The Angel of Highgate

by Vaughn Entwistle

“And lastly, there’s that tongue of yours, which is sure to begin wagging.” The gaunt face swam up close, filling his vision. The reek of chemicals was gagging. He felt his jaws being spread as Garrette reached in and seized his tongue, drawing it out of his mouth, stretching it.

  “Yes,” Doctor Garrette said. “I’m afraid it’s going to have to come out.”

  He caught the glitter of a scalpel and then his head jerked as the doctor sawed away at the meat.

  Unfortunately, Augustus Skinner remained conscious, his soul trapped in its prison of suffering flesh for the duration of what proved to be a long and horribly tedious operation.

  34

  RIPPED FROM THE WOMB

  The fist pounding on the front door launched Robert Greenley out of his chair. Despite his soreness, he rushed through the hallway, growing angrier with each painful step over the impudence of that impatient banging.

  When he snatched the front door open, Doctor Garrette stood on the front step, the black Gladstone bag clutched in one hand. He held a large jar filled with a clear liquid beneath his free arm.

  Greenley hesitated, then stepped aside and let the doctor in. As he brushed past, Greenley caught a whiff of the strangest odor clinging to the man’s clothes, but assumed it was something related to his profession: powerful disinfectant, perhaps.

  “I think it would be prudent to first consult with Aurelia’s present physician, Doctor Fuller.”

  “That would merely delay things. To be effective, the procedure must be carried out immediately.”

  “What exactly is this procedure—?”

  But the doctor was already climbing the stairs. “I am a very busy man. Your daughter is upstairs?”

  Greenley followed the doctor up the staircase. The odor really was quite overpowering. He knocked twice on the bedroom door before showing the doctor in. The room was dark apart from a single candle burning on the bedside table. Aurelia stood up from a chair, the novel she was reading clutched in her hand.

  “Father?”

  “This is Doctor…”

  “Garrette.”

  “Doctor Garrette. You have already met my daughter, Aurelia.”

  The doctor stepped to the bedside and looked down at Aurelia, then took hold of her chin and turned her face first this way and that. In the quivering candlelight her skin shone luminous and pale, the eyes all pupil and uncanny. Silas Garrette shivered in anticipation: the unborn child she carried must be near translucent. “I will need to give your daughter a thorough examination.”

  “Of course.”

  “Including the more intimate aspects of her physiology.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Her feminine parts.”

  Discomfort rippled across Greenley’s face. “Again? Is that entirely necessary? I am not sure I feel comfortable—”

  “Of course, you may stay and observe if you wish.”

  Like most men of his time, Greenley was squeamish about such matters. He quickly excused himself and fled the bedroom.

  The doctor flashed an unconvincing smile and instructed Aurelia, “Please lay back upon the bed.”

  Uneasy, she shyly complied.

  Doctor Garrette set the glass jar atop the dresser, then opened his bag, took out his leather holster of instruments and unrolled them. He reached back into the bag and produced a stoppered brown bottle and a mesh face mask.

  “Do you know what chloroform is?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I am going to sedate you. Do not be frightened. It will help you… slip away.”

  Doctor Garrette placed the mask over her mouth and nose and dripped several drops of chloroform onto it.

  “Breathe deeply. Soon you will find yourself lost in the most interesting dream you’ve ever had.”

  Aurelia looked up with frightened eyes. She grabbed his hand, trying to pull the mask away, but he kept it clamped in place.

  “Don’t fight it. Let go. Fall into it… fall into it like death!”

  Her struggles faded as the chloroform swept the light from her eyes. Aurelia’s hand loosened, fell away limp. Her eyelids fluttered and closed.

  Doctor Garrette stepped to the bedroom door and turned the key, locking them in and Robert Greenley out. He returned to the bedside to find Aurelia breathing deeply, fully unconscious. He unfastened several of the buttons on the front of her dress, and then pushed it up onto her chest. Her abdomen was softly domed. She was maybe two months along. With scalpel in hand, he knelt on the bed and pressed his ear to her belly, listening.

  Father… Father… came a tiny, distant voice. His newest child was there, sleeping just beneath the flesh, waiting to meet its new father. Just a few quick scalpel strokes away. His fingers trailed across the leather holster until they found his favorite scalpel. He drew it out, breathed upon its reflective surface and polished the blade on his sleeve.

  In the downstairs parlor, Robert Greenley paced, ill at ease. The idea of a stranger, albeit a doctor, having unrestricted access to his daughter disturbed him. Especially this doctor. There was something queer about the man that disturbed Greenley the more he thought about it. For one, he wore a white top hat—not a fashion befitting the gravity of such a profession. And then there was the man’s peculiar aroma, a scent that Greenley felt he had smelled before but could not place. When his unease peaked, he climbed the stairs to Aurelia’s room and knocked softly on the door. No answer. Greenley waited a few moments, then quietly turned the doorknob and pushed. To his surprise, he found the door locked.

  “Doctor?” he called, rattling the handle. No reply. He banged a fist on the door. “Doctor, what is going on?” A strange silence. Robert Greenley was a big man, so when he shoulder-charged the door the deadbolt tore loose of the casement on the first impact. Inside, he found the doctor, a scalpel in his hand, crouched over Aurelia who lay unconscious on the bed, exposed.

  Greenley roared with rage and leapt on the doctor and the two men toppled off the bed, upending the table and flinging the glass jar into the air. It hit the wall and shattered. The doctor slashed at his attacker’s face, but Greenley seized the hand with the scalpel and pinned it to the floor. The open bottle of chloroform was gurgling itself empty on the rug beside them. The doctor grabbed the bottle with his free hand and splashed chloroform in Greenley’s face, who recoiled, bellowing, as the volatile liquid burned his eyes.

  Doctor Garrette broke free and leaped to his feet. The jar was smashed. No time. He rolled up the leather holster and stuffed it into his coat pocket, then lifted Aurelia’s limp form from the bed and flung her over one shoulder.

  Groping, flailing, unable to open his eyes, Greenley caromed out of the bedroom and slammed into the wall at the top of the landing. He heard feet thunder down the stairs, the front door crash open and though he stumbled blindly after, he knew it was too late.

  Aurelia had been taken.

  35

  THE STORM BREAKS

  A late afternoon of turmoiled weather.

  It was only four p.m., yet a weird twilight came and went. At times bright sunshine cast sharp-edged shadows. Minutes later, the world dimmed and gusting winds snapped the Union flags flying above Trafalgar Square. On the far horizon, a dark armada of towering storm clouds sailed toward London, threatening violence to come. The gloom, slowly suffocating the dying day, matched Thraxton’s mood. After the wedding, he had dropped Aurelia at her home and then driven the brougham to Victoria Station. Here, he had said his last goodbyes to Algernon and his new bride before they vanished in a cloud of white steam as the Dover train thundered from the station.

  Now Thraxton stared through stray raindrops streaking the windows of his carriage, his fingers restlessly twisting and untwisting the phoenix head of his walking stick as the blue brougham trundled through London traffic. By the time the carriage turned into Soho Square, the lamplighters were already making their rounds. When the brougham clattered to a halt outside Aurelia’s house the front door yawned wide and then Robert
Greenley staggered out, his clothing disheveled, his eyes squeezed tight, face contorted with pain.

  Thraxton sprang from the brougham and ran to him.

  “Mister Greenley?”

  “The doctor! A scoundrel. An imposter. He has Aurelia! You must stop him!”

  Puzzled, Thraxton looked around just in time to see a tall man bundle Aurelia into a hansom cab. The man jumped aboard and threw a retreating glance over his shoulder—his eye fixing upon Thraxton. He had on a white top hat and rose-colored pince-nez spectacles. Thraxton remembered seeing that face before.

  Wimbledon Common.

  Mist-shrouded fields.

  The duel.

  The confrontation with Greenley. The doctor had been there, also.

  The world slowed and froze. The cries of costermongers, the rattle of traffic in the streets drained into silence. The man stared at Thraxton, the lenses of the rose-tinted pince-nez glowing red in the flickering gas light. A voice spoke in his ears, and Thraxton could not tell if he heard it or merely remembered the words:

  Death will not be mocked, nor sneered at. And there are many doors death can enter by… as you will learn at your cost.

  The brakes released and the world lurched forward, set in motion once again. Sound surged back into Thraxton’s ears with a rush.

  He ran to his waiting brougham and vaulted onto the driver’s seat next to his servant. “Harold! Quickly, after the cab!”

  Harold looked flummoxed, but cracked the whip over the horses’ heads. The carriage lurched away, almost colliding with a goods wagon loaded with beer barrels. The driver screamed a mouthful of Billingsgate and shook his fist at them. Thraxton ignored him, straining through the failing light to keep his eyes affixed to the hansom. Traffic was heavy and wagons and carriages stretched as far as the eye could see. Still, through Harold’s skilled driving and judicious use of the whip, weaving wildly past slower carriages, they hove within a dozen lengths of the black cab. But as the traffic squeezed beneath a railway bridge, a flock of sheep being driven to Smithfield Market flooded the roadway, stopping the traffic ahead of them, while the hansom they were pursuing managed to slip through.

  “Damn and bloody blast!” Thraxton yelled and jumped down. He threw a desperate look up at his servant. “Harold, return to Mister Greenley’s house. Take him to the nearest police station.”

  “What will you do, sir?”

  “Follow on foot and hope the hansom will also be held up.”

  Thraxton left the stalled brougham and dashed on ahead, running pell-mell through the frozen traffic. He reached the milling flock and barged his way through the mindless press of baaing sheep. As he ran beneath the railway bridge a train roared overhead, showering soot and fiery cinders on everything below. He plunged out of the gloom of the bridge and was just in time to see the hansom turn onto Wellington Street.

  He knew instantly where it was headed—the River Thames.

  Minutes later, he arrived at Waterloo Bridge, breathless, sweat salting his eyes. He was in luck: it looked as though every carriage, brougham, omnibus and horse cart in London was trying to squeeze across the bridge. Traffic in both directions was at a standstill. He spotted the hansom cab, snarled with the rest and ran up to it, snatching the door open.

  Empty.

  “You there, driver!” Thraxton shouted up. “You had a fare, a man in a white top hat and a young lady. Where did they go?”

  The cab driver pushed his bowler onto the back of his head.

  “Got off at the steps, sir. Just before the bridge. Looked like they was headin’ for the steamer dock.”

  At that instant a steam whistle shrieked. Thraxton ran to the bridge railing and looked out just in time to see a passenger steamer pull away from its pier and chug north up the river. As it passed beneath Waterloo Bridge, he could see passengers standing at the railing. Among them, a figure in a white top hat with his arm around the shoulders of a small figure in a black dress who slumped against him, head lolling. As the steamer passed beneath the bridge, the tall man looked up at him, raised his white top hat and waved it jauntily—Doctor Garrette.

  Thraxton pounded down the steps. A small paddle-wheel steam-tug drifted a foot from one of the piers, smoke billowing from its stack. The boat’s skipper, an abbreviated stump of shoulders and brawn whose physiognomy mirrored his vessel, stood gripping the tiller, smoke billowing from a pipe jammed in his mouth. Thraxton leaped from the end of the pier and landed sprawled on the deck at his feet.

  “Sir,” he said, breathlessly. “I need to hire your boat. A lady’s life depends upon it.”

  The pursuit was short in distance, but prolonged in time. The steam-tug Cricket was powerful but slow. It trailed behind the larger steamer, which steadily drew away. But the captain of the tug knew where the steamer was heading, to Cadogan Pier just a few miles down the river in Chelsea.

  * * *

  They were drawing stares, and that was bad.

  Silas Garrette knew that he and Aurelia presented an incongruous spectacle that pulled the eyes of the other passengers to them like iron to a lodestone: the tall, gangly man in the white top hat (which made him seem even taller than his six foot six height) and the pale-skinned, diminutive young woman who dangled in his arms, limp as a child’s rag doll.

  The couple standing at the railing had been watching them since they boarded. They appeared to be of the lower classes but were dressed up in their best finery: the woman in gaily colored dresses over crinolines and a flowery bonnet unseasonal for late October; the man in a bowler and scratchy tweed suit that stretched tight across his barrel chest, his muscular arms squeezed into sleeves too narrow. The man’s mustachios were trimmed in a military style and Garrette guessed he was likely an ex-army man and probably very handy with his fists. His inkling that this could be a danger was confirmed when the man whispered something to the woman and then left his place at the railing and approached.

  “Here,” the man said. “What’s your game, then?” He indicated Aurelia’s limp form with a nod.

  Garrette’s right hand reflexively dipped into his pocket and fondled the cold smooth steel of his scalpel. His eyes focused not on the uncouth face but on the carotid arteries—swollen tributaries of blood pulsing in the man’s throat. So readily accessible. A quick slash and the churlish oaf would bleed out in seconds.

  “I am a doctor. This young lady is my patient.”

  Despite the authoritative tone of Garrette’s voice, the military man remained skeptical.

  “She looks drunk to me. Or maybe you slipped her somethin’?”

  “Perhaps you should mind your own business.”

  Step a little closer, fool, Silas Garrette thought as he began to ease the scalpel from his pocket. I’d laugh to see the look on your face when I open your throat.

  “I think this young lady needs help. I think maybe she is my business.”

  Aurelia’s droopy-lidded eyes opened a little. She started to make mewling sounds of protest, but Garrette pressed the chloroform-soaked mask over her nose and mouth to stifle them, and her body slackened in his grip as she breathed in the vapors.

  The man’s eyes widened as he watched the mask press over Aurelia’s face. The huge hands balled into fists and he took a step forward.

  “She has the consumption. It is highly infectious. I would keep my distance if I were you.”

  At the mention of the word “consumption,” the man’s face paled and he stumbled backward. The other passengers sitting close also quickly vacated their seats and moved away. The military man took his female companion by the arm and drew her farther along the railing.

  Silas Garrette allowed himself a smile. He was quick with the scalpel—a few seconds’ work—but he needed to secure a new glass womb to supplant the flesh one he would rip his child from. He threw a look over the stern of the boat. He could see the tiny figure of Thraxton on the deck of the pursuing tug, but the slower boat was falling further behind.

  What’s more, they
were steaming toward a place Silas Garrette knew it would be impossible for Thraxton to find them.

  * * *

  In the skies above London, daylight grappled with night. At times bruise-colored clouds swamped the sun, suffocating the light. At other times, the clouds tore apart, shafts of sunlight shot down and bright day returned. The air smelled like rain. Ragged scraps of dark cloud scudded low. Now and then the sky shook with a distant rumble, a premonition of stormy weather moving in. On either side, steamboats chuffed up and down the Thames, venting smoke like watery dragons.

  “Can you go no faster?” Thraxton shouted above the rattle and wheeze of the steam engine.

  “Not without risking the boiler,” the captain replied. “The old gal’s ailing of late.”

  By the time the Cricket drew alongside Cadogan Pier, the steamer had discharged all of its passengers. Thraxton jumped from the deck, dashed up the pier, and was just in time to see Garrette drag Aurelia through the gates of the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens. Now he understood the madness behind Dr. Garrette’s method. The Cremorne Gardens was a popular public entertainment which featured park-like pavilions, dancing platforms, and acres of gardens, grottoes and tree-lined boulevards to promenade. Once lost amongst the thousands of Londoners that flocked to the place, it would be nigh impossible to find them again. As he sprinted through the iron gates, someone bellowed: “Oi! You there. A shilling for entrance!”

  The uncouth voice emanated from the barred cave opening of a ticket kiosk. Thraxton scrabbled in his pockets, seized a handful of coins and flung them through the bars, then ran up the main pathway, scanning the crowd.

  Doctor Garrette had found the perfect place to hide.

  Everywhere men in top hats and frock coats walked arm in arm with ladies. But then, in the distance, Thraxton saw a single white hat carried along on a river of black toppers.

  At the side of the path a wooden hand pointed the way above the words: Pagoda and Dance Platform. He could already hear the strains of an orchestra striking up. They were playing a waltz. Thraxton had visited the Cremorne many times, and had danced on the very same platform. Here the crowds were always the thickest. He hurried in pursuit.