The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (6 page)

“Well, you have a copy of the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence, first published in English in 1717, although this is obviously a later edition. The main interest in them for most readers is a dispute over the nature of space and, indeed, time. Here's Mach's
The Analysis of Sensations
from 1897. Mach suggested that only sensations were real, and nothing else, if I understand him right, although it's not entirely my area.”

He read out some more names that meant little to me—“Planck . . . Einstein, quite the coming chap”—and then frowned.

“Hullo,” he said. “He ordered various pieces by William James. Some of these are a bit outside our usual remit:
Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research
, Volume 3;
The Varieties of Religious Experience
;
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
. That's a curious one. Not uninteresting, but certainly curious.”

I waited. Sometimes, my own patience astounded me.

Richards smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Fascinating stuff. James refers to something called the ‘multiverse,' a hypothetical set of possible universes, of which this universe is just one part.”

“And what does he think is in these other universes?”

“I'm not sure he's got that far, but I can't confess to being an expert on James. Judging from Mr. Maulding's list, though, I'd guess that he'd become interested in the nature of reality. Complex business, especially for the general reader.”

I thanked him. I wasn't sure there was any more to be learned here, or any more that I might have a chance of understanding.

“By the way,” I said, “have you ever heard of a bookseller called Dunwidge, or Dunwidge & Daughter, in Chelsea?”

“Can't say that I have,” said Richards. “We can ask Young Mr. Blair, though. He knows every bookseller in London.”

He led me up various flights of stairs to a small section devoted entirely to works of psychology. A slight man in a dark suit, who must have been eighty if he was a day, was snoozing quietly behind a till.

“Old Mr. Blair's brother?” I inquired.

“Strangely enough, no,” said Richards. “They weren't even related, and they didn't get on at all. Young Mr. Blair wouldn't even contribute half a shilling for the wreath.”

Mr. Richards gently woke Young Mr. Blair, who took the disturbance well. In fact, he seemed rather pleased that somebody wanted to talk to him. Perhaps at his age he was just glad to have woken up at all.

“This is Mr. Soter, Mr. Blair. He has a question about a bookseller.”

Young Mr. Blair smiled and mumbled a string of words, out of which I managed to pick two, “delighted” and “help,” which boded well.

“I was wondering if you knew anything of a bookseller in Chelsea named Dunwidge?” I asked.

Young Mr. Blair's face darkened. He scowled. He shook his head. An index finger appeared and was waved in an admonitory manner. Another string of muttered words emerged from his lips, blending into one long caw of disapproval. Eventually, spotting that I was somewhat at a loss to make any sense of what he was saying, he managed to force out some coherent, if short, sentences.

“Dreadful man,” he said. “Daughter worse. Umm . . . Occultists! Fire and brimstone sorts. Quite. Quite. Old books.
Nasty
books. Not science. Not science at all.”

He leaned forward and tapped his finger on the counter.

“Mumbo jumbo,” he said, enunciating each syllable carefully.

“I need an address for them,” I said. “I've been told they're in Chelsea, perhaps on the King's Road.”

Young Mr. Blair returned to his mutterings, but he found a scrap of paper and, in elegant copperplate, wrote down an address for me. I thanked him for his help and prepared to leave, but he stood and gripped my arm with a surprisingly strong hand.

“Stay away from 'em,” he urged. “Bad sorts, both of 'em, but the daughter most of all!”

I thanked him again, and he released his grip and resumed his seat. His eyes closed, and he returned to his slumbers.

Richards was quite impressed.

“You know,” he said, “I haven't seen him that excited since Old Mr. Blair died . . . ”

I WENT
next to Chancery to report my progress, or lack thereof, to Quayle, but he was not in his chambers. Only Fawnsley was present, scratching disconsolately with his fountain pen at a document thick with legalese, like a sick hen scrabbling for a piece of stray corn in the dirt.

“Took your time getting here,” he said, in lieu of a greeting.

“What do you mean by that?” I replied. “I've only been gone for one night. I'm not a miracle worker.”

Fawnsley tapped the calendar on his desk. It was made of various blocks of ivory that could be turned to change the day, the month, and the year. The calendar read 15 October.

“Your calendar is wrong,” I said.

“My calendar is never wrong,” he answered.

I sat down heavily in a chair by the wall. I had lost a week. It wasn't possible. It simply wasn't possible. I had taken the train on the eighth. I had the ticket in my pocket. I had kept it so that Quayle wouldn't question my expenses. I searched my pockets and my wallet for the ticket, but it was gone.

“You look ill,” he said.

“Trouble sleeping,” I said. I stared at the calendar. Not possible. Not possible.

Fawnsley chewed a question silently in his mouth. I could actually see his jaws working.

“You're not . . . ?”

He trailed off. The shadow of Craiglockhart hung over us as surely as if the military psychiatric hospital itself lay outside Quayle's chambers, and the sun was setting behind it.

“No,” I said. “I'm fine.”

He didn't look as though he believed me. I tried not to look as though I cared.

“Did you get my telegram?” he asked.

“I did. Ten thousand pounds: a man could buy a lot with that kind of money.”

“Well, have you discovered what the man in question
did
buy with it?”

“Since you informed me about it only this morning, I may need a little more time,” I said.

Again, Fawnsley gave me that look. I corrected myself. I didn't want Fawnsley reporting back to Quayle that I was troubled, or unreliable. I needed the money.

“Sorry,” I said, making the best of a bad situation. “I meant that I have only this morning received some information, based on what was contained in the telegram.”

“And what is this great leap?”

“I think Maulding might have spent the money on books.”

“
Books?
” squawked Fawnsley. “He could buy a whole bloody library of books for ten thousand pounds.”

“He already has a library,” I said. “When a man has as many books as Maulding, he stops being interested in the ones that are easy to acquire, because he already has them. Instead, he starts seeking out rare volumes, and the rarer they are, the more they cost.”

“And what kind of rare volumes are we talking about?”

But before I could reply, Fawnsley was considering his own question.

“Surely it's not literature of a depraved nature? He never struck
me as the type.”

“It depends upon what one means by ‘depraved,' I imagine.”

“Don't come the philosopher with me, man. You know precisely what I mean.”

“If you're referring to works of an erotic nature, then, no, I don't think that was Maulding's weakness. He had some volumes of that type in his library, but not many. He did seem to have developed something of a fascination with the occult, though, and I couldn't trace all the books on the subject that he had acquired. Some of them appear to be missing, although I admit I might have overlooked a couple on his shelves. There are only so many titles that one man can examine at a time.”

“Occult? Erotica? You've become quite the expert, haven't you, and all that in just a week? Clearly, our money is being well spent. We may not have Maulding, but you're improving your education by leaps and bounds.”

There it was again: a week, a week.

“It's just common sense. Tell Quayle I'll be in touch when I have something more solid to offer him.”

“What about receipts?” said Fawnsley.

“You'll get them.”

“I should hope so. We're not made of money, you know.”

“I never thought you were, Mr. Fawnsley,” I said. “If that was the case, you'd invest in a better suit of clothes, and the manners to go with it.”

Fawnsley seemed about to say something in reply but decided against it. I knew what he thought of me already. Through a half-open door, I'd once overheard him carefully trying to steer Quayle away from hiring me shortly after I'd left Craiglockhart. I'd done some work for Quayle before the war, much like the work I was doing now, but back then Fawnsley had yet to make his appearance. His predecessor had been a clerk of the old school named Hayley, who was wounded at Sevastopol and drank port with his lunch.

“He wasn't even a proper officer,” Fawnsley had protested, a reference to the fact that I had been promoted from the ranks. “Worse, he is a broken man!”

And Quayle had replied, “He was more of an officer than you or I, and a broken man can be fixed, especially one who wants to mend himself.”

That was why I was loyal to Quayle. He had faith in me. It also helped that he paid me for my services: not well, and not fast, but he paid.

“Good-bye, Mr. Fawnsley,” I said, but he bade me no farewell.

IT WAS
already dark when I reached the address in Chelsea occupied by Dunwidge & Daughter, Booksellers. It lay in an area known as World's End, named after a pub at the western end of the King's Road. In the last century, this area had been something of an artists' colony: Turner, Whistler, and Rossetti lived and worked there, and it still had something of a bohemian feel to it.

Dunwidge & Daughter, though, seemed intent on maintaining a discreet presence, and the only indication that the terraced house might shelter a business lay in a brass plate on the front door, engraved with a pair of interlocking letter
D
's. I rang the bell. After a minute, a bald man wearing a suit jacket and waistcoat over his otherwise bare chest opened the door. He held a cigarette in one hand and a brass candlestick in the other.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Dunwidge?”

“That's me. Do I know you?”

“No. I'm here on behalf of Mr. Lionel Maulding, one of your customers,” which was not so much a lie as an approximation of truth. “My name is Soter.”

“It's late, but I suppose you'd better come in if you're here on Maulding's business.”

He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside. The house was
dimly lit but reminiscent of Maulding's own home in the sheer number of books that lined the walls of the hall. A stairway led up to the next levels of the house, but Dunwidge directed me through a door on the right. It was one of two interconnected rooms that served as a kind of shop floor, with books on tables and shelves and, in some cases, securely locked away behind glass-fronted and barred cabinets.

“He send you with his shopping list, then?” asked Dunwidge. He put the cigarette in his mouth and gestured with his right hand. “Well, hand it over. Let's see what he wants this time.”

I didn't answer. There was a table by the window in the main room, and on it rested an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. It was clearly where Dunwidge worked when he had no customers to trouble him. The rest of the table was taken up by various sheets of paper covered in handwritten symbols, part of some code that I could not decipher. I flicked through them, but they were all similarly arcane.

“What are these?” I asked.

“You might want to tell your Mr. Maulding about those,” said Dunwidge. “Very interested in them, he was, but I didn't have a full set of sixty folios to offer him, not then. They're Cipher Manuscripts. I suppose you could call them a compendium of magick.”

“What language is this?”

“English and Hebrew, mostly. It's a substitution cryptogram. It's not hard to interpret, once you find the pattern. This one came from a former Adeptus Major in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Seems he had a falling-out with Berridge over at the Isis-Urania, and Crowley, too. Can't say I blame him when it comes to Crowley. I won't have him in the house. He's a wrong 'un, and I should know: I've seen enough of them in this business. Once I'm sure that we have the lot, I'll let your Mr. Maulding know. I'll give him a good price, he need have no fear of that.”

Dunwidge lit a fresh cigarette without offering me one, and peered at me suspiciously through the smoke.

“He usually comes down here himself, does Mr. Maulding,” he said. “Always struck me as a private sort. Unusual that he'd send someone else along on an errand.”

I turned to face him.

“Mr. Maulding seems to have disappeared,” I said. “I've been asked to find him.”

“I see,” said Dunwidge. “Well, he ain't here.”

“When did you last see him?”

Dunwidge engaged in some ear-tugging and cheek-puffing. “Oh, not for two or three months or more, I would have said.”

“Really?”

“At least.”

I reached into my pocket and removed a sheaf of receipts from Dunwidge & Daughter.

“That's odd,” I said, “because all these receipts are more recent than that.”

“Well, we do a lot of business by post.”

“I'm sure. Nevertheless, Mr. Maulding made a number of visits to London in the last month, and he was not in the habit of visiting the city more often than was necessary. He was a meticulous man. He kept train tickets, notes of meals eaten and taxis taken. I've gone through them all, and it seems that your premises was his destination on more than one of those occasions.”