The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  When the door opened Duncan had a false name ready, but the maid had been the one who had served Duncan and Hewson breakfast on his first visit. She greeted him warmly, then led him down the cellar stairs. To his surprise half a dozen young men were gathered around Hewson’s work table where, with a human skull in one hand and a writing lead in the other, the doctor was pointing out where the glands under the jaw were located. Duncan had arrived early, and the doctor was still conducting one of his private classes. He settled onto a stool in the shadows to listen, and was joined a few minutes later by Olivia Dumont, also early for their meeting. She listened with rapt attention and reacted with energetic curiosity, pushing through to the table, when Hewson produced a glass jar of alcohol that contained a human jawbone with the glands still attached.

  Finally Hewson escorted his students out and returned with a tray of tea. He would entertain no discussion until he had examined Duncan’s wound, pronouncing it nearly healed.

  “The king sees no one for three days before his royal ball,” Olivia reported. “His royal ball retreat, he calls it.”

  “So Dr. Franklin informed me,” Duncan said.

  “What he could not have told you is that the Astronomer Royal has confirmed the meeting! Just Benjamin and George and Nevil!” she exclaimed, then told them that Franklin was preparing a short speech and had ordered a new waistcoat for the occasion. Captain Rhys had taken over arrangements for moving the incognitum, which still lay hidden a few feet from where they sat, and had his motley company of smugglers and seamen ready to conduct the move and stand guard once the bones had been hidden at the construction yard. Through his London network and discreet distribution of coin, the captain had obtained agreement from one of the contractors that the crates could be buried in loads of sand to be delivered to the site.

  “Of course Dr. Franklin is quite insistent about being conversant with the Royal Society’s views on the transit,” the Frenchwoman added. “Such a noble intellect, and so nobly sensitive about offending others. He was much gratified about tonight.”

  Duncan looked at her with new worry. “Tonight?”

  “He is invited to dinner with leading members of the Society. He says it is a great honor. He had me help him select his attire, for he must not appear to the esteemed gentlemen to be some bumbling colonial. Naturally he’ll say nothing about the Philadelphia calculations or the ancient creature—that news is for the king’s ears alone.”

  “Where?” Duncan pressed with sudden alarm. “Where is he dining?”

  “Why, Boodles, the club on Pall Mall. They say it overflows with dukes and earls. He said he feels like a young debutante, making an appearance at such a revered place.”

  “Olivia! It’s Hastings’s club! Probably Milbridge’s as well!”

  “Surely he is safe at Boodles,” Olivia protested. “It is a gentleman’s sanctuary. No violence would ever be committed there.”

  “Don’t you understand? They don’t need to pierce our secrets about the king’s meeting. They just need to remove Franklin for a few days.”

  Olivia knitted her brow. “Pourquoi—” she began.

  “The king promised a decision on the troop deployment to America before the end of the social season,” Duncan reminded her. “Before he leaves to go hunting for two months. If he is undecided he will defer to his advisers on the War Council, which means that if Franklin does not meet and dissuade him soon, the troops will be dispatched. The colonies will become military encampments and the new militias will start using their arsenals to protest!”

  “Surely, Duncan,” Hewson protested, “no one would act against him at the club. Why, it practically sits in the shadow of St. James’s Palace.”

  “The lair of earls and dukes? The aristocracy loathes Franklin. He will not have one friend there. They will consider it great amusement to watch him be humbled.”

  “But the club has rules,” Hewson ventured.

  Duncan replied with a skeptical gaze. “And to their minds rules are only for the lower order of men. Who is their biggest benefactor? Who invited him?”

  “A messenger brought the invitation to Henry Quinn,” Olivia said. “Very elegant it was, in a parchment envelope. Henry was most impressed, showed it to everyone in the house, exclaiming about what a great honor it is. It was made in the name of the Royal Society. And Duncan,” she added, “I sent a link boy to check with the steward, asking when we might send a coach to retrieve Dr. Franklin tonight. The reply was that his hosts will arrange his safe return. To assure us, he told the link boy that the dining chamber had been reserved by the proprietors of Benjamin’s very own home colony.”

  Hewson muttered a surprisingly unrefined curse. Duncan stared in disbelief.

  “The biggest benefactor of Boodles,” Hewson whispered, “is the Penn family.”

  “And the Penns loathe Franklin,” Duncan said. “He sought to have their charter revoked.” He stood, ignoring the pain that lanced his side, and grabbed his cloak and hat. “When is the supper?”

  “Early,” Olivia said. “Eight thirty.”

  “There’s still time,” Duncan said as he wrapped the cloak over his shoulders.

  “You mustn’t go to Craven Street!” Olivia warned. “You promised, at risk of your very life! The watchers are still there, Duncan. And we are taking precautions. Henry has a most clever plan to mislead them. Mrs. Stevenson will go outside to summon a hackney and Henry, wearing a cloak, a low hat, and spectacles, will rush out while she calls from the front door, ‘Enjoy your evening, Benjamin,’ while the real Benjamin darts out the rear door.”

  Duncan gazed in disbelief. Could the household still be so naive after all that had happened? “Then I shall go to Boodles,” he declared and darted up to the street before they could stop him.

  As he walked toward the Mall, he began to regret his decision. He had no plan, no possibility of entering the club itself. Turning into an alley, he waited, and his hope was realized when the wiry bosun appeared. He summoned Darby with a loud whisper and quickly explained that he was trying to divert Franklin from Boodles. Despite the skepticism that rose on the bosun’s face, he did not resist, only reaching out to pull Duncan’s tricorn lower over his face.

  The sun had set by the time they reached the club, minutes before the appointed hour. Elegant coaches were parked along the side of the wide avenue and more were arriving. The liveried porters who met their passengers were big, strapping men who seemed more like bodyguards than servants. Duncan would have considered jumping into Franklin’s coach when it arrived except that the darkness made it impossible to identify the arriving guests until they stepped under the bright lamps of the club’s portico.

  To his relief he spied Franklin walking at a jaunty pace along the tree-lined avenue with a link boy in escort. As Duncan turned to intercept the inventor, Darby grabbed his arm and nodded to the portico. “The big one in the livery that don’t fit, he’s one of the watchers from Craven Street! And that third coach past the entrance, it’s got a footman wearing them tall boots!”

  Duncan blended into the shadow of a big plane tree as he studied the men. Hastings’s shadow men were lying in wait for Franklin, but when he turned back he was too late. Two of the men dressed as porters had intercepted Franklin and led him inside the club. Another tossed a coin to the link boy and blocked his path. The boy backed away.

  Duncan quickly scanned the street. A hundred feet beyond the parked coaches was a group of perhaps a dozen link boys with lanterns and torches, waiting for customers among the wealthy who frequented Pall Mall. Opposite them were four lamplighters, chatting as they took a break in their work, beside two handcarts holding casks of the whale oil used to refill the lamps. The coachmen for the waiting vehicles were sitting in benches along the side of Boodles, smoking pipes and conversing amiably.

  “They won’t keep him there,” Duncan said. He leaned close to Darby. “Get a hackney cab and wait a couple hundred feet down the street on the opposite side. And make sur
e the horse is wearing blinders. Go!” he added when Darby cocked a questioning eye at him.

  He was back at war, when there was never time to fully plan, and never time to second guess. Hesitation was death, the rangers taught. Assess your options, however limited, then act. Confuse the enemy, then strike. He touched his coin purse and hurried to the link boys.

  “Tell me, men,” he started, “did any of you know Robbie, who died recently?”

  “Ye mean murdered by the damned horse soldiers,” a tall boy growled.

  “Who also tried to kill me,” Duncan declared. The announcement brought them close, and he began speaking. They listened with rapt attention, and went round-eyed when he handed each a shilling. Several tried to refuse the coin, saying they would gladly help for Robbie’s sake, but Duncan insisted, saying Robbie would want them to have it.

  All but one of the boys stacked their lanterns and torches along a stone water trough. Five of them moved down the row of coaches, pretending to admire the horses and their fancy harnesses as they stealthily lifted out the pins that held the harness whippletrees to the coaches, the only connection between the teams and their conveyances.

  Four more boys began teasing the lamplighters about who had the more important job, those of the fixed lights or those of the moveable lights, a scene Duncan had witnessed elsewhere on the streets. This time, however, as three boys inched closer from one side, the fourth rushed in from behind and seized one of the curved lighting staffs used to reach the wicks of the high lamps. As the boys sped away with a victorious whoop, the lamplighters gave chase. Duncan darted from the shadows, grabbed the nearest oil cart, and rolled it back into the darkness.

  Everything hinged on his assumptions that Franklin was being kidnapped and that his captors would not linger at the elegant club. He accepted the odds, opened the tap of the cask, and slowly proceeded along the outside of the parked coaches. The oil poured out in a narrow line beside half a dozen coaches, channeled by the cobblestones. He confirmed that the link boy who had kept his torch stood ready and that Darby was standing by with a cab, then hurried forward as the club doors opened. A sputtering Franklin was dragged outside by two of the big men toward the waiting Horse Guards coach. They shoved him inside, then one of them ordered the others to withdraw, creating a frenzy of movement as their livery coats were cast off and draped over the railing along the club entry.

  Duncan thrust the leaking cask under the Horse Guards coach, signaled the link boy, and opened the street-side door of the coach. The boy sprinted toward the coach with his torch as Duncan grabbed Franklin by his lapels and heaved him out, to the surprised gasp of the solitary guard inside, who had been watching his fellow soldiers.

  He was pulling Franklin toward the waiting cab when the cask exploded, and he turned long enough to see flames engulf the coach and spurt up the line of oil Duncan had left on the cobbles. It would not last long, but the sudden line of flame was enough to send the teams into frantic retreat. They leapt forward, dropping their unpinned carriage bars and leaving the coaches behind. In the pandemonium that followed, coachmen, soldiers, and club porters raised angry shouts, curses, and calls for fire buckets. Some men darted after the runaway teams, others to the water trough.

  Duncan had not noticed the soldier who seized his shoulder as he climbed into the cab but Franklin, already inside, did. The colonial agent raised the hard knob of his shillelagh. It slammed into the man’s head with a satisfying thud.

  Franklin cried out in glee as their pursuer collapsed. Darby, sitting beside the driver, shouted for him to give his horse rein, and Duncan, with one hand on the cab and one foot on the step, was nearly thrown off as the horse broke into an abrupt trot.

  Franklin could barely control his laughter. “Capital, McCallum! Charge of the Highlanders! We showed the arrogant fools! How dare they try to kidnap a representative of government! Why, did you hear my Irish stick connect with that brute? He’ll wake up regretting he tangled with us, I tell you!”

  Darby and Duncan had quickly agreed on a circuitous route to Hungerford Market, where Darby could walk with Franklin the short distance back to Craven Street. Now Duncan saw the folly of the plan. Hastings’s men would be furious and they still had the Craven Street house surrounded.

  “You can’t go back to Mrs. Stevenson’s,” Duncan warned.

  “Nonsense! The cads would never dare harm me in my residence!”

  “They don’t seek to harm you, doctor. They seek to detain you. You have one possibility to see the king. If you miss that date, he leaves for the hunting season and the troops leave for America.”

  As Franklin wrinkled his brow at Duncan’s words, Darby spat a curse. “Riders!”

  Duncan leaned out the window to see four men on horses weaving around traffic toward them. “Faster!” Darby shouted to the driver. Seeing that outrunning the cavalrymen was futile, he directed the cabbie onto St. James’s Street, which was jammed as usual. As they reached a tangle of hackneys, Duncan pulled Franklin out as Darby tossed a coin to the driver.

  They wove around the hackneys to the end of the congestion and leapt into a cab that was pulling away. Several others were escaping the knot of coaches and cabs and Duncan was sure that they had not been spotted by the Horse Guards riders. Their pursuers would have to divide, following different cabs, which were already moving in several directions. He cautioned his companions not to risk showing themselves out the windows and directed the cabbie toward Covent Garden, where he knew the nightlife would mean more confusion to any followers.

  Duncan’s racing heart had begun to slow when, as they approached the Garden, the cabbie called down, “If it be a man on a tall black horse who worries ye, friends, he’s but half a block back.”

  They waited until they were among a dozen other cabs, then ran to the far side of the congestion around the coffee shops, taverns, and bawdy houses before climbing into one more hackney. “Whichever route is clear,” Duncan replied when their cabbie asked their destination, “just make haste!” He paid no attention to their direction, instead just casting nervous glances out the window, until the big dome loomed ahead of them. Ludgate Hill was crowded as people flocked into a service in the cathedral, apparently after concluding some sort of memorial procession. “Just in time for the Holy Cross Festival,” the cabbie explained, nodding toward a line of worshipers who were arriving in a procession carrying four-foot-long wooden crosses, blocking their passage.

  “Lose yourselves!” Darby barked as he leapt out. “I’ll slow ’im down.” He picked up a cross from the stack left by the procession, then grabbed a smoking censer that was awaiting a cleric and began swinging it like a medieval morning star. “Go!” he snapped as they stared in confusion at him.

  “Dear God!” Franklin cried. “The Horse Guards are hunting us!”

  Duncan did not bother to point out that if caught it would mean an inconvenience for Franklin. For Duncan it would mean death.

  Chapter 21

  A RANGER WAS TAUGHT TO TAKE advantage of the terrain he knew. Duncan led a frightened Franklin through the crowd and into the west portico of the cathedral, then slowed. A choir was singing. Half the pews were occupied. Clergymen in red vestments were preparing to conduct a service. From outside they heard Darby’s loud shout of “Blasphemer! I heard him curse the archbishop!” then his words were drowned out by angry cries from the flock. Duncan almost felt sorry for the soldier.

  “In here!” Duncan instructed, pulling Franklin into the shadowed staircase. The famed wizard of electricity said nothing until they reached the Whispering Gallery, when he halted, chest heaving, and clutched his leg.

  “They know we are on Ludgate Hill,” Duncan explained. “And the streets around the cathedral are thick with parish watchmen. They will be alerting the watch. More of the Guards will come. We cannot outrun them. So we outfox them. We will wait them out.”

  “My dear lad, we are hardly inconspicuous here,” Franklin observed. “And my gout protests at every step
.”

  “Not here. Higher, and higher still. I know a place. We can go slowly. It will be an hour before they gather enough men to search the cathedral, and Darby will be distracting them. A few steps at a time.”

  Franklin remained stoically silent, valiantly climbing despite his obvious pain, although often pausing to lean on his walking stick. Duncan gave him a steadying arm for the last few steps, to the Stone Gallery, but he sagged when Duncan indicated the narrow stairway up to the Golden Gallery. “Surely this suffices,” Franklin said. “I am just too winded, my friend.”

  Duncan eyed a stack of buckets, brooms, and mops left by a cleaning crew inside the stairway. “Wait here,” he instructed, then began carrying the equipment up the stairs. A quarter hour later he finally led Franklin up to the small, high gallery. Franklin marveled at the view of the sleeping city. “Astonishing. All these years and I never knew about this perch.”

  “Let’s pray the Horse Guards are just as ignorant of it,” Duncan said as he removed his cloak “Enjoy it. I need a few minutes.” He carried the cleaning equipment back down the stairs, creating obstacles of buckets and mops leaning across the darkened steps.

  “So this is the plan?” Franklin asked. “I fear that unless we can grow wings we are trapped.”

  “This is not all,” Duncan said in a tentative voice. He knew he had already pushed the Philadelphia inventor to the limits of his endurance, but he led him around the walkway to the narrow ladder he had discovered when searching for Ishmael. “It leads up to a ledge for the workmen who service the gilded fixtures on top, and is on a sliding track, so that we can pull it up into the shadows once we reach the top. Ample room there for four or five, let alone two.”

  “Duncan, no. I simply cannot. This must suffice.”

  “If they find you, Doctor, they will detain you for a few days. If they find me I am dead.”