She looked better than he had ever seen her since they had first met on the moors the previous afternoon. For then she had just sprained her ankle and was suffering from the cold shock brought on by the trauma of the injury.
But now she appeared fresh-faced and with a rosy glow he had not seen before. She had washed and dried her hair, tying it up in a practical bun, and she was wearing an open-necked shirt and a new pair of Harris tweed knickerbockers. He could see from the way the knee-length sock on her right foot bulged that she must have strapped up her ankle well - it certainly didn't appear to be troubling her unduly - and had managed to put on another pair of walking shoes.
Ulysses found himself struck dumb by her simple, natural beauty - his English Rose had blossomed - and so it was Jennifer who initiated their first exchange of the day.
"Good morning, Ulysses. Is something the matter?"
"What? No. No, nothing." He realised he had stopped dead in the doorway of the drawing room on catching sight of Jennifer. Crossing the room, he sat down in an armchair next to the windows through which wan sunlight was streaming. "You're looking well," he said cautiously. "Are you feeling -"
"Yes, quite well, thank you."
"There's nothing quite like the smell of grilling bacon, is there?" he said, by way of making light conversation, anxious not to say anything that might upset Jennifer's seemingly cheerful mood, which he was sure must be balanced on a knife edge.
Nimrod returned and placed a plate laden with bacon, scrambled eggs and black pudding in front of Ulysses. Not only had he managed to rustle up a filling breakfast amidst the devastation of the kitchen, he had even found enough intact plates to serve it on.
"Looks wonderful, old boy," he beamed, inhaling deeply, savouring the succulent aromas of the hot food.
"Thank you, sir."
Having made himself scarce the night before when the much bigger dog had invaded his home, the smell of bacon and other such delights had drawn Ambrose the terrier out from his hiding place under the sofa. The dog squatted down beside Ulysses, hopeful eyes watching every forkful of food with expectant relish, but he wasn't even going to get a look in.
The dandy tucked in straight away, but, as far as he was concerned, the pot of coffee that Nimrod had produced was by far his greatest achievement.
"I'm sure you must ravenous after all your exertions last night," Jennifer said, placing her own knife and fork delicately together on her empty plate.
"What? Oh, yes," he admitted, still somewhat unsettled by her oh-so positive tone.
"Well, come on then, eat up. We're all going to need our strength for what lies ahead of us today, aren't we?"
There was something disconcerting about the way she was speaking so freely, a dark, disquieting edge to her strikingly cheerful tone. As far as she was concerned, there would be time enough to grieve later. For now, determination and a resolution to find her father's true killer was paramount.
"Um, yes," Ulysses managed through a mouthful of black pudding. "I'm looking forward to meeting Mr Umbridge."
Less than half an hour later, with breakfast finished and everyone suitably attired for a clear, cold day on Ghestdale, the trio, made up of the cryptozoologist, the dandy and his manservant, set off west, following the stony track that led across the moors in the direction of the Umbridge estate, Miss Haniver taking the gentleman detective's arm for support.
It had been cold out the night before, but certain that the beast would not be troubling him, he had made a bed of heather and bracken for himself in the lea of a rocky outcrop that sheltered him from the warmth-stealing winds that seemed to constantly scour the moors.
He had risen at first light, as the fragile light of the sun struggled to penetrate the cloying November mists and made his way back to the lodge. From his hiding place behind a dry-stone wall he saw a tattered curtain flapping in the breeze, tugged through the shattered remains of the French windows and wet with dew.
When he had reached the house after the others, the night before, all had seemed well. He too had thought the beast dead, or at least trapped within the warren of mine-workings underground. It was only as he was making his way home, scampering back towards the distant lights of the town, that he heard the blood-curdling howls and the woman's screams.
He had returned to the lodge at a run, but by the time he got there it was all over. It took some minutes for him to realise what had happened. It had been then that he had resolved to wait close by until morning, just in case she needed his help again.
It wasn't until the party were a good two hundred yards along the track - Miss Haniver making confident progress despite her injured ankle - that he left his hiding place and, careful as ever not to be seen, set off after them.
Heavy hobnail boots kicked away the wreckage of the devastated French windows, crunched over broken glass and entered the dining room. There on the table, lying under a blood-soaked tablecloth, was the dog. Yanking the cloth free of the animal's body the man turned his face away; the combination of blood, shit and putrefaction was too revolting to stomach even for him.
Hearing the sound of more heavy footsteps in the hall beyond, the man looked up to see his companion standing there, behind the splintered remains of the dining room door.
"Did ya find 'em?" the first asked gruffly, not bothering to remove the stub of the cigar he was smoking from between his teeth as he spoke.
"Only the old man," the second replied, "wrapped up in a curtain in the scullery."
"Bloody 'ell!" The man kicked at the remains of a shredded upholstered chair.
"The boss isn't going to be happy," the second offered unhelpfully.
"No, 'e's bloody not," the first scowled. He looked down at the corpse stretched out on the table next to him. "Come on, we'd better get on and shift this. We don't want anyone else coming round here and finding the bloody thing, do we? Come one, give me an 'and will ya?"
None too willingly his partner joined him at the end of the tables and took hold of one of the creature's back legs.
"And what do we do when we've moved the bugger?" the second asked.
The first took the cigar from between his teeth and smiled, the few yellow pegs of what teeth he had left looking like a row of discoloured headstones planted within the blood red cemetery of his gums. "What do we do then? Why, then we burn the place," he said, with obvious delight. "To the ground."
Chapter Sixteen
The Industrialist
Ulysses stood at the top of the flight of broad white stone steps, Jenny waiting nervously beside him, both of them looking up at the awesome facade of the mansion.
Umbridge house had been constructed in the Neo-Classical style. To either side of them stood great columns of white stone which in turn supported a grand pediment which was itself decorated with carved figures from Greek and Roman myth. The whole place looked more like a temple of antiquity, than someone's home.
Considering the imposing edifice in front of him, for a moment Ulysses felt butterflies of nervousness take flight within his stomach.
'Well, here goes nothing,' he said giving the bell-pull a tug.
A moment later a distant bell tolled ominously somewhere away within the vast complex of the building.
They had been able to approach the mansion unhindered, having not seen another human soul since arriving at the main gates half a mile away, down the gravel drive that snaked up to the main house through an acre of sparse woodland. For someone so keen on his privacy, Ulysses would have expected Josiah Umbridge to have had someone on the gate to monitor the approach of strangers.
For not only was Umbridge a recluse, he was also one of the richest, most successful men in the empire and, hence, the world. Umbridge's factories had proliferated across the North York moors, polluting the surrounding environment, in the process making him a very rich man. It was Umbridge Industries that provided other factory-owners with the factory structures themselves and internal machinery they needed to produce the automo
biles, automata, steam engines, printing presses, traffic control systems, dirigibles, kinema cameras and scores of other mechanical mechanisms that kept every major city from Edinburgh to Calcutta running.
And of course Ulysses now knew that Josiah Umbridge had had his own part to play in Project Leviathan. He might be an ill man, as was reported in the papers, but ironically, if it hadn't been for his deteriorating state of health he would like as not have been a dead man by now.
Ulysses was roused from the recollection of his last fateful sea voyage by footsteps coming from beyond the closed double doors. There was the rattle of bolts being loosened, a handle being turned and then one of the doors opened a crack. An ancient face peered out at them through the gap, the sagging jowls, the bags of skin under the eyes and scraggy wattles of the butler's neck wobbling loosely as he looked from Ulysses to his female companion and back again.
"Yes?" the butler asked, managing to sound both imperious and irritated at the same time.
"Good morning," Ulysses said brightly. "We're here to see Mr Umbridge."
The butler looked down his nose first at Ulysses and then, even more disdainfully, at Jennifer.
"Mr Umbridge is not receiving visitors."
"He'll see us," Ulysses said confidently, his jaunty tone shot through with steel. Reaching into a jacket pocket he extracted his leather card-holder with his left hand and then almost dropped it as he attempted to flick it open. The butler could not help but be unimpressed by Ulysses' clumsiness.
The butler took a moment or two to read the information presented there on the ID - a moment or two longer than was really necessary, Ulysses thought - all the while looking as though he was being expected to survey the contents of a gutter press publication.
"This way please, sir. Madam," the Umbridge Estate's ancient retainer said, stepping aside and ushering them into the cavernous, echoing entrance hall beyond. Everything was cold and white and palatial, like some eccentric aristocrat's mausoleum, an edifice built to honour the memory of a dead man.
The butler was a good head shorter than Ulysses' own manservant - and even Jennifer was a good few inches taller, and able to see the top of his balding pate - but he still managed to look down at the two of them.
As soon as Ulysses and Jennifer were over the threshold, the butler assiduously closed the door again, shutting out the morning light, returning the white-stoned hall to its previous state of grey shadow, and then, as the two visitors waited for him to show them to his master, simply held out a white-gloved hand.
"I'm sorry," Ulysses said, confused. "Aren't you going to take us to see Mr Umbridge?"
"Your ID, sir," the butler said unsmilingly, "if you would be so kind."
"Oh, I see." Ulysses hesitated for a moment before handing it over.
"Wait here," he said, and then, turning on his spatted heel, strode slowly away into the depths of the house, leaving the two of them alone in the sepulchral atrium.
In the shelter of a sparse stand of beech, Nimrod paused in front of a high stone wall. It extended away from him on both sides. He had approached it from the right, where, one hundred yards away, it turned a sharp corner and headed off northwards across the moors.
Nimrod had parted company with his master and the young Miss Haniver as they made their way along the rough dirt road that skirted the edge of Ghestdale as it tracked its way towards the Umbridge estate. The estate, with its Neo-Classical style mansion set at the north-east corner, came into view when they were still two or three miles away, the house itself framed by formal gardens. The high wall which was blocking Nimrod's own approach to the house, appeared to encompass the entire estate.
It was at this point that Nimrod split from the other two, taking a divergent path which headed back across the undulating acres of bracken and heather towards the rear of the estate. While his master and the naturalist's daughter sought an audience with the industrialist himself, Nimrod's remit had been to try to locate the gamekeeper Rudge - assuming he wasn't ensconced within some Whitby drinking house, or out on the moors - without attracting undue attention to himself. But Master Ulysses had a feeling that the thug wouldn't be too far away, and Nimrod tended to agree. And of course, even if he didn't find the man himself, who knew what other clues or dark secrets he might uncover? Under the circumstances, a little, clandestine exploration could pay dividends.
Nimrod wasn't blessed with the near prescient powers that his master seemed to have acquired during his sojourn with the monks of Shangri-La, but he still had the sudden and uneasy feeling that someone was watching him, right now.
One hand on the butt of the fully loaded pistol in its underarm holster, Nimrod turned, half-expecting to see the burly gamekeeper, pork pie hat pulled down hard on top of his head, bearing down on him, ham-sized fists bunched, ready to give him a pummelling.
For a split second he thought he saw movement, as if somebody had just ducked down out of sight, but then there was nothing. One tussock of coarse, sun-bleached grass looking just like another.
Who was it? Who was out there? Was it the gamekeeper, returning to the estate after unleashing the monstrous hound on the Hanivers?
And then the uneasy feeling was gone.
He turned back to the wall. After making a quick assessment of the arrangement of the stones, Nimrod started to climb, his black leather gloves helping him secure a confident grip. As soon as he could see over the top - the stones there arranged so that their jagged points might cause anyone trying to scale the wall no small discomfort - he scanned the grounds beyond, his gloves protecting his palms and fingertips.
He could see Umbridge house at the top of the hill, a good mile from his current position. Beneath the house and its clinically symmetrical formal gardens, carefully tended lawns stretched down to a babbling stream, the lush green sward a stark contrast to the sombre, almost spectral palette, of Ghestdale itself. The stream itself had clearly been re-engineered to produce a series of pleasantly descending and carefully sculpted cascades that eventually emptied into a lake at the bottom of the valley. Around the man-made mere, a carefully-managed strip of woodland was nestled, protected from the moor-scouring winds by the steeply-rising slopes and the estate wall itself.
Seeing no one within the fastidiously-kept gardens, Nimrod scrambled over the parapet and dropped down on the other side, landing lightly on his feet among the drifts of autumnal leaves that had collected there. Keeping to the shadows on this side of the wall, Nimrod moved as quickly and as quietly as he could towards the leafless wood. For if the gamekeeper had a hovel anywhere within the estate, it would be there.
After what seemed like an eternity, the butler returned. He made no apology for keeping them waiting but simply said: "Follow me."
"I told you he'd see us," Ulysses said in a forced whisper, offering Jennifer his arm again.
"But what are you actually going to say to him?" Jennifer whispered back.
"Don't worry, I do this sort of thing all the time."
"Really?" She looked at him with genuine astonishment.
"Really. And usually I just make something up on the spot."
"You're not serious?"
"No," Ulysses said with a forced grin, "of course I'm not. Not really. Do you think I'd walk in here to confront the man we suspect of masterminding the theft of the Whitby mermaid and the Barghest killings without having some sort of a plan?"
Ulysses wondered if all the white lies he told would catch up with him one day.
The butler led them from funereal white entrance hall into a wood-panelled corridor - clinical and dustless - through another room another hallway, just like those before, and so on. Many of the rooms they passed seemed more like museum pieces, as if the stately home was open for public viewings, the rooms and their contents trapped in time, like galleries in a museum of antiquities. The place certainly didn't feel lived in. It was almost as if the fading Umbridge had actually died long ago.
That was until the diminutive manservant led
them into a fire-lit study at the back of the house, and the warmest room in the place they had so far experienced.
The study was small compared with the palatial, columned chambers they had passed - sterile ballrooms, libraries, dining chambers and galleries, all unoccupied - but it was still easily as big as the largest room in Ulysses' own Mayfair residence. Much of one wall was taken up by a huge stone-carved fireplace, the fire that had been set within it blazing away, keeping out the wintry chill that seemed to pervade the rest of the house. Two massive leather armchairs, upholstered in a deep red, had been arranged so as to face the fire.
"Mr Quicksilver and Miss Haniver, sir," the butler announced to someone sitting in the chair with its back to the door, and so still out of sight.
"Show them in," came a reedy, age-cracked voice.
The unsmiling manservant signalled for Ulysses and Jennifer to approach.
As they rounded the side of the unnecessarily large chair, the voice said: "That will be all, Molesworth," and waved the butler away with a skeletally-thin hand, veins visible beneath the parchment-like skin.
Where Hannibal Haniver had appeared aged and withered by ill-health, the older Josiah Umbridge appeared even more so. He looked like little more than a skeleton. There was almost no flesh on his bones, beneath the waxy, liver-spotted skin and his out-dated black suit hung off his sparse frame as if he were no more than a glorified coat-hanger. As well as liver spots, his pallid skin was covered with crusted black pressure sores. From the waist down he was buried beneath a bundle of blankets so that his feet and legs couldn't be seen at all. There was barely a hair left on his head, other than for the occasional, intermittently sprouting strand of grey, which only served to give his head a truly skull-like appearance.
Pax Britannia: Human Nature Page 17
