Beneath London (15 page)

She realized that she was breathing shallow and fast, and was growing light-headed. She would fall if it weren’t for the rope binding her to the tree. She closed her eyes to calm herself, picturing the clear water of the pond on the farm where she had lived as a girl, the waterweeds growing in the depths, the silver fish darting about, appearing and disappearing, glinting in the sunlight. Her breathing slowed, and her head cleared, and she opened her eyes to witness what was coming to pass.

“Do you hear me, Clara dear?” Shadwell said now. “I’m right certain you’re not deaf. We mean for you to find what’s hidden beneath the stream, what your mother buried with her own two hands – a dead man’s living head, if such a thing can be imagined. So remove those iron shoes and walk about the shore, girl. Your old mum told us what was buried here before she passed into Hell, and I can tell you that she was happy enough to go. The fat woman will travel that same road, girl, unless you do as we ask. We mean to burn her alive, you see, but only if you’re troublesome. You can save her life if you have a mind to, and your own life into the bargain.”

“Hear him, girl!” Bingham said. “The fat woman will flame up quicker nor a bum’s rush, her flesh being unctuous and so much of it. The Smithfield witches ain’t in it.” He set Clara’s jacket and bag on dry ground and brushed his hands together.

Clara cried out, as if to stop their threatening talk. She shuffled her shoes from her feet and stepped bare-foot along the sand. She angled toward the edge of the brook until she felt the cold water with her bare foot. Then she stepped away again, moving toward the trees now, to a point very near Mother Laswell, some several feet above the river. Abruptly she stopped, and slowly she began to spin in place, her hands thrown skyward, her head back. Her smoked spectacles flew off her face as she spun faster, her mouth open, hair flying. Now she staggered and fell, landing in shallow water on her hands and knees, her dress billowing around her.

Bingham fetched her spectacles and then dragged her back onto the bank, where she lay in a patch of sunlight. Where her feet had augured into the bank, Shadwell began to dig, pitching sand and mud and debris to either side. Bingham watched him, taking his ease now. Clara was racked with trembling, her hands pressed over her ears and her eyes clamped shut.

“Lend a
hand
, Mr. Bingham, if you don’t mind,” Shadwell said, holding out the shovel and wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

“Easy, Dick,” Bingham said, taking the shovel and stepping down into the hole. “I’m as willin’ as the next man to do my part, now that we’re close to the prize.” He began to dig, putting his back into it until the pit was widened and deepened. Shadwell watched with a keen anticipation. The blade struck something hard just at the point when subterranean water began bubbling up into the hole, turning the sand to a heavy slush. Bingham hurriedly jammed the blade beneath the object, whatever it was, but could get no purchase on it.

“Here, Mr. Bingham,” Shadwell said, picking up a heavy stone from the bank and letting it drop into the hole. Bingham shoved the blade into the sand again and levered the shovel blade against the stone, prising the object out of the muck with a sucking noise – a black box, some twelve inches square and deep.

“The very object,” Bingham said cheerily, handing the shovel to Shadwell. He swirled sand and mud from the surface of the box, wiping at it with the palm of his hand. “Heavy,” he said, grinning like a dog. “Lead, it is, like the girl’s shoes, covered in beeswax. Take a squint.” He handed it to Shadwell, who took it by one of its leather handles, hefted it, and then set it down heavily.

“Worth a mint of money to the two of us,” Shadwell said. “I congratulate you, Mr. Bingham. You’ll live in style now, as you deserve.” He held the spade with his right hand, and held his left out to Bingham, who grasped it and attempted to clamber out of the hole, which was heavy going. He was up to his knees in watery sand now, and the edge of the hole collapsed in front of him when he leaned his weight against it. He sprawled forward, his legs trapped in a dense gruel of muddy sand. Shadwell yanked his own hand away and clutched the handle of the spade tightly with both hands, drew it back, and shouted, “Goodbye, Mr. Bingham!” and smashed the flat of the spade onto the top of Bingham’s head, driving him downward, and then smashing his head again and again as if he were sinking a tent stake.

Bingham covered his head with his hands and endeavored to pull himself free, but his feet were held tightly by what had become quicksand, the entire hole awash now. Shadwell knelt in front of him, soaking his own trousers to the knees, and brought the spade up over his head, Bingham raising his hands to ward it off. The spade knifed downward, the blade severing two of Bingham’s fingers and tearing into the flesh of his neck. Bingham screamed, falling forward and sucking up sand and water. He threw his head back, drowning now.

Mother Laswell shut her eyes and turned away from the horror, listening to the sound of the blade hacking against flesh and bone. Finally all was silent, and when she opened her eyes again, Bingham’s corpse lay face downward, afloat in the collapsed hole, his legs buried in the heavy sand, red blood swirling away downstream. The shovel lay on the bank near where Shadwell was fitting Clara’s shoes back onto her feet and her spectacles onto her face. He stood up now and approached Mother Laswell, carrying the leaden box and holding Clara by the wrist.

“I’m told that the item in this box is the severed head of your late, esteemed husband, ma’am. If his head could speak, I don’t doubt but what he would have a wild tale to tell. But he cannot speak, no better than you can. One day perhaps he will.” He picked up Clara’s jacket and bag, the box tucked under his arm.

Mother Laswell kept her face dead calm and looked into his eyes. He could easily murder her, bound as she was, but she was damned if he’d steal what little dignity she had left.

“I find that I cannot set you afire after all, more’s the pity, for I’ve drowned my lucifer matches in my scuffle with the late Mr. Bingham, and aside from that we promised the girl that we would allow you to live if she did as she was told, and so we will. Or
I
will, at least, Mr. Bingham being indisposed. I’m compelled to leave you here in your present thankful state, however, and I fear you’ll be less thankful tomorrow, perhaps, than you are at present, and even moreso the day after that – diminishing returns, one might say. Perhaps you’ll come to consider your own foolishness. If only you’d given the girl to us yesterday …”

He shook his head sadly. “But you did not. I’ll look after Clara, you can be certain of that, ma’am. I leave it to my employer to decide her fate. I’m desolated to say it, but I can make no assurances regarding the girl’s future. That will depend upon her compliance. Adieu, ma’am.”

Mother Laswell worked to keep her mind from running off course as she chewed on the fabric of the handkerchief, trying to gnaw through it, watching as Shadwell led Clara up the path toward the farm, guiding her gently along as if he had a vast concern for her welfare. The girl did not so much as cry out now.
Good
, Mother Laswell thought. Clara had gumption. She was a cipher to the likes of Shadwell, and that might be the small bit of hope in this affair, which wasn’t finished by any means, not while she had any life left in her.

The thought seemed to mock her, however, as time passed. The thin roll of cotton cloth was unyielding, turning between her dry teeth, and she worked to wet it, grinding away at it long after the two of them had disappeared from sight and sound.

TWELVE

T
he train entered Cannon Street Station amid a shriek of air brakes and clouds of roiling steam. Alice looked out of the window at the crowds of people hurrying to and fro with what seemed to her to be a celebratory air, although no doubt it was her own high spirits that she felt. She had first stepped out into Cannon Street Station as a young woman, looking up in awed disbelief at the immense glass and iron arch that roofed the station, nearly seven hundred feet in length, the immensity of the place quite taking her breath away. At the time she was accompanying her Aunt Agatha Walton to a meeting of the Royal Society, where her aunt was to read a paper upon the curiosities of salmon scales.

Alice had found herself seated very near a young man who was rather handsome in a craggy way, and who turned out to be a scientific-minded student of Richard Owen, the famous naturalist, an acquaintance of Aunt Agatha’s. The young man’s name was Langdon St. Ives. She thought now of his question earlier that day – whether he was a romantic creature at all. His idea of wooing her had involved squiring her to lectures from time to time, and once, under the supervision of Aunt Agatha, to the Kent Downs where they had dug ancient seashells out of a sandstone cliff. After a time, Alice had begun to feel unhappily like a mere occasional companion. It was Aunt Agatha’s advice, however, that she should encourage St. Ives to pursue his natural enthusiasms, which he was likely to do in any event, and to wait until the time was right.

Shortly thereafter he had gone off to Edinburgh, to the university. They had written to each other sporadically, but his wanderlust often led him to out-of-the-way-corners of the natural world, at which times he disappeared out of her life, and in time she found herself being wooed by a man named Benson Winn, who had inherited an estate and an income in Abbey Wood. He was cheerfully pleasant and handsome, and with an enviable tenor voice, a member of no fewer than three choirs. Alice was twenty-four years old at the time, not ancient, but not anxious to live alone, as did Aunt Agatha, who was utterly and happily self-reliant.

And then one afternoon, home from Edinburgh and from his travels, St. Ives had come round to her home in Plumstead without warning, carrying nets and large collecting jars. He was searching out juvenile crested newts in marsh ponds and wanted company. St. Ives had the idea of making a study of them and then returning them to their ponds the following month, in time for their metamorphosis into adult newts. Alice was fond of newts, especially crested newts, which she had kept as pets when she was a girl.

Carrying a picnic basket, they went out into the Plumstead Marsh to a pond that Alice knew, where they found four exotic-looking specimens along with snails and tadpoles to fatten them up on. The two of them were watching the newts paddle about among the waterweeds in their glass containers, the afternoon warm and empty, silent but for the sound of birds and the light breeze whispering through the trees, when Alice decided that the time was as right as it would ever be and kissed him – a shockingly bold kiss – which led to more of the same, much more. The following day she had made her apologies to Mr. Winn. Things had worked out very nicely indeed, and all of it due to newts.

They descended to the platform now and straightaway caught sight of Tubby and Gilbert Frobisher swarming along toward them, looking happy and thoroughly overfed. Gilbert’s double-breasted dinner coat bore silver buttons the size of half crown coins that glittered against the black satin. Tubby, who cared little for fashion, wore a brown flannel coat and checked trousers, very large examples of their type. Weighed together, Tubby and his uncle would tip the scale at well over thirty stone, but they had a hale and hearty look about them, as if they would happily beat the stuffing out of Satan himself.

Holding onto Gilbert’s arm was a fair-haired woman of perhaps thirty years of age, buxom and markedly short. She wore a hat with what was evidently a small crow secured to the side of it with an immensely long hatpin. A ball of polished amber was affixed to the end of it. The bird, its wings half spread, appeared to be launching itself into the air. It was an eccentric hat to be sure, although so was her own hat, Alice thought, decorated with the spring dun fly.

“Allow me to introduce Miss Cecilia Bracken,” Gilbert said to them. “Cissy, these are my great good friends, Langdon St. Ives, his wife Alice, and the inimitable Hasbro, which is just what his friends call him.”

Miss Bracken curtsied like a schoolgirl. “Charmed to meet you, Mr. Inimitable,” she said to Hasbro, and then she favored St. Ives with what could only be called the glad eye – a startlingly lascivious look – and then a quick glance in Alice’s direction, giving her an up and down inspection.