Horatio Lyle

by Webb, Catherine

  Lyle looked up, and seemed to see her properly for the first time. He tried to smile, and said in a softer voice, ‘I have never seen anyone act the way she behaved. Mrs McVicar, I mean. It was as if she ’d been hypnotized, conditioned to think a certain way by someone who came before me. Conditioned not to talk about Bray, conditioned to attack anyone who asked about Bray. “Don’t look at the eyes.” I don’t believe that hypnotism can induce any effect which cannot be undone again, Teresa, but there was something in what I saw that I cannot explain.’

  ‘Perhaps it were . . .’ she shrugged, ‘magic, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘That ’s really very unhelpful.’

  ‘Sorry, Mister Lyle.’

  Silence again, uncomfortable and heavy. Suddenly Lyle let out a long breath, looked up briskly, forced a smile on to his face and said in an authoritative voice, ‘So, Teresa, what have you discovered? ’

  Sitting by the fire in the kitchen, Tess ate a hastily prepared sandwich with one hand, drank a thick cup of soup with the other, and talked through the crumbs while Lyle watched with a slightly pained expression.

  ‘I went to Covent Garden first, ’cos I thought how they’d know there where this fruit thing come from, bein’ a . . . a . . .’

  ‘Lychee.’

  ‘An’ all. And I met this man there what said it come from China an’ the best place to ask were down at Clerkenwell where the East India Company had their offices. So I went down to Clerkenwell an’ there was this man what said “Hello.” An’ I said “Hello” an’ he said, “What do you want?”, only I think it was slightly different, ’cos I . . .’

  ‘Teresa?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you find out who sold the fruit?’

  She glowered. ‘You got no patience, have you, Mister Lyle? I’d listen if you were tellin’ a good story.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t!’

  ‘Well, I’d pretend to listen.’

  He sighed. ‘More soup?’

  She looked at her half-full cup. ‘Yes.’

  He poured slowly. She crammed another mouthful of bread into her mouth and washed it down quickly. Cheeks bulging, a mumble came out that might have been, ‘It’s this fella called Granter.’

  ‘Granter?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Mr Granter.’

  ‘He sells lychees.’

  ‘Well, he’s the company’s repres . . . man what goes around to the houses of all the bigwigs and tries to get their money for way more than it’s really worth and probably gets away with it too, ’cos all the bigwigs are just slow when it comes to business an’ . . .’

  ‘Where is Mr Granter?’

  ‘He lodges at . . .’ she frowned, ransacking her memory, ‘the Angel Inn.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Right. An’, ’cos I’m extra nice and really underpaid and really underappreciated an’ oughta get a medal an’ all, I found out who boils oranges.’

  ‘Lots of people boil oranges before they sell them, Teresa.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I know, Mister Lyle. But if you’ll let me just speak without all this interruption an’ all, I’d tell you that there was this man near the meat market in Smithfield, name of Josiah, an’ everyone local knows he boils his wares before he goes on sellin’, in order to get more money, but he only ever tries sellin’ to the bigwigs.’ She thought about this, then added righteously, ‘On account of how they’re slow.’

  ‘Where does Josiah lodge?’

  She eyed the loaf of bread on the centre of the table, and didn’t say anything. Lyle sighed. ‘Teresa . . .’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Have you so soon forgotten how I didn’t hand you over to the bobbies?’

  ‘I think of it always, Mister Lyle. You’d be right proud of how much I think of it.’

  He sighed, leant over and started hacking at the loaf of bread. ‘You’ll get fat,’ he warned.

  ‘Then I guess I’ll be less hungry when I go back to work.’

  Sudden, embarrassed silence. Tess felt her ears starting to go pink. She slurped soup hastily. Lyle said, in a quick, low voice, ‘Look, if you ever get yourself into . . .’

  ‘Josiah,’ she blurted, ‘lives near the old furniture place round the hospital.’

  ‘St Bartholomew’s Hospital?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Right! So all we need to do now is . . .’

  Upstairs, the doorbell jangled.

  The figure standing on the doorstep was so swaddled in a black cloak, beneath a hat several sizes too large and a huge beard, that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He hissed in a voice hoarse with the effort of disguise, ‘This is the residence of Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I be admitted?’

  Tess peered round Lyle at the figure and said, ‘He looks horrid, Mister Lyle.’

  Lyle frowned at the figure, then looked past him at the hansom cab waiting below and the rather chubby woman standing beside it with a nervous expression. He looked back to the figure at the door and said in a brisk voice, ‘Thomas, why are you wearing a false beard?’

  ‘Sir!’ hissed Thomas desperately, his voice becoming slightly more normal, if shrill with dismay. ‘I can’t be seen here! My father will be furious! Please, let me in!’

  Lyle rolled his eyes, but stepped to one side. Thomas scurried in. Lyle closed the door and Tess immediately reached up and plucked at the beard, dragging it from Thomas’s face. She looked at it then at Thomas and started laughing. Thomas flushed red from the bottom of his neck to the tips of his ears.

  ‘Thomas,’ said Lyle, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘I sneaked out!’ he declared gleefully, unwrapping himself from the huge cloak. ‘My father thinks I’ve gone with my governess to visit my cousins!’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Tess, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

  ‘Teresa,’ said Lyle, in a warning voice. Then turning to Thomas, ‘Why? ’

  ‘I want to help!’

  Tess realized she was holding the false beard, and tossed it on to a table in disgust. ‘Well, that’s very considerate of you, but I think we can . . .’

  ‘I can help, I know I can! I know my father’s handwriting, his signature, I know who his friends are, who might have received letters from him, how they could forge it. Look!’ He dug into his cloak and pulled out a pile of letters. ‘I took these! And I went to the Bank and said who I was and they gave me the letter used to deposit the sarcophagus in the vault! And I sneaked into my father’s study and looked through his correspondence, and I found something!’

  Tess put her hands on her hips. ‘Do you really think that—’

  But Lyle snatched the papers from Thomas’s hands, eyes widening in delighted surprise. ‘You stole these?’

  Thomas flushed a brighter shade of purple-red. ‘I do not steal. I think that as they are family property and I am the future Lord Elwick I have every right to . . .’

  Lyle was already flicking through the thick sheaf of documents. ‘Is this the one used at the Bank?’ he asked, holding up a piece of paper.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hm. Come on, children.’

  He strode down the corridor into the sitting room, reached behind a bookcase, and pushed something that clicked. It wasn’t the bookcase that swung outwards, which disappointed Tess immensely, but just a simple square of wall that blended seamlessly into itself. Lyle jogged down the spiral staircase behind it, and through another seamless wall into the furnace room where the pistons, pipes and coils of wire waited for use. He handed the dynamo with its little bulb over to Tess, who obediently spun the handle and watched light burn, while Lyle picked up a very long metal pole, taller than himself, twiddled a couple of handles so that a slow, pervading hissing sound filled the room, extended the metal pole towards a small niche in the furnace that looked specially designed to accommodate it, and flicked something. There was a whooshing sound. The furnace started burning with a dull orange light seeping th
rough the few slits visible in the metal monster. The magnet in its coil of wire slowly started spinning, and as the electricity began to flow Lyle pulled another lever.

  Lights went on in the room, bulbs exploding into almost unpleasantly bright fluorescence. Thomas gaped, his eyes wide with wonder and delight. Tess contrived to look bored.

  In this radiance and clattering noise, Lyle picked up another pole and reached up to one of the three big bulbs, the size of a man’s head and glowing red-hot, embedded in the ceiling. Behind it, he turned a curved mirror, like the reflector in a light-house, until the light was centred on one table. He repeated this for the other three bulbs, so that all the illumination was focused on one place. Into this spotlight of burning whiteness, he put the papers, and pulled out a magnifying glass.

  For a long while there was silence, apart from the machinery grinding away, while Lyle examined each document with scrupulous slowness. Finally he tutted, put the glass down and said, ‘If these letters are originals by your father . . .’

  ‘They are,’ said Thomas quickly.

  ‘Well. That is . . . interesting.’

  Thomas tilted his chin up proudly. ‘Yes, sir. I thought as much, sir.’ There was something he had to remember, he knew. A voice he had to remember, or possibly forget. His fingers itched. He smelt . . . something like dead leaves on a forest floor . . .

  Lyle was reading the letter. To whom it may concern . . . the following item . . . deposited in my name . . . redeemable upon . . . vault V18E . . . not to be opened under any circumstances . . . yours faithfully, Thomas Henry Elwick, third Baron of that name.

  Lyle was starting to frown, rubbing the edge of the paper, turning it over, looking at its thickness, feeling its texture, scratching at the letterhead, then at the stamped seal on the bottom, then at the signature, his frown deepening each time. Thomas hardly noticed, trying to remember . . .

  ‘Teresa, there’s a pad of paper in the desk drawer there. Would you bring it over?’

  She nodded, scurried to the desk, and opened the drawer. Inside was a series of metal tools that she didn’t dare speculate on, a collection of pens and pencils, a pad of paper, a mousetrap, and several pieces of disassembled metal that collectively resembled a gun. She closed the drawer quickly and darted back with the paper. Lyle took it without looking up and murmured distantly, ‘Thank you, Teresa.’

  Through the thin paper, which had the rough, jagged-edged look of a home-made item, he then laboriously traced the signature written on the forged letter to the Bank. Tess and Thomas watched in silence, though Thomas kept on finding his eyes wandering to the giant furnace, which dominated half of the room, clattering away with a sound that made his heart race. He looked slowly back to Lyle. There was something he had to remember, something inside that said . . .

  He felt inside his jacket, and was slightly surprised to feel something cold and metallic there. His fingers tightened round the smooth wooden handle. He stared at Lyle, busily scratching away at the desk, then at Tess, who was absently bent over, tickling Tate behind the ears. He took an uneven step towards Lyle, trying to remember, or perhaps not to remember, perhaps to forget, and . . .

  Lyle looked up and said, sounding worried, ‘This letter isn’t a forgery.’

  ‘It ain’t?’ said Tess, mild surprise entering her voice as she straightened up and moved towards the table to look.

  ‘If it is a forgery, it’s immaculate. The signature is identical, the seal, the paper, everything is perfect. This letter is either an impossibly good fake or the very real thing.’

  Tess and Lyle looked slowly towards Thomas. His face was stone, his eyes were slightly unfocused. ‘Thomas?’ murmured Lyle.

  Thomas’s hand tightened over the object tucked inside his jacket. He saw . . . green eyes . . . he saw . . . he saw . . .

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ hissed Tess.

  Thomas’s hand started coming out of the jacket. Lyle pushed Tess to one side quickly and dug into his pockets. They were empty. ‘Tess, take Tate and run!’ he snapped as Thomas drew out the long, slim knife, sharp and clean. Tess looked from Thomas’s empty expressionless face to Lyle’s pale one, and didn’t need to look again. She grabbed Tate by the scruff of the neck, dragged him towards the door and ran. Tate didn’t need much convincing to follow.

  Thomas’s eyes slowly fixed on Lyle, who started edging away from the desk, towards a chest of drawers. ‘Thomas . . .’ he murmured, and then realized he didn’t have anything to say. He shrugged helplessly. ‘Forgive me for stating the obvious, but you’re holding a knife.’

  Thomas blinked once, twice. He whispered, ‘He told me, Mister Lyle. He was so kind, so beautiful, how can you disobey a man of his mastery and power? You are not good, Mister Lyle. You and your family bring iron machines to think iron thoughts and make iron worlds. You look at a flower and see numbers in each petal, you look at the sky and see dust in each raindrop. He told me. He said he was strong, and I was weak. I wanted to cry that he could say so.’

  Lyle groped at the chest of drawers behind him. ‘Thomas,’ he murmured, sliding open a drawer, ‘you’re not well. You’re ill, in fact. Possibly drugged. Someone’s been getting into your head. Just . . . put down the knife somewhere where no one’s going to walk on it and we ’ll find you a doctor and a nice place to go quietly mad in, what d ’you say?’

  Thomas slowly drew the knife back into a better grip to kill with. Lyle grabbed something out of the drawer. It was a tube, lightly caked in baked white clay, but from inside which could be seen spiralling sheets of metal that never touched but between them formed the thick bulk of the tube’s mass, before narrowing into two sharp, wiry ends which didn’t touch, but protruded like antennae. Lyle said, ‘Now, Thomas, there are two ways this can go. I might have managed to charge this properly on the static generator, in which case it’ll be all right, or the science might be terribly, terribly wrong, in which case it’ll be difficult to tidy up. So just before you go mad, tell me what you’re seeing that’s sending you like this.’

  Thomas hesitated. He stared at Lyle, his mouth opening and closing slowly as he tried to think. The words that came were half-choked, forced out harshly. He hissed, ‘Don’t look at the eyes,’ and ran at Lyle.

  Lyle let him come and, as he neared, ducked under the knife and stabbed up hard at Thomas with the wiry ends of the tube. There was a static sound, a smell of burning, and a shower of fat blue sparks as the charge stored in the metal and clay tube discharged, up through Thomas. Lyle heard a scream and tottered backwards, surprised to find himself still alive. The knife fell from Thomas’s hand and he staggered back, falling to the ground, screaming endlessly, twitching from side to side and holding his head as if in intense pain, and still he screamed, a deafening, unnatural sound, so loud that Lyle had to clutch at his ears, curling away from it in pain, and still the howling went on as Thomas kicked and writhed blindly on the floor, before going limp, head on one side, hands loose and eyes shut.

  Tess exploded from the end of the stairs, Tate in tow, as the silence settled. She held a poker and charged with the headlong determination of someone about to do something heroic. She saw Thomas lying on the floor, dropped the poker and squeaked, ‘You killed him?’ She didn’t sound particularly offended - just surprised.

  Lyle stared at the tube in his hand. ‘It’s never done that before.’

  They put Thomas in Lyle’s bed and watched him uneasily. ‘What d ’you do to him?’ hissed Tess in a conspiratorial voice.

  ‘Nothing. I allowed a little stored charge to discharge, that ’s all.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I gave him a little electric shock.’

  ‘I heard screamin’!’

  ‘Yes. No one’s ever started screaming when they get shocked before,’ he said, frowning in worry. ‘Confusion and unconsciousness, yes, maybe a tiny burn mark around the point of discharge, possibly, occasionally prolonged vomiting and nausea, sometimes heart attack for a little while
- but never have I seen anyone roll around on the ground screaming after being hit by that.’

  ‘Will he be back to a bigwig soon?’

  ‘I’d be worried if he was back to being a black-market opium dealer with a criminal record soon.’ He saw Tess’s expression, and said in an embarrassed voice, ‘He should wake up quickly. People get more shocked than actually scarred by electricity.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He had a knife.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Apart from that, Mister Lyle.’

  Lyle looked with real worry at the slumbering Thomas. ‘It’s as if someone is going round hypnotizing anybody who’s come into contact with the case. I don’t know how. It seems impossible to contrive. But he said the exact same words as Mrs McVicar: don’t look at the eyes. Same words, different people, both connected with the case and the Fuyun Plate.’

  ‘Oh.’ Silence. ‘Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know you were ’orrid when I said the “magic” thing?’

  ‘Teresa!’ he snapped irritably.

  She raised her hands. ‘I’m just thinkin’ about what the file thing said. The cultural signifi . . . ficance thing.’

  He stared down at the slumbering Thomas. ‘The Fuyun Plate was supposedly made for “Tseiqin”, demon-angel creatures. Legend places its origin in ancient Tibet.’

  ‘Is Tibet near here?’

  Lyle rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily, eyes wrinkling closed to try and shut out distracting thoughts and fatigue. ‘No, Teresa,’ he said, sighing, but not unkindly. ‘Tibet is a province of China.’

  ‘An’ it were a Chinaman what followed us, weren’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It was.’

  ‘So?’ She waited expectantly.

  In a slightly surprised voice Lyle said, ‘You know, you’re right.’

  ‘I am?’ She sounded astonished and delighted.

  ‘It ’s time we knew a little bit more about what we ’re looking for. I think I know who to ask, too.’

  CHAPTER 10

  Wakings

  Evening in London, a bruised sky turned blue-orange near the sunset.