Gallowglass took a messy bite of ice cream. “Doesn’t look very sinister,” she said.
“Well it wouldn’t, would it?” he said. “It defeats the purpose of hiding in plain sight if you make it obvious, don’t it?”
“How did you know which flat was theirs?”
He coughed into his hand. Gallowglass looked at him. “What?” St. Cyprian cleared his throat, began to speak, and then closed his mouth. Gallowglass took a bite of ice cream. “Say that again,” she said. “I didn’t quite catch it.”
“I might once have, possibly, in a moment of uncertainty, considered perhaps maybe joining the—ah—the Order,” he said hesitantly. She looked at him and he flapped his hand in a calming gesture. “I was at a decidedly low point—I had just mustered out, fresh out of hospital, sudden heir to a grievous, crushing burden and I wanted help. The Order offered that help, and they weren’t alone in such dubious generosity either. I got more invitations than I knew what to do with. The foyer was flooded with RSVP cards.”
“So why didn’t you join?” she asked after a minute.
“Well, you showed up, didn’t you? Things got very hectic, very quickly, and by the time we were done with beastly business in Blackheath, I knew what was what and where was where. My equilibrium restored, I sent a polite note regretfully explaining the situation.”
“And?”
“They tried to blow up the Crossley,” he said.
Gallowglass cocked her head. Her eyes widened. “Was that what that was?” she asked, in surprise. “Flipping nora, I was wondering about that…”
“And yet you never asked,” he said. He looked at her. “You’ve got ice cream on your nose.”
“Saving it for later, wasn’t I?” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “What’s the plan?”
“I intend to break that most sacred of British taboos—I’m going to make a bit of a scene,” he said as he took a bite of ice cream. “Care to watch?”
“I’m still not allowed to shoot anybody?”
“Quite. But there are other ways to indulge your fetish for sudden, indiscriminate violence, should you be so inclined,” he said. “I’m simply taking outright murder off the table, for this particular escapade at least.” He handed her his ice cream. “Now, hold my ice cream while I go kick that door in.”
She took his ice cream, and he walked across the street. He bounded up the stairs to the door of the townhouse and gave it a boot. Then another. He paused, turned, saw her grinning at him from the foot of the stairs, flushed, and delivered a third kick. The door barely trembled. “I say, do you think it’s reinforced?” he said, glaring at it.
“No,” Gallowglass said.
“Who asked you?”
“Want me to shoot the lock off?” she asked, innocently.
“No,” he snapped. He stared at the door for a moment longer. Then, before he could rescind his objection, it opened. A servant stared at him, eyebrow cocked in a perturbed fashion.
“Might I help you?”
“Yes, hold this,” Gallowglass said as she pushed past St. Cyprian to smash her ice cream into the man’s face. She followed it up with a boot to his nethers, grabbed the back of his coat as he wheezed and bent forward, and shoved him down the steps and out of the way. Then she kicked aside the half open door and tromped in.
St. Cyprian hesitated for a moment, and then followed her into the foyer of the townhouse. It was narrow and decorated in a discreet fashion, with the most refined taste that money could buy. Portraits hung on the walls, glaring perplexedly down at the interlopers. “Was that my ice cream or yours?”
“Mine. I ate yours,” she said. She looked around. “Where to now?”
Before he could answer, several men thundered down the central staircase in front of them. They were young, resolute, and moved like men who’d never known the joys of running full-tilt into the teeth of German machine-gun fire. Gallowglass made to draw her pistol, but St. Cyprian stopped her. “No guns,” he said. “And no knives either.”
“Suits me,” Gallowglass said. She smacked her fist into an open palm. The first of the men reached them a moment later, hand extended towards St. Cyprian, as if to grab his collar. St. Cyprian avoided the hand and his shoes squeaked on the floor as he slid close to the would-be grappler. His fist stabbed out, catching the man in the kidney, prompting a whiney wheeze. The man sank down, clutching his side, his face ashen. St. Cyprian turned and caught a second man in the neck with his elbow. As his opponent staggered, St. Cyprian caught the back of his coat and gave him a helping hand out the door. He whirled, fists raised.
Gallowglass had another of the roustabouts down on his knees, his hand twisted behind his back, and her foot on his neck. As a fourth lunged for her, she drove her captive face-first into the floor. Wood cracked with a sound like a gunshot. St. Cyprian winced and dropped his fists. She didn’t require his help. She rarely did. It was usually the other way around, more often than not, he reflected ruefully.
Gallowglass bent backwards under a wild, looping blow, and popped up like a jack-in-the-box, her fists stabbing out in rapid reply. Her opponent bent double with a strangled yelp. Gallowglass spun, her foot catching him in the side of the head. The force of the blow flipped him end over end, and he crashed down beside his companion. Gallowglass drew herself up as the last man rushed her. She sprang into the air, and her knees slammed into his shoulders even as her elbows came down on his skull with a sound that made St. Cyprian rub his head in sympathy. “I say, that wasn’t quite cricket, was it?” he said, as she rose to her feet.
“We weren’t playing cricket,” she said, flexing her hands.
“What was that? Some dashed foreign nonsense?” he asked as he straightened his necktie. “Hardly the old Queensberry one-two, I must say.”
“I don’t know what you call it,” she said dismissively. “It was just something an old duffer in Siam taught me.” She cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders. “Works pretty well in a punch up, though.”
Before St. Cyprian could reply, a new voice intruded on the conversation in a parade ground bellow, “What in the name of God and all of his angels is going on down here?”
6.
“What is the meaning of this?” the old man roared. He was built thick, and dressed in stiff black, like a man who had found the fashions of the Victorian period to his liking and decided to drag them into the current century by sheer force of will. A thick mustache decorated his upper lip, and his eyes blazed fiercely as he glared down at them from the middle of the stairs. He held a heavy walking stick topped with a ram’s head clenched in one hand and he gesticulated at them with it.
“Sir Hermes Fleece, by the authority vested in me by His Majesty—” St. Cyprian began with, if not equal volume then equal force, as he pointed up at the old man. Fleece waved him to silence with an irritated gesture.
“Yes, yes, I am all too well aware of who you are and by whose authority you claim to perpetuate your petty vandalisms,” the old man said. He clasped his hands behind his back, and glared down at St. Cyprian and Gallowglass like a lord examining a horde of revolutionarily-minded peasants from the battlements. His eyes swept over his men, where they lay groaning on the floor, and his cheek twitched. After a moment, he sniffed. “Well…I suppose you’d best come up then. Your boy can stay downstairs.”
Thankfully, Gallowglass said nothing. She grinned up at Fleece and gave the man she’d felled a parting a kick in the belly, causing him to curl up into a ball. “I’ll wait down here then, shall I?” she said, looking around as if daring anyone to disagree with her.
“You are the soul of patience. Try not to burn the flat down while I’m up there,” St. Cyprian said, snatching up her cap from where it had fallen and tossing it to her as he started up the stairs.
“No promises,” Gallowglass said.
St. Cyprian followed Fleece up the stairs and across the landing, into a sumptuously decorated office. Bookcases of aged timber occupied two of the four walls. T
he third held framed photographs and a large, yellowing map, also framed. The fourth wall bore an immense portrait of an Elizabethan gentleman who bore some slight familial resemblance to Fleece. That, St. Cyprian knew, was the esteemed Sir Hopwood Fleece, circa 1587, and rabid proponent of the expansion of what would become known as the British Empire. Fleece had done bad things in the name of God, Queen and Country, including the invocation of an ancient Celtic storm-deity to give a bad weather walloping to the ‘invincible armada’ of Philip II.
St. Cyprian ambled across the room to examine the map. He tapped the frame. “Dee’s map of the polar regions, I believe. 1582, or thereabouts.” The map was an almost perfect recreation, albeit sanitized for public viewing. The original map was sealed safely away in his study in No. 427, with all its notations regarding Thule and ‘Ye Dreadful Gnommes in Arktos’ hidden from the eyes of the unprepared.
“You aren’t completely uneducated, then,” Fleece said.
“I did attend Oxford, you know,” St. Cyprian said.
“My point stands,” Fleece grunted. He sat down behind an immense desk of polished, pale wood that occupied the space beneath the portrait of his illustrious ancestor and spread his hands. “Why are you here, boy?”
“Boy,” St. Cyprian said.
“What else would you have me call you?”
“My name, possibly.”
Fleece’s face looked as if he’d bitten into something sour. “Why are you here?”
St. Cyprian looked around. “Did I interrupt something, Sir Hermes?” He hooked his thumbs into his waistcoat and made to peer at the papers and maps that decorated Fleece’s desk. There was a diary calendar as well, with a March date, not too far distant, circled and marked. The vernal equinox, St. Cyprian thought, as Fleece swept the papers over, and hid them from his sight. “Were you plotting the downfall of the Empire’s enemies, perhaps?”
“Something you’d know nothing about,” Fleece said.
“I’ve done my share of fighting. More than my share, I think, in the trenches.” St. Cyprian smiled unpleasantly. “Something you’d know nothing about.” He scanned the maps. “Why are you looking at a map of Wiltshire?”
“I own a house there, if you must know. Why are you here?” he asked again. He began to close the books and slide the maps out of sight.
“Were you missing anyone, at the last meeting?” St. Cyprian asked. He pulled his silver cigarette case out of his coat and extracted one. He snapped the case shut without offering one to Fleece. “Short fellow, about so tall?” He gestured and then scraped a match on the desk. He lit his cigarette. “Probably didn’t have the knife wounds when you knew him, but one can never tell these days.”
“What are you blathering about, man?”
“Stolen antiquities, what?” St. Cyprian said, puffing on his cigarette. He stepped closer to the desk, scanning it quickly. What was on a man’s desk could give you a picture of what he might be thinking. The books were an interesting bunch—Crossley’s Dead Man’s Tongue and Jenkins’ Oriental Pestilences were the most immediately recognizable. The latter was a travelogue of esoteric diseases, while the former was more in the way of a ‘how-to’ guide for the spiritual set. Neither was the sort of reading he expected of a man like Fleece.
“I’m no thief, and I’m insulted by the insinuation,” Fleece rumbled.
“I didn’t say you’d stolen them,” St. Cyprian said.
“You implied it. Why else would you be here? Why else would you manhandle my servants so crudely?”
“Maybe they enjoy a good manhandle. One can never tell, these days,” St. Cyprian said as he expelled smoke through his nose.
“You have a remarkably quick wit, and lamentably fast tongue,” Fleece said. “You are still your father’s son, I see.”
“Too right; my only weaknesses are women and bad puns,” St. Cyprian said lightly. Then, less cheerfully, he added, “And let’s not talk about him, what?”
“He was a patriot,” Fleece said.
“As am I. As are you. That doesn’t mean you’re not a perfect ass, Fleece old thing.” St. Cyprian examined the cherry end of his cigarette. “Patriotism hides a multitude of sins, but an ass is an ass, sporting the colors or not.” He plopped the cigarette back between his lips.
“Are you closing in on a point, or are you just wasting my time?”
“At least one of your men was involved in a theft last night. I know, because I checked the body, and you lot aren’t exactly subtle about identification,” St. Cyprian said. “What I don’t know is why. What was in that shipment that was important enough for the Order of the Cosmic Ram to reach out and attempt to commandeer it?”
“Nothing,” Fleece said. “Because we didn’t.”
“There’s a body in the Limehouse police station that says different.”
“You know as well as I that we are not responsible for what our members may or may not undertake without our awareness,” Fleece said. But his eyes had taken on a shrewd glint. St. Cyprian began to wonder if this were the first Fleece was hearing of the matter.
“That’s a familiar tune,” St. Cyprian said.
“Because it’s the truth, whether you like it or not.” Fleece sat back. “That dreadful little twit Gladstone was madder than a hatter. We revoked his membership in the Order well before he instigated his nasty little scheme, and frankly, we’re better off for you having done for him.”
“The creature he awoke did for him,” St. Cyprian said.
“But you watched,” Fleece said. “Jolly good effort either way, I’d say. Tell me, what exactly was it that I supposedly ordered stolen?” St. Cyprian hesitated. The truth was, he didn’t know. Melion hadn’t been clear, and St. Cyprian hadn’t pressed the issue. He cursed himself silently. He’d made a mistake. Fleece snorted. “Don’t know, do you? What was this then? Trying to get back at me for trying to help you?”
“You—help? Oh do me a favor and climb down off the cross, Hermes. We could do with the wood.” St. Cyprian tapped cigarette ash onto Fleece’s desk. The old man’s face purpled, but he said nothing. “Whatever it was, William Melion thought it was a good idea to bring it in through the servant’s entrance so to speak, which means that it’s dangerous.” St. Cyprian leaned towards Fleece. “There’s also a little matter of a certain goat-legged chap getting involved in the resulting hurly-burly.”
“Melion?” Fleece said, his face twisted in obvious confusion. “But he—wait, goat-legged chap?” He frowned. “What are you talking about?” he asked. Not, St. Cyprian noted, as if he didn’t understand, but as if he did and dearly wished otherwise.
“A demon, Hermes. A devil out of the ancient dark.” St. Cyprian snatched up Fleece’s walking stick and twirled it. “You sound puzzled. I assumed that he was one of yours, being the—ah—cloven-hoofed sort, donchaknow?”
“Which demon?” Fleece demanded.
St. Cyprian looked at him. “I don’t know—yet.”
“But you suspect. Is it… him?” Fleece asked, half-rising from his seat.
“I was rather hoping that you could tell me that, old thing.” St. Cyprian eyed him. “You’ve been looking for that old devil long enough, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. Though why you’d send him out to murder William Melion’s manservant, I can’t fathom.”
“Because we didn’t, obviously,” Fleece grunted.
“Maybe so.” St. Cyprian eyed Fleece. He didn’t believe the older man for a moment. He’d known Fleece too long to take him at his word. He seized on another thread. “You were surprised to hear Melion’s name. Why?”
Fleece pushed himself heavily to his feet. “I think that I have endured quite enough of your impertinence for one day,” he said slowly. “We’re done here. I shall overlook your treatment of my employees if you leave now. Otherwise, I shall ring for the police.”
St. Cyprian stubbed out his cigarette on the head of the walking stick and tossed it back to Fleece. “No, you won’t. At least not until you’re sure about
the truth of what I’ve said. I’ll be back, Hermes.”
“I have no doubt you will. Proverbial bad penny, ain’t you? And that’s Sir Hermes.” Fleece looked past him. “Sadie, darling, show Charles out, would you?”
St. Cyprian tensed, and then turned to see a young woman standing in the door to the office. She was dressed fashionably, even for Mayfair, with her hair cut into a bob similar to Gallowglass’ beneath a cloche hat. She yanked on the silver locket that hung around her neck in obvious annoyance. “Charles,” she said, stretching his name out into a curse.
“Sadie,” he replied. He hesitated, and then gestured helplessly. “How have you been?”
It was a weak effort, and he knew it. But, he hadn’t expected to see Sadie Fleece again, and certainly not face to face. The last time he had seen her had been in the whirlwind weeks of the first of the Blackheath murders, when he had been forced to break a dinner engagement at Wyndham’s, and she had pitched a vase at his head. While he half-suspected that her interest in him was more to do with her father’s abortive attempt to induct him into the mysteries of the Cosmic Ram than any actual affection, the grudge seemed intact.
Her agate eyes bored into his own with a relentlessness that would have made the elder Fleece proud, if he hadn’t been staring up at the portrait of his ancestor in apparent distraction. St. Cyprian considered pressing the matter, but Sadie quickly disabused him of any inclination in that regard. “Come along Charles. Father asked you to leave,” she said, glaring at him in a steely fashion that left no doubt she’d box his ears if he argued the point. Sadie was quite protective of her father, he recalled.
“Of course, forgive me, I’d heard that you were still in Wiltshire,” he said edging past her and out into the hall. She watched him like a lioness eyeing up a particularly irritating hyena. “Something about women’s rugby league? Or am I thinking of someone else?”
“Possibly,” she said, stalking past him towards the stairs. “How many of those trollops you’re acquainted with go in for rugby? Because it certainly wasn’t me.”
The Jade Suit of Death (The Adventures Of The Royal Occultist Book 2) Page 5
