Mr. Timothy: A Novel (32 page)

Colin sidles away just then, disappears into the mist, and for a few seconds, I lose track of him entirely--and then that sward of wavy black hair swims back into my ken. The cheeky, coal-eyed face climbs towards mine.

--And look at it this way, Mr. Timothy. You can't run worth shit, you don't mind my sayin'. You want a healthy pair of legs, you do. And a cove like me don't often get a chance for real live Ad-ven-ture, now do he? Not like this. So lay on, Mr. Timothy! That's what I got to say to you. Lay on!

I nod, very slowly.

--Cat got your tongue, Mr. Timothy?

--No. I was only wondering if your parents know about you.

--'Course they do.

--I mean, do they
know
you? As I do?

--Oh, Gawd, no. Better that way, ain't it?

Colin procures the clothes: pilot's trousers and oilskin caps and a pair of black pea coats purchased from the patrons of a public house in Coventry Street. (Colin's coat is too large for him by half; he has to roll up the sleeves almost to the elbow.) I am in charge of the gear: a rope ladder and a butcher's hook, secreted in a tartan knapsack.

And a butcher's knife, filched from Mary Catherine's pantry.

The cab we engage from a taxi stand in Piccadilly Circus. It is a little down at the heel, as hansoms go, with doors that sag and sigh, and ratty curtains over the side windows, but even so, it is positively sprightly in comparison with the cabman. He is as grim, as bedraggled, as mournful-looking a gentleman as ever sat atop a carriage, and rather than give our mariner's garments the suspicious eye they deserve, he seems to derive from them fresh evidence of the world's perfidy.
Oh
, he seems to say with every crevice of his being.
It's come to this, has it
?

--What's your name, driver?

With a long, trailing groan, he confesses:

--Adolphus.

--Very well, Adolphus. I wish to engage your services for the rest of the evening. Is that acceptable to you?
Job, at his deepest ebb, never took things so hard as Adolphus. He cups his hands and raises them to the heavens, as though he were pleading his case with the Great Celestial Mediator.

--"Acceptable!" He asks if it's acceptable! As if a fellow had any choice on a night such as this, with a wife and three young 'uns home abed, and who knows where I'll be when they wakes up? "Acceptable?" he asks!

--You'll be paid liberally for your time. And your discretion.

--Oh, "discretion!" It's
discretion
he wants!

This invites yet another discourse on the absurdity of free will (at least as practiced by one Adolphus the cabman), a treatise that carries on even after Colin and I have taken a seat inside and closed the door after us. The roar of the city dies down, but the dirgelike cadences of Adolphus continue pelting the roof of the cab like so many dirt clods.
Dame Fortune's grindstone...family obligations looped round a man's feet like an anchor...rentin' a cab and horse no better than slavin' on a sugar plantation, and that's a fact
. Our cabman, it turns out, is a bard of despond, and now and then, when the vehicle comes to a halt and the wind quiets, his lyric odes chime out in the chill night air.

--And he wants me to be
discreet
, does he? Why don't he ask me to be wealthy, too? That'd be summat. Adolphus with money in his pocket! He could afford to be discreet
then
, couldn't he?

The longer I listen, the more pleasing the sound becomes--as fixed and reiterative as a lullaby. Adolphus's children, I think, must go to sleep to this every night. Even now, I can imagine the sound worming its way back home to them, through the extinguishing blanket of fog that lies all round us. Although it would be hard to imagine anything penetrating this, for we are in the grip of a real London particular: whole buildings not so much hidden as excised, monuments decapitated, light swallowed entire. The fog doesn't roll in; it pushes outwards with a hydraulic force. It boils like the sea, burns in our nostrils, and eats at our skin.

And under its influence, my shivering fits return, like old family. I sit there in the corner of the cab, in the darkness, with Father's comforter wrapped round, a finger inserted between my teeth to keep them from chattering. And even still, my body shakes for all it's worth, and whenever a streetlight manages to bleed through the mantle of fog, it illuminates the look of wavering consternation in Colin's eyes.

Danger is one thing
, those eyes say.
A companion unfit to meet danger...that's another
.

The church bells strike the nine o'clock hour, and still the fog rises, muffling the very tongues of the bells, and as we continue northwards, the city itself seems to fall back before the wall of tawny grey. But here it is not the fog that has pushed the buildings away, for this is Portland Place, widest and grandest of all London avenues.

At least by repute. There is not tonight a great deal of grandeur on display, or if there is, it has been wiped clean by the fog. A sepulchral quiet reigns, and that quiet is not so much dispersed as reinforced by the orderly clatter of hooves, the creaks of waggons, all dying in the uttering.

--Driver! Stop here, if you please. The cab lurches to a halt. From above comes the aggrieved timbre of Adolphus:

--What's he goin' on about? We hain't reached the address yet.

--We'd prefer to walk the rest of the way, if that's all right with you.

--Oh, if it's all right with
me
.

The reins are thrown down, and with a polysyllabic sigh, Adolphus lowers himself to the ground, jerks open the carriage door, and stands there, glaring at our feet.

--No doubt you'll expect me to wait.

--Why, yes, if you would be so good.

--As if it were up to me. As if
I
had any say in the matter.

Not even the coin I place in his hand will brighten his mood; it is simply one more shackle in the chain that binds him to earth. With a gesture of martyred resignation, he pockets the copper and hauls himself back up to his box.

--Oh, driver, one last thing. We may have an additional passenger when we return.

--Additional? There's but room for two in this cab.

--And we may be in something of a hurry.

--"Hurry," he says. More freight, he tells me. It's all the same to him, I'm sure. Don't worry hisself 'bout Adolphus, shiverin' up on his box, coldest night of the year....

We leave him there, inveighing against his fate. And whether he leaves off for want of an audience, or whether his sound goes the way of all sound, his voice does, in fact, dissipate after a few paces. How I miss it! With nothing to attend to now but the sound of our boots scuffing against the pavement, and the occasional shrouded carriage trundling past, it becomes all the harder to stave down this feeling...this feeling of what? Of being alone, I suppose. Irrevocably alone.

For that is what we are, Colin and I, with our threadbare disguises, our knapsack full of tools, our barely concealed infirmities. By our own design, we have ventured into the griffin's lair alone. May God guide us out again.

Ah, yes. The bravado of two hours past has seeped away and left behind only loose fringes of possibility, unravelling even as I contemplate them. Perhaps, I think, perhaps it really would have been better to fall back on the vast institutional presence of Scotland Yard. And yet even at this moment of deepest doubt, I cannot trust men like Inspector Surtees with my holy work. For Inspector Surtees never knew Gully. He can never know this rage, this
heat
...scalding me through and through.

O, Gully. If you could but reach down from whatever aerie you now occupy, part the fog before my eyes and show me all the things I long to know. How many of them came at you? Did you have time to cry out? And was
he
there? Lord Griffyn? Baring his golden fangs? Did he offer his card?
And what of Philomela, Gully? Tell me why they spared her. Tell me what end they have in mind for her.
Tell
me.

--Mr. Timothy?

Colin's hand is on my arm. He peers into my face, waiting for something to dawn.

--What is it?

--You can stop now. We're
here
, ain't we?

We're here.

But Griffyn Hall registers to my dazed eyes as nothing more than an absence. Only after standing for some time before the front gate, only by letting my eyes relax into the mist, do I realise that this absence is, in fact, Griffyn Hall's intention. From its very genesis, perhaps, before even the Griffyns arrived, the house was doubling back on itself, sprouting an arcade of beeches on each side and sequestering itself behind a short lawn. Forming itself into a tiny citadel of secrets.

--You two! Move along!

Standing before the gate, like a pair of Myrmidons muscling away the fog, are two representatives of the Metropolitan Police. Not on their usual rounds, that much is clear. They have been engaged to a specific purpose: to guard the citadel through the night.

Old drinking mates of Rebbeck's, very possibly. Or just as likely, two random specimens of corruption, plucked from the streets. Amazing now to think that in my weakness, in my dread, I contemplated calling in Scotland Yard. When they have already been called in.

--What, deaf and dumb? I said, move along! Smart now!

One of the Myrmidons takes a step forwards, jabs the air with his baton. Colin tips his cap and grabs my arm.

--We was just leavin', Officer.

Passing from their range of vision, I murmur a prayer of thanks that Rebbeck himself was not manning the gates. God, it seems, has granted us this one favour. And a second favour, too, in the fog, which thoughtfully conceals the eastern side of Portland Place from the western. Simply by travelling on for ten paces and then crossing the street, Colin and I are able to retrace our steps without once being seen by the constabulary. And as we creep back towards our starting point, it occurs to me that the Myrmidons' presence is the best possible sign. It means--doesn't it?--that something is happening tonight at Griffyn Hall. Something the rest of the world isn't meant to see. And unless my intuition plays me false, Philomela lies at the heart of it.

Chapter 19

WE ARE MORE CAUTIOUS ON OUR SECOND PASSAGE. Rather than broach Griffyn Hall from the front, we come at it sideways, through a neighbouring estate. Easy enough at first, just a quick hop over a low wrought-iron fence, a plunge into a high yew hedge...and then a new obstacle confronts us: the hedge itself, too dense to be breached. We feel our way along the branches, grasping for openings, the tiniest gaps, but they are too few and too small. In a panic, Colin seizes the butcher knife from the knapsack and begins hacking a passageway of his own. But the branches fight us at every step, scratching and clawing, retreating only to surge back again. It takes us ten minutes more to carve out an opening--an illusory one at that, for though it bids fair to admit us, it changes its mind once we are admitted, and only by crawling and scrabbling our way through do we at last emerge on the other side, roughly halfway down the lawn to Griffyn Hall.

We crouch there, in our torn trousers, staring at a house that looks no closer than when we began. Indeed, from this vantage, it seems altogether more distant, an heirloom from the age of Palladio. Through the miasma, we see, some thirty feet away, a high flat white facade as sheer as a chalk cliff, topped by a dome one twentieth the size of the Pantheon's and yet conceived on a grand enough scale to lend the entire building a colossal impression.

Dismal to report: Griffyn Hall is no less a citadel on closer viewing than it appeared from the street. The only access I can espy is a flight of stairs running parallel to the house and climbing towards what looks to be a pedimented Greek-temple portico. Before we can apply ourselves to those stairs, though, we must first make peace with Griffyn Hall's advance patrol: a row of statues running perpendicular from the house to the street. Greek nymphs, each a perfect duplicate of the others, all in flowing robes, with eyes that pierce the fog...and gaze directly at us.

Fortunately for us, their marble enchantments have denied them a voice, so they make nary a peep as we crawl across the grass to them, and when we reach the middlemost maiden, she even presents her stone heel to us as a kind of good-luck charm (Colin takes the liberty of rubbing it) and her stone tunic fans round us, concealing us from both the Myrmidons on the street and the house itself, which now lies perhaps fifteen feet off.

--Stroke of luck, whispers Colin.--I'll take statues over dogs any day.

And just then the curtain of fog parts to reveal not a dog but a far more fantastic sentry: an Indian peacock in full regalia, dragging its long train of turquoise and bronze feathers, each feather tipped with an iridescent eye, and each eye peering up at us with a baleful interest.

The anomaly of him is almost too much. He should be mewed up this time of year, shouldn't he? He shouldn't have this profusion of feathers, not with the mating season so long past. Just our luck: a hothouse bird, following his own season. His train of feathers spills forwards, vibrating and shimmering, sending ripples of light into the grey.

--What's it doin', Mr. Timothy?

--He's...I believe he's courting us.

Just then, the fog gives way to another cock--irresistibly drawn by the commotion and exploring us with the same degree of priapic interest as his companion. And then, right behind, yet another peacock, and then another, and still one more. An alien race, inexorably crowding in, with not a hen in sight, and no other end in view but us.
Or rather, no end in view but my young friend. It is Colin whom the birds circle with their frank, appraising air. It is Colin for whom they flutter and flash and make their lovelorn entreaties.