The gate came back up, the canvas was drawn back across, and he found himself once again lying in darkness, his head throbbing with pain, listening as if from a great distance to the sounds roundabout, of night birds and teacups and the racket of the table being stowed. He moved his jaw, relieved that it wasn’t broken despite the pain, but almost anxious now for the chloral to take effect. The wagon set out once again, and very soon the St. Ives was slipping into a drugged darkness, thinking with the last remnants of his waking mind that his companions were somewhere very nearby, that Alice was with them, safe.
CHAPTER 9
Dry Bones and Clinkers
WE CAUGHT SIGHT of Tubby’s Uncle Gilbert’s house when we were halfway up the yew alley—a vast sort of Georgian pile with three tiers of windows. The ground floor looked large enough to house a company of marines, and smoke billowed from the chimney, which was a happy sight. There was a pond, too, with the moon shining on it, and a boathouse and dock with a collection of rowing boats serried alongside. “Uncle Gilbert is a boatman of the first water,” Tubby told us, laughing out loud at his own pitiful wordplay.
Barlow, Uncle Gilbert’s butler, let us in with great haste, as if, impossibly, he had been expecting our arrival. Uncle Gilbert himself met us in the vestibule, leading us into a stately, oak-paneled room with coffered ceilings and stained glass windows depicting knights and dragons. Hasbro himself sat in a chair, drinking whiskey out of a cut glass tumbler, and when he saw us his face fell. He couldn’t help himself. He had been full of the same hope and unease that Tubby and I had felt waiting for the Tipper at the Inn at Blackboys: he had banked on the thin chance that St. Ives would be with us. But now hope was dashed, and you could see what was left of it in his eyes. That changed, however, when he saw Alice. Something good had come of the day after all. Hasbro looked done up, as if he had traveled night and day to rendezvous with us, which in fact he had, having come back down by rail on an express to Eastbourne and then back up again to Dicker, arriving only a half hour ago.
There arose a gleam of optimism in my own mind, for the company was gathered together at last, the elephant reassembled, the waiting mostly over. I’m told that it’s common among soldiers and sailors to feel both a sensible fear and a fortifying elation before going into battle, and my own emotions confirmed it that night. There was a great fire of logs burning in the hearth, which was sizable enough so that a person might step into it without stooping, if one wanted to be roasted alive. There were oil lamps lit, and the room shone with a golden glow, our shadows leaping in the firelight. The walls were hung with paintings of birds and sailing ships. It struck me that I couldn’t remember having been in a more pleasant room with better companions—if only St. Ives were there. Already I was fond of Uncle Gilbert, who might have been Tubby’s older twin, if that were possible, but with his hair disappeared except upon the sides, where it stuck out in tufts. The old man was in a high state of pleasure and surprise at Tubby’s arrival, for he had himself been made uneasy by Hasbro’s revelations. His pleasure was heightened considerably when he got a good look at Alice.
“Ravished, my dear,” he said, bowing like a courtier and kissing her hand. “Simply ravished. You’re a very diamond alongside these two lumps of coal.” He gestured at Tubby and I. Then he shook my hand heartily, apologized for having called me a lump of coal, compelled me to admit to the truth of the insult, and then apologized again for having nothing but dry bones and clinkers to feed us. If he had known for certain that we were coming, he said, he would have slaughtered the fatted calf.
Barlow hauled me away at that point to see to my arm, which needed a proper cleaning and bandaging. He gave me one of his own shirts, my own being a bloody ruin, and he took my coat away with him to see whether Mrs. Barlow could put it right. Mrs. Barlow was at that moment apparently looking after Alice’s needs. We were being looked after on all sides. I had the distinct notion that the earth was growing steadier on its axis after having been tilted this way and that for the past weeks.
I found my companions in the dining hall where they were just then sitting down to gnaw on the bones and clinkers, which turned out to be bangers and mash running with butter and gravy, cold pheasant, cheese and bread, and bottles of good burgundy. Barlow had already taken the corks out of three of the bottles, and the glasses stood full. You can imagine that we fell upon the food and drink like savages, Alice included, pausing only to answer Uncle Gilbert’s myriad questions. He cocked his head at what we had to say, nodding seriously, cursing the man who had hit me on the head, astonished at the machinations of Ignacio Narbondo, who, he insisted, needed a good horsewhipping before he was bunged up in an empty keg with a rabid stoat and set adrift. He knew the Tipper, he said, from his hunting forays around Blackboys. Gibbet bait, he was. Vermin. A worm. Gutter filth. “We’ll settle him,” he told me, nodding heartily and tipping me a wink. “We’ll hand him his head in a bucket.” He seemed to be as worried for the Professor’s health as we were, as if the two of them were old friends.
His use of the word “we” made me uneasy. I mentioned to him that we would be out of his way before dawn, which meant getting precious little sleep….
“Of course I’ll come along,” he said. “You’ll need another stout hand when you beard these rogues.” He stood up from his chair and crossed to the wall, where he took down a saber, cutting at the air with it and skipping toward a great, mullioned, oak chest full of crystal objects as if to hack it to pieces. I thought of Tubby beheading the stuffed boar in the Explorers Club. I was fond of Uncle Gilbert, as I said, but he was distinctly excitable. My refusing him outright, however, wouldn’t have been gentlemanly, so I rather hoped that Tubby would come up with something to put him off the scent.
“You knew the Earl of Hamsters, didn’t you Uncle?” Tubby asked as Barlow poured more wine into our glasses.
“Lord Busby, do you mean? I did indeed know him. We were at Cambridge together, you know, before we were sent down over a misunderstanding involving the fairer sex, ha ha. Pardon me,” he said to Alice, “not half so fair as you, my dear. Anyway, I regretted it immensely, of course, but I mend quickly, and I was never any kind of scholar. I’m afraid it went ill for poor Busby, who was a frightfully sensitive man. Every small insult struck the man like a blow. The press made game of him, with the Earl of Hamsters comments, although he did have capacious cheeks. He had a trick of packing them full of walnut halves and then eating them one by one when we were in chapel. He saw nothing humorous in it, do you see. He simply didn’t have to share them with the rest of us that way, or crack the nuts during sermon. Poor Busby had a run of ill luck after the scandal, and became a variety of scientific hermit. I felt badly when I read that he’d been murdered. What has he to do with our mission?”
I told him what I knew—about the Prussians, about Busby’s experimental rays that were said to be impervious to the horizon and therefore monumentally dangerous, about the man’s palpable fear when I met him, like a mouse expecting the imminent arrival of a snake. At that time he had been holed up in the top floor of a hotel on the hillside looking down on Scarborough Bay. It was a den of prostitutes and panel thieves, but he was attracted to the hidden passages. Everything in his laboratory was set up on an ingenious scaffolding of stout wooden crates, and could be packed up and spirited away on the instant.
I had witnessed the workings of the sapphire ray on that occasion—a propulsion ray generated by a device that Busby referred to as a ‘transmuting lamp.’ Light bounced around inside a cylinder containing the sapphire until it was released as a narrow stream of blue light—‘disciplined radiation,’ as Busby would have it, although the phrase conveyed little meaning to my mind. The ray had sent a glass paperweight hurtling from where it sat on a table in front of the lamp, out through the open window and down into the sea. It plunged into the depths without so much as a visible splash, and was (for all I know) driven into the sea floor. The crystal structure of the sapphire was destroyed in the
process, broken down, Busby told us, by ‘imperfect hydrothermal synthesis,’ although why the phrase has lingered in my mind I can’t tell you. Mother nature’s stones, to put it simply, were of inferior quality. It had been a costly little experiment (the expense apparently borne by the Prussians) and one that quite surprised the Professor. I didn’t have the scientific wit to be surprised by it.
We agreed to meet again the following day. St. Ives, I believe, wanted to confront him on this issue of the Prussians, to talk sense, as they say, but Busby, perhaps anticipating some such thing, was gone from the hotel, lock, stock, and barrel when we returned. I was entirely ignorant of Busby’s having entrusted St. Ives with the fortified emerald, and quite rightly. It was a monstrous thing in every sense of the word, a thing best kept secret. A short time later St. Ives and I found Busby dead in the upper deck of a folly tower in North Kent.
Uncle Gilbert shook his head in both sadness and astonishment. But he was as keen as a schoolboy to know about the emerald, and his eyes grew wide when Hasbro drew it out of a drawstring bag and set it on the table. It was a vast thing, and I say that as a man who himself came into the possession of an enormous emerald some few years back, which I’ve set into a broach as a wedding gift for Dorothy Keeble, my intended. Busby’s manufactured emerald dwarfed my own. It fit neatly into the palm of Hasbro’s hand, but only just. It was oddly flattened and faceted, evidently not cut for beauty’s sake. There was something about it that was almost malignant, like a poisonous toad, or the proverbial ill wind that blows no good. Alice, I noticed, didn’t care to look at it. Hasbro slipped it back into its bag.
“What can you tell us of the lighthouse, Uncle?” Tubby asked, gnawing on a pheasant bone.
“That it’s a damned treacherous light,” he said. “Hard to see. It’s on the bluff, invisible when you’re coming down from Eastbourne ’til you sail halfway around Beachy Head. In a sea mist, you don’t know where you are. Captain Sawney was the keeper until recently. Drunk as a lord most of the time and asleep the rest, but he kept the lights topped off with oil and his wicks trimmed. You’d think he’d have fallen downstairs hauling oil up to the light or cleaning the blasted glass, but he didn’t, the poor sod. He walked off the cliff one night in a mist. They went out to look because the light went dark for want of oil and found the Captain on the rocks below with his head bashed in, the crabs eating him. There’s nothing on the beach below the headland but a ledge of shattered chalk. It comes down, you know, great masses of it some years.”
“Uncle Gilbert knew Cap’n Sawney on account of the birding,” Tubby said. “Beachy Head is a famous place for birds.”
“Quite right,” Uncle Gilbert said. “There’s a sort of cow path that winds around from East Dean. First rate birding on the South Downs and along the cliffs. Eagle owls, long ears, whooper swans, merlin. A blind man could see two-dozen varieties in a day with half an eye open. Captain Sawney kept a log, pages and pages of observations. God knows what came of it. Used to wrap fish, probably.”
“There’s a new keeper, then?” Hasbro asked.
“Some three months or more. I’ve been down that way twice now that the weather’s warmed up, taking a turn on the Downs with the binocle, but the new man won’t come down. Captain Sawney always liked a chat. It gave him a chance for a whet, you see. Didn’t matter what time of day. He’d bring the bottle and two glasses down with him. I’d sometimes haul along a fresh bottle myself and leave it with him in order to buy my round. If there was weather, I’d go up for the view. Many’s the time we watched ships beating up the Channel in a storm. He always wanted to know what I’d seen in the birding line, and if there was anything new. He was fond of owls….”
His voice fell, and he saw something in our faces now. “They murdered him?” he asked after a silent moment. “He didn’t fall? He was pushed?”
“Quite likely,” Alice said. “I’m sorry.”
“Then this new man…he’s in league with your Dr. Narbondo? They put their own man in?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but nodded darkly. He looked at his hands, opening and closing them. “It’s late,” he said, all the vigor gone out of his voice. “I want some rest. I suggest that we lay things out in the morning. I’ve an idea of how we might come at them.” He nodded decisively. “We’ll learn ’em,” he said. “See if we don’t.”
The pheasant had been reduced to a skeleton, the wine drank, and the cheese and bread lay in a general ruin. Uncle Gilbert was quite right. There was nothing left to be said that would do us half so much good as a few hours of restorative sleep. As I rose from the table I wondered what “come at them” might mean, and what Uncle Gilbert intended to learn them.
CHAPTER 10
Go On or Go Back
MORNING FOUND US on the Downs, or at least it found three of us there, Alice, Hasbro, and I, hidden in the shrubbery that covered the hilltop just west of the light, eating sandwiches out of a basket put up by Barlow and drinking tea out of an ingenious traveling teapot. There was the twitter of birds and the morning sun through the leaves, and away off shore a schooner ghosted along, appearing and disappearing through a rising sea mist.
I watched the lighthouse through a pair of Uncle Gilbert’s birding glasses. Five minutes ago a heavy, large man, most likely the keeper, had stepped out onto the encircling balcony carrying a telescope to take a look over the Downs as if he anticipated someone’s arrival. There was smoke rising from the chimney of the attached cottage, and a light beyond the window—someone else waiting inside, perhaps. Maybe several someones, unless the keeper kept lamps burning even while he was out. He had lamp oil to spare, certainly.
White mist drifted through on the breeze off the Channel, obscuring the lighthouse and the edge of the cliffs now. When it cleared, Tubby and Uncle Gilbert appeared, coming along the path from the direction of Eastbourne like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. Tubby used his blackthorn as a walking stick and Uncle Gilbert leaned on what I knew to be a sword cane, and not one of the cheap varieties made for show. This one had an edge on it and a certain amount of heft. Both men wore walking togs and carried birding glasses, the very image of well fed amateur naturalists taking advantage of the morning quiet. Uncle Gilbert stopped in his tracks, pointed skyward, clapped his glasses to his eyes, and watched a falcon turning in a great circle, drifting away northward. Tubby wrote what appeared to be an observation into a small note-book. A curtain of mist drifted between us again, and for a moment I saw nothing. When it cleared, they were halfway along the path to the lighthouse itself, Uncle Gilbert pointing up at the light, then at the schooner out in the Channel, apparently explaining nautical arcana to his nephew.
The plan proposed by Uncle Gilbert was simple: he and Tubby would chat up the lighthouse keeper on the off chance that he would let them take a look upstairs. Uncle Gilbert wasn’t a stranger to the Downs, after all—the keeper would suspect nothing. A jolly peek at the light wasn’t much to ask. The man’s allowing it wouldn’t demonstrate his innocence, but we would know something about the location of Busby’s lamp, at least in the negative. And if the keeper wasn’t amenable? They would persuade him, Uncle Gilbert had said, laughing at the word. But the whole thing must be done by eleven o’clock if Hasbro was to heed the ransom demand and give up the emerald at the lighthouse. If they failed to produce St. Ives, then he would give up nothing, but would look to his pistol.
Tubby knocked on the door of the cottage now, and they stood waiting. Then he knocked on it again, with his stick this time, and they stepped back in anticipation. But the door remained shut, the window curtains still, the smoke tumbling up out of the chimney. They went on around to the door of the lighthouse and treated it in a similar fashion, stepping back so as not to crowd the keeper if he opened it, which he did, directly.
He was a swarthy, heavy man in a Leibnitz cap. I could see through the glasses that he was scowling, as if he had perhaps been awakened by their racket. Uncle Gilbert gestured at the Downs, perhaps explaining what the two of th
em were up to, and then up at the light. The keeper shook his head, seemed to utter something final, and stepped back inside, shutting the door after him. Tubby turned as if to walk away, but Uncle Gilbert didn’t follow. He stood looking at the door, studying it, and then smote it hard several times, the handle of the sword cane held in his fist. The sound of the knocking reached us an instant later.
“Here’s trouble,” I said to Alice and Hasbro, who could see well enough what I meant. Uncle Gilbert held the cane before him now, his left hand on the scabbard, his right gripping the hilt. “We’ll have to act if we lose sight of them in the fog,” I said, “or if that cottage door opens.”
“Not the three of us,” Hasbro put in. “I have a revolver, after all. I’ll lend them a hand, but you two should remain hidden.”
“Yes,” Alice said.
Hasbro removed the velvet bag from his pocket, drew out the emerald, and sank it in the teapot, fastening down the lid afterward. “No use taking it into the fray,” he said.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 14