The entranceway was much as it had been since 1721, when Thomas Guy had founded the hospital with a fortune he made in the South Sea Bubble. Passing between the two stone columns that flanked the iron gates, Wells entered the wide forecourt, with Boland House on his left and the chapel on the right. He knew his way about a bit, and soon found his way to the Communicable Diseases Ward, where he stopped a young medical student, his face still spotty, and asked where he might find a Miss Emma Chasubel.
“That’s her, over there,” he said, pointing to a bosomy woman shaking a thermometer at the foot of a patient’s bed. Her dark hair was piled under a nurse’s cap so crisp and white and majestic it resembled a nun’s wimple. This ward, unlike many others, featured better ventilation than usual—the long windows had been kept slightly open, despite the cold drizzle starting outside—and the beds were not only more separated, but featured netting or screens between each one and its neighbors. When she had finished with the patient, she went to a sink and table in the center of the room, washed her hands, and dried them on a fresh towel. Only then did she notice Wells standing in his overcoat, letter in hand.
“Were you waiting for me, sir?” she asked, and when Wells acknowledged that he had been, she came to him, not accepting his extended hand, but nodding politely. When he introduced himself, she appeared taken aback. “Are you sure it’s me you were looking for, Mr. Wells, and not one of the physicians?”
“Not unless it’s their name on this envelope,” he said. “Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Of course,” she said, ushering him into a private alcove just off the ward, where there were two hard-backed chairs and a little round table with a single green bud in a vase. Someone had left a book on one of the seats. Wells guessed that this was where the night nurses sat to keep watch over the patients in their charge.
He put the book on the table—it turned out to be Sons and Lovers, by that upstart D. H. Lawrence—and sat down opposite Miss Chasubel, who still seemed flustered at being in the company of such a well-known person. To make her more comfortable, he joked that he would have to send some of his own books over to complement their library.
“Oh, we would be so honored. The patients would love it!” She was a strong woman, he could see that, with a wide-open face and kind eyes as big as saucers.
Which made his task only that much harder. After a few more moments of pleasantries, Wells placed the letter squarely on the table and said, “I have brought this for you all the way from the Front.”
“You have?” She picked it up, saw that it was indeed addressed to her, and from the expression on her face, immediately recognized the handwriting. At first she appeared thrilled—but then, fearing what the letter might contain, troubled.
Lowering her voice, though there was no one near enough to hear her, she said, “Is it from Friedrich, then?”
“Yes.”
“Is he all right?”
Wells dropped his gaze, let a pause fall, and said, “I so regret having to tell you this, but no. He is not. A short time ago, he was killed in action.”
She sat as still as a stone.
“But only after saving my life.”
“He saved your life?” she murmured.
“It would be difficult to explain, but before he died, his one wish was that I find you and give you this letter.”
The letter remained unopened. “Though I hesitate to impinge on your privacy,” Wells continued, “I think it’s best if you read it now, because I will need to talk to you afterward. I can step away if you like.”
She shook her head to indicate he could stay where he was, and with trembling fingers, she unsealed the envelope and took out two or three small pages, pale blue and closely written. Wells did not want to study her as she read, so he picked up the Lawrence book and pretended to peruse the opening pages. But after a minute or so he detected that same strange scent that he had come to associate with his attacks. It was the harbinger of the pain that now blossomed between his eyes, like a match that had just been struck. His fingers squeezed the bridge of his nose, and when he lifted his eyes from the book, his vision was blurred.
The ward, gloomy to begin with, had become even darker from the rainstorm outside. A patient moaned in his bed, another coughed like a dog barking. And at the end of the ward, behind a thin muslin netting, Wells saw a man sit up on the bed. He moved stiffly, poor chap, but then, after consolidating that gain, he drew the curtain to one side and stood up. Why he wasn’t wearing pajamas, or a hospital gown, was strange enough, but the fact that he was wearing a uniform—a military uniform—came as an even greater surprise.
Wells debated whether or not he should call the man to Miss Chasubel’s attention, but she was so intent upon the letter, tears rolling down her cheeks as she turned the pages, that he thought it better to wait and see what happened next. It wasn’t as if the fellow was about to run off—his legs were wobbly, and he could barely navigate his passage between the two rows of iron bedsteads that lined the room. But as he grew closer, Wells became even more astonished and perplexed.
The uniform was gray. Prussian gray.
He could wait no longer. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Nurse Chasubel, but one of your patients has—”
The breath caught in his throat as the man staggered closer still. He doubted that Miss Chasubel had heard a word he’d just said.
The face of the man was as deadly a green as that of any soldier felled by gas in the fields. But this man, Wells knew, had not died in the fields; he had died in the filthy, labyrinthine tunnels beneath no man’s land. And no doubt he lay there still, unwanted and unmourned by anyone other than the woman now grieving, her breast heaving mightily, in the chair at this very table.
A hallucination, Wells thought, that’s all it was. Like the dead soldier in the mirror at his flat.
The man was now looming right behind the nurse’s chair, and as she dropped the hand holding the tear-stained pages to her lap, he laid a consoling hand upon the shoulder strap of her white smock.
Although she did not openly acknowledge the touch in any way—how could she, this was nothing but a ghost, and one that only he could see!—she did, for whatever reason, raise a hand of her own to the exact spot, as if unawares, and hold it there in silent communion. Von Baden’s eyes, filled with grief and inexpressible longing, rested on his beloved, before lifting to take in Wells, flattened against the back of his own chair.
“Danke schön,” he said, though again, only Wells seemed to be aware that he had spoken at all.
Miss Chasubel had fished a crumpled handkerchief from the pocket of her smock and was using it to dab her tears. “I know he was German,” she said, “but he was a good man.”
Wells nodded in agreement.
“A good man,” she repeated, reading again whatever fond farewell appeared at the bottom of the last page. “We did love each other,” she said, as if challenging him, or anyone, to deny it.
“And that is why,” Wells said, as much for her benefit as that of the silent, sad apparition behind her, “he sent me here.”
Von Baden nodded, then bent to kiss the top of her nurse’s cap.
To Wells, it seemed a pity, and a puzzle, that she could not behold him, too—though if that would have been a solace to her, he could not know.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Graf hurled his wet umbrella into the foyer, yanked off his coat, and stormed back down the stairs to his laboratory.
“You could watch where you throw that,” Circe complained, pushing the door shut against the wind and pulling off her own damp coat. “Other people live here, too.”
Oh, how Graf wished he could remedy that! He was only really happy when he was surrounded by his petri dishes and bacterial cultures, his flasks and beakers and vials. Today, however, he had had to make an exception. He had not only had to leave the confines of Crowley’s townhouse, but take this brainless girl along with him for camouflage. Ever since his narrow escape from the
Horse Guards Parade, he’d been haunted by the thought of his brass sample case, left behind among the trees. Had it been found, and worse yet, been turned over to the authorities? It did not bear his name, but the engraving did indicate that it was from the Colonial Office of Germany. He had needed to go back and see if it could possibly be retrieved, and a man strolling in the park with a pretty young woman would be far less noticeable, he thought, than a single man rooting through the brush.
When they’d set out, the weather had been clear, but by the time they crossed Birdcage Walk and entered into the spacious grounds of St. James’s Park, it was already becoming overcast. Casually twirling his furled umbrella, with Circe hanging on his arm, he had led her onto the Blue Bridge that spanned the ornamental lake, and waited there, looking around, just to make sure that no one was following him. He suspected everyone. From this central vantage point, he could see Buckingham Palace to the west and to the east the tower of Big Ben and the perimeter of the parade grounds. Several people on the bridge were feeding the ducks and the famous pelicans, whose progenitors had been a gift from the Russian ambassador in 1664.
Sometimes, at times just like this, he had to remind himself that these people were the enemy, that his mission was to help defeat them and bring their nation to its knees. He had made a fine start so far by disrupting their supply of horses and pack animals, and was already concocting a fresh batch of deadly bacteria to administer on an even wider scale. But killing these dumb creatures was only a rough experiment for the grander scheme that he had hatched—a scheme that would devastate the human populace. Once that was done, and the plague and its terror had been fully unleashed upon this proud capital, he’d have done his part—more than his part—for the fatherland. He would one day be hailed as a hero to his country, his name enshrined not only as an equal to the great scientist Robert Koch, but also to the kaiser and Generals Ludendorff and Von Hindenburg. Schoolchildren would all learn his name, and in Berlin’s Tiergarten—a more beautiful park than this one could ever be—among the statues of Goethe and Lessing and Queen Louise, there would be a monument to him. In idle hours, he had sketched out ideas for what it might look like.
“It’s getting cold just standing here,” Circe had complained. She was wearing a scarlet coat that he had wished she hadn’t—it was too conspicuous—but there was no dissuading her. “Can’t we keep moving?”
He escorted her off the bridge, her arm crooked in his. Despite the chill, she was enjoying this. He could tell. As much as he dreaded leaving the house on Chancery Lane, she relished it. But then, he didn’t spend his time there as a sex slave to a British pervert.
In 1912, Crowley had joined the Ordo Templi Orientis, a mystical order founded by the German occultist Theodor Reuss, and risen quickly through their ranks. In a ceremony in Berlin, he had dubbed himself “Baphomet” and been declared “the Supreme Rex and Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britons,” head of the British branch of the OTO. But what really attracted him to the order, Graf knew, was its emphasis on “sex magick,” the notion that by harnessing sexual energy—the orgasm, specifically—one could transcend the ordinary world and bring whatever one visualized to reality. Crowley had even broken new ground by working various perverted acts into the ritual initiations of those members of the group who had been elevated to the Eleventh Degree.
As a scientist, Graf had to laugh at such errant nonsense, but as the German intelligence services knew, such a man—who remained anathema to their British counterparts—could be useful, especially as his natural sympathies lay in their own direction, anyway.
When Graf had come back to London, he had first found lodgings in the old German quarter of the city, but when those had proven unfeasible, and he had had to look for a place to set up shop anew, Crowley’s place had immediately sprung to mind. There was no one in the city who was at once so gullible and so compromised, so open to the most extravagant claims (like alchemy), and so eager to do anything to increase his own notoriety. Graf pretended to be an acolyte—Crowley was never hard to convince of that—and had readily been accepted into the fold. But when he had moved some of Crowley’s rudimentary torture equipment out of the cellar to make room for his laboratory, Crowley had complained.
“My dungeon is dear to me,” he’d said, “and necessary for certain rituals of initiation.”
“But think of the dungeons you can construct once I have refined my alchemical experiments, turning mere dross into gold,” Graf had countered. “You will be as rich as Croesus, and you’ll be able to build an underground kingdom worthy of Pluto and Persephone.”
The very thought of that—untold riches and an unlimited supply of maidens to ravish, like the lord of the underworld himself—was enough to overcome Crowley’s objections. The iron chains and leather straps had been relocated to an attic space, and Graf had moved not only his lab equipment but himself into the subterranean chambers. In an alcove, close to the furnace, he had set up a bedstead and rudimentary privy of his own. This way he could watch over his lethal cultures, brewing in their flasks and dishes, like a hen watching over her eggs, by night and day.
“Oh listen, there’s music!” Circe said, drawing him on in the direction of the St. James’s Park bandstand. By the time they got there, a small crowd had gathered to hear half a dozen Scotsmen in full ceremonial garb, playing their bagpipes and marching back and forth across the shallow stage.
Surveying the audience, Graf remembered coming here on St. George’s Day, a year earlier, to hear an orchestral concert to celebrate the Britons’ patron saint; it had begun to rain, as it threatened to do even now, and he had gone home, shivering and weak, to the top-floor flat he had inhabited at that time, a dismal suite of rooms that no one else had wanted, due to the unsavory reputation of the penny arcade just below it. In the morning, he had been so sick, running a high fever, that, much as he had wanted to avoid it, he had had no choice but to check himself into Guy’s Hospital under his assumed name of Eulenspiegel. He knew two things: Guy’s had a ward that specialized in communicable diseases, and what he was suffering from was an accidental exposure to one of his own research elements.
For the next week, he had been in and out of delirium, always fearful of what he might have said while unaware, but well attended by the doctors and nursing staff. It was a pity that they, like the rest of the city’s population, would now have to suffer so at his hands. But that was war, which had been fermenting, like his bacteria, for some time before the recent outbreak. Graf prided himself at being among the first to see it coming.
After a few minutes, he got restless—he hadn’t come to the park to listen to the screeching of bagpipes—and he dragged Circe off toward the parade grounds. The closer they got, the stronger was the aroma of the horses, still crowded into their makeshift pens and awaiting transport. But Graf was trying to calibrate the exact spot where he had run from the sentries, where the bullet had scathed the tree, where the brass box had fallen. He remembered falling over the bench, but there were several located close to the pathway.
When he diverted Circe off the pavement and onto the grass, she said, “Where are we going? My boots are going to get all muddy.”
He didn’t answer—he was focused too closely on his surroundings. Did he recognize anything? Was he in the right location? And most important of all, was there anyone else lurking about, some soldier or Scotland Yard plainclothesman hoping to catch the perpetrator returning to the scene of the crime? After a few minutes, with Circe complaining the whole time, he spotted the tree stump where he had laid his paraphernalia, and from that was able to judge roughly where he might have reentered the park grounds in his flight.
“Look at all the horses,” Circe said in amazement, surveying the maze of pens and corrals.
Graf glanced across the wide dirt road, too, wondering how many of them might have already begun to manifest symptoms, and spread the contagion.
“Why are there so many? Ooh, I wish I had
an apple or a lump of sugar to give them.”
That was a good idea, Graf thought. In the future, he should find a way to stabilize the germs and simply infuse lumps of sugar with lethal doses.
An armed sentry was posted twenty yards down the fence, and lest they be spotted, Graf pulled Circe back into the shelter of the park.
Turning, he passed a bench—was it the one he had tripped over?—and began scouring the tree trunks for a splintered patch. He must have studied dozens before he suddenly noted a fresh white scar on an old oak. That must be it! His eyes jumped to the ground, praying that he might see a glimmer of the case in the underbrush, but he caught a glimpse instead of a man in a long coat, a bowler hat pulled low on his forehead, casually lighting a cigarette. Instantly, his nerves were on alert, and as he had planned in advance, he pulled Circe into a tight embrace and pressed her up against the damaged tree.
“What do you think you’re—”
But he shut her up by pressing his lips against hers, slipping a hand between the buttons of her scarlet coat and fondling a breast.
Pushing him off, she said, “You could at least ask.”
“I’m asking,” he said, renewing his effort, and to his own surprise, she offered no further resistance. Crowley knew how to pick them.
He pretended absorption until he heard the man cough, and approach holding an open badge in his hand.
“What are you two doing there?”
Circe pulled back and laughed. “Guess it should be pretty plain, constable.” She wasn’t cowed in the least.
“Yes, it is,” he said, sternly, “and I’m not a constable.”
“Then what’s that?” Circe countered, nodding at the badge.
“It’s what tells you two to move along. This is a public park, and no place for shameless display.”
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 19