Ruler of the Night

by David Morrell

  Stella looked down.

  “There’s no need to continue,” I said.

  Carolyn stroked Stella’s shoulder, taking up the burden of the explanation. “Lord Cavendale has been in this condition ever since.” She was careful not to speak of a peer with the familiarity that her daughter, the nobleman’s wife, had a right to do. “The only physician in Sedwick Hill is Dr. Wainwright at the clinic. He was sent for at once. He noted that Lord Cavendale’s pupils were dilated and concluded that he’d sustained a brain concussion, that blood was gathering inside his skull, building pressure.

  “Dr. Wainwright considers the practice of applying leeches to be a discredited treatment from the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, he recommended that in this case, leeches could save Lord Cavendale’s life if they were applied to his temples. There, they could absorb the excess blood that created pressure in his brain. The alternative, he said, was to drill into the skull and relieve the pressure that way. Lord Cavendale’s son wouldn’t hear of it, arguing that the operation was too dangerous and that the stress of moving his father to an operating theater in London might kill him. Of course, without the operation, His Lordship might have died also. But it turned out that after three days of having leeches applied to his temples, His Lordship’s eyes returned to normal. The pressure was apparently relieved. But as you can see, he was never the same.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I told Stella.

  She studied her husband. “Can you hear us, Robert?”

  He showed no reaction.

  “I must believe that he can hear us,” Stella said. “I must believe that somewhere inside him, he’s aware of what’s happening but isn’t able to tell me. I haven’t given up. Three times a week, I go with him to Dr. Wainwright’s clinic. The water treatments there keep Robert’s muscles from withering.”

  Two servants entered, one carrying a tray for everything necessary to make tea, the other carrying an ornate platter of biscuits. Normally I greet food eagerly lest another opportunity not come along for a while, but given the circumstances, I could only pretend to welcome the arrival of refreshments.

  “I’ll do the honors,” Carolyn said. But as she opened a silver caddy and prepared to spoon tea leaves into the porcelain pot’s steaming water, something in the doorway caught her attention.

  A tall, thin man whom I judged to be about thirty stood there. He was starkly handsome, with thick, dark hair and intense eyes. His boots shone. Trouser straps were anchored under them to keep the trousers perfectly straight. His frock coat and cravat were the height of fashion. Only one thing about him wasn’t in fashion—he didn’t have facial hair. I suspected that was for reasons of vanity, because his jaw was unusually strong, contributing to his handsomeness. An aggressive handsomeness, I might add, and the intensity of his dark eyes was the consequence of anger, I soon discovered.

  “Harold, I didn’t realize you were there. Please join us for tea,” Stella said.

  Harold opened an ivory snuffbox and inserted a pinch of the pulverized tobacco up each nostril. He absently brushed specks of it from his cravat. “I’ve been listening. So you and your mother believe that my judgment was wrong and that my father would have recovered fully if he’d been taken to London and undergone the operation?”

  “I was merely explaining to our guests about the seriousness of Robert’s accident,” Stella replied.

  “Indeed, your guests.” Harold considered us dubiously. “I missed their introduction.”

  “My name is Thomas De Quincey.” Father nodded to him with respect. “And this is my daughter Emily.”

  “De Quincey?” Harold frowned. “Surely to God you’re not the Opium-Eater. Stella, can’t you find better people to bring to the house?”

  Carolyn provided the response. “They came at my invitation, Harold. I thought they would amuse her.”

  Possibly intending to annoy the man in the doorway, Father withdrew his laudanum bottle from his coat and drank from it, the only time I was ever happy to see him do so.

  “Oh, for the love of God.” Gesturing in disgust, Harold walked from the doorway and disappeared along a corridor.

  “Please forgive his rudeness,” Stella told us. “What really troubles him is that he blames himself for his father’s accident. The day it happened, he kept berating himself, saying that if he could only have grabbed Robert when he’d started to fall from the horse—”

  “Enough gloom,” Carolyn said, spooning the tea leaves into the pot. “Tell us an amusing story, Thomas. Tell us about”—she thought for a moment—“the fraudulent Sir Walter Scott novel that you wrote.”

  “You know about that?” Father asked in surprise.

  “I saw a reference to it in a magazine. But the reference only tantalized me; it didn’t explain anything.”

  “Walladmor,” Father said. “That was the title of the fraudulent Sir Walter Scott novel. The feel of the preposterous syllables on my lips makes me want to chuckle. Thirty years ago, Sir Walter was so popular in Germany that an unscrupulous publisher there decided to pay a hack writer to create a new novel in Sir Walter’s Waverley series. The German author’s pen name was Willibald Alexis, as ridiculous to say as the novel’s title. Willibald Alexis, the author of Walladmor.”

  I looked at Stella and was pleased to see her smiling.

  “The German publisher advertised the novel as a translation of Sir Walter Scott’s latest work,” Father continued. “That’s how Willibald managed to have his name on the covers—as the supposed translator. The work consisted of three bloated volumes filled with smugglers, shipwrecks, long-lost heirs, and demons. Everything went along splendidly until Sir Walter heard about this mysterious book attributed to him. He asked a London bookshop to obtain a copy. Meanwhile, a magazine heard about this dubious publication and asked me, because of my knowledge of German, to write a summary of the novel for its next issue.

  “The task was how to get my hands on a copy. The only one in England seemed to be in the London bookshop from which Sir Walter had ordered it. I bribed a clerk, who told me that Sir Walter was expected to pick up the novel in two days. That left little time for me to take all three volumes to my lodging, read them, write a plot summary, and return the novel before Sir Walter arrived to pay for it.”

  “This can’t be true,” Stella said, her green eyes brightening.

  “I swear. The next problem I faced was that the three volumes had uncut pages. I couldn’t very well take a knife to them and separate the pages without Sir Walter suspecting that something was amiss, so I was reduced to prying the pages apart as much as possible and peering up them in the attitude of a man looking up a chimney.”

  Father pretended to hold a circular object above his head and attempt to read it. Despite her troubles, Stella chuckled.

  “As you might expect, being unable to read the material on the far left and right sides of the pages, I inevitably missed some of the niceties of the plot, but at least I accomplished the task in time, with Sir Walter acquiring the volumes and never suspecting the intrigue. When the magazine appeared, my plot summary of Walladmor”—Father’s tone mocked the title—“aroused such interest that a dishonest English publisher offered to pay me to translate the full text. Always in need of money, I gladly accepted the offer, thinking, How hard can the task be? That the novel is in German won’t be a problem. I can translate as quickly as I can write. By then, other volumes of the German text had arrived in England. I obtained a set, slit the pages open, and began to scribble a translation, only to discover to my horror that my previous peering-up-a-chimney tactic had caused me to miss even more than I thought. The text by the esteemed Willibald was beyond dreadful and included such preposterous scenes as a man swimming on his back from Bristol to the far side of Wales.

  “I told the publisher that if I eliminated all the deplorable spots, I might be able to deliver an acceptable single volume, but no, the publisher said, he had paid me for three volumes, and by heaven, three volumes were what he expected, and s
o, as I have experienced many times, what looked like an easy task and easy income turned out to be quite difficult. In the end, I was forced to write what amounted to an original novel in Sir Walter Scott’s manner. On the title page of Walladmor, I wrote, Freely translated into German from the English of Sir Walter Scott and now freely translated from German into English.”

  Both Stella and Carolyn laughed, and indeed I couldn’t help laughing also.

  “It became more preposterous when Willibald so liked my improvement of his text that he translated it into German and arranged for his version to be removed from German bookshops and replaced by mine. Wordsworth’s sister-in-law happened upon the English version that I wrote and told me that she didn’t think Sir Walter had ever written a better novel.”

  Stella clapped her hands and turned to her husband, who remained immobile in the wheelchair. “Robert, did you ever hear anything so amusing?”

  If he had, alas, he wasn’t able to tell us about it.

  Harold appeared again in the doorway, thrusting another pinch of snuff into each nostril. He glowered at our laughter and walked away.

  EIGHT

  THE WATER-CURE CLINIC

  As the train swayed around a curve, Ryan sat on the bare bench of a second-class compartment and stared at the rain-streaked window. His focus was such that he didn’t see the gray countryside beyond the glass. His thoughts dwelled on the almost deserted Euston Station from which they’d departed after a police wagon had returned them to London. There couldn’t be more than ten other passengers on this train, all of them making certain that they were in widely separated compartments.

  “We’ll soon arrive at Sedwick Hill,” he told Becker and withdrew the Benson chronometer from a coat pocket. The train’s jostle seemed no longer to exist as he studied the watch’s golden luster and the glinting crystal that covered the blue porcelain in which the two mesmerizing dials were set. The time was eighteen minutes and twenty seconds after one o’clock. Ever since he’d come into possession of the watch, he’d felt a compulsion to open it and determine the precise time. Although he didn’t know what benefit that knowledge provided, he was very aware of how much the constant ticking movement of the second hand captivated him, showing him how quickly the present was becoming the past.

  “You’ll feel lost when you’re forced to surrender that watch,” Becker said from the bench across from him.

  “When all of this is settled. For now, it’s evidence.”

  “Of course,” Becker said.

  “I need to protect it. The moment I hand it over, it’ll go missing.”

  “Certainly,” Becker said.

  “All right, I admit that it’ll be difficult to give up,” Ryan conceded. “After my parents came here from Ireland, my mother used to take me for a walk every Sunday. It was the only day she didn’t work in a factory, and at first, I wondered why she didn’t rest when she had the chance. All five of us lived in a single room of a lodging house in King’s Cross, and each Sunday after our family went to church, she always took me to the fancy shops in Regent Street. She wore her best clothes, but in Regent Street, they were almost rags, and constables used to regard us with suspicion. I soon realized that my mother had a fantasy about working hard enough and being lucky enough that one day she might be able to afford one of the beautiful dresses she saw in the windows or something from one of the jewelry shops. It was a foolish dream, of course.”

  Becker shrugged. “But without dreams…”

  “Yes, we’d never move forward.” For a moment, Ryan thought about Emily and his own foolish dream that they could have a future together. Becker had the same dream, he knew, but because Becker was closer in age to Emily, he was more likely to achieve it.

  Ryan shut out the thought.

  “Anyway, eventually I wondered if my mother perhaps wanted me to see what was in the windows of those fancy shops. Maybe she hoped that if I worked hard enough and was lucky enough, I could be one of the people who frequented those places. To give me a better chance, she insisted that I hide my Irish accent and keep a cap over my red hair. She paid a bookseller to teach me to read, and only the better books.”

  “I wondered why you were able to speak the commissioner’s type of English,” Becker said.

  “‘Never stop trying to better yourself,’ she kept telling me. ‘You can be anything you want as long as you work hard enough.’”

  “I wish,” Becker said.

  “Until three weeks before she died from what amounted to overwork, my mother and I were still taking that Sunday walk to Regent Street. If only she were still alive so that I could show this chronometer to her. She wouldn’t have been able to stop looking at it.”

  “Did she know that you became a constable and then a detective inspector?” Becker asked.

  “She did.”

  “Was she proud, or did she think you hadn’t reached the mark she wanted for you?”

  “She told me, ‘Just take care that you never look down on poor people the way the constables in Regent Street looked down on us.’ I got the feeling she thought that maybe my children would have a chance to frequent the shops in Regent Street.”

  Again, Ryan thought about Emily.

  Buildings appeared beyond the window on the right and then a sign announcing SEDWICK HILL.

  “I still think we should have told Commissioner Mayne that we planned to come here,” Becker said.

  Ryan shook his head. “Lombard Street is already out of bounds for us. I don’t want to risk being told that anything else is out of bounds. There’s something going on that at least one of Harcourt’s powerful clients doesn’t want us to know. Everything started when Harcourt made a sudden decision to come here. If we can find out why, maybe everything else will make sense.”

  The train clanged and jolted, slowing to a stop. When a guard unlocked the door, they were the only two passengers who disembarked. Smoke enveloped them as the train chugged onward from the station.

  A clerk opened a window, surprised to see travelers.

  “Where will we find the hydropathy clinic?” Ryan asked.

  “In town, there’s a crossroads. Go east for a quarter mile. You can’t fail to see it.”

  As they followed a gravel road, the worst of the weather held off, light raindrops striking their shoulders and caps, the air feeling colder.

  The clerk hadn’t exaggerated that they couldn’t fail to see it.

  “Look at the size of this place!” Becker marveled.

  Three tall, gabled buildings were situated at the bottom of the hill for which the town was named. Parkland surrounded them. The stones of the lane that led to the grand structures were impressively white, as were the structures themselves, lustrous in the gloom.

  “I wonder what happens in there,” Becker said.

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to know,” Ryan told him.

  The middle building had a veranda that extended across the entire front and along both sides.

  A rumble of footsteps made Ryan and Becker turn. Six corpulent, expensively dressed gentlemen marched around the corner on the right. They spaced themselves so that they didn’t strike each other as they swung their arms inward and outward as if rowing a boat, all the while breathing with effort.

  Lest there be a collision, Ryan and Becker stepped back into the rain. The six men tromped past and turned the next corner.

  A seventh man—corpulent and expensively dressed also—rounded the first corner, swinging his arms in and out as the others had. His face was alarmingly red.

  Ryan and Becker stepped back onto the veranda.

  “Good afternoon,” Ryan said.

  The man assessed their ordinary garments. Normally he might not have responded to someone of a lower station, but he seemed grateful to stop marching. “Good afternoon.” He continued to swing his arms toward his chest and then outward.

  “A cold afternoon,” Becker said.

  “Dr. Wainwright says it’s good for the constitution.”


  “Do you know where we can find him?”

  “His office is in this building.” The man took a labored breath. “Near the entrance hall. But he could be anywhere. Even on Sunday, he supervises treatments.”

  “What’s that object hanging around your neck?” Ryan asked.

  It was round, made of ivory, and had numbers painted on it.

  “That’s my water dial. Each time I drink a glass of water, I turn it a notch to remind myself how close I am to my goal.”

  “Your goal? How high do the numbers go?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You drink sixteen glasses of water a day?” Becker asked in surprise.

  “It purges the toxins,” the man replied. “I had an abundance of them until I came here two weeks ago. Dr. Wainwright made a new man of me.”

  A rumble of footsteps on the veranda’s wooden floor preceded a different group of portly, expensively dressed gentlemen who marched around the first corner, swinging their arms in and out. They too had dials around their necks.

  “If Dr. Wainwright sees me standing here, he’ll be angry,” the man said. He marched forward but turned his head and told them, “If you’re looking for work, the tradesmen’s entrance is at the rear.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t lack for work,” Ryan murmured.

  He stepped back into the rain to avoid the next group of marchers. When they disappeared around the next corner, he returned to the veranda and pulled a cord next to an enameled blue door.

  Inside, a bell rang.

  When no one answered, Ryan tried the door and found that it wasn’t locked. He and Becker entered a spacious hall where, despite the dismal day, a hardwood floor gleamed. Opposite the entrance, a staircase—gleaming also—led upward and downward.