The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  “On the bleeding lake?” Parsons sputtered. “The man was raving.”

  “Never,” Tubby said. “Quittichunk’s Tablets were efficacious there, too, you know – in the case of lunacy, that is to say. Uncle Gilbert ground them with a pestle and consumed the powder with a measured dose of whisky when he was tempted to run mad.”

  Parsons blinked, speechless, his heavy features frozen into a rictus of bewildered loathing. The waiter brought the fresh bottle, which was beaded with moisture and apparently steaming cold. He poured it into Parsons’s glass, and the rush of ascending bubbles seemed to restore the man to partial equanimity.

  “You remember Uncle Gilbert, Langdon?” Tubby said. “You can vouch for his sanity?”

  “Indeed I can,” St. Ives replied. “As sane as you or I and with a measure left over.”

  “I have no argument with that,” Parsons muttered.

  St. Ives, in fact, would not swear an oath on the matter of Uncle Gilbert’s sanity, if it came down to it, although it was true that sanity was a difficult thing to define.

  “Do you know that he’s come up from Dicker on a birding expedition in the Cliffe Marshes?” Tubby asked. “He’s keen on finding the great bustard, which have largely been shot out of existence.”

  “He intends to bag the rest of them?” Parsons asked.

  “Not Uncle Gilbert. He intends to count them. Goes off hunting with his binocle and a notebook. The bird was allegedly seen in the brushlands in the marshes by an amateur birder, although it might easily have been an enormous pheasant. Uncle Gilbert means to sort the bustard out. He’s setting up a bivouac above the bay. Another glass of this capital champagne?” Tubby asked St. Ives.

  “No,” St. Ives said. “It’s wasted on me.”

  “You were off your feed at lunch, I noticed. Pining for home and hearth again?”

  St. Ives nodded, started to reply, but was abruptly distracted when it came into his mind that he had been promised begonia cuttings, and that he might have time to fetch them before leaving for the station. The thought perked him up considerably. Something good might come of this damnable two-weeks-long detour after all. Alice was a slave to begonias – one of her chief hobbyhorses. She could plant a fragment of a leaf in a pot of sand, and it would put down roots and produce fresh leaves in a fortnight. She would be doubly happy to see him if he arrived with cuttings, and, it seemed to him at that moment, her happiness was his own.

  He bent forward and looked back out of the window, where he could see the glass roof of the conservatory, a small palm house kept by an ancient gardener named Jensen Shorter, recently the secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society. Shorter had seemed to decline in stature over the long years and was now as old as Moses and as tall as Commodore Nutt. The interior of the glass building appeared to St. Ives to be inordinately dark, given the bright afternoon, as if the coal oil heater were smoking, although why the heater would be on in midsummer was a poser. Shorter was a begonia fancier of the first water: rhizomatous exclusively, no gaudy tuberous show-offs. He had been given two-dozen new species from Brazil a year ago, but he wouldn’t hear of parting with any of the plants until his cuttings had flourished. Given that he hadn’t taken the lot of them out to the gardens at Chiswick, it wouldn’t take ten minutes for Shorter to snip off a few pieces of rhizome, which would ride home snugly in various coat pockets.

  St. Ives stood up decidedly. “Good day to you both,” he said. “I’ve got to see Shorter about begonia cuttings before I set out for Tooley Street.”

  “Begonias,” said Parsons dismissively, “I don’t fancy them myself. Hairy damned abominations, like something out of a nightmare.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” St. Ives said, shaking the man’s hand. “Please convey my apologies to the Society for the way this business of Banks’s notebooks fell out. I would have had it turn out in any other way than it did.”

  “As would I,” Parsons said, shaking his head and scowling. “The loss in money is troubling enough, not to mention the reputation of the Society, but that’s the least of it. Forty-seven original drawings by the greatest botanist of his age reduced to muddy rubbish! Still, no one’s suggesting that you were careless in the matter. Time and chance happeneth to all of us, eh? Some of us perhaps more often than others. All the more reason to put it behind us, as they say.”

  “Time and chance it will have to be,” St. Ives said, seeing that Tubby had a dangerous look about him, as if he were on the verge of committing an act of violence against Secretary Parsons. “I’ll just be off, then. Tubby, give my best to Chingford.”

  “I’ll do that,” Tubby said. “I’m on my way out myself, though. I’ll see you to the street.” He drank off the rest of his champagne, nodded darkly at Parsons, and put on his hat.

  They passed through the book room, which was nearly empty, although it appeared to contain a high percentage of luminaries among the several men lounging at the tables. Lord Kelvin sat alone near the window, sketching something out on a piece of foolscap. St. Ives knew two of the others by reputation, both mad doctors, who sat nattering away in Latin; one of them a wild-eyed French phrenologist and the other a crackpot criminologist from Turin University named Lombroso, whose work with imbeciles had impressed certain members of the Royal Society, especially Secretary Parsons, who was happy with the idea that the greater part of the world’s population suffered from imbecility. St. Ives was currently inclined to include himself among that number.

  “There might be a bigger fool than Secretary Lambert Parsons alive in the world,” Tubby said, “but if there is, he keeps himself moderately well hidden. The man is a humorless oaf. It’s a marvel that air allows itself to enter his lungs.”

  They walked down into the entry hall, where Lawrence, the doorman, was propped against the wall just inside the open door, taking advantage of a warm ray of sunlight, his eyes closed.

  “Do you have a coin for Lawrence?” Tubby whispered to St. Ives. “My pockets are empty.”

  St. Ives reached into his pocket, and in that instant there sounded a shattering explosion and he was thrown bodily to the floor, Tubby landing on top of him like two-hundredweight of sand. St. Ives was deafened by the blast, and he found himself looking up at the chandelier swaying dangerously overhead, plaster raining down.

  “Move!” he shouted at Tubby, his voice sounding small and distant, but his friend was already pushing himself to his feet, and the two of them staggered at a run through the door, the chandelier crashing to the tiles behind them, glass crystals pelting them on the back of the legs.

  Lawrence crouched on the footpath now, holding his palm over a bloody gash on the side of his head. There was the sound of screams, people shouting and running. The ground was littered with broken glass and wood, fragments of stone pots, and uprooted trees and shrubs.

  Shorter lay folded in half, dead still, twenty feet away on the lawn, his neck and head canted back at an unnatural angle. St. Ives saw at once that the man’s arm was missing at the shoulder, torn off in the blast. He looked away, his chest tightening.

  The glasshouse had blown to pieces. Where it had been there was a stone foundation and little more. Along the base of the inside wall, between what had been the glasshouse and the Bayswater Club proper, a gaping hole looked down into the Ranelagh Sewer. Sunlight shone through the hole, revealing the shimmering surface of the Westbourne River moving toward the Thames through its immense brick tunnel.

  Secretary Parsons appeared, looking stunned. “Thank God the force of the blast went out through the glass,” he said. “Aside from the odd window and the chandelier in the entry, the club itself seems to be sound. Poor Shorter.” He shook his head, looking across the lawn. “He was with Wellington at Waterloo, you know. Ninety years old if he was a day. And now he’s done down by a damned anarchist in his own palm house.”

  “Do we know that?” asked St. Ives.

  “Take a look at the man,” Parsons said. “He’s been blown to pieces.”

/>   “I mean do we know it was an anarchist’s device? Why would anarchists blow up a palm house?”

  “Because they’re imbeciles. They exist to be imbeciles. No one but an imbecile would detonate a bomb in a hollow tree near Marble Arch, but the thing was done.”

  Parsons and Tubby moved away toward where a policeman was just then laying a coat across Shorter’s body. It occurred to St. Ives that the totality of the old man’s begonias lay in fragments amidst the rubble. He would gather pieces of them up before he left, he thought, and Alice could carry on with them – something saved from this carnage. He stepped down onto the floor of the ruined glasshouse and looked around, seeing at once that there was a wash of fine black dust on the ground, despite the turbulence of the blast, which must have thrown most of it into the atmosphere. Several clay pots that had miraculously survived the blast burned with an orange flame, which was damned odd. He smelled a wisp of rising smoke. Greek fire? Sulfur, surely. He tried to recall the ingredients of the incendiary fluid – pitch? Resin? The smell of sulfur overrode the others. He recalled that the interior of the glasshouse had been uncommonly dark when he had looked out at it through the window. Coal gas was a filthy substance when it burned, but that scarcely explained things here, unless it had been leaking badly.

  He stepped across and peered into the sewer, although it was too dark to see more than a few feet in either direction. The brick floor of the enormous pipe was so broad as to be nearly flat, with a depression in the floor along which the Westbourne rippled in its channel. There was a litter of wet brick lying about and more of the black dust. He crouched at the edge of the ragged hole and bent into the pipe, looking back upriver into utter darkness. A person could trudge all the way to Hampstead Heath in that direction, to where the Westbourne rose at Whitestone Ponds, but it would be a long and tiresome journey. He turned to look downriver, and immediately saw a light in the far distance: the mouth of the sewer, perhaps, where it emptied into the Thames below the Chelsea Embankment.

  Abruptly the light shifted, however, then disappeared entirely, and then winked back on – not the mouth of the sewer at all, but a lantern some distance away, moving in the direction of the Thames. Perhaps a lone anarchist.

  St. Ives stepped into the sewer, down the several feet to the floor, and set out into the musty air, the light through the hole in the sewer wall giving up almost immediately so that he quickly found himself in darkness. His going back after a lantern would simply waste time – no value in even thinking about it. And besides, a lantern would give him away. It was stealth he wanted. He trailed his left hand along the wall, watching the lantern light ahead, unable to gauge its distance. Thank God, he thought, that the moving water smelled as if it were more river than filth, but he was careful where he stepped – as careful as was possible in the darkness.

  He hastened forward, emboldened by the comparatively smooth brick floor, but almost immediately he stumbled over an impediment and fell to his knees, scraping his palms on the bricks and letting out a muffled shout, cursing himself under his breath, and then staying very still. The lantern in the distance went on apace. He looked back, but could see nothing behind him now, the tunnel curving slightly to the west as it ran beneath Hyde Park. That he could still see the lantern meant that it was closer than he had thought; otherwise it, too, would be hidden by the swerve of the tunnel wall.

  He pushed himself to his feet, flexing his bruised knees, and went quietly on, listening hard. The awful picture of Shorter lying dead on the lawn came into his mind, and abruptly he wished that he had a weapon of some sort. He thought of Tubby Frobisher, who was as fearless as a water buffalo and nearly as vast. Tubby would have come along with him in a cold moment if only St. Ives had thought to summon him before setting out. But there was nothing for it but to go on. Nothing ventured, he thought, nothing gained – aside from a knife in the ribs.

  It came to him now that he could hear a squeaking and rattling, like axles turning, as if the moving lantern were fixed on a cart. Had they brought machinery with them? To what end…?

  He heard a sharp, scraping sound behind him now. He turned, seeing too late a moving shadow lunging toward him, a man’s narrow face slightly pale against the darkness. St. Ives was borne over backward, the back of his head banging down onto the brick floor so that his skull rang with the force of it. Before he could come to his senses he was rolled bodily into the river, his assailant clutching him by the hair, pushing his head beneath the surface of the water.

  St. Ives flailed with his hands, seeking a purchase on the brick, which scraped past beneath him as he was swept downward in the flood, pulled from the grip of the man who was endeavoring to drown him. He lurched upward, gasping in a breath of air and twisting around, getting his feet under him so that he managed to half stand up. Immediately he was struck hard on the right cheek with something heavy and flat – the blade of a shovel? – and he reeled back against the wall of the tunnel, his cheek throbbing with pain, holding out his hands to keep the blade away from his face, hoping that his assailant was equally blind and that it had been a lucky blow.

  He saw that the distant lantern bobbed toward him now – almost certainly a second assailant, coming at a run to finish him off. The word “imbecile” was no doubt writ large on his own face where the shovel had struck him. Then he realized that he was looking upriver and not down – that the lantern was coming down from above – two lanterns, in fact, come to rescue him. He heard his assailant’s splashing footfalls receding down the tunnel. There was no lantern to be seen downstream at all now, no sound of turning axles, nothing but dark silence.

  TWO

  HOME AT LAST

  “You say that you followed these men into the darkness alone, Langdon?” Alice asked.

  “Not men, do you see. One man.”

  “But you said that you believed one to be pushing a cart with a lantern on it while the other one lurked behind to waylay you. I count two.”

  “Lurked, as you so accurately put it. I had no idea of anyone lurking, not until he sprang out at me.” St. Ives helped himself to a second slice of cold beef and kidney pie and poured more ale from the pitcher on the breadboard. Moonlight shone through the bullseye glass in the kitchen window, casting circular shadows on the wall behind him.

  “Lurkers are clever that way,” she said. “They’ve been schooled in the art of lurking. That’s why one doesn’t wade into dark tunnels to seek them out. You’ve still got black grit along the edge of the wound.” She dipped a cloth in a basin of water and wiped gingerly at the dried blood.

  The wind had come up outside, and the night beyond the wall was alive with moaning and creaking. It had been a hellish trip out from London – a three-hour wait outside Gravesend for repairs to be made to the tracks, and with every hour that passed St. Ives had regretted not having taken a coach. Walking would have made considerably more sense than waiting, or at least wouldn’t have been so wretchedly frustrating. Despite the noise of the wind, Alice had opened the front door the moment she heard him step up onto the veranda half an hour ago. She had been up waiting for him, perhaps watching from the bedroom window upstairs.

  “You’re quite fortunate that you were turning away from him,” she said, peering closely at his face. “He might easily have disfigured you. You’ll have an untidy scar.”

  Her dark hair was tousled from sleep, giving her a slightly wild air, and she wore a silk robe that made her appear… lithe, perhaps. She was tall, nearly six feet, and under certain circumstances could appear to be quite formidable – at the present moment, in fact – largely because of her eyes, which had the keenness of those of a predatory bird, and were intensely beautiful. It seemed to him now that he had been away a foolishly long time, and he wondered what she was wearing beneath the robe.

  “What I feel most,” he said, shifting the subject into a safer realm, “is the death of the book thief. I didn’t want that. I’m certain that I behaved as a complete flat throughout. The escapade se
ems to me too contrived, elaborately choreographed up until the point of the man’s death, which was a grotesque accident.”

  “But it’s done now, if I follow your story correctly.”

  “Done and done, as was I – done to a turn.”

  “Indeed. First by this mysterious book thief, and then by yourself, and then by a man with a coal shovel.”

  “By myself, do you say?”

  “You went into the tunnel out of a sense of guilt, it would seem. You had failed to solve the first crime, and in fact blamed yourself for compounding it. So you set out into the sewer to put things right as a salve to your conscience.”

  He sat in silence considering this. It sounded logical enough to him, although equally unfair. Human motivation was surely more complex than this.

  “At the time,” he said to her, “it seemed to me that there was a man’s murderer to catch, and it was within my power to do so.”

  “Good enough. But you’re also telling me that you had Tubby Frobisher close at hand, but you failed to invite him to join you in the pursuit of this murderer, this anarchist?”

  “I’m not persuaded that anarchy had anything to do with it,” he said.

  “Ah, surely that makes a great difference. Were you worried that Tubby would be discommoded, then?”

  “Tubby? Of course not. He would have seen it as sport. You know Tubby.”

  “Indeed I do. I’m baffled that you didn’t know him a little better yourself when you decided to go sporting in the sewer alone.” She tossed the cloth onto the tabletop, stepped back, and gave him a steady look, staring not at the wound on his cheek, but into his eyes, holding his gaze. It wouldn’t do to look away, and clearly it was best not to answer. “The next time you behave like an impulsive schoolboy and witlessly put yourself in danger, you won’t have to go into a sewer in order to be beaten with a coal shovel. I can accommodate you in that regard right here at home.”