The Aylesford Skull

by James P. Blaylock

  Who had done this – the man she had seen standing among the trees? Why hadn’t he merely stolen the fish, which could feed a moderately large family? He must have been remarkably curious if he had simply wanted to get a look at it. She stared at the fish for another moment, then hoisted the creel over her forearm and started off along the shore once again, looking into the wood with a heightened sense of suspicion. She unfastened the gaff from where it hung at her side and gripped the handle. Carrying the gaff in one hand and the creel in the other meant leaving the waders, but she would be less encumbered. The man would think twice about approaching her once he’d had a look at the business end of the gaff. Soon she was entirely out of sight around the swerve of the shore, and in fifteen minutes she was home again.

  The sun shone through the intertwined branches of the wisteria alley, stippling the path. Away to her left the hop plants were shockingly green, climbing up their twining supports toward the heavens. She saw that Eddie and his sister Cleo were playing at tin soldiers on the broad veranda, Cleo laughing and bowling through Eddie’s troops with a siege engine towed by a mechanical elephant that was a marvel of moving gears, visible through a sort of Momus’s glass set into the elephant’s belly. The wind-up engine had been contrived for the children by William Keeble, the preternaturally brilliant London toymaker and inventor, who had long been Langdon’s friend.

  Young Finn Conrad, the gardener’s apprentice, was cultivating the soil in the flowerbeds nearby, clearing fresh weeds from around a riot of pansies and foxgloves and marigolds. Finn had come into their lives a year ago, having endured a hard passage on the streets of London for a time before that, after tramping down the North Road from Edinburgh when he was eleven years old, taking six months on the journey. He had grown up in Duffy’s Circus and had manifold talents, of which they knew only a small part. He spoke less of what he had learned on the road and shifting for himself on the London streets and docks than about what he had learned in the circus, although no doubt both of those worldly schools were colorful in their course of study. He could ride a horse as if he were born to it, which he had been, and he was an astonishing tumbler and acrobat, with a fearlessness that made Alice pale on occasion, and which she very much hoped would not appeal to Eddie beyond a merely useful degree.

  Finn stopped hoeing for a moment, apparently giving Eddie advice about troop movements, and then he saw Alice and waved heartily. She knew that Finn was a little bit in love with her, which was endearing, although it was only one of many endearing things about the boy, who was honest and forthright to a fault. The summer afternoon was so serene, and the scene so idyllic, that Alice felt abruptly foolish to be carrying the gaff, and she regretted having abandoned the waders, which ran the risk of being stolen by the lurker in the wood.

  “Did you catch him?” Finn asked

  “I did not,” Alice told him. “He stole my newly tied fly and nearly took my pole into the bargain. But I know where he lives now. He can’t hide from me.”

  She greeted the children, who marveled at the pike in the creel, especially its enormous mouth and teeth. Eddie immediately saw its military potential as a counter to the elephant, but Alice closed the top of the creel, pointing out the fish’s potential as supper, which failed to impress either of the children.

  “I’ve built a parachute, Mother, in order to launch soldiers from an airship like the one Father is to have.” Eddie showed her a spotted handkerchief, cut into an octagon, the corners tied with string, the bottom ends tied around the neck of a marine.

  “It doesn’t work,” Cleo put in. “He’s killed seven soldiers trying.”

  “I have not,” Eddie said. “One’s broken his leg, that’s all. I set it with a splint.”

  He broke off, seeing that Cleo was again mobilizing the elephant, and Alice leaned her fishing rod against the corner of the veranda and carried the creel into the house, where she found her husband sitting on the big upholstered chair next to a sunny window in the drawing room, his long legs resting atop an ottoman, Hodge the cat stretched out asleep across his knees.

  Alice had bought the chair and ottoman in London, courtesy of Aunt Agatha’s estate. The chair was one of the new coil-spring affairs with a vast amount of padding. Most of the furnishings in the house had belonged to her aunt, and were in varying degrees ancient, including the watercolors of wild flowers and fish that hung on the walls. The room, with its Turkey carpets and polished wood-paneling, was somewhat beyond the fashion, which delighted Alice, who found these reflections of the past both comforting and beautiful.

  St. Ives looked up from a copy of Benson’s Air Vessels of the Royal Navy, just now aware that Alice had come in. He wore down-at-heel slippers and the disreputable waistcoat with embroidered orchids and flower petal buttons that he had apparently owned since he was a young man at the university, when he was something more of a Bohemian. It was much frayed and was rubbed through at the collar, but he generally put it on when he was in an expansive, cheerful mood. The carpet roundabout the chair was littered with drawings, books, and catalogues.

  “One week!” he said to her happily.

  “Until…?”

  “Until the vessel is airworthy. Or so Keeble tells me.” He picked up a letter from the table next to the chair and waved it at her. “It came in today’s post. Keeble has laid out the particulars – the miniaturization, the motive power. It’s a very nearly fabulous craft, Alice, perhaps the first of its type – a rigid skeleton, do you see, built of bent bamboo, with the skin stretched around it so that it maintains its shape even when it’s idle. Hydrogen gas will fill the nose of the craft first, so that it’ll be very nearly vertical at launch, with the interior of the gondola remaining level due to its being hung on a pendulum. We’ll stow it in the barn. I’m devising a means by which to draw back a vast section of the roof in order to sail her straight up into the sky. Have I mentioned that?”

  “Not above a dozen times,” she said. “I think it’s a grand idea. The family can flee the country at a moment’s notice when Scotland Yard finds us out. I’ll keep a bag packed and ready.”

  St. Ives laughed out loud. He was happy enough with his pending airship to be easily amused. “What do you have in the creel?” he asked. “Supper or something to hang on the wall?”

  “Supper, I believe. It’s been a baffling afternoon.”

  He set Hodge onto the ground, hauled his legs off the footstool, picked up a scattering of papers from the floor, and set them atop the upholstery. Alice ascertained that the bottom of the creel was dry before settling it on the papers.

  “Baffling in what sense?” he asked, opening the creel. “Outwitted by a fish, were you?”

  “Yes, but I expected that. He’s a wise old fish.” She told him about the man in the wood, the crying out, the battle of the weir, and the strange business of someone having meddled with the pike.

  The kitchen door opened, and St. Ives’s factotum, Hasbro, walked in carrying lemonade on a tray. He and St. Ives had been through so many adventures together that neither factotum nor manservant quite applied, although it had at one time. Hasbro kept up his old habits, though, which had come to define a small part of him. Alice took a glass gratefully. Fishing was thirsty work. St. Ives pushed aside a mechanical bat that sat on the table – an automaton, built by Lambert in Paris, which was so perfectly contrived that it looked stuffed. He set his glass down and then peered into the creel again.

  “You say that someone not only opened this, but examined the fish? And he didn’t simply pinch it?”

  “Yes. It was the strangest thing, especially given the man hiding among the trees. I was never apparently in any danger, and the fish is comfortable enough, but someone had a highly suspicious interest in the creel and in my fishing. Absolutely nothing came of it, I’m happy to say, although I left my wading boots behind.”

  “Should I fetch the wading boots, ma’am?” Hasbro asked. “I’m taking my afternoon constitutional shortly. I’d as soon walk alon
g the river as elsewhere.”

  “Thank you, Hasbro,” Alice said to him. “If you don’t mind. You won’t need to search for them.”

  St. Ives had his head in the basket now, evidently smelling the fish. He looked up, frowning. “Do you detect an odor?” he asked Hasbro, holding out the creel. “Not the odor of pike, but something else, something musty? I don’t believe it to be the moss. Something quite distinct.”

  Hasbro sniffed the open creel, thought for a moment and sniffed again. “Boiling parsnips,” he said. “Certainly neither the moss nor the fish.”

  “Mouse filth, I was thinking, although parsnips emit the same odor.”

  “If I were to make a hasty judgment, sir, I’d guess devil’s porridge.”

  “Yes, and almost certainly distilled, not conveniently dredged out of a nearby ditch. There’s none of it mixed into the moss.”

  “Devil’s porridge?” Alice asked. “You don’t mean to say…”

  “Yes,” St. Ives told her. “Assuredly it’s hemlock. The demise of Socrates distilled into a clear liquid. Look here. The villain has sliced the fish open with something very sharp – a carefully honed knife or perhaps a scalpel – along the edge of the dorsal fin where the incision isn’t apparent. He wanted to make sure that the poison invaded the flesh, you see. It’s impossible to say how much he poured in or how potent the solution.” He picked the fish up by the mouth and tail and turned it over. “No doubt he dumped some here on the gaff wound, also, poisoning the adjacent meat. If you’d simply given this to Mrs. Langley to stuff and poach, we’d all of us be dead by bedtime, Eddie and Cleo included.”

  “I’ll just take a fowling piece with me along to the river,” Hasbro said.

  “Would you like company?” St. Ives asked.

  “The rifle is company enough, I should think. I fear he’ll be far away by now.”

  “Indeed,” said St. Ives. “An escaped lunatic, I’d warrant, except that he would have to be a tolerably careful chemist, not that chemists don’t run mad as often as the next man. Rather more often, quite likely.” He glanced at Alice, who was looking steadily at him.

  “Shall I have Mr. Binger dispose of the fish, sir?”

  “If you will, Hasbro. Ask him to hack it up and cover it with quicklime, then bury it deeply enough so that Hodge won’t get at it.”

  FIVE

  THE RETURN OF THE DEAD

  The suggestion that the hemlock fancier had been an escaped lunatic had failed to impress Alice; St. Ives had seen as much in her face, although she hadn’t confronted him with it. The crime was too devious, too well thought out, too purposeful. He could think of only one man who might do such a thing, but why that man should be lurking in the environs of north Kent was a mystery to him. The man, an evil genius who called himself Dr. Narbondo, was well acquainted with their previous residence in Chingford. Indeed, Hasbro had chased him from the premises a little under a year ago when he’d come around at night intent on stealing St. Ives’s bathyscaphe, which, it had to be admitted, St. Ives had recently stolen from him. But their removal to Aylesford had been kept quiet – no fanfare at all – and in fact he and Alice still owned the farmhouse at Chingford-by-the-Tower, which they now leased to Tubby Frobisher. They weren’t hiding in Aylesford, but they weren’t conspicuous either.

  St. Ives walked along the rows of hops, which reached above the top of his head now, his mind sorting through various possibilities. Idly he watched out for the long-winged flies and lice that were the bane of hops, but there was no evidence of such evils. He picked a leaf and crushed it between his fingers. It had a slightly bitter smell. He dropped it, brushing his fingers on his trousers. If the hemlock had simply been torn up and sprinkled onto the pike, he might convince himself that it had been a devilish prank, but this had been something more – the work of someone who had a decoction of hemlock about his person, a determined poisoner, not a prankish devil.

  He strolled out into the wisteria alley, looking with satisfaction at the broad green lawn away to his right, where there stood a dozen or so hoppers’ huts. They would see considerable activity come September, when the hops were harvested, the grounds becoming a literal fiddler’s green during the celebration afterward.

  In the distance now, Hasbro approached from the direction of the river, carrying the rifle and rubber waders. St. Ives walked out to meet him.

  “Nothing out of the way?” he asked.

  “A deepening of the mystery, perhaps.” Hasbro reached into one of the waders and drew out a piece of an oak branch, half the length of a cricket bat and stained with blood. “There were two distinct sets of footprints in the soil of the path. I’m persuaded that two men had come down separately from the direction of the village, one stopping near the weir and the other going on to the river’s edge where the missus had apparently submerged the creel with the pike in it. Then the single track – the man who poisoned the fish – reversed direction and returned toward the village again, running afoul of the man whom she saw lurking in the wood near where she fished. At that point there was an apparent struggle – a rhododendron trod nearly flat. The shout was almost certainly uttered by the man who was struck with this club. It has a considerable heft to it, and the bloody result argues that the attacker meant to do him a considerable mischief. There was evidence that the stricken man fled into the trees. I found his footprints again some distance away, doubling back toward Aylesford once more after he had eluded his attacker.”

  “But who struck whom?” asked St. Ives.

  “The man who fled into the wood was evidently the same man who had poisoned the fish.”

  “Did his footprints put you in mind of Narbondo?”

  “Quite possibly, or a man of similar size. Nothing certain in that, however.”

  St. Ives stood silently for a moment, listening to the buzzing of an unseen fly. He heard Eddie’s laughter from the direction of the house. “The first man, the poisoner, might have been pursued surreptitiously by the second, I assume?”

  “More likely it was mere happenstance,” said Hasbro. “If the second man had followed the first with some fell purpose, he wouldn’t have tarried near the weir, it would seem. His prey might simply have continued along the river and got away.”

  “There’s no indication that they were companions?”

  “No, sir, to the contrary. Their separate tracks led back to the village, where I discovered that they had started out by different routes – one of them from behind the Chequers Inn and the other from the path that runs up into what’s known as Hereafter Farm, or so I’m told by the publican at the Chequers.”

  “Isn’t that a spiritualist commune?”

  “Indeed, sir. Owned by a woman named Mother Laswell, who, I gather, is widely considered to harbor dark secrets. She has apparently lived in Aylesford these past forty years and is known by everyone, largely because of her reputation for speaking to the dead, and also her public disapproval of the industrial debris created by the paper mills. She’s considered to be ‘the bane of industry,’ according to our publican.”

  “So the man from Hereafter Farm followed the other?”

  “In some sense of that word,” said Hasbro. “I wonder if it’s conceivable that he observed the other doctoring the pike and took offense to it.”

  “Knock the man on the head, but leave the poisoned fish lying in the creel?” asked St. Ives. “He would be a tolerably strange guardian angel.”

  “Indeed he would,” Hasbro said. “We’re none the wiser, I’m afraid. There’s no evident motive for the poisoning, or for our man to be laid out with a stick.”

  “The lack of motive suggests Narbondo,” St. Ives said. “And of course motives invariably exist. We’ll find them out in due time, although it would suit me down to the ground if the whole business simply went away. I’m not keen on tumult, Hasbro. I’ve had too much of it lately. I’m content to live the life of the gentleman farmer and let the planets revolve as they will. Indeed, I’ve promised Alice as much
. But we’ll keep our eyes open, certainly.”

  The two men parted company, Hasbro toward the house and St. Ives toward the barn. Ahead of him he saw the filled-in pit that Mr. Binger, the groundskeeper, had dug to bury the pike, the white quicklime visible in the dirt. His mind began to dwell on the poisoned fish once again, and he found that he was angry, despite the gentleman farmer talk. He had suppressed the anger in front of Alice, and just moments ago, when speaking to Hasbro, he had bid it disappear, but here it was again, returning with a vengeance. Anger, he was certain, was almost always a toxicant, worthy of being buried beneath quicklime. Still, he would know the identity of the poisoner before he was done, which possibly meant a visit to Hereafter Farm and a chat with Mother Laswell.

  It was often the case that he saw things more clearly when his mind was occupied elsewhere, and he forced himself now to think about the hiatus in the barn roof – the combination of pulleys and line that he would design to draw back sections of roof along a greased track on behalf of the airship. The undertaking wouldn’t be simple, regardless of what he had told Alice. Hasbro, however, had served in the Royal Navy in his youth and was a wizard of tackle. And St. Ives would call on Keeble to help, once the air vessel was fit to take aloft. Together, the three of them would prevail. It occurred to him now that it would require a considerable force to move the sections of roof, given the necessary size of the outlet. A steam engine would do, but he abhorred the noise and the vapors, and certainly it would poison the livestock in the enclosed barn. The inscrutable Mother Laswell would condemn him publicly.