The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives (74 page)

“Our train,” Hasbro said, interrupting.

“Oh, damn our train, man.” St. Ives cast him a look of thinly veiled disgust.

“I’m afraid I must insist, sir.” He put a hand into his coat, as if he had something in there to enforce his insistence.

St. Ives was filled with black thoughts. Here was an opportunity gone straight to hell. They had him on a leash, and they weren’t going to reel out any slack line. Hasbro was deadly serious; that was the only thing that kept St. Ives in check. He knew too well that one didn’t argue with Hasbro when the man was serious. Hasbro would prevail. You could chisel that legend in stone without any risk. And when Hasbro was in a prevailing mood, he generally had reason to be. It wouldn’t do to argue.

The two of them left, proceeding directly to the station, and then, after no more than five minutes’ wait, back to Harrogate where they drove once again out to the manor, St. Ives holding on to the jar of beef broth all the way home.

At last they stood awkwardly on the meadow, near the silo door. Hasbro held the keys in his hand. It was clear that they weren’t going back into the manor. St. Ives would have liked another small glass of port before toddling off to the past again, but there he wasn’t about to ask for it. Like as not, Hasbro would have complied, but there was still such a thing as dignity. Best to do what the note had instructed, leave straightaway. He had what he came for. “I’ll be setting out now,” he said.

‘‘Best of luck, sir.’’

“I’ll see you, then, when this is through.”

“That you will, sir. I’d like to buy you a drink when the time comes.”

“You can buy me two,” St. Ives said, striding away through the weeds toward the silo. “And then I’ll buy you two,” he shouted, turning to wave one last time. Hasbro stood on the lonely meadow, watching him depart, the picture of an old and trusted friend saddened at this dangerous but necessary leave-taking. Either that or he was hanging about to make damn well certain that St. Ives wouldn’t cut any last-moment capers.

Seated in the bathyscaphe at last, he wrapped the jar in his new coat and secured it beneath the seat, then turned his attention to the instruments. He had the wide world to travel through, but ultimately he left the spatial coordinates alone, returning simply to his own time, some two hours after his first departure so that he wouldn’t run into an astonished Parsons still snooping around the silo.

He was filled with relief at being back in his own time at last, and he sat back with a sigh, regarding his surroundings. Grinning, he thought all of a sudden of the bet he’d made with Fleming. All the hindsight in the world hadn’t been worth a farthing to his future-self, had it? He still couldn’t believe that he had taken to betting on cricket matches. He simply wouldn’t. He was warned now. Who the hell had that been? The Harrogate Haberdashers? He laughed out loud. What a lark! His future-self would be hearing the news from Hasbro about now: “I what…!”

He climbed out of the machine, weary as a coal miner but still smiling. There was no sign of Parsons, nothing but silence round about him. The silo was dim, but even in the gray twilight he could see clearly enough to know that something had changed—something subtle. Terror coursed through him. This wasn’t good. This was what he had feared. It was exactly what his future-time self had been desperate to avoid.

He couldn’t at first determine what it was, though. His tools lay scattered as ever…Then he saw it suddenly—the chalk marks on the wall. The message was different now. In clean block letters a new message was written out: “Harriers 6, Wolverines 2.”

Mrs. Langley’s Advice

There was too much danger in staying. St. Ives would have liked to sleep, to eat, to sit in his study and look at the wall. The beef broth, though, wouldn’t allow for it. Time—that commodity that he ought to have had plenty of—wouldn’t allow for it. It would insist on going on without him, piling up complications, altering everything. Never had he been so aware of the ticking of the clock.

He sneaked into the manor by way of the study window, remaining long enough to fetch out a purse containing twenty pounds in silver, and then, without so much as a parting glance, he loped back out to the silo, climbed into the machine, and sailed away in the direction of midcentury Limehouse.

He arrived a week earlier than he had on his previous visit. The child wouldn’t be so far gone this time around. It was just after midnight, and to St. Ives, looking down over Pennyfields, it seemed as if nothing had changed. There was no fog, and the moon was high in the sky. But the old woman sat as ever, smoking her pipe amid the scattered junk slopping out of the door of the general shop. Sailors came and went from public houses. The seething Limehouse night was oblivious to the tiny tragedy unfolding in the attic room above.

He pulled the garret window open and stepped in carefully, setting the jar beneath the sill. The child slept on the floor, although not under the window now. He breathed heavily, obviously already congested, lying on his back with the ragged blanket pulled to his chin. But for the sleeping child, the room was empty.

“Damn it to hell,” St. Ives muttered. He
must
talk to the mother. He couldn’t be popping back in twice a day to feed the child the beef broth. He could think of nothing to do except leave, climb back into the bathyscaphe and reset the coordinates, maybe arrive three hours from now, or maybe yesterday. What a tiresome thing. He would make the child drink the broth now, though, just to get it started up. Trusting to the future was a dangerous thing. A bird in the hand…he told himself.

There was a noise outside the door just then, a woman’s high-pitched laughter followed by a man’s voice muttering something low, then the sound of laughter again. A key scraped in the lock, and St. Ives hurried across toward the window, thinking to get out onto the roof before he was discovered. The door swung open, though, and he stopped abruptly, turning around with a look of official dissatisfaction on his face. He would have to brass it out, pretend to be—what? Merely looking grave might do the trick. Thank heaven he had shaved and cut his hair.

In the open doorway stood the woman who must have been the child’s mother. She was young, and would have been almost pretty but for the hardness of her face and her general air of shabbiness. She was half drunk, too, and she stood there swaying like a sapling in a breeze, looking confusedly at St. Ives. Sobering suddenly, she peered around the room, as if to ascertain that she hadn’t opened the wrong door by mistake. Then, as her countenance changed from confusion to anger, she said, “What are you doing here?”

The man behind her gaped stupidly at St. Ives. He was drunk, too—drunker than she was. A look of skepticism came into his eyes, and he took a step backward.

“Who’s this?” asked St. Ives, nodding at the man. He pitched it just as hard and mean as he could, as if it meant something, and the man turned around abruptly, caromed off the hallway wall, and scuttled for the stairs. There was the sound of pounding feet and a door slamming, then silence.

“There goes half a crown,” she said steadily. “I’m not any kind of bunter, so if you’ve been sent round by the landlord, tell him I pay my rent on time, and that there wouldn’t be half so many bunters if they didn’t gouge your eyes out for the price of a room.”

“Not at all, my good woman,” St. Ives said, surprised at first that she was moderately well-spoken. Then he realized that it wasn’t particularly surprising at all. She had been the wife of a famous, or at least notorious, scientist. The notion saddened him. She had fallen a long way. She was still youthful, and there was something in her face of the onetime country girl who had fallen in love with a man she admired. Now she was a prostitute in a lodging house.

She stood yet in the doorway, waiting for him to explain himself, and St. Ives realized almost shamefully that she held out some little bit of hope—of what? That she wouldn’t have lost her half crown after all? St. Ives, her eyes seemed to say, was the sort of man she would expect to find in the West End, not your common sailor rutting his way through Pennyfields before his ship set sail.

“I’m a doctor, ma’am.”

“Really,” she said, stepping into the room now and closing the door. “You wouldn’t have brought a drain of gin, would you? A
doctor,
is it? Brandy more like it.” She gave him what was no doubt meant to be a coy look, but it disfigured her face awfully, as if it weren’t built for that sort of theatrics, and it struck him that a great deal had been taken away from her. He could hear the emptiness in her voice and see it in her face. The country girl who had fallen in love with the scientist was very nearly gone from her eyes, and there would come a day when gin and life on the Limehouse streets would sweep it clean away.

“I’m afraid I haven’t any brandy. Or gin, either. I’ve brought this jar of beef broth, though.” He pointed at the jar where it sat beneath the window.

“What is it?” She looked at him doubtfully, as if she couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard.

“Beef broth. It’s an elixir, actually, for the child.” He nodded at the sleeping boy, who had turned over now and had his face against the floor molding. “Your son is very sick.”

Vaguely, she looked in the child’s direction. “Not so sick as all that.”

“Far sicker than you realize. In two weeks he’ll be dead unless we do something for him.”

“Who the devil
are
you?” she asked, finally closing the door and lighting a lantern on the sideboard. The room was suddenly illuminated with a yellow glow, and a curl of dirty smoke rose toward a black smudge on the ceiling. “Dead?”

“I’m a friend of your husband’s,” he lied, the notion coming to him out of the blue. “I promised him I’d come round now and then to check on the boy. Three times I’ve been here, and each time there was no one to answer my knock, so this time I let myself in by the window. I’m a doctor, ma’am, and I tell you the boy will die.”

At the mention of her husband, the woman slumped into a chair at the table, burying her face in her hands. She remained so for a moment, then steeled herself and looked up at him, some of the old anger rekindled in her eyes. “What is it that you want?” she asked. “Have your say and get out.”

“This elixir,” he said, setting to work on the child, “is our only hope of curing him.” The boy awoke just then, recoiling in surprise when he saw St. Ives huddled over him.

“It’s all right, lamby,” his mother said, kneeling beside him and petting his lank hair. “This man is a doctor and a friend of your father’s.”

At the mention of this, the child cast St. Ives such a glance of loathing and repugnance that St. Ives nearly toppled over backward from the force of it. The complications of human misery were more than he could fathom. “Do you have a cup?” he asked the mother, who fetched down the tumbler from the sideboard—the same tumbler that St. Ives, a week from now, would use to…

What? He reeled momentarily from a vertigo that was the result of sudden mental confusion.

“Careful” the woman said to him, taking the half-filled tumbler away.

“Yes,” he said. “Have him drink it down. All of it.”

“What about the rest of it?” she asked. “A horse couldn’t drink the whole jar.”

“Two of these glasses full a day until the entire lot’s drunk off. It
must
be done this way if you want the boy to live.”

She looked at him curiously, hesitating for a moment, as if to say that life wasn’t worth so much, perhaps, as St. Ives thought it was. “Right you are,” she said finally, returning the glass to the sideboard. “Go back to sleep now, lamby,” she said to the boy, who pulled the blanket over his head and faced the wall again. She patted her hair, as if waiting now for St. Ives to suggest something further, as if she still held out hope that he might be worth something more to her than the half crown she had lost along with the sailor.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, stepping toward the window. “I’ll just…” He looked down at the jar again. In his haste to leave he had nearly forgotten it. Now he was relieved to see it, if only to have something to say. “This has to be kept cold. My advice is to leave it on the roof, outside the window.”

In truth, the room itself was nearly cold enough to have done the trick. It was a good excuse to swing the window open and step through it, though. Hurrying, he nearly fell out onto the slates. He stood up, brushing at his knees, and leaned in at the window.

“Leaving by way of the roof?” she asked, making it sound as if she had been insulted. It was clear to her now that this was just what St. Ives was doing. He wasn’t interested in what she had to sell. He had chased off the sailor, and to what end? Now she would have to go down into the street again…“Stairs aren’t good enough for you?” she asked, raising her voice. “Don’t want to be seen coming down from the room of a
whore?
Precious bloody doctor…”

He nodded weakly, then checked himself and shook his head instead. “My…carriage.”

“On the roof, is it?”

“Yes. I mean to say…” He hesitated, stammering. “What I meant to say was that there was the matter of the money.”

“To hell with your filthy money. I wouldn’t take it if I were dying. Lord it over someone else. If the boy gets well, I’ll thank you for it. But you can bloody damn well leave and take your money with you.”

“It’s not
my
money, madam, I assure you. Your husband and I wagered a small sum four years back. I’ve owed him this, with interest.” St. Ives pulled out the purse he’d taken from his study in Harrogate, full of money that would no doubt mystify her. She would make use of it, though. Here goes another twenty, he thought, handing it in to her. She paused just a moment before snatching it out of his hand. It would buy a lot of gin, anyway…Ah well, he would win it back from Fleming someday in the hazy future. Time and chance, after all…

He tipped his hat and walked away across the roof, having nothing further to say. He would trust to fate. He climbed in through the hatch and calibrated the instruments, his head nearly empty of thought. Then he realized that during the entire exchange in the room he had never once associated the sick child with Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. There seemed to be no earthly connection between the two. Even the look on the child’s face at the mention of his father—a shadow so deep and dark that it belied the child’s age. Well…it didn’t bear thinking about, did it?