The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  “You waste your breath,” Moorgate said. “Come, Helen, return the bauble to the Doctor. We’re finished here.”

  Helen looked at Moorgate as if she weren’t at all finished, her eyes as black as the pearls that Narbondo offered to her. In that instant, having made up his mind about her, Narbondo sprang forward, his knife in his hand, the same knife that had dispatched Mary Eastman, and others before her. He swept the blade across Moorgate’s throat, and then at once fell back to avoid the spray of blood.

  “Yes,” he said, “finished indeed.”

  Moorgate’s eyes remained wide open in surprise. His crimson breath bubbled out of his throat, which he touched now with a palsied hand, toppling to his knees, pressing his hand more forcefully, trying to breathe and to staunch the flow of blood.

  “Keep the bauble or return it, as you wish,” Narbondo said to Helen. “I have an entertaining suggestion, however, that will profit us both. You might want to hear it before you decide.” He gestured at Lord Moorgate. “There is always a choice, you see.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  UNCLE GILBERT’S ENCAMPMENT

  The airship floated some six feet above the flat, sandy sward near Gilbert Frobisher’s vast Arabian tent – several tents, actually, as well as sun shades with their sides furled to let the sometimes considerable breeze slip through. The ship was moored fore and aft and along either side with heavy rope, long wooden stakes set deeply in the well-packed sand. A ladder made of rope and with wooden treads dangled from the open gondola door – more a gate than a door – the excess ladder piled on the ground.

  A line of high dunes separated the encampment from the shore of Egypt Bay, the tent quite invisible from a boat on the water or from the track along the edge of the bay. St. Ives was inclined to think that this accounted for the fact that the extravagant and lonesome outpost hadn’t been robbed and ravaged by Narbondo’s men or other bands of river pirates and smugglers. The cooking smoke would have been visible, of course, but a single traveler with a simple campfire could account for cooking smoke.

  St. Ives considered the company roundabout him as he sat drinking tea and eating toasted muffins and strawberries. They were awaiting the arrival of Jack, Tubby, and Doyle, but the day was wearing on, St. Ives growing more anxious as the minutes passed, minutes that he kept track of by repeatedly conferring with his pocket watch. He had no right to ask it, but he badly wanted help with his likely assault on the surprisingly large company of cutthroats they’d seen from the airship when it passed over the infamous Shade House an hour back. Merton’s map had named the inn, although unnecessarily, for its reputation as an old smugglers’ outpost had been the stuff of legend.

  Gilbert, who was the image of his nephew, easily as stout but with the hair gone from the top of his head and wearing heavy spectacles, had brought his valet with him, a man named Barlow, tall and fit and evidently competent, but with his ankle splinted and wrapped and propped on a settee. He had sprained it two days ago when he stepped into a rabbit hole. There was also an old birding acquaintance of Gilbert’s named Mr. Hodgson, who was small and bandy-legged, although active, it appeared, for a man getting well along in years. He was taken up with the study of a surprisingly wide array of eggs and feathers and nests laid out upon tables, blue and pink and speckled eggs sitting comfortably in their requisite nests. He was so taken up with them, in fact, that he scarcely spoke, but was a slave to his collection, writing away in a notebook while sitting at a wide, wooden desk, leaping up to gaze at the particular construction of a nest or the shape of an egg and then returning to the notebook.

  There was a cook, too, named Madame Leseur, a wide-bodied woman who spoke Frenchified English, and who worked her marvels within a kitchen enclosure that included an iron stove, broad chopping blocks, hencoops, and cabinets. She had heavily muscled arms and stout legs, as if she had spent her life carrying hod rather than cooking. Somehow she had contrived to bake bread, and several long loaves stood in a wire basket. A brace of pheasants hung overhead along with a ham, several wrapped cheeses, and bundles of herbs. She was filleting a fish at the moment with a wickedly thin knife, and there was a ragout of lamb in the oven that smelled good enough to draw boats in off the Thames. Wood smoke rose from the stovepipe, straight upward into the still air.

  Gilbert had hired a company from Gravesend to transport the crated-up encampment, including books and spirits and feather beds and other civilized necessities, and to set the bivouac up, dig and enclose the privy, and return at three-day intervals with meat and green-stuff and fruit brought fresh from the orchards of Kent. Gilbert supplemented the stores with game, the pheasants being an example.

  There was nothing wrong with shooting a bird now and then, Gilbert told St. Ives and Hasbro, showing them his new birding rifle. “An Anson and Deeley,” he said proudly, “what they call a ‘boxlock.’ It’s the very latest thing, Professor. Internal hammers, self-cocking. You flush the bird, bring up the gun, and pull the trigger on the instant as smoothly as kiss-my-hand. Scarcely sporting, you’ll say, but if you had eaten Madame Leseur’s cookery, you’d think differently.”

  Of the present company, only Barlow would have any business taking part in the sort of activity that St. Ives had planned – an all-out assault – but of course he could do no such thing laid up as he was. There would be no gainsaying Uncle Gilbert, however, which was worrisome, since Gilbert was dangerously high-spirited and spontaneous. He had helped to save St. Ives’s life some time back, and so St. Ives could not decently deny him a part in the coming raid, but he feared the result, the old man having Tubby’s dangerous habit of putting himself in the way of trouble. Gilbert was given to a much higher pitch of excitement than his nephew, however, which tended to scatter the old man’s wits.

  St. Ives lost track of the substance of the conversation roundabout him, his mind adrift, and was visited suddenly by a clear, sun-lit vision of his home, as if he were standing in the wisteria alley – spring flowers in bloom, the hops growing, Eddie and Cleo’s laughter on the breeze. He felt his heart beating heavily in his chest. Not trusting himself to speak, he stood up for the third time since they had arrived and walked out past the airship, carrying his telescope, up the side of the dune to where he had an overview of the bay. It was a glorious summer day in virtually every regard – the sun on the water, a living, nourishing warmth to the air, the sky a deep blue – and yet he cared nothing for it, and he could scarcely remember the quality of joy that he took in such things even a few days ago. He thought of Alice, missing her to an unsettling degree. He shut his eyes, shook his head, and made an effort to clear his mind of all sentiment, simply for the sake of his sanity. Opening his eyes again, he surveyed the expanse of water with his telescope, discovering that nothing had changed in the last half hour.

  A swerve of shore hid much of the southern reaches of the bay, which was just as well; he and Narbondo were mutually invisible from each other. He looked out toward the inlet to the bay where the hilly ground blocked the view of the Thames and saw a line of smoke now that canted back upriver – a steam launch, almost certainly coming round into the bay, given the behavior of the smoke. He waited impatiently, and minutes later it was visible: a small launch heading straight toward him, damnably slowly, it seemed to St. Ives. The smoke from Madame Leseur’s stove no doubt made their whereabouts clear. St. Ives hurried back into the encampment and announced the arrival, returning with Gilbert and Hasbro to the edge of the bay.

  His three friends were ferried ashore in a scow that had been towing behind the launch. Their gear consisted mainly of two wooden crates with the stamp of Gleeson’s Mercantile burned into the sides – Tubby’s idea, no doubt, and very civilized of him, although it was coals to Newcastle, certainly, given Gilbert’s provisions. St. Ives had no notion of remaining long enough to open a crate. He had rarely been so alive with the desire to act, and rarely so frustrated of the opportunity. The scow ran up onto the shore at last, Tubby handed a sum of money to the man at the
oars, and the three companions stepped overside onto the sand. Hasbro and Jack carried away the larger crate between them, and Tubby manhandled the smaller, introducing Uncle Gilbert to Doyle, pointing out to his uncle that he already knew Jack, which lead to a riot of hand-shaking and recollection, and then Tubby walked away with his uncle, the two of them looking like the Tweedle brothers as they made their way up the dunes.

  “We’ve made some small discoveries,” Doyle said to St. Ives as they stood on the shore, the water lapping at their feet. “It’s largely speculation and half-knowledge, but perhaps between the lot of us we can see the shape of things.”

  “Dinner is moments away, I should think,” St. Ives said. “We’ll talk as we eat, and either we’ll get to the bottom of the business, or we will not. My own motive remains unaltered. I’m going to make another attempt to retrieve my son, as soon as I’m satisfied with what I know, or don’t know, if it comes to it. I fear that Narbondo will effect an explosion in London soon, probably catastrophic.”

  “Tuesday, we believe,” Jack said, having returned to them. He handed St. Ives the sheaf of papers they’d taken from de Groot. “Tomorrow, perhaps, or a week hence.”

  “Tomorrow, I’d guess, from the eagerness of their work,” St. Ives said as they walked over the dunes. He wondered if, indeed, the day was at hand. If it were, then the two men they’d seen carrying Greek fire along the embankment this morning were only a small part of things. It was singularly impressive that they’d blown up the Fleet Sewer, but it must be a meager display indeed if Mother Laswell’s fears were remotely sensible. Surely, he thought, there was no time for Narbondo to be contriving ornate new skulls for the Customer if in fact he looked forward to opening a door to the afterlife on the morrow. Narbondo already possessed the Aylesford Skull, his open sesame, as it were. Perhaps kidnapping Eddie had everything to do with revenge after all, revenge and profit – the attempt at extorting the heavy ransom from St. Ives, while taking fees from the Customer – playing them both false and luring St. Ives into the Cliffe Marshes into the bargain, thus getting him out of London. Any or all of this might be the case. Or none of it.

  He studied de Groot’s papers while awaiting dinner, neither surprised that Moorgate should be the infamous Customer, nor that he was working toward some nefarious political end. Regicide, however? Was the man so far gone in megalomania that he would dare to murder the Queen? Narbondo would seize at the chance to manipulate such a man.

  Dinner appeared, arriving in several removes, the garlicky fish cooked in wine and herbs and finished with butter, the lamb ragout redolent with cloves and allspice and cinnamon, and bottles of India Pale Ale brewed by Uncle Gilbert’s particular friend in East Sussex. Tubby and Gilbert mopped up the gravy with chunks of bread, Gilbert reporting on bustards, of which he had seen not a one, although they had recorded thirty-four other species of bird, having shot and eaten three of them. Their hopes were far from dashed, however, for they’d spoken to a man who claimed to have seen a fifty-pound bustard in an open meadow. The man hadn’t been quite sober, perhaps, but liquor didn’t turn a man into a liar by any means, Uncle Gilbert pointed out. The opposite was more often true. There was of course some chance that he had seen a particularly fat lamb…

  Gilbert intended to stay through the summer, birding being his great passion, and the encampment having come to seem like a second home. St. Ives only half-listened, and as for the food, he ate but scarcely tasted it, his mind distant. He considered the mysterious Guido Fox, the business of the dust flying along with the martyrs. He thought of Shorter’s palm house, the contraband coal, the phosphorous and gunpowder and lead bullets in Narbondo’s lair in the rookery, the photographic plate with Eddie’s image on it, which he swept out of his mind immediately now.

  “What do you know of coal, sir?” he asked Uncle Gilbert, who had fallen silent while helping himself to another slice of fish.

  “I know the price of it by the ton,” he said, “and the relative merits of hard and soft varieties, but only when it comes to smelting. My firm manufactures railway iron, you know, near Blackboys. Not my firm any longer, of course, in any real sense of the word. I sold the vast majority of my shares in the spring. I’m a free man now.”

  “And a rich man,” Tubby put in.

  “Quite right,” Gilbert said. “Buckets of the stuff. Croesus ain’t in it. I enjoy my comforts, Professor.”

  “I’m quite enjoying them myself, sir. Dangerous, is it, coal? Flammable, of course; but explosive?”

  “Can be. Depends on particle size and how it’s treated.”

  “Doyle, you were telling us about your voyage aboard the Mayumba steamship,” Jack said, “speaking of dangerous coal fires.”

  “We suffered a coal fire in a storage bunker,” Doyle told them, leaning forward. “We were north of Madeira, coming home. The captain was opposed to flooding the bunker due to the weight of the water, which would make the ship unwieldy, what with the swell running high, so he elected to seal the bunker to reduce oxygen. The fire smoldered hot, though. At night the hull plates glowed red, and the boats were maintained at the ready. We had a cargo of palm oil aboard – highly explosive.”

  “There’s a vast amount of dust in a coal bunker, of course,” said Gilbert, shaking his head, “and that’s the problem, isn’t it? If the bunker was opened and the ocean breeze allowed to suspend the dust, it might have gone very bad, sir, very bad indeed, no matter how many boats were readied.”

  “Tell me specifically about such explosions, if you please,” St. Ives said.

  “It’s an elementary business, sir,” Gilbert told him, “although I don’t mean to come it the school teacher.” He drank half a bottle of pale ale then, at a draft, and gasped afterward.

  “I’m in need of a school teacher,” St. Ives said. “Tell away.”

  “Well, sir. I’ll tell you that five things are required to effect an explosion: a sufficiency of coal dust – less than you’d suppose – the suspension of the dust, along with oxygen, heat, and confinement. In the case of Mr. Doyle’s ship, they were all on hand except the suspension. The coal would burn, low and hot, but without suspension there would be no explosion no matter the temperature. Hence the Captain’s sealing of the bunker against the breeze. It reduced the oxygen, certainly, but the oxygen was far less dangerous than a gust of air.”

  “And all coal dust is equally explosive?” St. Ives asked.

  “No, sir. Anthracite dust not at all. It’s a matter of what they call the volatile ratio, do you see? Calculating it is a simple business, but suffice it to say that it must be bituminous coal or something softer to create a dust hazard, but only if the particle size is tolerably small.”

  “Lignite coal?”

  “Quite explosive, especially if it’s dry.”

  “The smaller the particle the more explosive, I take it.”

  “Just so, for two reasons. The small particles are of course easier to suspend, and the explosion requires less heat, which transfers far more quickly through fine dust.” Gilbert took another hearty swallow of his ale, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and set the bottle down.

  “It must take a great quantity of dust to set off an explosion of any consequence,” Jack said. “Tubby pointed out to us that Guy Fawkes had hauled a dozen barrels of gunpowder into his basement beneath Parliament. Surely gunpowder is far more explosive than powdered coal?”

  “Don’t believe it for a minute, sir,” Gilbert said. “Guy Fawkes was a fool, which is why he was hanged.”

  “Not hanged,” Doyle said. “As I recall he leapt from the scaffold and broke his neck.”

  “My point is proven in either event,” Gilbert said. “Here’s the thing. If there was enough dust on the floor of this coal bunker so that footprints were clearly visible in it, there was enough dust for an explosion were the dust suddenly suspended, although perhaps not a terribly intense explosion. This is a matter of what the experts refer to as the ‘minimum explosive concentratio
n,’ although it’s not a fine science, sir, especially in a large structure. In a coal bunker it’s much easier to calculate. To a point, the more dust, the greater the blast. Beyond a point, the dust has a smothering effect. If there was coal gas present also, as there often is, the result would be extraordinary.” He thrust a piece of fish into his mouth at this juncture, immediately found a bone, and spat the bone and the piece of fish out into the grass. “Pardon me,” he said, “that ain’t manners. Come, what more do you need to know, Professor? I’m quite enjoying this, you being the student and me the tutor, ha, ha.”

  “As for heat…” St. Ives began, thinking of Shorter’s palm house, with the coal oil heaters and lamps.

  “For dry, finely corned lignite coal, thoroughly suspended and in sufficient quantity,” Gilbert said, anticipating him, “a mere spark might set it off. Certainly an open flame would bring about an explosion. The danger was very great in Mr. Doyle’s ship, for there was no doubt red-hot dust on the floor. The mere act of suspension would have ignited it, the heat being already present.”

  St. Ives stood up and nodded his head, having made up his mind and feeling the day slipping away from him. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe I see the way of it now. It’s my belief that Narbondo and Lord Moorgate intend to create an atrocity at tomorrow’s ceremony at the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs by pumping it full of suspended coal dust and igniting it, either with Greek fire or by some other source of heat. Hasbro tells me that the Queen will be on hand, along with no end of dignitaries and God knows how many thousands of onlookers. I doubt very much that we can stop it ourselves, and Narbondo’s motivation – you’ll have to take my oath on this – is so very implausible that it would be folly to attempt to persuade the police or the army to act. In order to avoid utter defeat I intend to attempt to rescue my son immediately, and let the devil take the hindmost. Once again, anyone who is with me is welcome. Duty to the Crown, however, would require that you leave for London post haste to attempt to prevent the debacle, if in fact I’m correct.” St. Ives moved immediately to collect the weapons that he and Hasbro had brought along with them – the pistols that had served them well enough in Angel Alley, although their service had profited them little, except perhaps for saving their hides.