Skinner eyed the pile of thick, square books at my elbow. Reading was not his favourite occupation, especially not heavy technical works. Anything deeper than the Daily Sketch was too dense for his taste.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you telling me Mabel Brown read through all that lot?”
“She only had to come across the relevant passage in one book.”
“You saw what her taste in reading matter was. Romantic and literary. More likely she was intimate with Mathers. There was a few scandals with that lot and young girls, weren’t there?”
I did a mental calculation. If Mabel Brown was the same age as Elsie Granger, then she would have been about thirteen when Mathers died—and she would have had to have been in France. An intimacy with Mathers hardly seemed likely. She must have found the clue after he died, although I had to agree that none of his works fit in well with her interests.
“I’m trying the indexes first.” I had been going through them all, looking for baetyl, bethel, meteorite, aerolite, shooting star and a few others. I had learned something at least from Hoade, not that it was doing me any good.
“Well, you keep up the good work here,” Skinner said. “I’ll find out what’s happened to that cup of tea I asked for. And maybe I’ll go out and get us some buns. I’m getting hungry now.”
The rift between us had not exactly been healed, but it was papered over for the time being. As long as we had our common goal, we would be a team.
On his return, bearing the tea tray himself along with a heap of penny buns, Skinner finally opened the letter that had arrived in the early post. “Another summons to the manor house. At least it’s not that lunatic gardener this time.”
He passed me the note:
The Gipsy woman I mentioned will visit the Firs this afternoon, leaving the house between two and three. Follow her at a safe distance, on no account allowing yourselves to be seen. Maintain a record of her movements, keep a record of everyone she sees, and find out exactly where she is staying. If it is an encampment, we will need to know where within the encampment.
She claims she makes the water by harvesting the dew by starlight when it is exposed to certain arrangements of constellations. Look for any evidence of such activity but also any distillation apparatus or stores of unusual liquid or other possible sources.
Report back to me when you have her location. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT.
“I believe Paracelsus mentions collecting dew,” I said.
“It’s a blind. Collecting dew is a bit of old gipsy palaver, what they say when they want to put you off the scent. And you don’t want to trust Paracelsus. He put all sorts of japes into his recipes to stop the wrong sort of people copying him.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes,” Skinner said as if it was common knowledge. “Any luck with Mathers?”
What I had discovered about Mathers was less than encouraging. He was, it was true, a founding member of the Golden Dawn, an organisation set up at the same time as, and in opposition to, Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists. I had come across one of the remnants of that group during the Roslyn D’Onston affair. The Golden Dawn had also fragmented, splitting into a multitude of hostile groups. Occultists were a fractious lot.
The Theosophists and Golden Dawn were not enemies but rivals. W. B. Yeats, perhaps thanks to his Irish charm, had succeeded in belonging to both. The Golden Dawn was largely given over to psychic experimentation of the sort that Miss De Vere would have deplored. They sought to project their consciousness across the gulfs of space to explore distant planets. Mathers, wielding a wooden mace, would trace out a mystic sequence of numbers on a tablet, and the viewers would be transported.
The worlds they discovered were suspiciously like romantic versions of our own. I have had cause to read up a little about the solar system, and I know something about the conditions on other planets. Mathers’s description of Mars, with its vineyards and warring medieval principalities, seemed just as fictional as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom and a good deal less entertaining. Scientists are now in agreement that Mars is a dead world, freezing cold and almost airless. If there are any Martians, they are utterly alien beings.
The more I read about Mathers, the less I took to him. He changed his name from plain Mathers to MacGregor Mathers and called himself Comte de Glenstrae after a Jacobite he imagined was an ancestor. He was dictatorial and unbending to his fellow members of the Golden Dawn and insisted that he alone was in psychic contact with powerful, unseen beings. That form of communication conveniently allowed for no verification by anyone else and no means of challenging his pronouncements. He invited Aleister Crowley into the order and gave him a high rank, which caused much of the later trouble. By every account, Crowley was an evil man, perhaps as bad in his way as Roslyn D’Onston.
In later life, Mathers became increasingly eccentric and obsessed with the Jacobite cause. He took to walking the streets of Paris in full highland rig, including a kilt and several daggers. He claimed to be in psychic contact with the pretender to the throne of Scotland, planned to put him into power, and picked fights with anyone who questioned him. In addition, he seemed to think he was the earthly incarnation of the Egyptian god Osiris. It was rumoured he had tried to resurrect one of the Egyptian mummies at the Horniman cases, which made me think of palingenesis, but the experiment had evidently failed.
W. B. Yeats called him “half a lunatic, half knave,” which was not a recommendation.
Mathers seemed like a victim of his own imagination. The Golden Dawn’s exercises in projection sounded not unlike ordinary daydreaming to me, the main difference being that they were conducted at greater length and with a great deal of solemn ritual.
In short, he did not seem to be a man who could be relied upon. If he had discovered anything valuable while sorting through the accumulated dust heaps of Horniman’s storage rooms, in between the mummy cases and the boxes of butterflies and the African idols, Mathers would surely have made something of it. But if his occult talent was, as I suspected, nothing more than showmanship, then Mathers lacked the skill to recognise an otherworldly specimen such as the baetyl.
Skinner summoned a taxi and ordered the driver to park around the corner from the big house and wait, keeping the meter running. The two of us then sauntered down the street. It was a broad avenue of expansive villas and not the sort of place where you could idle, but we found a shady tree where two men might pause and shelter from the afternoon sun, and we took advantage of it. Skinner’s case, which was mainly to make us look more like commercial travellers, proved to contain greaseproof paper bags with an assortment of pork pies, scotch eggs, and some sausage rolls, which he had acquired from the baker that morning.
We made a picnic of it. I dare say a lot of others found excuses to do the same that day.
“An army marches on its stomach,” Skinner observed placidly.
The view up and down the street also helped us reassure ourselves that we were not being followed in turn. Taking a taxicab was a good way of losing pursuers who were on foot or might be able to take a bus or tram.
At twenty past two, the gates of the Firs opened, and a small, round woman appeared. As luck would have it, she turned towards us and passed on the other side of the street. Skinner and I pretended to be deep in conversation.
The woman looked very much the gipsy in an ankle-length dress of rich red-and-blue material, her hair covered by a headscarf in contrasting shades. Instead of a handbag, she carried a wicker basket. She moved with the steady but determined pace of a beetle, her toes appearing with every forward step. She did not glance around at us but was occupied with her own thoughts. As she passed, I caught a flash of gold from her hands, which had rings on every finger.
We waited until she was almost at the end of the street before unhurriedly polishing off the last of our snacks, brushing off the crumbs, and making our way after her. She was a slow walker, and keeping up would be no trouble.
The pursui
t was carried out in stages. Skinner was in the lead, and at intervals, I was sent back to the taxicab to instruct the driver where he should move to next. We had to make sure he was ready to hand in case we needed a conveyance, but a car could not park everywhere. As the afternoon wore on, we began to accept that the gipsy woman went everywhere on foot and that the taxi was an encumbrance as well as an extravagance.
She made first for Central Hill and spent some time going in and out of shops, principally those selling clothing but also an ironmonger. She met two women, who were evidently acquaintances, on the street and chatted a while with them. Then she made her way towards Sydenham Hill, where she paid a visit to a house situated on its own in the shadow of the wood: old Whatley’s place. I knew him mainly by reputation; previously, when I had visited with Mr Yang, Whatley’s daughter had refused to open the door to me.
The gipsy woman was admitted at once. We waited at a safe distance, leaning on a fence. Skinner picked a long piece of grass and chewed on it. Metallic green flies buzzed about, sometimes landing on the vegetation and moving with abrupt, mechanical bursts of speed. Higher up, hoverflies caught the sun as they slowly circled each other in a lazy dance. Investigations often involved a lot of hanging around and waiting. There were worse ways of spending a summer day.
“There used to be a big gipsy camp near here, at Gipsy Hill,” Skinner told me as we leaned against a shady wall. “They were there for centuries. Maybe that’s what brings her back.”
“What happened to the camp?”
“The authorities started cracking down on them. But some say that masked men with torches came and burned them out.”
Half an hour later, the gipsy woman emerged again, and we glimpsed Whatley’s daughter in the doorway. The gipsy was carrying the same basket as before, and the weight of it had not changed much. She continued on foot at her slow, steady pace, and we followed at a decent interval.
We trailed her to a lane by the woods where a painted wooden caravan with enormous spoked wheels nestled under the trees. There was no sign of a horse, and judging from the grass growing around it, I did not think the caravan could have moved in the last two weeks.
Two dogs of the undifferentiated terrier variety were tied up outside. Her approach prompted excited barking and tail wagging. She mounted the wooden stair and let herself into the caravan with a key.
“And that is all about that,” said Skinner, not without satisfaction. “Stand easy, Bombardier. Our objective has been obtained. With no casualties.”
A minute later, the caravan door opened, and the woman came out with a bowl of scraps for the dogs. She proceeded to sit on the step and talk to the animals while she peeled potatoes.
“I thought gipsies camped together,” I said.
“It’s because she’s a choveck,” he said tightly. “A witch. They have to stay apart from the rest. The clean don’t mix with the unclean.”
Skinner knew something of gypsies from his carnival days. I would have stayed and watched for longer, but he was for moving on. “She’s settled in for a bit now. I intend to take up a strategic position in the Bird in Hand public house and relay a report of the day’s action to headquarters while refuelling the unit’s engines. Come on, before she sees you gawping.”
I was reluctant and suggested that one of us should remain to keep an eye on the caravan in case she went out again. Skinner noted that she had changed her shoes for slippers and showed every sign of being finished for the day. At that point, we heard voices; some men were approaching. We turned around as three men rounded the curve of the path.
They were labourers in canvas trousers and wool shirts with leather waistcoats and hats. Their colourful kerchiefs and dark complexions suggested they were at least part gipsy if not full-blooded Romanies. One of them carried a long instrument over his shoulder, something like a scythe, and the other two had shorter sickles.
They stopped when they saw us.
“What’re you doing here?” demanded the first, an older man with a long moustache and a gold ring through one ear.
It was a fair question. From our location, anyone might have reasonably suspected that we were spying on the caravan and its occupant.
The man with the scythe and the one with the sickle placed their feet farther apart and changed the way they were holding their tools. I had seen gipsies in the ring many times and even fought against a gipsy myself on one occasion. I had a healthy respect for them. Generalisations could be dangerous. Most boxers might be Jewish, but not everyone who spoke Hebrew could punch like Kid Lewis or even Sammy Gold; plenty of them were as weedy as any Anglo-Saxon. But the gipsies had always been a great race for boxing and still quite dominated the field when it came to the bare-knuckle sport. They were great fighters—tough as nails and fast as lightning. As a rule, their boxing style was uneducated but not unskilful, and could wear down a boxer with greater technical knowledge if he did not keep his wits about him. They took punishment and kept taking it in a way that few others could match.
I judged the layout of the situation like a geometric puzzle. If I left the lead man to Skinner, I would have to move fast to take on the other two. Surely, they would not use deadly force, and a scythe made a clumsy weapon. Still, if the bearer was sufficiently angered he might use it—
In the fraction of a second I had been calculating the odds for a fight, Skinner had already started speaking. “Gentlemen! We’re looking for Mr Whatley’s residence. We were thinking of asking the lady in the caravan, but we did not wish to alarm her. Do you know Mr Whatley by any chance, I believe he’s friendly with the Zingari people?”
“Can’t help you, pal.”
The last word was said quite disrespectfully. That we were wearing suits cut no ice with these gentlemen. That Skinner knew some of their language made them suspicious.
“Perhaps you could pause and think a second.” Skinner spun a silver sixpence in the air. “Just in case anything comes to you. Perhaps you don’t know the name Whatley, but he lives in a cottage down one of these lanes, and there are not many of those… but we seem to have been misdirected. We’re not bailiff’s men or anything, are we?”
“No, we’re not bailiff’s men,” I echoed when Skinner looked up at me. Caught off guard, I said it so woodenly and with such lack of conviction that nobody hearing it would have been convinced.
“Not bailiff’s men?” repeated the moustachioed man, eyes on the spinning coin. “Well… you could try going down there and taking the next lane on the left about a quarter mile.”
I noted that he did not admit to knowing Whatley or even of having seen any cottages in the area. It was a well-crafted reply, one that a lawyer might have admired. I noted also that he was sending us in the wrong direction for Whatley.
“We’ll give that a try, then,” said Skinner with a smile, tossing the coin to him. The gipsy caught it one-handed as easily as a lizard caught a fly with its tongue.
“Thank you very much for your assistance, gentlemen,” said Skinner, touching the brim of his hat.
“Much obliged,” I added with the same gesture.
“Afternoon,” said the gipsy, no friendlier than before, but the three of them parted to let us pass.
I was still wary that they might assault us, and the back of my neck prickled, but as soon as we were past, they carried on their way. We heard them call out a greeting to the woman in the caravan, and I saw them doffing their hats and bowing most politely, even reverently.
On Skinner’s insistence, we repaired to the pub, where he stood me a pint. The place was busy, and no wonder on such a hot day. A cool beer could not have been more welcome.
“You know what nearly happened there?” said Skinner after the ritual of the first swallow and a long pause to appreciate it.
“What?”
“We could have been mowed down!” He seemed more pleased by his own word play than concerned about the encounter.
“It was close enough.”
“They’re
as suspicious of us gajoes—outsiders—as we are of them,” said Skinner. “They must be here for the fair. It’s like a rendezvous point when you’re all wanderers with no fixed abode.”
“It must be a strange life.”
“It has its charms,” Skinner agreed, then suddenly his mood dipped. His squib about being mowed down had brought back memories. “And Christ, all those poor bastards not here to enjoy it, lying under the sod in Flanders Field.” He took a long pull of his beer. “It’s up to us to drink the pints they can’t drink and make love to the women they’ll never know. To feel the sun…” There was a choke in his voice.
“It’s not your fault. It was the war.”
“I led them over the top,” he said. “‘Come on, lads. Last one to the wire is a sissy…’ They trusted me. They should never have trusted me! And somehow, the bullets always missed me so I could do it again and again.”
I wanted to explain that those men would have died whatever Skinner had done, that the whole thing was out of the hands of men like us. There was something bigger at work that was as inevitable as the seasons. The whole giant machinery of it had been set in motion years before, and it would grind up millions more, whatever happened. I did not know how that machinery was built or why, I just knew that it was there. But I did not have the words to express myself.
“It was a bad business,” I said. “You were just doing your bit.”
“Thanks, Harry.” He patted my arm and took another drink.
I was thinking about a different war—the one that Miss De Vere and her friends were fighting—and the wasteland of the future she had shown me. Skinner and I were in battle again, and we hardly knew which side we were on.
Chapter Thirteen: Reading the Leaves
I am not, as you may have gathered, a great one for deception or subterfuge. My acting skills are rudimentary. Hence, I prefer the straightforward approach where possible. I like to state my business plainly and deal like an honest man. But as both Skinner and my correspondence course have advised me, this is not always fruitful in the investigation business, and more often than not, an oblique angle is advisable.
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 12
