Ruler of the Night

by David Morrell

  The pounding on the door became more frenzied.

  “Help!” the woman kept shouting.

  Ryan quickly rose from the sofa where he’d fallen asleep when his eyes could no longer focus on Dr. Wainwright’s documents. He struck a match and applied it to a lamp on the desk.

  Impossibly, the woman sounded like Emily.

  Clutching the lamp, he hurried from Dr. Wainwright’s office and crossed the entrance hall.

  Becker ran next to him, having risen from a sofa in the waiting area.

  Ryan aimed the lantern while Becker freed the bolt on the door and tugged at the handle.

  Four people lurched through the doorway.

  “Thank God,” one of them exclaimed.

  Ryan gaped. The woman was indeed Emily. Her father was hunched over next to her, and they were accompanied by two women whom he’d never seen before. Hail dropped from their shoulders and hats. They were drenched, shivering.

  “Sean? Joseph?” Emily asked, seeming to fear that she was hallucinating.

  “We’re trying to find out if anyone here knew Daniel Harcourt,” Ryan blurted. “Why are you and your father—”

  His question ended abruptly when he saw that the other two women wore dressing gowns that showed beneath the bottom of their dripping outer garments. The only things on their feet were soaked slippers. More astonishing, the younger of the two women—a woman whose face, for all its beauty, was as pale as her fair hair—opened her wet coat, revealing that she held a baby.

  “Help me to get him warm,” she pleaded.

  “Over here,” Becker urged, leading them to a fireplace. “The coals are still burning. I’ll get more.”

  “Blankets,” Ryan said. “We need blankets. Hot tea. We need to wake—”

  “What’s all the commotion?” a voice demanded.

  Ryan turned to see Dr. Wainwright holding a lamp and hurrying down the staircase.

  “I don’t know yet,” Ryan answered. “Two of these people are my friends. I’m not certain how they got here or—”

  Turning to Emily, Ryan felt a shock when he noticed her left cheek. It was dark. Initially he’d thought that he was seeing only a shadow, but now he realized what the darkness actually was.

  “Emily, good God, you’re bleeding.”

  The blood was all over her coat.

  “Stella!” Dr. Wainwright said. “Carolyn! What on earth…”

  Servants hurried down the stairs, adding more light from candles they held.

  “Bring blankets and dry clothes!” Dr. Wainwright ordered. He spread his arms, urging the four refugees toward the fireplace.

  Becker had already added fresh coal from a pail next to the hearth. He gripped a bellows that hung on the side and pumped it, exciting the flames.

  “Help me get these wet coats off!” Dr. Wainwright told Ryan.

  Still dismayed by the blood on Emily’s face, Ryan roused himself into motion. As he took away Emily’s coat and hat, he frowned at how heavy they were from moisture.

  “Emily, what happened to you?”

  “Harold did it,” the woman hugging the baby managed to say. She trembled close to the fire.

  Servants ran toward them with blankets.

  “Harold?” Ryan asked. “Who’s—”

  “Lady Cavendale’s stepson,” Dr. Wainwright answered.

  “My husband is dead,” the woman with the baby said.

  “What?” Dr. Wainwright looked stunned. “Lord Cavendale is…”

  “Harold smothered him tonight.”

  “Smothered?” Ryan asked.

  “Lord Cavendale’s an invalid,” Dr. Wainwright explained. “Two months ago, he fell from a horse and—”

  “Tonight,” the woman with the baby told them. “When Harold thought everyone was asleep, he sneaked into my husband’s room. But I saw him coming out. When I went in after Harold left, I found my husband dead.”

  “These two men are Scotland Yard detectives,” Dr. Wainwright said. “Lady Cavendale and Mrs. Richmond, if there’s anything amiss, I’m certain that they’ll determine the cause.”

  “Detectives?” Mrs. Richmond asked. She was older but with striking features. Gray streaks emphasized her fiery hair.

  “Are you certain he’s dead?” Ryan wanted to know.

  The two women looked at Emily, who clutched a blanket around her.

  “I used every test Dr. Snow taught me,” Emily answered. “There’s no doubt.”

  “But Dr. Wainwright said he was an invalid after a riding accident,” Becker noted. “Maybe Lord Cavendale died of natural causes.”

  “His son uses snuff,” the woman with the baby said. “Specks of it were on my husband’s chest. A pillow was next to him. It had a contour as if it had been pressed against my husband’s face.”

  “Specks of snuff?” Ryan asked.

  “Emily and her father saw them.”

  “It’s true,” De Quincey said. The cold had made his face look like an aged plate with so many tiny cracks that it seemed any moment it would shatter.

  “I saw the specks also,” the older woman told them. “I even smelled them. They were snuff.”

  “Struggling to reach here, I kept thinking about my husband’s riding accident,” the younger woman said. “Harold was the only person with him when it happened. Could it be that my husband’s fall wasn’t an accident? At dinner this evening, Harold even said he thought it would be better if his father were dead. Harold has massive gambling debts. Could he have become impatient about waiting to inherit his father’s estate?”

  Dr. Wainwright examined Emily’s cheek. “This is going to need stitches.”

  “Stitches?” Ryan asked, appalled. “For God’s sake, someone tell me how this happened.”

  “Harold struck Emily’s father with a riding crop,” the woman with the baby replied.

  “A riding crop?” Ryan barely controlled his fury.

  “And when Emily tried to protect her father, Harold whipped her face.”

  The noise of the rain on the attic’s roof prevented Dr. Mandt from sleeping. The din worsened when the rain became hail. He sat up on his cot and felt nauseated from the stench of his chamber pot.

  He pawed at a wooden crate, finally locating matches and a lamp. He lit the wick and made his way through the maze of boxes that concealed him. When he reached the curtained window, he set the lamp onto a crate, parted the curtains, and pushed the window open.

  Greedily he inhaled the fresh cold air, dispelling the terrible odor that clogged his nostrils. Hail slanted onto him through the window. He didn’t care.

  A cry for help made him straighten. It came from a woman below him. Straining to look down, he saw what seemed to be four people struggling through the storm to reach the entrance to the building.

  “Help!” the woman kept screaming.

  Even with the noise of the hail on the roof, he was certain that he heard someone pounding on the door. Then the pounding ended as someone evidently opened the door for them. Leaning out, ignoring the sting of the hail, Mandt saw a glow appear in many windows below him as the commotion roused people in the building.

  In the wagon, the Russian continued to study the middle building. A noise made him turn as his two companions climbed back under the canvas cover. Water dripped from them, but they didn’t comment on it.

  “Did you have any problem?” he asked.

  “None,” one of the men replied. “We found a deep furrow in the field behind us and covered him with mud. A farmer might find his body two weeks from now.”

  Nodding, the Russian returned his attention to the window in the attic of the middle building.

  “What were the voices we heard?” one of his companions asked.

  “Four people—I think three of them were women—went down the lane to the clinic and pounded on the door, shouting for help. They must have become stranded in the storm somehow. I worried that we’d have to deal with them if they tried to climb into the wagon for shelter.”


  He hadn’t been worried about killing them but about the complication of dealing with so many bodies.

  “Look at the attic window,” he said. “There’s a faint glow. It’s difficult to tell in the storm, but I think someone opened the window and leaned out.”

  “Who’d be in the attic at this time of night?” one of the other men wondered. “Perhaps servants sleep up there?”

  “No. I’d have seen a lot more activity. This is only one person.”

  Abruptly, the front door of the middle building opened. A man charged outside. Another man pursued him.

  “Sean!” the second man yelled. “Stop! For God’s sake, calm down!”

  But instead of listening, the first man broke into a run, reached the road in front of the clinic, and charged away into the darkness.

  As the hail changed to rain, Becker lengthened his stride, splashing through muddy puddles, desperate to catch Ryan.

  A huge house loomed in the darkness.

  “Sean, you need to calm down! Don’t do anything you’ll regret!”

  Ryan raced up the front steps two at a time. Under a portico, he grabbed the brass knocker on the entrance. He pounded with such force that the door trembled. He kept on striking it, faster and louder.

  “Harold! I want to talk to you! Open the damned door, Harold!”

  Becker reached the top of the steps and grabbed Ryan’s shoulders, but Ryan pushed him away and kept pounding the door.

  With a scrape of metal against wood, someone freed a bolt on the inside. The door opened only enough to reveal lamplight and a male servant peering out in alarm. “Lord Cavendale is in his room. Go away before I send a messenger into town and summon the police.”

  “I am the police!” Ryan told him.

  Ramming his shoulder into the door, Ryan forced it open and shoved past the servant. In a massive entrance hall, he yanked off his hat and threw it across the marble floor, spraying drops of water.

  “Harold, where are you? I want to talk to you! You struck a friend of mine with a riding crop! You cut her face!”

  A man wearing a velvet dressing gown appeared on the stairway. The lamp he held revealed that he was tall, with a strong-looking chest and arrogant features. He scowled at Ryan’s red hair.

  “I’m Lord Cavendale to you. As my servant warned, if you don’t leave, I’ll summon the constable from town.”

  Ryan stalked toward the staircase. When Becker ran ahead of him, Ryan pushed him away so hard that Becker fell.

  “You cut her cheek, Harold!” Ryan shouted. “Now I’m going to—”

  As he reached for something hidden under his right trouser cuff, Becker dove for his legs and toppled him.

  They struggled.

  “Get away!” Ryan yelled.

  Becker’s vision suddenly blurred. He lurched backward, realizing that he’d been struck in the face. He raised a hand to his bleeding mouth, ignored the pain, and used the other hand to push Ryan away from Harold.

  “Sean, don’t be a fool! If you hit him, the home secretary will make an example of you! It doesn’t matter how much Commissioner Mayne supports you, you’ll be dismissed for striking a peer!”

  Ryan fought to get around him.

  “But that’s not the worst of it!” Becker pleaded. “We’re only laborers! What happens to a carpenter who’s insolent enough to strike a lord? You’re the one who’ll go to prison! Even if all the evidence is against this man, his judges will almost certainly be lords! They won’t be able to forget that you assaulted one of their own! You’re destroying the chance we have to punish him!”

  Ryan’s chest rose and fell. His gaze was the fiercest, angriest that Becker had ever seen.

  “Emily,” he said.

  “Yes,” Becker said. “Emily. Listen to me. I know she’d tell you the same thing. Be smart about this. Don’t do anything that’ll stop the law from punishing him.”

  Ryan glared at the man standing above them on the stairs.

  “The law punish me?” Harold scoffed. “For what? Striking a common woman who refused to leave my house? I’d be equally justified in striking you for intruding in the middle of the night. Leave at once.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” Ryan asked.

  Becker realized that the man held a riding crop.

  Ryan charged up the stairs.

  “Sean!” Becker pleaded.

  Ryan pulled out his badge, telling Harold, “I’m Detective Inspector Ryan. Where’s your father?”

  “You have no right to—”

  “Harold, if you won’t take us to your father’s body, we’ll go from room to room until we find it.”

  “I order you to leave.” Harold swung with the riding crop.

  In a blur, Ryan caught it, yanked it from Harold’s hand, and raised it.

  Harold cringed.

  About to strike, Ryan’s hand shook. Indeed, his entire body shook. All at once, he hurled the riding crop down the staircase.

  As Harold opened his mouth in shock, Ryan and Becker ran up the staircase.

  At the first level, a female servant looked astonished about what she had witnessed.

  “Where do we find Harold’s father?” Ryan demanded.

  She glanced nervously toward the next landing.

  Ryan took her lamp. He and Becker hurried farther upward.

  “You don’t have any right,” Harold blustered, pursuing them.

  On the next level, Ryan and Becker separated. The light from the lamp that Ryan held was sufficient for them to see past the doors they opened.

  “This one,” Becker said.

  They entered a bedroom and approached a bed where parted curtains revealed a still figure.

  As they stepped closer, the lamp illuminated the gaunt features of a man of many years. His eyes were open, dull and unfocused.

  “Stop here,” Ryan told Becker. “Don’t go any closer. We’ll do this the way we always do.”

  “Get out of this room,” Harold ordered.

  Ryan gave Becker the lamp and stepped carefully forward, scanning the bed for details. He leaned through the parted curtains and felt for a pulse, but the man’s clouded eyes left no doubt that he was dead.

  Ryan picked up a pillow that was next to the body. The man’s wife had said that it had an indentation matching the shape of the corpse’s face, as though it had been used to smother him.

  But now the pillow had no such indentation.

  “Did you touch this pillow?” Ryan asked Harold.

  “Absolutely not.”

  Ryan studied the dead man’s face, noting the yellow crust of dried spittle at the corners of his mouth. He looked at the pillow.

  The stain of what looked like spittle was on it.

  “Your father’s eyes are open,” Ryan said.

  “I don’t know why that merits a comment,” Harold said. “I assume that many people die with their eyes open.”

  “Not when they’re asleep,” Ryan told him. “What would have wakened your father? A pillow pressed over his face, perhaps? I’m told he was infirm. It may be that the only sign of his struggle would have been his eyes opening in panic.”

  “Is my so-called stepmother still accusing me of smothering my father?”

  Ryan leaned close to the blue blanket, searching for specks of the snuff that the man’s wife and Emily’s father had described.

  The specks weren’t there.

  He thought a moment and told Becker, “Lower the lamp toward the floor.”

  “What are you doing?” Harold demanded.

  Ryan crouched, studying the carpet next to the bed.

  He moved his fingers across it.

  “You have no right to do this!” Harold shouted.

  Ryan’s fingers touched specks of something. A few of the specks stuck to his index finger. He raised them and smelled them.

  “Snuff.”

  “That’s impossible!” Harold said.

  Ryan stepped close to Harold, noting that specks of snuff clung to the unde
rside of his nostrils and the top of his dressing gown.

  “You reshaped the pillow so that it no longer had the contour of your father’s face, but you failed to notice that your father left spittle on it when the pillow was pressed over his nose and mouth. After my friend and her father found snuff on your father’s blanket, you came back here and brushed the specks away. But you should also have removed them from where they fell on the carpet. I’m arresting you for your father’s murder.”

  TEN

  HYDROPATHY

  “I don’t have any spare bedrooms,” Dr. Wainwright told the shivering arrivals. “But I’ll arrange for cots to be placed in consultation rooms. Here are dry clothes for all of you. I apologize,” he told Carolyn and Stella. “These maids’ dresses are hardly what you’re accustomed to.” When he looked at Emily’s bloomer dress, he seemed to decide that in her case she probably wouldn’t mind. “But they’ll keep you warm until we can dry the clothes that you’re wearing. My assistant here is named Rick.” Wainwright indicated a young man who wore the white uniform of the clinic. “He’ll help this matron to get all of you settled.”

  “Tea,” Emily said. “Is it possible for someone to bring us hot tea?”

  “I don’t allow tea or coffee here,” Dr. Wainwright told her. “No stimulants of any kind. But the kitchen staff will bring you hot water with honey.”

  Emily held a handkerchief over her bleeding cheek.

  “Miss De Quincey, I’m afraid I’m not a surgeon. I don’t have the training to place the stitches you need.”

  She nodded, understanding that physicians had a revulsion about touching their patients and that only surgeons, at the low end of the medical hierarchy, dealt with blood and gore. “If you have the equipment, I’ll do it myself.”

  Carolyn, Stella, and Dr. Wainwright regarded her with astonishment.

  Dr. Wainwright seemed not to know what to say. “Well, I do have the equipment, but surely you don’t really intend to—”

  “I don’t have a choice. Show me where it is.”

  He led her to a consultation room. Trembling, De Quincey followed.

  Wainwright opened a drawer, revealing a curved needle and catgut sutures.