“They brought him water, you know, and food,” Hanrahan said, nostalgically. “Dan Eaton, I mean... when he was in the pillory, for printing The Rights of Man. Now, if Patou could bring Tom Paine back to life–what a triumph that would be!”
“So it would, Jack,” Ned agreed. “So it would.”
Chapter Four
The House in Purfleet
When Jack Hanrahan let Ned Knob down from his cart in Fleet Street, Ned made a considerable show of going away, because he knew that the burker would be wary of being followed. Given that he had a strong suspicion as to where the cart was headed, though, he did not need to trot along behind it. He merely had to take up a convenient point of vantage once or twice along the way, to make sure that Hanrahan was still headed for the river.
He was not unduly surprised when the burker went around the Tower on the north side and made his way to the St. Katherine Dock. Patou was bound to be more careful now, having been seen at Jenny’s and the quay near Southwark Bridge, in company with two grey men.
The cart skirted the docks and made its way to the edge of the Thames, to a jetty not far west of Tower Hill. Ned ran on ahead, as fast as he could go, to the Hermitage Stairs. There he found a ferryman whose boat was twice the size of a common skiff, and was fitted with a sail.
“Can you slip across to Cherry Garden Pier and wait in its shadow?” Ned asked. “There’ll be a ship along in a matter of minutes–an hour at the most–riding the stream and the outbound tide. She’s a two-master, but she won’t be carrying much sail, given the flow. If you can keep pace with her till she docks again, without her master knowing he’s being followed, there’s half a guinea in it.”
“There’s six shillings now and another six when we get there,” the ferryman relied, “provided that we go no further than Gallion’s Reach.”
“Six now, six then and another six if we have to go further than Hornchurch Marshes,” Ned said, showing the ferryman a generous handful of coins that he had pulled from his trouser pocket.
“You’re a gentleman, and no doubt,” said the ferryman, only a little sarcastically–but he did as he was asked, and waited under Cherry Garden Pier on the south bank until Ned nudged him and showed him the vessel he was to follow.
“Right,” said the ferryman, unenthusiastically. “Should’ve known it’d be her. If it weren’t broad daylight, sir, I’d hand your money back–but it’s only at night that she’s said to be haunted. I’ll follow her for you, but you needn’t fear that I’ll get too close. “
“If you know for certain where she’s headed,” Ned said. “You can take me there at your leisure. Do you know her regular berth?”
“Not far this side of Hell, I’d imagine,” the ferryman opined. “I don’t want to know–but I’ll do as I promised, provided that I can keep my distance, and darkness doesn’t fall.”
“Why do you say that she’s haunted?” Ned asked. “She seems very ordinary to me.”
“You don’t ply your trade between the Tower and Westminster after dark, sir,” the ferryman said. “I’ve seen strange things in my time, and learned to keep my eyes averted from all kinds of skullduggery... but those eyes! If you’d seen those eyes looking out over the water...”
“Does her master have those eyes?” Ned wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” the ferryman admitted. “He shields them with that Quaker hat he wears–but when a ship is carrying the souls of the damned, its master is bound to be a demon. That’s just common sense.”
More common than sense, Ned thought, but he held his tongue.
They eased into the stream when the Prometheus had passed by. There was plenty of traffic on the river, and Ned did not think that anyone aboard John Devil’s craft would think their sail suspicious, but he fretted nevertheless as they negotiated Woolwich Reach and Gallion’s Reach, and kept on going past Crossness and the Erith Marshes.
Ned wondered, as they went, whether Gregory Temple had discovered anything at Germain Patou’s Stepney address. He suspected not. Whatever message had been waiting there for Ned Knob would not be given to anyone else–and now, it would not need to be given to Ned Knob either. If Temple had drawn a blank, he would presumably redirect his attention to Jack Hanrahan, but that wouldn’t matter either, now that Ned had satisfied himself that Hanrahan was on the very periphery of the affair. In time, Temple was certain to find out where Patou was, and where the grey men were normally kept, but for the time being, Ned had at least a day’s start on the secret police.
He wondered, too, how many other people were of the opinion that a vessel crewed by monsters and captained by a demon was making daily trips up river into the Port of London. Ferrymen were not known for keeping close counsel, and they carried a great many passengers by day and night–even in the heart of the city, where there were bridges a-plenty–but there had been so many other stories of a fanciful sort abroad in the last 20 years that no one paid any of them serious heed. The Thames would be choked with ghostly pirate ships and rotting sea-serpents had all the tales been true.
The ferryman was beginning to grumble that he could not possibly go any further than the bend at Grays when the vessel they were tracking finally put in to Purfleet. Ned handed over the last of the promised coin, and begged the ferryman to set him down as quickly as he could. The ferryman was glad to oblige, and Ned set off at a sprint to catch up with Germain Patou’s landing-party.
Half a dozen seamen–none of them grey-skinned–were loading up a cart far sturdier and more capacious than Jack Hanrahan’s. Although the transferred cargo contained ordinary supplies as well as corpses, the number of parcels packaged in dirty winding-sheets told Ned that Jack Hanrahan was far from being the only supplier to this particular buyer. It occurred to him that when people spoke of a burking “epidemic,” they were only referring to bodies that had been reported missing. Who knew how many more there might be like the little girl from St. Luke’s, whose posthumous disappearance would never attract the slightest attention?
Ned did not know how far he might have to go when the cart set off and he set off in pursuit. He hoped that it would be no more than a few hundred yards, given that the masters of the grey men seemed to find the river so convenient for their purposes. So it transpired; on the eastern edge of Purfleet, there was a three-story house with two stubby swings and a hectic multitude of gables, set in high-walled grounds. The only obvious means of access was a sturdy steel gate that was locked as soon as the cart had vanished inside, but Ned wasn’t in the least worried by that.
He made a tour of the walls, looking for the most convenient point of entry. There was ivy on the walls to the rear, but the bulk of it was inside and would not lend him much support. Fortunately, the wall was old and the mortar between the stones was crumbling. With the aid of his clasp-knife–which he plied with great care, not wanting to blunt the sharpness of the blade as well as the point–he was able to hollow out a sequence of footholds that would take him to the top. Once he was there, the ivy made the descent much easier.
There were birch-trees within the wall that hid his descent from the windows of the house, so he did not think that there was any possibility of his having been seen as he slid over the wall. He felt entirely confident of his invisibility as he crept through the undergrowth towards the house.
The ground was lower at the back of the house than at the front, so the rear door gave access to a basement whose floor was considerable lower than the floor of the front hallway. There was no one in the kitchen garden, but Ned saw movement in several of the windows on the floor above the basement and the floor above that. The house seemed to be abundantly tenanted–and he understood very quickly what the ferryman had meant by those eyes looking out. Grey faces were continually appearing at one window or another, merely in order to look out. They were not keeping watch as sentries might: they were simply staring into the garden, as if they had nothing better to do than contemplate the tawdry wilderness.
Sawney might be the
best of them rather than the worst, Ned thought, for all that he could not seem to string his thoughts together. Whatever has been done to these people, it has let them weak in body and in mind–but Patou seemed genuinely concerned for Sawney’s wellbeing, and he a physician, not some Caribbean slave-holder.
Ned rested for some little while when he reached the extremity of the useful cover, wondering whether he ought to wait for darkness–which would come soon enough, given that All Souls was more than a week past. If he intended to play the spy and make his escape without his presence ever being suspected, that was undoubtedly the wisest course–but how much could he learn by peering in through windows? The weather was cold, and it would get a good deal colder when night fell–and what would he do when he went back over the wall, given that he was so far from London?
In the end, the fact that Gregory Temple could not be very far behind him was the deciding factor. There was only one way that he could stay ahead of Temple–and only one way to put the mystery beyond Temple’s reach, if that seemed to be the right thing to do.
“I’m a gentleman, after all,” he murmured, dusting his sleeves, “and I’m an old friend of the family. Why should I be shy?”
Even so, he hesitated for five more minutes before he marched out of the copse, strode resolutely to the kitchen door and knocked.
When the door opened, he tensed himself, expecting to find himself face to face with a grey man, but the woman who answered was ruddy in the cheeks and bloodshot in the eyes. She was wearing a cook’s apron.
“Who are you?” she demanded, in a tone more worthy of a fishwife. “What do you want?”
“Forgive me for coming to the tradesmen’s entrance, Ma’am, if I should have presented myself at the front door,” Ned said, cheerily, “but I have not been a gentleman all my life, and I am still at something of a loss when it comes to country house etiquette. My name is Ned Knob, and I’m here at the invitation of Monsieur Germain Patou, physician. I wonder if you could send a message to say that I’m here. He knows me, and is expecting me–though not, I confess, precisely at this hour.”
“Wait!” commanded the cook–and slammed the door in his face. Five more minutes passed. When the door opened again, there was no sign of the cook; a footman had been sent to welcome him in.
“Would you come this way, sir?” the footman asked.
“Certainly,” said Ned–and followed the manservant through the kitchens and up a dozen steps to the ground floor, then up two more flights of carpeted stairs to the very top of the house. The candles had not yet been lit, and the corridors were very gloomy; all the doors ere carefully closed, and he met no grey men on the way.
He was shown into a room that seemed to him the very image of what a scholar’s study should be. Germain Patou was there, but it was not Germain Patou’s study. The blond-haired man sitting behind the desk was younger than Patou, and slimmer. He looked very well, and very much alive–which was a little odd, considering that he was supposed to have blown his brains out in the summer of 1817, but not odd enough to astonish Ned Knob.
“Ned,” said Comte Henri de Belcamp, alias Tom Brown, alias John Devil the Quaker. “It’s good to see you again–I’m glad you got our message in spite of all the confusion, and were able to respond despite your mishap on the quay. Do sit down. May we offer you something to drink?”
“Cognac, if you have it,” Ned said, taking the seat he had been offered, across the desk from the Comte. Patou went to a cabinet, poured brandy from a decanter and meekly brought it to him.
Ned raised his glass, and said “A l’avantage!” as if it were a toast.
“We no longer need all that,” the Comte said, affably. “The Knights of the Deliverance would have served their purpose, had things gone well–but things did not go well. Indeed, I do not think I ever had a day in my life when things when so awry as the day when I thought it politic to die–and that was not for want of healthy competition.”
The cognac was good–far better, at any rate, than Jenny Paddock’s eau de vie. “Why did you not call for me sooner, old friend?” Ned asked. “I am quite offended. Was I not your most trusted lieutenant in England?”
“We only knew one another for a few weeks, Ned,” the Comte reminded him. “It was a significant passage in your life, I know–and I am very grateful for all that you have done for my grieving widow–but you should not overestimate the extent of our actual acquaintance. Even so, you’re absolutely right. I should have called for you sooner, and I was very disappointed to see you seized so rudely when you waved to me from the quay. I sent the boat back, of course, to see if there was anything to be done, but the blackguards had carried you off into the dark streets. I’m very glad to see that you’re all right. Germain says that you told Hanrahan to tell him that he has enemies, but we already know that. Would you mind telling us how you got away from them?” His voice seemed light enough, but the suspicion behind the question was palpable.
“I pointed out that he had no right to hold me,” Ned said. “He accepted the justice of my case, and let me go.”
“Indeed?” the Comte said. “It seems that his moral progress is as rapid as his intellectual progress. He would not have been so gentle had he actually managed to capture Germain... although I had not thought him likely to make such a silly mistake, give that we were clearly visible from the shore. Was it living men who took you, or grey men?”
“I fear that we’re talking at cross-purposes,” Ned told him, apologetically. “I misled Hanrahan slightly when I said that my captors were after Monsieur Patou. They were only after the address he wrote on the card. I imagine they have investigated it by now. I did not go there once I knew that it had been compromised–I followed the Prometheus. I could not see anyone else doing likewise, but you might not have much time. Gregory Temple isn’t a man to underestimate.”
Ned had seen Comte Henri de Belcamp astonished before, and had even had the honor of causing such astonishment himself, but he still thought it a feat worthy of congratulation–and so he congratulated himself, albeit a trifle reluctantly, when he saw the expression on the other man’s face.
“Temple!” exclaimed the Comte, running his fingers through his blond hair. “I thought that I had put him in Bedlam for once and for all. Is he on my trail, then?”
“He is now,” Ned told him, moving on swiftly to add: “Not my doing, I assure you–but his men saw your hat, just as I did, and he drew the same conclusion. Prior to that, he was only on Hanrahan’s trail, trying to follow it back to the buyer who had created such a busy market in dead bodies. If you desire to work in secret, you really shouldn’t advertise yourself. There are Quakers by the thousand in London, but they don’t sneak up and down the Thames in a ship that every ferryman on the water believes to be haunted.”
“That was bound to happen,” Patou put in. “We should never have taken any of the grey men aboard the ship.”
“How shall we–or they–ever find out what their capabilities are, if we do not try them?” the Comte complained, allowing his attention to be distracted. “How will they ever recover their old selves, if we keep them cooped up here with nothing to look at but unfamiliar walls and a mediocre garden? They need stimulation, Doctor, as you yourself have aid a hundred times. If we’re to beat Mortdieu, we need to accelerate our progress. It was a mistake to send Ross, I’ll admit... but in all fairness, he made more progress in the hour that he was gone than he’d done in the previous month, despite all your efforts. That’s what they need if they’re to recover their memories completely: to see familiar faces in familiar places, to converse with people they loved. How else can they recall themselves, or be themselves?”
“There was one who had no trouble,” Patou said, grimly–but the Comte was already looking at Ned Knob again, his troubled eyes questioning.
“Until last night,” Ned went on, “Temple had no idea of your involvement. He’s with the secret police now, chasing radicals... especially radical burkers. He knows n
ow, though–thanks to a stroke of mischance. Hanrahan came to deliver the doctor’s message to me just as Sawney made his grand entrance, and Temple had a spy in the parlor, who jumped to the conclusion that I knew far more than I did. Temple still knows nothing, except that I saluted a Quaker hat–but that’s all he’ll need, given that he has no trouble with his own memory, and his burning desire for retribution. But I must know, before we decide how to deal with Gregory Temple–did you really bring Sawney back from the dead, or was the hangman careless?”
His urgency was in vain; he got no immediate answer. Instead, the blond man turned to Patou again. “If Ned could follow the ship, Temple won’t be far behind,” he said. “We have two sets of enemies now, Doctor, and they’re both too close for comfort. I’m not sure which of them is more to be feared at present.” He turned back to Ned. “The secret police, you say? England has secret police now, and Gregory Temple is working for them? I do not know which is the greater scandal... but I suppose I must take some of the blame. I left him ruined as well as broken in that Newgate cell, and I dare say that he had little choice in matter of employment, once he was released. Damnation! You’ve changed, Ned. You were little more than a boy back in ’17, so I suppose it’s only to be expected... I should have reckoned on that, and come to you much sooner.”
“I had a good teacher,” Ned said, “if only for a matter of weeks. I’m here now–who is after us, apart from Mr. Temple?”
Again, the Comte did not reply immediately. Ned let loose a little sigh. It seemed that Helen Brown’s son had not changed at all; he still fancied himself the master manipulator, who used everyone, trusted no one and never under any circumstances told anyone the whole truth, or anything at all until he had to.
“We’ll have to move again,” Germain Patou said. “There’s been no sign yet of Mortdieu, and he’s less capable than we are of moving unobtrusively, even though he probably has as many living men in his employ as we have. The secret police are a different matter. I’m as reluctant as you are to cut the experiments short again, but what choice do we have? The setback to our work will be far greater if they find us now.”
Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night Page 34