Arthur dropped Thorold’s spectacles and looked about for a weapon. Nothing obvious presented itself.
Dimmick picked up a large glass jar and dashed it on Thorold’s head. Dimmick’s stick appeared to have been snapped in two somehow while Arthur wasn’t looking. Blood and glass everywhere—Thorold staggered but returned to the fray, with vigour that would have been remarkable in a man a third of his age. He seized Dimmick by the throat and the two of them wrestled, reeling from side to side of the room, knocking books off shelves and shattering glass. Occasional moonlight illuminated them. Dimmick butted Thorold’s head, drenching the scene in fresh blood. The doctor howled, lifted Dimmick, and hurled him bodily into a shelf. Dimmick fell to the floor and rolled in broken glass, swearing mightily.
Atwood crawled towards Arthur and crouched in the doorway at his side. He was winded, and bleeding from a cut on his head.
Thorold ran for the door—almost down on all fours now, loping—and Arthur tackled him. They rolled together, sliding on smooth parquet into the wall. Somehow Arthur ended up underneath the old man, whose eyes were yellow, whose breath was foul, whose teeth glittered. Arthur held on to a hank of his hair for dear life, scared to let go.
Dimmick struck Thorold on the back of the head with a candlestick, then hauled him off Arthur, grunting, hup, hup, hup, you bastard, hup.
Atwood, on his feet again, chanted some sort of gibberish, one hand commandingly raised. What effect this had, if any, Arthur couldn’t tell. Dimmick and Thorold, bloody and tattered, bashed each other against one wall, then another. Then in the next sliver of moonlight Dimmick had somehow got up on Thorold’s shoulders, the better to bash at his head and gouge at his eyes. Thorold bit Dimmick’s wrist. They stumbled, writhed. Dimmick kicked Thorold’s leg. Thorold howled and fell. Bone glinted. Dimmick kicked again, and again, and again. Then, as Thorold writhed on the floor, Dimmick went for the candlestick again.
Arthur averted his eyes from the final blow.
In the silence that followed, Arthur could still hear the echoes of the struggle—thump thump thump. It took him a while to realise that it was his heart.
Atwood re-entered the study.
“Well done, Mr Dimmick.”
Dimmick swayed. “Sir.”
“Fortunate that I was able to contain his power.”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “Well bloody done, all of us. God forgive us.”
IV: The Hour of Venus
By Arthur’s reckoning, it was now the hour of Venus, which was suitable for the calling up of spirits, the learning of secrets, and the resolution of mysteries.
They searched Dr Thorold’s premises. Atwood had uttered some words that he said would delay the arrival of the police, or nosy neighbours. Arthur found bandages, and bound Dimmick’s wounds as best he knew how, while Dimmick cursed at him. Atwood collected all the papers he could find in Thorold’s study, and a handful of books.
“Thieving from the dead,” Arthur said. “Good God.”
“These may hold the key to the conspiracy. If you lack the will to do what must be done—”
“I swear to you, Atwood—” Arthur made a fist, then let it go. “Never mind. I’ll search upstairs.”
Upstairs, he found no evidence that Thorold had any family, for which small mercy he gave thanks. There was an empty maid’s room, its window swinging open over the garden. No other servants. Thorold lived frugally for a man of his station. Had lived. He’d liked photographs, and paintings of dogs, and he had a large collection of books in French and German. He was—had been—untidy, in the way of scholars and elderly bachelors (not to mention wolves), and his rooms upstairs were full of heaps of papers and books arranged in ways that no doubt had made sense only to him, with cups and plates and old bits of toast interspersed among them. Medical papers. Accounts of expenses and income. A lecture on hospital administration. Some correspondence with the university. A quiet life, and no more than a moderately eccentric one. It did not seem like the house of a murderer, or like the lair of something worse.
When Arthur came downstairs again, Atwood was searching through the cabinets in Thorold’s study.
“The maid may have fled by the window,” Arthur said. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she goes to the police. Atwood, are you listening?”
“Yes. What clues did you find to the nature of the conspiracy?”
“Conspiracy? Not a thing.”
Arthur glanced through the door at the lanky thing that lay dead on the floor, and shuddered.
“I don’t know,” Atwood said.
“Hmm?”
“Doctor Thorold’s transformation. I’ve never seen anything like it. Old magic, made new.… I wish we’d been able to save some of that fluid.”
“Thank God we didn’t!”
Dimmick slouched by the front door, smoking a cigarette. Arthur advised him to leave his bandages alone. Dimmick swore at him.
The door to Thorold’s basement was locked. It didn’t respond to any of Atwood’s mystical passes and muttered incantations. Dimmick limped up, kicked it open, then went back to sitting and smoking by the front door.
At the foot of the stairs there were four cages, containing some dogs and a much-abused ape. Arthur thought it was a chimpanzee. Whatever it was, it awakened Atwood’s mercurial sympathies. Tears came to his eyes, and he insisted on giving the creature a merciful death. A job for Dimmick, naturally.
There was another door, not locked. The windowless room beyond was full of a terrible bitter-sweet odour. Apart from the odour, the room contained bookshelves, cabinets, unlit gaslamps. In an alcove in a corner Arthur found a collection of sketches and photographs of Augustus Mordaunt, the late Duke of Sussex, whose mysterious death on the night of the storm had kept the police busy for the past half-year, and the newspapers occupied in ghoulish speculation. Words in heavy gothic lettering circled the dead man’s face: the names of angels and demons and fairies, drippings of wax and blood and tar. On the floor of the cabinet was a dagger, and a glass jar with a dried black fluid encrusted on it. This, Arthur supposed, was a clue. He called Atwood over.
“Ah,” Atwood said. “Well, well.”
“Can you explain this, Atwood?”
“As a matter of fact, I can. I suppose you know that the late Duke had an interest in the occult? For a very long time. I had approached him regarding the activities of the Company. He was very interested, though somewhat alarmed. He was terribly ill, you know. Who knows what we might find out in the spheres, I said—who knows what treasures, what powers, what medicines … He began to support us. With money, that is. Gracewell always says that the Engine should pay for itself one day, but in the meantime I find I have to shoulder rather more expense than I would like. I’ve had to sell off some properties. Anyway, there it is; you can see why my enemies would do what they did.”
“By God, Atwood—is everyone in London a magician?”
“Fashion. Lately there has been a quite regrettable fashion. Men of power, greedy for more power over this world, take to the study as if it were a business.”
“And you?”
“My sights are set higher. Knowledge, Shaw, not power.”
Atwood scraped the wax and sniffed at his fingernail. He poked at the glass jar, being careful not to touch the fluid. He began to explain the ritual Thorold had employed, the forces he had summoned to inflict ill-health, fevers, bad luck, trembling, and falling. He paced the room, candle held high, guessing where Thorold and his co-conspirators had sat to perform this horrible procedure.
“A minimum of half a dozen, Shaw. A minimum. If only they’d left their cards, ha-ha. On the night of the storm—the very same night, while we were otherwise occupied—a blow from two directions at once. They are schemers, these people…”
Arthur stopped listening. He’d seen enough to suppose that whatever awful things Atwood was saying were true, or true enough. He felt that there should be a moment of silence.
So they’d solved the mystery
of the Duke’s murder, where Scotland Yard had failed; and the Times; and Arthur Conan Doyle; and a hundred psychics, letter-writers, and busy-bodies. But what now? They couldn’t tell the police what they’d done. They couldn’t tell anyone. No one would credit it if they did. So order and sanity couldn’t be restored, and the mystery was unsolvable after all, and things would only get worse. He would have preferred not to know.
Atwood set the pictures on fire, and smashed the glass.
“Did you know?”
“Hmm?”
“Atwood—did you know? Is that why you wanted to come here?”
“We avenged two murders tonight. I would think your conscience could be at ease.”
“Did you know?”
“The spirits gave me an inkling. Though I wish they could have given me more warning of Thorold’s … tendencies. Let that be a lesson to you about spirits.”
“And how does this help us find Josephine?”
“One less enemy.” Atwood paced around the room in circles, stopping sometimes, as if imagining his enemies seated for their horrible ritual. “And how else should our investigation proceed? Nothing in magic is by the direct method. Yet now I begin—perhaps—to perceive the nature of our enemy. The shape of their circle. We have shed a little light upon the dark.”
“We’re back where we were.”
“Then tomorrow we may begin again.”
“It’s Sunday tomorrow. I intend to go to church.”
V: The Hour of Saturn
It was the small hours of morning when Arthur finally arrived back at the flat off Piccadilly. He entered quietly, took off his shoes and coat, and crept into the silent room where Josephine slept.
She wore a white nightdress. No blankets or pillows; not safe. The maid Abby had brushed out her hair. She grew paler every day of her absence, the way that dust will accumulate in an unused room. Arthur suspected she wasn’t eating enough.
There were times when she twisted and moaned, as if she were having a nightmare; and there were times when she was calm, even smiling. When she smiled, Arthur told himself that it was a sign that all was well wherever she was, and that she was on her way home to him. When she moaned, he told himself that it meant nothing at all.
Abby was asleep in a chair in the corner of the room, her knees drawn up and her head on her arm. Asleep, she looked even smaller than she did awake—she was little more than a child, and, curled up in a chair, she looked doll-like.
There were tears on his face. He wiped them with his sleeve. The horror of Dr Thorold’s house returned to him and his knees trembled.
He crept out of Josephine’s room, and closed the door.
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even think of sleeping. He lit a candle, poured himself a glass of Atwood’s whisky, and paced. He examined the books on Atwood’s mantelpiece: a family history, Lucretius, Milton, various Bibles, the De Lapidibus of Bishop Marbode, and the Contra Celsum. Baedeker Guides: Paris and its Environs, Palestine and Syria, The Eastern Alps. Far-off places he would surely never see. He stared out the window waiting for dawn to come over the rooftops. He cleaned his shoes. He took off his jacket and inspected it for tell-tale signs of the struggle at Dr Thorold’s house. It was while he was brushing at a speck of dirt on his cuff that he noticed that a calling-card sat on the table by the door. Someone must have visited and left it with Abby. He went to examine it.
The card bore a design of an ill-tempered dragon coiled about what might have been a printing press. Beneath that was the name Henry Addington, Lord Podmore.
It gave Arthur a chill to see that name, and a worse chill to think that Podmore or his agents had been knocking at the door that night. The card hadn’t been there when he left the house to attend Atwood’s Rite of Mars, and that had been at eleven o’clock. It was now perhaps three or four in the morning. A midnight visit could hardly be a friendly one. But then why had Podmore left his card?
There was no note with it, no letter. Nothing was written on the back of the card. The paper was very finely glazed—in fact, it seemed polished, so that in the darkness of the hall it was somewhat dimly reflective. Curious, Arthur held it up so that it caught the faint light of the candle next door. He could see the shadow of his own face reflected in it, dim and wobbling. He lifted the card a little higher and tilted it. The reflection of the candle’s light sharpened and brightened, and his own face became clear, as if he were looking into a mirror. Behind him, over his reflection’s shoulder, stood four men. His reflection’s eyes widened.
Chapter Twenty
Arthur dropped the card, and his drink. He turned to see that four men stood in the hall, quite impossibly, as if they’d stepped Alice-like from the mirror.
Three of them were young men in shirt-sleeves and caps, all of whom had the grey pallor and inky eyes that Arthur associated with Podmore’s men. The fourth was older: fat, imposingly tall, black-bearded, in a long green coat. Stranger still, they had brought a long black cabinet with them.
Two men rushed him. He swung his fist and caught one with a glancing blow, but it did no good. They shoved him against the door so hard that the breath left his body, then forced him to his knees. At the fat man’s gestured directions, they heaved him up and shoved him into the drawing-room and down onto Atwood’s sofa. One man remained to menace Arthur with a knife, while the other two dragged the long black cabinet into the room, then went into the bedroom. One dragged Abby out and threw her in a tearful heap in a corner of the room. The other carried Josephine flung over his shoulder. The knife-man gave Arthur’s collarbone a significant jab.
They heaved the cabinet up on its end and stood it against the wall. It was man-height, and extraordinarily ornate, made of polished ebony, inlayed with gold and ivory and pearl. The lower part of it was decorated with complicated, swirling designs that looked Arabic to Arthur’s eye, while the upper part was crowded with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Podmore’s men opened the lid, put Josephine inside it, and shut her away as if in a wardrobe. There was a loud click and a much louder thump. When the lid swung open again, the wardrobe was empty.
Arthur croaked. He felt faint. The only light in the room was the candle that was now in the fat man’s hand, as he tut-tutted at Atwood’s bookshelves. The cabinet loomed nightmarishly. The pale men moved through the gloom like burglars, like figments of a nightmare.
The fat man leafed through a book, shaking his head and muttering. Then he sighed, put it back on the shelf, pulled up a chair, and sat facing Arthur.
“Arthur Archibald Shaw,” he said. “My name is Addington—Lord Podmore. I hear you are a newspaper man. A noble profession. I am a newspaper man too, in my way. I do not ordinarily make unannounced visits, or indeed poke my head outside my shell at all; but to make the acquaintance of young Master Atwood’s newest associate I will make an exception.”
He gestured at the man with the knife. “You there—find us something to drink. Mr Shaw will need to wet his throat. He has a great deal to tell us.”
* * *
Arthur sat on the sofa. Thugs loomed. The wound in his side ached, for the first time in a long while. It had healed so swiftly, thanks to Sun’s excellent ministrations, that he’d almost forgotten it, but the struggle appeared to have aggravated it again.
“Well, Mr Shaw. Is it true?”
Lord Podmore had placed the candle on the table. Now his head seemed over-large, floating in the darkness. There was something gross about him; he resembled a caricature that might have appeared in one of his own newspapers. His sallow skin appeared golden, his copious black beard oily and glittering, his eyes recessed in shadow. He had an air of irritation at having been called out so late at night.
“Your wife, Mr Shaw—is it true that Atwood and his fellows sent her among the spheres?”
“We weren’t married.”
“Ah.” Podmore nodded. “My apologies. Sometimes my men err.”
“The spheres—yes. So Atwood tells me.”
“Well!” Podmore
poked one of his men cheerfully in the elbow. The man scowled, and flinched from the contact like an unfriendly cat. “That would be a story, wouldn’t it. Imagine it in the newspapers: London bride-to-be visits the moon. I don’t suppose she disappeared on her wedding night, did she? No? Was it the moon, Mr Shaw, to which our friend Atwood dispatched her?”
It seemed to be a genuine question, expecting an answer.
“Mars, he says.”
“Even better. The public love their stories of Mars. Wandering among the canals. The ruins of ancient glories.” Podmore laughed. His men didn’t. They prowled around the room, coming in and out of sight.
“What have you done with her? Where is she? What is that … thing?”
“That?” Podmore glanced at the cabinet. Its door was closed now; its ornament glittering in the dark. “That is the Cabinet of Osiris.” He looked as if he expected Arthur to recognise it.
“What have you done with her?”
Podmore shrugged. “Your wife is with your erstwhile employer Mr Gracewell. Neither of them need come to any harm, but you understand that we must know what your new friends have done to her. There are a great many urgent questions. Matters of emergency, one might say.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Answers, Mr Shaw. How do you come to be working for Martin Atwood’s merry band?”
“Accident. Bad luck. The storm.”
Podmore laughed. “Come on, Shaw. What did Atwood promise you?”
“Six pounds. Six bloody pounds a week.”
Podmore looked confused.
Abby started sobbing and pleading to know what they meant to do with her. Arthur wanted to calm her, but he was too afraid himself, and couldn’t find the words.
“You and you,” Podmore said. Two of his men picked Abby up off the floor and threw her on the sofa beside Arthur. Her elbow jabbed his wounded side and he swore.
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