and
Pickwick
and also a copy of Mrs. Gaskell’s
Lois the Witch
. I looked into it a year ago but was distracted and never finished it.”

Clara nodded, although whether happily or merely out of politeness it was hard to say. She was most often silent – always silent in company – and more so at the moment, Mother Laswell knew, for her mind was on her mother’s death. Best to let her be. It would be some time before any of them saw Hereafter Farm again, and Mother Laswell neatened the room now, intending to leave it just so. There was bad luck in leaving an untidy house. This afternoon they would take the post chaise south to Tunbridge Wells and then a train north through the night into Yorkshire. That had been Bill’s idea of a ruse – heading south before running north. They had a basket of Alice’s pasties and a bag of their own apples along with cheese and biscuits for the four of them to eat along the way. Young Simonides was traveling with them. It might put the boy in some peril, but it might just as likely remove him from peril. There was no saying.

The world was upside down, it seemed to Mother Laswell as she stepped out through the French window and walked toward the barn. In such times as these one had to trust to prayer and dead reckoning when navigating, for the stars were often hidden from sight. The valise that the man Bingham had brought along yesterday lay in the mud against the barn wall like a dead thing, shot to pieces. She’d had Mr. Tully burn the straitjacket on the rubbish heap yesterday evening.

She picked the valise up now, looking at the compartments inside, and saw that it contained nothing apparently of value. There was a flat cloth bag with what appeared to be a set of false eyebrows and what might have been a stage mustache inside, much crimped from being smashed into the bottom of the bag. There were several sheets of paper also, wrinkled and stained as if with coffee or tea. She pulled them out, flattened them, and saw that they were handbills.

She stared at the picture depicted on the bills, confusion in her mind. It was a clear sketch of a man whom she recognized as her own son, Dr. Ignacio Narbondo – not his given name – dead this past year and more, something she thanked God for, although it was no doubt sinful. She had last seen him in London, in his lair in the rookery near Flower and Dean Street. There she had attempted to shoot him with a pistol in order to remove his shadow from the light of the world.

She had failed, and perhaps the failure had preserved her own sanity, and anyway he was dead within a few days. The handbill offered a reward for information of his whereabouts. There was an address listed, but it meant nothing to her. St. Ives had told her that Narbondo had fallen into a cleft in the floor of the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs when it had been destroyed. Alice had confirmed it. Mother Laswell needed no more proof than that. She wondered, however, whether her dead son was of interest to someone who had taken against him for some other reason – someone ignorant of his death.

What was particularly troubling to her was that the handbills were in this particular valise. Given his criminal past, the Metropolitan Police might easily want news of Narbondo if they were unaware that he was dead. The only coincidence, really, the only disturbing thing, was that the handbills had ended up at Hereafter Farm. She wished that the Professor were handy. He would shine some light on the mystery. But he was not, and she would see neither him nor Alice again for some time.

She folded two of the handbills up small. And then, from a pocket in her gown, she removed the cloth purse in which she kept their traveling money, and she put the papers into it. She had no desire to keep her son’s likeness close, but the whole business was simply too curious. She would show it to Bill when they had a moment to themselves. She put the other objects into the otherwise empty valise, walked around behind the barn, and pitched it onto the prunings that Mr. Tully was burning, watching as he pushed them around with a hay-fork. Finally she walked back into the house, where Clara still sat in her chair, wearing her darkened glasses and lead-soled shoes. Her face was a complete cipher. Mother Laswell could not tell whether she was happy to leave Aylesford for a time, or whether it was all one to her. The girl was uncannily stoic.

Mrs. Tully, the gardener’s wife, passed by hurriedly on her way into the kitchen where she was cooking supper. She and Mr. Tully would stay behind to look after the children. As far as the two of them knew, Mother Laswell and Bill were traveling down to Tunbridge Wells for a long stay with an old friend, a friend who did not in fact exist. Mother Laswell had written out the location of the friend’s imaginary cottage on a piece of paper so that anyone who came calling would be able to find her there, if only they could find the cottage, which they could not, it being imaginary – a dead end.

“Ten minutes, and we’ll be off to Aylesford to catch the coach,” she said to Clara, who nodded again. Mother Laswell walked down the hall and into her bedroom, where there stood a little-used door letting out to the side of the house. Bill had just minutes ago gone outside to water the pots of begonias that Alice had given them in the summer. They were in an area favored with afternoon sun and were fairly safe from the depredations of the children’s games, although not quite so safe from whitefly and grubs. Mr. Tully had promised to spray them with soap.
So many things to fret about
, she thought,
when one goes away on holiday
. Something she hadn’t done, really, since she’d gone into London a year and a half ago, and that had been no holiday.

She swung the door open and stepped out onto the small wooden porch in order to tell Bill that all was packed and ready. He lay face down on the ground, however, his arms thrown out in front of him as if he were attempting to fly. There was a bloody gash on the side of his head, pooling on the flagstones next to his ear. In her surprise it took Mother Laswell a moment to see it. She stepped down and hurried forward, crying out Bill’s name and hauling her kerchief out of her bodice.

A hand grabbed her wrist then – a man’s hand – and she was jolted to a stop. Another hand covered her mouth as the man stepped behind her, and in that moment she knew that she had been a fool, that Bill had been knocked on the head.

Murderers
, she thought, and she heaved herself sideways in a vain effort to throw her attacker off balance. She saw his hat fly off, but he held on tightly, so she bit down hard on his fingers, hearing him curse, and then she kicked backward with the heel of her shoe and connected with his leg, although feebly, for she wore only a pair of cloth list slippers. The man pinched her nostrils closed now, and very quickly she was suffocating. He pulled her backward, clipping the back of her knees, so that she sat down hard, and then pulled her own kerchief from her hand, yanked it between her teeth, and tied it off. She made an effort to climb to her feet, but her tormenter pushed his boot into her side and tumbled her over, and then stepped over her and bound her wrists with a length of rope. It was Detective Shadwell.

Of course it was, she thought miserably. She had sensed that he was a bad man, but to their undoing she had ignored her instincts. Shadwell’s face was altered, however: his nose smaller, his mustache gone, his eyebrows narrower, his hair receded halfway up his head. It was his eyes that gave him away. He picked up his hat, a jaunty, green-felt affair, and put it onto his head.

Mother Laswell cursed herself for her stupidity. Alice had advised her to leave at once for Yorkshire, but she had dallied, foolishly trying to put things in order before their journey, and now…

The other one, Bingham, came out through the open door at that moment, leading Clara. He closed the door behind him. He carried Clara’s jacket folded neatly over his arm, her bag in his hand. It came into Mother Laswell’s mind that there was no reason for them to take the girl’s bag if they meant to murder her as they had murdered her mother, which they surely had. Shadwell pulled Mother Laswell to her feet, and straightaway he led the way into the trees along a little game trail and out of sight of the house. He held onto the end of the rope that bound Mother Laswell’s wrists, the rest of the rope coiled in his hand. Clara followed, her hand on Mother Laswell’s shoulder. That was good. With luck they would think that Clara was helplessly blind, although she would have precious little chance of eluding them if she bolted. She must wait for her chance. She remembered Bill now, who might be either alive or dead. She prayed that he was alive, and that he would come to his senses and…

And what? Bill could have no idea where they had gone. No one had seen the two men arrive, evidently, nor had anyone seen the lot of them leave. She stumbled on a tree root and very nearly fell, but Shadwell, whatever his name actually was, pulled on the rope and held her up, and once again she trudged on, more helpless even than poor Clara. Low sunlight shone through the trees, which were mostly bare now that November was upon them. The trail led toward the back of the farm – she knew its course well enough – past the oast house, which many years ago had been the site of her dead husband’s laboratory, although it had burned when Mother Laswell herself had lit it afire while attempting to put an end to her husband’s experiments into vivisection, the last of which had been perpetrated on the body of their own son. Would that she had burned it ten years earlier, she thought. Would that she had murdered the man in his sleep.

They skirted the sheep pastures, entering the woods at the point where the brook flowed out onto the meadow. There the ground became uneven, the path edging around boulders and beneath fallen branches. Mother Laswell’s slippers weren’t made for rough walking, and the handkerchief pulling at her mouth was increasingly painful now, her mouth dry. She tried her wrists against the rope, but to no avail.

After a weary time they stopped, perfectly hidden from the world. The stream formed a wide pool here, with sandy banks on both sides that ran along for fifty feet or so. Come the winter rains the stream would drown the banks, and then it would be midsummer before they reappeared. A beech tree rose straight skyward on the outer edge of the bank, which was cut away by the moving water. Shadwell led Mother Laswell to the tree and bound her to it, taking several turns around her body with the rope before tying it off.

“I told you to cut another fathom of line, Dick,” Bingham said. “She’s as broad as she is tall.”

“We’ll melt the fat off her right enough before we’re through,” Shadwell said, and he stepped behind a heap of boulders and dry limbs and pulled out a shovel with a long iron blade, spearing it into the sandy soil and pressing it home with his boot. He withdrew two faggots of wood from the hiding place now and set them at Mother Laswell’s feet, and then gathered sun-dried brush and leaves, tucking them in and around the bundles. “That should do,” he said. “When the fire gets hot, the tree will go up like a torch and she’ll roast fore and aft, the witch.”

Clara had begun to moan, softly, rocking forward and back, and putting aside her terror. Mother Laswell wondered what it was that had set her off. The meaning of the bundles of wood and Shadwell’s bloody-minded comment were clear enough to a sighted person, but Clara couldn’t see the bundles without the aid of her elbow. It was something else that she sensed, something buried beneath the bank, perhaps. Despite her lead-soled shoes, she felt it.

Mother Laswell was certain she knew just what it was. The two men had searched for it beneath the floorboards of Sarah Wright’s cottage, but hadn’t found it. In the end she had told them. She closed her eyes and focused her mind. There was nothing she could do to save Clara or herself. Sarah Wright had been compelled to reveal her secret, and whatever she had revealed was understood by Shadwell to be true. Nothing Mother Laswell said – even if she could speak – would convince them otherwise. The head was buried under the streambed, and the two men meant to unearth it. Clara was their lodestar.