by Ewan Lawrie
‘As did I, sir, as did I,’ I replied.
‘You heard nothing?’ he asked.
‘I slept like an innocent.’ I looked to Job. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No, sir.’
These words came no easier to him.
I was a little puzzled as to why the coroner was asking such anodyne questions, until the policeman offered his only observation on the matter.
‘Died o’ fright. Bottles. Everyone knows not to touch the bottles.’
The coroner looked at me and shrugged. He leaned over the cadaver, pulled the shirt collar gently away from the neck and immediately replaced it with a great deal more haste. He licked his lips.
‘Who was he, Robson?’
‘Traveller, ca-yum on the co-acch. Divvent kna his na-yum. Nivver will now.’
The coroner stiffened his spine, tugged at the bottom of his waistcoat and declared: ‘An apoplexy caused by extreme fright. Clear as day. Robson, two guineas for the removal and arrangements.’
Robson looked somewhat put out at this, but handed over two gold coins and some silver, withdrawn piecemeal from a pouch strung around a grubby neck. The coroner took the sum with the alacrity I had come to expect from him. Whether corrupt or simply lazy, he seemed disinclined to mention what he had seen on the cadaver’s neck. With a curt bow to myself and Miss Pardoner, he left the inn, the policeman trailing behind him.
Robson informed me, somewhat sheepishly, that as the hour was now nine the cart might be late at the House of Correction, since he would be using it to deliver the unfortunate fellow to his final destination. I asked him at what time we could expect to leave Catchpole’s place of work, intending to set off – together with my new retainers – for Gibbous House from there.
‘Haff past, Mistah Moffat. His last trip willunt be a long yin.’
Robson was as good as his somewhat difficult to understand word. We set off northward at precisely half past the hour by my timepiece. Catchpole had merely bundled the two parolees out of the door and slammed it behind them without even the slightest glance at his son.
Neither of the two had aught by way of possessions, save the clothes on their backs. I instructed Bill to drive the cart and enquired of the slattern if she knew the whereabouts of their destination. She replied with a toothless cackle, ‘Wuh aal know Gibbous House, Mr Moffat.’
‘Get you there then, as best you can. Do not think to play the absconder. You would regret it, I assure you.’
Job hanging limpet-like from the rear of our chaise, Miss Pardoner and I set out at a somewhat faster rate than the cart – despite our nag’s customary lethargy.
We had left the cart far behind us by the time we reached the Lion Bridge. Thankfully, Miss Pardoner did not share Maccabi’s passion for matters ornithological. I was equally grateful for the young woman’s unusual ability to remain silent on occasion. Nevertheless, I interrupted my own reverie on the pleasurable events overnight to ask her, ‘Did she mean Maccabi? The woman in the cell?’
I took my eye off the road ahead, safe enough at the jog-trot pace of our horse. She looked uncomfortable, something I had all too seldom succeeded in making her. She licked her lips and the words came out in somewhat of a rush.
‘Yes, I mean no. Well... ’ At which point she hung her head.
‘Ellen, tell me.’ I placed a hand on hers.
She was not to be fooled and shook off my comfort as though it were an irritating fly.
‘Very well, the woman claimed that Maccabi had... had compromised her.’
I was surprised at her timidity of expression.
‘Really? Perhaps, there is more to Jedediah than I thought,’ I said.
‘Or less,’ she said bitterly and she sat in stiff-backed silence for the remaining hours of the journey.
Chapter Thirty-seven
We arrived a little after one, in expectation of lunch. A wait of reasonable duration produced no welcome at the door, despite repeated applications of the monkey’s-head knocker. Abandoning the chaise at the entrance, we took the track around to the rear entrance. The door was ajar, and we made our way into the deserted kitchen.
‘Ellen, check Mrs Gonderthwaite’s quarters.’
I looked around the kitchen, running a finger over the dust on the range. It seemed better not to ponder where the food came from or how it materialised from such an unpromising source. Miss Pardoner returned, two spots of colour in her cheeks.
‘She will be here presently. I took the liberty of telling Mr Cullis to attend at the same time, since he was also there.’
I laughed and, after a moment, she permitted herself to do the same.
My anger at being kept waiting by these menials was greatly offset by the anticipation of introducing the new staff to the rest of the household, especially to Maccabi. His continued absence was surprising. That of the professor was not; the fellow seemed always to be in some distant part of the house engaged in some no doubt arcane and bizarre pursuit. Truly, I had doubts about the man’s sanity.
Mrs Gonderthwaite floated in, as insubstantial as ever, followed by Cullis with his clumsy gait: a phantasm followed by a troll. I informed them that there would be three new members of the household arriving shortly; Mrs Gonderthwaite and Cullis were to prepare rooms and make any other arrangements for their arrival – after preparing a suitable luncheon. I escorted Miss Pardoner out of the kitchen, preferring not to dwell on the peculiar methods that might be employed in that place.
Job had reverted to his earlier mode of perambulation and followed behind us on all fours. He was suprisingly nimble, indeed he seemed more comfortable so, and evaded any encounters with the piles of furniture in the vestibule.
We chose to await the arrival of luncheon in the library, that being my favourite room. It was not that it was any less outré than the room filled with the taxidermist’s phantasmagoria – there was, after all, a riot of clashing styles and many a thousand rare and unlikely books. No, it was that it was the only part of the house that retained a sense of grandeur, that was not overpowered by furnishings or filled with a menacing claustrophobia. Besides, as in most of the reception rooms, there was a plentiful supply of beverages.
It had been in my mind to take Miss Pardoner into my confidence, as I wished to share the problem of the encoded papers. I had long felt a certain nostalgia for the early days with Arabella Coble, and I fancied that my ward was a woman of character – if not necessarily good. Job had scampered to the French windows and was stretched out in the pool of sunlight painting the parquet floor. I bade my ward sit with me at one of the ancient but exquisite tables in the room. A lone candle in a seven-branched candelabrum stood on it.
I withdrew the papers from a pocket in my frock coat, struck a lucifer match on the sole of my boot and lit the candle. Handing Miss Pardoner one of the papers, I held the other over the guttering flame. She raised a solitary eyebrow at me over her blank sheet; I tilted mine toward her and watched her composure falter as she watched the symbols appear. I laid the page on the table, took the other from her and warmed it at the flame. Leaning closer toward her, I said, ‘I have it in mind that these are encyphered messages. They came to me in a packet with details of the settlement. They may be from old man Coble, they may not. Perhaps they are from Arabella, perhaps not. Will you help me with them?’
‘And how would I do that, Mr Moffat? What do I know of cyphers?’ Her smirk was most irritating.
‘Come, Ellen, whatever you do or don’t know about cyphering, two minds are better than one, are they not?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
Both pages had some five lines of the alien script inscribed upon them. I withdrew the professor’s rendition of the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets from a pocket and placed it beside them. I whispered, without quite knowing why, ‘The journalist believed it might be as simple as transliteration and substitution for the Roman letters. It seems likely, for who would expect me to have the Hebrew, much less Aramaic?’
&nb
sp; ‘No one, I’m sure, Mr Moffat.’ She gave a laugh. ‘So what to do? Substitute A for Aleph, B for Bet and so on?’
‘I cannot believe it would be so simple,’ I replied. ‘But perhaps we should try it – if only for the purpose of elimination.’
‘It is not worth the effort,’ she said. ‘Can you not see that these are not words?’
Springing to her feet she walked over to the exquisite white-wood escritoire. She withdrew some sheets of paper from the secret drawer and I thought I perceived the tiniest of starts when she discovered the packet of opium was missing. Her composure was quite recovered when she returned with the paper.
We began, or should I say Miss Pardoner began, by making a very good fist of copying the symbols from the parchment onto the paper. Wisely, she had chosen to apply herself to the briefer of the two sheets.
She gripped her pen lightly, but her penmanship did not strike me as particularly feminine; her strokes were bold and confident and if the loops on the descenders seemed a little ungenerous, it had a pleasing effect. Stopping suddenly, she sighed. ‘Well, that’s of no use at all.’ She gestured with the pen nib at the last symbol. ‘Do you recognise it?’
‘I don’t know, woman!’ Perhaps I was a little sharp.
‘It matters not in any case, Mr Moffat.’ She jabbed at the letter with the nib once more. ‘Look carefully at it.’
It was the symbol from the inn’s sign. A symbol I had seen in the books in the asylum. A symbol that appeared in Arabella’s diary.
‘Is it not familiar, sir?’ She looked keenly at me.
‘Indeed, I confess I have seen it, but I know nothing of its meaning.’
She whispered clearly to herself alone, ‘How can that be?’
I proposed a beverage of some kind, pointing out to my ward that the writers of my acquaintance often turned to the spirits for guidance. She laughed and said, ‘The Armagnac,’ and it was clear that Miss Pardoner was privy to more of the house’s secrets than she cared to admit.
The good Cardinal Dufour having provided once again, I warmed the spirit in the glass and enjoyed the aroma, eying Miss Pardoner over the rim of the glass as I did so.
‘The professor, does he strike you as,’ I thought for a moment, ‘reliable?’
‘In what sense? In the manner of an expensive clock?’ she asked, mouth twitching.
Clearly she wished to draw me out, and I felt it unwise to declare my true impressions of the man’s character.
‘He seems a little, if I might phrase it so, excitable.’
‘He is a genius, Mr Moffat, one must make allowances.’
She sat back in her chair and took a generous mouthful of the Armagnac.
I attempted to turn my thoughts to the problem at hand, but in point of fact my head was as empty as those of the twins. Perhaps I slipped into reverie, but it seemed short-lived. I was brought to myself with a start when Miss Pardoner gave the table-top a mighty wallop with the palm of her hand, crying ‘Ha!’ in the manner of the most dissolute baronet winning at Hazard in Crockford’s Club.
‘You have it, Ellen?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. But I will tell you the name of this symbol and the name of the man who created it.’
The name of the glyph was Monas Hieroglyphica, which meant nothing to me. Its inventor was John Dee, which did, as did the symbol itself since I had seen it more than once before.
I remembered the patient then known as Moffat refused me access to but two books during the years that I remained his plaything. Both had been written by John Dee. He often slept with one or other under his bolster. Once I tried to slip the book from under his guarding hand and he swept the back of that hand fiercely against my cheek. My skin was cut by the heavy ring on his finger. How could I have forgotten the signet on that ring? It was John Dee’s glyph and, furthermore, said ring had not been on the patient’s finger the day that I became Moffat.
My face must have betrayed something of my shock to Ellen.
‘You see!’ Her eyes shone, but I had not the slightest clue as to why. It was patently nonsense, but I decided to humour her; after all, what else had I to do?
‘And so you present me with a further puzzle, Ellen,’ I said equably.
She was not beaten yet, however, and shewed me two letters at the beginning of each version of the message. The first was א; the second was ב.
‘There, you see.’ She spoke fiercely, daring me not to see it.
I saw nothing but the Hebrew letters Aelph and Bet and presumed the other the Aramaic versions, which the professor had pronounced Alep and Beth.
‘There are no words on this paper. Save perhaps one and that is a word belonging to neither of these languages.’
I confessed that I was none the wiser for this information.
She ran a fingernail under a group of five letters in both languages, and stabbed a forefinger at the Hebrew for emphasis. Her elegant hand had written
‘תאפפמ’
‘Do you see now?’
There seemed no point in dissembling, I knew that Hebrew did not, in general, represent vowel sounds in the script, with the exception of the letter Aleph.
‘One might imagine that someone was trying to write Moffat.’
I was not happy with this development; it sat ill with me that my name should appear on the document when the will itself had been so vague about the person who might be the beneficiary, viz ‘The husband of Arabella Coble, if such person there be.’
Therefore, in spite of my certainty that the mysterious message had mentioned me, I sought to cast some doubt on it.
‘My dear girl, surely it is naught but a marvellous coincidence! Look at the rest, a random assortment of letters indeed.’
‘Perhaps they are not words, but they are not random.’
The door having swung on its hinges, the professor entered. I gathered the greater part of the papers and placed them on my chair beneath the seat of my trousers. Miss Pardoner, meanwhile, had begun writing on one of the remaining blank sheets. Naturally, the professor, having the inquisitive nature of all men of science, peered over my ward’s shoulder to ascertain what she had been writing.
‘Ach, a poem, ein Gedichte. I hope it is suitably romantic and full of love,’ he said, giving her a lascivious smile, which made his absinthe-ruined teeth still less attractive.
‘Shall I read it, Professor?’ The professor’s head still loomed over her shoulder as she gave me the most expressive wink.
‘Yes, yes, too much of science makes Enoch a dull fellow.’ He let out a laugh that might have cracked a looking-glass had there been one to hand.
Nor ever so big, as the snout of a pig,
this tiny bud makes home in a fig,
or perhaps a flower, whose petals unfold
with a gamy fragrance, if a fellow is bold.
She looked innocently up at the professor, and asked, ‘Did it please you, Professor?’
His eyes had crossed momentarily and he ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Clearing his throat, he opined, ‘An interesting verse, although of uncertain metre.’
He spied our Armagnac and scuttled off in search of a glass.
Mrs Gonderthwaite arrived and announced the arrival of luncheon in the dining room, and all three of us drained our glasses before leaving.
My astonishment was great indeed when I saw the paucity of the fare on the long table. There was a pair of loaves, but sadly no fish: only a large and mouldy cheese of indeterminate type. There were four long-corked bottles on the near end of the table that looked much like porter bottles. Mrs Gonderthwaite had departed the dining room without so much as a backward glance.
Maccabi was in attendance. He caught my eye and gestured toward our feast.
‘There are outstanding accounts at most of the suppliers in Seahouses,’ he said simply.
‘Well, let us settle them,’ I suggested.
‘We are short of cash,’ he replied.
‘There must be something,�
� I protested.
‘Ahh... ’ But I did not allow him to finish.
‘You mean to tell me that the two idiot boys are more solvent than the household?’
Rather than wait for an answer, I seized one of the bottles and confirmed that it was indeed porter. We took our seats and then the four of us made desultory inroads on the meagre fare.
Chapter Thirty-eight
We had eaten, if not our fill, then as much as we could stomach of the victuals on offer when Maccabi let out a sigh. I asked him the cause of this exhalation.
‘I am tired, Mr Moffat. Sick and tired,’ he answered.
‘For why, you have a comfortable position here, have you not?’ I enquired.
He laughed. ‘It’s comfortable enough while there are funds sufficient to eat. But don’t imagine I am advantaged in any pecuniary manner, Mr Moffat.’
This, perhaps, accounted for the deeply unfashionable style of his attire, the best of which I had left at Salomon’s. I let him alone; there seemed little point in needling him as his funk ensured there would be no satisfactory reaction to it.
I turned my attention to the dwarf, perched on his strange arrangement of box and chair.
‘Enoch, you must have been busy at something most important when Ellen and I returned. I had thought you might attend our arrival.’
He squirmed on his high-chair and sniffed loudly. ‘Ah, yes... yes I was busy with the inventory!’ This last came out at a rush. He gave a broad smile, as though pleased with his ex tempore invention.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘There is no full inventory of the contents of the house?’
He looked puzzled for a moment then, ‘Why, there are the papers of entailment, among those that you were... delinquent in reading at the notary’s.’ He ran a forefinger along the side of his nose.
‘But these are not comprehensive, since you are making an inventory?’
‘No,’ he replied and stopped short, realising that he had perhaps chosen the wrong untruth to conceal whatever nefarious activity he had been engaged in.
‘Splendid, Professor, you have quite made my day, and, indeed, I presume Jedediah’s also. We shall waste no time in ascertaining with which goods we might realise an efficacious sum in the shortest of times,’ I said.