“That’s Bobby and Cooper in the scow,” Larkin said to Alice. “The ones who foisted your man’s watch. He’s got a sharp eye, has Bobby, and he don’t forget a man’s face once he’s picked his pocket.”
Alice looked back, seeing that Tubby was rowing. Bobby and Cooper were standing on the thwarts, Bobby looking through a short spyglass, sweeping the river. They moved downstream, passing St. Catherine’s Docks on the left bank and a confusion of wharves and causeways on the right. The barrels on the river were farther between now, fewer barrelers finding their way into the river at all. Larkin sculled along at a surprising rate of speed, passing the barrels that were merely borne upon on the tide. There were far more men than women afloat, for some reason, but none of the men was Langdon. A ship blocked the sight of the opposite shore now, and Tubby crossed behind it, the scow disappearing as it went down the far side, then reappearing, the children still scanning the river. The minutes passed, the sun sank out of sight, and now there were no shadows at all, just a gathering dusk. Larkin moved toward the right bank again, where a dozen barrelers bobbed along in a loose cluster, none of them Langdon.
Once again they lost sight of the scow, and now they were swerving around the tight bend of the river into Limehouse Reach, with its maze of dockyards and wharves. Lighters moved from one to another, carrying tons of coal and goods from moored ships. The odd barrel drifted among them, but few and far between. Alice wondered with half a hope whether Langdon mightn’t have got into the river at all. Perhaps he had struggled with the police and was sitting safely in a cell at Newgate Prison—the very thing that Tubby had feared. She prayed that it was so.
There was a piercing whistle now, and Larkin shouted, “Sharp’s the word!” Alice saw that it was Cooper blowing the whistle, the boy Bobby pointing hard at a cluster of five barrels near the left bank, perhaps eighty yards away—four yellow hats—and even in the failing light Alice could see that Langdon floated hatless among them. She thanked God that Bobby had picked his pocket. Larkin brought the skiff around, shaving the stern of a lighter with four feet to spare and not condescending to reply when someone shouted a curse at her.
They approached at a good clip, the scow, the skiff, and the barrels drawing closer and closer together—close enough so that the barrelers perceived that they were about to be boarded. They shouted, endeavoring to grasp hands with their immediate neighbors. They gathered together like a school of fish that perceived a predator, their paddlewheels throwing bow waves as they surged forward. Tubby leaned hard on the oars in order to outdistance them and cut them off, and Larkin shouted, “Hold fast!” and drove straight into the mass, the barrels pushed apart, the bow of the skiff thumping into one of them, spinning it around.
“Langdon!” Alice shouted, reaching far out, waiting for a chance to grab the raised boot at the rear of the craft. Her husband’s head jerked around, and he saw them now. The wild look on his face—the face of a madman, a stranger—made Alice hesitate, but then her own face hardened into a mask of determination. Langdon turned his ships’ wheel hard a-port, driving away toward the left bank and into a current of swift moving water, Larkin following, sculling with wide, even strokes, reversing the blade with each turn.
Langdon was in the midst of the current now, outpacing them, his paddle wheel plowing along, throwing the water wide as they ran down through Limehouse Reach. His energy was clearly fading, however, the paddlewheel slowing and finally stopping. Alice reached down and plucked up the barrel’s stern rope, which was trailing behind. “I’ve got him!” she cried.
But in that moment Langdon opened the hatches of the barrel, stood up, and attempted to leap out. The barrel rolled, and he was pitched face-downward into the water and sank beneath the surface. Alice had no leisure to remove her shoes, but she was thankful that she had worn trowsers beneath her petticoat. She hastily slipped out of her skirt and petticoat and rolled over the gunnel into the river, her eyes and mouth tight shut. She surfaced, got her bearings, and struck out after her husband, holding her head high.
Langdon was swimming desperately into the dark shadow between two moored ships now, his shoes and coat obviously dragging at him. Alice swam up alongside him, holding her head above the water and planting a hand under his right shoulder, scissoring her feet in order to propel herself upward and flinging him over onto his back with all her strength, then throwing her arm across his chest and bringing her hip up under the small of his back, stroking hard with her right hand and kicking her feet to keep them both afloat.
He arched suddenly as if he meant to fling himself into the air, and then splashed down, driving both of them beneath the water. She held on tenaciously, levering him over onto his back again, jamming her hip beneath him, and getting her head up, the dirty Thames water streaming from her hair.
“Easy,” she gasped. “I have you now, my darling.” He groaned softly, moving his lips as if trying to speak. Whether he understood her, she couldn’t say, but he ceased to struggle. She heard a wooden clatter, and then heard both Tubby and Larkin shouting at her to hold on. An oar glanced off the side of her head, followed by a shouted apology. She flailed out with her free hand, banged her knuckles on the oar, and then got a grip on it, fearing that at any moment Langdon would cut another caper and break from her grasp. Tubby drew them in quickly, however, and with Bobby and Cooper pulling and Alice pushing, they heaved Langdon into the scow, where he lay on the flat bottom between the thwarts.
Alice grabbed onto the gunnel of the skiff, not daring to attempt to pull herself into it and risk overturning. As her breathing slowed it came fully into her mind that Langdon was safe, or at least alive. She thought of Larkin’s admonition that she must “kiss the frog,” and of Gilbert’s very nearly awakening when she had done so. The thought was an element of hope that she held onto as tightly as she held onto the skiff. She did her best to be silent in her weeping and was happy that her tears would mingle with the Thames water still leaking from her hair. Larkin bent over to look down at her and said, “That’s Drunkard’s Dock right ahead, ma’am. Bobby and Cooper can fetch a barrow. We’ll push your man up to Greenwich Road and find a hackney to fetch us back to the Half Toad.”
KISSING THE FROG
HUNDREDS OF BARRELS grounded on the Goodwin Sands, and an unknown number of barrelers drowned or lost at sea,” Alice read. “They’re still searching for bodies.”
She laid the Times on the table and looked at St. Ives, who sat across from her, saying little. His hands shook uncontrollably from time to time, and he had elected to sit on them. The shaking was evidence of his headfirst plunge into madness, and he was anxious to expunge as much of that evidence as he possibly could. With luck, he would be rid of the worst symptoms by tomorrow, and they could return to Aylesford. The guilt and shame, Alice knew, would weigh on his mind despite anything she could say to diminish them.
“The death toll would have been far worse if there had been heavy seas,” Gilbert said. And then to St. Ives, in a perfectly cheerful voice, he said, “The tremors will pass away, Professor. I shook like a jelly when the poison was wearing off yesterday, but I’m steady now. It was a rapid decline, to be sure, but an equally rapid recovery. Are you still dreaming of the river?”
“Yes,” St. Ives said. “I’m in the river every time I close my eyes.”
“We share that, then. I’m rather happy about being there, however. There never was such calm, pellucid water in the waking world, such utter peace. I now understand the opium addict’s regard for his pipe. Do you know that opium eaters employ people to awaken them from their dreams? They won’t leave them otherwise, but would starve on their couches, the dream world being so very much superior to our own.” Then, looking across to the table where Tubby and Larkin played a desperate game of Old Maid, he shouted, “Tubby’s got a card in his sleeve, Larkin!”
“And who taught me that dodge when I was a mere boy?” Tubby asked, glowering at his uncle. “Do you remember drilling it into me? ‘Shuffle me
an ace,’ you’d say, and then give me a sweet when I succeeded. You should have been taken up for ruining a child’s innocence.” He removed the half-hidden card from his sleeve and tossed it onto the pile of discards. To Larkin he said, “Watch your Uncle Gilbert very carefully when he deals cards, child.”
Larkin scooped up the pot. “Fair is fair,” she said, “and I’m not a child. You cheat, you lose your chink.”
“Now see what you’ve done, Uncle. She’s very nearly fleeced me. Loan me back ten bob, Larkin.”
“I will, too, but you must pay me back fifteen.”
“Larcenous,” Tubby said. “Are you quite persuaded to be her guardian, Uncle? You see how it goes with her.”
“Doubly persuaded now that she’s taken you down a peg.”
“It’s wonderful that you offered to be Larkin’s guardian,” Alice said to Gilbert in a low voice. “Are you quite sure you’re up to the task—a girl, after all. Soon she’ll be a woman, with all that entails, and a fierce one, too.”
“My man Barlow and his wife have two girls of their own. Mrs. Barlow will rally round. And as for fierceness, why, the girl helped save the lot of us on account of it. I value her for it. I worry only that she’ll find life in Dicker fairly mild. She knows something about birds, however, and there’s famous birding on the South Downs.”
Alice looked at St. Ives and discovered that he was gazing at her. “Is your memory returning?” she asked him.
“Yes, but in fragments. I recall consuming the first two packets of the powders at the George Inn, and again the following morning before I wrote that humiliating note and left if for Billson to find. My down-going course was so swift, however, that I very quickly became a mere sot, to my undying shame. Perhaps it’s best that I don’t recall it in detail.” He picked up the morocco note-book from the table in front of him and looked into it. Immediately he shut it and set it back down.
“But I remember being in the Thames,” he told her, “and you holding me. You said, ‘I have you now.’ I’d have drowned otherwise. I know that much.”
Alice found that she was unable to speak, and so she took Larkin’s advice and kissed him.
The Aerial Spring
TWO MEN CROSSED the grounds of Bimbury Manor, the medieval ruin near Thurnham in Kent. The late spring morning, the nineteenth of June, was quiet, there being no one present save the two, one tall and one short, who followed an overgrown path toward a particularly wild section of woodland. It was a still day, the leaves and grasses a deep green. The heavy limbs of the Spanish chestnuts stretching above them had shaded the path for untold centuries, the trees having been planted by the lord of the manor in a distant age. The shorter of the two men, William Hampson, the Vicar of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, carried a broad magnifying glass. He stopped for a moment to study a block of flint half hidden in a creeper-covered wall. Hampson was an amateur lichenologist, churchyard lichens being his specialty, although he was attracted to any lichen that grew upon old, cut stone, the older the better.
The other man was Professor Langdon St. Ives, a naturalist and adventurer who lived some five miles away in Aylesford with his wife Alice and his two children, Eddie and Cleo. St. Ives had walked the distance to Bimbury Manor early this morning when the sun was just up and the air was cool. He carried a haversack that he intended to fill with summer mushrooms. He had no compelling interest in lichens, but he and Hampson had recently become friends and the two enjoyed each other’s company. Hampson had only yesterday sent to tell St. Ives of his accidental discovery of previously unknown standing stones in a meadow hidden deep within the woods beyond the old manor. If there were undisturbed lichens upon those stones the plants might conceivably be thousands of years old. Hampson had stumbled upon the meadow at evening and was unsure of his way home, and with night coming on he’d had no time to spare for it.
They followed the path downhill now, forded a stream, and went up another rise, climbing over a fallen tree and picking their way through a low, swampy area overgrown with fern, marsh orchids, and the asparagus-like shoots of club moss. No human footprints were to be seen on the damp trail save the three-days-old imprints of Hampson’s boots coming down from the opposite way. There were the prints of badgers and deer, however, and they started a number of rabbits and surprised a large red fox that regarded the two men curiously for a time before turning and disappearing into the heavy foliage. The trail had quite disappeared by then, and they found their way only because Hampson, anxious to make his way back to his standing stones, had tied ribbons torn out of a blue handkerchief to conspicuous limbs.
“I’m very keen to ascend in your balloon, Professor,” Hampson said as they trudged along. “I long to be aloft and that much closer to heaven, as foolish as it sounds when I say it out loud.”
St. Ives had been up in the balloon a dozen times, tethered for the first several flights. Alice had no idea of his being blown out over the North Sea, however, especially with the Vicar riding along, and she recommended the tether, but Hampson was sensible of the danger, and rather enjoyed the prospect of an untethered ascent. “It doesn’t sound silly at all,” St. Ives told him. “There’s something heavenly about a balloon ride, to be sure.”
“I was offered the chance to ascend many years ago with Roger Kryzanek, the eccentric Polish balloonist, who was a friend of mine. Two days prior, however, I took a header down the sacristy stairs and broke my tibia, and I was cheated of the opportunity. It was months before I was steady on my pins. By that time Kryzanek had quite disappeared. He lived in Maidstone at the time, six children in all. That was twelve years back, almost to the day. Did you know Kryzanek?”
“Not first-hand,” St. Ives said. “I’ve read about his exploits, however—those that were made public—especially of his strange disappearance above Sandwich. The Kryzanek mystery, as the Times called it, was very much in the news because of the report of a rain of periwinkles and nondescript pelagic crabs, bright orange, in a farmer’s field on that same day.”
“I recall the phenomenon,” Hampson said, “or at least the rumor of it.”
“Unfortunately, Alice recalls it quite well. She was a girl at the time, living near Plumstead.”
“In what sense is the memory unfortunate?” Hampson asked, pushing aside the limb of a shrub and holding it for St. Ives.
“She believes, perhaps rightly, that I sometimes take too great an interest in scientific arcanum and that the habit lures me into dangerous waters. She herself is fond of mysteries only if they’re safely imprisoned within the pages of a novel.” He pointed now and said, “I believe I see one of your ribbons, away to the left there.”
They clambered through the undergrowth toward the correct track, Hampson pointing out a stand of penny bun mushrooms to St. Ives. “Julia fries them with butter,” Hampson said. “They’re the prince of mushrooms, for my money.”
“I’m with you there,” St. Ives said as he set about gathering a goodly number of the largest.
When they set out again, Hampson said, “My brother-in-law Bates, the publican at the Queen’s Rest in Wrotham Heath, witnessed Kryzanek’s disappearance. He was one of the ground crew, you know—the chemist. Kryzanek preferred hydrogen gas to hot air, and Bates could brew up hydrogen gas by the tubful. He comprehends the art of it. As Dick Bates tells it, Kryzanek’s balloon was drawn out of sight by a vortex of wind. He was heavily ballasted with sand, but not heavily enough, perhaps. One moment the balloon was visible, and the next it was not, as if it was yanked out of the sky with a shepherd’s crook. Kryzanek was never seen again, poor fellow.”
“A vortex of wind, do you say? What an unlikely notion. It’s the sort of thing that Alice would be unhappy to hear.”
“That was Bates’s phrase, but it was repeated in the newspapers, which made it official. Your rain of periwinkles and crabs was written off as a hoax.”
“Almost certainly it was a hoax,” St. Ives said.
“Or a miracle,” Hampson said, “whic
h is an often overlooked possibility.”
They found the ghost of a game trail and for half an hour made good time. Mushrooms of prodigious size grew everywhere, with enormous chicken-of-the-woods sending out fat gold rays from oak trees, and dense patches of chanterelles growing up through the deep mulch of the forest floor. St. Ives plucked up the chanterelles as he went along, putting them carefully into his haversack. The mushrooms were further evidence that the area was unexplored: they would certainly have been collected and eaten otherwise. Hampson’s standing stones might indeed be previously undiscovered or, at the very least, long, long forgotten. The two men had agreed that they would remain so: there were too few wild places left in England.
“We’re very near the meadow, if I’m not mistaken,” Hampson said, pointing to yet another ribbon, and the two climbed a steep rise onto a hilltop at the bottom of which lay a grassy dell, perhaps an acre in size. The circle of weathered standing stones stood dead center—grey limestone richly colored by swathes of lichen. There was the sound of bees on the air and of an unseen fall of water, both of which increased the sense of loneliness.
The stones and the lichen, however, were suddenly of little interest to St. Ives, for he was distracted by something monumentally unlikely—a clamorous waterfall—a vertical, sunlit cylinder of water with no visible source, falling straight down out of the sky some twenty feet from the standing stones. It might have been an optical illusion, except that water was clearly splashing onto the meadow and running down to the edge of the woods in a wide rill and forming a small but apparently growing pool.
“I saw no such thing when I passed this way earlier,” Hampson said, staring at the sight. “The meadow was dry. Now it looks for all the world as if someone has opened a tap in the heavens.”
“There appears to be a vague disturbance of the air far above, perhaps at the source—the spring, as it were.”
The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives Page 33
