“You, of all people, should know what madness is good for,” said Donnelly to me.
I exchanged glances with Vanstone and Miller, while Donnelly looked on complacently and supped his beer.
“They were some terrible rough times in the old days,” said Donnelly. “I’m talking about a thousand years ago and more, back in what they call Dark Ages. The Romans were long gone, society had collapsed into anarchy, and the flickering flame of civilisation was kept alive only by a few monks copying illuminated manuscripts in their cells in Ireland. And maybe a few in England.”
“The monks weren’t mad,” said Vanstone. “They might have seemed eccentric. They were taking the long view. Not mad.”
“So they weren’t,” said Donnelly. “But their labours were interrupted by the Vikings, sailing swiftly o’er the seas in their dragon ships, burning villages and stealing cattle, killing the men and raping the women. The Irish had great warriors and bold men with legendary swords, but we were never a match for the raiders. When shield wall clashed with shield wall, the Vikings always prevailed, and you know why?”
There was a collective shaking of heads.
“The fiercest fighters man ever faced—the berserkers! They fought in the front rank, without armour, sometimes without weapons, naked. The berserkers were madmen, whose madness was fired by the smell of blood. They roused themselves to such fury that they foamed at the mouth and howled like beasts. Some say the berserkers became beasts, wolves and bears, impervious to fire and steel, stronger than bulls, and raging for man-blood. They broke through the shield wall like matchwood, tearing their enemies limb from limb—those who didn’t flee from them first.”
“Cor,” said Miller.
“Madmen, one and all,” said Donnelly, “invincible in their battle-fury. The only trouble was calming them down afterwards. The berserker madness, honed to a sharp edge, was the Vikings’ secret weapon.”
“I hadn’t heard of them,” said Vanstone.
“Could bullets stop them?” asked Miller, imagining perhaps a whole regiment of berserkers going over the top on the Western Front.
“It might take a lot of bullets,” said Vanstone. “You know what they’re like. And they wouldn’t stop until the last man was down.”
“You should suggest it to the War Ministry,” said Miller. “But I don’t know if any of our lot would be any good. They’ve got the wrong sort of madness. Like that FitzRoy, he’s as barmy as a bandicoot but harmless as a babe.”
“But is FitzRoy really mad?” asked Donnelly. “It wouldn’t be the strangest thing if by some quirk of history, a secret marriage or a hidden document of disinheritance, the rightful heir ends up in an asylum. Who can say? Maybe your man George at Windsor is a pretender, and we should all be bending a knee to FitzRoy, like Jenkins and Tailor and his other courtiers.”
Technically he was correct, though this was dangerous talk. My thoughts immediately flitted to the Man in the Iron Mask and also to the tricky business of determining royal succession, which sometimes proceeds down irregular channels. But Vanstone slapped him down at once.
“We don’t need your treasonous Fenian nonsense,” he said gruffly, and he was only half-joking. “There’s no comparison with the real king. FitzRoy is a crackpot with a wooden spoon for a sceptre and a tinfoil crown under his mattress.”
“He’s not as bad as Grogan, thinks he’s a woman.” Miller waved, limp-wristed in imitation of Grogan’s girlish manner. “I can’t prove who’s king, but that’s an easy one. I said to Grogan, ‘Have you tried looking between your legs, Mister? You ain’t no woman, not with that tackle!’”
“Grogan knows what sort of equipment he’s got, all right,” said Donnelly. “But he’s not happy with it. He says he’s in the wrong body. To his way of thinking, he’s a woman’s brain in a man’s body.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Vanstone.
“Why? You say there’s something wrong with his brain, but you might as well say there was something wrong with his body,” said Donnelly. “If you surgically changed his body into a woman’s, then he’d be a sane man—or woman, rather. So maybe it’s not the brain at fault after all.”
We all laughed at that. I repressed a desire to mention what I had learned of Rosslyn D’Onston and his experiments with exchanging bodies with others. It was unlikely that Grogan might really be the victim of that sort of psychic trickery, but not the impossibility I might once have assumed.
“Hooper, he’s proper mad—he thinks he can work magic,” Miller persisted.
“He’s an umbrella maker,” said Vanstone. “Worked in that place on Westow Street, Shelvoke’s.”
“I gave him a pack of cards and asked him to show me a trick,” said Miller. “And he couldn’t! He said it’s the wrong sort of magic. But couldn’t do it.”
“Maybe he’s the sort of magician that saws women in half,” said Donnelly. “You should have given him a glamourous assistant and a carpentry set.”
“If there’s glamourous assistants being handed out, I’ll have mine first,” said Vanstone.
We all laughed, but it set me thinking. Ryan had mentioned that Gillespy, my late predecessor, had been investigating an umbrella-maker. I really did need to have a word with Hooper. It would not be easy, zigzagging along with his conversational turns, but maybe he could tell me something.
“What about Ross?” asked Miller, trying to find one patient whose madness Donnelly might admit to. “All that screaming at night.”
“Maybe we’d all scream if we really thought about things in the night,” said Donnelly. “Maybe Ross is the only one who troubles to lift up his blinkers and see things as they are. And those poor souls staring miserably at the wall see the world clearer than we do.” He lifted his glass. “For myself, I’m happy to stay deluded.”
Vanstone accused Donnelly of Jesuitical tendencies—meaning, I suppose, that he could talk the hind legs off a donkey, weaving words into fantastic constructions where black was white and mad was sane.
“If you poor prods had to learn about transubstantiation, you’d all have a grand understanding of higher logic,” Donnelly said. “Simply because something looks like wine, smells like wine, and tastes like wine to you, it can still be blood as far as the priest is concerned.”
“Except priests aren’t mad,” said Miller.
“I’d no idea you were such a good Catholic boy, respecting our priesthood,” said Donnelly with a chuckle.
Miller fumbled, trying to explain that while he did not believe in Popery, he respected religion in general, or at least Christian denominations. But he soon gave up amid the general laughter.
“We’re getting a lot of these new treatments now,” said Vanstone, perhaps wanting to shift away from religious matters.
“He’s a slave to science,” said Donnelly. “When science says something works, Beltov has to run after it, like a dog chasing a stick. Now there’s this new character, this Nye fellow, putting new twists on all the old treatments, and we have to try them all over again. It’s something new every week for poor old Beltov.”
“I liked the fruit best,” said Miller. “They used to get fresh fruit every day, and there was always plenty left over for us.”
“Vitamin therapy,” said Vanstone, smiling at the recollection.
“Oranges and peaches and pineapples! And strawberries!” Miller grinned. “That’s the sort of treatment I like. Fruit therapy. We never had any trouble administering that one.”
“It’s all a great waste of time,” said Donnelly. “But I’ve no objection to fruit.”
“What do these doctors ever know,” said Vanstone. “I knew an old gipsy—old Whately, d’you know him?—who could do more good than all the doctors put together. When people went to him with nerves, night terrors, or seeing things, he’d listen to their troubles and give them two tablets, and that would be it. Cured the next day. The thing is, though”—he paused, looking around for effect—”it was always the same tablets, whate
ver they had. Whately gave them sugar tablets.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s the power of the mind, you see. Them gipsies know a thing or two.”
Donnelly promptly declaimed:
“Whereat he answer’d, that the gipsy-crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men’s brains,
And they can bind them to what thoughts they will.”
He dropped back to his speaking voice. “Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy. A true story, so it is. They’re clever, those gipsies.”
“They should get Whately in instead of these doctors,” said Miller. “Gipsies instead of doctors, that’d be a right laugh!”
“Except they can’t get Whately because he just died,” said Vanstone. “And they say he was cracking up before he went. He fell down an old well, raving about the Second Coming.”
“Should have taken some of his own medicine,” said Donnelly.
We all laughed again.
“Better than coming in with us with all these therapies,” said Vanstone. “One day, they’ll get us to dust off the Faradisation kit. What larks we’ll have then, eh?”
The others muttered into their beer.
“What’s faradisation?” I asked.
“Torture,” said Vanstone, in such a dire tone that I did not pursue the subject.
I had another taste of drink—or rather more than a taste—the next day. I was on the rota for the night shift, so I was free in the afternoon and had arranged to drop round and see my friend Captain Hall, a notable mariner who started his career back when they still sailed tall ships. He had travelled the world and seen the mercantile trade taken over by steam. He was a sailor as full of tall tales as you could hope to meet. Having made a tidy sum at his trade, he had taken retirement here in the city, far from the sea. There was no lighthouse-keeper’s cottage or weekend pleasure sailing for him. Captain Hall had his fill of the ocean and left it while he still had strength to enjoy life. He played the part of a local character with gusto.
Before I had even sat down in the Captain’s drawing room, the old rogue was holding up two glasses in one hand. His wife was out shopping, and there was no question of a pot of tea with him at the helm. The Captain liked something stronger to loosen his tongue.
“You won’t say no to a tot, will you, Harry?”
I was by no means a drinker of spirits, and even if I was, I would not start drinking at that time in the afternoon. But to refuse the hospitality would have been an insult, and the Captain needed my permission if he was to have a drink himself. “I don’t mind if I do,” I said.
“Ha-ha!” He chortled as if I was an old dog for suggesting the idea, but that he would indulge me. The Royal Navy took to diluting its rum with water years ago, but the Captain was a merchant seaman. He disdained the foibles of the uniformed service and never had any truck with anything less manly than neat spirit. The Captain filled both glasses to the brim with clear brown liquid in a twinkling. He might have been an old man, but the Captain had an impressively steady hand.
I took a preparatory sniff. The fumes rose off it, stinging my nose.
“Your health, Harry!”
“And yours!”
The room had a few odds and ends to remind one that this was the house of a former sea-captain, including a couple of prints of sailing schooners, a framed Master’s Certificate, and a brass clock on the mantelpiece that was decorated with anchors of assorted sizes. But more important was the parrot, a great scarlet bird who occupied a rail running along one side of the room at head height.
It sidled over towards me on scaly dragon’s feet and cocked its head, blinking in that disturbing way they have. The Captain’s parrot is famed for its command of invective and can swear in a great many languages. But after looking me up and down, it only said, “Ello!”
“And hello to you,” I said politely.
“I hear you’ve been getting into all sorts of adventures,” said the Captain, admiring the colour of the rum against the light. “I can’t thank you enough for sorting out that business with Yang’s nephew.”
“That was all Arthur’s doing,” I said.
“Not the way I heard it,” he said. “But I won’t ask no questions, and you won’t have to tell me no lies, eh?”
The rum was fiery, but the burning subsided almost instantly, leaving a pleasant warmth and a long, smoky aftertaste like burned sugar in its wake.
We chatted about general matters for a bit, but he was impatient with my attempts at small talk. “Come on, Harry,” he said. “You tell the Captain what’s on your mind now.”
“As a matter of fact, I have a question for you. It’s a bit of a long shot, but I thought I remembered something from somewhere.”
It was disingenuous. I wanted to ask someone I could trust, and someone who could keep his mouth shut. Also, the Captain was a tough old bird, who on his own account had survived enough serious scrapes to kill any six other men. I did not feel I was endangering him.
I produced the glass tube from its newspaper wrappings and passed it over to him.
“I need to identify this contrivance,” I said. “I believe it might have some significance for a case I’m working on.”
The Captain extracted horn-rimmed reading glasses from an inner pocket and placed them on his nose. “That’s a funny inscription, there,” he said, squinting at the green wax seal on the end. “I haven’t seen one quite like that before.”
“Do you know what it is?”
He passed the tube back to me. “Of course I do!” He stood up. “But that one’s just a toy. I’ll show you what a proper one looks like. And while I’m on my feet, I’d better recharge the glasses,” he added. Mine was still half-full, his considerably less so.
A minute later, the Captain was back with a mahogany box with brass fittings. Inside, nestling in green baize compartments precisely mounded to their forms, were a set of instruments. Captain’s Meteorological Instruments appeared on a sheet pasted to the inside of the box lid, above a lot of instructions in small print.
He placed an instrument in my hands—a glass tube on a mahogany base, with brass fittings. It looked very much like some sort of nautical instrument, but I would not know a sextant from a plumb line.
“Now that is a proper FitzRoy Storm Glass,” he said. “Not so much used these days, but plenty of captains swear by them. That can tell you what weather’s coming when the barometer fails.”
“How does it work?”
“Hmm, well, there’s nothing to see now, as it’s set fair for days to come. But when the weather starts to change, so will the glass. If there’s going to be cloud, it turns cloudy, and there’re different signs for the different winds.”
From the lining of the case, he produced a slip of dry, brown paper with illustrations of the storm glass in various weather conditions.
“‘A north wind produces crystal growths resembling fir, yew, or fern leaves,’” I read.
“That’s right,” he affirmed. “I’ve seen that many times.”
This sent an odd chill down the back of my neck. “Is there vegetable matter in the mixture?” I asked.
“Camphor oil,” he said after a moment. “Camphor’s a tree. Not here, but I’ve seen them growing in Japan.”
I had previously encountered the phenomenon of palingenesis, where the form of a living thing could be recovered from its powdered ashes. I had seen photographs of a rose recreated from its dust. I had also encountered the considerably less harmless exercise of reanimating a human being from grave soil. The operation of the storm glass seemed altogether too similar. “It sounds more like magic than science,” I said.
The Captain shrugged and took a good swig of rum. “You don’t know what a storm is,” he told me. “A landsman, living in a city, all a storm means to you is you lose your bowler hat, and maybe a roof tile or two goes flying. Storms don’t mean anything in London, but at sea—that’s another matter.”
“I’ve hea
rd you tell of storms at sea,” I said.
“A storm glass can save your life,” he said. “One time, when we were at anchor in Maldonado Bay—that’s South America way, on the coast of the Argentine—the barometer dropped, and the storm glass grew leaves, like it says there. Now, that was strange, because the wind was in the southwest, and no sign of bad weather. But Captain King, he was a wise man. Here.” He leaned forwards and topped up the glasses again, raising his. “Here’s to Captain King, as wise a master as every ship should have.”
We gravely clinked glasses, and I ingested another slug. It was easier to drink with every swallow, the trail having been blazed, so to speak, by the first glass.
“Captain King reefed the sails and ordered the watch doubled, and it was lucky he did,” said the Captain. “We had one of those blows the locals call a pampero, a storm that blows over the plains and brings a squall line with it. Well, was four bells on the first watch, and the wind veered to southwest and strengthened so quick that there was no time to do anything, and before you knew it we were broadside on, with two boats washed away.
“Captain King was on deck in a heartbeat—he’d never taken his boots off—and he picked up an axe and cut through one of the anchor cables. That brought the head of the ship into the wind, and he let the other anchor drag as we were carried clean out of the bay and into the open sea among foaming whitecaps that came out of nowhere.
“Now, I had gone to my hammock when it was all peaceful, exhausted as always from all the running about they put you through. I was practically thrown out of it when the storm hit. Half the lanterns were out, and hands were rushing about everywhere, and the ship heeling more violently than I had ever seen. I didn’t know where I was or what was happening or what I was supposed to be doing until the bo’sun slapped me about the face and sent me to help with pumping.”
I missed some of the technical terms—all of them, in fact—as he explained what the storm did and how it damaged the spars and why they could not get the ship under control, but fifty years later, the old man was still in the grip of the boy’s fear and disorientation that night.
Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4) Page 10