The Aylesford Skull (24 page)

“I strongly suspect that to Narbondo’s mind this is merely the prelude to further villainy,” St. Ives told them. “It’s quite possible that he means to draw us in, murder us, and have a clear field. Narbondo is rumored to be engaged in some larger, infinitely evil scheme, which we will thwart if ever we can, although thwarting that scheme is secondary to me tonight. Hasbro and I will go in first. They’ll be on the lookout for us, but they have no idea of the three of you. You’ll take no unwarranted chances, but if you can find a way to come around behind them, then between the surprise of the thing and the weight of our attack, we can dispatch them quickly and beard Narbondo in his den.”

“Quite so,” Tubby said, hefting his stick. “If I can’t lay them out like wheat before the scythe, I’m a damned humbug.” He was nearly apoplectic with anticipation, and Doyle looked at him with an expression that was something between admiring wonder and professional concern.

“But we must keep in sight of each other,” St. Ives said, “each looking out for the other.” He talked around the food, telling them what news they had got from Slocumb – the alley, the arched passage, the possibility of multiple exits. The rest they would discover in Spitalfields, come what may.

“One thing, gentlemen,” he said, when they were rising to leave. “If it is within my power to do so, I mean to end Narbondo’s career this evening, by whatever means are necessary, even if we are successful in securing my son unharmed. I have cold-blooded murder in my mind; I tell you that plainly and with no compunctions. If you have any objections to that, then by all means go about your business now; it’s far the more sensible course.”

Tubby laughed out loud, which startled Doyle once again, although he hesitated only a moment before putting out his hand for St. Ives to shake. “One for all, and all for one, as the saying goes.” He winked at Tubby, who slapped him manfully on the shoulder, hard enough to knock a smaller man out of his chair. St. Ives was heartened by the high spirits, but Eddie was ever on his mind, as was Alice, and his own spirits were something less than high. George had been dead right about one thing: St. Ives could not return to Aylesford and to Alice having failed again, not this time.

TWENTY

MOTHER AND SON

F
or an anxious time, Mother Laswell had thought that Mabel was dead – throttled by the immense psychic charge of Narbondo’s presence in the room. When her friend had come to, she was physically exhausted, barely able to stagger to bed, where she fell instantly into a fitful sleep, sitting up wild-eyed from time to time as if she saw some horror right there in the room. Mother Laswell had sat with her throughout the day, listening to her feverish ramblings and sponging her brow, returning time and again to study the torn, vellum map. The planchette needle had plowed a furrow straight into Spitalfields, stopping directly above Whitechapel Road in what appeared to be a warren of unnamed courtyards and alleyways. She wished that it had somehow been more exacting, but it would have to be enough. She would depend upon her senses to lead her on once she was near her destination.

In the evening she persuaded Mabel to drink a cup of tea, after which her friend passed into a more natural slumber. Mother Laswell had left her then, along with a note that expressed her gratitude but said nothing of her intentions. Mabel needn’t be a party to the pending horror, for a horror it would surely be. Mother Laswell had gone down the stairs, taking her parasol with her, unsure whether she would return, or whether her journey would simply end tonight.

A patchy fog hung in the dark streets now, the gas lamps glowing with a gauzy, yellow light, the buildings tolerably distinct close at hand, but ghostly across the road and vanishing utterly in the distances. The stones beneath her feet were solid enough, however. Figures loomed up out of the murk, their footfalls strangely loud for the space of a few moments and then passing away into silence. She recalled the bright sunlight of her morning trek across the bridge and the press of people going about their daily business, all of it seeming almost cheerful to her now. The city had been very much alive. There was a sinister quality to things tonight, though, and she wondered where it originated – whether it was mere atmospheric stagecraft, a product of fog and shadow, or was it the offspring of her own mind, made dark by what she had become and what she must accomplish? Perhaps it was a glamor of sorts, a spell emitted from the room in which Narbondo sat alone with the ghost of his brother, his mind drawing her along through the gloom, her own mind convinced of the dull-witted notion that it was she who acted out of rational necessity.

That Narbondo had been able to project himself, to intrude upon Mabel’s conjuring, had been a vast surprise, although she saw now that it oughtn’t to have been. Narbondo was her son, after all. She should have suspected that he had the gift. She should have warned Mabel so that Mabel might have guarded against his intrusion. But she had not, and her friend had paid dearly for the oversight. And yet for all that, now that she herself was forewarned it did her little good. Narbondo could murder her if he chose, and would no doubt do just that if he knew what she intended. When she searched her heart for motherly emotions that might stay her hand, she found mere darkness.

Well
, she thought,
so be it
. She came to herself and discovered that she stood on the corner of Commercial Street and Flower and Dean without quite knowing how she had got there. She walked south, picturing Mabel’s vellum map in her mind, and, on impulse, turned the corner onto Wentworth Street, although Whitechapel lay another long stretch to the south. She abandoned the mental image of the map and pictured herself a living planchette, drawn forward now by a magnetic tugging in her second mind. Edward’s spirit was abroad, or had been; she sensed it clearly.

She slowed her pace, feeling her way with her mind more than with her eyes. Although Commercial Street had been a broad thoroughfare, Wentworth Street was narrow and crowded, and with a deviant personality, if a street could be said to have such a thing. A window opened now in the murk, and for a moment moonlight allowed her a view of a narrow byway – “Angel Alley,” a sign read – a street of mean lodging houses, the second and third stories jutting out over the first so that the street seemed narrower yet. A strumpet with a sweet face passed, clutching the arm of a sailor who was evidently drunk, the two of them entering a door that revealed a set of stairs in what was apparently a nameless lodging house. A sign in the window offered “couples beds” for eight pence. There was a reek of garbage and human filth and general decay roundabout now, but she went resolutely up the alley.

Ten steps farther on a group of four low men lounged in an alcove against a nearby wall, one of them fearsomely large and with black, lank hair and beard, his arm in a makeshift sling, another a man with a mutilated face. The filthy window beside the four appeared at first to look out from an empty house. The panes were filmed with dirt, several of them broken and stopped with rags or paper. But then she saw candlelight through the window, and the haggard, pale, slack face of an idiot child peering out. There was the sound of arguing within, something smashed against a wall, someone cried out, and there was a burst of high, drunken laughter. People moved about beyond the staring child like restless spirits in Hell.

It came to her that the squalid lanes and alleys of the rookery were densely populated despite the nearly empty streets. She felt the weight of thousands of dull, sorrowful, hopeless minds pressing in upon her own mind and soul like the fog itself. She sensed hunger and illness, avarice, too, and a grasping, roiling evil in the dark spirit of the place. She searched for hope, but found little, either within herself or in the gloom that surrounded her.

“Take a dram, mother?” one of the four men asked her, and she hurried away without answering, listening to the laughter behind her, clutching her bag beneath her cloak. No one with any sense would carry anything of value in such a place unless they wanted to be knocked on the head.

Mother
, he had said... She glanced furtively back at the men. Coincidence, no doubt.

Her temples throbbed painfully, and it came to her that her son Edward’s spirit haunted the air roundabout, as if he were standing nearby. “Edward?” she asked in a whisper, listening with her mind rather than her ears. There was a courtyard ahead, with fog swirling through it. She was drawn into it, seeing now an illuminated figure hovering within the mists, its outline coming into focus: Edward’s ghost, fully formed. His three-dimensional semblance was made solid by the fog itself, almost as solid as if he were a living boy. He seemed to see her – she was certain he did. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart felt a yearning that made her faint. She stepped forward, holding out her arms until she was bathed in his light – not the meager candle glow that had generated his ghost when she had possessed the skull, but a vivid, living illumination. Images flitted through her mind now like pictures on a screen, memories of Edward’s time on earth: Mary Eastman as a girl, the books by his bedside, a fire in the hearth, a patch of ground with his shadow swinging across it, the shadow of the rope rising from behind his head...

A wave of pain and sorrow engulfed her, and she turned her back on his ghost and staggered into the darkness. When she looked back he was gone. She saw now that a long wall divided the courtyard she stood in from the courtyard beyond. Atop the wall stood a lighted room – the same room that she had seen in the mirror this morning when she had convened with Mabel Morningstar. Narbondo sat at the table, looking out at her, Edward’s skull before him, its eyes dark. The very sight of it once again filled her with both horror and longing – emotions that should have been incompatible, but were not. She heard footfalls, and turned toward a man who stepped out of the shadows to her left. He wore a low hat with a rounded crown, which gave him the air of a country parson.

“I’m sent to convey the Doctor’s wishes, ma’am.” He swept his hat from his head and bowed theatrically. He was bald on top, his hair in ringlets like an illustration of Nero. “He beckons you up, ma’am – bids you to come freely, of your own accord.”

“Do you know who I am?” she asked, damned if she would be cowed by the man. She was in unfamiliar territory here, but that was all the more reason to be forthright. Her communion with Edward’s ghost had solidified her resolve.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “Only that the Doctor would have a word with you. I’ve been waiting this past hour, since nightfall, and now you’ve come. I’m bound to do my duty and show you up the stairs.”

“Good enough. I’m bound to do my duty and follow. I wonder, though. Did you see the ghost just now?”

“Plainly.”

“It was the ghost of my son,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

“It’s not my business to think, ma’am. I leave that to the Doctor. Will you come up?”

“Only if I know your name.”

“That would be George Kittering, ma’am, at your service.”

“You can call me Mother Laswell. The man upstairs, whom you call the Doctor, once called me ‘mother,’ and it wasn’t figurative, mind you. I am indeed his mother.”

George nodded, considering this but apparently having nothing to say. He turned around, moving toward the arched passage in the wall that loomed before them, almost obscured by fog. She was aware of footfalls behind her now, and she glanced back, not surprised to see the man who had offered her a dram of gin, followed by his three companions, the largest of the three looming a full foot above the others. She knew now that they weren’t a threat to her. Quite the contrary, they had no doubt been waiting for her, four of Narbondo’s bullies on the lookout for her appearance, perhaps to guarantee her safe passage through the rookery.

It came to her that the night suddenly had a fateful quality to it, as if something that had been scripted long ago were coming to pass. She and her murderous son were strangely of a like mind. She came to him willingly, out of need. He invited her in willingly, but what was his need? She reminded herself that it lay within her to exert her will in order to alter the script. She was a free woman and she disbelieved in fate.