Beneath London (3 page)

“I don’t know him, unless you mean Sidney Franklin, the prizefighter. I knew him when he was tap-boy at the Lamb and Kid near Newgate. He was a good lad, but had his eye gouged out and his back broke in his bout with Digby Rugger. That put an end to his capers in the ring. He died a beggar.”

“I suspect that we’re referring to different Franklins. But speaking of pugilists, I’m not entirely fond of your new mate, Mr. Bingham. He’s weak, deceptive, and deeply stupid. By ‘weak’ I refer to his mind, of course.”

“His fists have come in handy a time or two. I can keep him on the straight and narrow.”

“Can you now? I’ll hold you to that. When you go into Kent a week from now, watch him carefully. If he becomes a hazard to navigation, sink him. You’ll collect his portion of the profit if you do. The decision is yours to make, although I advise you to consider it thoroughly.”

“What if this Professor St. Ives won’t play cricket?”

“He will. Harrow’s expedition will draw him into London. St. Ives put paid to Narbondo’s capers with Lord Moorgate, which cost several of us a pretty penny, and he’s a neighbor of the Laswell woman, who, as you know, mustn’t be allowed to interfere with our goals, but at the same time St. Ives must not be harmed. I have use for him. I do not resent St. Ives for his efforts, mind you. He’s a do-gooder, widely known as an honorable man, which is his chief weakness. That being said, we had best not underestimate his considerable intellect and his penchant for what is commonly called heroics. No, sir. St. Ives can be a right dangerous opponent, although also being a humble man he does not characterize himself that way, which has led others into stupidities, Ignacio Narbondo among them. I repeat that he must not be harmed. As my agent you’ll avoid stupidities as you value your life.”

TWO

I
t was a rare autumn day in Aylesford, Kent, the year 1884, a cloudless blue sky in November after a long week of Indian summer, the warm breeze stirring the lace curtains through the open casement. Langdon St. Ives sat in his easy chair with his feet on a cushioned footstool, his copy of the
Times
open on his lap: more news of the vast sink-hole that had collapsed a section of the Victoria Embankment several weeks past, swallowing shops and houses near Blackfriars Bridge.

The collapse had occurred very near the site of the destroyed Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs, a debacle that had almost cost St. Ives his life a little over a year ago, not to mention the lives of his wife Alice and his son Eddie. The Metropolitan Board of Works had managed to dam the river edge of the sink-hole, stopping the Thames from emptying into it at high tide, and planned to stuff it full of asphalt, sand, and gravel at the first opportunity.

St. Ives gazed out of the window into the far distance where a line of tall beech trees stood along the edge of Boxley Woods. Among the native trees stood copper beeches that must have been planted in a distant age, given their great size, and the air was clear enough today so that St. Ives could see the distinctly purple foliage, still hanging on. He contemplated the turning of the seasons, trying to prevent his mind from straying to the possibility that his own part in the destruction of the Cathedral had caused a subterranean shift that had ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Embankment. Perhaps the two events were simply coincidental, he thought. Surely they were. Despite his momentary uneasiness, however, the fair weather pleased him, and the mild breeze was like a tonic.

The dormant hops fields in the near distance made a stark contrast to the fields that had flourished with vivid green plants in midsummer. Small hillocks of soil covered the rhizomes and stubs of last year’s vines now, all very tidy and ready for cold weather. The dead vines had been burned, and the buds dried in the oast house and delivered to Mr. Laporte, the brewer in Wrotham Heath. Hasbro, St. Ives’s long-time friend and factotum, although by now more friend than anything else, had driven away in the wagon half an hour past to collect the several kegs of ale that St. Ives had negotiated in partial payment for the hops. Hasbro’s return would add a celebratory air to the already perfect afternoon.

A portion of the fields had been enriched experimentally with elephant dung, of which they had a fair quantity. Dr. Johnson, their resident Indian elephant, had been a birthday gift from his wife Alice a little over a year ago, and had proved to be an amiable creature, quickly becoming a member of the family and setting up a strong bond with Hodge the cat, with whom it often took a ramble. Finn Conrad, the fifteen-year-old boy who lived in a cottage on the property, was at the moment teaching the elephant to turn a capstan that opened a broad panel in the roof of the barn. Now and then cries of “Ho, Johnson!” and “Heave away, sir!” drifted in through the windows, along with the ratcheting sound of the mechanism that opened and closed the panel.

The dirigible that St. Ives had at one time intended to levitate through the open barn roof had been destroyed beyond repair when he had deliberately sailed the craft through the glass lid of the doomed Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs, of which nothing now remained – neither of the Cathedral nor the dirigible. That had occurred a year ago last spring, shortly before the coming of the elephant, and the expense of another dirigible was too great to be considered. St. Ives had purchased a hot air balloon in its stead, soon to be delivered, which would make both the elephant and the moveable barn roof eminently sensible.

“I believe I’ve got it,” Alice said, looking up from her work. She was dressed in duck trousers and a blouse of the same linen, the cloth having been washed with stones until it was soft and pliable. She was tall – very nearly six feet in her stockings – with long black hair, haphazardly arranged. She showed him a tied fly, which she held by the hook, the fly glowing in sunlight through the window. “It’s a spring dun fly. What do you think of it?”

“It’s a glorious thing. If I were a fish I’d swallow it right down, regardless of the season.” Alice looked remarkably attractive in the linen garments, which she wore only around the house – her lounging garb, she called it. His lounging garb was an orchid-embroidered Bohemian morning coat, purple velvet, very exotic, but far past the fashion and worn to a perilous extent, the once-plush nap long ago scoured off at the elbows. “What is the wing feather?” he asked.

She regarded the fly with a happy look on her face. “It’s from a starling, darling – young, before the feather darkens. There’s blue, yellow, and brown in it – you can see the colors if you look closely – and primrose-colored silk wound around the body of the fly, with a strand of yellow over the shaft of the hook. I’m afraid it’s too gay by half, but I’m fond of it as an ornament.”

Alice was particularly cheerful today, and the joy she took in tying the flies brought out her natural beauty, despite the magnifying goggles that she wore for close work, which made her eyes appear to be uncommonly large. She was rarely unhappy, thank goodness, for she had a formidable temper when she was offended, especially on someone else’s behalf, St. Ives’s included. She had, in fact, bashed a man in the back of the head with a three-inch-thick oak plank some four years past when she saw that St. Ives was threatened. He rather liked the idea of being married to a woman who could beat him to pieces if she chose to, which she would not, the two of them still being very much in love. He had never been attracted to the hothouse lily sort of woman recommended by Charles Dickens (nor had Mr. Dickens been, apparently).

“Is that your Uncle Walton’s notion of a trout fly, then?” St. Ives asked. Izaak Walton, famous among fishermen, was Alice’s two-centuries-removed uncle. Her Aunt Agatha Walton had been a keen fisherwoman and amateur naturalist. Alice had inherited her passion for fishing from Aunt Agatha, along with her aunt’s house and property when the old woman had died two years ago. The fish inhabiting the River Medway, not two hundred yards from their front door, had no doubt celebrated when they heard that Aunt Agatha, their old enemy, had passed away. Now they dwelt in fear of Alice.

“No, it’s not Uncle Walton’s,” she said turning back to her desk and picking up a book that had been propped open with a glass paperweight.
Practical Fly Fishing
the book was titled. “I ordered it from Murphy’s catalogue, along with this batch of feathers, hooks, silk, and wire. It’s alleged to be irresistible to a trout.”

“The
book
, do you mean? It must make tolerably soggy reading, although perhaps it’s all one to a fish.”

She removed the goggles and gave him a look of feigned exasperation, but she couldn’t maintain it, and her smile returned to her face.

“You’re… irresistible yourself today,” St. Ives said to her. “We might repair to the bedroom for a nap, if we find ourselves… sleepy.” Their children, Eddie and Cleo, had been taken to Scarborough to stay for a week with Alice’s grandmother, old Mrs. Tippetts. Mrs. Langley, who was the St. Ives’s housekeeper, cook, and nanny, had gone along with them, being great good friends with Grandmother Tippetts. The house was quiet, in other words, and the empty afternoon stretched before them.

“A
nap
?” Alice asked. “Are you making love to me? You must be, because you’ve lapsed into euphemism. Make your meaning plain, for goodness’ sake. In what sense am I irresistible? I’m wearing linen trousers, after all, that are stained with paint and glue, and my hair appears to have been pinned up by a madwoman. Is it my wit alone that attracts you?”

“Only obscurely,” St. Ives said. “It’s the magnifying goggles that make my heart race. You have the eyes of a frog when you wear them. You know that I’m partial to frogs.”

“I do know that, although I make an effort not to let it worry me, nor am I persuaded by flattery. Is it too early in the day for a glass of cold shrub? We’ll take it upstairs, perhaps, in order to add to the general dissipation, if I’ve puzzled out your intentions correctly.”

“Yes. I mean to say that you’ve puzzled them out. And it’s not at all too early for anything having to do with dissipation. I’ll mix a pitcher at once.” He stood up and walked toward the kitchen, hearing in that moment someone coming up the porch steps, and through the front window he saw that it was the postman, who, when he opened the door, gave him two letters and a copy of
Cornhill Magazine
. He set aside the magazine for Finn Conrad. One of the letters – from Scarborough – was addressed to Alice, and turned out to announce that everyone had arrived safely and that the seaside weather was satisfactory. The other was from their absurdly wealthy friend Gilbert Frobisher, a retired steel magnate and captain of industry who had recently endowed the avian wing of the British Museum’s Natural History building: the Bird Wing, as Gilbert referred to it at every opportunity, always happy to laugh at his own witticism. Gilbert was good company, generous to a fault, and his happy laughter often set others to laughing, which made him value his own humor all the more highly.

St. Ives sat down on the footstool and slit the envelope open with his penknife. “A missive from Gilbert Frobisher,” he told Alice.

“The answer is no,” Alice said. “You know I’m tremendously fond of Gilbert, but if he intends to lure you away from me again, I’ll take a very dim view of it. I’m already taking a dim view of it, and I have no idea of the contents of the letter. Surely he doesn’t have another excursion planned. The man is mad with doing things, and he seems to have no alternative but to involve his friends. That’s the consequence of retiring from more useful work.”

“Not at all. He’s just himself returned from his second voyage to the Caribbean,” St. Ives said to her, “and he’s written to say that someone has found a fully preserved great auk in the cavern left by the sink-hole along the Thames.”

“That’s worth the three-penny stamp, surely.”

“You’re correct in that regard. The great auk has been extinct for forty years, last seen in Iceland, I believe. Bones and feathers wouldn’t have excited anyone beyond a murmur, although it’s moderately strange that it was living a subterranean existence. A preserved bird is something else indeed, Alice.” St. Ives read further, and then said, “There’s some fungal quality to the whole thing that mystifies Gilbert and his friend Dr. James Harrow from the museum. Harrow is quite a learned man, an ornithologist, you know, and a brilliant paleontologist. I run into him now and then at the Bayswater Club. Gilbert wonders whether I might come into the city to take a look at Harrow’s auk, given that I published that monograph on Paleolithic avifauna and have a passion for mushrooms and their ilk. He’s got permission from the Board of Works to explore the sink-hole cavern along with Harrow. There’s little time to lose, because the Board of Works is anxious to begin the job of filling the hole and restoring the Embankment, which is currently in perilous condition.”