“I’m not even prepared to consider the matter until the two children you have stolen have been returned to their homes,” Temple retorted, immediately.
“Yes, of course,” the other countered. “But you are not such a prisoner of obsession as to be unable to think of the day after tomorrow. You know exactly what I am offering in return for your loyalty. Are you determined to die, or are you prepared to seek a better redemption that faith has to offer? If the latter is the case, will you curry favor with your former enemy, in the presently-frail hope that he might bring you back from the dead as something better than an imbecile—or would you rather ally yourself with wiser men? Men, that is, who have means of preserving you much as you are while you wait for the most disciplined scientists in the world to perfect the process of resurrection, and will do their utmost to guarantee you an afterlife in which your faculties will not be diminished in the least. You and I both know that it is possible, do we not? And it is, as you have remarked, a matter of science, not of magic.”
“I’m flattered by the invitation,” Temple said. “Will I be a full member of the brotherhood, or merely an employee, like your methodical kidnappers?”
“We are not offering membership,” the authoritative voice replied, frankly. “We very rarely issue invitations of that sort, and you have done nothing to deserve one. We are merely pointing out the logic of the situation—which is that your wisest course of action by far would be to commit yourself to our cause.”
Gregory Temple nodded his head slowly, to imply that he could indeed see the logic of the situation. He wondered if John Devil would see it as clearly, if he were sitting here—and how John Devil might react to that logic, when the time came for him to do so. “First,” he said aloud, “the children. When the children are both safe, there will be time to consider other matters. Until then—and afterwards too, if you have sold them for three satchels full of gold—you are merely common criminals, too despicable to warrant the consideration of an honest man. My answer is no.”
He thought that he heard the slightest of sighs disturb the silence that followed but it might have been a draught of air from one of the corridors disturbed by some obstruction.
I’m a fool, he thought. I should have lied, and played along—but at least I’m still an honest man.
“English stubbornness,” said a voice from the left, in an accent more heavily accented than most. “We’ve met that before. We still need the other—and we need him now.”
There was a sound then—not of a sigh but of a muffled hiss of disapproval.
“Take him back to his cell and tell him what to do,” instructed the commanding voice. “We proceed with the plan.”
Chapter Six
Giuseppe Balsamo’s Overtures
After eating a meagre meal, Gregory Temple began to write a letter that he had been asked to produce on his captors’ behalf.
My dear Suzanne, it read, I have seen both Armand and Friedrich, and can attest that they are both well and are being cared for with all possible diligence. I am convinced that their captors have no intention of harming them, provided that the remaining two thirds of the ransom are paid. Tonight, at midnight, the Comtesse de Belcamp must take a further 10,000 livres to the bridge by the mill, where the Comte de Belcamp once saved her life. She may take Pierre Louchet with her, but no one else. The second child will then be surrendered. I will write again to give instructions for the third exchange. I too am quite safe and well, and will return to you when this business has been completed.
He signed it Your loving father, Gregory Temple, and gave it to the masked man who was waiting to read it. When it was given back to him, he sealed it in an envelope, which he addressed To Madame Suzanne Thompson, Château de Belcamp. Before handing it over to the man who was waiting for it, he said: “When you have taken the second child away, the third may be afraid. Might he be allowed to share a cell with me so that I can reassure him?”
“Perhaps,” was the only reply he got.
He surrendered the envelope, and went to lie down on his bed while the bar was replaced on the door of his cell. He did not feel tired; indeed, he felt quite well. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious, or to what particular day the “tonight” written in his letter might refer, but even if he had slept for 24 hours, it seemed to him that his current feeling of well-being was unexpected. The meal he had been given had satisfied his hunger despite its simplicity—which supported the hypothesis that he had not, in fact, slept around the clock—but he had only been given water to drink, so he had not been dosed with any obvious medicine since waking up. Whatever the kidnappers had given him to make him fall unconscious in Little Switzerland had not done him any harm, and apparently quite the reverse. Was that, he wondered, supposed to be a subtle demonstration of the extent and efficacy of their esoteric knowledge?
He wondered whether the fact that he had been asked to instruct the Comtesse de Belcamp to make the second ransom delivery meant that her son would be the second to be surrendered. If the conspirators’ chief objective was to lure Henri de Belcamp out of hiding, they must be hoping that it would bring him hurrying to the bridge by the mill. It seemed a risky strategy, though. If he had not reached Miremont yet, the second exchange would doubtless proceed as ostensibly planned. What then?
It occurred to Temple that the demand that Jeanne de Belcamp should make the second exchange might be a feint, and that the child she would obtain in return would be Friedrich Boehm. But that seemed an unnecessary complication. Perhaps the alchemists believed that the order in which the children were returned would make no difference to Henri’s inclination to intervene. They might well expect—and rightly so, in Temple’s view—that pride would compel him to make just as much effort on behalf of Sarah O’Brien’s child as Jeanne’s. Sarah had, after all, been his close companion—and presumably his mistress—for far longer than Jeanne Herbet.
On the other hand, Temple thought, the kidnappers might have some way of knowing that the first installment of the gold had been provided by Jeanne, and were anxious that Sarah might hold back her share if her son was released before Armand. Was that likely? Temple had only met Sarah O’Brien while she was playing other parts—Sarah O’Neil in London, then Lady Frances Elphinstone in Miremont—and he could not claim to have the measure of her, but if she and Jeanne really had fallen out, despite the fact that Sarah must have moved back to the new château following her husband’s death in order to be near her, her response to an appeal for help might be difficult to predict.
Temple was conscious of the fact that he was concentrating very narrowly on the immediate matter in hand, and ought perhaps to be devoting more thought to the question of exactly who his captors were and what their grander plan might be. He was first and foremost a policeman, though. He was no longer attached to Scotland Yard, because the King and Lord Liverpool apparently thought that his talents as a detective were more useful in another context, but he was still, in his heart of hearts, a diehard opponent of crime. His vocation was to catch robbers and murderers, coiners and cut-throats, kidnappers and fraudsters—anyone, in fact, who threatened to disturb the peace of law-abiding citizens.
Many attempts had been made to bribe him, and he had rejected them all, because his was a calling that could not be corrupted without being utterly betrayed. He had been accused of breaking the law himself—and had done it, too, most of all when he cheated his way into Newgate Prison with the intention of liberating a wrongly-condemned man—but he had never betrayed his calling, always acting in favor of innocents and against malefactors. That was his duty and his sole purpose now, no matter what fantastic lures might be laid out for him.
For that reason, he maintained the concentration of his thoughts on his future course of action in respect of the captive children—or, in a matter of hours, the captured child. His only objective, for now, was to keep that child safe. If there was a possibility that he and the child might escape safely, then he must try to do so
—but in order for that possibility to come about, he would need to find out a great deal more about where he was being held and exactly how it was guarded. Might his captors consent to their prisoners taking a little exercise in the open air? Probably not—but he would ask anyway. If no escape proved possible, then he must think instead in terms of protection and defense—but he no longer had his revolver, or his knife. Both had been taken from his person while he slept, along with his watch, his pocket-book and most of his other trivial possessions. He had no weapons but his hands and his wits
No matter how insistently he told himself that he was not impotent, while he was sound in brain and limb, his opportunities for action seemed direly limited.
After what seemed like two hours, he heard noises in the corridor. He went to the door of his cell, opened the hatch and tried to see what was happening, but the angle was too narrow. It was his ears that told him that one of the two boys was being taken from the cell next door. Their youthful voices, raised in distress, told him that it was indeed Armand, not Friedrich, who was being taken away to be sold. He called out to Friedrich in very poor German to tell the boy not to be afraid, and then renewed his pleas in French to be allowed to have the boy in his own cell, so that he might soothe the child’s fears—but the only reply he got was: “Later, perhaps.”
He inferred from this that his captors had something else in mind for the interim, and so it proved. After the lapse of a further half hour or so, his cell door was opened and an unmasked man came in. It was the man with whom he had conversed on the coach between Calais and Amiens. The door was closed and barred behind him by someone in the corridor.
“Have your 30 comrades delegated you to make a further appeal, Signor Balsamo?” Temple asked. “There is no point, you know, until all three children are safe at home.”
“There will be no further appeals, Mr. Temple,” the other said. “We are satisfied that if you know any more than you were prepared to tell us in the star chamber, you will not yield it voluntarily. Personally, I believe you, and I made no secret of my confidence.”
“Have you come to gossip about the wonders of electricity and the meaning of progress, then? I thought we had exhausted those topics on the coach. Shall I continue to address you as Signor Balsamo, by the way, even though that is not your name?”
“It would be convenient,” the pretended Italian told him. “Are you so certain that I am not who I claim to be?”
“Perfectly certain. I saw the logic of the situation when your comrade mentioned the Rosicrucians and other flattering imitators. It is a matter of cryptic coloration. In pretending to be members of your brotherhood, poseurs like Cagliostro and the Comte de Saint-Germain provide you with a series of perfect disguises. By offering yourselves as defunct poseurs, layering folly upon folly, you augment the impression that there is no reality behind the sham. What better disguise could there be for a true secret society than to masquerade as a false one? The devil’s greatest asset, it is said, is the inability of people to believe in him.”
“We are not the Devil’s men, Mr. Temple,” the false Balsamo said. “You have encountered us in strange circumstances—but that too is a kind of imposture.”
“I disagree,” Temple said. “I, a policeman, have disguised myself on occasion as a criminal, in order to eavesdrop on other criminals—but I have never gone so far as to collaborate in their crimes. Had I done so, I would have ceased to be a policeman in disguise, and become a common criminal myself.”
“I take your point. We have honest ways of making gold, of course, which were adequate to our limited needs for centuries—but times are moving much more swiftly nowadays, and our needs have increased. Our worst misfortunes are far behind us, but we have had our difficulties during the recent wars, just like everyone else. We have always been firm adherents of the principle that the end justifies the means—including means like hostage-taking, and others of which you would disapprove wholeheartedly. It was once a common form of bargaining between powerful men, and we are great adherents of tradition. Are you so sure of your own moral ground, when your own upholders of the law hang so many men, woman and children, and transport so many others to hell-holes in Australia, in futile support of your own less-than-ideal ends? Your friend Ned Knob would not agree with you, I think.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“He’s a better friend than you imagine, Mr. Temple. He has confirmed your testimony and proclaimed your innocence loudly.”
“Is he here, then? How did you capture him?”
“As my friend told you last night, he went chasing wild geese—and they caught him. He seems a good deal more interested in our temptations than you did, Mr. Temple. He offered to work for us with great alacrity, and swore to be our loyal servant for as long as we might need him.”
“Then you would be well advised to make full use of him,” Temple said. “He’s a man of many talents, despite his size. If anyone can discover where Mortdieu went, he’s the one.”
“I don’t doubt it. He probably swore eternal allegiance to Mortdieu with the same alacrity that he swore it to us, not to mention Henri de Belcamp. Still, such a man might be useful to us—more useful, it appears at present, than a man like you.”
“Agreed,” Temple said. “And yet, here you are, talking to me like a man in need of friends. Would it be possible, do you think, for me to take young Friedrich outside for a breath of fresh air? It’s not good for a child of his age to be locked away underground for days on end. The air down here is terribly stale.”
“On the contrary,” the false Balsamo replied, calmly. “The corridor is uncommonly well ventilated, for a convent whose bowels have been slotted into natural fissures in the rock. Monks have ever been an ingenious breed, you know.”
“Apparently, some monks have been more ingenious that anyone knows,” Temple retorted. “That’s where your secret society must have begun, I suppose, in the days when monasteries were havens of peace in a turbulent world, and the sole custodians of learning. There’s an unmistakable Catholicism about your procedures and philosophies—the whole idea of a covert elite deciding what the multitude might be allowed to know, and hence to do, is Romanist through and through.”
“We have a few ostensible protestants in our ranks,” the other told him. “We have attempted to transcend the squabbles of the Reformation as we transcended other schisms, with a measure of success. You are correct, of course, to judge that we have long been formulated as a monastic order, but we have never taken our orders from Rome—not, at least, from the papal throne. In better times we were sometimes able to put our own people on the papal throne, but that was never easy. The college of Cardinals was always a difficult institution to influence, let alone control. Fortunately, its habitual introspection makes it easy to avoid.”
“And I suppose that you have sometimes been able to put your people on other thrones?”
“No, Mr. Temple—that is one aspect of the game that we have let well alone, although we have sometimes had occasion to ensure that secular thrones fell vacant. It is a fundamental aspect of our philosophy that the quarrels of petty barons and their armies are irrelevant to the true pattern of history, which is the growth of knowledge and its careful application to the cause of progress—in the meaning that we attach to the word.”
“You spent a good deal of time criticizing my use of the term,” Temple told him, “but I confess that I still do not know exactly what you mean by it. Somehow, having sat through your star chamber as well as your subtle interrogation on the coach, I cannot see you as Godwinian Utopians committed to the ideals of universal liberty, equality and fraternity.”
“No, Mr. Temple, we are not Utopians. We are, I suppose, dedicated Malthusians—although we have less affection for the negative checks than you might have supposed, on seeing our costumes. We believe in liberty and fraternity for the few and discipline for the many, and in a strictly ordered social hierarchy.”
“Did you tell Radical
Ned Knob that before he swore eternal loyalty to your cause?”
“I was not present, but I dare say that my comrades mentioned immortality for the few and mortality for the many, and pointed out the logic that would lead any other situation to hellish chaos.”
“I would have to give that matter a great deal of thought,” Temple said. “Even Ned Knob, I think, might hesitate to jump to that conclusion too readily.”
“I agree entirely that you should give the matter a great deal of thought, Mr. Temple—and I trust your logic to reach the right conclusion in the end. We really are men of science nowadays, you know, even though we retain certain attitudes and rituals that were more appropriate to the alchemists, astrologers and diviners we once were. There was a time our organization included the only true men of science in Europe—but that was before the invention of the printing press. We underestimated its danger—perhaps the worst of all our many miscalculations, the Great Catastrophe notwithstanding. Attempting to manage history is a direly difficult business, as you can imagine.”
“If history was ever manageable,” Temple retorted, “it is no longer. Any attempts you have made in recent times must have demonstrated the hopelessness of the task.”
“A fair comment,” the other admitted, equably. “Even if one sets aside such irrelevancies as wars, empires and nations, we have not done well. We kept the telescope, the microscope and the principles of optics secret for 300 years, but they escaped us in the end. Steam we thought unlikely to make a vast social impact, for want of fuel, but we failed to anticipate the extent of the coal measures waiting to be excavated. The real tragedy, though, has been our failure to usurp the secrets of electricity. That genie was out of the bottle before we even had a chance to attempt its containment. No matter how many Faradays we might be able to draw into the fold, there will be many more—and the reanimators are already proliferating in their wake. This is our final challenge, Mr. Temple—our last throw of the dice. You may be able to understand our desperation.”
The Shadow of Frankenstein Page 18
