The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (12 page)

At the same moment that the gunshot stunned my ears and I threw myself witlessly to the ground, I felt a spray of blown-apart chalk pepper the back of my head, and I realized that the bullet had gone wide, had struck the wall behind me. Narbondo corrected his aim in the heavy, ear-ringing silence that followed, gesturing me to my feet again. He began to utter something, but before the first words were out of his mouth, a shadow filled the doorway, and there stood the Peddler, an evil looking truncheon in his hand, what’s sometimes called a “slung shot”—a heavy iron shot with a flexible handle, meant to kill or maim.

“I heard the gunshot, Doctor…” he started to say, and then he saw me standing there, my face still drawn with shock. “Good day to you Mr. Owlesby.”

I said nothing. There was scarcely enough space in the small room for another person, and so he remained there in the doorway, digging into his pocket and removing the drawstring bag that he had taken from Hasbro. He handed it across to Narbondo, who fished out the large green stone from within and held it up between his eye and the window. Then he laid it on the table top, picked up a stoppered bottle of some sort of chemical, opened the bottle, and with a glass rod dipped out a droplet of the liquid and touched it to the emerald. A faint wisp of smoke rose from the surface. Narbondo shook his head sadly and swept the emerald onto the floor beneath the table, as if it were worth nothing.

“Mr. Burke,” he said, “I suggest that you either don one of the asbestos caps or retire from the scene so that we can continue our experimentation. You’ve carried out your work admirably, and I thank you for it. I’ll make my thanks more tangible in due time, but at the moment I intend to put Busby’s interesting device to further tests. Professor St. Ives has made himself a willing subject, and it’s time that we put him through his paces, as the quaint saying goes. You might want to adjust your cap, Mr. Owlesby.”

The Peddler turned to leave, and in that very moment there was the sound of a heavy thud, and the man was precipitated bodily back into the room, sprawling on the floor, blood flowing copiously from his scalp onto the white chalk. Alice stepped into the doorway now, holding the oak bar from the door. There was cold murder in her eyes. She looked at St. Ives, lying blessedly still now, and then at Doctor Narbondo, who still held the pistol, which apparently meant nothing to her.

There was a long silence as she stared Narbondo down, and I believe that I saw doubt in his eyes for the first time. She reached into a pocket in her waist now and withdrew the fortified emerald, which she had clearly fished it out of the teapot before following me down the cliff, intent upon bringing it to Narbondo herself, choosing to be the one to decide its fate and the fate of her husband.

Narbondo and I stared at the emerald in her open palm, the silence heavy in the room, the world waiting. Then, breaking that almighty silence, there was the sound of a distant, very powerful explosion, and beyond the window I saw a perfect storm of birds flying skyward, and the air was rent with their calling.

“Alas,” said Narbondo, shaking his head sadly. “I’m afraid that we’ve tarried too long with our experiments, and…”

“He’s murdered Hasbro,” I said to Alice, interrupting him. “They lured him to the lighthouse, locked him in, and detonated an infernal device.”

“Of course,” she said, her voice steady. “His baseness knows no bounds. It’s a Devil’s bargain, giving him the stone, and I choose not to bargain with the Devil.” And with that she calmly and deliberately flung the fortified emerald, square through the center of the window. It glinted for a green moment in the sunlight and then soared out of sight, bound for the depths of the Channel. Submarine or no submarine, Narbondo would never in life find it.

“Well done!” Narbondo said, affecting his usual bonhomie. But his voice was pitched too high, so that he sounded rattled. He looked down at the Peddler, seeming to notice him for the first time, and he lost himself in a sudden, tearing rage and kicked the man savagely in the back of the head. The pistol shook in his hand, and when he aimed it in my direction, I took a step backward. Narbondo bent at the knees, groping for the cast away emerald beneath the table. He slipped the emerald into his pocket, and then awkwardly picked up Busby’s lamp, yanking it loose from its wires, all the while watching us, murder in his eyes.

“Out, you go,” he said simply.

Alice dropped her oak club. Narbondo wouldn’t give her a chance to use it a second time. He was a careful man, was Narbondo. He had been surprised once, but that would be the end of it. We were at his mercy.

“Downward,” he said simply, and I set out down the long steep flight of stairs that led to the moored submarine. I knew but one thing—that I would not allow Alice to board that submarine while I had any life left in me. Soon enough we stepped down onto the boards of the dock. Away to seaward stood the sheer wall of the cavern. There was no sign of an opening of any sort, but seawater was perpetually sucked out from somewhere beneath the wall, and then, after a moment, it swept back in again, the submarine rising and falling on the surge. The entrance to the sea cave, then, lay hidden beneath the surface of the sea.

Narbondo, ever vigilant, fiddled with the latching mechanism on one of the porthole panels on the side of the metal ship, swinging open the panel. I stepped in front of Alice, crowding her back toward the stairs. “See to St. Ives,” I whispered.

“Silence!” Narbondo croaked.

But instead of silence there came a growing clamor from above, where Tubby and Gilbert heaved along downward, already halfway to the landing outside the room where St. Ives was held prisoner. From out of that room, as if on cue, staggered the Peddler, truncheon in his hand. Hearing the clatter above him, he turned stupidly and lifted the truncheon as if the mere sight of it would give Tubby pause. But pause wasn’t in it for Tubby. Inertia carried him down the last few stairs, and he was swinging the blackthorn even as he came along, cracking the Peddler on the shoulder with twenty stone of moving weight behind the blow.

The Peddler would have been knocked into a cocked hat, if there had been one, but there was not. There was empty air at the edge of that precarious landing. He endeavored to catch himself, wind-milling his arms like a man in a play before toppling over the edge. We watched him fall, shattering himself on the rocks in shallow water, the ocean washing in around him, crabs scuttling away to safety. Tubby stopped just short of the brink and leaned heavily against his stick. But already Uncle Gilbert was rampaging down the stairs, death or glory in his eyes, his sword unsheathed. I saw Narbondo’s pistol rise to stop him, and I sprang forward, clipping Narbondo’s arm near the elbow. He fell backward with a grunt, the pistol clanging on the metal of the ship and dropping into the dark water. He rolled sideways, back into the vessel, and then sprang to his feet like an ape and reached out to claw at the hatch in order to yank it closed. But he was hindered by Busby’s lamp, which he still held on to. He was desperate to salvage it, everything else having gone completely to smash in the last three minutes. It was Alice who sprang forward and snatched if from him, yanking it away viciously. He let out a wild groan, feinted as if to climb out onto the dock again, then slid back into the bowels of the submarine, slamming shut the hatch despite my endeavoring to stop him.

We busied ourselves in trying to find a way in, thinking to haul Narbondo out by his boot heels, but there was nothing to do but hammer on the sides of the submarine as it sank slowly into the dark water with an upsurge of bubbles. There was a humming noise, and lights sprang on within, shining through the portholes and illuminating in the water around it a garden of waving waterweeds and darting fish. Slowly the vessel glided forward and downward, and within moments the lights winked out as it passed from the cavern into the open ocean.

We released St. Ives from bondage straightaway, Alice naturally taking charge. She was solicitous, but left St. Ives his dignity—no fawning over him, only a few tears, her emotion passing away quickly, but enough of it for St. Ives to take heart. You could see the change in his face, the lifting of the clouds that had darkened his sensibilities that distant-seeming night at the Half Toad. Although he managed to accompany us without aid, he obviously knew little of where he was or how he had got there. We trudged tiredly along, Uncle Gilbert regaling us with the tale of the taking of the keeper and of persuading him to give up the location of the hillside cave, and then of persuading the Tipper and his crony to climb into Saratoga trunks, which Uncle Gilbert suggested be trundled down onto the dock now in order to be cast into the sea.

Neither Alice nor I had the heart to say anything about the explosion, although the truth would soon be known—sooner than I anticipated, in fact. The great periscope mirror was of vague interest to St. Ives in his still-fuddled state, although it was of monumental interest to me, for there in plain sight stood the Belle Tout Light and the keeper’s cottage, perfectly whole.

The cottage door opened even as we watched, and out walked the keeper himself, looking back and apparently saying something through the open door. He carried a crate full of items that he had apparently looted from the cottage and lighthouse.

“Forsooth!” Uncle Gilbert cried. “The villain returns! We should have burnt his eyes out when the poker was hot! I mean to say…” He glanced at Alice and left off sheepishly.

“I’m persuaded that it’s Hasbro’s good luck that he
did
return,” I said. And it turned out to be true, which we discovered when we followed Tubby and Uncle Gilbert out through the cave into the midday sunlight of the Downs. The keeper, having been ignominiously chased off by our friends, had sneaked back to the cottage to recover a purse of money from beneath a hearthstone. One can only imagine his surprise when he found Hasbro tied into an overturned chair and the infernal device ticking away, getting ready to blow the entire place to flinders. In a desperate effort to save his hidden loot, he had fetched the device out through the open door and hurled it off the cliff, apparently setting off the bomb, which did no more than frighten the sea birds. Then he had prised up the hearthstone, retrieved his purse, filled a crate with odds and ends, bid Hasbro a good day, and went away again.

It was we who untied a grateful Hasbro. Tubby’s figurative elephant had been knocked about, but was happily reassembled. St. Ives showed signs of recovery, and so to enliven him further we repaired to the cavern, where we made a brilliant lunch of the would-be contents of Doctor Narbondo’s larder, including several bottles of superb wine—I can’t recall quite how many. The rest of Narbondo’s considerable stores eventually found their way to Uncle Gilbert’s house, small payment for services rendered. As for the Tipper and Mr. Goodson, we took them along down to Eastbourne, secure in their Saratoga trunks, where we left them in the care of the authorities.

§

Several weeks later, after Alice and St. Ives had returned from their holiday on Lake Windermere, we revisited the Downs on a balmy, early summer day, only to discover that the hidden entrance to the cavern had collapsed in what appeared to have been an explosion. Boulders of shattered chalk littered the ground without, and the once-dense shrubbery was blown to leafless, broken sticks. We walked out to the edge of the cliffs, where we discovered that the hand-line down the face of Beachy Head had been cut away as well. Determined to see the adventure through, we made our slow and treacherous descent along the narrow trail, only to discover that the great stone that had sheltered the cleft above the Channel had fallen inward—more likely
drawn
inward, if that were possible—blocking the entrance so effectively that the cavern had become the domain of sea birds and bats and other creatures small enough to find their way in through cracks and crevices. Narbondo had evidently returned to Beachy Head, either to make his fortress secure or to destroy it.

We spent the remainder of the morning scouring the Downs near the copse where we had hidden on that fateful morning, searching for the lens of Narbondo’s fabulous periscope. It was a wonderfully sunny day, and yet there was no telltale glint of sunlight on glass. The lens must have had a clear view of the Belle Tout light and the meadow roundabout it, and so must have been in plain sight, and yet it was maddeningly undiscoverable. After a time the idea came into my mind that we must be looking at the lens but not seeing it, the victims of a master illusionist. I was possessed by the uncanny certainty that we ourselves were at that very moment being observed in our fruitless meanderings—that somewhere in the depths of the chalk, Dr. Narbondo was even then gazing into his mirror, his hands on the spokes of the ship’s wheel, his mind revolving upon schemes of revenge.