Beneath London (19 page)

St. Ives heard Tubby remonstrating with his uncle now, angry and placating in equal measure. He closed his ears to their exchange. It was none of his business, he told himself, but he was aware that there was a brother’s keeper element to it that gnawed at him, as well as the problem of the troubled state of Gilbert’s mind. Gilbert was an excitable man, much at odds within himself when he was upset, which might further complicate their trek underground. Better, he thought, that he was going on alone.

The landing at the end of the wooden causeway lay beyond most of the collapsed rubble, and from that vantage point St. Ives had a clear view of the fairly steep, uneven ground that they would traverse on their way to reach their immediate goal. Two more gulls flew past on a cool wind off the river, one of them defecating copiously on the shoulder of his coat before flying into the cave – a good omen, if one believed in omens. He slipped his knapsack onto his back, slung the coil of rope over his soiled shoulder, and hung the basket containing the Ruhmkorff lamp from the crook of his elbow. He looked back up the pier, where Tubby and Gilbert had finally parted company, the old man walking slowly down into the darkness as if under a great weight.

* * *

G
ilbert Frobisher’s steam yacht, the whimsically named
Hedge-pig
, was a Scottish-built, side-wheeled craft that he had brought down from Dundee to its moorings in Eastbourne two years past. It was now anchored fore and aft along the Thames shore, a biscuit-toss from the great sink-hole. The yacht was a lavish affair, sixty feet long and built for idle pleasure, most of the deck being a saloon and galley, with sleeping quarters below. Alice stood under a party-colored awning, the long saloon shielding her from the south wind that had recently arisen. It was a cold wind that promised rain.

The tide was at its peak, and she had a high, clear view over the bulwark of stone and wood that dammed the edge of the collapse. From that elevated vantage point Alice could see into the reaches of the dark void itself. She watched Langdon and Gilbert apparently chatting, pointing out marvels. Alice felt strangely distant from her husband, regarding him through opera glasses, which made the entire undertaking seem like a piece of theater.

The notion of the women remaining aboard the yacht was Gilbert’s idea – very festive, a view of the proceedings without mud and turmoil. Alice would just as soon explore the sink-hole cavern along with her husband, taking James Harrow’s place. But it wasn’t to be. She was plagued by an indeterminate but ominous dread that had settled in her chest last night when they’d heard of Harrow’s unfortunate accident. The smell of the bodies buried in the sink-hole added to the weight of her doubts. The feeling of dread wasn’t entirely rational, of course, but the knowledge didn’t dissipate it in the least.

Barlow, Gilbert’s butler, came out through the saloon door carrying a silver platter and a cylindrical silver coffee pot. The coffee had been roasted and ground that very morning by Madame Leseur, Gilbert’s French cook, whom Gilbert took along with him on his travels, Gilbert being a slave to his stomach. Barlow poured the coffee into a large china cup decorated with the Frobisher crest: two bright stars above a rampant hedgehog, a flailing red devil in its teeth. Alice took the coffee gratefully, foregoing sugar or milk, and went back to her post. Tubby and Hasbro had just disappeared into the sink-hole carrying knapsacks and a coil of rope.

She saw now that a man was crouching among the boulders some few feet above the river, partially hidden by the stone bulwark thrown up in the first days after the collapse. He had a sneaking air to him. She wondered how long he had been there. She had been so intent upon watching Gilbert and Langdon that she had seen little of what was going on roundabout them.

The man crept closer now, as if anxious to see into the cavern itself, but equally anxious not to be seen. He was a small man with a narrow, weasely face, what she could see of it, and he wore a uniform of some sort. It came to her that he might be a man from the Board of Works, although what he meant by hovering about in such a way was a puzzle.

Alice suddenly wished that she had company, another pair of eyes, so to speak. Miss Bracken sat in the saloon, out of the weather, and Alice turned toward the window, raising her hand to knock on the glass in order to summon her, but at just that moment she was shocked to see the woman slip three silver coffee spoons into her embroidered bag, which she instantly clasped shut.

It was a recklessly bold theft, for Barlow would certainly discover that the spoons were missing. Except that Barlow might easily be constrained from telling Gilbert, especially given Gilbert’s open sparring with Tubby on the issue of Miss Bracken. The woman knew very well what she could get away with. What was the point of stealing Gilbert’s spoons, however – mere trifles – if she anticipated marrying the man? Perhaps she did not anticipate any such thing. Perhaps what she wanted was a free passage to London, a bag of stolen silver, and an opportunity to disappear.

Alice turned toward the sink-hole once again and looked through the glasses. Hasbro and Tubby had come topside, and Langdon was making his way down into the darkness, very quickly passing out of sight, still some few yards from the lantern light at the end of the dock. Gilbert and Tubby appeared to be carrying on an impassioned argument. After a moment Tubby threw up his hands and walked away. But he paused suddenly, turned, and grasped his uncle’s shoulder as if to bid him farewell. Gilbert, however, shrugged away and followed along behind Langdon without looking back. The whole business was both sad and troubling, and Alice’s feelings of general unhappiness increased.

The lurking man along the bank had climbed up toward the top of the embankment by now, perhaps to get a better view of the two men below. He bent over, meddling with something hidden within the rocks.
Who are you?
Alice whispered, hearing Miss Bracken come out through the saloon door now, having donned her bird hat. Alice beckoned to her, but just as she called Miss Bracken’s attention to the lurking man there was the sound of a muffled explosion, and the man scurried away across the rocks.

For a moment all was still, and then, as Alice watched in horror, the roof of the cavern slowly collapsed. A great heap of stone and embankment and barricades fell like a piecemeal curtain, blowing a shower of dust and debris out of the void.

Miss Bracken screamed, but Alice’s throat was closed, her breath stopped. It began to rain at that moment, wind-driven rain, and the dust quickly cleared away. The dark cavity that had been there only a moment ago was gone, the Thames swirling in through a breach in the wall, lapping against what was now a hillock of broken stone. Tubby and Hasbro climbed down over it, evidently searching fruitlessly for some passage into the interior. Unable to look away from the disaster, Alice watched through the opera glasses until rainwater obscured the lenses.

“Where is Mr. Frobisher?” Miss Bracken asked in a small voice, the wet blackbird leaning over her ear. “I don’t mean that Tubby. Where is Gilbert? Where is my Gilbert?”

A double crack of thunder sounded, and the rain redoubled.

“Gone,” Alice said to her. “Both of them are gone.”

And upon hearing these words Miss Bracken fell to the wet deck in a faint, her hat tumbling off, the rain beating down. Alice looked for the lurking man again, but he was nowhere to be seen.

FIFTEEN

W
hen St. Ives came to his senses he lay sprawled on his back in what at first appeared to be a meadow of glowing clover, but in fact was thick with some variety of mushroom. There was the smell of a filthy horse stable in the air, and he felt the plants beneath him moving like sandworms in a seabed. He sat up, unhappy with this and with the pain in his side – a bruised rib, maybe cracked.

He set about moving his hands, arms, legs, and neck in order to take stock of his injuries, discovering in so doing that he had lost his pith helmet. He remembered being cast bodily from the end of the pier as if slammed hard from behind. He had landed upon his feet, toppled forward, and had instantly begun to run, gravity helping him along. The ground was too steep for running, however, and he retained the sensation of hurtling along wildly for a distance, his legs flailing, unable to control his forward flight. He had tumbled for a time, desperately clutching the strap of his knapsack, which he was not clutching now. When he had been knocked unconscious and how far he had fallen he couldn’t say.

He wasn’t paralyzed, at least. His extremities were functional, his hands opening and closing, his fingers active, his toes working inside his boots. His head throbbed with pain, and he discovered a swelling above his right ear, where his hair was matted with blood, but he could discover no dizziness, nor any indication of a cracked skull. He wasn’t apparently still bleeding from the head wound, which was poulticed with a clot of bloody dirt. His injuries were nothing desperate, he told himself – the aches and pains, say, of a man who had been beaten or had fallen off a horse, the sort of thing that he had experienced often enough in the past.

He ordered his mind in an attempt to recall what had happened. The sound of grinding and cracking had filled his ears, the all-pervasive rumble of the earth moving. He had been but half conscious of the noise as he had wind-milled forward and then tumbled down the steep incline. But just before that he had looked back toward Gilbert, and he was certain that there had been a flash of light. He could picture Gilbert being suddenly and sharply illuminated. The sound of an explosion would quickly have been consumed by the indistinct cacophony of the cave-in, the world falling in upon itself. What had Alice seen from where she stood on the deck of Gilbert’s yacht? He had waved to her a few minutes earlier, before joining Gilbert on the staging platform. Alice no doubt wondered if he was dead.

He abandoned that line of thinking and thought again of James Harrow being kicked by his horse, and of the strangely variable actions of the Metropolitan Board of Works, in particular their declining opinion of the exploration. Was there an unseen hand at work here? An old grudge, perhaps, playing itself out? Or, he wondered, were there powerful forces that meant to keep the subterranean world a secret for reasons of their own?

He caught sight of small movements on the ground roundabout him. He looked more carefully and saw that they were struggling insects in the grip of the fungi, which appeared for all the world to be consuming them, or perhaps paralyzing them with some variety of toxin. The mushrooms seemed to be a cousin of the blewit, although stinking and a phosphorescent shade of sickly green. They were stout, meaty things, despite their luminescence. Certainly they were nondescript: James Harrow’s auk fungi. A hairy white spider the breadth of his hand struggled in a mushroom’s grip, and the sight of it compelled him to stand. His dislike of spiders was both irrational and inarguable.

He made out the dark form of his knapsack now, very welcome indeed, lying on a glowing green carpet twenty feet away, and near it the basket containing the lamp. Its lid appeared to be securely fastened, its fall cushioned, perhaps, by the carpet of fungi. The coil of rope was nowhere to be seen. St. Ives found that he was steady enough on his feet, and so he trudged to where his knapsack lay, fetching up the basket first and unlatching it, removing the bag of stuffing and scrutinizing the lamp, which looked and felt whole, the Geissler tube evidently unbroken.

He set the basket down carefully and picked up the knapsack, drawing from an outside pocket his hand compass in its brass pill-box and putting it into his coat pocket. Then he drew out the wires snaking out of the induction coil before slipping his arms through the straps of the knapsack and hanging it onto his back, the wires draped over his shoulders. He sat down, holding the lamp securely in his lap. Squinting in the darkness and feeling the way of it with his fingers, he affixed the wires to the lamp. He turned the crank and the gas within the Geissler tube grew luminous, the glow increasing until it was a bright white, revealing the details of the world roundabout him. He hung the lamp around his neck, clipping the stiff metal harness at its base to his heavy leather belt in order to steady the lamp, and then very carefully rose to his feet.