The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle)

by Webb, Catherine

  A gloved hand emerged out of the darkness, holding half a ginger biscuit. Tate sniffed the hand, sniffed the biscuit, then ate the biscuit, tail wagging happily. The hand scratched Tate behind the ears, and faded back into shadow.

  Tate trotted on, knowing full well that since everything would probably sort itself out, none of this was worth his worrying about.

  CHAPTER 6

  Dusk

  ‘Is everything satisfactory, your grace?’ A voice like maple syrup. ‘Her ladyship has assisted most generously in gathering together everything possible. Sandstone, Portland stone, marble, granite, flint, slate, Caen stone, limestone, sarcen, serpentine, Bedfordshire, Staffordshire and Suffolk clays; and of course, the all-important London clay. This is what the city is made of, your grace. Every street, every house contains some of these. It is said that the very cobbles themselves remember the land they were once torn from; so many parts to make up a whole, so many disparate characters coming together. Remarkable, don’t you think, your grace? This city is made up of so much melding into one, ancient personality. Now degraded, of course.’

  Silence. Then a clink, as of stone rubbing against stone. A faint breath.

  ‘The city is sick, your grace. Sick in its soul. The people are not people any more. They live like animals, think like animals, and it is this city, this ancient monster squatting on the bones of its own past, which has made them this way. Together, your grace, we can change it. Everything that made the city is here for you to see, to master, according to our bargain.’

  The silence of consideration.

  ‘Your grace? We have found everything.’

  Somewhere in the distance, a carriage rattles, a long way off. Glass tinkles on glass. Someone laughs, giggles, the sound carried by the wind crawling through the fog. There is the dead quiet of snow falling on stone.

  ‘Your grace?’

  The voice that answers is a roar, shattering the fog and the night, although neither moves for the breath that utters it.

  ‘Where is Selene? Where is the blade? Power is nothing without the black blade!’

  The echoes bounce from stone to stone, wall to wall, humming with a sympathetic power; ripple through the fog, tearing at it, as if it weren’t there, and fade gently into shadow.

  A few miles away, Lyle jerks out of his contemplations. At his feet Tate whimpers, as if having a bad dream. The hansom cab rattles on, across the sleeping cobbles of London.

  Mister Lyle’s house, which had in recent months undergone extensive restoration following an embarrassing incident involving a small mob and an exploding furnace, was a thing far too large for him, and far too small for both him and Tess. Arguably, it could have accommodated several large families. But no number of compressed people could possibly have made the same amount of noise Tess did when faced with such horrors as, say, a bath. Or indeed that Lyle did when faced with, say, a positive current through an electrolyte solution, and a consequent rapid and unexpected, if not downright messy, ionisation induced by the potential difference between two terminals, which in itself was of such an embarrassingly exothermic nature as to cause rapid combustion of all local products and the subsequent but essential purchase of a new pair of trousers.

  Thomas hesitated on the step as Tess bounded indoors, Tate plodding at her side. Though he had on many occasions stayed at Mister Lyle’s house, usually informing his parents that he was hunting with ‘new money’, and hoping that his father’s pragmatism would overwhelm his social indifference, Thomas always felt just a bit . . . outside. Lyle and Tess, even Tate, had, in their own bickering way, formed an attachment that still amazed him. Somehow, they didn’t just get on, they cared, though neither party would admit it. It was a warmth and mutual understanding that Thomas had never experienced in his own life.

  In the doorway Lyle, as if sensing Thomas’s reluctance, looked back at him. ‘Lad?’

  ‘I ought to be looking for my boatman, Mister Lyle; it’s a long way back to -’

  ‘Stay here tonight.’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t want to intrude, and my family -’

  ‘Where are your parents?’

  Thomas hesitated. Lyle raised his eyebrows, a polite but firm expression settling over his face - one of those faces that Thomas had never dared defy.

  He hung his head, and said, ‘Somerset.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in Somerset?’

  ‘I’m to remain in London and study.’

  ‘Then come in and learn a little.’

  ‘Sir, my father expressly said that the study of Latin and Greek would be more beneficial to me than -’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I . . .’ He looked up at Lyle’s face. In the hall behind him, Tess had struck a light and was looking back, the orange light casting odd shadows across her face. Tate sneezed.

  ‘I’d be delighted to stay, sir.’

  Lyle patted him on the shoulder as he walked across the threshold. ‘Well done, lad.’

  Only when Thomas was inside did Lyle look back into the fog, studying the shadows. When he saw nothing, he looked away, although he knew in his heart that seeing nothing didn’t necessarily mean that nothing was there.

  Supper was like most things Lyle cooked: made with an exceptional understanding of the chemical processes involved, but no sense of taste. Tess had long ago discovered that the only meal Mister Lyle was really good at cooking was breakfast. Consequently she tried to time things every morning so that she could be up too early for lunch but too late for breakfast. That way Lyle would tut and say, ‘Well, you’d better just have a very large breakfast, to see you through to supper.’

  At pudding (uninteresting egg custard), Tess was the one who asked the question that Thomas had been dying to ask from the first minute, through her spoon. ‘Mnnm mnnm mn?’

  ‘Well, that’s something I’ve been wondering too,’ replied Lyle, not glancing up from a deep contemplation of his pudding cup.

  ‘Forgive me, Miss Teresa, but I didn’t quite catch -’ began Thomas.

  Tess removed the spoon from her mouth and waved it imperiously, like a conductor’s baton. ‘What in all hells is goin’ on?’

  ‘Oh, Miss Teresa, I thought such language was -’

  ‘I think it’s quite clear what’s going on,’ continued Lyle, still distracted, ‘but I’m not sure why it’s going on. Or if it’s going to turn out well.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tess frowned, thought about it, shrugged, and went back to the more interesting pastime of cleaning out her cup.

  It took Thomas three minutes to blurt the question. ‘But what is . . . going on?’

  In those minutes Lyle had drifted to yet another place. He came back with a jerk. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What’s going on, sir? Who killed Captain Fabrio and Mr Stanlaw? Where are they now? What was happening on the Pegasus?’

  Lyle smiled at him, in a way that made Thomas almost proud that he’d asked such questions and received such a look in return. ‘Those, lad, are very good questions. Let’s go upstairs and have a hot drink by the fire, shall we?’

  Tess snoozed in the giant armchair, wrapped in Lyle’s giant coat. Tate lay by his master’s feet, paws idly sticking up, while Lyle talked.

  ‘The first thing you have to ask yourself is about the victims: Captain Fabrio and Mr Stanlaw. Mr Stanlaw seems in many ways the easier case to discuss: an employee of Lord Lincoln, you can assume that he was sent to the docks by Lord Lincoln to meet Captain Fabrio. Why, we don’t know. It’s the “why”s in this case, lad, that are not easy. Stanlaw was a tough man, large, well built, well fed, and difficult, I would imagine, to catch off guard. Mrs Milner made it clear that the Captain was, at the very least, afraid of Mr Stanlaw. More importantly, the Captain hadn’t been expecting him on the night they both died, but they left separately. ’

  ‘How is that important?’

  ‘It’s important when you consider the chronology of what happened on the boat.’

  Thomas waited impatientl
y. Lyle continued, ‘Edgar said he heard voices on the boat at one in the morning. That leaves a whole hour and a half between Stanlaw leaving the Captain and Mrs Milner’s, and his murder on the boat. In that time I believe someone else arrived on board, went down to the cargo hold, and . . .’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Lad, I don’t want you telling Teresa this. She’s a good lass, but still young. I found a coffin in the hold. A large stone coffin. Someone had recently broken it open. There were fingernail marks on the inside.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’s just possible someone was being transported in that ship, sealed alive in their own coffin. The coffin carried the same mark as the letter in Latin to the Captain, warning of a dangerous passenger: the cross from Isalia. It is possible that the dangerous passenger was picked up from Isalia and sealed alive in that coffin. With enough space to breathe and essential supplies already in the coffin for the journey, it would be possible to keep a passenger trapped down there.’

  ‘Alive? In a coffin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But why . . .’

  ‘Think about the letter. It said that the inhabitant was very dangerous. Now, I looked at the footprints which came up from the hold; the footprints which wore no shoes and which hadn’t boarded the ship, like the others had. The stride and the depth of the marks gave the indication of a man weighing no less than sixteen stone and no smaller than six foot three inches. Lad, the coffin was the right proportion for a man of exactly that description.’

  ‘You mean . . .’ Thomas’s voice was a whisper, ‘they carried someone trapped and alive for days, and then he got out in the night and killed them?’

  ‘Not got out. Was let out. There was a fourth set of footprints, belonging to neither Stanlaw nor the Captain. Its owner boarded the ship before the others, went down to the cargo hold, broke the seal on the coffin . . .’

  ‘The one that the letter mentioned?’

  ‘That’s the one. This fourth person broke the seal, and released the coffin’s inhabitant. Stanlaw and the Captain arrive just in time to meet this person, who kills them and then departs with the owner of the fourth set of footprints.’

  ‘Are you . . . do you think that’s what happened?’

  ‘I have no idea; it’s pure speculation.’

  ‘But then that makes the fourth person bad! It means that they must have broken in and -’

  ‘Don’t leap there yet, lad. There’s more. The letter from the Abbot of Isalia told the Captain about having a “holy father” present if he broke the seal on the coffin. Now, think back to the Captain’s cabin. What stood out?’

  Thomas thought. ‘The cross? The golden cross?’

  ‘Exactly. The Pegasus is a ramshackle old ship; the Captain lived in the poorest rooms he could find. But he suddenly has this rich gift in his cabin and is hinting at Mrs Milner that his fortunes have taken a change for the better - so, what can we conclude?’

  ‘That he was very well paid?’

  ‘Think, lad, think! Who pays a sea captain with a golden cross, something emblazoned only for the highest cardinal or the most powerful abbot?’

  ‘A ... uh ...’

  ‘Think about it . . . cardinals, from Italy . . .’

  Thomas’s mouth moved soundlessly while he tried to work it out. Then his eyes lit up. ‘The fourth man is a priest! He must have paid the Captain to sail to Isalia to pick up the coffin - that’s why the abbot knew about him, wrote about the “holy father” in his letter, because he knew the Captain had been sent by the priest to collect the coffin and then the Captain, having been so well paid, transported the coffin back to London where the priest went on board and freed its trapped inhabitant.’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ continued Lyle in a low, calm voice, ‘that the priest was expecting just to pick up his cargo without a fuss - after all, he had paid a fortune. I’m thinking something happened that made him change his plans and release the coffin’s inhabitant. I’m thinking he deliberately holed the ship to try and cover up this crime.’

  ‘Mr Stanlaw met the Captain?’

  ‘That’s right. Lord Lincoln sent one of his agents to see Captain Fabrio. The Captain wasn’t expecting him, was afraid of him, even. Isn’t it just possible that if the Captain was surprised, our mysterious priest would also have been surprised, and might have reacted in the only way that seemed sensible at the time?’

  ‘So the priest released whoever was in the coffin to murder them?’

  ‘It’s possible. After all, only the fourth set of footprints, and the killer’s, left the ship. A priest pays a captain to sail to an isolated monastic island, collect a coffin containing a living man, and sail back to London; then uses the trapped and presumably very, very angry prisoner to kill both the captain and an agent of the government in order to keep his secret. The two leave together. Wherever the priest is, there too is the murderer.’

  Thomas almost bounced in his seat. ‘Edgar said he heard a foreign voice: an American!’

  ‘So our priest might be an American. And clearly, despite his holy vows, one with access to money, if he can so liberally pay for the Captain’s passage with such a valuable item.’

  ‘But can we be sure of any of this?’

  Lyle smiled, eyes crinkling up with a happy secret. ‘Oh, yes, I suspect so.’

  ‘Who is he? Who is the priest?’

  Lyle leant back in his chair, radiating satisfaction. ‘I’d say he is about five foot nine, weighs fourteen stone, wears expensive leather shoes, has an American accent, a slight limp in the left foot, wears a very long black coat that trails in the snow, has a two-horse, four-wheeled carriage at his disposal and is called Ignatius.’

  Thomas gaped. ‘Ignatius? But . . . but how could you possibly . . .’

  Lyle held up a crumpled note between thumb and forefinger. ‘I knew all along. I just felt like a conversation.’

  The deepest dark settles over the streets of London. It isn’t dark that just excludes light, it is the dark that absorbs it, gobbles it up like a whale swimming through plankton. It is a dark that crushes everything: smell, sight, sound; creeps into every corner and under every door, pushing back even the warmth of the fire to a small circle around the heart of the flame.

  The ice spreads across the river, and thickens still. Even the rats are too cold to fight, and huddle together in the sewers for any warmth they can find.

  A footstep on a stair. Heavy, slow, but followed in smooth succession by another, and another, so that the normal process of knee joints bending doesn’t seem to be happening, and the sound is that of a continuous but heavy glide; a mêlée of contradictions.

  ‘I can hear you, miss. But I don’t know your tread.’

  ‘Mrs Milner.’ A voice like warm marble.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I see you have just put on some more coals - visitors? I’m told that Captain Fabrio boarded with you here.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘You must have heard things. With your very good ears.’

  ‘I don’t intrude on other people’s concerns.’

  ‘Have you heard a man with an American accent speaking here in the night?’

  ‘American . . . odd accent? Can’t say I remember, miss.’

  ‘Did you let Lyle into the Captain’s room?’ Silence. ‘Did you tell him things? Was it he who put coals on your fire?’ Silence. ‘Oh, Mrs Milner. I had hoped you were just a foolish interfering blind woman whom no one would believe and who would be too mad to know a pigeon from a paperweight.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, miss. You sound as if you are used to getting your own way.’

  ‘I am. Now you’re going to have to be something else.’

  ‘What would that be, miss?’

  Shadow across the fire, drawing itself up. Darkness at the window, crawling under the door, whispering in for the spectacle. Bells ringing the hour in the distance, a perpetual hourly alarm trying to wake the sleeping city, calling
out the new warning of the new hour, Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, sleep and empty wretched stillness pressed into every eye from every corner and . . .

  And a hand like marble, crushing old, thin paper. And a voice like warm marble. ‘An epitaph, Mrs Milner.’

  The dark crushes the light from the lamplighter’s taper, suffocates the light from the window of the tavern, sweeps dirty, unswept streets and pushes at each chimney stack, meets for secret, cruel, crowded meetings in every winding alley and whispers with the fog through every exposed cellar of every rookery, and races on, chasing the sunlight away into the west.

  The note was short, written in English, in a neat hand, and read:

  My dear Sir,

  My blessings on you, and thanks for your safe delivery back to port. I will be arriving tonight to collect my cargo; do not attempt to move the coffin until I am present. I am sure the holy father on Isalia has warned you of the dangers of disturbing the seal, but I wish to reassert the necessity of caution. As always, do not speak to anyone of what your mission has been, not even to Father Fornaio. I will arrive shortly.

  Your most humble servant,

  Father Ignatius Caryway

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where did - I mean, how did . . .’

  ‘It was in Captain Fabrio’s room, with Mrs Milner. Clearly this Father Caryway was expecting to take delivery of the coffin - and its inhabitant - but Stanlaw interrupted things.’

  ‘Who’s Father Ignatius Caryway?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Oh.’ After all that drama, Thomas felt this was a bit of a let-down.

  ‘But I think I know where we can start looking.’

  Tate sleeps by the fire and dreams of ginger biscuits and a soft silent step in the night, and scratches an ear contentedly, and wonders how long until the others work it out.

  Lyle carries Tess silently up to her room, pulls the blanket up to her chin and blows the candle out, closing the door and creeping away to leave her dreaming of a light burning in the darkness and little ideas forming together into something that might almost be called knowledge, or might almost be called hope. A rhyme tickles through her mind and sings,