The Dark Enquiry

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  After a moment, we came to the garden wall and slipped through the gate, closing it noiselessly behind us. It was a mark of his attention to detail that Brisbane kept the gate oiled at all times.

  We cut round and emerged into Cock Yard and thence to Davie Street, where we hailed a hackney. I would have preferred the lighter and swifter hansom, but Brisbane elected to make use of the privacy the hackney offered. Concealment was to our advantage, and as we settled inside, Brisbane quickly doused the lamps. We rode in silence to Highgate, alighting a little distance away in order to make our entrance on foot. It was not until we reached the gates that it occurred to me they would be locked. I muttered a curse, but Brisbane was not discomfitted by such an eventuality. He laced his fingers into a cradle and told me to step up and vault myself over the high stone wall.

  “Are you sincerely mad?” I hissed. “Pick the lock!”

  “It would take far too long and make enough noise to wake the dead. Have I taught you nothing?” Now that he mentioned it, I did recall some lecture to the effect when he was first teaching me to pick locks. The tools required would have been enormous, never mind the fact that it would look terribly suspicious if he were discovered crouching over the lock. No, it would have to be over the wall, and quickly.

  I placed my foot where he indicated and after one or two false starts, managed to land atop the wall. “Oof,” was the noise I made as I hit hard. “Be careful. There is broken glass here,” I told him. It had doubtless been laid to discourage this very activity, but luckily there was little of it where we had chosen to cross.

  In an instant, Brisbane was beside me, and then he was down again, on the other side and motioning impatiently for me to join him. I closed my eyes and threw myself down, knowing he would catch me. When he set me on my feet, his lips grazed my ear.

  “From here on, no more talking,” he instructed. And I nodded to show I understood.

  We moved slowly forward, and it seemed we walked for an age. Highgate was an enormous place, comprised of many different walks and gardens, each packed with crypts and monuments. Weeping angels jostled with crosses and heraldic badges and woeful statues. It might have been beautiful, in a terrible and melancholy way, were it not for the errand we were bent upon and the rising fog. For fog had begun to creep through the stones, swirling at our feet and obscuring the path.

  Brisbane noted it and gave a short nod, indicating he was pleased. The fog would give us a bit more protection from prying eyes, and he was careful as he moved not to disturb it more than necessary. Perhaps it was something learnt in his Gypsy boyhood, for I saw how a quick motion could cause the fog to swirl and eddy, betraying one’s presence. But Brisbane moved with the litheness of a cat, fitting himself to the fog as it passed over the dew-soaked grass.

  I followed as noiselessly as I could, and in due course we reached the Circle of Lebanon. I had not seen it in some years, not since Brisbane and I had discovered the identity of Edward’s murderer. I had visited once to lay my flowers and my ghosts at the same time, and I had not come back. That part of my life was finished and done with, and I could not fathom why it had been raked up again.

  The Circle of Lebanon was a crescent of stone crypts, overshadowed by an enormous cedar of Lebanon which spread its dark branches against the pale moonlight, blotting out all but the faintest trace of silver. The crypts were deeply shadowed, but some little distance away stood a solitary chapel on its own. The door of this was open, and a light glowed from within.

  With a gesture, Brisbane indicated for me to stand behind him as he made his way to the chapel. It was an achingly slow process, with each step requiring a pause as he listened intently in the dark. There was no sound, not even wind in the trees, for the night was still and it felt as if the stones themselves were waiting with bated breath.

  At last, he reached the chapel door. He stooped to grasp a handful of pebbles, and after a moment’s contemplation, he threw them hard inside the chapel, steeling himself for a response. There was none—only the fog, shifting as it rose, and the warm, beckoning glow of the torch. We remained there, poised at the open door, for an eternity before Brisbane signalled that we were to move again. When we did move, he was diligent in keeping me behind him, darting his glance swiftly around to peer into the darkness and make certain we were not followed.

  He hurried me into the chapel, and it took but a moment to realise we were entirely alone. It was a very small chapel and filled with narrow wooden pews and a metal table that I quickly realised was a bier of sorts. There was no space for a villain to hide. The only sign of life came from the flickering torch that had been placed in a bracket by the door. Brisbane nodded towards it and I took it up in my hands. As the light shifted, we both looked to the bier. Upon it lay a small white envelope. As one, we moved to the bier to retrieve it. I held the torch up and put out my hand.

  As I did so, there was a great grinding creak and the floor suddenly gave way beneath us. Instantly, Brisbane flung out his hand to grab my wrist, and for the space of a heartbeat I teetered between the hard strength of my husband and the yawning nothingness that had opened up behind me. Brisbane pulled sharply and I fell against him, clinging to his arm as I watched our progress. We were descending slowly into some black abyss whose depths we could not see. I watched the crypt above us moving further out of reach. As unnerving as the crypt had been, it now seemed to be a place of safety, a refuge against whatever horrors lurked below. At last, the floor settled into place, and a quick glance above showed we had come down some thirty feet or so.

  “What the devil?” I demanded, for it seemed we had descended to the very bowels of hell. We were in a sort of vaulted chamber, and I realised that the floor of the chapel above was not precisely a floor at all, but rather a platform attached to a pulley system with wheels and gears and enormous chains. I stared in disbelief. “What is this place?”

  Brisbane looked about us, assessing the situation. “I have not been inside one of these in years. It is a private crypt, built to secure the dead against graverobbers.”

  “Graverobbers!” I peered into the gloom around us. By the light of the torch, I could make out a series of iron cages, and beyond the bars I saw shelves fitted to the wall. Upon each of them rested a coffin. The air was thick with damp and decay and the smell of wet stone. I wondered if I fancied the sickly sweet scent of human putrefaction.

  “These tombs were very popular when graverobbing was in its heyday, but they fell out of fashion half a century ago,” he informed me. “The platform was for lowering the coffins and then the graveyard workers would shift the coffin to a trolley and wheel it to the proper cage to be locked safely away.”

  “How do you know about such places?” I asked, rubbing my arms with a shiver. I was not cold. At least, not yet. But fear prickled my skin.

  “I lived in one when I first came to London,” he said absently.

  I stared at this charnel house and shook my head. I could not have heard him correctly. “You lived in one?”

  “Yes. It was better than the streets. Shelter from the rain and plenty of space and lots of peace and quiet.”

  I broke my heart over the picture of him as a child of ten, alone in this vast city and living off scraps he stole and sleeping in such a place as this. But Brisbane was not conscious of my emotion. He stepped off of the platform to inspect the pulley system, peering intently at the gears. I held the torch close, glad to turn my attention to something other than the mouldering corpses around us.

  Brisbane was rather a long time, poking about various bits of the elderly hydraulic machinery, and finally he rose, wiping his hands with his handkerchief, his face a picture of disgust. “Jammed. Irretrievably so, no doubt by the blackmailer.”

  “But it worked a moment ago,” I protested. I liked to think of myself as stalwart as any Englishwoman, but spending the night in a crypt was not my preferred form of entertainment.

  “It has been rigged, and rather cleverly so, to descend when
someone stepped on the platform. But the combined body weight that triggered the descent also broke the rod that held the bloody thing together.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Certainly. Let me fetch my tools from the iron mongery.”

  I pulled a face. “Don’t be prickly, Brisbane. I wondered if you could contrive a temporary solution, just enough to see us safely back up to the chapel.”

  He shook his head. “Not anything I would trust your life or my weight to.”

  “There must be another way out. We will find it.” It seemed a reasonable enough assumption, but Brisbane was shaking his head again.

  “That was rather the point of these places, my dear. A single way in or out. No point of access for a graverobber, except the way we descended, and the crypt above would have been locked save during a funeral.”

  “You mean, we are trapped here?” My voice rose slightly, and I knew I had to get hold of myself lest I give way to hysteria. I squared my shoulders and looked Brisbane directly in the eye. “I do not accept that.”

  “Accept it or not, it is a fact.”

  “Your saying it is a fact does not make it a fact,” I parried. I took the torch and began to investigate.

  “Julia, what are you doing?”

  “I am finding a way out. Would you care to help me?”

  “We do not require a way out. This tomb is not sealed, so we shall not lack for fresh air. The flaring of your torch tells us that much. It is damp, but not overly cold, so we are in no danger of hypothermia, merely discomfort. Bellmont knows where we have come. When we cannot be found tomorrow morning, he will come to Highgate.”

  “And how will he know we are here in this particular place?” I demanded. “Do you expect the blackmailer will have left a helpful torch burning outside or a banner reading, ‘This way, please’? If he has anything approaching common sense, he will have doused the other torch and locked the crypt behind him, leaving no trace that the place has even been opened in the last half a century. And even if Bellmont does come, how will he explain that he knew we were here? He will be exposed, as surely as if he did not pay the blackmail,” I argued.

  Brisbane’s brow furrowed. “That is a curious point. If the blackmailer truly wanted money, why did he leave without it?” He patted the pocket where five thousand pounds lay tidily wrapped in brown paper.

  “Maybe he means to come back. When we’re dead,” I whispered in a suitably sepulchral voice. “It is no crime to steal from a dead man.”

  “Yes, in point of fact, it is. And I do not believe the blackmailer has lured us here to entomb us like the Mistletoe Bride,” he retorted.

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “Not at the moment,” he admitted. “But it is always a mistake to theorise without enough information.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and continued to investigate. The chamber was enormous, much larger than I had first supposed, and within it was a warren of cages, each securely locked and hung with an iron plaque bearing a family name. Some of the cages held only a coffin or two, but others were stuffed, the dead layered upon the dead, and it struck me as faintly obscene.

  “It looks like a wine cellar for the dead,” I muttered. Brisbane, for all his nonchalance, had taken up the search with me, and together we covered every inch of that vile place, tapping upon stones and examining seams in the walls for any hint of a second entrance.

  As we searched, I noticed his breathing changed. It became heavier, and he paused once or twice, his eyes fixed upon nothing in particular. There was a glassiness to his stare that I did not like, and at one point, his lips moved soundlessly.

  I touched his face, surprised to find it cold as death. “Brisbane, what is it?”

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes never meeting mine but instead fixed upon some point in the distance. “Something is happening,” he murmured in a faraway voice.

  “To you? Brisbane, are you ill? Speak to me,” I demanded. The terrible stillness did not abate, and his flesh seemed to cool even further at my touch. If I were given to fancies, I might have thought he was somehow slipping away from me, although he stood upon his own feet, tall and strong as ever. Only, his spirit seemed distant, and my mouth went dry as a desert as I suddenly realised what was happening.

  “Are you having a vision?”

  His eyes widened, and he continued to stare unblinking at the stone wall in front of him.

  “I must get you out of here,” I muttered. I shoved hard at him, but he did not blink. I tugged his hair, I pinched him—hard enough to leave a mark—but he did not respond. Desperation welled within me, and I murmured an apology as I drew back my hand and struck him hard across the face, once then twice.

  He rocked back on his heels and his eyes slowly focused upon my face.

  “Something bad is happening,” he ground out through clenched jaws. “We must get home.”

  I grabbed his hand and hurried us back to the platform and its ominous, unworkable gears. I had no idea how long he would remain lucid before slipping away again, and I knew I must act quickly.

  I stared up the vertical length of chain as it rose through the gloom to the shadowy height of a ceiling I could barely see, and I knew what I must do.

  “Brisbane, I am going to climb the chain and go for help. I will get you out of here,” I promised. If he heard me, he did not respond. He clutched at his head and sank to his knees.

  “Brisbane!” I cried. I knelt beside him, torn. I knew I had to go to find assistance, but it cleaved my heart to leave him alone in this place.

  He looked at me with a stranger’s eyes. “Go,” he ordered, and his voice was something less than human.

  Without hesitation, I stripped off my coat and rolled up my sleeves and put my boot to the chain. I would have sworn all the way up the chain, except that I had no breath. My dislike of heights, coupled with the difficulties of climbing the chain, made it impossible for me to do anything other than focus all of my attention on the links in front of me. Slowly, painfully, I climbed. Each time I set my foot into a link, each time I clasped my hands around the rusting iron, I bit back a scream of pain and fear. I dared not look down; I dared less to look up. I was afraid that if I saw how far I had yet to go, I would lose first my hope and then my grip.

  So I climbed, onward and upward, long agonising minutes, until at last I found myself peering over the edge of the chapel floor. Suddenly, I felt paralysed, completely uncertain of how to proceed. I had climbed the chain, but I had not considered how to manage the last bit. I considered it for a long moment, until I felt the sweat seeping from my hands. The chain was slippery in my palms, and to my horror, I found my grip beginning to fail.

  “You have one chance, Julia Brisbane,” I told myself firmly. “And this is no different than mounting a horse.” With a great shout, I flung myself up and over the edge, landing hard upon one hip. I almost sobbed in relief, so happy was I to be done with that purgatorial climb. I lay for several minutes, slightly dazed, and when I rolled back over, I gave a shriek.

  “Brisbane!”

  He had climbed up behind me, and so intent had I been upon my own ascent that I had never noticed. He vaulted from the chain to the crypt floor, but his movements were stiff and slow, and I took his hand as I led the way from the crypt.

  We emerged cautiously into the cool night air. I breathed great lungfuls of the stuff; it was intoxicating after the dank atmosphere of the crypts.

  We made our way through the cemetery, picking our path carefully through the stones. The fog had thickened to a dense white blanket, sending gauzy fingers through the trees and amplifying sounds strangely. There was the scampering of small nocturnal creatures and the call of a late nightingale, but that was all, and we soon found ourselves at the gate. Once more we went over the wall, and in a very short time, hailed a hackney and directed it to take us home.

  He collapsed against me once inside the carriage, and I held him close, knowing that he suffered torme
nts when the visions were upon him. He fought them so bitterly that the usual result was a migraine of a particular vicious variety. This time, something of the vision had forced its way through, and the result left him disoriented and exhausted. I, too, was conscious of a deep fatigue, bone-tired after our ordeal and longing for a hot bath and my bed. I must have dozed off as we rode, for the next thing I knew, Brisbane had roused himself, and I heard his voice, still distant and strange.

  “Julia,” he said, as if the word was unfamiliar to him.

  “I am here,” I promised, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  “What is it?”

  The hackney drew to a stop just as Brisbane pointed.

  “The house is on fire.”

  The Fifteenth Chapter

  Let us make an honourable retreat.

  —As You Like It

  The rest of that night passed as a grim dream. The women of the staff were herded to the back of the garden, huddled together in their nightdresses, whilst the men gave every aid to the fire brigade in putting out the fire. It was not so bad as we had thought, for it was only the very corner of the house that had caught, and the place suffered far more from the smoke than actual flames. The morning room was in ruins, but the service passage had been spared, as had the kitchens and domestic offices. Even Aquinas’ pantry had little damage, and it was Aquinas, in his nightcap and a very dapper striped dressing gown, who organised the staff and retrieved Rook and Grim.

  With the extinguishing of the fire, Brisbane seemed to have recovered himself, although his colour was deathly pale and his eyes still slid occasionally out of focus, as though he saw things from a faraway place.

  We were assembled in the garden with the various staff and pets when Brisbane took Aquinas aside. “Who rang the fire bell?”

  “I did,” Aquinas related. “I was wakeful and thought I would read for a while. Just as I sat up to put on the lamp, I smelled something peculiar. I traced the odour to the morning room, where I found the fire.”