Langdon St. Ives: Beneath London Part 3

Mr. Klingheimer nodded and stroked his beard again. "Have you seen them bigger than the likes of me as well, the toads, as you call them?"

"Oh, aye, maybe just, if you know where to look, now and then a right forest of them. Fat stalks with round lids on top that a man might sit upon, if they didn't smell like horse-s.h.i.+t, begging your honor's pardon."

"You amaze me, Mr. Zounds. You're a small man with an outsized knowledge of some tolerably arcane things. Did you inform your previous employer about the great fungi?"

"No, your honor. He didn't ask."

"Ah! Well then I'm glad that I did ask, and I'm pleased to make you an offer that I believe you'll not despise. There's another twenty pounds for you if you show us a 'right forest of these toads,' as you put it so poetically paid down tomorrow morning at dawn when we set out. Twenty more if we find Narbondo's corpse. Forty if we find the living man. That's a mort of money, Mr. Zounds, all in a heap. I can't say fairer than that. If you serve me well on the morrow, then you will have pa.s.sed the third test and will have found another situation into the bargain. You can fetch your belongings from your quarters in the Seven Dials and be quit of that neighborhood forever. I very much hope that suits you."

Beaumont put two fingers to his hat and bowed at the waist. "It suits me down to the ground, your honor," he said.

His luck was in, just as he had hoped not an hour past when the potato boy had given him the handbill. He could disappear out of Mr. Klingheimer's world when he chose to, he told himself, whenever the man played him false, and he could shut the gate behind him with a peck of gunpowder.

SEVEN.

HEREAFTER FARM.

The old ragstone house, which had stood at the center of Hereafter Farm for over a century, had a blue-gray cast to the stone. The traces of blue heightened in wet weather until they were very like the color of a robin's egg. The red tiles of the roof were stained a deep, autumnal brown. St. Ives, Alice, and Mother Laswell sat in the parlor on upholstered chairs, looking out through a French window at a gla.s.shouse some distance away, the shadow of vegetation visible within. The fine weather had quite disappeared, and the sky was dark with clouds.

A barn stood nearby, the top half of its Dutch door open and the gray mule Ned Ludd standing just inside, a.s.sessing the wide world with a satisfied face. Clara Wright stood beside him, stroking his neck. The mule was reputed to be astonis.h.i.+ngly intelligent, had learnt his letters up to T by now. When he had the entire alphabet he would be taught to spell, all of this under Clara's tutelage.

At Mother Laswell's insistence St. Ives had been compelled to reveal the cause of Sarah Wright's death before she would leave the wood, but the revelations were more mystifying to her than revealing. The hole in the floor had been evidently troubling. She had made him describe what he saw in particular detail, and then had shaken her head and said, "They didn't find it." She took it no further, and St. Ives refrained from asking what it was they didn't find and how she knew. When they had arrived at Hereafter Farm, Mother Laswell had conveyed the sad news to Clara although only that which needed to be conveyed but Clara had merely nodded. Clearly she was already aware of her mother's death, and in fact revealed to Mother Laswell the exact moment on the previous day when it came into her mind that her mother had breathed her last.

Mother Laswell poured tea into their cups now, and pa.s.sed around the milk and sugar, then sat back in her chair. "Clara lost her sight when she was seven years old," she told them. "Shortly thereafter Sarah Wright expelled her husband the scoundrel Clemson Wright from the cottage. It was... very bad. He beat Sarah, do you see? And he took the money that she had laid by that she had received from her own mother. He never returned, thank heaven. Clara came to live here some few months later, nearly eight years ago now."

"Was the loss of Clara's eyesight organic in nature?" St. Ives asked Mother Laswell. "Did it advance over time?"

"It was quite sudden, in fact."

"Is it psychical in nature, then?"

She shrugged, as if the question was not vital. "Hysterical, do you mean? It's an unhappy word, Professor. Will it surprise you to know that I corresponded with Monsieur Charcot himself on just that subject? Have you heard the name, sir?"

"A prominent physician in France, although with some tolerably modern notions."

"My good friend Mabel Morningstar had met the man. He was a friend of Mabel's late husband. Charcot suggested that I convey Clara to Paris for a course of hypnotic therapy. We were to be prepared to stay for some time. Clara refused to go, and neither Sarah nor I insisted. Half of me believed that Charcot was a charlatan, you see another Mesmer, if you will, who intended to publicize Clara's misfortune in order to promote himself."

"Indeed," St. Ives said, "I believe that the jury is still out on that subject, ma'am, although Charcot's work has borne interesting fruit. I have no business playing the grand inquisitor, but may I ask whether Clemson Wright misused the girl?"

"There you have it," Mother Laswell said.

"Ah. And now this terrible business." St. Ives shook his head and stared into his teacup, as if reading the leaves.

"And yet Clara possesses a strength of spirit that I envy," Mother Laswell said. "Sometimes I feel like a weakling when I'm in her presence."

Alice looked out through the dark afternoon and saw that Clara was still in the lamp-lit barn, feeding an apple to the mule. It astonished her that children could undergo such hards.h.i.+ps and still have any happiness in them. Mother Laswell poured more tea into their cups. She looked worn out, and not merely from the day's tribulations, Alice thought, but from early years of trouble and pain a wicked, murderous husband of her own, and a son who was worse. Both dead now, and the world better off without them. Their malicious ghosts still haunted her life, however.

"Shall I tell you something that will surprise you?" Mother Laswell asked, breaking the silence.

"By all means," St. Ives said.

"I'll reveal to you that Clara is a hydroscope of enormous power. Her ability to sense the presence of underground water and of dead things buried near it is quite remarkable."

"Do you mean that she's mastered the art of the divining rod?" Alice asked.

"No, Alice. I mean that Clara is the divining rod a human hydroscope. She falls into fits if she stands above underground water, even very deep beneath the earth. She begins to spin, and can't help herself. She'll seize if she's not forcibly moved away."

"I'll tell you truthfully," St. Ives said, "that I'm skeptical of wands and hydroscopes having the power to find buried human bodies or treasures or suchlike. The notion was exploded long ago."

"You would not be skeptical if you'd witnessed Clara entering a cemetery, Professor. In truth we keep her very nearly a prisoner at Hereafter Farm, for the ground beneath her can become a living nightmare if she's not careful. Her mother fas.h.i.+oned a pair of shoes soled with sheet lead for her, which diminishes the effect, but the girl is unhappy wearing them. The shoes diminish her powers, you see, and her second sight fades because of the layer of lead that separates her from the earth. When one has second sight in abundance but is lacking in eyesight, one is loath to lose one's powers and be left impaired. At times she wards off such threats by reciting rhyme or running through the alphabet in strange sequences that she has invented. Sarah taught her a poem by Mr. Lear 'The Jumblies' making certain that she had it word for word despite its being nonsense, or perhaps because of it. They used the poem to call each other telepathically, to use the modern term. Those who know the art scarcely need to name it."

"Clara is an interesting girl, to be sure," St. Ives said. "I don't wonder that you wanted to keep her out of the hands of Monsieur Charcot or anyone else who wanted to make a study of her."

"Then you can perhaps understand that I must know what Dr. Pullman discovered in regard to Sarah Wright, but that I very much want to remain out of the way, if you take my meaning, and Clara also."

"Certainly," St. Ives said. "You seem to be carrying a great weight, Mother; you needn't bear it alone. There's no greater burden than secret knowledge."

"You're in the right of it there. To put it plainly, I fear that my dead husband is the source of this evil. When I first spoke of him to you I refused to utter his name, which was an abomination to me. But our doings in London and in the marsh a year ago left me a changed woman, and his name no longer has any power over me. He was born Maurice De Salles. Now you two know his name, in case you hear it again. When they hanged him for practicing vivisection and for the murder of children I wrote that name on a slip of paper and buried it in the dung heap, in order to be done with it. I haven't used the name since. It has become imperative, however, that I know whether his... whether Maurice De Salles's legacy, so to speak, is at work here."

"Your dead husband's legacy is not your own legacy, Mother, whatever his name is," Alice told her. "And the man has been dead as a stone for a good many years."

"So he has, after a fas.h.i.+on. But what he knew hasn't died with him, Alice, nor ever will, apparently, and it attracts those who want the knowledge for their own ends. I told you something about him, Professor, when we first met on that dark night after poor Mary Eastman was slaughtered in the graveyard, but I left much out, because it didn't signify. I believe it signifies now. After my husband was hanged, they buried his body at the crossroads down from the old bridge in order to maze the body, and a stake was driven through the body to fix it in place."

"Surely that sort of thing was given up in the last century," Alice said.

"Not in special cases, ma'am, I do a.s.sure you, and his was a special case. Worse than you can easily believe. The body still lies there today, pinned in place, but not in the state in which it was first buried. I have no desire to offend you with what I reveal, but I'm afraid I must reveal it. The night after the burial, when the dirt in the grave was still loose, it was opened in the dark of night and the head was taken. The grave was closed again, the soil tamped flat and swept clean, and so it's remained. The road was metaled some years since, but thank G.o.d the body was deep enough to lie undisturbed. The desecration of the body was done at my request, and I'll tell you plainly that I would do it again without a qualm."

Alice had covered her mouth with her hand and stared at Mother Laswell now in simple surprise. "Why on earth?" she asked. "It must have been terrible."

"It was ... necessary, ma'am."

"In certain European countries," St. Ives said, saving Mother Laswell the effort, "it is still quite common to cut out the heart or remove the head of a condemned murderer, divide the body into pieces, and bury the pieces near running water, so that the stream will bear away fragments of the spirit. According to popular thought, the body must be separated into parts in order to confound the ghost, just as the several paths that merge at a crossroads confounds it, disallowing it from returning home. The law takes a dim view of the practice, but the law takes a dim view of many notions that innocent, well-meaning people are entirely dedicated to, although they mightn't speak of it."

"Just so," Mother Laswell said. "The law has an understanding of the world that has little to do with things of the spirit. I recall you telling me that you saw strange things yourself when the Cathedral was besieged, Alice things that were beyond your ken?"

"Yes," Alice said. "You're perfectly correct. I find once again that I've led a moderately sheltered life in some ways."

"Be happy that you were allowed to. I wish to heaven that I had. As I said, however, I contrived to have the head removed. I myself did not take an active part, although I watched through a pair of opera gla.s.ses from a high window in the Chequers Inn, where I had put up during my husband's trial, being in fear of staying at home alone. I saw little beyond moving shadows, for it was a fortunately dark night, but my conspirators worked swiftly. The gravediggers were the two men who had buried the body that very morning. Mr. Sarney, the butcher, who owed me a debt, cut through the neck of the corpse to take the head. Sarney died not long after, and the two gravediggers kept mum, being culpable themselves and well paid for their work. One of them pa.s.sed away long years ago, but the other was alive until a week past.

"He became s.e.xton in his time at St. Peter and Paul's, and I came to know him quite well. He was ninety years of age, old Mr. Peattie, and it was thought that he pa.s.sed away in his sleep, but I have my doubts. There was one other person who stood by me, and that was Sarah Wright. It was she who boxed up the head of Maurice De Salles and buried it as a favor to me, laying counterfeit coins on the eyes and stuffing the lead box with mistletoe and dipping it in layers of wax. I have no idea where it lies, or, G.o.d help us, where it lay, if indeed she buried it beneath the floorboards of her own cottage, which I very much doubt that she would have. We never spoke of it after, lest we call up spirits."

Mother Laswell paused. She pursed her lips and shook her head, as if to rid her mind of the recollection. "Sarah Wright was murdered," she said, "because someone wanted something of her. She was quite penniless. She had nothing to give them aside from knowledge. When you speak to Dr. Pullman, Professor, you would do me a favor to say nothing of what I've revealed to you just now, although you could mention my name innocently enough. I don't ask you to lie, but I must know if the head of Maurice de Salles was recovered from the cottage."

"I have nothing against an honorable lie, Mother, or a convenient fiction."

"Nor have I," Alice said. "We're entirely with you, and we'll do anything that can be done for Clara."

Langdon poured the rest of his tea down his throat and looked at his pocket watch. Alice knew that he was counting the minutes, waiting for Hasbro's arrival. Dr. Pullman and the Constable had pa.s.sed by on the road some time ago, the body lying in the back of the wagon, covered in a shroud, and Langdon had spoken to them briefly, agreeing to pay a visit to Dr. Pullman's residence at the very first opportunity.

Now three ragam.u.f.fin children, two girls and a small boy, orphans taken in by Mother Laswell, walked into the room along with Clara Wright, the two girls holding Clara's hands. Clara was quite pretty despite the sad look on her face. She wore smoked spectacles and a pair of thin stockings, but no shoes. Alice had found her sightless eyes disconcerting in the past, which struck her now as a shameful weakness.

The children gawked for a moment at Alice and then ran giggling toward the door to the kitchen, the little boy ducking past the girls and endeavoring to squeeze through the doorway first. The taller of the girls s.n.a.t.c.hed the collar of his s.h.i.+rt and dragged him back, calling him a cauliflower-head, and the three disappeared into the kitchen, shouting abuse at each other with a happy vigor.

Clara curtsied and then c.o.c.ked her right arm around so that her hand rested on her left shoulder, the crook of her elbow pointing straight out before her. As if "seeing" that Mother Laswell sat in the chair six steps away to the left, she walked in an uninhibited manner in that direction and put her hand on the old woman's shoulder. Mother Laswell covered Clara's hand with her own.

Alice, hoping that Clara would recognize her voice, said, "It's good to see you again, Clara, although I wish it were under other circ.u.mstances." It occurred to her immediately that her phrasing wanted improvement, although no amount of improvement would make mere words say anything useful. Clara turned toward Alice and acknowledged her statement with a nod of her head, and then sat down in a chair next to Mother Laswell. Mother had told Alice that Clara rarely spoke except in her sleep, sometimes laughing aloud, which seemed to Alice to be both hopeful and troubling in equal measure.

There was the sound of a vehicle coming up the drive now, and, as if put off by the thought of visitors, Clara followed her elbow out of the room, turning away down the hall.

St. Ives rose and went to the window. "It's Hasbro," he said, plucking his coat and hat from the hooks by the door. "With haste there's the chance we'll return before dark."

EIGHT.

THE BROKEN LENS.

The way to Dr. Pullman's house, with its morgue in the rear yard, led along the River Medway for a time, the water brown and high with the season and the tide, and then through the village, approaching the Chequers Inn over the very same road beneath which Mother Laswell's murderous husband lay buried, his headless body long rotted away, but his memory still alive. Hasbro drove the chaise, and St. Ives looked up at the old inn, seeing what must be the window through which Mother Laswell, a comparatively young woman at the time, had watched the grisly business of the taking of the head. He was quite sure that she recalled that dark night all too perfectly, and that it haunted her dreams. The ghosts that remain in one's memory, St. Ives had often found, are not often easy to lay.

They drove out across the old bridge now, the open sky above them dark with clouds, the fine weather a thing of the past. The air smelled of rain, calling up in St. Ives's mind happily empty childhood days. He untied the las.h.i.+ngs that secured the folding hood and raised it over their heads, and none too soon, for the rain began to fall in earnest when Hasbro turned up the road toward Dr. Pullman's house, past occasional cottages that stood among bare orchards and fallow fields. Most of the cottages had small gardens, already showing the shoots of broad beans and onions and winter lettuce. There was something beautiful in autumn rain and in the autumn countryside, something that he had forgotten when the remnant of summer had appeared this morning and beguiled him.

"It's a philosophical sort of day," St. Ives said to Hasbro, raising his voice in order to be heard above the clatter and jingle of the cart and horse.

"Indeed it is," Hasbro said. "It's a philosophical season to my mind, a regretful season, just the opposite of spring. If it weren't for Christmas, there'd be little joy in it, although there's comfort in home and hearth when the air outside is full of flying snow."

"I find myself somewhat gladdened by the changing season, which is apparent on such a day as this. If the world is turning toward winter, it is turning toward summer at one and the same time. There's something to be said for looking ahead, at least in moderation."

English oaks grew on either side of the road now, their nearly leafless canopies closing overhead, but blocking little of the rain. They came out under the sky again at the edge of Dr. Pullman's property. The man himself, wearing a stained medical coat, sat on a bench on the veranda, watching the rain. He had a gla.s.s in his hand, and he raised it in a gesture of recognition when he saw who was coming along in the chaise.

St. Ives knew Pullman well enough, had visited on several occasions in the year and a half since he and Alice had moved to Aylesford, he and Pullman dissecting a gibbon ape that had died of apoplexy on one occasion. Pullman was much the superior anatomist, which was edifying for St. Ives, who valued the gaining of ready-to-hand knowledge. The ape's body had been obtained from Mr. Marchand, a former zookeeper who lived in Maidstone and who still kept a variety of exotic animals on his considerable property. It had been Mr. Marchand who had sold Johnson the elephant to Alice.

Pullman rose and stepped down the several stairs, greeting them cheerlessly. "Will you take a gla.s.s of whiskey?" he asked, holding up his own gla.s.s again by way of ill.u.s.tration after leading them under the cover of the veranda and out of the rain.

Both men declined, and St. Ives said, "We're here on an errand for Mother Laswell of Hereafter Farm. You know her, I believe. I'm afraid that she's sadly distressed by the death of her friend."

"Indeed I do know her. A very sensible, capable woman despite her eccentricities. I have no idea of her ghosts and fairies, but her struggle against what the poet referred to as 'black, satanic mills' has my entire sympathy. I a.s.sume you mean that she's anxious about the particulars of the death."

"Yes. I hope there's something we can tell her that would be comforting, even in a small way."

"There is not," Dr. Pullman said. "It was foul murder of the most unnatural, cold-blooded variety. I've never seen anything like it, a senseless, unimaginable horror."

"When did it occur?" St. Ives asked.

"Yesterday, in the morning to my mind."

"What motive would a murderer have to kill an innocent woman in such a manner?" Hasbro asked. "Do you suspect a madman?"

"I'm not at all certain that I distinguish between murderous madmen and other varieties of murderer. From my point of view, cold, thoughtful murder is madness in any case, whether it be temporary madness or permanent. I can tell you, however, that if this man was literally insane given that the fiend was a man and not a woman he was also a skilled surgeon."

He set his gla.s.s down on the little deal table next to the bench and said, "You won't relish what you are about to see, if you choose to see it, but it's the only way to convey the nature of the thing. But you already know that, Professor."

"My knowledge is superficial, Doctor. We're very keen to understand what sort of monster walks among us."

Dr. Pullman ushered them into his modestly furnished home, which smelled of pipe tobacco, formaldehyde, and cooking grease. The wooden floors were covered with braid rugs, the place almost empty of needless decoration, but cluttered with shelves and shelves of books, many with Latin t.i.tles. Anatomical drawings papered the leftover wall s.p.a.ce, and a wired-together human skeleton hung from a coat-rack in the corner, the hook behind it bearing an umbrella and a bowler hat.

The stove was lit in the small kitchen, the oven door standing open, no doubt in order to heat the house now that autumn had truly descended upon them. There was a broken disk of Stilton cheese atop a plate on the oil-cloth covered table, next to which a dead pelican shared a breadboard with half a loaf of bread, the bird's breast cut open and its wings pinned back.

"I've been anatomizing over my lunch," Dr. Pullman said. "One finds curious things in the bellies of sea birds."

Without expounding on the matter, he led them out of the back door, down the stoop, and back out into the rain. They hunched across a patch of weedy gra.s.s to a stone building with a slate roof. A ladder leaned against the side of the building. On the ground below, a heap of broken slates lay piled beside a bucket that was black with tar, the brush stuck in it. Inside the operating room, however, there was a sense of organization and cleanliness: plaster walls with wooden cabinetry along the length of the room, drawers both large and small, framed anatomical depictions, jars containing various human organs and fetal animals. At one end of the room, beneath a window that let in afternoon light, was a broad basin with water taps above. The room reeked of carbolic acid. Mingling with the chemical odor was the smell of death, the summer-like heat earlier in the day having hastened the process of decay within the body that lay covered in a stained sheet upon the operating table. Dr. Pullman raised the end of the sheet and drew it from the corpse of Sarah Wright, folding it across the dead woman's shoulders.

"Even though the murderer evidently meant to kill her, he removed her head after subduing her with chloroform," Dr. Pullman said. "He wanted an unconscious but living patient. Lord knows why. The result, as you know, was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess.

"A skilled surgeon, you say?" St. Ives asked.

"A surgeon's a.s.sistant might have committed the atrocity, although competent, surely, and willing to take great care with scalpel and saw. As you can see, the flesh has been neatly incised and the spine divided between the third and fourth vertebrae. The carotid and cervical arteries were severed last, to my mind, in order to put off certain death until the last moment. The body, of course, pumped out a tremendous amount of blood in its final seconds."

"There is certainly more to be discovered," Hasbro said. "The motivation could not have been mere deviltry. This is too systematic, too careful."

"Indeed," Pullman said. "There has been a spate of murders in London recently that involved surgeries adrenal and pineal glands taken, brains entirely removed from the skull. Heads removed in much this same matter. London is full of vagabonds and orphans whom no one would miss, and such crimes are rarely solved. So this murder is not untypical, gentlemen, except that in this case the murderer traveled into Aylesford and thence into the heart of Boxley Woods in order to find a cottage that few even know exists."

"Just so," said St. Ives. "It was clear that the cottage had been thoroughly investigated furniture upended, cupboards emptied onto the floor, floorboards prised up, holes dug in the ground beneath. Evidently there was something else they were searching for. Was there no evidence that they'd found it? Constable Brooke is looking into the mystery, I take it."

"In his usual... careful manner, yes. In the cottage he found a great deal as regards the crime, but very little as regards the criminal."

"Does he have any idea what might have been found beneath the floorboards, then?"