The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (14 page)

Godall, incredulous, plucked his pipe out of his mouth and squinted. “You’re telling us he broke into the house to steal the plans for this fabulous sausage machine?”

“Not a bit of it. I rather believe he was after something else. He’d been at the floor with a prybar. He’d seen me slip the plans into the cache. I’m certain of it. But he couldn’t get at them. I’ve a theory that he balanced the casement open with a stick so as to be able to shove out in a nonce. But the stick slipped, the casement banged home and latched, and in a panic he snatched up the nearest set of plans and ran for it, thinking to be out the back before I awoke. The cook surprised him.”

“What can he do with these plans?” asked the Captain, tapping his pipe out against his ivory leg.

“Not a living thing,” said Keeble.

Godall stood and peered out to where wind-whirled debris danced and flew along Jermyn Street in the night. “For my money Kelso Drake will market such a device within the month. Not for profit, mind you—there wouldn’t be much profit in it—but as a lark, to thumb his nose at us. He was after the perpetual motion engine then?”

Keeble began to assent when a banging at the door cut him off. The Captain was out of his chair at once, his finger to his lips. There was no one beyond the seven of them whom they could trust, and no one, certainly, who had any business at a meeting of the Trismegistus Club. Kraken slipped away into a rear chamber. Godall shoved a hand beneath his coat, an act which startled St. Ives.

At the newly opened door stood a young man who was, largely because of a disastrous complexion, of indeterminate age. He might have been thirty, but was more likely twenty-five: of medium height, paunchy, brooding, and slightly stooped. The smile that played across the corners of his mouth was evidently false and served in no way to animate his cold eyes—eyes ringed and dark from an excess of study under inadequate light. He seemed to St. Ives to be a student. Not a student of anything identifiable or practical, but a student of dark arts, or of the sort who wags his head morosely and knowingly over cynical and woeful poetry and who has ingested opiates and stalked through midnight streets, without destination, but out of an excess of morbidity and bile. His cheeks seemed almost to be sucked inward, as if he were consuming himself or were metamorphosing into a particularly picturesque fish. He needed a pint of good ale, a kidney pie, and a half-dozen jolly companions.

“I am addressing a meeting of the Trismegistus Club,” said he, bowing almost imperceptibly. No one answered, perhaps because he had addressed no one or perhaps because it seemed as if he expected no response. The wind whistled behind him, trifling with the tattered hem of his coat.

“Come in, mate,” said the Captain after a long pause. “Pour yourself a glass of brandy and state your business. This is a private club, you see, and no one with a full deck would want to join, if you follow me. We’re all idle and we have little regard for hands, you might say, looking for a sail to mend.”

The Captain’s speech didn’t wrinkle the man in the least. He introduced himself as Willis Pule, an acquaintance of Dorothy Keeble. Jack’s eyes narrowed. He was certain the claim was a lie. He was familiar with Dorothy’s friends, and even more, he was familiar with the sorts of people who could likely be Dorothy’s friends. Pole wasn’t one of them. He hesitated to say so only out of a spirit of hospitality—it was the Captain’s shop, after all—but the man’s very presence became an immediate affront.

Godall, his hand yet in his coat, addressed Pule, who hadn’t touched a glass despite the Captain’s offer. “What do
you
suppose we are?” he asked.

The question seemed to take Pule aback. “A club,” he stammered, looking at Godall, then glancing quickly away. “A scientific organization. I’m a student of alchemy and phrenology. I’ve read of Sebastian Owlesby. Very interesting matter.”

Pule chattered on nervously in an unfortunately high voice. Jack was doubly insulted—first at the mention of Dorothy, now at the mention of his father. He’d have to pitch this Pule into the road. But Godall got in before him, waving his free hand and thanking Pole for his interest. The Trismegistus Club, he said, was an organization devoted to biology, to lepidoptery, in fact. They were compiling a field guide to the moths of Wales. Their discussions could be of no use to a student of alchemy. Or of phrenology, for that matter, which, insisted Godall, was a fascinating study. They were awfully sorry. The Captain echoed Godall’s general sorrow, and Hasbro instinctively arose and showed Pole the door, bowing graciously as he did so. A silent moment passed after Pule’s ejection. Then Godall stood, pulled his coat from its hook, and hurried out.

St. Ives was astonished at Godall’s so quickly and handily ejecting Pule, who was, to be sure, not at all the right sort, but who might have been well intentioned. There could be little harm, after all, in his praising Owlesby, though Owlesby’s experimentation was not entirely praiseworthy. In fact, when he considered it, St. Ives wasn’t sure what part of Owlesby’s work Pule had such admiration for. None of the rest of them could enlighten him. No one, apparently, knew this Pule.

Kraken peeked out of the rear chamber, and Captain Powers waved him into the room. Godall and Pule were forgotten for the moment as Kraken, at the Captain’s bidding, spouted the story of his months as a hireling of Kelso Drake, the millionaire, punctuating it with accounts of his readings into scientific and metaphysical matters, the deep waters of which he sailed on a daily basis. And what he found there, he could assure them, would astonish the lot of them. But Kelso Drake—nothing about Kelso Drake would astonish Bill Kraken. Kraken wouldn’t put up with the likes of Drake, not for all the money the man possessed. He gulped at his scotch. His face grew red. He’d been fired by Drake, threatened with a thrashing. He’d see who was thrashed. Drake was a coward, a pimp, a cheat. Let Drake get in his way. Drake would reel from it. Kraken would show him.

Had Kraken news of the machine, asked St. Ives delicately. Not exactly, came the answer, it was in the West End, in one of Drake’s several brothels. Was St. Ives aware of that? St. Ives was. Did Kraken know which of the brothels it might be in? Kraken did not. Kraken wouldn’t go into Drake’s brothels. They wouldn’t hold Drake and him at once. They’d explode. Bits of Drake would fall on London like a blighted rain.

St. Ives nodded. The evening would reveal nothing about the alien craft. He might have guessed it. Kraken was proud of himself, of the stuff he was made of. He launched suddenly into a vague dissertation on the backward spinning of a spoked wheel, then broke off abruptly to address Keeble. “Billy Deener,” he seemed to say.

“What?” asked Keeble, taken by surprise.

“I say, Billy Deener. The chap who broke in at the window.”

“Do you know him?” asked Keeble, startled. The Captain sat up and ceased drumming his fingers on the countertop.

“Know him!” cried the slumping Kraken. “Know him!” But he didn’t bother to elaborate. “Billy Deener is who it was, I tell you. And if you’re sharp, you won’t get within a mile of him. Works for Drake. So did I, once. But no more. Not for the likes of him.” And with that Kraken reached once again for the scotch. “A man needs a drink,” he said, meaning, St. Ives supposed, men in general and intending to do right by all men who weren’t there to satisfy that particular need. Moments later he slid into a chair and began to snore so loudly that Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hauled him into the back room on the Captain’s orders and arrayed him on a bed, shutting the door behind them on their return.

“Billy Deener,” said St. Ives to Keeble. “Does it mean anything to you?”

“Not a blessed thing. But it’s Drake. That much is clear. Godall was right.”

Keeble seemed to pale at the idea, as if he’d rather it weren’t Drake. A common garret thief was far preferable. Keeble poured out a draught of the scotch left in the bottle, then clacked the bottle down onto the tray just as Theophilus Godall slipped back in out of the night, easing the door shut behind him.

“I’ll apologize,” he said straightaway, “for my behavior—hardly the sort one would expect from a gentleman, which, I profess, is what I heartily wish myself to be considered.” The Captain waved his hand. Hasbro tut-tutted. Godall continued, “I hurried Mr. Pule on his way only because I knew him. He is, I’m sure, ignorant of that. He meant us no good, I can assure you. He was in the company, day before yesterday, of your man Narbondo.” He nodded at the surprised Captain. “The two struck me as being passing familiar with each other, and although we might have led this Pule along a bit to see what stuff he was made of, I thought the idea rather a dangerous one, in the light of what I perceive as a situation of growing seriousness. Forgive me if I acted in haste. My rushing away was merely a matter of desiring to confirm my suspicions. I followed him to Haymarket where he met our hunchback. The two of them climbed into a hansom cab and I returned with as much haste as propriety allowed.”

St. Ives was stunned. Here was a fresh mystery. “Hunchback?” he asked, swiveling his head from Godall to the Captain, who squinted grimly at him and nodded. “Ignacio Narbondo?” Again the Captain nodded. St. Ives fell silent. The woods, apparently, had thickened. And as mysterious as the rest of it was the mere fact that Captain Powers was so well acquainted with Narbondo, quite apparently had an eye on the machinations of the evil doctor. But why? How? It wasn’t a question that could be asked outright.

And Langdon St. Ives wasn’t the only one mystified. Jack Owlesby, perhaps, was the one among them most seething with angry curiosity. He hardly knew the Captain, who, it seemed to Jack, carried on a strange sort of business for a tobacconist. He knew Godall not a bit. He was certain of only one thing—that he would marry Dorothy Keeble or blow his brains out. The slightest hint that she was being swept unwittingly into a maelstrom of intrigue made him fairly burst with anger. The idea of Willis Pule flattened him with irrational jealousy. His window, he reminded himself, overlooked the Captain’s shop. He’d be a bit more attentive in the future; that was certain.

It was almost one in the morning, and nothing had been accomplished. Like a good poem, the night’s doings had aroused more questions, had unveiled more mysteries, than they had solved.

The seven of them agreed to meet in a week—sooner if something telling occurred—and they departed, Keeble and Jack across the road, Hasbro and St. Ives toward Pimlico, Theophilus Godall toward Soho. Kraken stayed on with the Captain, unlikely to awaken before morning, despite the shrieks of the wind rattling at the shutters and whistling under the eaves.

THREE
A Room with a View

The open doors of the public and lodging houses along Buckeridge Street were wreathed with smoke, which wandered out to be consumed by the London fog, yellow and acrid in the still air. A gaunt man could be seen through one such door, sitting at a table in a dim corner, half a glass of claret before him, boldly clipping the gats off counterfeit half crowns and filing the edges smooth with a tiny, triangular iron. He’d been at the work all evening, tirelessly tossing cleaned blue coin into a basket and covering the heap with a scattering of religious tracts that prophesied the coming doom.

He employed no agents to sell the coin, preferring to distribute it at greater profit and peril through the faithful—his lambs, who understood that they did the work of Shiloh, the New Messiah. They’d be very pretty coins, once they’d been plated, and would further the work of God. The time approached when such work would be at an end. The Reverend Shiloh had honed the coming of the apocalyptic dirigible to the day. Twice it had passed in the early morning, and the last time, more than four long years ago, it had appeared to him out of the west, emblazoned by a dying moon, its impossibly animate pilot peering down out of the heavens.

Historically speaking, the current years should have been fraught with disaster and portent, but recent months had little to recommend themselves beyond the crowning of the Queen as Empress of India and a spate of lackluster scuffling in Turkestan. The next month would see changes, though—that was certain—changes that would knock the Earth askew of its axis and which, Shiloh knew, would reveal the truth of his monumental birth and the identity of his natural, or unnatural, father. It had been twelve years since he’d confronted Nelvina Owlesby on a balcony in Kingston, a blooming trumpet flower vine behind her, shading the two of them from a noon sun. She, in a passion of momentary spiritual remorse, had confessed to him the existence and the fate of the tiny creature in the box. But she was unfaithful. She had recanted, and disappeared into the Leeward Islands that night, and for a dozen years he had waited to see if she had cheated him. The day was nigh. And in the long night to come no end of people would pay. In fact, it was easier to count the few who wouldn’t, scattered here and there about London, passing out tracts, doing his work. Bless the lot of them, thought Shiloh, tossing another coin into the heap. “As ye sow,” he said, half aloud.

More than anything he would have liked to see the ruination of those who had condemned his mother, who had diagnosed her dropsical when she knew that she carried within her the messiah; those who had denied his very existence, who scoffed at the notion of the union of woman and god. But they were dead, the filth, long years since—beyond his grasp. And so he carried out his father’s work. He was certain that the tiny man in the box, the homunculus possessed by Sebastian Owlesby, had been his father. Let the doubting Thomases doubt. There was no end of gibbets in hell.

Idly he snipped a gat with a scissors, rubbing the slick coin with his fingers and gazing out toward the street at the hovering fog. If there was the slightest chance, the remotest chance, that the hunchback could resurrect his mother, Joanna Southcote, whose body lay beneath the loam of Hammersmith Cemetery—if the vanished flesh could be regained, revitalized…Shiloh clutched at his basket, overwhelmed at the thought. The act would be worth a thousand of Narbondo’s animated corpses, a million of them. They weren’t, after all, ideal converts, but they worked without protest, demanded nothing, and thought not at all. Perhaps they were ideal converts. Shiloh sighed. The last of his coins was clean.