Pax Britannia: Human Nature

by Jonathan Green

  The dying man - and he certainly smelt like he was dying, the air around him already heavy with the smell of death and decay - regarded the two of them from the abyssal pits of his sunken eye-sockets and his thin lips parted in a deaths-head grimace.

  "Miss Haniver; what a pleasure it is to meet you at last."

  "Mr Umbridge." Jennifer hesitated, having not expected to be the one to have to speak. "Thank you for agreeing to see us at such short notice, um, without an appointment," she said, as if feeling under pressure to give some sort of explanation as to their presence there within his home. "I hope that we are not keeping you from anything important."

  "Well, I could hardly refuse now, could I?" Umbridge replied, turning his deathly gaze on Ulysses. "Not when you come bearing such auspicious authority." Still without having actually addressed his other guest directly, Umbridge turned his gaze and his smile back onto Jennifer. "You're dear old Hannibal's daughter, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  The atmosphere within the study suddenly became thick with expectation.

  "And how is your father?" he asked softly, regarding her closely from beneath beetling eyebrows. "I trust he is well."

  "Actually, he's dead."

  Ulysses watched Jennifer closely. She made the announcement without any hint of emotion. She must still be in a state of shock, he thought.

  In the awkward silence that followed Jennifer's revelation, Ulysses became uncomfortably aware of the inescapable ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece above the fire. Its steady clockwork heartbeat seemed to draw attention to his own mortality, the way it moved on from one second to the next, unceasingly, with never a single one to be reclaimed, to be lived again.

  "As am I," Umbridge said at last, his words doing nothing to alleviate the atmosphere of tension and despair.

  Ulysses looked at him askance, one cynical eyebrow raised. "Really, Mr Umbridge. Then I must congratulate you on your most excellent impression of a living being."

  "I am as good as dead!" the old man suddenly snapped, turning on Ulysses like a tiger cornered by hunters, knowing that its time has come, but determined to fight to the last. "I have a death sentence hanging over me. It's cancer, you know? Whole damn body's riddled with it. There is no cure, hence I am a dead man."

  He stared at Ulysses, his caustic gaze intended to strip away the younger man's resolve, but Ulysses Quicksilver was made of sterner stuff than that and simply stared right back.

  "I know what you're thinking," Umbridge snarled.

  "Oh? And what's that?" Ulysses challenged, calling the old man's bluff.

  "You think I deserve everything that's coming to me. You think I'm an old man who's lived beyond his time anyway, getting rich at the expense of the poor downtrodden working classes. I know what people like you are like - like that damned Darwinian Dawn - eco-terrorist sympathisers. You despise me."

  "Do any of us look like we have much in common with the working classes?" Ulysses pointed out. "And I don't mind telling you, there is little love lost between myself and the Darwinian Dawn."

  "But I can see it in your eyes, just the same," Umbridge persisted. It seemed that Ulysses' one chance remark had awoken the lion in the old man's heart. "You claim to care about the empire, about the legacy we are leaving future generations, as custodians of this planet. You think that industry has ruined this green and pleasant land. Well I'll tell you; without those dark satanic mills, your world would not exist. That is the reality we live in, and there is no going back."

  Ulysses opened his mouth to speak, but then, for once, thought better of it. At this rate, the old man would have them thrown out before they managed to find out anything.

  When he was certain that he had silenced Ulysses with his tirade, Umbridge turned his attention back to the young woman again. "You must excuse me, my dear," he said, his tongue darting out from his mouth to moisten the dry, peeling skin of his lips, "what is it that I can do for you?"

  Jenny hesitated, looking to Ulysses for support.

  "Go on," he said, encouraging her to speak with a nod of his head.

  "Well, it's like this. Last night..."

  Jenny broke off abruptly. Taking a deep breath, to calm herself, she started again. "Last night my father was killed, while yesterday afternoon Mr Quicksilver, his manservant, and myself were attacked whilst out on the moors."

  "I am very sorry to hear that, my dear. Truly I am. Very sorry to hear of your loss, my dear, very sorry," the old man suddenly looking crestfallen. "Your father was a great man. If there is anything I can do to help at what must be a very difficult time..." he said, his corpse-smile returning, "please do not hesitate to ask, and I will do all I can to assist you. All I can."

  "We have reason to believe that your man Rudge might have had something to do with the attacks," Ulysses put in forcefully.

  "What, the gamekeeper?"

  "I don't know of any other."

  "I'm sorry, but do I know you, Mr Quicksilver? Have we met before?"

  "No, but I met your man Sylvester last year, on the first and last voyage of the Neptune."

  "Ah, yes. A most unfortunate business."

  "You go in for understatement, do you, Mr Umbridge?"

  "I see no point in being melodramatic about these things."

  "But do you know why the world's most sophisticated submersible cruise-liner ended up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?"

  "Perhaps you could enlighten me on another occasion. I'm sure you understand, Mr Quicksilver," - the man's breath was a rattling wheeze in his chest - "that my time is precious; more so now than ever. It takes no little amount of time and effort to keep a ship like Umbridge Industries on course, and I am not blessed with much of either."

  "You met my father once though, didn't you?"

  "Really? Quicksilver, Quicksilver," the old man mused, as if trawling the fathomless depths of his memory for any recollection that might help make sense of things.

  "His name was Hercules. Hercules Quicksilver."

  "I must apologise," Umbridge said, the same fixed smile on his face but now full of sinister intent. "I am an old man. My body's riddled with cancer. I'm afraid that my memory is not what it once was."

  "But I bet you remember the name Project Leviathan."

  "I'm sorry, Mr Quicksilver, but I thought you came here to talk to me about yesterday's dreadful occurrences."

  "Indeed."

  "And you believe someone in my employ had something to do with this poor young woman's father?"

  "I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss the matter with him."

  "And on what do you base such a ludicrous supposition?"

  "On the fact that I was supposed to meet him at the edge of Ghestdale yesterday, only he didn't turn up and instead I had a run in with the Barghest beast!"

  "The Barghest? Will you listen to yourself, man? You sound as bad as those melodramatic gossip-pedlars at the paper. Phantom dogs roaming Ghestdale, taking the lives of all and sundry? You'll be telling me that the Whitby Mermaid was the real deal and not a poorly-conceived fake next."

  "Mr Umbridge, I saw the creature with my own eyes, I watched as it tore my father's... my father..." And then, unable to hold back the tears any longer, Jennifer dissolving into a fit of silent sobbing. Ulysses put a comforting arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  "I am sorry, my dear, really I am, and I don't doubt the veracity of your words for a moment," Umbridge said, leaning forward in his chair, as if this gave his words an added sense of sincerity. "This is indeed a most distressing matter. I don't believe that Mr Rudge is on estate land at present, but I am very concerned by what you have told me. Leave the matter with me and I promise that I will look into it."

  The old man slumped back into the chair and closed his eyes, a long rattling breath escaping from his cancerous lungs. For a moment Ulysses wondered if he had actually passed away, there and then, right in front of them. Then his rheumy eyes flicked open and the darting tongue reappeared
from between the pale drawn lips.

  "Now, if you will excuse me, I am very tired. It's the cancer, you know? A little bit more of me dies every day. So, if you will excuse me, our meeting has quite taken it out of me. I would ask that you leave now." He looked at Jennifer again, with hooded, half-closed eyes. "And have no fear, I shall give this matter my utmost attention."

  He closed his eyes.

  Sensing another presence in the room, Ulysses looked up. Molesworth was standing there, regarding them with that familiar disdainful frown. "This way," the butler said abruptly, ushering them out of the study.

  As Molesworth was about to follow after them, Umbridge's eyes flicked open once more, like a corpse waking from its eternal rest, and a wave of his long fingers halted the butler in his tracks. Molesworth looked at his master.

  "Sir?"

  "They know too much," Umbridge said darkly, his voice a sinister, serpentine hiss. "Get Rudge up here. Miss Haniver and Mr Quicksilver are going to be staying after all."

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Freak

  Nimrod looked at his watch for the umpteenth time and then back at where the sky was purpling like a bruise on the horizon. The persistent cloud cover had not let up all day, keeping everything beneath its foggy clutches in a state of permanent cloying dampness.

  There was no point lying to himself; he was becoming concerned. Dusk was falling and after four hours neither Master Ulysses nor the young Miss Haniver had returned to the rendezvous point. And he had been waiting at the south-east corner of the estate, back on the Ghestdale side of the wall, since three o'clock that afternoon.

  It was perfectly possible that Josiah Umbridge had been the perfect host and had invited the gentleman and his lady friend to stay for supper, but knowing that they had arranged to meet over an hour ago at the latest, Nimrod was now convinced that something untoward had happened to them. He had already tried calling his master using his own personal communicator, and there had been no response.

  His own search of the estate grounds had born fruit, up to a point. He had found the gamekeeper's cottage at last - a stone-built refuge, that was not much more than a single-roomed hovel, various ill-kept vicious steel traps hung from nails on the wall, a clutch of dead vermin strung up on a line between two trees outside - not far from a rusted gate that led onto sheep grazing land on the far side of the walled grounds.

  But he had not found the gamekeeper himself. A cursory search of the roughly-furnished cottage had turned up nothing that linked Rudge, the Umbridge estate, or even Josiah Umbridge himself, to the Barghest or the late Hannibal Haniver in anyway. The one thing he had noted in particular was the cudgel hung up in pride of place on the plain whitewashed wall above the cold grate of the fire.

  Nimrod was starting to wonder what Master Ulysses and Miss Haniver had uncovered. Whatever it was, it was preventing them from making the rendezvous as planned.

  He had promised Ulysses' father that he would look out for his eldest son, no matter what. It was a vow that he took very seriously - even more so after Ulysses' return after an absence of eighteen months, in April that year, having been declared dead after his hot-air balloon went down over the Himalayas - one that he had sworn to uphold with his very life, if necessary. After all, it came, in part, as his repayment of a debt that he could never repay to the late Hercules Quicksilver for having saved his own life, in more ways than one, all those years ago.

  For a moment he considered contacting Inspector Allardyce and the local police - he even got as far as taking out his emergency personal communicator - but had then dropped the brass, teak and enamel device back into his pocket. Until he had a better idea of what sort of trouble Master Ulysses had got himself into, Nimrod didn't want to do anything that might make what was already doubtless a dangerous situation even worse. After all, so far they knew that a crazed vivisectionist was involved, a brute of a man who wasn't averse to dishing out a good beating and, possibly, a powerful industrialist.

  No, the police would only turn up in a whirlwind of flashing blue lights and wailing sirens, barrelling in there in their clumsy size elevens, and God alone knew what a man who revelled in cutting up living things, a desperate thug, or a man whose position of power and affluence made him believe that he could do anything he wanted, might do.

  Leaving the police to their investigations into the Ghestdale killings - even though he already knew who, or rather so far, what was responsible - remembering the old adage that if you want something done properly, you'd best do it yourself, Nimrod set off west, following the wall where it demarcated the perimeter of the Umbridge estate.

  This time, to avoid drawing attention to himself, Nimrod took the longer, and yet less exposed route, around the outside of the estate wall until he reached the rusted gate, close to where Rudge's hideaway lay.

  The decorative ironwork of the gate made it an easy thing to climb, and dropping down on the other side Nimrod re-entered the estate wood. Still unseen, he made his furtive way back to the gamekeeper's cottage through the rapidly encroaching gloom.

  Creeping through stands of elm and ash he saw the hovel as now nothing more than a shadowy construction growing out of the murk of the darkening woods. There were no lights shining from the windows and so it seemed likely that there was no one at home.

  Placing his feet with care, and moving at a cautious pace - so as not to trip over an exposed tree root or catch his foot in the mouth of an animal burrow - remaining as vigilant as possible in the encroaching dark, Nimrod made his way to the door.

  Earlier that afternoon, when he had first explored the estate, he had kept half an eye open for any signs that the Barghest had been there - oversized paw prints, the animal's spoor, claw marks in the trunks of trees - but he had found nothing. But then he hadn't approached the gamekeeper's domain from this direction before: he wondered what he was missing now in the dark, unable to even make out the ground beneath his feet.

  Cautiously, one hand on the pistol underneath his arm, Nimrod eased open the door. The hinges complained loudly in the twilight stillness, the protesting metal seeming to scream into the November night. But, when no one shouted in surprise or leapt at him from the darkness, Nimrod stepped inside, closing the door carefully behind him.

  Inside, the cottage was just as he had left it before, only now it was in utter darkness. Nimrod knew that if he was going to find anything else here he was going to need to light a lamp, despite the risk that it would alert anyone nearby to his presence within. However, that one slight risk was nothing compared to the terrible fate that could befall his master the more time he wasted here, blundering about in the dark.

  He could see a hurricane lamp on a window sill, silhouetted against the window behind it: that would do. With the lamp lit, its warm amber glow suffusing the cottage, playing a game of cat and mouse with the shadows at the corners of the single room, Nimrod took another, closer look around.

  Last time he had only really been looking for the gamekeeper, or any sign of a connection to the Barghest beast. Now he was looking for anything, anything that might give him a clue as to what might have happened to his master. And it wasn't as if he could just walk in through the front door of Umbridge House. That was how Master Ulysses had made his move and, chances were, that was what had got him into trouble. No, he had the certain growing suspicion that he had missed something the last time he had been here and that he was missing it all over again.

  Standing in the middle of the room, he held the lamp high and looked all around him, peering into every darkened corner, at every piece of furniture.

  There was a simple sink and a stove next to the small hearth built into the chimney breast. In one corner stood the gamekeeper's rough, unmade bed, a chamber pot underneath. In the opposite corner was a rocking chair with a knitted blanket thrown over one arm.

  There were other seemingly incongruous homely touches - the rag rug on the floor, a picture of an old mop-capped woman, that might have been the man's
mother, over the range, an anonymous brass trinket of some kind - but on the whole it looked like precisely what it was, the simple home of a middle-aged man with few, if any, attachments in the world, a man with simple needs, the torture of defenceless creatures being one of them.

  Nimrod turned around to look at the other side of the room and felt something shift beneath him, heard the subtle creak of wood giving under his weight.

  He stopped and looked down at the rug on which he was standing. Shifting his weight from one foot to the other he heard the creak again. Stepping off the rug, he took hold of a corner and lifted it up. Pulling the rug away completely, there, revealed in the middle of the flagstoned floor of the hut, was a trapdoor.

  Nimrod's pulse began to quicken. He took hold of the iron ring recessed into it at one end and pulled it open. A waft of cold, earthy air hit him full in the face. He could see a set of worn stone steps leading down into the dank darkness below.

  Laying the open trapdoor carefully down on the discarded rug, so as not to alert anyone who might be down there already, Nimrod crouched down, lowering the hurricane lamp into the hole.

  Six feet or so down, the steps met with the floor of a rough-hewn tunnel, cut from the rock and earth that lay beneath the foundations of the cottage. Here and there he could see where tree-roots penetrated the underground passageway. He breathed deeply and caught the aroma of peaty soil and mould.

  Who knew how far down the tunnel went or where it led, other than that, to begin with at least, it appeared to lead in the direction of the house? The steps certainly didn't lead down to a cellar - after all, why would such a small dwelling even have one - and it seemed as likely that the tunnel would connect it to the house, as anywhere.

  There was nothing else for it. If Nimrod was to find out where the tunnel led for sure, he was going to have to follow it.

  Lantern held high to illuminate his way, eyes peering into the darkness at the limit of the lantern's sphere of radiance, ears listening for any indication that he might not be alone down there, Nimrod descended the steps and set off along the tunnel. Taking care to place his feet lightly on the dirt floor, he had to crouch to keep from grazing his scalp on the low ceiling of the passageway.