"And what's this?" Ulysses said, striding over to the desk and snatching the papers from Bartholomew's hands. A wry smile on his lips, he began casually flicking through them. "So, the two of you were about to have me declared legally dead? Looks like I arrived just in the nick of time, as ever."
Ulysses calmly paced his way around the desk and lent against the mantelpiece, he glanced once at the painting of his father on the wall above him and then tossed the papers casually into the fire. The solicitor gasped and Bartholomew took a sudden step forward and then remembered himself.
"Well, I'm still alive and that's that. This residence is still the property of Ulysses Lucian Quicksilver, until I deem otherwise, and if I choose to leave it to the Cat Protection League in my will for when I really am dead and gone then that is my business."
Bartholomew opened his mouth as if to speak.
"And if you want to keep your allowance from our late father's estate, Barty," Ulysses said, silencing him with a glare, "then I suggest you don't say another word. Understood?" The younger man nodded, a look of defeat on his sallow face. "Nimrod, my brother will be leaving now. If you would kindly find him his coat?"
"At once, sir." The manservant bowed his head and then with an outstretched hand motioned Bartholomew Quicksilver to leave.
"Mr Screwtape will also be leaving now," Ulysses added, scowling darkly.
"M-Mr Quicksilver," Screwtape said, finding his voice at last, "you understand that I was working to help the Quicksilver family to the best of my ability and that if I had known..."
"Known what? That I was still alive?"
"Why, yes, sir. If I had but had word..."
"What are you trying to say, Screwtape? If you had known I was still alive you would have acted more quickly to bring this nefarious scheme to its conclusion for the benefit of my brother and yourself?"
"No, sir. Not at all."
"Nimrod?"
"Yes sir?" the manservant said, still waiting in the shadows at the threshold of the study.
"It has been a long day and I have travelled far. I am going to retire for the night very soon. If you would be so kind as to bring me up a nightcap - cognac, I think - once you have escorted my brother and our ex-family solicitor from my property."
"With pleasure, sir." Nimrod now ushered both Bartholomew and Screwtape from the room.
"Mr Quicksilver, I must protest," the lawyer persisted in foolish desperation.
"Yes, Mr Screwtape, so it would seem. But I insist, and I can be very insistent, as can Nimrod here, so I suggest you just go before my goodwill runs out. Do not think for one second that I would extend to you the same clemency as I do towards my wayward brother, which he has earned by dint of being my blood relative, heaven help me. So, I say again, goodnight, Mr Screwtape."
"Good night, Mr Quicksilver," the lawyer managed to bluster before a strong hand on his arm encouraged him to exit the study, leaving Ulysses Quicksilver alone, at last, for the first time since he had left over a year before to venture into the Himalayas and beyond on an endeavour that had nearly cost him his life.
Laying his cane on the desk Ulysses eased himself into the padded leather chair behind it and smiled as his eyes alighted on the same cuttings his brother Barty had been perusing earlier. 'Himalayan Adventure Ends In Double Death' one read. Certainly it had cost Davenport his life, the poor wretch. 'Search For Missing Millionaire Suspended' read another and 'Quicksilver: the Quick or the Dead?'
Well, the question had been answered now. Ulysses Quicksilver was back and tomorrow London would be reminded of what it had been missing.
ACT ONE
THE DARWIN CODE
APRIL 1997
CHAPTER ONE
On the Origin of Species
The night Alfred Wentwhistle died began just like any other.
The cold orb of the moon shone through the arched windows of the museum, bathing the myriad display cases in its wan blue light. The electric street lamps on Cromwell Road were a mere flicker of orange beyond the windows.
Alfred Wentwhistle, night watchman at the museum for the last thirty-six years, swept the polished cabinets with the beam of his spotlight. Gleaming eyes, hooked beaks and outstretched wings materialised momentarily under the harsh white attentions of its light. The beam's path was a familiar one, the repeated motions of a never-ending ballet of strobing light. The winding path Alfred took through the miles of corridors, halls and galleries was a familiar one also, the same route taken every night for the last thirty-six years. It was the course Shuttleworth had taught him when he was a boy of barely sixteen and when old Shuttleworth had just two months to retirement, having trod the same path himself for fifty-four years.
There was never any need to change the route. Night watchman of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington was not a demanding role. Alfred carried his truncheon and torch every night but he had never had need of the former in all his years in the post, and he no longer really needed the latter either. He could have found his way around the galleries on a moonless night in the middle of a blackout with his eyes closed, as he used to like to tell Mrs Wentwhistle with a chuckle. He simply carried the torch through force of habit. There had not been one break-in in all his thirty-six years at the museum. And apart from the infrequent change of the odd cabinet here and there or the moving of an artefact every once in a while, the familiar layout of the museum had changed little in any significant way since the arrival of the Diplodocus carnegii, ninety-two years before in 1905.
Alfred Wentwhistle enjoyed his job. He delighted in spending hours amongst the exhibits of stuffed beasts and dinosaur bones. Of course, you could experience the real thing now with the opening of the Challenger Enclosure at London Zoo, but there was something timeless and magical about the fossil casts of creatures that amateur archaeologists, who had effectively been the first palaeontologists, had taken to be evidence of the existence of the leviathans of legend such as the dragon or the Cyclops.
Every now and then, undisturbed by the presence of the public, Alfred took pleasure from reading the hand-written labels explaining what any particular item was, where it had been collected, who had recovered it and any other pertinent information the creator of the exhibit had seen fit to share. After thirty-six years there were not many labels that Alfred had not read.
He took great satisfaction from knowing that he was playing his part to keep secure the nation's - and by extension the Empire's and hence, in effect, the world's - greatest museum of natural history. Even though there had been no challenge to its peaceful guardianship of Mother Nature's myriad treasures since he took up his tenure, Alfred Wentwhistle was there, every night of the year - save Christmas Night itself - just in case the museum should ever need him.
Every now and again he would come upon one of the museum's research scientists working late into the night. They would exchange pleasantries and perhaps offer him a warming drink. They all knew old, reliable Alfred and he knew all of them by name. Over the years Alfred had seen professors come and go - botanists, zoologists, naturalists and crypto zoologists - but some things stayed the same, like the Waterhouse building itself and its night-time guardian. Alfred knew his place. The scientists were highly intelligent and erudite luminaries of the museum foundation and he was merely a night watchman. It was enough for him that he was allowed to spend hours enjoying the exhibits on display within. 'Nature's Treasure House' was what they called it; Sir Richard Owen's lasting legacy to the world.
Alfred's slow steady steps inexorably brought him back into the central hall and to the museum entrance. He paused beneath the outstretched head of the skeletal diplodocus to shine his torch on the face of his pocket watch. Five minutes past, just like every other night; regular as clockwork.
He looked up, shining the beam of his torch into the hollow orbits of the giant's eye sockets. It stared ahead impassively at the entrance to the museum and saw 20,000 visitors pass beneath its archways practically every day.
&
nbsp; Alfred heard the tap of metal against metal, caught the glimmer of light on glass out of the corner of his eye, and it was then that he realised one of the doors was open.
There was no doubt in his mind that the door had been locked. It was the first thing he did when he came on duty. Should any of the scientists or cataloguers be working late and need to leave after this time, Alfred himself had to let them out and then he would always lock the door again after them.
No, there was no doubt in his mind that something was awry. Pacing towards the doors he could see where the lock had been forced.
The sound of breaking glass echoed through the halls of the museum from an upper gallery.
There was something most definitely awry. For the first time in thirty-six years his museum needed him.
Turning from the main doors the night watchman jogged across the central hall, his shambling steps marking the full eighty-five foot length of the diplodocus to the foot of the main staircase.
Once there he glanced back over his shoulder and up at the grand arch of the first floor staircase. Above him carved monkeys scampered up the curving arches of the roof into the darkness, amidst the leaf-scrolled iron span-beams. The sound had definitely come from the gallery where the museum staff's private offices were located.
Putting a hand to the polished stone balustrade and taking a deep breath, Alfred Wentwhistle started to take the steps two at a time. At the first landing, where the staircase split beneath the austere bronze-eyed gaze of Sir Richard Owen, he turned right. Hurrying along the gallery overlooking the central hall and running parallel to it, past stuffed sloths and the mounted skeletons of prehistoric marine reptiles, brought him to the second flight of stairs.
Here he paused, out of breath and ears straining, as he tried to work out more precisely where the sound had come from. In the comparative quiet of the sleeping museum he heard a crash, like the sound of a table being overturned. The noise had come from somewhere on this floor, away to his right, from within the western Darwin wing.
Alfred turned into this series of galleries, passing beneath the carved archway that read 'The Ascent of Man'. He quickened his pace as he came into a moonlit gallery of cases containing wax replicas of man's ancestors. They stood frozen in time, in various hunched poses, every kind of hominid from Australopithecus to Homo neanderthalensis. His sweeping beam shone from bared, snarling teeth, glass eyes and the black-edged blades of flint tools.
On any other night Alfred would have paused to examine the specimens and their accompanying explanations, telling of the evolution of Man from primitive ape. He would have been just as fascinated and amazed as he had been the first time he had read The Origin of Species and learnt of the incredible story of the human race's rise to become the most powerful and widely proliferated species on Earth, and beyond.
When Charles Darwin had first proposed his hypothesis of the origin of species, natural selection and the survival of the fittest, he had been derided by the greatest scientific minds of his day and denounced as a charlatan and a heretic. For he had spoken out against the worldwide Christian Church and its core belief that God had created all life on the planet in its final form from the beginning of time.
With the rediscovery of the lost worlds hidden within the jungles of the Congo, atop the mesa-plateaus of the South American interior and on lost islands within the Indian Ocean, others - many of them churchmen - had come forward to challenge Darwin's claims again, vociferously supporting the supposition that because dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures still existed on the Earth in the present day, the idea of one species evolving into another was ludicrous. And the debate still raged in some persistent, unremitting quarters.
But over a hundred years after his death, Darwin had been posthumously exonerated of all accusations of bestial heresy and scientific idiocy to the point where he was practically idolised as the father of the new branch of science of Evolutionary Biology, and had an entire wing of the Natural History Museum dedicated to the advances made since he first proposed his radical ideas in 1859. In fact there were scientists working within that field now; men like Professors Galapagos and Crichton.
On many previous occasions Alfred Wentwhistle had found himself wiling away time gazing into the faces of his evolutionary ancestors, his reflection in the glass of the cabinets overlaid on top of the pronounced brows and sunken eyes beneath. On such occasions he had wondered upon Darwin's legacy for the human race and what implications such an accepted theory might have for Her Majesty Queen Victoria, in that it presumed that the British monarch was descended from the apes of aeons past.
The familiar smell of camphor and floor polish assailed Alfred's nostrils. Moonlight bathed the gallery with its monochrome light. He found himself in a gallery displaying mammalia, reptilia and amphibia ordered so as to clearly show the evolutionary path Man had followed. From the moment his Palaeozoic ancestors had first crawled out of the primeval swamps to the present day when he bestrode the globe like a colossus, the human race covering the Earth and the nearer planets of the solar system.
It was off this gallery that some of the scientists had their private workspaces. A number of doors on either side stretched away from Alfred bearing the brass name plaques of the great and the good.
Alfred could hear clear sounds of a struggle now. In the beam of his torch fragments of glass glittered on the floor before one of the doors, looking like a diamond frost on the first morning of winter. The flickering glow of an electric lamp cast its light into the gallery from inside the office before suddenly going out. There was a violent crash of more breaking glass and furniture being overturned.
He would certainly have a dramatic tale to tell Mrs Wentwhistle over bacon and eggs the next morning, Alfred suddenly, incongruously, found himself thinking.
As the watchman neared the invaded office he noticed wisps of smoke or some sort of gas seeping under the door and a new smell - like aniseed, with an unpleasant undertone of rotten meat - that made his nose wrinkle.
The door suddenly burst open, sending more shards of glass spinning into the gallery, clattering against the display cases. The figure of a man burst out of the office and collided with the ageing night watchman. Alfred reeled backwards as the man barged past him. He couldn't stop himself from stumbling into a case containing a family of Neanderthal waxworks posed around an inanimate fire. The torch fell from Alfred's hand and its bulb died.
"Here, what do you think you're doing?" Alfred managed, calling after the intruder as he sprinted from the gallery. He was holding something about the shape and size of a packing box in his arms. But the thief did not stop and before Alfred had even managed to regain his balance, he was gone.
Alfred's heart was racing, beating a tattoo of nervous excitement against his ribs. In all his thirty-six years he had never known anything like it. Adrenalin flooded his system and he was about to give chase when something reminded him that the thief had not been alone in the office. Alfred had heard more than one voice raised in anger as he had approached and there had been definite signs of a struggle.
Cautiously, he approached the doorway of the office. The rancid mist was beginning to dissipate. The soles of his boots crunched on the fractured diamonds of glass.
Inside the pitch black office-cum-laboratory he could hear a ragged breathing that reminded him of an animal snuffling. Then, suddenly, there was silence.
Alfred took another step forward.
"What the devil?" was all he could manage as, in an explosion of glass and splintered wood something burst out of the office, ripping the door from its sundered frame. The night watchman barely had time to yelp out in pain as slivers of glass sliced his face and hands as he raised them to protect himself, before a hulking shadow of solid black muscle was on top of him.
Alfred had a momentary impression of thick, matted hair, a sharp bestial odour - a rank animal smell mixed in with the aniseed and rancid meat - broad shoulders and a blunt-nosed head slung low between th
em. There was a flash of silver as the moonlight caught something swinging from around the thing's neck.
He had never known anything like it, never in thirty-six years.
And then, teeth bared in an animal scream, its hollering cry deafening in his ears, fists flailing like sledgehammers, the ape-like creature attacked. Feebly Alfred put up his arms to defend himself but there was nothing he could do against the brute animal strength of his assailant.
It grabbed Alfred's head by the hair so violently he could feel clumps of it being ripped from his scalp. Then, in one savage action, the enraged beast smashed his skull into display case. With the second blow the glass of the cabinet shattered and Alfred Wentwhistle's world exploded into dark oblivion.
CHAPTER TWO
The Inferno Club
Ulysses Quicksilver woke with the midday sun streaming in through the crack in the heavy velvet drapes of his bedchamber. The warm light reached his sleeping form, bringing to an end a night of vivid, almost feverish, dreaming. It banished the transitory memories of unsettling dreams and replaced them with physical reminders of a host of old injuries, his worn body aching.
He stretched beneath the crisp sheets of the grand four-poster and immediately regretted doing so. There was the sharp twinge in his right shoulder, the stab of cramp in his left leg and the dull throb in his left side.
He had slept long and deeply, his dreams overflowing with half-real recollections of the events of the past eighteen months. There was the rapid descent through the freezing fog above the snow-clad peaks, the violent lurch of collision as the gondola broke up on contact with the pitiless rocks. Then he was lying in the snow, teeth chattering hard enough to break, Davenport's body lying there next to his, his blood freezing black in the sub-zero hell.
Then his sleep had been filled with the sonorous chanting that had filled the monastery, the sensation of returning warmth, air thick with the smell of tallow fat and jasmine flowers. In another moment he had found himself training again with the masters of the temple, his still-healing body being subjected to a beating with bamboo poles and blunt wooden weapons. There had also been the mental challenges as he strove to acquire mastery over his body through strength of will alone. Then there had been the final test, the duel with the snow beast, his body suspended in the air above the arena before he had brought physical form and mind back as one and, incredibly, bested the creature.
Pax Britannia: Unnatural History Page 2