Blood Royal

by Jonathan Green

  A tear came to his eye as he read that last sentence again. He blinked it away. He could not afford to get sentimental about it now; it was too late for that. His purpose was clear. He had to remain detached, focus only on the immediate, see her as nothing more than a test subject. Otherwise he would never go through with it.

  For as long as she could be connected to him, she would not be safe. He would deny them everything and cover his tracks as well as he could.

  Returning the sheet to the blotter on his desk, the suffused light of his reading lamp reflecting from the glistening ink, he signed the hand-written letter.

  A friend never in more need,

  Victor

  He folded the page carefully and neatly, and slipped it into a crisp white envelope.

  On the front he wrote the addressee’s name.

  Ulysses L. Quicksilver, Esq.

  Carefully placing the fountain pen in its gold and marble stand, he rose, and having dabbed his eyes dry, he left the study-cum-laboratory.

  Slowly he walked downstairs. It felt like the longest, hardest walk of his life, as if he were walking to his execution or his own funeral. At the turn of the landing, before starting on the final flight down, Gallowglass halted abruptly, his breath catching in his throat.

  Standing in the hall, wearing her eggshell blue woollen coat, was his daughter, Miranda. At that moment he felt as though he had never seen anything more beautiful and more precious. He fancied that she looked just like his late wife, even though that was impossible.

  It had only been two weeks since her abduction and her ordeal within the locust hive, but she had come through it amazingly well. There was barely a mark on her now to bear witness to the nightmare she had lived through.

  He felt so proud of her he was afraid he might burst into tears again.

  Hearing his foot on the stair, she turned and looked up at him. Her innocent features knotted into a frown.

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re not ready,” she said.

  “No. I’m not coming with you.”

  “But you said –”

  “I’m going to catch you up later,” he lied. “I have some things to finish off here first.” He passed the child’s governess the letter. “See that you deliver this in person, Miss Wish art.”

  He knelt down in front of Miranda, helping her finish buttoning her coat. “I’ll see you again soon.”

  She threw her arms about his neck and hugged him close.

  “Don’t leave me alone, Daddy.”

  “You won’t be alone. Look, there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll have Miss Wishart with you.” Miranda gave her governess a stern, appraising look. Miss Wishart smiled back, warmly.

  “That’s right, Miranda,” she said. “I’ll be with you at all times.”

  “And, besides, it won’t be for long.” Gallowglass lied again.

  “But, Daddy, you still haven’t told me where we’re going.”

  “If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise now would it, my darling?”

  A smile like sunshine after rain lit up her young face. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him close once more.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she whispered in excited glee. This time he pulled her closer, kissing her on the cheek and burying his face in the hollow of her neck.

  She pulled away from him suddenly. “Daddy, your beard’s tickling me.” She giggled.

  “I’m sorry, my darling,” he said, reluctantly letting her go. He got to his feet.

  “Come, Miranda,” the governess said, holding out her hand to the child.

  The child, obedient as ever, did as she was bidden. Gallowglass stepped past both his daughter and her guardian and opened the door.

  The three of them dutifully trooped out and down the steps to the street where Gallowglass hailed a cab.

  As a horse-drawn hansom pulled up, Miranda gave her father one last beaming smile and, standing on tiptoes, stretched up to plant a kiss on his cheek.

  “Now be good. And remember, I love you. Always. Now go. We mustn’t keep Miss Wishart waiting any longer.”

  If he didn’t do it now he would never let her go again and would never see this matter through to the end.

  The child clambered up the step and into the cab after her governess. Gallowglass closed the door firmly behind them.

  “Take them directly to 31 Charles Street, Mayfair,” Gallowglass told the driver, pushing a crumpled five pound note into the delighted man’s podgy hand.

  A broad smile spread across the features half-hidden beneath the brim of the driver’s pork pie hat. “Right you are, sir.”

  With a click of his tongue and a tug of the reins, the cabbie guided his team out and on their way.

  “Bye-bye, Daddy,” Miranda said, smiling from the window.

  “Goodbye, my darling,” he said, unable to hide the sadness in his smile now.

  Gallowglass watched his daughter’s suddenly uncertain face disappear into the Smog. Somewhere across town, the drone of the evening curfew chorus wound up to its siren wail.

  BACK INSIDE, WITH the door to the street firmly closed, he gave in at last to his grief. But he didn’t regret what he had done. He might never see her again, but she would be safe now – he’d made sure of that.

  Returning to the first floor laboratory he paused to survey it for the last time. The enormity of the plan he had already put in motion struck him. His eyes lingered on the phials of blood samples, the microscopes, his Babbage unit, the sterile surfaces, his writing desk.

  He took a deep breath to steady his nerves as he considered how many years of work were about to come to an end. But it was the only way.

  A fire still smouldered in the grate. A prod with the poker roused it into crackling life, sending wisps of blackened paper spiralling away up the chimney.

  Next to the writing materials on his desk, Gallowglass had left a tidy pile of paper files and Babbage engine print-outs. Beside these lay two carefully-placed packages, both the size and shape of cigar boxes, wrapped tightly in brown paper.

  Gallowglass picked up the files and print-outs and approached the fireplace. He crouched down and methodically fed the sheets into the flames, watching as the formulae and test results crinkled and blackened. The culmination of a life’s work, condensed down into a sheaf of papers, and now gone up in smoke.

  His life’s work destroyed, he returned to his desk. Taking up his doctor’s bag, he opened it, exposing its red velvet lining. One by one he took a number of sealed phials of rich claret-red blood from a test tube rack and placed them carefully within the compartments of the carrying case.

  His eyes glistening wetly, Gallowglass picked up the photograph of his late wife Marie that had always stood on his desk, kissed it and then put it back.

  Taking a stoppered glass bottle from among a selection on the workbench, he placed it inside the carrying case and closed the bag.

  Picking up another bottle, he studied the colourless liquid that sloshed inside it for a moment, before casually tossing it into the fire.

  Then, with doctor’s bag and the cigar box-shaped packages in hand, he left the laboratory and made his way downstairs. Once in the hall again, he took his hat and coat from the mahogany stand and put them on. Snatching up his cane from its resting place in an elephant foot stand, he opened the front door, turned out the lights, and left the house.

  The curfew sirens were winding down. Smothered by the clinging fog, the streetlamps appeared like will-o’-the-wisps, tethered to the cast iron masts of the lampposts.

  From the bottom of the steps he gave the Gallowglass family home one last look. The flicker of firelight was visible through the windows on the first floor.

  And then he turned and set off into the deepening dusk.

  THERE WAS A knock at the study door.

  “Come in,” Ulysses Quicksilver called, hastily hiding Barty’s letter under that day’s copy of The Times.

  “I am sorry to disturb you, sir,” his manservant bega
n, on entering.

  “That’s alright, old chap,” Ulysses said. “I wasn’t doing anything special. No, just sitting here, reading the paper.”

  “It’s just that you have visitors, sir.”

  “Visitors? After curfew? This is starting to become a bit of a habit.”

  Ulysses rose from his desk, his indefatigable curiosity having taken over from his brooding sense of melancholy at Barty’s abrupt departure.

  “A Miss Wishart,” Nimrod called after him, as Ulysses headed for the front of the house, “and Miss –”

  Grabbing the door jamb, Ulysses spun himself into the drawing room. His eyes opened wide in astonishment and a beaming smile formed.

  “– Gallowglass,” Nimrod finished.

  “Uncle Ulysses!” the girl shouted in delight and ran from her place by her governess to throw her arms around her saviour and squeeze him tight.

  “Miranda!” he beamed, returning the embrace. And then his smile darkened. “Where’s your father?”

  “Excuse me, Mr Quicksilver,” the governess interrupted as politely as she could, handing him a crisp white envelope. “My employer asked me to give you this.”

  IN DOCTOR VICTOR Gallowglass’s study the liquid in the bottle lying in the fire began to boil and the glass cracked. A split second later, a fireball erupted from the fireplace, bathing the room in flames.

  Hearing the boom of the explosion, Victor Gallowglass stopped and looked back. He watched as the flames blew out the windows on the first floor. Lights came on in houses all along the street, windows opened and servants were sent to the door to see what had happened. The fire was spreading quickly. Somewhere, far off, the wail of a fire engine could already be heard.

  Silhouetted black against the blaze, Gallowglass turned from the burning building and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Cloak and Dagger

  THE SIRENS WERE louder now. London’s noble fire brigade were on their way, but they would be too late. The neighbouring properties would be saved, but 14 Elizabeth Street would be gutted by the fire, just as he had planned. Then Victor Gallowglass could rest easy, certain at last that no-one would be able to resurrect his work after he was gone.

  All that remained for him to do now was to put the last stages of his plan into action.

  Over the wailing of the fire engines, the ever-present clatter of the Overground and the tapping of the soles of his shoes on the pavement, Gallowglass heard something else.

  He shot a fearful glance at the rooftops to his left but didn’t stop moving. He was being followed. He had rather suspected he would be. Tightening his grip on his bag and cane, he quickened his pace. He paused again only to pop his two carefully wrapped packages into a post box outside the Passport Office on Belgrave Road.

  When he had put a fair few streets between himself and his home, he decided it was time he found himself another mode of transport and hailed the first cab he saw.

  “You just come from there?” the cabbie asked as he climbed aboard, pointing back at where the Smog was coloured black and orange by the growing conflagration.

  “The East End, and quickly.”

  “Right you are, sir. Missed the curfew, eh?” the man muttered, as he engaged the throttle and the steam-hansom chugged away.

  Sat in the back of the jolting contraption, Gallowglass kept one eye on the tops of the buildings they passed, as the cab wound its way through the thinning traffic and Smog-choked thoroughfares. He kept both hands in his lap, one holding his cane, the other his bag.

  The fog-blurred streets of Belgravia gave way to the mist-shrouded roads of Westminster; then Lambeth and on eastwards until Gallowglass recognised the dockside warehouses of Bermondsey and Wapping. He banged on the roof of the cab with his fist.

  The cab rattled to a halt. “Will this do ya?” the driver called.

  “This will do,” Gallowglass said grimly, scanning the tops of crumbling tenements before alighting. Having paid the driver he set off again, this time following the lapping sounds of the waves against mouldering brickwork and the fog-horn cries of river traffic.

  Guttering clattered above him and a shower of dislodged moss and brick chips cascaded down from the darkness above. Gallowglass quickened his pace.

  He was nearly there. Only a few more steps and it would be as if he had never set foot on the path that had led him to the gates of perdition and brought him nothing but heartache.

  The clattering sound came again, as if a horse were galloping over the tenement roofs above him.

  Gallowglass began to run.

  The galloping horse kept pace.

  Panting for breath, Gallowglass turned into an alleyway that ran perpendicular to the route he had been following. Deep down he knew it probably wouldn’t make any difference in the end, but as long as he could keep his pursuer from catching up with him before his task was complete, that would be enough.

  The clattering gallop suddenly stopped. Something landed heavily on top of an outhouse just metres from him.

  A cascade of tiles crashed into the alley and Gallowglass ran.

  His tail persisted, criss-crossing the alleyway above him whenever it met an obstruction. The doctor dared to glance upwards as he heard the thing take another bounding leap across the alleyway. He thought he saw something black – no more than a shadow – whip through the fog above him, its passage marked only by the coiling trails it left behind.

  Gallowglass took a sharp left, throwing himself down a narrow rat-run, shoulders hitting the bulging bricks to either side of him. The sprinting hoof-beats quickened, were silenced and then crashed down again on the roof of a chandler’s. There was a greasy quality to the air hereabouts. It was redolent with the lingering rancid smell of tallow and the honeyed aroma of hot beeswax.

  And then there was the river ahead of him, the sluggish Thames, its thick black waters like treacle. Old Father Thames, the Big Stink, London’s greatest sewer, and Victor Gallowglass’s salvation.

  The doctor burst from the alleyway onto a wharf-side jetty. The skeletal silhouette of a loading derrick rose out of the mist, looking like the ghost of the Tyburn tree, the net hanging from it completing the illusion that it was, in fact, a gibbet.

  Gasping for breath, Gallowglass set out along the jetty, sprinting over the rattling boards and the murky river oozing beneath, his cane clutched tightly in his left hand, pulling back his right hand, and the carrying case held within it, ready to hurl it off the end of the pier and into the river.

  With a tremendous crash something heavy hit the deck in front of him, landing like a spider, gangling limbs absorbing the force of the leap.

  Gallowglass gave a stifled moan of surprise that was quickly snatched from his throat by the suffocating fog.

  He lurched backwards, his feet slipping out from under him, as he attempted to pull back from the thing now rising to its feet.

  His backside hit the jetty hard but he didn’t pause for a second as he tried to scramble away, kicking at the rattling planks with his heels.

  The thing rose, the long black cloak it wore falling around it to hide its unnatural lanky form, hanging like a shroud from its bony shoulders. Gallowglass saw now that there was a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down hard over a head that gleamed beneath the brim like polished steel. His assailant took a step forwards and Gallowglass got a glimpse of a limb as long and thin as a steel rod.

  Staring up in horror, into the darkness beneath the brim of the hat, he was sure he saw the light reflected in the whites of the hunter’s eyes.

  Coming face-to-face with the grotesque horror that was trying to kill him snapped him out of his state of paralysing shock, and he had the good sense to bring his cane to bear.

  Raising it in his left hand he pointed the end squarely at his assailant’s chest and pulled the trigger concealed within the bone handle.

  There was a loud crack and the gun-cane’s single shot was spent. Gallowglass’s assailant was hurled sideways ac
ross the jetty in a cloud of gunpowder, to clatter to the deck ten feet away.

  Gallowglass was on his feet in a moment. Picking up his bag he started for the end of the wooden pier, sprinting past the flailing form of his attacker.

  His pulse was pounding in his ears now. Behind him, he could hear the rattling sounds of the thing struggling to stand. After only a moment’s pause, he heard the pounding impacts of its galloping run as it gave chase. He dared not look back. The end of the jetty and the river lay ahead; only a few more strides and he would have made it.

  The galloping footfalls fell silent. Gallowglass kept running. He felt the breeze of his attacker’s passing as it sailed over his head. He heard the whistle of the air passing through the spaces between its gangling limbs as its cloak streamed out behind it like devil wings.

  In a blur his attacker landed with a crash on the planks in front of him. This time Gallowglass was ready.

  He reached into the open bag swinging from his right hand and grasped the bottle within. Pulling back his arm he bowled it at the thing’s face. It was a throw his Games Master at Eton would have been proud of.

  The creature screeched as the bottle smashed and the hydrochloric acid ate into its flesh.

  The scuttling thing recoiled, shaking its head as if that would somehow free it of the agonising pain, clawing at its face with the dagger points of its fingers.

  Gallowglass was paralysed by a combination of fear and bewilderment.

  The high-pitched screeching of his assailant changed, becoming an asthmatic whine and then it sounded like the thing was coughing, or barking, or –

  – laughing.

  Gallowglass had never heard anything so unpleasant or unsettling in his life. And then the thing spoke.

  “Slice and dice, slice and dice,” it chuckled, silvered finger-blades scissoring open and shut with a sound like a cut-throat razor being sharpened.