The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (21 page)

He extricated his head slowly, careful not to start an avalanche of nautical debris. In his hands he held the hidden box. A thrill of fear and excitement rushed along in his veins, washing away all rational thought. There it was again—the voice, tiny and distant, as if someone were trapped, perhaps, in the wall. He could understand none of it. He wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he wanted to understand it, and was smitten with the wild certainty that the voice spoke from within his own head—a devil.

He was possessed. He’d read Paracelsus. It struck him at once that this was almost certainly a matter of Mumia, that the woman who’d lured him to the den where he’d been beaten was a witch. She’d used him, sensing that he was burdened with Mumia from the bodies he’d carted about London in the night. The sins of his past were rising like spectres, pointing at him. He shook with fear. It was
more
whisky he required, not less. He silenced the tiny voice, clacking his teeth to shut out the noise, then leaped in sudden horror as the noise turned into a fearful shouting.

He banged down the lid of the chest and jumped clear. The outer room was a tumult. That’s where the noise had come from! Kraken peered around the doorjamb, only to lurch back into the comparative safety of the dark room. Kelso Drake stood without, in the open doorway of the shop. He’d come at last. Having Kraken beaten and shot hadn’t satisfied him. He’d come to finish the job. Kraken pressed back into the room, bumping against a closed window. He unhooked the latch, swung it open, and crawled out across the sill and slid into the mud of the alley, where he lay breathing heavily. He stood up, casting a glance over his shoulder at Spode Street, then loped away toward Billingsgate. In a few hours the thronging crowd at the fishmarket would hide him and his prize from his enemies.

SEVEN
The Blood Pudding

The pounding startled the lot of them, except, perhaps, Godall, who wore on his face a look of shrewd curiosity. The Captain took a step forward as if to open the door, but it was thrown open almost at once by Kelso Drake, who smiled benignly and bowed just a bit before striding into the room. Keeble leaped up and threw his coat over Jack’s lap to hide the toy.

Drake stood just inside the door, bemused in his top hat, looking about him at the shop with the air of a man half baffled that such a place could exist, and coming to the conclusion that perhaps it could, given the quality of the men whom he confronted. He swept an invisible fleck from his sleeve and rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth.

“Light?” asked the Captain, holding a long match aloft.

Drake shook his head and squinted.

“Rather eat them, would you?” said the Captain, tossing the match into a bowl. Keeble had gone white, a peculiarity Drake seemed to relish.

He smiled at the toymaker. “You’ve brought it along, then,” he said, nodding at the half-concealed box in Jack’s lap. “It’s good when a man sees reason. The world is too full of unpleasantries as it is.”

“The only unpleasantry I can see,” cried the Captain, reaching beneath the counter, “is you! Get out of my shop while you can still stand on yer pegs!” And with that he hauled out a braided leather cosh the length of his forearm and slapped it against his ivory leg.

Drake ignored him. “Come, come, my man,” he said to Keeble “Hand it across. The machine will do as well as the plans. My workmen can puzzle it out.”

Jack was bewildered. Only Keeble and St. Ives entirely understood. St. Ives groped beside his chair for the neck of an empty ale bottle. Here was a dangerous man. It quite likely wouldn’t come to blows—that wasn’t Drake’s way. But the man who’d tried to purloin Keeble’s plans was quite clearly the domino player on Wardour Street. They’d best all be cautious. Who could say what sorts of ruffians waited in the shadows outside?

“You’ve had my answer,” gasped Keeble, shaking visibly. “It hasn’t changed.”

“Then,” said Drake, removing a chewed cigar from his mouth, “we’ll attempt coercion.” He stood silently for
a moment as if lost in thought. The rest of the company was frozen, waiting for Drake’s pronouncement. But instead of threatening and bribing, he merely tipped his hat and turned toward the door, saying, “
Very
pretty daughter, that Dorothy of yours. Reminds me of a girl I had once…Where was it?” He turned once again toward Keeble with a mock questioning look on his face, only to find Jack catapulting out of his chair in a fury. The box flew, Keeble caught it, and Jack punched wildly at Drake, missing the leering face by a foot and sprawling into Godall, who reached across and grasped the Captain’s wrist as he brought the sap back for a swing that would have left Drake senseless.

The millionaire had feinted toward the door to avoid Jack’s blow, and saw the Captain’s attempt out of the edge of his eye. The look on his face changed from leering indifference and amusement to black hatred in an instant, and his hat flew off onto the floor as he checked his feint and jerked around in anticipation of the blow. But Godall still held the wrist of the furious Captain Powers, and Drake recovered, edging just a bit toward the door.

He stooped to retrieve his hat, but the Captain, stepping forward, pinned it to the floor with his peg leg, smashing the crown sideways, then, transferring the cosh to his free hand, flattened the hat utterly with three quick blows.

“That’ll be your head, swabby, if I catch you around here again. You or any of your bully boys. You’re filth—bilgewater, the lot o’ ye, and I’d just as soon stamp you to jelly as look at ye!”

Drake’s grin was palsied. He neglected the hat, turned as if to say one last thing to Keeble, but never got it out. The Captain, jerking free from Godall, struck Drake on the shoulder, sending him sprawling through the open door, then crouched, grabbed at the ruined hat and sailed it out into the night like a flying plate, banging the door shut in its wake. He opened a fresh bottle of ale and poured it into his glass with a shaking hand. Godall sat down. The Captain drained half the glass, turned to his aristocratic friend, and said, “Thanks, mate,” then sat down himself.

Jack was once again possessed of the box. He stared at a spot on the floor, thoughtful or embarrassed. Keeble seemed to be staring at the same spot. St. Ives cleared his throat. “This business is growing curious,” he said. “I don’t half understand why we have to be embroiled in such complications—as if Narbondo’s machinations aren’t enough. Now we have two villains to deal with. We keep the weather eye on one of them, and all along the other one’s watching us. And, I’m afraid, gentlemen, that I’ll have to leave you to it—my train departs King’s Cross Station tomorrow morning at ten sharp, now that the oxygenator is finished. I can’t afford to put if off. Conditions are almost right.”

Keeble waved his hand haphazardly. “Drake is my affair,” he said, sighing, as if he were tired of the whole issue. “I’m not sure I won’t sell him the plans. What difference would it make?”

“You can’t!” cried Jack, half rising from his chair. And just as he shouted, lightning lit the road as if it were midday and thunder rattled the windows, rolling away for almost a minute before silence fell. Rain thudded against the panes and fell off, then thudded again in a wash of great drops that whirled and flew in the wind. The abrupt arrival of the weather seemed to furl Jack’s sails, for he slumped into his chair and was silent.

“The lad is right,” said Godall, knocking his pipe against the edge of a glass ashtray. “Drake mustn’t have the engine. He’ll have what’s coming to him and no more—no less, I should say. I’ve come up with a bit of information myself that will, if I’m not mistaken, satisfy all of you on several points. Drake and Narbondo are in league, I mean to say. Or at least the one does business with the other. I’ve taken a room across from the doctor’s cabinet—Drake has visited Narbondo more than once.

“I followed the two of them yesterday afternoon—not together, mind you; Drake wouldn’t be seen abroad with Narbondo. They met at a public house in the Borough, a low sort of place that appears to have sprung up fairly recently. It’s at the back of one of those old sprawling innyards, long ago fallen into disuse, and even the local people avoid it. There’s rooms, as I say, that back up onto an alley; if there’s a front entrance, I couldn’t find it. Likely enough it lets out into the old inn, which is a regular warren of gables and attic rooms and hallways that seem to lead nowhere. If a man was scouting out an appropriate location for an opium den, he’d have to look no farther. There’s not much else could be done with it, though.

“Anyway, these rooms—three of them with the walls broken out to connect them—let out onto the alley. There’s not a window in the alley wall, and it’s dark as pitch inside the pub and cold as a winding sheet. Luck for me, in fact, for I’m certain that if they’d gotten a glimpse of the cut of my clothes, they’d have seen me out.”

Godall paused over his pipe and studied the street, where sluicing rain was illuminated every minute or two by ragged lightning.

“Damn, but there’s a draft in here,” said the Captain. He pulled a plaid muffler from under the counter and wrapped it round his shoulders, then waved his pipe at Godall as if to suggest he resume his story.

“There’s nothing to identify the place but a curious sign over one of the alley doors, and not a hanging sign either, but painted on and ill done: The Blood Pudding, it reads. Inside were a dozen or more men, sitting idle, not speaking, mind you, and there weren’t more than two of them had anything to drink. Even those weren’t interested in their glass, although one kept peering at it as if there was something in among the bubbles to see, as if he
remembered
that there was something there he liked mightily once, but couldn’t quite fathom it now. The odd thing about him was that he looked as if he’d been dead for a month.

“It wasn’t just lack of sun, either. There was something unwholesome about him—about all of them, for that matter, that all the fresh air wouldn’t undo. One stood up after consuming a quantity of the most loathsome-looking black pudding and walked face first into the wall before he got his bearings and set a course for the door.

“Kelso Drake appeared a quarter of an hour after the doctor, who was involved, at the time, in a meal consisting entirely of live birds—sparrows if my knowledge of the science of ornithology is not amiss. He caught and consumed them beneath a drape that hung to the floor. The nature of the meal was evident, for the peeping and chirping of the poor things filled the darkened room, and the rustle of their wings against the drape played against the crush and snap of tiny bones.

“Drake was taken aback, I can tell you, when the hunchback appeared from beneath the drape, chin bloodied, and a scattering of broken meats littering the table before him.”

“By God,” interrupted the Captain, standing up and peering toward the rear of the shop, “there’s a window open that shouldn’t be, or I’m a lubber.” He stumped round the counter, lit a candle, and disappeared into the room that contained, since Kraken’s visit, a half-emptied sea chest. His shout brought the rest of the club to their feet.

Gaslamps were lit and the window was pulled shut and bolted. On the floor lay the spyglass, the sextant, and two bits of oak plank. The Captain leaned into the chest, hauled out the pig and the sabers, and realized almost at once that the emerald box was gone. He slammed down the lid, threw the window open once again, and leaned out into the alley in a wash of rain. There was nothing to see in either direction when lightning obliged him by brightening the otherwise dark night. He turned to his companions, dripping rain from his beard, and gestured helplessly.

“Something stolen?” asked St. Ives, a rhetorical question, given the debris on the floor and the open window.

“Aye,” gasped the Captain, reeling toward a chair. But he hadn’t sat for more than a few seconds before he was up and through the door, bursting into Kraken’s empty room with a shout. Silence met him.

“Kraken gone!” cried St. Ives.

“The scoundrel!” shouted the Captain.

“Perhaps,” said Godall passionlessly, “Kraken himself has been the
victim
of this thief. Let’s not leap to conclusions.”

“Of course,” said St. Ives. “I’d bet on the man with the chimney pipe hat here—the one who was after the plans to the engine. I ran afoul of him myself recently. I’d bet he’s sneaked in through the casement, robbed the Captain’s sea chest, and done Kraken a mischief while Drake waylaid us in the shop; that’s the ticket.” St. Ives stroked his chin, squinting at nothing. “But why should this man
necessarily
be in league with Drake?” He addressed the question to no one, but Godall answered.

“Drake owns the house in Wardour Street—one among many. Your disguise, by the way, was a bit on the transparent side. It was me that you bumped into after you’d gotten hold of the clock.”

The captain interrupted the exchange by raging back into the room waving the almost empty whisky bottle that he’d found under Kraken’s bed. “This is all stuff!” he cried. “The man’s made off with…with my property, and no mistake. There was no man in a hat—not here anyway, kidnapping and robbing and clattering about under our noses. No, sir. Kraken’s made away with the goods, and there’s no use making up tales.”

“What goods?” asked St. Ives innocently. “Perhaps we can recover them.”

The Captain fell silent and collapsed into an armchair, precipitating a little cloud of dust. He buried his face in his hands, his anger apparently having fled in the face of St. Ives’ question. The Captain looked up at his congregated friends, started to speak, glanced at Jack, and shook his head. “Leave me to think,” he said simply, and slouched deeper into his chair, suddenly tired and old, his face lined with a hundred thousand sea miles and the weather of countless storms and suns.

Thunder rattled the casement, and the party gathered coats and hats and silently made ready to bend out into the road, awash now with the downpour. Jack and Keeble had only to cross Jermyn Street to shelter, but St. Ives and Godall had a longer journey. The muffled chiming of a clock could be heard through the pelting rain—two doleful peals that announced, more than anything else, the certainty that hansom cabs would long since have ceased to run, and that the walk, for St. Ives at least, would be a long and sodden one. The Bohemian Cigar Divan lay some half mile to the northeast, and the Bertasso in Pimlico some three miles to the southeast, but for six blocks or so, Godall and St. Ives walked together down Jermyn toward Haymarket. Neither was satisfied with the half-finished meeting. Things were hotting up at such a rate that action of some sort seemed to be called for. Biweekly meetings over cigars and ale would avail them little.