The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  “A portion each day, I suspect, but I will ask,” Noah confirmed. “Do you talk about that of only the patients or of the keepers’ uniforms as well?”

  “All of—” Duncan was interrupted by a girlish laugh.

  “Why, Mr. McCallum!” Madeline Faulkner entered the library, followed by an attendant carrying two bolts of cloth. “Whatever are you doing, arriving without announcing your intentions to the lady of the house?” She removed her cloak, draping it on a chair, then took one of the bolts of cloth and flung it over the desk, spreading out a deep green silk. “But such propitious timing. You must help me decide!”

  Duncan held up one end of the silk to expose the papers underneath. “I was admiring your drawings, Madeline.”

  She hesitated only a moment, touching the tight yellow ribbon around her neck. A choker of some kind seemed to be a permanent feature of her wardrobe. Some women used beauty marks to set themselves apart. Madeline apparently used chokers. “Oh, those boring things. Just the work of some of the men in my father’s enterprises. They use the library sometimes, to hide from competitors or some such nonsense. I haven’t time for such silliness. It’s nearly the end of the season and I am simply immersed with the dressmakers. The king is throwing a royal ball to cap it all off.” She gestured her attendant forward with the second bolt of cloth. “Prithee, Duncan, is it to be the green or the blue?”

  Not for the first time Duncan wondered why Sarah would have befriended such a frivolous woman. But he was grateful for her help to Conawago, and he had long ago learned that the servants of a household often reflected much about its master or mistress. He could not reconcile the gentle, intelligent Noah with his mistress.

  “The blue,” he declared. “A royal color for a royal affair.”

  “Of course!” she exclaimed. “Such a blessing to have the view of a worldly man.” She turned to her maid. “Run the blue to the dressmaker. We’ll barely have time for a second fitting as it is.” She left the green cloth draped over the desk. “Now let’s leave this stuffy old book closet and find some tea. I am simply parched!”

  Duncan caught Noah’s eye but the groom quickly looked away, then stood and backed toward his work at the hearth. Duncan hesitated until Madeline had stepped into the hallway.

  “Most days I am in the stable after the luncheon hour,” Noah said, lowering his voice, “brushing down the horses.”

  Duncan lingered still, sensing that something had gone unexplained, but Noah turned and crawled back into the fireplace without another word.

  The block below the old Moorgate teemed with last-minute customers as shopkeepers began bringing in the goods they had displayed on their bulks. Ishmael, who had increasingly assumed the wary air of a warrior in enemy territory, was now distracted by a watchmaker’s shop where two apprentices sat in the window, polishing gears. “Mrs. Laws says London makes the best watches in all the world,” the young Nipmuc said. “She has her husband’s watch and unscrewed the cover to show me the works. There were jewels!”

  Duncan was pleased that Ishmael had forgotten his despair, however briefly, but found himself studying the street. A wiry figure leaning against the wall of a nearby alley caught his eye for a moment and nodded. Duncan had begun to feel grateful for the bosun’s dogged determination to shadow his movements.

  He had to pull Ishmael away from the watchmaker’s shop, with the Nipmuc casting regretful glances over his shoulder at the apprentices, but as the apothecary shop came into view he gasped and darted forward to Huber’s dusty window. When Duncan reached him, he began pointing to the glass jars, each filled with alcohol. “A giant centipede! A scorpion! And, Duncan, a tiny alligator! There,” he said, indicating a large jar on an upper shelf. “Could that be a vampire bat?”

  Duncan pointed to the most exotic item, a two-headed snake, then pulled his companion inside. Huber greeted him enthusiastically and went round-eyed as Duncan introduced Ishmael as a member of the Nipmuc tribe. The German darted to the open door behind his counter and called out, “Greta! Hier ist ein wilder!”

  Moments later a weary-looking middle-aged woman emerged from the rear of the building, pulling off her apron and straightening the blond hair placed in a bun on top of her head. A wonderfully sweet, yeasty scent seemed to cling to her. Greta was as affable as her husband and good-naturedly announced that she had just taken a strudel out of the oven and she would not permit them to leave until they sat for tea.

  Huber smiled fondly at his wife as she hurried away to make preparations, then turned to Duncan. “I take it your curiosity about Bethlem brings you back.”

  “I might still have need of that satchel, Herr Huber.”

  “Please, it is Heinz. And keep it so long as it is of use to you.”

  “Even more useful may be your knowledge,” Duncan said.

  Huber’s brows rose.

  “You said you were a physician by training. In my experience it is difficult for a physician to simply abandon his calling.”

  “If I can be help to someone in need, yes. But most don’t want a foreign doctor, at least not unless you ride in a grand coach and speak with a thick accent,” Huber said with an ironic smile.

  “It’s different at a hospital,” Duncan suggested.

  Huber shrugged. “I help in Brideswell and Bethlem from time to time, yes.”

  “And you serve them as both doctor and apothecary.”

  “More the apothecary, but yes. Where to draw the line? The apothecary needs to know the human body, the doctor the medicine.”

  “I have questions about doctors at Bedlam.”

  Huber frowned. “You know a patient’s confidences to his doctor are sacred.”

  “Not about a patient. We know our patient, an old man who is unjustly confined there.”

  Huber sighed. “Kin and kith almost always say the confinement of a loved one is unjust.”

  “It’s my uncle,” Ishmael interrupted. “The last chieftain of our tribe. This is not his land. He cannot die here. His soul would be in eternal torment.”

  Huber seemed confused for a moment, then as Ishmael’s words sank in, his face grew pained. The silence was broken by an insistent voice from the doorway. “We will have strudel now,” Greta Huber announced. She had been listening. “You will ask your questions, Mr. McCallum,” she declared with a peeved glance at her husband, “and Heinz will answer them.”

  They sat in a small but comfortable dining chamber, around a table adorned with lace and linen. Greta moved back and forth from table to sideboard, offering a matronly pat on Ishmael’s shoulder each time she refilled his plate. Huber’s resistance disappeared as they ate, and he readily confirmed that medicines at Bethlem Hospital—he never used the colloquial name—were often administered in teas. Patients drank them with relish, and the staff would never have time to separately administer pills and powders to hundreds of patients.

  “Laudanum?” Duncan asked.

  “Never in tea. It requires much more precision in dosing.”

  “Henbane?”

  Huber looked down, suddenly very interested in the crumbs on his plate. “You know what’s good with strudel?” he asked. “Cheddar cheese.”

  “Mr. McCallum shall have cheese if he desires it, Heinz,” Greta said, exasperated. “But he asked you a question.”

  “I don’t approve,” Huber said.

  “Heinz! Mr. McCallum is our guest!”

  “Nein, nein, mein liebchen. I mean I don’t approve of the practice he refers to.” Huber ran his hand through his long graying hair and fixed Duncan with a troubled gaze. “Henbane is a very dangerous substance. We don’t understand it well enough to use it. In small amounts it can be a useful sedative, but some of the doctors use it to other purposes, you might say.”

  “Including Dr. Granger,” Duncan said. “Who advises the board of governors.”

  “And is physician to half its members.”

  “Are you suggesting he is fond of using henbane?”

  “Do you ha
ve any idea of its power in higher doses?” Huber asked.

  “Hallucinations. Seizures. Coma even.”

  “In the northern lands,” Huber related, “there are tales of Viking warriors who rubbed on a salve made of henbane before battle. It transformed them into monsters of battle. God knows how it affects those poor souls in Bethlem.”

  Duncan chewed on a piece of Greta’s pastry, considering Huber’s distraught tone. “You supply henbane,” he suggested.

  It was Greta who answered. “We run an apothecary. Supplying medicines is what we do. It is our bread and butter.”

  “Not so often as the shop up the street,” Huber amended. “But yes, Dr. Granger asks for henbane from time to time. We usually have it available.”

  “And you have some now?” Duncan asked.

  “We just received a shipment from our man in Bremerhaven, yes,” Huber replied. “Why?”

  Duncan replied with another question. “When you examine patients at Bethlem, are you summoned to do so?”

  “Sometimes. But physicians who would contribute their services are generally welcomed at any time.”

  “Are patients ever brought to you in an exam room?”

  “Never. There is no time nor staff to deal with private exams. We go to the wards. Sometimes I will set up a station in one of the galleries for the patients who are permitted freedom of movement.”

  “But sometimes you go inside the locked wards?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “And do they give you a key?”

  “Never. A keeper accompanies me.”

  “There must be so many keys to mind.”

  “There are many locks at Bethlem. The entrances, the supply rooms, the offices, the special wards. The lower-ranking keepers have the keys to their assigned wards. The more senior keepers have master keys.”

  Ishmael lowered his fork. “Tell us more about master keys.”

  The German doctor’s face clouded. “I don’t think I am at liberty to do so,” he said, and fixed the Nipmuc with a stubborn gaze.

  “Heinz!” Greta snapped. “You will speak of keys, mein liebchen, or you will be eating nothing but cold sausage for a month!”

  “We take this coach,” Ishmael said, lifting a salt bowl from the chart spread on Mrs. Laws’s dining table, “down the road to the old deer park, then, to what they call Kew.”

  Darby swatted at his arm. “Don’t be daft! Didn’t we say five minutes ago the salt is the Horse Guards Palace! Ye can nae move a building, lad. I told ye, coaches are the walnut shells!”

  The dining chamber of the Neptune had been turned into a war room. Captain Rhys had contributed some old charts, which they had reversed and pinned down with books. Lizzie the chambermaid had joined in with a conspiratorial gleam to find various markers in the scullery while Duncan sketched in streets and marked with preliminary Xs the Horse Guards Palace, Craven Street, the Neptune, Hewson’s house, and Bethlem Hospital. Ishmael added another mark near the last one and wrote Bethlem Laundry. Mrs. Laws’s small salts were deployed to mark buildings, then Darby had arranged a dozen peas around the Neptune.

  “The second company of watchers,” he explained. “Good lads every one.”

  “Whose lads?” Duncan asked.

  “We ain’t got enough sailors to go around, especially seeing how three got thrown in a parish cell for public drunkenness. So Sinner John volunteered his link boys. You know, Xander, Robbie, and the others he lets sleep in the stable, the ones he leads in songs at the noon bell.”

  Duncan didn’t know many of the boys, but he did recall hearing songs from the stable. He gave an appreciative nod.

  “Link boys make pennies a night,” Darby explained. “As Sinner John said, give one a shilling and he’s yours for days. And who notices link boys? They’re everywhere, the poor little buggers. People pay as much attention to them as rats and squirrels. The fools from Whitehall are so arrogant they even keep their long boots on. If a boy sees any of the boots near here he’ll come running to tell his boss, ye might say.” Darby motioned to someone out of the shadows of the adjoining room. Xander, wearing a new shirt and beaming with pride, gave a bow to the company. “Xander is captain of the link boy brigade,” Darby declared. A second boy, his freckled cheeks pink from scrubbing and his usual thicket of hair brushed and tied at the back, emerged from behind Xander. “And young Robbie is his sergeant.” Robbie gave a quick, shy nod and edged closer to Xander.

  Duncan threw the boys a salute, which they eagerly returned, with a joint “Your servant, sir.” Xander took a tentative step toward Duncan, extending a small piece of metal on a cord. “We’d like ye to have this, sir,” he said to Duncan. “Robbie and me found it in the Thames mud, where we sometimes lark about at low tide.” Duncan accepted the token and studied it. “It be Roman, I warrant, ’cause we found it with pieces of old Roman glass. We put a good strong cord on it to save ye the trouble.”

  The little bronze amulet was of a leaping dolphin and had an air of great age about it. It could indeed have been Roman.

  “Fish be good luck,” Robbie blurted out. “Everyone knows fish be good luck. Good luck for our Highland gladiator!”

  Duncan smiled and thanked the boys, then considered them for a few heartbeats. “Do you know a boy named Bertie?” he asked.

  “Oh aye, if ye mean the scrub who’s taking coin from them soldiers,” Xander confirmed with a scowl.

  “The very one.” Duncan produced a shilling. “Have a talk with Bertie,” he said.

  “I can stop him from working for them without a coin,” Xander said, rubbing a fist in his palm.

  “No. Not all battles are won by shedding blood. Give him the extra coin,” Duncan said, pushing the shilling into Xander’s hand. “I want him to continue but I want him to tell you what he does for them. And there’s a little added task. Lieutenant Nettles wears a little gold pin on his lapel. I want to see that pin. I’ll give it back. Bertie can replace it so that the lieutenant may not even miss it.”

  Xander’s eyes lit with excitement. “I will have it later today!” he declared, and with a whoop he and Robbie sprinted away.

  As the boys disappeared, a figure in a heavy cloak entered from the kitchen, then threw off the hood to reveal radiant curls. “Is there another seat at this table?” Olivia Dumont asked. “What game is this? Who has the peas and who the walnuts? And oh,” she added, touching a bowl at the edge of the table, “there’s raisins!”

  They sat in council until midnight, proposing plans and discarding many of them, discussing how the incognitum might be secretly delivered to the location chosen by Franklin and the Astronomer Royal Maskelyne. An hour after Olivia arrived, Sinner John appeared with two new members, their cloaks dripping from a summer shower. Captain Rhys and Patrick Woolford had met on the steps of the Neptune and were already chatting warmly as they reached the dining room.

  Woolford appraised their map with the eye of a seasoned ranger as Duncan explained the plan they had devised. The deputy superintendent listened with a skeptical eye, then dropped three raisins on the road leading out of the city, shaking his head. “The three of us won’t be enough. We need watchers surrounding the block around Hewson’s house and runners connecting the watchers with us.”

  Sinner John stepped forward. “Which will be my brigade of link boys,” he declared, and repositioned several peas near Hewson’s house. “Peas be the young soldiers, raisins the older ones,” he explained. He added a raisin by the peas. “That be me, may God protect us.”

  Darby added several more raisins. “Myself, and my stalwart Galileos.”

  “With the blessing of Saint Joan, moi aussi,” Olivia chimed in, dropping another raisin.

  Another hand appeared but was quickly intercepted by Mrs. Laws. “Not you, dear,” she told Lizzie firmly. “You are fully engaged in the battle of mops and brooms.”

  Duncan pushed a smile onto his face, trying not to think of the disaster that might await any of them if they fell into Hastings
’s hands. “Enough for the main campaign,” he said. “Now we must look to our first skirmish, that of the magicians who are going to make the lightning wizard vanish into thin air.”

  Chapter 17

  THE PATCH OF BATTLE FOG, as Patrick Woolford called it, was a block where a narrow street led off Pall Mall and then became little more than a crooked alley that connected to St. James’s Street with a sharp turn. For the past three days Franklin had played his part well, emerging from Craven Street to climb into the same hired coach, then instructing the driver to take him on his prescribed “touring circuit” to Whitehall, a circular route that took him up to Piccadilly on St. James’s Street, then back through Green Park, where he called on the driver to pause while he admired a particular bird or tree. Once he even got out to retrieve, with exaggerated exclamations, a huge plane tree leaf. The watchers in black boots, some wearing cloaks, some in workman’s clothes, had no trouble keeping up with his leisurely pace, including down the alley identified by Woolford, a common shortcut to avoid the congestion around St. James’s Palace, where the king was still residing while Buckingham House was being rebuilt.

  Today Franklin had continued his routine, with one watcher following on horseback and two others on foot, but as soon as the driver made the turn for the shortcut to St. James’s Street, a farmer’s cart stacked high with cabbages turned into the narrow pathway. Moments later the cart driver seemed to lose control of his mule. The cart made an abrupt turn, stopping at an angle that blocked all traffic, and half the cabbages tumbled out. Darby had intercepted the farmer before dawn and offered him double his market price for the load if he threw in the use of the cart for the morning. The farmer had been hesitant until Darby pointed out that he was merely paying for the loan of the cabbages, which could still be sold at Covent Garden or Hungerford Market.

  The rider on the black horse spat a curse at the chaos of cabbages, then wheeled about and went back onto the main street. By the time Franklin’s coach emerged, Franklin had leapt out and Xander and his friend Robbie had jumped in, laughing over the trick and the free ride they were taking to deceive the followers. As the coach emerged onto St. James’s Street, Duncan, Franklin, and Woolford were riding in another direction in a sturdy nondescript vehicle of the kind that often served those traveling to and from the towns and villages outside London.