‘You were sent here to discover your mother’s secret.’
‘Hardly. She is not going to tell me, constable. She hates me, I think. I asked as soon as I arrived, just in case her approaching death would scrape up some residue of maternal love in her desiccated breast. But there was none. She means to die with the secret still locked inside her head. Unless someone else can persuade her to divulge it. Or someone else can discover it another way.’
Burroughs grinned demonically. And, like that, Horton saw it all, for the first time.
‘The Monad on the bodies of the Johnsons – you left them there for me to find.’
‘Indeed, yes.’
‘The book with the pages torn out of it. Johnson knew nothing of John Dee, did he? You planned to hook me on your snare.’
‘Not just you, constable.’
‘The Royal Society. Sir Joseph Banks. You knew they would seek my help, would send me here. You knew they believed Dee had discovered the secret to eternal life. The Company need not be involved. And then there is Putnam. Your dupe.’
‘A dupe? No indeed. Feel no sympathy for him. He engineered the tableau on the Ratcliffe Highway.’
‘You killed the Johnsons, and left them in the icehouse.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he removed them, carried them to Wapping. He injured them with the maul. All that – it was to attract my attention.’
‘Yes!’
‘And what of Amy Beavis?’
‘Amy who?’
‘She was killed. She took Captain Suttle’s letters from Johnson’s house.’
‘Ah. Unfortunate. Putnam was supposed to remove the letters. I suppose he had to kill her to get them back. Perhaps she was blackmailing him?’
‘But I do not understand – if you wanted me here, why poison me?’
‘Poison you, constable? Who on earth poisoned you?’
‘I suspect the Company. Unless . . . unless they don’t know what you’re really up to. You plan to take over this little operation. Your uncle. Even he doesn’t know. The Company saw me as a threat, and needed me silenced. They must have tried to make it look like the same killer despatched me as killed the Johnsons.’
Horton thought.
‘And Putnam – he knew nothing of this elaborate charade to get me here. He saw the Monad on Benjamin Johnson, and tried to rub it off.’
Burroughs breathed air out through his nose. He looked troubled. But then his face cleared.
‘You are correct. Putnam only knew of the plan to silence the Johnsons and hide their true murderer. This other little scheme is entirely my own. I imagined that the combination of John Dee and a great secret would be enough to tempt you here. And here you are. They failed to stop you. It was a lucky chance, perhaps, that you avoided death. Perhaps the gods are on my side. Perhaps Dee himself is watching over us.’
‘You plan to take over from your mother?’
Burroughs leaned forward, and Horton saw he was holding one of John Dee’s volumes before him, like a Bible.
‘Have you ever heard of David Ricardo, constable?’
‘No.’
‘I expected as much. Ricardo is a kind of natural philosopher of money. He is to the Bank of England as your Sir Joseph Banks is to botany. Some time ago he wrote an essay in the Morning Chronicle saying the English currency had been debased by the suspension of cash payments in 1797. Does that mean anything to you?’
The year did, of course. The year of the Nore Mutiny. Of hardship in England and renewed warfare in Europe. Of the rise of Bonaparte and the newfound confidence of the French. Oh yes. 1797 meant a great deal to Charles Norton.
But suspension of cash payments did not. He shook his head.
‘Well, if I were to give you a silver shilling or a gold guinea, we would both understand that the value of the coin I was giving you was essentially the value of the metal it was made of, as declared by the Mint. But what of paper money? In what is that value vested? Well, in its potential convertibility; in the fact that the Bank will, if asked, change that paper money for the equivalent value in gold from its own reserves. Or at least that used to be the case; until 1797. In that year, the Bank began to refuse converting notes into gold. Since then, the value of our paper money has been entirely notional and, since we can print as much of it as we like, that value has been degraded. This is Ricardo’s argument. We need, he says, to start linking the value of our paper money to the value of gold. Which means we’ll need more gold. A lot more gold.’
Burroughs’s eyes twinkled.
‘You see what is at stake here, constable? It comes from the ground. It comes out of the rock. It flows through the veins of the Earth before it is transmuted into the lifeblood of our Empire. Gold. And here, I have the means to extract as much of the stuff as I like.’
He put down the book.
‘Or rather, I almost do. This stupid little secret, held entirely in that woman’s head, is holding the entire Empire to ransom.’
‘And you believe I can discover it?’
‘Oh, no, constable. Not you. The little woman, currently tied up in agony at an unspecified location. She’s the reason I brought you here.’
‘Abigail?’
‘My uncle is a patron of St Luke’s Asylum for Lunatics. It is one of his good works. Earlier this year I met an interesting man at one of the events the asylum holds for its patrons. He was a man called Drysdale, and he had an unfortunate thirst for liquor. Somewhat in his cups, he told me about an interesting case he was working on. A case of a woman who could make others do as she wished with only the power of her mind. He called her a mesmerist. A woman who had been in a madhouse in Hackney just last year. A woman called Abigail Horton.’
Mina Baxter was staring at her son, her fingers scrabbling on the cloth of the trousers she wore.
‘My mother won’t tell me her secrets, Constable Horton. But she will tell Abigail. She won’t be able to stop herself.’
You’re wrong. You’ve got it wrong. Horton had only a second to grip onto the extent of Burroughs’s scheme – the extortion of an Empire, and the exploitation of his own wife – but then the air sucked itself out of the room, accompanied by a hellish bang, and suddenly the room was full of smoke and screaming.
Horton’s ears no longer seemed to operate. He was lying face down – had he dived for the floor, or been thrown there? Heavy rocks lay across his back and his arms; he was virtually buried in them.
Slowly he moved his hands down his sides, put them either side of his chest, and began to layer himself up. The rocks fell from his back as he rose.
No. Not rocks. Books.
Smoke and paper filled the air, the contents of John Dee’s library merging with the destroyed remnants of Mina Baxter’s house to form a new kind of gas, one that was thick with detritus and derivations born of the building and the books. It filled his lungs and coated his skin.
In front of him, a four-legged monster struggled to lift itself from the floor, with its four arms and two heads. It rose and fell, rolled and struggled, and spat and cursed and bit, a horrible chimera whitened by dust and paper.
But again his distorted senses were mistaken. It was not a monster. It was two men, struggling with each other. The gargoyle and the assistant treasurer rolled around in the destroyed library, while Horton screamed out one repeated question that he could barely hear himself.
‘Where is she? Where is she?’
He stepped towards the struggling men, almost tripping over a long body lying, like him, face down on the floor under a pile of exploded volumes. He bent down and removed some books from the body, and saw the side of Mina Baxter’s face lying there, a trickle of blood coming from her ear.
His hearing was beginning to work again, as if he were swimming up from the depths of the waters in the cave below them. He could hear the struggles of the men fighting nearby. And he could hear his own voice shouting that question over and over again. He stumbled towards the men.
‘I ki
lled you!’ said an angry but desperate voice. ‘I killed you not three hours ago!’
Horton lifted his head, in time to see Burroughs pin the gargoyle to the floor and straddle his chest. The assistant treasurer took something silver and sharp from his jacket, and Horton threw himself at him, his head connecting with the side of Burroughs’s face with an alien crunch and his weight sending the man sprawling.
Horton felt around on the floor beside him, and he picked up a heavy volume, its cover half-blown away but its spine still intact, and with a yell smashed the book down into Burroughs’s face, over and over and over again. The white dust which had settled onto the destroyed pages on the floor became spattered with red. He would not remember how many times he brought that volume down.
After a while, he stopped, and got to his feet, and so did the gargoyle. They looked down at the shapes on the floor: Mina Baxter, and her terrible offspring. Burroughs’s face was no longer a face. It was a red circle of horror, a gigantic full stop in a room full of sentences.
‘Where is she?’ Horton said again, and the gargoyle turned its ugly face to his.
‘Come with me.’
They left the room. The hallway outside was, if anything, even more destroyed; it must have been here that the gargoyle left the explosive. The ceiling had been opened to the sky in one or two places, the front door to the house was no longer there.
Outside, the gargoyle pointed to the barn beside the house. A light was glowing from within. Without waiting, Horton ran across to it, and found her.
‘Charles,’ she said, her arm held in an awful shape, her voice as thin as the paper in one of Dee’s ravaged volumes. For a moment he could not breathe, so great was his horror and anger, and when he moved to put his arms around her and she cried out in pain, it seemed like a commentary on their marriage. But he found a way to hold her that did not cause her pain, and for a good while that was more than enough.
‘Fernando saved me,’ she said.
‘Fernando?’
‘The ogre.’
He looked up to thank this Fernando, but the gargoyle – or ogre, as Abigail called him – had gone. How long had he been sitting here with Abigail? A year, or a minute? Puzzled, he gently unfolded himself from his wife, and stood up to look around.
‘See, Charles? See what she has been making?’
A gigantic blanket covered the floor. No, not a blanket. A sheet of silk, held down by rocks, its components sewn together by hand, covered almost the whole floor of the barn.
‘The mulberry trees, Charles. Remember, I discovered them?’
I will leave this island, she had said. I will fly away.
I have my own means of transport.
In the far corner of the barn, he could see the shape of an enormous wicker box, as big as a horse. Was that what she had intended to travel in?
A thought occurred to him.
‘I must check inside the house.’
‘Charles, don’t. It may be dangerous.’
‘I must. I shall only be a moment.’
He walked back to the house, through the space where the door had been and down the exposed corridor. Paper still fluttered in the warm night air. His hearing had returned, and there was a great pain in his head. He may have been injured.
He went into the library. Burroughs’s body was where he had left it, half-submerged beneath the volumes he had made such a study of. But Mina Baxter’s body was gone.
THE HORTONS LEAVE THE ISLAND
The island’s doctor came to reset her shoulder and it was as agonisingly awful as she had envisaged, with none of the immediate relief she had seen in the eyes of other patients with dislocated joints.
‘How long has it been like this?’ the doctor asked, and she made up some story about falling down a defile. He tutted, and told her there had been a lot of damage, though she doubted greatly whether he knew what this might mean. What it meant for her, just now, was pain, and a good deal of it. She lay in Seale’s bed while her husband sought Mina Baxter, sometimes with Seale, sometimes without him.
The man who had injured her, Edgar Burroughs, was dead. Charles told her what had happened to him, though she felt he left out the more sanguinary details. The simple fact was that Charles had killed him. She wondered at how little she was chilled by this, but then remembered her own temptation up on the hillside. One did not kill demons; one simply exorcised them.
Charles tried, with difficulty, to explain the secret which Burroughs had sought to protect. She knew of no part of natural philosophy – none whatsoever – which could explain the process which the Baxters had used to extract gold from the rock of St Helena. But she thought she could at least imagine it.
‘The rock would have to be mined,’ she said, as her husband sipped water after a morning scouring the island’s hidden places. ‘I assume that whatever the substance is that Mina was using reacted with the gold in the rock, somehow, and allowed for it to be reconstituted in some way. But gold does not react with any substance I know of.’
‘There was definitely a mine,’ said Charles. ‘We found workings, and explosives. Indeed, the explosives the gargoyle used.’
‘He was called Fernando, Charles,’ she reminded him.
The Governor had become involved, of course. There were Chinese workers attached to the mine, and when they discovered Seale and Charles poking around in the caves beneath the mine, word got back.
‘We are to leave on the first available ship,’ said Charles. ‘The Governor seems very minded to see the back of us sooner rather than later.’
‘But what of the Company? Won’t they react to this?’
Are we in danger? That was the unspoken question. She watched Charles ponder it.
‘I do not know, wife,’ he said, eventually. ‘When we return to London . . . a good many things may have changed. Harriott may no longer be well enough to work. Graham, too. My word, they might not even be alive. We will have to talk of the future.’ He smiled, weakly. ‘When you are well.’
It was the first time she sensed they might not return at all. She changed the subject.
‘Alchemy was about more than gold, you know,’ she said.
‘Indeed?’ he said. He was looking at Seale’s map.
‘Gold is the purest metal – the purest state of matter. But alchemists believed there was a pure state of being, also. A state for mankind to aspire to. To be at one with God, and to live forever. Some alchemists believed that you could reach this state if you drank liquid gold.’
Was that Fernando’s secret? Was the ogre the face of God? The thought was unfathomable and unspeakable. Watching Charles gaze at Seale’s map reminded her of Halley’s maps, the ones showing the lines of magnetic variation and the way they bent over the surface of the Earth. Were these lines of magnetic force actually images of something invisible, a field of magnetism enclosing the Earth, acting at a distance?
She wondered if the Opera had remained hidden for so long because, in most places and at most times, its recipes for gold extraction had failed to work. She wondered if there was something different about St Helena – some confluence of magnetism, some expression of the inner workings of the Earth – which might explain Fernando Lopez and the endless stream of gold which had poured out of this island and had, in some way, sustained an Empire.
That door with no lock, worked by magnetism. Indistinguishable from magic, if you did not see the mechanism. Was there a lesson there?
Her husband had been up at Mina Baxter’s house, and had, he said, discovered another of those strange doors. He had tried to use the same magnetised rod as had worked the door of the fort, but to no avail.
‘A different lock?’ said Seale.
‘Perhaps,’ said Horton. ‘Or a different mechanism entirely.’
‘Another secret, then.’
‘Perhaps.’ He smiled at Abigail. ‘They have found us a ship. She sails tomorrow.’
But to where, thought Abigail, does she sail?
‘Wi
ll you find her?’ she asked Charles, and he looked up at this. He was happier to discuss investigations than he was listening to scientific speculations.
‘I think not,’ he replied.
He had been searching for days, but from the start he knew he would never find Mina Baxter. She had disappeared so utterly on the night of the explosion, along with her strange ogre, that he found himself wondering if she’d uncovered other secrets in John Dee’s library – the secret to walking down into the Earth, for example.
On the morning of their departure he was woken at first light by a soldier carrying a note from the Governor, a carefully worded little missive which said more than it seemed. It was a politician’s letter, designed to be read by others than those to whom it was addressed.
Horton – I have in the last day received orders which will change forever the nature of this island. I do think that the eyes of the World will be on this place. I am not at liberty to reveal these matters, and in any case it would be unbecoming to discuss them with a constable. I will simply take this opportunity to say that the militia will shortly take hold of Miss Baxter’s farm and outbuildings. I request that you supply Mr Seale with any keys or devices necessary to gain ingress to the various facilities. This is a matter for the Company and for the government of St Helena. If any discoveries are made which impinge on the Crown’s settlement on the island, they will be made known and dealt with in the appropriate manner.
You will today leave the island aboard the whaler Bala. The Council of the island acknowledges your work in discovering this matter. We trust the sensitivities regarding the private affairs of this island and its inhabitants will receive due regard from you and your superiors in whichever report you decide to file.
Governor Colonel M Wilks
The Detective and the Devil Page 28