The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  Silence fell and then there was the sound of a door closing – Tubby stepping outside onto the bridge landing so as not to be seen – and then, very shortly, footfalls on the stairs. De Groot, if he was indeed the man who had purchased the miniature lamp from William Keeble, strode into the room, saw Doyle and Jack looking back at him, and at once drew a small pistol from beneath his coat. He was indeed a heavy-bodied man, dressed in a sack coat and with a deerstalker cap perched on his round head. He wore side-whiskers but no mustache, and had a tiny, pointed beard at his chin. His hair was theatrically red.

  “I’ll relieve you of the ring you’re clutching, sir,” he said, looking at Jack’s closed fist. “Immediately, or I’ll have you taken up for trespass and theft. There are four soldiers waiting in the road. Come, what business do you have here?”

  “By God I own this building, sir,” Jack lied. “Who in the devil are you?”

  “The man who has come to collect a signet ring that does not belong to you.”

  “Then to whom does it belong? There’s been considerable deviltry here, and I’d like to have a word with any witnesses.”

  “It gives me great pleasure to tell you to mind your own business,” de Groot said. “You lie copiously. Give me the ring immediately, or I’ll summon my men.”

  Tubby walked silently in behind de Groot at this juncture and hammered him on the back of the head with the cudgel. Jack moved forward and caught the falling pistol nimbly, pocketed both the pistol and the ring, and then stepped back out of the way as de Groot slowly collapsed onto his side in a heap.

  “What about the horsemen?” Doyle asked.

  “Still waiting patiently, God bless them,” Tubby said, “although their patience no doubt has its limits.” He bent over and wrenched off de Groot’s coat, the man’s limp arms swinging upward and then flapping to the ground again. He moaned and turned onto his back, his eyes shut, breathing heavily. Doyle pulled one eye open with his thumb, exposing the white of the rolled-back eyeball. Tubby searched the coat pockets, drawing out a purse and a sheaf of papers bound up in ribbon before flinging the coat into the corner of the room. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “We don’t know,” Jack said. “Bring the lot.” Doyle stepped past them into the front room in order to take another look out of the window.

  “We’ll take his purse into the bargain,” Tubby said to Jack. “I rather fancy the coat, too, but it’s an ironclad rule of mine that I don’t dress in my victim’s clothing.”

  “One of the soldiers is climbing down from his horse,” Doyle said to them. “He’s pointing this way, having a word with the others. We’d best be off.”

  “Hell and damnation,” Tubby said. “No time to drop our man headfirst into the courtyard?”

  But de Groot was moaning where he lay and shuffling his feet, and Jack and Doyle were already heading toward the door that led out onto the bridge. Tubby followed, the three of them making their awkward way, high above the courtyard, the boards beneath their feet bobbing and swaying. Tubby lifted his hat to a young woman walking below, and then the three of them went through the open door and into the shadows, where they stopped for a moment to look back. There was movement through the broken window of the penthouse, and the sound of someone calling out tentatively – the soldier quite possibly, not wanting to offend de Groot, perhaps, by bursting in unannounced.

  Doyle led the way downward and out into the alley again, the three of them moving away to the west as hurriedly as they could without calling attention to themselves, out onto Whitechapel Road and away toward Smithfield.

  “Lord Moorgate, certainly,” Jack said, shuffling through the papers. “Mr. de Groot seems to be privy to the man’s most particular business. But what the devil is Moorgate up to?”

  “Skullduggery, I don’t doubt,” Tubby said. “I have nothing but respect for your typical politico, and very damned little of that. I wish Doyle would work his magic on that cipher. I’m clemmed. I could eat a cow. We’d best be on our way as soon as he translates it, and so I’m leery of waiting breakfast on the man. We might all go hungry, which would be criminal.”

  As if in answer, Henry Billson came out of the kitchen carrying a plate on which sat a stuffed pastry shaped like a circular Greek temple, with columns around the outside and a fleur-de-lis atop. It was baked to a golden brown, and the steam smelled of goose liver and bacon. Billson set it atop the table in front of Jack and Tubby and dusted his hands.

  “Strasburg pie,” he said, “and kickshaws just finishing in the oven – Welsh rabbit, curry tarts, and, as another remove, a plate of cold oysters that Henrietta brought back from Billingsgate just this instant. I figured that you gentlemen might be peckish, but perhaps I should wait on the kickshaws until Mr. Doyle returns, if I can keep ’em hot.”

  “God bless you, William,” Tubby said, “but Mr. Doyle might be hours yet. And he’d sooner starve than abandon his work. Bring out the lot of it, along with a spoon, if you will, so that Mr. Doyle can scrape up the crumbs if he comes too late for the feast. And send poor Hopeful out with an ewer of the Half Toad’s best ale, if you would. We’ve got a long day ahead, and we need sustenance. We’re bound for the Cliffe Marshes to exterminate vermin.”

  When Billson had gone off to the kitchen, Jack said, “What I read in the news about Lord Moorgate leads me to believe that he’s no good, but I don’t know quite why. He seems a pompous ass to me, prating on about other people’s faults as if he has none of his own, and with no apparent goal but to puff himself up at another’s expense. He despises Gladstone; that much is evident.”

  “His brand of Whiggery can’t tolerate Gladstone’s concern for the Irish,” Tubby said. “I know him from White’s. He’s a bottomless pit of stinking lucre. He once wagered three-thousand pounds that Morris Whitby, the Drury Lane agent, would be sick at the stomach within a quarter of an hour. Said he could tell from the pallor of the man’s face and the look in his eye. Lord Bingham took the bet and lost it again before they’d sunk their first glass of champagne. Poor Whitby began to act the part of a cat puking up a hairball and then set in to spewing his guts. Disgusting business. Krakatoa ain’t in it. I heard from Wickham that Moorgate had dosed Whitby’s gin to set it up, although Moorgate denied it, all the time grinning like a devil. Whitby threatened to sue, but there was no evidence. I wouldn’t play cards with the likes of Moorgate, but then he wouldn’t play cards with the likes of me, I suppose. I can easily imagine him consorting with Narbondo, although it would be the end of his reputation if it were known.”

  The ale appeared, nearly a gallon of it, and they breakfasted on the Strasburg pie and made inroads into the heap of oysters, which were indeed cold, Billson having the wonderful habit of layering the shells atop foundations of chipped ice.

  “Perhaps we can set about destroying Moorgate’s reputation if there’s something damning in the cipher, which there must be, given that it’s signed ‘Guido Fox,’” Tubby said. “‘Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent, to blow up the King and Parliament,’” he recited. “But they can’t be serious about blowing up the King, because there ain’t one.”

  “Even if there were something to implicate Moorgate in de Groot’s papers, he would claim that the ‘Guido Fox’ signature was a mere lark. And in any event nothing means anything unless Moorgate is particularly identified in it, and if it’s evidently criminal.”

  “The signature is too clever by half. The police love the clever ones, Jack. It’s the plain, stable sort of criminal who confounds them – the cheerful gent who lives in a cottage by day and turns into a murderer by night. Clearly this bunch has explosives on the mind, however – anarchy, perhaps, or this fabulous scheme of Narbondo’s to hobnob in Hell, if we can credit it.”

  “St. Ives credits it, or at least believes that some such thing is coming to pass, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “Then I’ll celebrate your sagacity by sampling the tarts and the Welsh rabbit, if only to make sure that they’r
e up to Billson’s usual standard. I suppose it’s only fair that we lay aside a crumb or two for poor Doyle, given that he’s doing the real work.”

  “Here’s our man now,” Jack said, nodding in the direction of the stairs.

  Tubby poured ale into Doyle’s glass and said to him as he sat down, “Jack was hungry as a wolf, and I was forced to prevent him from swallowing the entire breakfast and then eating the table into the bargain. What did you discover?” He heaped food onto Doyle’s plate and handed him his fork.

  “It was a simple transposition cipher,” Doyle said, giving each of them a sheet of foolscap with two paragraphs written out on it. “The letters were separated into five lines and were often mingled with musical notes, which was confounding at first, but they gave the business away when I realized that they must be transposed along a five-line staff, do you see, like a piece of music, and not the usual three-line arrangement.”

  “Fascinating,” Tubby said. “Eat up, old man. Time is passing.”

  “The notes were superfluous to the meaning,” he said, “meant to confuse, although I saw something in them, and I suspected that ‘Guido Fox’ was a little too proud of himself. The notes were transposed in a manner of their own, distinct from the verbiage, but when it was all shifted along the five-line staff, you could sing the result in the manner of the old Irish Guy Fawkes song, ‘The Ballynure Ballad.’”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing it sung,” Tubby said, “and I’m not sure I have the stomach to hear it sung now, so I’m happy you’ve written it out plain like this. Have one of these capital curry tarts, Mr. Doyle, and a glass of ale, and give us the gist of it.”

  “The gist of it,” Doyle said, swallowing a mouthful of tart, “isn’t plain. It was sketchy enough so that I can only guess at the meaning, although no doubt it’s obvious to both Lord Moorgate and the person who sent it – this self-styled Guido Fox. They mean to cause an outrage, probably explosive, and not on the fifth of November. Soon, I believe. There’s no mention of a date and we don’t know when the cipher was composed, but there is a reference to a Tuesday, which, as both of you are aware, is the very day of the week that Guy Fawkes was to blow up the House of Lords.”

  “Tomorrow!” Jack said.

  “If it’s not next week,” Tubby put in. “Tuesdays come along with some regularity.”

  “Here’s a reference to a ‘Colonel W.O.,’” Jack said, looking at the paper that he held in his hands. “What do we make of that? A man’s initials, I suppose. He seems to have assured Mr. Fox that his men will see to the ‘crowd’s cooperation when the dust begins to fly, along with the martyrs,’ and that the stated sum is acceptable.”

  “How many colonels with the initials W.O. can there be in London?” Tubby asked. “Seems to me that it would be impossible to run them all to ground in order to ask them if they’re involved in a crime. Flying martyrs! Have another of these Welsh rabbits, Mr. Doyle.”

  As he shifted his plate so that Tubby could slide the morsel onto it, Doyle said, “As Jack pointed out, the initials might mean anything: ‘War Office,’ for example. What that would tell us is that there are soldiers involved, and that they’ve been bribed.”

  “There were four with de Groot this morning,” Jack pointed out.

  “It’s a restful day in London when no one’s being bribed,” Tubby said.

  “Here at the end,” Doyle said, “he writes, ‘Gladstone will reap the whirlwind.’ I suggest that they mean to shift the blame for the outrage to the prime minister, who, we’ll remember, has had a rocky time of it. They’ll make him out to be a Fenian and he’ll be tarred with the brush of a dozen infernal devices.”

  “We should settle the bill if we mean to be on the river at nine o’clock in order to catch the ebb,” Jack said.

  Tubby reached into his coat and withdrew de Groot’s purse, from which he took a sheaf of banknotes. “Narbondo has his Moorgate to supply the odd five bob,” he said, “and we have our de Groot, who is a capital fellow, ha ha. Did you catch that, Jack? – capital fellow. He’s investing in our dealings, do you see?”

  “I do see,” Jack said, “and I’m sensible to the brilliance of the wordplay. How much has the fellow contributed?”

  “Ninety pounds sterling!” Tubby said.

  “I for one cannot steal the man’s money,” Doyle objected.

  Tubby stood up out of his chair and gave him an incredulous look. “Steal? Nor could we,” he said. “I assure you. A gentleman wouldn’t consider it, although I cannot speak for Jack. But the man’s given it freely, or at least he gave no objection, which is much the same. And I’ll remind you that none of us are wealthy men, and we’ve got to pay William Billson for this food and drink, and also the captain of the steam yacht who’s waiting to take us downriver. And if we hurry we still have a moment to stop at Gleeson’s Mercantile to lay in a hamper of food and drink, since we oughtn’t to drop in on Uncle Gilbert like a parcel of beggars. What money’s left over we’ll give back to de Groot when we encounter him next, except we’ll pay him in coin, a great lot of it delivered to the back of his skull by way of a leather bag. We’ll do him the favor of knocking some sense into him in measured doses.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  CLIFFE VILLAGE

  “I had another of the dreams last night, Bill,” Mother Laswell said, “and it put me off my feed.” She watched the landscape of the Cliffe Marshes pass by the train window – grasslands and scrub and pond water, with here and there a copse of small trees or a line of forest in the distance. Sheep in plenty wandered the marsh along random trails and across meadows. This branch of the South Eastern Line was new, with debris left lying in heaps, already up in weeds and rust.

  “The same dream, was it?” Kraken asked her.

  “The same and different. The door was there, and the fire within, but it opened in the air above a city street. Full of brimstone and smoke. Things flew out, bats, worse things – the spawn of Hell.”

  “The black goat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it was a vision of what we fear, a-coming to pass.”

  “Perhaps it was,” Mother Laswell said. “It’s what I’ve come to fear, in any event, and maybe I put it into the minds of others who have troubles enough as it is. I’m wondering, Bill, was it me who put it in my own mind to fear it – to dream the dream? Or was it a true vision? A prophecy? That’s the rub, isn’t it? We all of us carry a portmanteau full of fears and hopes with us, lying loose on either side, and we open the satchel ourselves, Pandora-like, not knowing what will fly free, although it’s soon enough that we find out.”

  Kraken apparently had no answer to this except to look unhappy, and it occurred to Mother Laswell that she was being both morbid and philosophical, when Bill was neither of these things.

  “Just listen to me,” she said. “I sound like a perfect little whiner. You know I don’t half mean it, Bill.” She patted Kraken on the knee and winked at him to show that she saw through her own nonsense, but it did little to cheer him. They passed a cement works, followed close on by a chalk quarry, both of them hideous blights on the countryside. Although the relentless ruination of the God-given beauty of the world did not make her long for death by any means, certainly it made death more palatable. Hereafter Farm was a biscuit-toss to the south – twelve miles in all from Cliffe Village. She could walk the distance and be home before dark. Home before dark – the phrase had a compelling but fearful ring to it. She missed the youngsters and Ned Ludd something terrible, and the peace of the farm as well.

  “It’s a gift you’ve got, Mother,” Kraken told her in a voice that was moderately stern.

  “I’d as soon return it sometimes, Bill. Little happiness it’s brought me. Many a mountain I’ve made out of a molehill.”

  “You oughtn’t to be so low, is what I’m a-saying. Keep your spirits up. That’s your only man to ward off the humdudgeon. Clap on to the recollection that you gave them reptiles a thunderous great dose yesterday, and
by God we’ll do for them again today, maybe for good and all.”

  “You’re right, of course. But I’ll tell you plainly that I don’t like staying behind. There’s nought for me to do in Cliffe, but to stand and wait. It makes a body feeble to contemplate it.”

  “With them corns a-flaring up, Mother, you mayn’t come along. You’ll be a cripple before we’re halfway there. I don’t mean to take the easy route, neither. It’ll be hard going – in and out, and me back with the boy before sundown, and all of it quick and quiet as a weasel. Then we can find the Professor and take stock of the dreams.”

  “Tossing the corns in my face doesn’t mollify me, Bill. The long and short of it is that I’m to darn stockings while you’re putting things right.”

  The thought of waiting uselessly made her think of the Professor’s poor wife. She searched her mind for the name – Alice, Bill had said. She didn’t know the woman, had never seen her that she was aware of, but, again according to Bill, she was a great beauty inside and out. The black door had opened before Alice, too, and had swallowed her only son. If it were in her power, Mother Laswell decided, she would get a message out to Alice St. Ives, bearing some small scrap of hopeful news. She could perhaps do nothing about the waiting, but she might about the wondering.

  “I’m at loose ends, Bill, that’s the gist of it. You’re certain, then, about the marsh? I’ll stay behind, but I must know your thinking. You came into London in my time of need, without asking my leave to do it, and I tell you plainly that I mean to do the same for you if my second mind tells me I must.”

  “I’m main certain of the marsh, as certain as a man can be without calling down fate for a braggart. I knew where they’d taken the boy as soon as Mabel Morningstar mentioned the place of shadows when she was a-feeling of the tooth. Shade House, they call it. I been there myself, when I was down and out and living hard, tending the flocks for Mr. Spode, and I didn’t like it none at all. It’s always been a place for low types – cutthroats, people who don’t mean to be found. Last I heard it was abandoned, but like as not the Doctor has laid claim to it. I aim to get in and out quick-like, through the tunnels.”