Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  Shelley seemed disposed to disagree fervently, but Ned raised a hand to forestall his intervention. “Captain Walton is right, sir, at least for the moment,” he said, politely. “You cannot trust me fully, since I am admittedly in the employ of Gregory Temple. I can understand, too, why you might be unready to trust our mutual friend the Comte–but if, as you say, you have more enemies than I know, you might be well advised to seek further assistance from those most sympathetic to your cause. I shall go now, but I will come back, if you will grant me permission, when your wound has been properly dressed and you have had a chance to discuss the matter.”

  He paused until Shelley nodded to give him the permission he had requested, and then continued: “In the meantime, I might be able to do you one small service by removing the Turks from the list of your potential enemies. The other spy who has been watching your house may well have followed your friend here from Walton’s house. If so, I shall seek him out. I’ll do my very best to persuade him that you are not, in fact, engaged in the manufacture of explosives, and that you have no hostile intentions in respect of the Ottoman masters of Greece or anyone else.”

  Walton and Frankenstein were still looking at Ned with alarm and frank distrust. Shelley, on the other hand, seemed to be clinging stubbornly to the good opinion he had formed in advance of the unexpected cataract of revelations. “Thank you for your kind assistance, Mr. Knob,” the poet said, formally. “I shall look forward to seeing you again. Gregory will show you out.”

  Gregory scowled, but set down the bowl and gestured towards the door.

  Ned went lightly down the stairs ahead of the manservant, and allowed himself to be ushered out of the door that let out on to the road behind the house. He went unreluctantly, feeling that he had set the stage well enough for another, hopefully more productive, encounter.

  Chapter Five

  The Skirmish on the Strand

  Ned had little difficulty locating the man who called himself Guido, who had indeed followed the man of science from Walton’s house, and was now inspecting the Don Juan very carefully. He saw Ned coming towards him, and made no particular attempt to hide himself. On the slope that led down to the strand, however, 100 yards behind Guido, another person was trying as best he could to conceal himself, although the cover offered by the desiccated bushes was not quite adequate to the task. Ned did his best to hide the fact that he had seen this new spy from both Guido and the man in question.

  “They should not have hired a fool like Roberts to build her,” Guido observed, as Ned drew near. “The English are so stupid, always preferring their own countrymen, however inept, to local craftsmen. This vessel is not suitable for pleasure-trips within the gulf, let alone for carrying armaments all the way around the boot of Italy to the Greek islands.”

  “That is not her purpose,” Ned said. “I have spoken to Shelley, and I am certain that he has no intention of doing anything so silly. If ever Lord Byron decides to lend material aid to the Greeks in their war of independence, he will take a more direct route. For the moment, he has other concerns in mind.”

  “The Carbonari, you mean?” Guido guessed, giving the impression that he would not mind at all if Byron’s mind were focused on Italy’s domestic problems.

  The bright daylight gave Ned a much better opportunity to measure his adversary than he had had the previous night, but he could not find any tell-tale sign to indicate whether his inference that Guido was a Turkish spy was correct. It remained possible that he had been sent by the Spanish authorities, who had cause enough to be anxious about their own revolutionaries and the possibility of their gaining foreign support, but Ned still suspected that he had come from the east rather than the west. “No,” Ned said. “Shelley and his friends are not involved in anything of immediate interest to the Carbonari. What concerns them at present is a private and personal matter, with no political implications.” That was not entirely true, of course, but Ned felt perfectly justified in giving a narrow meaning to the “political implications” of the project in which Shelley and Byron had involved themselves.

  “You’re telling me that I’m wasting my time here,” Guido said, skeptically. “You know that I can’t take your word for that. We’re pooling information, remember. I need to hear something useful, something new, if we’re to continue our friendly association.”

  “I don’t know who you’re working for,” Ned said, in a neutral tone, “but I feel confident that I don’t have anything to tell you that would be useful to them.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Guido said, instead of responding to Ned’s tacit information to name his employers.

  Ned sighed. “You were right about the boat having been modified,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the Don Juan “but you must have seen enough by now to know that it was a mere matter of correcting faults of construction. The boat has not been adapted for smuggling anything.”

  “To speak of correction is overgenerous,” Guido said, gesturing contemptuously at the Don Juan. “The vessel is a death-trap. The Mediterranean has the reputation of being placid, by comparison with the Atlantic, but the Ligurian Sea can be exceedingly treacherous. I agree with you, though–the adaptations were not made with the purpose I suspected.”

  “Shelley is not in need of any further death-traps at present,” Ned told him. “He and his wife are both ill. Whatever plans he and his friends had in hand this morning will have to be shelved for the time being. The cavalry officer who was sent by the authorities in Pisa to put a spoke in their wheel succeeded all to well–the wound he inflicted on Shelley has been reopened and the injury has become serious.”

  “He seems likely to die himself,” Guido observed. “These Italian hot-heads always take such projects a little too far. It would be amusing if the affair were to escalate into a vendetta, but this is not Sicily, and Masi was, as you say, acting under orders–however ineptly. Will Walton’s associate be able to save Shelley’s life, do you think?”

  That, Ned knew, was the crux of the matter. What he did not know was whether Guido knew, or suspected, how exactly crucial it was. He glanced surreptitiously at the bushes on the slope, but he could not make out any detail of the person watching them, save that he was dressed in drab grey clothes, with a broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his brows and a scarf masking the lower part of his face. Given the scarf, and the gaucherie of his attempt to hide himself, the big man might as well have been carrying a flag bearing the word SPY, but there was something about him that unsettled Ned.

  “They told me that they had more enemies than I knew,” Ned told his immediate rival, risking one more small revelation in the hope of obtaining something in return. “Do you, perchance, know of any enemies they have, apart from you?”

  “I am no one’s enemy, my friend,” was the reply he got. “But I do know of at least other party which might be ill-disposed toward Walton’s companion. Circumstances sometimes conspire to set the most virtuous of men at one another’s throats. Do you, perchance, know who the man on the slope might be, who is watching us at this moment? His presence seems to be disturbing you.”

  Ned cursed his own carelessness silently, but contented himself with replying: “I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen him before, although it’s difficult to be sure while he’s muffled up like that–but there is something disconcerting about him, is there not?”

  “Yes, there is,” Guido agreed. “He followed me from Walton’s house, as furtively as he could, but he’s far too awkward to be unobtrusive. Even had he been a tiny mouse like you, I’d have seen him easily enough. Given that he’s so bulky as well as so clumsy, and so carefully wrapped up in spite of the summer heat, I would have had to be blind and stupid not to be aware of his proximity. Is he one of the enemies of whom your countrymen are fearful, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know,” Ned said. “Shall we follow him home and sneak into his bedroom tonight, daggers in hand, to propose that we all join forces?”


  Guido laughed. “I like you, my friend,” he said, “despite your reluctance to share what you know.”

  “This business is becoming far too complicated for my simple tastes,” Ned told him. “When too many spies become involved in a matter, they’re bound to waste their time fencing with one another, as we are doing now.” So saying, he turned round, intending to march straight towards the bushes on the hillside where the third would-be spy was attempting to conceal himself.

  Ned’s primary objective was to get a closer look at the man, in order to assuage the nagging suspicion that had taken hold of him, for no reason of which he was conscious. Hardly had he taken two strides, however, when he saw that a number of other men were now heading towards the crouching man’s hiding-place from the top of the slope. They were moving stealthily, and they were armed. Some had poniards in their hands, others pistols.

  If the situation had seemed complicated before, it now seemed utterly chaotic. Ned looked to his right and left along the shore. There were several other people visible within 100 yards, all of whom seemed innocently busy about their boats, but none had yet taken alarm. He did not know whether he ought to resist the temptation to call out a warning to the tall man, but his hesitation in that regard was momentary. No warning was necessary.

  The man who had been hiding in the bushes stood up suddenly, having realized that there were people behind him. To Ned’s astonishment, it was the big man who called out a warning to him.

  “Take cover,” the masked man shouted, in French, just before the first shot was fired.

  Ned was astonished that the big man’s pursuers were prepared to fire their guns in broad daylight, for they were certainly not policemen or militiamen; they looked for all the world like a gang of bandits. Tuscany had no shortage of such robber bands, but they were very rarely seen this close to a town as large as Spezia. Although the shore of San Terenzo was relatively quiet, save for the hours at which the fishermen habitually set sail and returned, it was unusual in the extreme for bandits to call attention to themselves in such a location. The other men on the strand had all taken alarm now, and several had begun to run along the shoreline in one direction or the other.

  Now that the man who had been hiding was out in the open, running down the hill with great leaping strides, it was possible to make a much better estimation of his size, build and gait–but Ned observed, with a slight sinking feeling, that it was still impossible to judge the color of his skin. His waving hands were gloved.

  Because he was coming down the slope as fast as he could the fugitive was, perforce, heading almost directly towards Ned and Guido, putting them both in the line of fire. Only three pistol-shots had been released, but Guido needed no further provocation; he dived behind the stern of a fishing-smack drawn up on the strand parallel to the Don Juan, ducking low as he passed out of Ned’s sight. Ned ran the other way, into the shelter of the Don Juan’s prow, but he remained on his feet and went right around the boat to the stern, eager to keep track of the fleeing man.

  More men had already appeared at the top of the slope, some of whom were already raising muskets–but they did not fire, perhaps because they were fearful that too many detonations would be sure to attract attention and perhaps because they were fearful of hitting their fellows instead of their intended target. Ned could not tell where the three pistol-shots had gone–for all he knew, they might have been fired into the air by way of warning rather than aimed to kill–but the pursuers chasing the big man certainly seemed determined, and were evidently not afraid to use their weapons.

  Once he was on the level ground of the strand, the hunted man turned aside, running in the opposite direction to Casa Magni, towards Spezia’s harbor. The boats drawn up on the shore provided far better shelter than the bushes on the slope, and he was soon lost to sight. No more shots had been fired after him, perhaps because the pistoliers thought that he was too far away to permit them to take aim, but perhaps also because they feared that a stray shot might hit some innocent party, and did not want that to happen. Ned glanced back at Casa Magni, and saw a face–almost certainly Walton’s–at one of the first floor windows, staring out anxiously. The spectacle seemed sure to excite the conspirators’ anxieties even further.

  The men who were chasing the fugitive were all in plain view now. They were at least a dozen in number. Their well-worn clothes might have marked them as peasants had it not been for their weapons, but they were obviously well-used to bearing arms. Although the war had, in theory, been over for seven years, Ned knew that the desultory fighting in these parts was unlikely to have been stilled immediately by news of Waterloo. He knew, too, that many of the banditti in the northern provinces of Italy had joined forces with anti-Bonapartist resistance-fighters, rebranding themselves as patriots, and had thus obtained far greater license to steal and kill than they had ever enjoyed before. It was possible that these men still enjoyed a local reputation as heroes, and thus felt free to parade themselves, but Ned could not believe that the man they were chasing was merely a left-over Bonapartist who might be considered fair game by the townsfolk of San Terenzo and Spezia.

  Within five minutes, the hunt and its quarry had passed out of sight and hearing. The bandits if such they were, had paid no more attention to Ned than to any of the fishermen they had briefly disturbed.

  “This is a madhouse,” Ned muttered, as he went to look for his rival.

  Guido was lying down where he had taken cover, but he was not about to get up. His head was bleeding. For a second or two, Ned thought that he might have been grazed by a stray pistol-shot, but then a head appeared over the side of the fishing-boat, its face wearing a broad grin. A hand appeared, still clutching the short club with which the spy had been struck down. Ned recognized the courier to whom he had given the coded letter destined for Henri de Belcamp–the man that Guido had robbed on the previous evening, and who had sworn vengeance in the customary Italian style.

  The courier jumped down and began to rummage through Guido’s pockets, expectantly. Ned took the letter out of his own jacket, but paused before handing it over in case the courier found anything else of interest while searching for it. Eventually, though, the courier looked up and shook his head.

  Ned handed him the folded paper with the broken seal. “I’ve no time to write out a supplementary report and encode it,” he said. “Have you enough English to take and transmit a verbal report?”

  “Yes,” said the courier, “but...”

  “No buts,” Ned said, “unless you can tell me who that man was who fled just now, and why the others are hunting him.”

  The courier shook his head, but grinned again. The chase had provided him with the distraction he needed to get close to his own quarry, but he had no idea what it was about.

  “In that case,” Ned went on, “I must make shift to find out. Do you know who this man is?” He pointed at the unconscious Guido, expecting another shake of the head.

  “Dirty magyar,” the courier supplied, spitting on the sand beside the bleeding head.

  “In the pay of the Turks, you think?” Ned said.

  The courier shook his head. “No Turks here,” he said, confidently. “Vampire’s minion.”

  Ned looked at the courier in amazement. “You can’t mean that literally,” he said.

  The courier shrugged. “Dirty magyar,” he repeated. “Be careful. Great danger, if vampire comes. Strange things. I make report too.”

  “By all means do so,” Ned said. “Make sure, though, that you keep it distinct from mine, which is this: Shelley is injured, perhaps mortally. His wife is ill. Frankenstein is ill too, in a different way. He is extremely hesitant in the matter of resuming his experiments. Shelley and his companions know that I am here in the name of the English crown, but they know nothing of my other master. They are afraid of some enemy, but are reluctant to seek the help they may need. That will do–can you repeat all that when you pass on the letter?”

  “Yes,” sai
d the courier, “but...”

  “He will not approve. I know that–but the time for codes and ciphers is past; events are moving too rapidly. If he decides to take a hand in this, he had best come quickly. Now go.”

  The courier made no further objection. He moved off rapidly along the shore, in the same direction that the fugitive had taken. Ned looked down briefly at the unconscious man, then shrugged his own shoulders and followed the courier at a slower pace, looking for signs of the pursuit.

  The trail was very evident, and easy to follow whle the hunters and their quarry were moving along the shore towards Spezia. When the tracks turned inland again, however, they became more difficult to follow, and they twisted and turned as the hunted man attempted to evade his pursuers. They finally evaporated on the hard and busy pavements of the town.

  After searching for some time, Ned eventually caught sight of eight of the hunters outside a tavern. They had evidently abandoned the chase, at least until one of their scouts could obtain another sighting of their prey. They had put their weapons away, but they were making no attempt to hide themselves from the eyes of passers-by. On the contrary, they often offered salutes that implied recognition, although not all the greetings were returned. The eight men seemed to be adopting a swaggering attitude, whose bravado did not seem to be exaggerated by insecurity. Banditti though they presumably were, the men were evidently familiar to the port’s inhabitants, and had no fear of arrest or molestation. The day when they could pass for heroic veterans of a fierce guerilla war against Bonaparte’s allies was evidently not yet done. There was no sign of any uniform whose wearer might be duty-bound to object to their armed presence.

  Ned began to make his weary way back to his hotel, deep in thought. His priority now had to be to make contact with Shelley again as soon as possible, if possible in confidence, in order to build on the sympathy that had sprung into being between them.