Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by David Hambling

  People needed a bit of something cheerful to see them through, especially if they were working long hours in a pickle factory. I had my friends in Conquering Hero and at the gymnasium, and I had Sunday lunch with the whole family to look forward to. Sally had no family and no friends from her previous life except perhaps among the nuns at Virgo Fidelis, and she ached for missing her son.

  A bat fluttered overhead, swooping this way and that. I was about to point it out when Sally suddenly spoke up. “Harry, did you ever think about what life would be like if you were married?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “In a few years, wouldn’t you like to live in your own place rather than someone else’s? Have someone to cook properly for you and keep company with?” She spoke dreamily. “Maybe some little ones, one day?”

  “I suppose it’s what everyone wants.” My rented room was in fact beginning to feel cramped; it was not having anywhere to put books that did it. I supposed I could get something larger than a room, but that would mean a housekeeper, and the complications that entailed had put me off the idea.

  As for women and courting and marriage, those were worlds apart for me. I could not imagine how it would ever come about that I would be in a position to propose, given all the steps in between. How would I even meet a woman?

  “I know you’re not comfortable around any women,” Sally said, reading my mind. “But you could do a lot worse.”

  I abruptly realised that she was still holding my arm; she was talking about my marrying her.

  “I know,” she said, although I had not said anything. “I have a past. God knows I have a past. But we’ve got shared history, you and me. You can talk to me like you can’t talk to anyone else about things. And I understand. About beetles and things.”

  That was true. Sally knew more about my work than even my family. She had seen things that no other living human had seen.

  “I don’t want charity,” she went on. “I’ve had enough of that from the nuns. With you and me, it’ll be a real partnership, fifty-fifty. I can cook and clean and keep house and everything… and you can trust me. With everything.”

  “Is that a shooting star?”

  “Let’s wish on it,” she said.

  But I saw at once that it was not a shooting star. The fierce red glow that drifted above us, in among the placid blue-white stars, went for too long before going out. Then another and another went by. We both gawped upward and followed the stream of glowing embers back to their source: an angry red glow from behind the trees, just in the direction that we had come from.

  I hurried back, and as I approached, I could hear the dogs barking at the wooden caravan, whose gaily painted sides were burning like a funeral pyre, wrapped in long ribbons of red-yellow flame that twisted round each other. The fire roared like a blast furnace and, even as I watched it, the caravan started collapsing in on itself. The intensity was astonishing as though the caravan had been dipped in paraffin before being set alight.

  “Hester!” I called.

  There was no sign of her, and the caravan door was still shut. She could hardly have fallen asleep in that time. There had been no fire burning when we had left. Even if she had lit the stove for a brew, I could not see how it could have run out of control so fast.

  “Hester!”

  It would only be three steps to get out of the caravan, even if it was burning and she had stayed in too long trying to put the fire out, but somehow, I did not think Madame Hester had escaped.

  The dogs barked furiously. Their chains were at full stretch, and they were barking into the fire.

  Shadows bent around the trees two fields away. They were cast by a pair of car headlights, moving swiftly down the next lane.

  Sally watched the holocaust wordlessly.

  “Well, this is a right mess,” I said.

  Chapter Fourteen: A. E. F. Horniman

  “Don’t ever marry if you can help it,” said Skinner. “That’s my advice.”

  We were seated on a park bench, and he waited until a woman pushing a perambulator had passed before continuing.

  “You don’t have to marry her, I take it?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Nothing could have been further from my mind.”

  “Well, there you are. Unfortunate about Madam Hester, though.”

  “Unfortunate hardly covers it.”

  “First Mabel Brown, then our second-hand dealer, and now your gipsy woman. His gills will not be happy with another dead end. This here is our last and final chance.”

  I could not, of course, prove that Miss De Vere was behind the violent fire that had gutted the caravan in seconds. But the circumstantial evidence was considerable. Her aim of eliminating dangerous knowledge, and the fact that she had tabs on the two of us, argued for it. It also conveniently cast doubt on my own integrity, driving a wedge between Stafford and me—which was exactly what she wanted—while at the same time furnishing her with a piece of information she could use for blackmail. Both Skinner and Sally had urged me against informing the police that Sally and I had been the last people to see Madam Hester alive, and with some reluctance, I had kept my peace.

  At least a new line of investigation had opened up. I had been in the library on a dual quest. One half of it had been successful. On the matter of life travelling through space on meteoroids, there was quite a collection of literature, culminating with a Swedish chemist called Arrhenius, who thought that all life originated in that way and spread across the stars. There was even a word for it, panspermia, which I duly made note of. Perhaps a meteorite containing alien spores might really be a magna mater, a Great Mother to all kinds of troubling creatures.

  However, the second part of my quest, looking through still-more-unlikely books by Mathers for possible revelations concerning his time as curator at the Horniman museum, was proving utterly fruitless.

  In the midst of that, there was a polite cough at my elbow. “Ah, Stubbs,” said Hoade, looking awkward and doing his best to hide behind his beard. “I didn’t see you there earlier.”

  “Good morning, Hoade.” I was always pleased to see him as I knew he would not approach me unless he had some nugget of information to impart. Hoade was not the sort to say hello just for the sake of politeness.

  “I’m sorry, Stubbs. I’ve been an ass,” he said abruptly. “Mathers is a complete red herring.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there’s a far better and more obvious connection between the Golden Dawn and the Horniman Museum. I jumped at Mathers because he came out first and seemed to fit. You would have thought that cross-word puzzles had taught me not to use the first, obvious answer. But no.” He shook his head sheepishly. “It’s Annie Horniman.”

  “A member of the Horniman family?”

  “Granddaughter of Honest John Horniman, who made the family fortune. Daughter of Frederick Horniman, who created the museum. She was the friend of Mather who got him the post there. She was also a chum of Yeats, and she joined the Golden Dawn at the same time as him.”

  Hoade reasoned, sensibly enough, that Annie Horniman had more familiarity with the collection than Mathers, having lived with it in the same house for years. Given her interest in the occult, she was likely to have come across the baetyl. My researches on Mathers suggested that, while he might be good at translating old books, he was pretty impervious to ideas that were not his own, and Annie Horniman might be a better candidate.

  Unlike the late Liddell Mathers, Miss Horniman was not only alive, but she was living in London—and able, we hoped, to answer a few questions. Of course, they would have to be put in the right way, and that was the trick. She was quite an important figure in theatrical circles. She had broken with the Golden Dawn and with Mather and with W. B. Yeats, but her association with the latter included her setting up a theatre with him in Dublin. He had moved from magic to poetry, and she to theatre.

  And Hoade, genius that he was, had found it child’s pla
y to locate Miss Horniman for me.

  “I am greatly in your debt,” I said.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, sounding almost offended. “Oh, and another piece of minutiae, as you were asking—I can’t find anything to link Pandora’s box with meteorites except very indirectly. In fact, in the earliest versions of the myth, it was Pandora herself who was the bearer of trouble—she was created by the gods, the perfect woman, as a trap for mankind.”

  “How peculiar.”

  “Oh, not really,” he said, glancing down at his wedding ring with a little smile.

  “That reminds me—do not mention any of this to anyone. It’s life or death. Especially,” I added, “if there’s a blond American lady asking.”

  “I won’t. And I’ll certainly watch out for American blondes.”

  He seemed unmoved, but somewhere behind those glasses, I suspected that there was a small thrill of vicarious adventure. I hoped that if Miss De Vere appeared, he would quell his impulse to share information and would stay silent. I did not want her knowing that he knew anything about baetyls or occult connections. A man who was in a position to learn more might qualify as a danger in her view.

  It struck me that a library full of books was a dangerously inflammable place and that all that dry paper only needed a match to set it off.

  “If you’re working here on your own after hours,” I said, “try to keep a fire extinguisher handy.”

  ***

  The hall was beginning to fill up. The audience was largely female and of middle years, though there were some men among the older attendees. I was in my good suit, and Skinner had spruced himself up for the occasion. He smelled of eau de cologne and had his hair slicked back and a fresh flower in his buttonhole.

  I felt more than usually out of place. The other folk were moneyed, but they were not exactly the smart set. They were more those types of middle-class, arty-crafty people who have a cultivated air of casualness. They were the sorts of people who filled the concert halls and galleries and attended educational public talks. They could tell the paintings of one artist from another and comment when the bassoon was off-key. They might not all have known each other personally, but they could recognise their own kind and those who were not of their own kind. The two of us attracted the odd curious glance. Or perhaps they were just looking at me.

  The subject of the talk was the future of the theatre, a topic on which I was entirely ignorant and Skinner even more so.

  “I don’t see how they’re going to fill five minutes with that,” he grumbled, looking from the program to the rostrum, where the speakers were readying themselves, “never mind an hour.”

  The plan was that after the talk, Skinner would instigate a conversation with Miss Horniman, and he would develop the situation from there as needed. He harboured no doubts about his ability to establish a rapport with her; according to Skinner, he was able to engage any woman, even one from such a superior social class, as easily as a snake fascinated a rabbit.

  “Even a wealthy, educated woman in her sixties?” I had asked him when he first floated the idea.

  “Nothing to it,” he said. “A little bit of flattery goes a long way with women that age—they’re starved for it. Is that your homework you’re working on?”

  Now, while Skinner fidgeted, I was writing up my account of recent events, in which I had fallen somewhat behind. Even without what you might call a full-time job, it was surprising how few hours I had left in the day to catch up after taking into account my need to maintain a level of fitness at the gymnasium, my social obligations, and my correspondence course.

  “Just trying to keep up to date on the ‘insurance policy,’” I said.

  The talk was a discussion with three participants: Miss A. E. F. Horniman, Mr K. N. Smith. and Dr W. Reese. Smith was an American gentleman from New York who smiled a great deal and found everyone charming. He was the referee, and he made introductory remarks and supplied the others with topics, not that they needed much to start them up.

  The meat of the discussion was a battle between Miss Horniman and Dr Reese over whether the theatre was, in a manner of speaking, going to hell in a handbasket or whether it was in fact healthier than ever.

  I did not recognise the names of any of the playwrights mentioned, or their works, and still less the directors or other parties involved. Comedy and “crook” plays, which were all I ever went to, were dismissed on all sides. A Russian called Tchechov was mentioned repeatedly. As for theatre business, I did not even know what a mushroom syndicate was or why it would be such a bad thing.

  It was like one of those neighbourhood quarrels going back years, where old doings were raked over and misdemeanours taken out and aired and everyone understood what Joe had done to Bert.

  Dr Reese was a literary man from Oxford, whose ruddy complexion indicated a familiarity with his college’s wine cellars. He was unforgiving towards the modern world and the way that the vandals had made free with our theatrical heritage and besmirched—his word—our great treasures. The great dramas of human emotion had been replaced with cheap sensationalism and lewd displays that were unfit to put on the stage.

  Miss Horniman listened to all that with great patience. She was a plain woman with short-cropped grey hair and little sign of vanity about her person. Most women of that type sported turbans and gaudy brooches, but she was as unadorned as she was straight-talking.

  When Miss Horniman spoke, it was with great conviction and a surprising flair. Art was not a mirror but a hammer; it needed to reshape the world and not just reflect it. For her, putting on a new play was about effecting social change and addressing the issues of the day, even if that included subjects that some people might consider sordid or unpleasant.

  “Yes, we can have Shakespearean tragedies about the fall of kings, but let us not have just Shakespeare. Let us have works that the ordinary man—and the ordinary woman—can see, which chime with their own experience of the world. Theatre should not be dull and worthy, just for scholars. And pedants.” She gave a sideways look at Dr Reese, which drew a laugh.

  Miss Horniman recounted her experiences with productions in Dublin, Manchester, London, and Canada, and she contrasted the audiences. In her view, it was the job of the theatre to put on plays that people would want to watch. She recited a poem from memory by “Willie”—W. B. Yeats—about the frustration of dealing with knaves and dolts and theatre managers and how important it was that someone took on that task.

  She was quite passionate in her speech and very convincing. Theatre sounded like an exciting, eye-opening, and important experience when she talked about it. I even thought I might go and see a play myself afterwards.

  There were some long-winded questions from the audience afterwards. Skinner was yawning. I thought he would be getting ready to make his move, but he was rooted.

  “You must be joking,” he said sourly. “Look at her. She’s even wearing trousers, for Gawd’s sake. Her type isn’t interested in men. We’ll have to find an alternative line of attack because this one is a dead loss.”

  Miss Horniman was having an animated discussion with Mr Smith about costumes and scenery and the merits of a mobile production.

  “Maybe I’ll have a crack myself,” I said, not meaning to speak out loud.

  “You? Be my guest, Harry, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ll be waiting outside.”

  For some reason, smoking was not allowed in the lecture hall, and Skinner was panting for a cigarette. I let him go and gingerly made my way to the front of the room.

  I was not at all certain how I would manage an introduction, given that Miss Horniman was at the centre of a knot of people. Only one of them was actively engaged with her—a stooped, balding man whose insistent tone carried over to where I was. Evidently, he was telling her about a theatre in Bristol, but as soon as she caught my eye, I distinctly heard her interrupt him midflow.

  “You will have to excuse me, Mr Dean. I must just talk to a friend.” Sh
e stepped over to me. “Delighted to meet you,” she said, extending a hand. “Mr Dean is so tiresome. He knows he won’t get another penny out of me for that folly of his in Bristol, but he will keep on about it every time he sees me. I’m not a bank.”

  “It’s an honour, Miss Horniman,” I said, taking her hand cautiously, though her grip was strong enough. “My name is Harry Stubbs, and I was very impressed with your talk, very impressed indeed. You beat that Reeves on points fair and square, three rounds to nothing.”

  “Thank you. Some men still entertain outdated ideas, and we need to put them right. You’re not in the theatre business yourself?”

  I had long since learned to accept that people made assumptions based on my appearance and my accent even when I was in my best suit. Perhaps I expected Miss Horniman to be more perceptive, and my disappointment, coupled with the excitement of the situation, spurred me to say more than I meant to.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m a writer.”

  “Well, bully for you, Mr Stubbs,” she said promptly. “As I was saying, Britain needs more playwrights with a true understanding of the average man.”

  “I’m really more of a novelist than a playwright at the present time.” Lying has never been my talent, and I must have coloured like a schoolboy. To cover my embarrassment, I held up my sheaf of notes in evidence as though Miss Horniman might not believe otherwise that I really could string words together.

  “Oh, a manuscript.” To my surprise she took the top few sheets and, placing gold-rimmed half glasses on her nose, started reading. “I don’t have much to do with novels. If you were to adapt it for the stage, I might be able to give you some names. It’s a little old-fashioned in style.”

  “I dare say it is,” I said.

  “But is it a serious work?”

  “I don’t know if that’s for me to say,” I started but then decided to strike back rather than dodging. “If a work succeeds in reflecting life in a way that people can recognise, then it deserves to be taken seriously—even a modern work in a popular genre. The first job of any work is to be read. And if it distorts real life, then, like a lens, the distortion can be what magnifies.”