Part 13 (1/2)

Mr. Smythe strode down to where Hopeful was now hefting Miss Bracken's portmanteau, shouldered Hopeful out of the way, had a word with the driver, and gave him a coin. The driver tipped his cap, handed down the trunk, and set out up the road. Smythe returned, followed by Hopeful and the two pieces of luggage, and very soon Miss Bracken found herself in quite an elegant coach, driven by a stilt-legged man in a red bowler, traveling down Farringdon Street, and seated next to Mr. Smythe. She marveled for a moment about how one's luck can change on the instant.

She opened her bag, hidden by her person, and peered inside in order to have a look at her prize the ivory jewelry case that she had taken from Tubby Frobisher's portmanteau this very morning while he sat downstairs greasing his face with rashers. The gold shone with a high polish, and she longed to look at the diamonds within, but caution advised against it. Gilbert would not have begrudged them to her. She knew that for a certainty.

She closed the bag and smiled at Mr. Smythe, who looked her up and down, and said, ”You're at loose ends, then, ma'am? No friends or family in the whole of England, I believe you said.”

”That's very close to being true, sir, although I believe I can count you as a friend, since you were kind enough to offer your friends.h.i.+p last night. I have it in my mind to stay at the Midland Grand, St. Pancras. I'm told that gold leaf adorns the walls and that there is an astonis.h.i.+ng hydraulic lift. I intend to await Mr. Frobisher in a room with a view of the station so that I can see the trains come and go.”

Mr. Smythe was silent, his face grave as he stared out through the window at the busy morning traffic. After a moment he shook his head and said, ”You'll wait a tolerably long time, ma'am. Mr. Frobisher's body was found underground just this morning along with that of Professor St. Ives. Both of them were crushed. It grieves me to say so, for they were good men, especially Mr. Frobisher, who left his mark on the city. He'll be sorely missed.”

Miss Bracken scarcely comprehended the words, and so said nothing as they settled into her mind. She began to sob, then, and Smythe comforted her by putting his arm around her shoulder and drawing her toward him.

”I suppose I mustn't go to the hotel as I'd thought,” she said. ”It's too dear by half if I'm indeed alone and hopeless. Can you suggest a small inn? I'd be happy if it were clean, but I make no other demands.”

”I cannot,” Smythe said, as the coach careered around onto Fleet Street. ”I won't happily allow you to remain alone in this very dangerous city. I offer you my protection, ma'am, if you'll agree to accept it.”

”Well,” she said, looking at him now. He wasn't an ugly man at all, just a trifle hard, perhaps, jowly and one eye a bit askew. In his morning coat and frilled s.h.i.+rt he looked very much the gentleman. She was already in his debt; it would be uncivil to spurn his offer. ”I'd be happy for your protection, sir. It is my idea to return to Jamaica at the first opportunity, unless I'm persuaded otherwise.”

”Then I'll do my best to persuade you.”

They turned up Whitefriars Street now, and then around onto a byway that ran between a scattering of lavish homes enclosed by high walls and iron gates. The coach drew up outside one of the richest, a many-windowed mansion that might have housed ten families. There were curtains drawn across most of the windows not a cheerful house, it seemed to Miss Bracken, although she couldn't quite say why.

”Whatever place is this?” she asked, seeing two men lounging within the dim confines of a carriage house. One of them stood up, and she was shocked to see that it was Mr. Hillman or at least that it appeared to be, although his forehead was wrapped in a bandage.

”This is my own domicile,” Mr. Smythe said. ”Elegant, ain't it?”

”You told me that you were a commercial gent,” she said, ”in from Manchester.”

Hillman came down the drive and unlatched the gate, looking in through the window of the coach with a broad smirk visible through the bandages. Two of his teeth were missing. She heard him laugh out loud.

”That was my little lark,” Smythe said, grinning at her. ”I'm actually a non-commercial gent from Sh.o.r.editch.”

”And I dare say this is another little lark, this grand house. I'll ask you to let me out of the coach, sir. I've changed my mind and will make my way to the hotel after all.”

”Will you now? And I tell you that you've come home at last. Better than any hotel. You'll find it amusing here, I dare say. Nothing is as it seems in Mr. Klingheimer's house, ma'am. Things are topsy-turvy like unless you're one of the regular crew. You'll learn to like it, I'll warrant, and you'd best believe I will. I'll learn the both of us to like it.”

Hillman had swung the gate open and the coach began to move. Miss Bracken threw herself sideways, pushed the door open, and attempted to fling herself out of the coach, but Smythe grabbed her arm to stop her as Hillman lunged at the door and pushed it shut again. She began to scream, attempting to pull away from Smythe, seeing that the gate still stood open, although it was fast swinging closed. Smythe swarmed over her, however, smas.h.i.+ng his hand over her mouth and hauling her back onto the seat as the coach turned sharply up the drive.

She reached up to her hat and s.n.a.t.c.hed out the long hatpin that secured the crow, and with all her force she stabbed it into Smythe's stomach. It was quite sharp and it pierced his s.h.i.+rt before it pierced his flesh. She yanked it out and stabbed him again and again, leaning into it in order to bury it deeply, hoping to puncture his vitals. The heart was more to the point if one wanted to kill the man, but a rib would turn the pin aside or break it....

She curled forward now, making a ball of her head and shoulders so as to make herself less vulnerable as he yanked hard at her collar, cursing at her, his spittle showering her neck. He let go of her and clutched himself, gasping in pain and rage, and her final desperate thrust went into his right hand, stopping hard against bone. His mouth opened in a hoa.r.s.e gasp as she began to scream again, and with his left hand he hit her hard on the side of her head, her hat flying off. His hand closed upon her neck now, pressing her head back and choking off her screams. The coach lurched to a stop, the carriage house doors closed, and as she fought to draw breath, she saw that Smythe's foot had pinned the crow to the floorboards, flattening it, and that a wad of cotton was thrust through its neck where its head had been.

TWENTY-FOUR.

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN.

St. Ives descended from his cab in Cavendish Square and set out along Wigmore Street considering what he might accomplish by visiting the nefarious Dr. Peavy, given that it was possible at all to do so. Speaking of anything related to Sarah Wright might be deadly, especially in Peavy's own lair, so to speak: the conversation with Kilner had made that apparent. He contemplated making his way to the Half Toad and then returning later with Tubby and Hasbro. Tubby could act the lunatic easily enough to make their visit plausible, and with two men at his back, St. Ives could be more forthright in his discussion with Peavy.

His discussion regarding what, exactly? Certainly he would have to be subtle. Peavy would be less inclined to reveal anything less inclined to talk at all if confronted by three men, whereas Peavy's apparently brazen self-a.s.surance might betray him into an indiscretion if he were confronted by one.

He turned up Wimpole Street, walking in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on, crossing Queen Anne Street, and, near the corner of New Cavendish Street, seeing the Elysium Asylum opposite, its elegant grounds deserted, its gates closed. It was an austere, squarish, three-storied structure built of stone, the heavy mullions in the iron-framed windows perhaps serving as bars. The window in the tree-shaded gatehouse stood open, and the shadow of a human head was visible in the dim interior. Surely there was no risk in chatting up the gatekeeper. St. Ives stilled any craven voices remaining within his mind, waited for a coach and a hay wagon to rattle past, and then strode purposefully across the street. He could see the face of the man inside the gatehouse now a stout, short, balding man in spectacles who appeared to be upward of seventy years old, no sort of threat, certainly.

”Good day,” St. Ives said through the window, upon which the man looked up at him and smiled agreeably.

”I'll go so far as to call it a splendid day, sir,” the man said. ”Indeed it is. How might I be of service to you, Mr....?”

”Broadbent,” St. Ives told him.

”And why have you decided to visit Elysium, sir?”

”My wife and I are rather desperate to find a means of caring for my wife's brother. He is quite mad, do you see, although harmless. We've quartered him for a year now, thinking that it was in his best interests to be among familiar faces, so to speak that we might improve the state of his mind. But we've grown weary of it. The thing is impossible. It's apparently not in our best interests to care for him, to make my meaning plain. I've lost the ability to find suitable plat.i.tudes and euphemisms, I'm afraid. We're at the end of our tether.”

”That's often the way of it,” the gatekeeper said. ”Most people are essentially kind, I've found, but in cases such as you describe it's an ill-informed kindness, and the result is that the lunatic's inevitable descent drags those around him under. They cannot swim against the tide, alas.”

”I'm quite persuaded of it.”

”You would like to have a look at Elysium Asylum, then?”

”Inside and out, if you please, although I can already see that the outside ill.u.s.trates the name of the hospital nicely.”

”There is a serenity in the grounds, sir, without a doubt. Their salutary effect on the troubled mind is often instantaneous. I'll call for an attendant, Mr. Broadbent.” He pressed the b.u.t.ton of a doorbell, picked up a speaking tube, listened for a moment, and asked that an attendant come to the gate. A silent minute pa.s.sed before a man in a white laboratory coat issued from the front door of the hospital. He shut the door behind him and strode down the walk to the gate, which he opened with an iron key that hung about his neck.

”In you go, Mr. Broadbent,” the gatekeeper said pleasantly. St. Ives rather liked the man. Certainly there was nothing suspicious about him, although St. Ives had the distinct feeling that he had seen the attendant that he had known him somewhere in the dim past.

”Have we met before?” St. Ives asked the man as he locked the gate behind him. ”Your countenance is familiar to me.”

”No, sir,” he said, looking into St. Ives's own face. ”I believe that I heard Lester say that your name was Broadbent?”

”Just so. And yours?”

”William, sir. I've never met anyone named Broadbent, although I knew a Mr. Narrows when I was a child my tutor for a period of months, and my brother's also, until he bolted with the cook the tutor, I mean, did the bolting. My brother is dead.”

He followed a gravel path through the gardens, informing St. Ives that they had been designed by Capability Brown himself, late in life. The many trees were perfectly enormous, two gigantic beeches with yellow leaves shading the hospital roof. A number of small maples, blazing red, stood in flowerbeds among clumps of purple verbena flowers and velvet-brown helenium. A sudden gust of wind blew through, generating a fall of beech leaves and shaking the flowers on their stalks. St. Ives noted that the lawns were mostly clear of leaves, however, as if they had been raked this past half hour.

The park-like grounds were so pleasant in their beauty that St. Ives wondered whether Dr. Kilner had been altogether honest in his condemnation of Benson Peavy. There was some compet.i.tive jealousy, perhaps bad blood that had been left to fester, if blood could be said to fester. When they strolled along the side of the house, St. Ives saw that there was a cellar to the place, the low windows mostly hidden by a wall of the same gray stone that made up the walls of the house. A heavy plume of dark smoke rose from a chimney at the rear of the house, and he could see that the chimney extended to the level of the cellar, where there was a broad iron door, no doubt leading to a vast coal scuttle. Behind the building lay a paved half-circle large enough for a coach and four to turn around on, as well as a high gate that evidently let out onto a by-way.

A van and a Berlin carriage were parked in the half-circle, the van hailing from ”Waltham's Goods and Parcels” according to the sign painted on the side. The driver of the van, a man in a red bowler, sat atop the box smoking a pipe while two men unloaded parcels from the back, one of them carrying a cloth-covered dome some eighteen inches in height, a bird cage, perhaps, or the cage of a small animal. His companion closed the rear door of the van and said something to the driver, who nodded. St. Ives watched as the man with the covered cage went in through a rear door. Near it, was a heavily barred cellar window, the visible corner of which showed a light behind it. There was nothing necessarily suspicious about a cellar, and barred windows were by no means out of place in an asylum, but...

His musing was interrupted, however, as his mind once again labored to recall where he had seen the attendant's face. It had very nearly come to him, and was hovering at the edge of his mind. Certainly he knew the man. His face was badly pock-marked, and he had small eyes looking out of his green-tinged face with a cunning look about them that might easily predispose people against him. St. Ives followed the now-silent man up the several stairs to the front entry door, which was locked. A figure appeared beyond, a man with a key, who opened the door and then stepped aside to allow St. Ives and the attendant to enter. He locked the door again, dropping the key into his coat pocket, and then sat down at a nearby desk, where a magazine lay open.

The interior of the large lobby contained chairs and tables set among potted plants and small cases of books. Landscape paintings, at least two by Richard Wilson and worth a great deal of money, hung on the walls among lesser paintings, all of them illuminated by the autumn sunlight through the windows. On the far wall, along the west-facing windows, stood a long dining table set with candles. It was lavishly set with plates, gla.s.ses, and cutlery. A number of men and women sat in the chairs, dozing, reading or affecting to read.

One man suddenly shrieked with laughter over the newspaper in his hand, and then tore it violently in half and dropped it onto the floor a copy of the Times, it appeared and then began to weep. St. Ives saw that a woman, perhaps eighty years old, played at blocks at a broad double-sided library table, a teacup and teapot precariously close to her very active elbow. She piled the blocks haphazardly and then knocked them down again, putting her hand coyly to her mouth as she watched them fall. Across from her an old gentleman clad in a well-maintained army officer's uniform s.h.i.+fted a phalanx of tin soldiers and miniature cannon about the tabletop, his free hand holding a pince nez to his eye.