Part 2 (1/2)

”There's a cottage in Boxley Woods, where my friend Sarah Wright dwells. I have a clear foreboding that all is not well with her. She is known to be a witch, you see, and has suffered for it, as is the lot in life of those who can see what most people cannot.”

”I've heard the name,” Alice said. ”Aunt Agatha spoke of Sarah Wright from time to time.”

”Your Aunt Agatha consulted her. I know it for a fact, as did other women, generally in secret. Agatha Walton strolled to her house in the light of day, however. I'm happy to be able to say so. Children threw sticks at Sarah when she came into the village, and reviled her as a witch, so in time she stopped coming and was largely forgotten. There's a beaten path from her cottage in the wood to Hereafter Farm, however, and I've carried meat and greens and black bread to Sarah Wright for many, many years. She was a hermit, you might say, although she was good company when she had something to say, and she harmed no one.”

She stopped then, a painful look on her face. ”I mustn't say 'was.' From time to time the more daring children in the village, hearing rumors of the witch, make forays into Boxley Woods to look at her. At Hereafter we've seen them sneaking along the path, but since Bill came to the farm they've mostly stayed away, because he won't allow them to cut their capers. It was this very morning, however, Bill being gone off to Maidstone, that I saw three boys running back along the path toward the village as if the Devil were after them. Seeing those boys put ideas into my head.” She paused for a moment and then said, ”I believe that you've both met Clara,” she said, ”the blind girl who lives at the Farm?”

”The girl who sees with her outstretched elbow, as I recall,” St. Ives said, careful to keep his tone clear of any suspicion of doubt. He had seen the girl's powers, which at the time he suspected of being a clever parlor trick. He had few such suspicions now, nor did he have any notion of explaining the phenomenon, which was beyond his ken. The scientist in him knew that there was an explanation somewhere, but the other part of him wasn't as sure.

”Indeed. Clara is Sarah Wright's daughter. She came to live at the farm when she was eight years old. She was understandably withdrawn, and Sarah rightly believed that the girl wanted company, although Sarah herself did not want company, and Clara had come to fear the woods. I like to think that Clara has thrived at Hereafter, and you can understand that I'm unwilling to allow her to come to harm. In any event, Clara also saw the frightened boys, and fell into a swoon. It was Clara's... condition that convinced me to come to you. Clara sees what many of the rest of us cannot see. I fairly dread looking into the cottage alone because of what the girl saw, or rather sensed. Perhaps I'm simply being foolish. Indeed, I pray that I am.”

”I'll just take myself in hand,” Alice said. ”I'll fetch your coat from upstairs, Langdon. The weather is changing. Give me two minutes, and I'm with you.” She rose and hurried away up the stairs.

St. Ives took up his pen and wrote a note to Hasbro, asking him to bring the chaise around to Hereafter Farm and to wait for them there, and then he took Alice's double-barreled fowling piece from the wall and slipped four sh.e.l.ls into his trouser pocket, before compelling himself to sit back down at the table. He was anxious to see this through in order to be back about his business.

”Sarah Wright granted me a particular service once, Professor, for which I owe her a great deal, although it's nothing I can speak of here, and nothing that I would willingly make public. I was mortally certain that our secret was safe, but if it is not, if someone has...” She struggled to her feet when she saw Alice descending the stairs, and the three of them went out beneath the afternoon sky, her sentence left unfinished.

Mother Laswell drove the wagon, the three of them sitting together tightly on the seat. St. Ives's s.h.i.+llelagh, which served him as a weapon and walking stick both, lay on the bed of the wagon along with Alice's fowling piece. He had no idea of taking the women along to Sarah Wright's cottage until he had seen it for himself, or of leaving them defenseless in the chaise. He had raised the issue as soon as they had started out, and neither woman had protested, Alice agreeing immediately to remain with Mother Laswell.

His mind turned on Boxley Woods now, which he had regarded through the window not an hour past. He had tramped through it on two previous occasions, searching out mushrooms for Mrs. Langley, but he had never traveled deeply enough into it to see the cottage where Sarah Wright lived. Now the wood lay a hundred yards in front of them, the copper beeches at the outer edge, and the upper branches of the old forest towering one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. Had it been the purple color in the beeches that had attracted his attention earlier today, or had his attention been attracted by something else? By a presentiment, say. It was a novel idea one that he would have laughed into oblivion fourteen months ago, before he had met Mother Laswell and got caught up in her desperate affairs, which had turned out to be his own.

The wagon entered the wood and fell into shadow. The vast trunks of the beeches were green with moss along the woodland floor, although gray above, the spa.r.s.e leaves a hodgepodge of browns, reds, and yellows. There was almost no undergrowth far too much shade and the beech saplings were puny and starved for sunlight. Mosses and lichens covered the rocks that lay along the roadway, with here and there a patch of gra.s.s when a break in the foliage above let in a ray of sun. Mushrooms grew up through the litter of leaves and rotted wood on the ground blewits were particularly plentiful, and oyster mushrooms on fallen limbs. St. Ives promised himself that he would return in the next week or so with a basket. The family would make a day of it.

But the pleasant idea disappeared from his mind as quickly as it had entered, replaced by a sense of indefinite dread, which increased as they drove deeper into the trees. He wondered whether his mind had been infected by Mother Laswell's sense of foreboding, or whether the foreboding had some authentic existence. The wind gusted, and leaves fell from overhead and skittered along the dirt track, which had narrowed.

A fork appeared in the road ahead, the track on the right being hidden by leaf-covered gra.s.s, as if no one had pa.s.sed that way since summer had ended. Mother Laswell turned down along the path less traveled, and soon the trees closed in on either side, and she reined in the horses on a clear, gra.s.sy patch of ground.

St. Ives climbed down, handed Alice the fowling piece, and set off down the footpath, coming in sight of the cottage within a few minutes. The plank door stood open. He paused, hiding himself behind a tree trunk, listening to the wind through the branches, but hearing little else. Nothing moved. There was no smoke from the chimney of the slate-roofed cottage, which was built of stone and with windows of old bull's-eye gla.s.s. He listened hard for sounds from within, and looked for an indication of someone lurking, but there was nothing visible, neither a wagon nor a horse. He stepped from his hiding place, crossing a board that lay over a deep, still brook, and he saw that a wagon track ran away west from the clearing where the cabin lay the road past Hereafter Farm, no doubt. A white chicken hurried out through the open door now and ran off around the side of the house.

He stopped just outside the open door, listening again to the silence, and then peered in past the low lintel. There was the unmistakable smell of a dead body on the warm air, and he could hear the buzzing of flies. The interior of the cottage one room, very nearly square, and with a wooden floor was dark, and it took him a moment to see that someone sat on a chair by the hearth, unmoving. It was a corpse, headless a woman, no doubt Sarah Wright. Her gown was soaked with blood, and she was tied into the chair. There were several turns of rope about her body.

He took in the rest of the room before going in: a tall cupboard set into a recess in the wall, the contents strewn on the floor dishes, books, cooking implements. The cupboard itself had been pulled away so that the intruder could see behind it. The bed stood on its side, the torn mattress on the ground spilling out feathers. A loom near the hearth had been broken to pieces, a half-woven rug in the frame. Floorboards had been prised up, exposing the packed dirt beneath.

Someone had pulled the place apart searching for something. Quite possibly they had murdered Sarah Wright because she wouldn't give it up the secret, perhaps, that Mother Laswell had mentioned, although to murder her in this horrific fas.h.i.+on... There was a necessary room in the corner, with a door that stood open, the small closet clearly empty.

St. Ives looked carefully around himself at the trees that stretched away on all sides. The place had a lonesome air to it. A pair of squirrels scampered along beside the stream now and up the trunk of a beech, chattering to each other, and a rooster strode out from behind a pile of firewood and stood looking at him. He stepped into the interior of the cottage, where he set his s.h.i.+llelagh against the corner of the wall by the door. He saw now that holes had been dug into the dirt beneath sections of torn up floorboards. Had they found what they were looking for, he wondered, and he walked across to view the body, his eyes growing used to the dim light. From the charnel house smell it was likely that she had been murdered yesterday, the village boys discovering her this morning.

A bunched square of cloth lay on the floor, which he picked up and held to his nose, immediately smelling the residue of chloroform, although it had dried by now. Whoever had committed the atrocity had done Sarah Wright the service of deadening her senses. Possibly she had simply been murdered with the chemical, although the ghastly quant.i.ty of spilled blood argued that her heart had pumped it out unto the very last moments. The incision appeared to be remarkably neat to him the work of someone who was familiar with the use of a scalpel and saw.

There was a rattling outside now the sound of a wagon drawing up, having come along the road from the west. St. Ives stepped to the door and retrieved his s.h.i.+llelagh, before looking out at the wagon, and recognizing the driver Dr. Lamont Pullman, the coroner, along with the village constable, a pleasant but slow-witted man named Brooke. With a deep sense of relief St. Ives went out under the now cloudy sky to meet the two men, leaving the door open as he had found it.

SIX.

BEAUMONT'S REWARD

The several houses that lined Lazarus Walk were large, many-roomed structures from the last age, with multiple chimneys and lamp-lit geminate windows glowing through the fog. Beaumont looked into the courtyard of number 12, through a broad, scrolled-iron gate between the high walls of granite stones that separated the immense house from the rest of London. It was a half-timbered mansion with colored gla.s.s in the downstairs windows. Many years ago someone had bled money to build it.

There was no gatekeeper to be seen. A gold-painted Berlin carriage, very old and very elegant, stood on the cobbles near the arched front door, its two patient horses waiting in front of a large carriage house, lanterns lit within. A man the driver, perhaps came out of the carriage house now and stood smoking a pipe, the reek of burning tobacco mingling with the fog. He was a narrow man, his legs needlessly long The Duke of Limbs, Beaumont thought. He wore a red bowler hat with a low dome. Beaumont waved the handbill at the man, who stared at him with a look of disapproval on his face. A crowd of laughing people jostled Beaumont, shoving him against the iron bars of the gate, one of them knocking his hat askew and laughing as he did it. The chin ribbon saved it before it fell.

”Be off with you, dwarf!” the gangly driver shouted at him, but Beaumont held up the handbill again and pointed at the picture drawn on it. The man considered him for another moment before stepping across to the gate and said, ”State your business, then.”

”I'm here to lay claim to my reward, your honor: twenty pounds, it says here on this bill, as you can see right enough.”

”Tell me what you know, then, and I'll fetch your money. If it's worthless to Mr. Klingheimer I'll fetch you a kick in the a.r.s.e.”

”I'll fetch my own reward from Mr. Klingheimer, if you please, sire,” Beaumont said. ”It'll spend better in my hands than it will in yours. The man you see here, I was his coachman, the same situation as you, I don't doubt. A black Landau coach, which I cleaned and polished and cared for the horses. I was ostler and driver both for near on a year.”

”And where is he now, this master of yours?”

”Under my hat, which is where he'll stay.”

”Tell me what the man did, then. What line of work?”

”All manner of evil more than aught else. Viversuction, poisons, resurrection. I had nought to do with any of that. It weren't in my line. I mostly minded his horses' business, not his.”

”Go around back, then,” the man said, ”down the lane there. If it's twaddle you're peddling, you'll regret it.” He nodded up the road, where there was no doubt a cut-through. ”The red door, first you come to. Don't bang the knocker. Mrs. Skink will open it in due time.” He turned away and walked back into the coaching house, disappearing within.

Beaumont considered what he would reveal as he walked along the narrow bit of pavement toward the red door, which he could see now through the wisps of fog blowing past, hiding and then disclosing things. He realized that he had little to say to anyone that he had not already said, except that the man they sought had gone to d.a.m.nation, a prisoner of the toads. They would pay little for news about someone who was as good as dead. Beaumont would bra.s.s it out, though, to see what came of it a farthing for his trouble, perhaps, which was twice better than half a farthing.

He waited as he had been told, standing several paces back from the stoop, removing his hat and holding it in the crook of his arm. The door was standing open at present, a greengrocer handing crates of vegetables through it to someone unseen in the shadows. The grocer went away in the direction of the river pus.h.i.+ng his now-empty cart, and the door swung shut. Beaumont looked up at a bank of long windows that led out onto a narrow balcony along the third floor and at the ledges and heavy moldings that decorated the wall beneath it foot and handholds enough for a person leaving by one of the windows. He had never been happy playing the ape, not since he was a boy, but he still considered houses as places from which a person might find it necessary to leave in considerable haste.

There was a clatter from within now, what sounded like a bolt banging open before the door was drawn back by a withered housemaid with a scraggle of hair and a long green gown with a tattered hem Mrs. Skink, no doubt. Two men pushed out past her. Both of them stared at Beaumont for a moment, one of them with apparent ill intent, before they walked slowly in the wake of the grocer. The one who had given him the stink-eye was as bad a man as Beaumont could recollect, known along the river as Cobble, and was in the smothering lay, which paid well better than the resurrection men were paid, the smothered corpses being still fresh and warm. Cobble had brought two of them to Narbondo one dark night at the old Shade House in the Cliffe Marsh near Egypt Bay.

Beaumont noticed that Mrs. Skink was regarding him now, as if taking his measure. He bowed to her when she gestured him forward, and walked into the dim light inside. He smelled cooking odors and heard the noise of the nearby kitchen, and he watched as the woman shut the door. There was a Chubb lock with a twist latch set into the door a foot from the top. The latch clicked shut when the door stopped against the jamb, which meant it was always locked unless the lock was fixed open. She lowered a heavy bar across the door and padlocked the bar into place. What did that signify, he wondered, a door with locks meant both to keep the outside out and the inside in? and him inside now.

He saw that there was a closet in the wall with a black curtain across it, the curtain half open at the moment. Inside the closet stood a bed and a chair, the bedclothes tossed in a heap Mrs. Skink's cupboard, she being always on duty. The gaoler, he thought. He didn't like the look of her, nor she of him, apparently. And there was something in the air of the house that wasn't right a smell of physic, perhaps, beneath the cooking odors, or the smell of death coming up through the floorboards. It was more than a mere smell fresh ghosts, more like, troubled and unhappy. It was a house, he thought, that wanted to be burnt to the ground. He wondered now whether it was the sight of the man Cobble that had played on his mind, but his wondering was interrupted when the gangly man with the red hat appeared and said, ”Come along, then.”

They set out along a hallway toward a flight of stairs. Beaumont looked back and saw Mrs. Skink hide the padlock key inside a pitcher-pot that sat on a shelf near the door. A blind mouse could find it, which meant that they hadn't had any troubles with blind mice, so to speak. She sat down on a stool against the wall, crossed her arms, and bowed her head as if to sleep.

There was a maze of narrow corridors at the top of the stairs, and he memorized the left- and right-hand turns, noting the look of things in case he needed to find his way back out in a hurry. Dealing with the door locks would take some doing, especially since he mayn't be tall enough to reach the pitcher that held the key to the padlock, nor the latch on the uppermost lock. He could use the doorkeeper's stool, perhaps, which would make a handy weapon in a pinch.

At the top of the stairs lay another hallway, this one broad and paneled, brightened with electric-lamps suspended from the ceiling and with rich, Turkey carpet running along the floor. Heavily framed portraits lined the walls on either side, dark and dim with age. A door opened ahead of them, apparently of its own accord, and red hat ushered him into a large room, scattered with upholstered chairs and settees and wooden tables. It at first appeared to be empty of people, but then Beaumont saw that a large man in s.h.i.+rtsleeves sat at a desk along the far wall, writing with a quill pen. The door closed silently behind him, red hat having gone out like a ghost. It seemed as if the man at the desk Mr. Klingheimer himself, no doubt was unaware of his presence, which was an awkward business. Best to wait him out.

As ever, Beaumont glanced around quickly for something small that he might nick, the owners of the house being not likely to suffer if a loose item or two found its way into his pocket. A crystal paperweight with a garden of gla.s.s flowers inside caught his eye on a nearby console table, s.h.i.+ning in the light of an Argand lamp. French crystal, no doubt. Heavy, but in that regard useful as a weapon or for beating out a window or a man's skull if there were trouble. He picked the orb up, slipped it into his coat pocket and pinned it with his elbow, watching the back of Mr. Klingheimer's head the entire time.

”That's a lovely bauble, isn't it?” Mr. Klingheimer said in a cheerful voice, without looking up from his work. ”It was given to me by a woman who I remember fondly, dead now, alas.”

Beaumont bowed, removed the crystal ball from his pocket, polished it on his cuff, and set it down again on the console table. He glanced again at the closed door, wondering whether it, too, was bolted on the outside. He could play the flute caper again, as he had in the Goat and Cabbage, but it was one thing to strike a no-account p.i.s.s-maker in a low pothouse, and another to strike a rich man in his mansion. And in any event, gaffing Mr. Klingheimer in the throat wouldn't unlock doors. Beaumont would be brought to heel, and that would be the end of it.

The man rose from the desk and walked toward him. He was a stout man, and tall, a second cousin to Father Christmas, with a clipped white beard and lengthy white hair with a curl to it, his tweed trousers held up with braces. His collar was loosened, and there was a spray of ink on his s.h.i.+rt. Beaumont wished that he hadn't played the fool with the piece of crystal, for there was something about the man that belied the smile something that made the hair on the back of Beaumont's head creep, although there was nothing to account for it in the way he looked or spoke, which was pleasant enough.

The man pointed toward a round, upholstered chair of the sort a woman might sit upon to make up her face. ”Take a seat, Mr....?”