We had reached the Rookery, a series of gardens and sweeping views at the top of the common. An Italian was selling ices from a handcart; I proposed getting one for everyone, and my brother and I joined the queue.
Georgie needed a farthing for the wishing well. Back in the last century, the place had been famous for its mineral waters. It had been a sort of health resort for Londoners, and nearby Beulah Spa had once been a fashionable spot where they came to take the waters. But springs came and went at their own whim, and all that remained on Streatham Common were a few old buildings and the wishing well.
“Tell him to use his wish wisely,” I told my brother.
“Knowing him, he’ll just wish for ice cream,” he said.
My eye was caught by an unusually fine motorcar, a powder-blue limousine parked with two wheels up on the grass. The windows were rolled down for the occupants to enjoy the sunshine. In the back seat, wearing a pair of sunglasses—something I had only seen in pictures of Hollywood stars—was a beautiful woman with blond hair. Her bare arm, adorned with a gold bracelet, rested on the windowsill.
The dark glasses, round and shiny as insects’ eyes, hid her expression entirely. I could not even see what direction she was looking in, and there was no sign she had seen me. But Miss De Vere had seen both me and my family, and she wanted me to know it. Of course, she had as much right to the common as anyone else, but I did not appreciate mute intimidation from any source, not when it involved my family.
“Excuse me one minute,” I said to my brother. “I just need to attend to a small business matter.”
I strode over with long steps and unclenched my fists with a deliberate effort. My first thought had been to go over and rock the car, threatening to turn it over. That would have shaken her up. But that would be childish and foolish. It would draw attention, and what possible excuse could I give for such an attack?
It would also mean a fight with her chauffeur. The man in the front seat was a substantial individual; the uniform did not conceal the thickness of his arms and neck. He sat at attention, eyes forward but alert.
Two paces later, I had thoughts of breaking off the wing mirror, but that was equally futile and would show the hopelessness of the physical approach.
As with the lout in the library, I would need to find a verbal counter.
Her head turned slowly as I approached. Diamonds on her bracelet sparkled in the sun.
“Do you have some business with me?” I demanded.
“Aw, and I thought you’d be flattered I’m here,” she said, pouting. “Not many men get this sort of attention.”
She was not exactly mocking, but superior. Skinner might, perhaps, have attempted to flirt with her. I was not in the mood.
“I have your business card, and I will contact you as and when I see appropriate. I don’t welcome your attentions when they are directed at my family.”
“Aw, hold your horses, cowboy,” she said, or rather, drawled. “I’m not here to threaten your delightful family.”
“Then why…?”
“I was honestly disappointed not to hear from you. You know… I could use a man like you on my side.”
I sensed the driver’s eyes on me in the wing mirror. It was half the look of a bodyguard assessing a threat, half the look of a jealous rival.
“My services have already been engaged by another employer,” I said.
“You’re aware that this particular Pandora’s box contains an alien material. And it’s dangerous.”
She turned her head and looked down the hill, towards the horizon. Rainbow points of light danced from her bracelet.
For a moment, the quality of the sunlight shifted. I was still standing in front of her in the same pose, and the contours of the land were the same, but the common and the people had gone, and we were in the middle of a desert. Now she was in a carriage—I’m not sure what it looked like. I was watching the towering dust storm blowing towards us across the lifeless landscape. It was not quite a mirage or a dream, and it was so fleeting that I hardly had time to register the details. There were houses, but they were empty shells, and the church at the bottom of the hill was a ruin, and the city was all ruin that merged into dunes in the distance. I blinked, and the vision had gone. The greenery and the crowds had returned, and the noise came back like someone turning on a gramophone.
“Hypnosis,” I said, wondering if it was the effect of her bracelet and looking around to reassure myself that everything was back in place. The vision, for all that it was fleeting, had the vividness of a nightmare. Roslyn D’Onston wrote about visions of the past and the future being conjured up and shared, but I had not thought the trick could be done in broad daylight.
“Hypnosis is a cheap trick,” she said. “Freud talks about the human subconscious. The universe has a subconscious too. You just had a peek into it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sure you do,” she said with a complicit smile. “You can shove a man out of the way with physical force, or you can use psychology and persuade him to move. Same with the world. Magic is just psychology.”
I suppose that some men, the sort who judge a woman by her looks, would assume that Miss De Vere was what Americans called a “dumb blond.” The same people would assume I lacked intellect because of my physique. Miss De Vere and I had more in common than that, though. You might say that each of us had been born with certain natural gifts, and we had both improved upon nature, me with the goal of being a better fighter, and her to become… what? A siren, I supposed. Both of us quietly used our talents in pursuit of the extraordinary, dealing in matters that all those hundreds on Streatham Common would never believe.
And both of us were on the trail of the same dangerous quarry, which had fallen as a shooting star.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“This thing you’re after, it runs through living things like a disease. It holds them together, and when it goes… they turn into dust.”
“I thought it might be something like radioactivity,” I said. “Like radium.”
She raised an eyebrow. I was guessing, but perhaps she was surprised by the acuity of the guess. Or its inaccuracy.
“Well… the energy behind it is something like that. Altered matter, isomers rather than isotopes, but it’ll burn you to dust either way.” She smiled as she put me right. No doubt there were times when Miss De Vere had to hold her tongue and let others hold forth. But she was never going to let me imagine I knew more than her. “Think about what could happen if it gets loose. All these people… dust.”
“I appreciate the concern,” I said.
She leaned forward to tap her driver on the shoulder.
“I have a champagne picnic to attend in Dulwich Park,” she said before looking up so her eyes met mine with sudden directness. Her voice dropped to a purr. “I know you and I can do business, Harry. There’s a lot riding on it.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, my voice unexpectedly hoarse.
Looking at the hand that I had unconsciously placed on the car windowsill, she added, “Careful. You wouldn’t want to lose a finger, now.”
I lifted my hand, and the deep rumble of the limousine’s engine drowned out any reply I might make. The car glided off, stately as a galleon.
“Now, she’s a right fancy piece of work,” commented my brother, having seen the transaction. “How do you know a woman like that?”
“She’s a business acquaintance. She wants me to leave my employer and work for her.”
“And she shows up here on a Saturday afternoon?” He looked at me with a new respect. “I won’t ask you no questions about your business, and you don’t need to tell me no lies.”
“Mrs Blundell mentioned her daughter saw you in the tea shop with a woman the other day,” said Ma.
“That was a different woman entirely,” I said, which didn’t make it sound any better. “An informant on a case I’m working on.”
My mother waite
d to see whether I would reveal anything more, but I knew it was best to stay silent. If she found out who Sally was, and what her former profession had been, she would be mortified.
“It may be none of my business,” said Ma, “but a mother likes to know.”
Ma had views on potential wives. Her life was a round of sweeping, scrubbing, laundering, cooking, baking, darning, and knitting, not to mention shopping and running a household, and any woman who could not meet her exacting standards was not fit for the job. Luckily, my sister-in-law was from the same rugged, good-humoured stock. When the next Sunday roast was served, the white tablecloth would be perfectly ironed, the glasses polished to a gleam, and the Brussels sprouts cooked to within an inch of extinction, all according to unwritten regulation. My brother and I would be trusted with washing up afterwards but nothing else.
“He’s not courting,” my brother assured her. “Harry isn’t situated for that sort of thing.”
I had lacked any sort of steady employment ever since leaving Latham and Rowe. The job with the fictitious insurance company was certainly lucrative, but in Skinner’s view, it was a short-term occupation with no prospects. The bubble could burst any day, and we had to make the most of it while we could. Our employment rested on a rich man’s whim. If next week his wife persuaded him to take up breeding Afghan hounds instead of pursuing arcane knowledge, we would be out on the streets.
“Maybe in a year or two I’ll be set up for courting,” I said. “At the moment I’m still learning the trade – and I need to finish my correspondence course.”
“I’d say your prospects are looking up,” said my brother. “What a motor! What do you think—is it fifty horsepower? But I liked the look of that Daimler your Chinese cove used to drive around.”
“Who did you say that blond woman was?” persisted my mother.
“She’s an American writer,” I said. “Miss De Vere. She’s come over here to write a book about English life.”
My mother said nothing but pursed her lips. I could read her thoughts well enough. Nothing good could come from consorting with flashy American women however much money they might happen to have.
I wanted to tell her what Sally had said about Miss De Vere and how she and my mother would agree, but there was no way to bring the conversation around.
“A funny thing happened to me in the library this morning,” I said.
Chapter Twelve: The Gipsy
I was back at the library first thing on Monday morning, entering beneath the watchful gaze of Shakespeare and his peers. True to his word, Hoade had found the answer. Or at least, so he thought: the exact details lay somewhere in the books spread out before me. It should have been easier to find a clue in those volumes than in the hundreds of thousands of items in the Horniman Museum’s collection, but it was still no small undertaking.
At the same time, I had drawn some uncomfortable conclusions from my weekend conversation with Miss De Vere.
It was another lovely morning, and the rectangle of sunlight from the window had moved a good way round the office before Skinner arrived. He looked no better than usual for a Monday morning, peering at the world through a haze of hangover. His hair was combed tidily at the front, but the back bristled in all directions like an angry hedgehog. I had no sympathy for his sorry state.
“You talked to her,” I said.
Skinner hung his hat on the rack and slung his jacket over the back of his chair, buying time while he struggled to get his misfiring brain into gear. “So what if I did?”
“You didn’t mention it to me.”
Skinner spread his hands in a show of openness. “After what we saw in that garden, it seemed best to explore our options.”
He picked up the envelope on his desk and fed it back and forth through his fingers.
“She showed you the wasteland, did she?”
“Aha, so you’ve been talking to her too, have you? That’s downright hypocritical.”
“I didn’t talk to her,” I said. “She talked to me.”
“She’s not wrong, though, is she? Do you want to see this green and pleasant land”—he waved at the tree outside, whose leaves practically brushed the window—“turned into the ruddy Sahara Desert?”
“Bearing in mind the source, the credibility of that claim is open to question.”
Skinner pulled up his chair and leaned close. “It’s all science,” he said as if I had missed an obvious point. “If you leave a food out, like an apple or a piece of bread, it goes mouldy in no time. Always. And you know why that is?”
I shook my head.
“It gets covered in spores and microbes because there’s millions and millions of them floating in the air. The earth is the same—like an apple spinning in space. And there’s all these germs landing on it and infecting it. From those millions and billions of stars himself was going on about.”
“Microbes inside meteorites?” I said.
“Like a nutshell, to protect them from harmful radiations and so forth. All sorts of them, landing and infecting the earth all the time.” His fingers mimed the falling of snowflakes “They land here, and they start growing. Tiny little seeds or mushroom spores or maggot eggs. And if they’re not stamped out, they grow—sea monsters… and abominable snowmen… and other things.”
Liker tardigrades, I thought, remembering the little crawling creatures I had seen through Dr Evans’s microscope. She said those little creatures could fold themselves up and hibernate and survive the rigours of space travel. That was how they spread out through the universe—not on rocket ships like the heroic explorers in science fiction, but as particles drifting through space like dandelion seed.
“And this one here, it’s like a disease that infects everything. Only it’s not a disease exactly; it’s a ‘different arrangement of matter.’ Imbued with an energy alien to our planet and incompatible with our form of life.”
I knew Skinner well enough to tell if he was putting me on, but he seemed utterly convinced by the explanation he had been given, even if perhaps he had not understood it as well as he thought. He sounded like a religious convert with words and phrases indelibly imprinted in his brain. Miss De Vere’s powers of persuasion were greater than I had realised.
“And it’s only Miss De Vere’s people who fight the infection,” he went on, as if picking her name from my mind. “They find it, and they sterilise it before the whole planet goes rotten.”
“That’s the government’s job.”
Skinner made a noise that might have been “Pshaw!” He never was taken with the government’s way of doing things, not since the war.
“Any government that gets hold of something like this, they’ll try and turn it into a new poison gas or germ warfare so they could destroy more cities. That’s why she wants to get rid of it—so nobody finds out how to use it.”
“So she says,” I said.
“It’s true.” Skinner’s eyes were wide. “They’re defending the human race. It’s got to be a better cause than Lord Wotsit. He only wants to get the Holy Grail for himself. You don’t see him going to tell the government—or getting a proper doctor for that poor beggar with his fingers dropping off.”
He had a point inasmuch as our patron was not behaving any better. Skinner knew that ideology was my weak spot, and he pressed his point. He had never shown any concern for Pierce before.
“It’s dangerous stuff—playing with fire. You’ve seen that with your own two eyes. And that was just a tiny little piece of the baetyl. Now, I can’t say whether it might not turn London into a desert, and neither can you. And you want to hand it over to him?”
I had no ready answer for that.
“Not that there’s much prospect of us finding anything, is there?” he asked. “We don’t have to fight over what we don’t have.”
“I am pursuing a lead.”
“Good man!” Skinner punched me on the shoulder. “Once we find it, we’ll have a few pints, and I’ll prove the case to you prope
rly, point by point. Can we declare a ceasefire until then?”
“Certainly,” I said. Not that I trusted Skinner, who was always warning me not to trust anyone, least of all him, but unless we worked together, there was little prospect of success. And perhaps he did have a case. Stafford did not inspire trust. Although Miss De Vere did not seem any more trustworthy.
“What have you found?”
In truth, the credit all belonged to Hoade, but I preferred not to mention him to Skinner, who was always so secretive about business matters. The librarian had ferreted out a link between the Horniman Museum and the occult. The connection was a man called Samuel Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a famous society of magical scholars that still exists to this day. Mathers was a polyglot who translated important texts with titles like The Lesser Key of Solomon and The Grimoire of Armadel from obscure ancient languages. He was a friend of W. B. Yeats, another member of the Golden Dawn, and the two had exchanged much intelligence on occult matters.
“But what’s the connection?” Skinner asked.
“In 1890, Samuel Mathers, being strapped for cash, took up a new post in South London. Yeats mentions that Mathers lived on the edge of a big garden belonging to an eccentric rich man and arranged and dusted his curios.”
I paused, and Skinner’s eyes narrowed as the penny dropped.
“Horniman?”
“Horniman,” I affirmed. “Mathers wasn’t the actual curator—he was more a sort of janitor—but he had the run of it. If there was an important occult item hidden away in the collection—such as a baetyl, for example—he would surely have been the one to find it.”
“That’s a lead right enough,” said Skinner. “Good work, Harry. How do we find this Mathers fellow?”
“Unfortunately, there is a difficulty there. He died in Paris in ‘18 during the Spanish-flu epidemic.”
“Well, that’s no good.” Skinner slumped over in a parody of misery, chin on the table, and looked up at me. “What do we do now?”
“Mathers left a great many writings on the occult. If he found something important in the museum, he must mention it somewhere in one of his books even if only parenthetically. I’m going through the most promising chapters, but it’s all rather…” I struggled for a word. “Rather opaque than otherwise.”
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 11
