Aided by Hasbro and me, Tubby clambered up onto the granite landing where we stood, the rainwater sluicing mud from his trousers and shoes, just as a pair of constables descended from above to stand beside us in open-mouthed disbelief as the octopus moved glidingly downriver toward the black disk that opened above the river into the granite wall of the embankment: the open mouth of the Fleet sewer, out of which cascaded a torrent of water. The octopus sheltered Gilbert and its treasures from harm as it pulled itself up the embankment wall, the torrent washing over it. Within moments Gilbert Frobisher was carried away into the darkness.
“What in the dear Lord’s name…?” one of the constables asked the other, his eyes still wide with astonishment.
“It’s the Kraken of old,” the other said, “come out of that there box. It’ll plug the Fleet like a wine cork. Come on, Bob. We can do naught standing here.” And with that they hurried back up the stairs and out of sight, paying us no mind at all.
“I intend to follow the flaming son of a bitch,” Tubby said, referring, I believe, to the octopus. He looked about himself as if he were ready to leap back into the Thames mud. Of course it was utterly impossible that Tubby could force his way through the torrent that poured from the circular opening in the embankment wall, even if he could climb up to it, which he could not.
“We’re hampered by the torrent here,” St. Ives said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll want an intercepting sewer at a higher elevation.”
“The Ludgate crossing, perhaps, in Dean’s Court,” Hasbro said to him, the lot of us turning toward the stairs. “The Oxford Street channel is too distant.”
“Aye,” said St. Ives, “Ludgate it is. It’s conceivable that we might get in ahead of the monster rather than merely following it, given that it’s traveling northward.”
“And do what?” I asked, as we were ascending, but the answer never came, for at that moment a pistol shot rang out, and then another. As the street came into view we saw that our coach had moved out onto the road and traveled some distance farther down. Boggs was laying about himself on all sides with his whip, St. Ives’s smoking pistol in his other hand. A man lay dead or wounded on the street. Another clung to the handhold on the side of the carriage as the horses shied and the carriage lurched on the pavement, its wounded wheel canting from side to side. Two men tried to drag the horses up the little byway called Puddle Dock while evading the coachman’s lash. A fifth man climbed across the top of the carriage, apparently having gotten up over the bags secured to the rack behind. All of this we perceived by the time we had completed our ascent of the embankment.
We raised a shout and ran forward as the man climbing up beside Boggs jerked the whip from his hand and pitched it away. Boggs turned in that same moment, aimed the pistol, and shot his assailant dead through the forehead, the man sprawling away, even as the villain atop the coach clutched Boggs by the hair and the shoulder of his coat and flung him bodily from his seat, immediately sliding down onto the bench and snatching up the reins as his two uninjured companions leapt clear of the horses and climbed into the coach. In the very moment that we drew near it set out at a rapid clip despite the wobbly wheel, up Puddle Dock toward Queen Victoria Street with its maze of cross streets and byways, where it might easily disappear.
I saw then that the landau carriage that had swerved past us sat now along the curb, some fifty feet up Puddle Dock. A bearded man wearing a pince-nez and a Homburg hat peered out of the window, looking back. Aside from the driver he was alone in the coach, although he hadn’t been a few minutes ago.
“Look there!” I shouted, pointing in that general direction. “Lucius Honeywell, by God!”
It was a guess, of course, but calculated. Tubby Frobisher and I set out at a run, but before we had crossed to the pavement, the broken-wheeled coach rattled past the Landau, which angled out onto the roadway and followed along behind it, both conveyances disappearing around the bend in the road. All of this occurred in a matter of moments—a shorter time than it takes to tell it.
We turned back, toward where poor Boggs lay stunned on the road, Hasbro and St. Ives feeling for a pulse and prodding the swelling lump where he had hit his head. Boggs was apparently comatose, and so after a brief powwow we left him with the very capable liverymen at Apothecaries Hall and hastened north up Puddle Dock on foot, the rain lessening now. We were bound for Dean’s Court, where the aboveground entrance to a cross-channel of the Fleet sewer stood. There it would be possible to clamber down an iron ladder to the sewer proper without being drowned in the process.
Tubby was in too much haste, however, to be happy with the plan. “When we find our way into the sewer,” he asked as we hastened along, “which way then? Up or down?”
“I don’t know,” St. Ives said. “Perhaps we’ll discover the answer on the walls of the sewer—some gelatinous sign that the creature has passed through. Unfortunately the river sewers are in fact a warren of tunnels and cross tunnels—channels that run east toward the Walbrook and west toward the Tyburn, not to mention downward from one level to another. There’s also the possibility that the creature will find the sewer gasses intolerable and be compelled to return to the river.”
“Then God help Uncle Gilbert,” Tubby said, with an uncharacteristic note of despair in his voice. It came to me that Tubby stood to inherit his uncle’s lavish estate, and yet would cheerfully die to save the old man’s life, a fact that redoubled my own determination to be of use to him, although every passing moment diminished our chances of finding Gilbert in time to save him.
CHAPTER 9
Pursuit
ALTHOUGH UNDER OTHER circumstances Queen Victoria Street might be the natural route along which the two coaches would flee, at the moment it was at a standstill in the heavy weather, and it seemed to us mildly unlikely that the coaches would intentionally mire themselves there. We pushed between the carriages and up St. Andrew’s hill, where our supposition was proven correct. A crowd of onlookers was gathered around Gilbert’s coach, which lay crippled on its side in the street, the wheel having come off and careened through the window of a butcher’s shop. The landau stood abandoned behind it, the horses skittish, left to their own devices. The box containing the ambergris, of course, was no longer inside the fallen coach, but had been carried away by the three villains, who had fled on foot. They were rough men, we were told, and no one had interfered with them except the irate butcher, who had been knocked down for his efforts. No one knew what had happened to a man in a Homburg hat and pince-nez. No one had seen him.
We set out again at a run, very shortly issuing out onto Ludgate Hill at the north end of Dean’s Court, where lay a heap of brick and a tree that had been snapped off several feet above the pavement, all of it lying in a pool of water that still leaked out of a great hole broken into in the wall. A mangled iron grill that had blocked the entrance to the sewer lay some distance away. We had found our octopus, it seemed, or at least the ruin it had left behind.
St. Paul’s Churchyard stood dead ahead, the great cathedral beyond. There was a hubbub in the direction of the cathedral clock tower, people making a din and pointing skyward. We saw it then, the octopus itself, rising up between the two towers directly behind the statue of St. Paul, which was dwarfed by the great beast. It rested the end of one tentacle around the saint’s neck, as if considering whether the head was a useful trophy. With another tentacle held onto Gilbert Frobisher, the man very evidently alive, for his head swiveled as he peered roundabout him and then bent his shoulders forward in order to look below. Tubby waved heartily at him, let out a bark of laughter, and cried, “He lives!” in a voice husky with relief.
The octopus had been careful to preserve Gilbert’s life thus far, but although it clearly had a regard for Gilbert, it could know nothing of architecture and engineering. The massive Portland stone in the heavy outer walls of the cathedral supported the great weight that stood atop it now, but its roof timbers were another matter, should the creature
venture farther from the edge. I envisioned the destruction of the great cathedral, the smoking ruin that would be a consequence of our having meddled with Mother Nature, stealing away one of her grandest and most fearsome creatures and blithely bringing it home to lay waste to London.
People were issuing from within the cathedral now, hurrying through the great portico and down the stairs, ushered out by constables and church workers in a state of confusion. Nothing that they had been told could have prepared them for the truth, which was revealed when they looked back and upward into the rainy sky, where the tentacles of the inconceivable creature waved like branches in a stiff wind. The octopus moved away along the wall toward the bell tower now, where it stopped again, reaching upward with a long tentacle and effortlessly snapping off the golden, pineapple finial from atop the tower. A keepsake? I fervently hoped so. The finial was massive, and I recalled that the octopus had thrust an anchor straight through the hull of the Celebes Prince…
Again it moved off, disappearing from our view behind the massive structure of the tower. People roundabout us shifted away, back across the churchyard through the drizzle, hoping to keep the octopus in view.
“Hark!” said St. Ives, and he pointed toward the lawn beyond the clock tower, where a knot of onlookers stood pointing skyward and gawking. One of them sat upon the wooden crate that bore the ball of ambergris, and standing beside him were the other two ruffians who had taken the coach.
We set out directly in the direction of the clock tower, making a circuit of it in order to come in behind our men unawares. The man sitting atop the crate stood up, hoisted the crate to his shoulder, said something to his friends, and the three of them walked away up the south side of the cathedral toward New Change Street and Cheapside. We followed at a quick trot, unseen still, closing the gap between us and them as we approached the east end of the cathedral. There was a din from the direction in which we had come, a hundred voices exclaiming, the octopus cutting capers, no doubt. One of the three men hearing the noise, looked back, saw us closing in upon them, and shouted.
He was too late, however, for Tubby broke into a furious sprint and bowled straight through the man who had shouted, knocking him hard aside and latching onto the one who held the crate, grappling him like a great bear. The third man simply ran away like a horse in the final stretch, easily outdistancing us and disappearing into the traffic that clogged New Change, many of the carts and carriages abandoned, people standing in the road, gazing at the cathedral roof.
The crate tumbled as Tubby’s man was borne down, and it broke open against the edge of the waist-high wall that runs along the edge of the cathedral garden. Hasbro threw himself forward even as it was falling, and caught the ball of ambergris in a flying leap that would have done an acrobat proud. His weight, however, tore loose a small stretch of spear-shaped iron pickets that topped the wall, and he rolled bodily into the garden. He was up again immediately, holding the uninjured ambergris, blood flowing from a long gash on his forehead, where a flap of skin and scalp was torn open.
“Here’s one for Mr. Boggs!” Tubby shouted at his prisoner, and then cuffed him hard on the back of the head and pushed him sprawling onto his hands and knees. Before he could arise, Tubby skipped forward and kicked him on the backside. The man fell onto his face, but immediately scrambled crabwise to his feet and hurried off at a hobbling run, looking back in amazement at the great ivory ball that Hasbro held in his hands. For a moment I thought that Tubby would run him down a second time in order to continue abusing him, but there was more vital work to do. All three of the villains had won free, which gave none of us a moment’s pause. St. Ives hauled a handkerchief out of his vest pocket and carefully closed and swabbed the wound in Hasbro’s scalp, and Tubby offered up his own kerchief, which was something more in the nature of a small awning, and which St. Ives tied as a bandage around Hasbro’s head while I held onto the unlucky orb.
We set out directly, back toward the Ludgate side of the cathedral in order to see the way of things above. The din of the crowd had increased, and hundreds of people jammed the pavement now. A party of Fusiliers endeavored to hold the mob back, but in fact the mob was held back in the interest of the strange view high above them. People pointed skyward past hundreds of black umbrellas, and although I was as wet to the skin, I prayed that the rain would continue, for it was the rain, I was sure of it, that kept the octopus alive.
The creature had ascended partway up the great dome by now, to the level of the Whispering Gallery, where I had gone as a child with my mother, an intrepid climber. The Whispering Gallery stood some two hundred and fifty steps above the floor of the cathedral. The climb had winded me as a boy, despite my boundless energy. The octopus was still moving upward resolutely, holding Gilbert to its breast and clutching at the Corinthian columns that girdled the lower reaches of the dome, hauling itself toward the Stone Gallery now, moving with surprising delicacy, the columns standing solidly under its weight, at least so far.
The mass of people roundabout us were in high spirits, and resembled an audience watching an open-air play at the fair. A boy approached shouting, “Brollies!” and carrying a sack of down-at-heel but serviceable umbrellas, of which we purchased three. Another lad was doing an enviable business selling second-hand opera glasses and tin telescopes. Costers pushed their carts around the perimeter, peddling hot coffee and sweets and hot-cross buns, which were bought up by the wet and shivering. A man nearby offered competing odds whether Gilbert would be crushed or eaten at the hands of the monster, and I cast him a vicious look, which engendered a happy wink. The man was more than half drunk, and offered six-to-one odds in favor of the eating. He didn’t want for punters.
Tubby was deaf to all of it. His entire being was concentrated on the octopus and its passenger. The creature had ascended beyond the Stone Gallery and was creeping across the dome itself, its monstrous tentacles gripping and releasing, the sensitive tips darting here and there as it felt the terrain above. It settled atop the flat bit of eave that runs around Golden Gallery, sitting side-saddle, as it were, wrapping a single tentacle around the gilt ball beneath the pinnacle cross itself. And there it came to rest, three hundred sixty feet above the churchyard, tentacles splayed out over its heavenly throne, waving its pineapple scepter. Gilbert Frobisher sat atop one of its knees, it you’ll allow me the term. Astonishingly, he now held the speaking trumpet and wore Tubby’s Bollinger hat, which was surely a sign of the octopus’s good will. The beast peered out toward Camden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, surveying what it perhaps believed to be its domain. Its immense, drooping mantle hung behind it like a half-inflated balloon. The sky roundabout it was a riot of pewter clouds that stood stock still in the windless heavens.
“I’ll need that ball of ambergris, Jack,” Tubby said, his voice clipped and terse. “If you gentlemen have no objection, I’ll assume responsibility for it from this point hence.” He took it from me before any of us had responded, and then removed his coat and wrapped it around the ball, tying the sleeves tightly to make a bundle.
“Perhaps two of us should carry the ambergris on to Threadneedle Street for safe keeping,” St. Ives said to Tubby. “It’s a matter of little more than half a mile.”
“I mean to return it to its rightful owner,” Tubby said, “as ransom for my uncle.” He shook his head sharply, his face fixed in a determined squint.
St. Ives nodded, although his eyes revealed his doubts. “It’s conceivable that such a plan will work,” he said. “The creature is much attached to the globe, having guarded the thing through the years. It dearly loves a trinket of any sort, and to my mind your ball of ambergris is the real prize.”
“Bartering with the creature has the distinct advantage of being our only option,” Tubby said. “It’s the sole form of diplomacy that the octopus understands. I looked into the depths of its eyes when it first confronted me, and I saw what I believe to be a rational being looking back out at me. It took my measure before it took my
hat. I mean to parlay with it.”
“I adjure you not to go alone, Tubby,” St. Ives said to him. I’ll accompany you.”
“I honor you for the offer, Professor, but I don’t want for company. There’ll be two aloft as it is, two Frobishers. A third man cannot help, nor can a fourth, neither. If our nabob takes it into its mind to descend, or, God help us, to fall…” He paused for a moment and then shook his head sharply. “We’ll want allies on the ground.” And with that, the thing had been decided.
Tubby set out in the direction from whence we had come five minutes previously. I thought hard for a moment before I said to St. Ives and Hasbro, “I’ll accompany him whether he likes it or not,” and before St. Ives could utter anything sensible to me, I handed my newly-purchased umbrella to a woman standing beside me, and then turned on my heel and set out, hurrying to catch up to Tubby and half expecting St. Ives to call me back—perhaps hoping that he would.
“It’s madness, Tubs,” I told him when I drew up to him. “Sheer lunacy.” I was more than a little doubtful about Tubby’s climbing those endless stairs. His monumental strength was inarguable, but like the fearsome and powerful hippopotamus, his endurance was not boundless.
“We’ll chat about it afterward, Jack, or else we will not. Simple as that.”
“It’ll mean two dead. Perhaps you didn’t see what that creature did to Billy Stoddard, but I can tell you that it turned my stomach. It has a fondness for Uncle Gilbert, but…”
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 26
