The Aylesford Skull (17 page)

He was swallowing the first mouthful when two men stepped out onto the road a good distance ahead, as if to block their progress.

“Hold up!” someone shouted in that same moment, in the voice of a sea captain out-hollering a storm. It was neither of the two ahead. St. Ives looked over his shoulder and discovered that two more men sat on horseback behind them. He recognized them immediately, even at a distance – Fred and George from the Queen’s Rest. It occurred to him that they must have set out soon after he and Hasbro had departed. George waved cheerfully. For a moment St. Ives was confounded, and he very nearly waved a greeting back. Then he saw that Fred held a pistol, exhibiting it now for St. Ives’s edification.

The muddle cleared and he understood: all had been a lie. They had been practiced upon, led down the garden path. He swiveled around and looked at the two men in the road ahead. One, a big man with long, unkempt hair, held a truncheon, and the other secreted his hand in his coat, which might or might not mean something. Their own pistols were in the portmanteau behind them. He added stupidity to the day’s list of his manifold criminal offenses, noting that the big man must be close to seven feet tall – twenty stone if he weighed an ounce, his black hair hanging past his shoulders, his beard equally lengthy. Hasbro drove the wagon forward very slowly, the distance of their enemies shortening both before and behind, and no escape on either side, unless they meant to burrow into the shrubbery.

“It’s Fred and George, from the Queen’s Rest,” St. Ives said. “We’ve been duped. The pistols?”

“On top the rest,” Hasbro told him. “I took the liberty of loading them. I suggest that I endeavor to run the two ahead down, sir, so perhaps you’ll attend to our friends along behind.”

“Say the word,” St. Ives said, as they moved into the shade of an oak that arched over the road like an immense umbrella.

“Now,” Hasbro said, whipping up the horse at the same moment. St. Ives twisted on the seat, the lurching of the wagon nearly throwing him off, and clutched at the portmanteau, which he tore open, reaching inside and closing his hand upon the pistols, one of which he thrust into Hasbro’s outstretched hand. There was a heavy thud on the bed of the wagon, and he was shocked to see a man crouching upon it, having dropped from a tree limb, his hat tied under his chin. The man was grinning at him, a knife in his hand, but trying to keep his balance on the moving wagon. St. Ives flung himself forward, onto the wagon bed, lunging straight at the man, who stepped forward, although off-balance with surprise.

St. Ives felt the wagon slow, Hasbro perhaps not keen on pitching him off into the gorse. Clutching the grip of his pistol with both hands, St. Ives fired a shot straight past the knife wielder’s head in the direction of the two men on horseback, who, seeing him take hasty aim, reined in and yanked their horses aside from the path. Without pause he struck the man before him hard on the side of the face with his weighted fist, simultaneously blocking a knife thrust with his forearm. The man grunted audibly and slammed down onto his back, although he saved himself from tumbling off the rear of the wagon and held onto the knife. He was endeavoring to heave himself to a sitting position even as St. Ives grabbed the wagon’s side for balance and hit him again on his open, leering mouth with the butt of the pistol, blood spraying, the force of the blow pitching the man over backward, knife flying, his upper body disappearing from sight behind the wagon, although he held on tenaciously with his knees to the low railing at the back of the bed.

St. Ives saw that George and Fred were riding up hard behind them again, Fred holding his own pistol aloft, trying to move in close in order to make the shot count, although George, not apparently a skilled horseman, was encumbering him. St. Ives grasped his assailant’s foot, levered him upward, and dumped him onto the road, where he struck his head and sprawled out, bouncing once before being run down by George’s horse, which stumbled and fell forward onto its knees, pitching George off into the scrub along the road. Fred came along gamely, his pistol held aloft, but turned shy and veered away down a side path when St. Ives found his balance again, leveled his own pistol at him, and blew the hat off his head.

There was a general shouting ahead of them now, and St. Ives heard a gunshot. He threw his arms in front of his face in the moment that the bullet blew a splinter of wood out of the edge of the wagon bed, the splinter tearing through his coat and shirtsleeve, taking flesh with it, although he scarcely felt the wound. He knelt on the wagon bed, seeing that his current assailant stood just ahead in the road with his legs spread, aiming his smoking pistol carefully. The big man stood farther on, the truncheon held in his grasp, his arm upraised. Clearly he meant to strike the horse if the wagon came on. The forward momentum would double the force of the blow. That would surely end it.

“Rein up!” St. Ives shouted at Hasbro, and he aimed the pistol at the giant, but then swung his arm slightly and shot the man with the gun, who slammed over backward onto the road, a lucky shot if ever there was one.

The wagon bounced over the body of the fallen man as St Ives turned back and fired a shot at Fred, who had ridden close upon them again, and who was half hidden in the rising dust. Fred instantly pulled back on the reins, clutching his shoulder, his pistol sailing away. The wagon bounced again, the body flopping down in a heap, and St. Ives turned to see the giant rushing upon them, the truncheon upraised, straight up the center of the road. His face was set with a blind rage, and he was roaring, his mouth wide.

Hasbro calmly and deliberately shot the man in the arm. The truncheon dropped onto the road, and yet the giant came on, his arm hanging uselessly. The sight of two pistols at close range apparently changed his thinking, and he crashed away into the bush and was gone. The road before was empty. Behind them the body of the man who had fallen out of the tree lay crumpled and still some distance back, as did the body of the man with the pistol who had traveled beneath the wheels. The horse that had stumbled and gone down, miraculously, was gone, as were both Fred and George. St. Ives was happy about the horse. The two men lying on the road didn’t concern him overmuch.

He and Hasbro had the advantage for the moment, and by mutual unspoken consent they were underway again, moving ahead at a canter, through open country. St. Ives sat in the bed of the wagon, now, holding a pistol in his surprisingly bloody hand. The splinter of wood from the edge of the wagon bed had done its work, although there was still only middling pain. He set the pistol atop his open portmanteau, removed his coat, and pressed a kerchief to the wound, which, thank God, was shallow, the flow of blood deceptive and easily staunched. He fully expected the three survivors to make a second attempt, and he watched the road for a sign of them, ready to blow them to kingdom come this time without any ceremony. They were serious, determined men, which was troubling.

The minutes passed, and the road remained empty – no dust, no sound but the rattling and creak of the wagon and Logarithm’s hooves as he cantered along. St. Ives’s mind calmed now that the storm was past, and he clambered back onto his seat, leaving the portmanteau open.

“Narbondo is beyond our reach now,” he said flatly.

“Indeed, sir, although I would wager that he was well beyond it as soon as we turned off the highway in Wrotham. He no doubt passed along the London Road as we first assumed.”

Ahead of them lay a proper road now. When they came up to it they saw a sign at the juncture that read “Harvel,” with an instructive arrow pointing west. They turned in that direction, bound once again for the Gravesend Road. Another wagon moved along ahead of them in the near distance, and there were farms on either side once again. They were safe from another surprise, but two hours out of the way now – a fact that St. Ives forced out of his mind.

“Fred and George needn’t have followed us,” he said to Hasbro. “That seems to be telling. We were doing well enough on our own once we had taken their advice.”

“Precisely, sir. We were gone off on a fool’s errand, and would have found ourselves in this very spot in any event.”

“Which means that they intended to lure us into the countryside in order to murder us, not merely to slow us down.”

“It would seem so.”

“Narbondo is certainly capable of murdering us for mere sport,” St. Ives said, “but it seems wasteful to send five men to accomplish it.”

“I believe that you miscalculate, sir. His desire to murder for pleasure is a weakness in the man. Certainly Narbondo has reason to hate the both of us, but I’m convinced that he fears us as well, or something like it. We’ve repeatedly interfered with him, and he was very nearly brought to bay at the Chalk Cliffs and was thwarted on Morecambe Bay. He must by now suspect that he overreached himself when he lingered dangerously in Aylesford. When he kidnapped Eddie, he put a spade through the hornets’ nest, sir, and he knows it.”

St. Ives thought again of his conversation with Mother Laswell, and his words to Alice came back to him. The entire business of the Aylesford Skull and the portal to the land of the dead might well
be
nonsense, as he had insisted – surely it was – but Narbondo did not see it as nonsense. He saw it as something considerably more dangerous than that – something worth sending five men to waylay them on the road. Hasbro was in the right of it again. This was something much more than old grudges. St. Ives had trivialized it to his own and his family’s peril. But John Mason hadn’t trivialized it, nor had Mother Laswell or her vivisectionist husband, nor did Narbondo. There was a trail of dead people down the years, and St. Ives and Hasbro had nearly joined their ranks, because St. Ives had compelled himself to see the entire business as tiresome nonsense.

As if he had just learned a useful lesson in the dangers of stupidity, easy assumptions, and shallow logic, he thought again of his ill-fated interlude two weeks ago in London – of the notebooks and their theft and the part he had played in the entire wretched business. The thing was clear to him suddenly, as if a shade had been drawn back. It had been a night-and-day swindle – the notebooks, their disappearance, and the botched attempt to buy back something that quite likely hadn’t been worth a tinker’s dam to begin with – a swindle that had ended in bloody death for a desperate man who was a mere pawn, and a cartful of regret for St. Ives.

The whole thing had the virtue of being a multifarious lesson, however, and, if nothing more, he knew now the place where they were bound in the great city of London, and how they might come to terms with the man they would find there after stabling their horse and wagon. It was the first sensible thing that had come into his mind since he had heard Mrs. Langley pounding away on the scullery door. It wasn’t much of a victory, but he had been a damnably dull creature this past twenty-four hours, and even this small victory put an edge on him again.

FIFTEEN

THE GOAT AND CABBAGE

T
he fish and seaweed reek of Billingsgate Market hung in the warm air along the Thames, the stone walls of the vast fish market doing little to contain it. The smell filled Finn with memories, recalling the days that he had worked with Square Davey, the oyster dredger, and had spent his time on the river, or loitering along Lower Thames Street, watching the boats come into the Custom House or the sunset from London Bridge or the hundreds of tall ships in the Pool. At night there was Toole’s Theatre, and Mr. Woodin’s Carpet Bag Wheeze, Mr. Woodin diving into his bag in the disguise of Martha Mivens and climbing out moments later as Major Bluster, better than anything old Duffy had put up during Finn’s years in Duffy’s Circus. It had been easy enough to sneak into Toole’s and save the odd penny, and he smiled at the memory of it, although it was not a thing he would readily tell Alice or the Professor. He wondered, though, what was playing at Toole’s this evening and whether the old dodge would still serve. But there was no discovering it, no going back.

A score of oyster boats were moored along the wharf that was commonly called “Oyster Street.” Early this morning they would have been swarming with people looking to purchase oysters by the bushel basketful, dripping with sand and sludge, brought upriver from the Thames Estuary, the best from Whitsable and points farther south. Finn could easily picture the early morning crowds, the sailors taking their ease, the salesmen shouting, the baskets drawn dripping from the hold, the coffee houses serving out coffee and bread and butter.