Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘And she tried to ban smoking,’ Marjorie recalled. ‘Luckily for us she died. Unluckily, her husband bequeathed that to the club, so we put it in here out of the way.’

  Sally’s hand went up and back and flicked forward. ‘Right eye,’ she said quietly as something flashed from her.

  There was a thud and Baroness Worford was impaled through the pupil by a dagger, the horn handle flittering with the quivering blade.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘Welcome aboard, Sally.’

  *

  We sat at the table, poring over maps, drinking and planning, but the more concrete our plans became, the more I knew I could never enact them.

  ‘Goodness.’ Harriet jumped as the clock struck the hour. ‘I am supposed to be helping serve tea for the staff against the old boys’ football match, and Mr F thinks I have only popped out to get potted beef.’

  ‘Perhaps we should all call it a day,’ I said.

  ‘We must meet again to fix a date,’ Dulcie said, so firmly that I decided to argue about it another time. With any luck they would all cool on the idea after they had slept on it.

  ‘Football,’ I pondered. ‘Harriet, you are a genius.’

  59

  The Rubber Solution

  MOLLY OPENED THE door warily.

  ‘Oh, miss, he’s as cross as a pancake,’ she whispered. Molly’s whispers could have been heard in the gallery of any music hall on a bawdy Saturday night.

  ‘But why?’ I whispered back.

  ‘Misssss,’ she hissed like The Flying Scotsman. ‘He’ll hear you.’

  ‘Why is he angry?’ I asked quietly and Molly flapped her arms.

  ‘I dontn’t not know.’ She looked over her shoulder nervously. ‘But he showed me his teeth and threatened to increase my wages,’ she struggled to remember the word, ‘frorth-width.’

  ‘But that means you are getting more money,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh.’ Molly’s mouth drooped even further. ‘But then I’ll have to go out and spend it and be married by wicked Sir Gasper.’

  ‘Sir Jasper is a made-up person, Molly.’

  ‘I could see he was made-up,’ she rejoined. ‘I was right on the front row at the front and I could see his red cheeks running down his neck in the heat of the slimelights, but he was still wicked and ohhhhhh, poor sweet Miss Clara was—’

  ‘What did you do?’ I broke in before I heard the entire plot of The Farmer’s Daughter for the eighth time.

  ‘Well, what could I do?’ she reasoned. ‘I just sat there and sissed every time he came on.’

  I tried again. ‘What did you do to make Mr Grice raise your pay?’

  Molly screwed up her apron and chewed the hem. ‘I just only told him that those things with what he was playing with looked like those toads what had been squashed and couldn’t be unsquashed again after I stood on them, and then he got all different and told me I was a stute, and I said I didntn’t not know what a stute was and he laughed. Heavens below it was terrorifying, miss. He laughed like a person and then he said he was going to do that thing to my wages what I never get anyway, with breaking things and swearing. I ran out of the room and didntn’t not come back until he rang his bell for tea immediantly after, and now I have to go to the fishmongerers.’

  ‘But why?’ We both knew that her master would not allow fish in the house.

  ‘On an errant.’ Molly watched me hang up my own bonnet and roll my parasol and put it in the stand.

  ‘Then you had better do it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  Molly stood like a monument. I went round her and into the study, which might have survived an invasion by the Goths, but only just.

  Sidney Grice had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up and his cravat pulled open. His face was splattered with something resembling cement and there was something pink clinging in plaques to his waistcoat.

  ‘I have had an idea,’ I told him, my excitement deflated like one of Molly’s unfortunate toads.

  ‘Good, good,’ he replied distractedly. ‘In the meantime—’ he indicated the carnage on his desk, mixing bowls half-full, some tipped over, clogged-up test tubes, spatulas caked in assorted crusts—‘I have had a better one. I have made alginate impressions of both pieces of shot and used those to make precise gymsum replicas of them.’ He pointed to two large watch-glasses, each bearing the now-familiar lumps, one whiter than, but apparently identical to, the original grey version, apart from each being attached by a blob of yellow wax to a wide-bored glass pipe with an L-turn at that end. ‘So as to avoid abrading or scratching the actual specimens. I have been obliged to deface these models, but I intend to make nineteen copies of each specimen and insert my glass pipe into a different position every time.’ He paused and looked at me as if expecting a ripple of applause. ‘And now—’

  ‘You are going to coat them with rubber solution,’ I chipped in, as he paused again for the ovation that was never to come.

  ‘You guessed.’

  ‘It was also my idea.’

  ‘It was mine first.’ He had a beaker of water simmering on a tripod over a spirit burner.

  ‘What time did you have your idea?’

  ‘At fourteen minutes after the hour of two post meridiem.’

  ‘That was before mine,’ I admitted. ‘But then I did not have the benefit of Molly’s technical advice.’

  My guardian bridled. ‘If you are to laud that calamitous dolt of a skivvy for unwittingly triggering my genius, you might as well credit an apple for the discovery of gravity, though the fruit probably has a greater intellect than the maid.’

  ‘Shall we do one each?’ I suggested, and he brought his sense of effrontery under control.

  ‘Very well.’ He swept aside an assortment of his equipment with no concern for what was shattering or spilling or crashing to the floor.

  Mr G brought out a large brown bottle and removed the cork bung and, like a genie, the smell uncoiled, an invisible cloud filling the room with its fumes.

  I coughed. ‘Shall I pull up the sash?’ The only time I had ever done so in the study before was to clear the air of cyanide coming from the corpse at my feet.

  ‘Certainly not.’ Mr G handed me a new stiff-bristled paintbrush. ‘An open window is far too much temptation to a mischievous ragamuffin with a ready supply of sunbaked horse droppings at his feet. Besides which,’ Mr G inhaled as if it were sea air and he were taking a cure, ‘I find it rather invigorating.’

  He started to paint his plaster model – the thick black liquid dripping over his already filthy blotter – and I joined in.

  ‘How thick do you want it?’

  ‘One sixteenth of an inch.’ He waved his brush, showering his bookcase like a priest with holy water but, fortunately, failing to bless me.

  We painted steadily and soon had two glistening blobs like shrivelled toffee apples on the sticks. I rotated mine. ‘How long does it take to dry?’ I was pleased to see that there were no air holes while Mr G was dabbing some more on one spot.

  ‘According to my earlier experiments, approximately fifteen minutes. Keep turning or it will sag.’

  ‘So I have to stand for all that time just waiting for it to dry?’ I was getting bored already.

  ‘Of course not.’ He held his up like a lollipop but did not lick it. ‘You must wait for the latex to coagulate at the same time.’

  I shifted my weight. ‘That makes the process so much more interesting.’

  ‘Indeed.’ My guardian clipped on his pince-nez with his left hand and watched the process avidly. ‘Did we finish our light chat about the differential identification of rodential earwax?’

  ‘We did not,’ I confessed.

  ‘Shall I resume my diatribe?’

  ‘Not unless you wish to induce rigor mortis.’

  My godfather considered my proposal. ‘I do not,’ he decided regretfully. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

  ‘Something that doesn’t involve murder.’

&n
bsp; ‘Everything involves murder.’

  ‘Music does not.’

  ‘Leaving aside the hundreds of operas which depict violent deaths and the number of composers who have killed or been killed illegally, music is murder.’

  I considered and rejected poetry, art and flower pressing. No doubt he would know of a homicidal collector of omnibus tickets or all about the massacre of a conference of beekeepers.

  ‘Keep turning it,’ he said.

  ‘I never stopped.’

  ‘I did not say you had.’

  ‘That is like me telling you to keep breathing.’

  ‘Useful advice if I were in a room which I believed to be full of toxic gases but you knew not to be.’

  I dabbed a puddle on the leather top, peeled it off and turned it over. It was dry. My guardian prodded it with a silver toothpick.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ I asked.

  ‘We exhale.’ He put the pipe to his lips and blew. With his cheeks puffed out, he was all at once a child blowing bubbles.

  I tried mine. The rubber was much less stretchy than I had expected. Perhaps my latex was too thick, for I could feel my eardrums bulge as I struggled to expand it, but at last I had something resembling a ball. ‘That was more difficult than I expected,’ I puffed.

  ‘And now you must do it again.’

  Whilst mine had deflated to a large prune, Mr G had a finger over the end of his glass pipe to stop the same happening.

  ‘But it will happen to yours the moment you let go,’ I prophesied.

  Sidney Grice pfffed. He had five different pfffs and this was his least dismissive one. ‘But I shall not let go.’ He sidled along his side of the desk and lowered his ball into the beaker of bubbling water. ‘Until it has hardened.’

  The water splashed over a stack of calculations but that did not seem to perturb my godfather, so intent was he on his task.

  I reinflated mine and slipped a finger into my mouth this time. Mr G removed the ball, letting it drip over an open Latin dictionary where I could just make out Decollavi – which even I knew meant beheaded – underlined in red ink. He pricked at the rubber.

  ‘Huzzah.’ He spoke quietly, an uncharacteristically military ejaculation from a man who had never been in uniform. ‘What now?’ he challenged, and I realized that I had not thought beyond this stage and that all the information we needed was inside our creations.

  ‘Well.’ I immersed my balloon before it had a chance to lose any air. ‘We cut them in half, turn them inside out and glue them back together.’

  ‘What an ingeniously stupid idea.’

  I tried but failed to hide my indignation. ‘What then?’

  ‘We pour melted wax inside.’

  ‘Well, that goes without saying.’

  ‘Clearly,’ he murmured, slotting a funnel over the end of the tube. ‘Whilst the pipe is still warm.’ He took a stick of white modelling wax, held the end of it above the flame, and removed it to drip into the funnel and trickle down into the ball. ‘Take yours out and hold this in the water.’

  I did as I was bid, so that only the funnel projected above the surface. Mr G repeated the process.

  ‘Another eighty or ninety applications should suffice,’ he calculated.

  My hand was already uncomfortably warm and my sleeve damp with steam. ‘I have a quicker way,’ I said, inspired by my own discomfort. ‘If you put the wax into a syringe and heat that, then you should be able to inject the wax straight in. It would be quicker and you are less likely to trap any air bubbles.’

  ‘Why, March,’ Sidney Grice bobbed behind his desk, ‘your technical advice is almost as good as Molly’s.’

  ‘I have never met a man more adept at turning a compliment into an insult,’ I complained as he yanked open a lower drawer.

  ‘I am not convinced,’ he rose as if on a lift, ‘that such a man exists.’ My guardian waved a syringe – probably the same one he had used to inject me once – pulled the plunger out and forced two sticks of wax into the chamber. Two or three minutes later he had the ball filled. ‘And here comes that bootless lumpen wench.’

  The front door crashed open and closed, and then the one into the study, and Molly lumbered in, laden with an iron bucket. ‘Sorry, sir, but he wouldntn’t not let me have any ice without buying an eel so I had to stop on the way back and eat it.’

  ‘You ate raw fish?’ I questioned and Molly guffawed.

  ‘Oh, bless you, miss, they aintn’t not fishes. Eels are snakes and snakes are always raw. I’ve seen them at the zoo.’ She looked down. ‘And now most of the ice has vanished like the invisual elepant I saw in Hyde Park last year.’

  ‘Put it on my desk.’

  Molly hauled her load up. ‘Oh, sorry, miss, a teeny big lot of it jumped on to your old dress.’

  It was a new dress and I was about to tell her so and that I was soaked to the skin, but her master smiled magnanimously.

  ‘Oh, do not worry about that.’ He dipped his rubber ball into the icy water. ‘Just run along and make some tea.’

  Molly curtsied like a puppet whose strings have become tangled, before she departed, while Mr G swirled the ball around, untroubled by the clinking of ice against the sides of the bucket. ‘That should do it.’

  Sidney Grice whipped a cut-throat razor out of the air and ran the blade rapidly round the ball. ‘The time of truth.’ He peeled the rubber apart to reveal a perfect white sphere. ‘And now for the other one.’

  I went upstairs to change into something dry and, whilst I was there, I smoked a cigarette out of the window, overlooking the courtyard garden. By the time I returned, Sidney Grice had two wax balls on a bed of cotton wool beneath two magnifying glasses on brass stands on the round central table, the only uncluttered surface in the room now.

  ‘Take a look at this, March,’ he invited me eagerly, and I stood over them.

  ‘They look very similar to me. Which is which?’

  Sidney Grice pointed. ‘This is my replica of the ball, which – if we are to believe that grotesquery of a medical student – came from Wallace’s cranium, and this, your inferior attempt, from your handbag.’

  ‘Why inferior?’ I bristled

  ‘Because it is over-inflated.’

  ‘How do you know that yours is not under-inflated?’ I asked, knowing full well he would have an answer.

  ‘Because mine is a point four five two calibre, the same bore as Schlangezahn’s weapon, which I ascertained by the simple means of inserting my index finger into the barrel – and a man who does not know the exact dimensions of all his digits might as well fritter away his life performing charitable deeds – whereas yours is point six three, not a bore which has been used since bores have been calibrated.’

  ‘And I bet you were one of the first,’ I muttered, adding more loudly, ‘So do they match up?’

  ‘Judge for yourself.’ Mr G traced the course of a long scratch on the first ball with his silver toothpick, a fraction of an inch above it. The line curved one way and then the other, then split and rejoined before breaking up into a delta. I looked at the second ball and it had been scored in exactly the same way.

  ‘There are nine other abrasions which match, or will, when I devise a method of making these replicas exactly the same diameter,’ Sidney Grice forecast.

  I rotated the balls on their glass pipes. ‘There is a large gouge in my one which I cannot see in the other,’ I observed.

  ‘I would be desolate if there were not many marks which did not match,’ he told me. ‘For one ball passed through hair, skin, skull, meninges and brain tissues, whereas the other penetrated the tanned and dyed hide of a cow—’

  I completed the list for him. ‘My handbag, cigarette case and hip flask.’

  ‘Which is bound to create other blemishes,’ he said, oblivious to my sense of outrage.

  ‘So you can prove that Johnny Wallace was killed by Prince Ulrich’s air gun,’ I concluded.

  ‘Indeed.’ He viewed the mess of materials
on his shirtsleeve with a wounded sigh. ‘It might be slightly more difficult to prove that the prince himself fired the rifle but, bearing in mind the way he tries to avoid putting his weight on to his left toes, I would like to be granted a viewing of his naked foot.’

  ‘When he was running across the ceiling.’ I had noticed the way the prince walked but was not about to admit that I had thought nothing of it.

  ‘Possibly.’ Sidney Grice placed his hands together in a Namaste – Hindu greeting – pose. ‘But no jury would convict on such esoteric evidence.’ He scraped some plaster off his cufflink. ‘Incidentally, you have a speck of rubber on your collar.’

  ‘Then why go to all this trouble?’ I demanded. ‘At least I do not have any in my hair.’

  ‘And I hope that is of consolation to you.’ He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. ‘Because we have come into possession of something more precious than money or tea itself – the truth, March. I know it, you know it, and I shall make sure that His Illustrious Highness, Prince Ulrich Albrecht Sigismund Schlangezahn, knows it.’ He glanced in the mirror. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean.’

  60

  The Bridge of Sighs

  THERE WAS A long queue for the toll.

  ‘The Bridge of Sighs,’ I quoted.

  ‘Is in Venice,’ my godfather corrected me. ‘This is Waterloo.’

  ‘I was referring to a poem by Thomas Hood about a girl who committed suicide here,’ I explained. ‘It reminded me of Albertoria Wright.’

  ‘That was Westminster Bridge.’ He drained the dregs of tea into his tin cup.

  ‘We are on the move,’ I leaned out for a better view.

  ‘I did not think the scenery was slipping backwards,’ he remarked acidly, but then perked up. ‘When we reach it, I shall indicate the spot where Samuel Gilbert Scott died.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Probably with a languid droop of my left hand.’

  ‘How did he die?’ I clarified, for it was obvious that he was itching to tell me though I was more fascinated, as always, by the great ships arriving from and departing to every corner of the world, and the bustle of boats ferrying goods and passengers across the water.