Honeywell erupted suddenly, thrashing beneath my weight, spittle flying from his mouth as he roared and bit like an ape. On the moment he had ceased to be the consummate gentleman and man of business, as Gilbert had styled him. His enormously costly machinations had fallen apart. His head jerked toward my own as he endeavored to bite me, and I raised my fist to knock him senseless, but before I could strike the blow I was swept bodily aside by the wet, rubbery weight of an immensely heavy tentacle. Honeywell endeavored to rise, the pistol still gripped in his hand, but the very tentacle that had pushed me aside grappled him around his chest, pinning his arms, his feet kicking like those of a man hanging from a gibbet. His hands opened involuntarily, the pistol clattering to the deck as the golden pineapple whipped downward out of nowhere, out of the sky, and smote Honeywell’s wide-eyed head from his shoulders, the head flying out over the churchyard and into the mob, which scattered screaming. The octopus flung Honeywell’s headless body away like a bit of trash, and I watched it fly off through the branches of a tree along New Change Street.
Popping and cracking noises sounded from overhead now, and a fear swept through me that sharpshooters in the great gondolas were endeavoring to murder the octopus. But it was not so. Their rifles were trained on the balloons that buoyed the net, and which popped one after another, the net descending, the dirigibles hanging overhead so close that they blocked my view of the sky. The net fell over the mantle of the octopus, ensnaring four or five tentacles as it was drawn closed by the lead weights, which thumped against the dome. I fully expected the octopus to secure itself to the pinnacle of the cathedral, perhaps endeavor to pull the dirigibles out of the air. Surprisingly, it released its grip and clutched at the net instead, giving up its protracted struggle.
The two great dirigibles hauled the octopus clear of the cathedral, gaining elevation, but terribly slowly—dipping and then rising again, clearly straining. They headed off at a creeping pace in the direction of the river while the octopus hung beneath, still as death. Reduced to the status of mere onlookers now, the three of us watched anxiously from our perch. Tubby’s arm was bound up into a bandage and sling that Gilbert had cut from his own coat with his penknife. He was sweating, working to mask the pain of the wound. The old man’s face was a mixture of emotions—wounds of another sort: a piece of his soul hung in yonder net, sold for a ball of whale excretion and at the expense of the monumental beast that had been as loyal as a dog. Gilbert’s face changed, however, as I looked upon it, a wondering joy coming into his eyes. The octopus had began to haul itself upward with its several free tentacles, climbing the mooring ropes toward the nearest of the dirigibles, which was pulled lower in the sky as it took more and more of the weight.
God help them, I thought, swept up in utterly contradictory emotions. The dirigible had caught a right tartar in its net, and the men aboard her could have no idea of its deadly intelligence. We watched its inexorable ascent, the dirigibles swinging out over the river, their gondolas heaved downward in the stern, a great tentacle reaching upward, upward, groping at the whirring propeller, but not yet near enough to get a purchase on the gondola. In the next moments it would assuredly tear the dirigible to pieces.
And then at point midway between Blackfriars and Waterloo bridges, in that stretch of river known as King’s Reach, they cut the ropes mooring the net. It plunged downward, the great tentacles pointing skyward in the moment before it fell into the river, casting up a vast plume of water as a farewell. The dirigibles swung around toward Greenwich, having been immensely successful, but only by a few lucky moments.
The octopus had disappeared out of the world, a dying god entangled in a net, perhaps poisoned by the fresh waters of the Thames mixed with the filth disgorged from London’s sewers. Gilbert shook his head sadly and began to speak, to utter a eulogy, perhaps, but what he had in mind to say I would never know, for the first of the Fusiliers stepped out onto our balcony in that moment. He stooped to pick up Honeywell’s fallen pistol, straightened again, and asked, “Which of you is Mr. Gilbert Frobisher?”
“Here, sir,” Gilbert replied, looking lost and old, the weight of the long day crashing down upon him at last.
“You’re arrested for public endangerment, general mayhem, trafficking in dangerous beasts, and the destruction of property belonging to the Crown. You lot also,” he said, nodding at Tubby and me. “What’s that, then?” he asked, nodding at the ball of ambergris.
“Nothing but a pasteboard pearl,” Tubby lied.
“Relieve him of it,” the man said to one of the soldiers, who did as he was told.
EPILOGUE
The Ring of Stones
MY IDEA TO cast the blame at Lucius Honeywell’s feet (dead men being famously unable to tell tales) fell on deaf ears. Although Honeywell had feet, there was nothing at all left of his face, which had been pulped. Lucius Honeywell had ceased to exist. To make matters more difficult, our arrival at the London Docks had been sensationalized by Gilbert’s antics, and a host of people had seen the octopus emerge from the iron hold, the beast apparently mesmerized by Gilbert Frobisher, who had quite clearly climbed into the creature’s arms and ridden his steed straight up the Victoria Embankment and into the sewer.
It was St. Ives who persuaded Alfred Russel Wallace to intercede on Gilbert’s behalf, and the charges against the three of us were dismissed before the day was through, for the great man was fortuitously in London at the moment, and was still in favor with the Crown, having not yet insulted them with his socialist tirades. There were damages to pay, however, and the levying of an immense fine, and before the clock tolled midnight, Gilbert’s ball of ambergris had disappeared into the Royal Treasury. Gilbert had lost his octopus, his ambergris, and his pocket-watch in one strange and lamentable afternoon.
The octopus had quite disappeared. The net was fished out of the Thames the next morning, containing a discarded beef cask and a dead sheep. There was a small article in the Times two days later regarding a cow that was plucked mysteriously from the deck of a barge in the Dover Strait. Some few days after that there appeared a report of a giant kraken haunting the waters of Eastbourne Harbor, where the Nancy Dawson once again rode at anchor, and an old sailor, far gone in liquor, claimed to have seen the monster abroad on the Downs. There was foggy weather on the East Sussex coast, however, and the descriptions of the alleged kraken were equally foggy.
GILBERT SUMMONED OUR little company to his Georgian mansion in Dicker a week after our return to London. This time there was no mystery about the summons. In his characteristic manner, Gilbert had landed solidly on his feet. He had sold the patent for his removable holds—‘cargo boxes’ as he now referred to them—to the Carnforth Ironworks, which had paid him a startling sum of money. Each of us was to receive a gold ingot for our part in the adventure of the octopus—each ingot weighing one hundred troy ounces. We made our way from London to Dicker by rail, Alice St. Ives and Dorothy coming along. We were in a festive mood, as you can well imagine, but Barlow, Gilbert’s factotum, had the face of a worried man as he led us up to the third floor, where Gilbert sat looking out the high, bow window, watching his foggy yew alley through his birding glasses. He muttered something about being on the lookout for snowy owls, which he believed were nesting nearby. We expressed an interest in his owls. Perhaps he was telling the truth…
I returned the decorated speaking trumpet to him, and he took it with a sad nod of his head, peering wistfully for a time at the depiction of the rampant octopus.
He was fitting out the Nancy Dawson for another trip to the Caribbean, he told us at last. He meant to look in on Miss Bracken this time, and would be delighted if we were to come along as moral support, for he meant to ask her hand in marriage, if he found her alive and willing. All of us had lives to return to, however, and regretted that we couldn’t accompany him. To my ear, ‘looking in on Miss Bracken’ was heavy with veiled, double meaning, and his gaze was repeatedly drawn to the window as he searched the misty night
beyond.
It was some months later that Tubby brought us news of Gilbert’s second voyage. The volcano on our uncharted island had fallen silent, and Gilbert had moored once again within sight of the sea cave. Despite his aversion to being submerged in the diving bell, he had descended into the sunlit waters with Lazarus MacLean, and had left the speaking trumpet, heavily lacquered to keep out the salt sea, among the relics in the small, sad treasure trove within the ring of coral stones.
ALICE AND LANGDON St. Ives looked back toward Cannon Street Station as their hansom cab made its turn at the corner, rattling off in the direction of Ludgate Hill, bound for Smithfield. Alice had first come into Cannon Street Station the night she had met St. Ives, and she would forever have a romantic notion of the place. Its vast glass and iron roof disappeared behind buildings that were nearer-to, and a final train whistle diminished in the distance, drowned by street noise, the clatter and jangle of the cab, and horses’ hooves clopping on the paving stones.
It was a festive sort of warm evening in late April, the streets full of people and the cabbie calling his horses by name as they threaded their way through traffic. St. Ives found that he was happy to be in London after four months at home in Aylesford, but that he was equally happy to have played the country squire for those four months. He had seen the first weeks of spring come into bloom in the Kentish countryside, and into his children as well, and the month of May, his favorite month of the year, was right around the corner, full of promise.
Alice, taking up a discussion interrupted by their arrival at the station, said, “…but you will admit that the more we learn about something the more we come to value it, given that it’s a thing of value.”
“Yes, indeed,” St. Ives said. “We manufacture our enthusiasms, to be certain. I’ve developed a keen interest in your begonias, for instance, although three years ago I had very little interest at all. And I’m growing tolerably fond of Vicar Hampson’s lichens, which I had always viewed as the outcasts of the plant family. But life is short, and we must pick and choose. The mind can only encompass so much. The opera is simply not one of my choices. The word ‘caterwauling’ comes to mind.”
“I wonder what a caterwaul would look like—all toothy and hairy, perhaps, like a goblin or a bedraggled husband just waking up. Do you know that I mistook that word for years? I was disappointed to discover my error.”
Happy to see that she was apparently letting him off his opera-house duties, he said, “Tubby and Gilbert will squire you to Covent Garden, one on either arm. You’ll have a grand time while I fall asleep in my chair pretending to read.”
St. Paul’s loomed up before them on the right-hand side and then passed away in turn, and soon they rounded the corner onto Old Bailey, having traveled half the distance to the Half Toad Inn, where they would rendezvous with Tubby and his Uncle Gilbert. No doubt the two were already seated at one of the upstairs tables. St. Ives wondered what William Billson, the proprietor of the inn, had turning on the spit—a goose, perhaps, or a venison haunch. His stomach rumbled, his big guts devouring his little guts, as his father would have put it.
“What on earth is this, now?” Alice asked when they were held up at Newgate Street. She nodded in the direction of the Magpie and Stump, where a century ago people assembled to watch the public hangings at Newgate Prison or to pitch garbage and stones at people displayed in the pillory. Now a line of oak barrels reclining on india-rubber wheels was strung out along the curb in front of the pub. People sat within the barrels, fully contained except for their heads and arms, which were thrust through holes as if the passengers were captives in rolling stocks, the holes comfortably pillowed with padded leather. The barrels sported tiny ship’s wheels, rain hoods, and raised storage boots attached to the backside. It was apparent that the barrelers were prepared to make a journey. They looked patently ridiculous, however, all of them wearing plum colored hats of varying shapes and sizes, yellow feathers in the hatbands. Many had mugs of beer in their hands, although several simply sat staring or sleeping.
St. Ives tried to puzzle it out—how they fit so neatly into their barrels—and then he spied the pairs of hinges here and there on the tops and sides and the several neat cuts that allowed the barrels to open up like a puzzle box. A man dressed in an apron and carrying a tray came out of the pub to collect mugs, and the train of barrels set out toward the river, roped together and hauled by two hefty boys in bright red vests and short pants, the jolliest of the barrelers breaking into song. One of the sleepers lost a hat, which cartwheeled away along the pavement on the breeze, and the second boy dropped the line and chased the hat down while the first red-vested boy labored on alone at a good clip, managing to ring a hand-bell at intervals.
St. Ives and Alice had a clear view of the eastern sky as the coach moved away up Giltspur Street. An approaching army of dark clouds had assembled in the east, low on the horizon—a storm blowing toward them on a freshening wind. St. Ives wondered idly whether it had dropped rain on Aylesford, watering the hops plants and the lawns.
They passed an open courtyard clustered with dozens of the wheeled barrels gathered in the shade of freestanding awnings, as if today were a barrelers’ holiday. Not as jolly as the plum-hatted lot at the Magpie and Stump, most of this crowd was looking languidly at the road but apparently seeing nothing, reminiscent of chained-together prisoners contemplating their fate. Boys in red vests moved among them, apparently seeing to their needs.
“They’re going to get a ducking in the storm if they don’t find more useful shelter before nightfall,” St. Ives said.
“Certainly they’ll have gone home by then,” Alice said. “They appear to have had a hard day. What a bizarre pastime, like gipsy caravans, but with keepers.”
The coach soon turned onto Fingal Street, where the Half Toad Inn, an ancient, three-story building with quaint windows of colored, bull’s-eye glass, sat at the edge of Lambert Court. The front half of a carved, wooden Surinam toad, cheerfully painted, looked out from above the taproom alcove where the street entrance stood. Two men came out through the door now, both of them laughing as they stood in the shadow of the toad, and in the moment before the door closed, St. Ives got a glimpse inside, where Lars Hopeful, the tap-boy, was just then passing by with two jugs of ale—the promise of things to come. It was a popular maxim that it was a better thing to travel than to arrive, but clearly there were notable exceptions, arriving at the Half Toad being primary among them.
THE TORTOISE IN WINTER
YOUR BARREL PEOPLE are what they call Here-and-Thereians,” William Billson told them after setting down two plates of kickshaws: oyster-and-dill tartlets and deviled ham on toast. “The boys in the red vests are just so—‘Red Vests,’ people say. Your lot at the Magpie was the Purple Hats, West Smithfield faction. I don’t know about the rest, but they say there’s nigh onto three dozen factions, some with a hundred members and more by the day.”
Henrietta Billson, who had married William close onto forty years ago when he first bought the old inn, brought in a jug of ale and filled their tankards, admonishing them to drink up and to eat the food while it was fresh and hot, for doing otherwise was criminal. They were waiting for the arrival of Tubby and Gilbert Frobisher, who were uncharacteristically late.
Alice, a great fan of oysters, swallowed a mouthful of tartlet and then said, “So they’re a society of some sort, these Here-and-Thereians?”
“Yes,” Henrietta said, “and very much in the news—a phenomenon, they call it, like the South Sea Bubble.”
“We’ve given up reading anything but the Maidstone Gazette,” Alice said, “and it’s tolerably free of news, which suits us these days.”
“But surely you’ve heard of this man Diogenes?”
“I’ve heard of Diogenes,” St. Ives put in while helping himself to deviled ham. “I remember the lesson well: Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in Athens something over twenty centuries ago. He said cheeky things to Alexander the Great and housed
himself in a barrel, although some refer to it as a tub and others a jar. He allegedly rolled it roundabout the city in perpetual search of an honest man, whom he failed to discover. People sought him out for philosophic advice. I’m happy to think that his star has risen again.”
“I admit to never having heard of Diogenes of Sinope,” Alice said.
“Nor have I,” said Henrietta. “I meant the barrel-peddling man with the great walrus mustaches who sells headache powders in Bankside, at the foot of London Bridge. They say he’s rich as your uncle Midas, although he has the face of a swindler.”
“Headache powders?” St. Ives said. “I wonder if they’d have any effect on the pain in my sciatic nerve. It recently decided to betray me.”
“Pains of all sorts,” William put in. “The first envelope is gratis, they say, but customers come back looking for more once they’ve had a taste. We’ve seen them queued up down Borough High Street nigh onto eight o’clock at night, him set up under the electrical lights. A bruiser with a truncheon stood by to guard the strongbox.”
“But the barrels is where the real money comes from,” Henrietta said. “This man Diogenes is a sort of saint to them who takes the powders and buys his barrels.”
“The man’s no saint,” Billson said, shaking his head. “Them that climbs into the barrels rarely climbs out again. More and more of them have taken to the river.”
“To the river?” Alice asked. “Do you mean afloat?”
“Aye, ma’am, afloat.”
“How do their barrels remain upright in the water?” St. Ives asked.
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 28