Beneath London (28 page)

“Rest assured that I do not mean to harm you. Quite the contrary, sir. My only desire is that you live, and with your wits intact. You and I will very soon become kindred spirits, one might say, for I mean not only to look into your mind. From that vantage point I intend to see as you see and to know as you know. You will have the same advantage of me, the salient difference being that I can choose to end our communion whereas you cannot. I will be the actor, that is to say, and you will be acted upon.”

The musty cabinet was very close, and Finn was warm in the heavy jacket that he had bought from the boy on the road – a long time ago, it seemed to him. His leg was falling asleep, and so he shifted his weight, and the floor of the cabinet creaked, the sound unnaturally loud. He froze where he stood, holding his breath and listening to the silence, willing Mr. Klingheimer to carry on again.

But Mr. Klingheimer asked in a voice meant to carry, “Who is it? Who is there? Show yourself!” Finn remained still, waiting him out. “Ah well,” Mr. Klingheimer said at last, “it’s to be a game of hide and seek, is it? Give me a moment to complete my task, and then I’ll come for you.”

He started up again, speaking to Narbondo. “What I offer you, sir, is the opportunity to conjoin your mind with the minds of your fellow – I’ll not say prisoners – your fellow travelers, let us say, these mounted, living heads that you see before you, maintained by fungal blood. One of them you might recognize – the one hidden by the gauze veil. He arrived just yesterday, having found his way to London after a prolonged engagement in Kent as a river deity. I have it on good authority that you and he knew each other of old. I’ll draw back the veil now, so that you might look upon him and wonder.”

Finn wondered whether he should run. Narbondo’s box, however, was very near the door, and it would take only an instant for Mr. Klingheimer to step in his way. The man was large – too large to knock aside. Up the ladder, perhaps, if he could evade the man. Finn had quite possibly sealed Clara’s fate by climbing into the wardrobe, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

“Your countenance has come quite thoroughly alive, Doctor,” Mr. Klingheimer said, “and your flesh seems to be agitated, as if it were engorged with small, scurrying insects. Well, well. You don’t care to look upon your stepfather’s countenance, although surely it’s scarcely recognizable to you. It is wonderfully preserved
beneath
the flesh, however, and the flesh, as we know, is mere stuff. The person dwells within. In a very short time you will be able to gaze into his mind, and he into yours. In that sense you’ll have become as a god in your small way. As for the sputum you’ve vomited up, Dr. Peavy will see that it’s swabbed clean. Good day to you, sir.”

All was quiet for a time, and then Finn heard the disconcerting sound of footsteps drawing near, then stopping, then going on again. He could not quite tell where the man was. Then he heard a door open and close – the room, no doubt, where he had slept. The footsteps returned, stopping very close by. He should have run. He had missed his chance.

In the voice of a schoolmaster, Mr. Klingheimer said, “Come out, thief.”

Finn remained silent, considering what he would do.

“No,” Klingheimer said after a long silence. “Not a thief! Here is a fine opportunity to put my powers to the test. Before my mind’s eye stands a boy with green stockings and a stout heart. I see… an owl. I see… a coat stained with blood. Are you a desperate rogue, I wonder, or is it the blood of an animal?”

There followed the soft scraping noise of the latch rising, and Finn threw himself hard forward, the door smashing into Klingheimer and knocking him backward over a bench, the man sprawling and grunting. Finn dodged out, Klingheimer’s arm making a grab at his ankle, but missing, Klingheimer scrabbling to get up. Finn scarcely looked at Narbondo when he raced through the laboratory – had no desire to – but swarmed up the ladder with his creel over his arm, moving fast – far too fast for Klingheimer to follow.

* * *

I
t was early yet when Beaumont walked back toward Klingheimer’s mansion through a gray fog, turning things over in his mind. He had breakfasted at Rodway’s – half a pound of bacon served up on toast and enough hot coffee to drown a cat – and as he swallowed his food it had come into his mind that his stay at Klingheimer’s might likely be a short one, what with Narbondo brought into the house and now the boy Finn having come to save the blind girl. And there was the heads and toads and all this upset about the sink-hole and the man underground. There was something afoot, things changing, some deviltry that he had no desire to be caught up in. Howsomever, he told himself, now that the key to the padlock on the red door lay in his pocket he could slip out when he chose to. Perhaps he could find odds and ends of things to take along with him. There was no tearing hurry.

He cut along down the Victoria Embankment, the air reeking from the smoke of the try-pots near the sink-hole melting down mineral pitch. Beyond Blackfriars Bridge a great number of men moved through the reek, laboring to fill the hole before the rest of London fell into it and was swallowed up. Barges loaded with asphalt and rubble came and went, taking full advantage of the tide. Beaumont turned up Temple Avenue and then down a narrow byway that ran along the back of several spacious old houses, relics of London’s past, their courtyards invisible behind high stone walls with arched wooden carriage gates.

One of these houses he remembered quite well, because it had belonged to Dr. Ignacio Narbondo himself, and Beaumont had spent a goodly number of weeks within it, if you added the days together. He had spent some small amount of time
under
it, also, for the house had hidden passages below it that led away beneath the city and out along the river – bolt-holes, in a pinch, or for slipping in and out unseen. Narbondo, a secretive man who had been involved in many criminal undertakings, had possessed several houses in and around London, two of them deep in the rookeries, and he had shifted from one to the other so that he might seem to be nowhere and everywhere, looking out through the windows like Bo Peep but rarely seen on the street.

This house would make a snug kip for a man like Beaumont if he had to leave Mr. Klingheimer’s quick-like – large enough so that no one would see lamps and candles lit in the recesses of the place, and likely wouldn’t care a fig if they did. Two grapnels at either end of a length of two-inch line would do the trick to get him over the wall, the lower grapnel moored to a crate of eatables that he could pull up after.

He slowed his pace now, seeing through the fog that the carriage gate at the back of what had been Narbondo’s house stood open several inches. There was the noise of workmen hard at it inside, and now the gate swung wide and two mules came out through it hauling a wagon with low sides. Beaumont stopped dead and moved out of sight behind a piece of wall. He knew the driver – a man named Wilson who worked for Mr. Klingheimer and who had gone along underground just yesterday on the search. It had been he who had found the bit of newspaper, which had perhaps saved the lot of them from Mr. Klingheimer’s wrath. This work on Narbondo’s house was Mr. Klingheimer’s doings, that was certain. A heap of dirt and rock lay atop the bed of the wagon, which made away upriver in the direction of the sink-hole, a contribution no doubt – borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

The gate remained open, and Beaumont made toward it now, turning his head as he passed to see what was what: an excavation, was what, much like a mine. It angled down into the ground – a sizeable hole, large enough to back the wagon straight down into it, along the edge of the house itself. The rear corner of the house was shored up with heavy beams, and more beams and boards stood in neat piles nearby, alongside a pyramid of cut stone. A stone foundation had been laid around three sides of the hole. They were building a hut, no doubt to hide the mouth of the tunnel: gatehouse meant to be the gate itself. And it was meant to be permanent, too.

A man walked up out of the tunnel now, crossed the courtyard, and began to push the broad gates shut. Beaumont looked ahead of himself and moved on, not looking back, fairly certain that he had not seen the man before and so wouldn’t be recognized.

What are you about, old cock?
Beaumont asked under his breath, addressing himself to an imaginary Mr. Klingheimer, but as soon as he had voiced the question, the likely answer came into his mind: Klingheimer was setting up shop in Narbondo’s abandoned house and yard to bring things out of the land beneath. Deans Court was too difficult an entry, and Hampstead Heath too far away. But right here, a stone’s throw from Klingheimer’s own house, the man could do his rotten business behind high walls and no one the wiser. When Beaumont had worked for Narbondo, none of the passages beneath the house were so deep as to access the lower reaches of the land beneath. Something must have opened a way – the collapse of the Cathedral, perhaps, the explosion that had opened the great crack in the floor.

Did Klingheimer mean to close the other doors, the dog? Would he lock Beaumont out, the rightful potentate of the world beneath, the very man who had led Klingheimer to the toad forest where Narbondo was imprisoned? It came to him that he, Beaumont, might have sold his birthright for a handful of sovereigns – betrayed his father’s secret only to bring shame upon himself out of greed and stupidity. Suddenly enraged, he made a fist and struck himself in the forehead, hard enough to dislodge his hat, although it caught around his neck by the strap and hung there. He had a mind to wrench it off and leap up and down upon it, except that he was far too fond of the hat. The hat hadn’t played him false, after all. It was Klingheimer who had played him false, or was setting things in train to do so.

In fact it might be worse than that. Why would a man like Klingheimer allow Beaumont to remain alive at all once he had no need for him? Beaumont knew too much about the underworld, had seen too much of what went on in Klingheimer’s cellar of living heads. A careful man would not remain at Klingheimer’s house at all now that this was made clear. A careful man would take his bag of sovereigns and count himself lucky to keep his skin into the bargain. He would go underground, east to the sea, that’s what he would do – to Margate, where he could enter the eastern reaches of the underworld through the sea caves and never set eyes on the likes of Mr. Klingheimer again.

When he found himself nearing the alley where stood the red door, however, he had given up any idea of immediate flight. The boy Finn and the blind girl Clara were still inside the house, after all. Beaumont had befriended the boy, who had taken no unseemly notice of Beaumont’s size, and who had come into London like a hero to save his sweetheart from these low men. Klingheimer could not know that Beaumont had seen the tunnel. Beaumont knew more about his enemy than his enemy knew about him, which was a good thing. But that would soon change, and he must be gone before it did, and he must take Finn and the blind girl with him.

The fog was heavier now, although the sky was white above as if the sun was raveling the fibers of the mist. He saw someone hurrying toward him – Arthur Bates himself, waving at him.

“Avast there, Zounds,” he said. “Mr. K. wants all hands to turn out for the search.”

“I’m as turned out as can be,” Beaumont said. “What search?”

“There’s been a boy snooping in the house, a thief, most likely, and he’s got out. When the old man left for Peavy’s he was fit to be tied.”

“What’s his appearance, this boy?”

“Middling tall, roundabout fifteen years. Sandy hair. Black shirt and green stockings in his boots. He’s quick, too – sneaked past old Mrs. Skink, unlocked the door, and went straight out. She never saw him, the hag. You go down along the river and look roundabout Blackfriars. I’m to search the Temple, although if he’s got that far there’s no finding him at all, like as not, and good riddance.”

Bates turned away in the direction from which Beaumont had just come. Beaumont watched him leave, thinking things over yet again. Had Finn taken the girl with him? For it was clearly Finn who had run. If he had taken the girl, then Beaumont’s work in Klingheimer’s house was finished. He had no pressing reason to stay. If Finn had
not
run, then the girl was still a prisoner, and Finn was lost to her if they found him. Beaumont had no idea of searching Blackfriars, but went along toward the red door instead. It stood ajar, with old Mrs. Skink standing on the stoop, a vinegar face and her hair like the nest of an uncommonly stupid bird.

“I looked along by the river like I was told,” Beaumont said to her. “No sign of the boy.”

She squinted hard at him. “I didn’t see you go out, Dwarf, and your mark ain’t on the board.”

“Then you should keep your eyes in your head and not in your pocket. Mr. Klingheimer don’t want a blind woman at the gate, especially with thieves in the house. It was me who was at hand when the news broke, which is what you don’t know. And the door weren’t barred, because the boy had opened it. And you was no doubt asleep, with the doors standing open, so out I went as easy as nothing, just like the boy did, and now I’ve come back. You’re an ugly, worthless, fig of a woman, Mrs. Stink, but you’ve got a fitting name.”

He pushed past her as she began to rail at him, and he made his way upstairs toward the attic. In his head was a presentiment that things were coming apart fast. It was a bit of luck that he had left the door unbarred this morning so that Finn could get out – for that’s what must have happened if the boy escaped – and another bit of luck that the unlocked red door would be blamed on Finn and not on Beaumont, although Mrs. Skink had her suspicions. He had seen that in her face. Still and all, she couldn’t peach on him, since it would be plain that she wasn’t at her post this morning.

He went into his room and was satisfied that all was as it should be. Narbondo would not be back from Peavy’s until noon at the earliest, and in the meantime Beaumont intended to lie abed and contemplate on things. He took off his hat and set it on the table, and then removed his coat and hung it across the back of the chair before turning to the window to draw the curtain. There, framed by the casement, was Finn Conrad’s face, the wind blowing his hair aside.