The Aylesford Skull (48 page)

There was the sound of a door shutting behind her, and Alice realized that she and Eddie were alone in the room, perhaps in the house, the driver and Helen having gone out again. She heard the tinkle of bells and the sound of the coach leaving the courtyard.

But now there were footsteps somewhere above, and then a door closed followed by more footsteps, perhaps someone descending a stairway. She looked around for a weapon of any sort, but saw nothing useful, the room cluttered with the heavy furniture but almost empty of objects that might be thrown or brandished or broken to produce a cutting edge. She cursed her unthinking hurry when the boy Simonides had come for her. In her excitement she had lost her mind. A clasp knife might be worth a fortune now. Helen hadn’t thought to search her bag, but if she had she would have found nothing but a hairbrush and a dressing case...

Alice hurriedly opened her traveling bag now and removed the dressing case, groping in the bottom of it, her hand closing on a bit of felt in which were enclosed three decorative hatpins. She removed the longest of the three, which had a piece of ivory affixed to it, carved in the shape of an elephant – a solid weight that she could grip in her hand. She returned the dressing case to the bag, which she set on a chair just as a panel in the wall whispered open and Dr. Narbondo bent through it.

He smiled at her and bowed. “Welcome to my home,” he said heartily. “Your stay in London promises to be brief, but eventful. I believe I can guarantee that.”

* * *

“Upon my honor, I have only the faintest idea why this new cathedral was built on that piece of ground,” Harry Merton told Jack Owlesby. “But then it’s scarcely the sort of thing that would be brought to my attention.”

Jack, Tubby and Arthur Doyle stood in Merton’s workroom – not in the Thames-side shop where St. Ives and Hasbro had found him, but in Merton’s second shop, open by appointment only. Doyle had picked the lock on the alley door when Merton hadn’t responded to their persistent knocking. The long bench or table at which he worked was covered in heavy paper and littered with inkpots and canisters containing strong reductions of tea and coffee, squid and sea hare inks, green algae and emulsions of garden soil, and dozens of other strange dyes and tints. There were brushes and quill pens and pieces of sponge lying about – all in all the stock in trade of a very advanced forger. Whatever Merton had been working on he had hastily slipped into a drawer when they stepped into the shop.

“We suspect that the cathedral is built on hallowed ground of some sort,” Doyle said, “or perhaps cursed ground that needs to be sanctified or cleansed.”

“Quite possibly,” said Merton.

“Quite possibly which?” Tubby asked.

“It’s true that it’s built over an ancient pagan cemetery, the most ancient of those in London.”

“I believe that the cemetery in Smithfield is the most ancient of the four
Roman
cemeteries,” Doyle said. “It dates to the fourth century, unless I’m mistaken.”

“You’re correct, sir, as far as it goes. But there’s an even more ancient burial ground, to my certain knowledge, that lies below Carmelite Street, stretching beneath the Temple itself, which predates the Roman cemeteries. It was not only pagan but was pre-Christian and pre-Roman, lost and forgotten centuries before Joseph of Arimathea carried the Grail to Glastonbury. It’s very deeply situated, I’m told, part of a lost city, or so they say. Its existence is largely unknown except to the... cognoscenti.”

“And Harry Merton knows it!” said Tubby. “You amaze me, sir.”

“Not at all,” said Merton, smiling at the compliment. Then the smile was replaced by a frown. “I deny that I
know
it. Not in so many words. It’s mere rumor, no more. There were certain objects alleged to have been taken from there that made their way to the British Museum when I was a very young man. I had recently been promoted, you see, to the position of Associate Purchaser of Antiquities, quite the youngest employee ever so honored. But of course I would have nothing to do with the objects in question. Robbing the dead is an infamous business. I deplore it.”

“All of us do,” said Jack. “What variety of object?”

“Carvings, sir. Of soapstone and ivory. Representations of the heads of devils or gods, I believe, which amounts to the same thing, to my mind. Nasty looking items. Grotesques. I recall that one was tentacled, with a diabolical human face, much elongated and with sharpened incisors. It was meant to suggest cannibalism, without a doubt.”

“And these were dug out of graves?” Doyle asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know. But I would guess that they were taken from crypts.”

“Is it conceivable that Ignacio Narbondo would be aware of these catacombs? He certainly wouldn’t scruple to rob graves.”

“I would be most remarkably surprised if he were not aware of them,” Merton said, “given that they exist at all. It was his nefarious stepfather who attempted to persuade me to traffic in the diabolical carvings. Of course I sent the man away. Would Narbondo have learned his stepfather’s secrets? Assuredly. Depend upon it.”

A bell tolled the hour somewhere beyond the walls of the shop, and Merton removed his apron, folded it, and hung it on a peg. “That was the bell of St. Mary Abchurch,” he said. “Remarkable tone and accuracy, gentlemen. Correct to the minute. It informs me that it’s time for me to lay down my work if I desire peace with Mrs. Merton.”

“We’ll need a map before you go,” Tubby said. “Do you have such a thing, Harry? Not a common ordnance map, but something more arcane?”

“I might,” Merton said. “Although it comes at a price. And I warn you that it’s monstrously dangerous ground. The catacombs and their environs lie far beneath the Fleet River in a land of perpetual night. The door to that world was shut many years ago, according to all sources, hence the value of these detestable objects. There were only those few, you see. As collectible items, there is perhaps nothing rarer on Earth.”

“We have no idea of seeking out these catacombs,” Jack said. “A reliable map of the several underground rivers and their tributaries and access ways will do nicely. We mean to scour the area, Mr. Merton, but only the more modern passages, in order to head off an enormity contemplated by Dr. Narbondo.”

“The man is my bane, gentlemen, as I told Professor St. Ives quite recently. I warn you that you take him far too lightly. How do you know that you were not followed here tonight?”

“We
were
followed,” Tubby said, “but we knocked the man on the head and pitched his body into the river. We’re the bane of Dr. Narbondo, sir. He won’t survive us. We mean to pull his nose for him.” He took de Groot’s purse from his coat now and dumped the contents among the pots and jars and brushes on Merton’s workbench.

Merton looked at the money and shook his head, as if he were suddenly weary and defeated – particularly weary of money. “Because you three are
particular
friends,” he said, sweeping the bills and coins into an open drawer beneath the desk, “I’ll help you. I’m doomed as it is, perpetually hunted down and taken to task. It’s my lot in life, I suppose, to be victimized by my friends and enemies both.”

He opened one of a series of wide, shallow drawers now and withdrew a map, and it occurred to Jack that five pounds would have purchased it as easily as fifty, for there was another apparently identical map beneath it. But it was another man’s money that they were paying with, which was spent far more easily than one’s own. “Might we have two?” Jack asked. “You seem to have a plethora of them, and we’ve two friends who are equally in need.”

Merton widened his eyes, shrugged, and drew a second map out of the drawer. They wished him a good night and went out carrying their rolled-up maps, bound for Jermyn Street, supper, and sleep. Tomorrow would arrive tolerably early.

* * *

“It must be very like heaven, sir,” Finn said. He had abandoned the telescope and stood next to St. Ives, looking intently out of the window of the airship.

St. Ives marveled at the fact that the boy apparently had no fear, that he was filled with wonder instead; the beauty of what lay beyond the windows of the gondola pushing any darkness from his mind. He searched his own mind for fear, but didn’t find it. Perhaps it, too, was banished by the utter peace and great purity roundabout them. Passing below was a school of very low-flying gray clouds like great whales, the edges silver in the light of the moon, which shone brightly overhead, the sky awash with stars. Far below lay more stars – the lights of a small city, seeming to wink in the darkness. The clean air smelled like the air on a Scottish hillside or on the edge of the ocean, laden with moisture, it seemed to St. Ives, and the world aloft was almost silent, just the thrum of the wind in the rigging. He looked at his watch: three o’clock in the morning. Finn had slept for a time, and they had eaten most of the food that Madame Leseur had put by. St. Ives would have paid a good deal for hot coffee, or cold coffee, for that matter, but they had been in far too much of a hurry to think of it.

He tried to determine just
which
illuminated city lay below. Oxford, perhaps. Reading if they were lucky. Certainly not Swindon, he thought. God help them if they were that far out. They had been blown many miles off course to the northwest in the first hours, leaving the lights of London far behind. Finally, out of desperation, he had risen to two thousand feet, according to the clever Cailletet altimeter that Keeble had installed – high enough so that the black expanse of the North Sea was visible in the east. The altimeter was a very new invention, however, untested for the most part. Keeble had warned him about rising too high, for there was some risk of blowing up the airship like a penny squib because of the pressure of the expanding hydrogen gas. How high was too high? Keeble couldn’t say. There were too many variables, mostly untested. A “test,” it seemed to St. Ives, might likely prove fatal, and he wished he had studied the science of the craft more thoroughly, although of course he hadn’t known that he himself would be tested in such a hellfire hurry.

The experiment of seeking the higher altitude had succeeded, however, for he had found a contrary wind, and they had made a wide circuit to the west and south, the North Sea disappearing below the horizon. Although they could not be said to be on course quite yet, they were in a fair way to run even farther south and west, drop down to a more sensible altitude, and make another attempt at London with a more favorable wind behind them.

Finn returned to the telescope, looking toward the horizon, the clouds having passed away for the moment. “I see darkness, sir, due south by the compass. The sea again, I believe, with towns along it.”

“The Channel, I’d warrant,” St. Ives said. “Fifty miles away, given our altitude. Perhaps sixty. The lights of Brighton and Eastbourne.” There was some fair chance, then, that the city below them had been Reading – a piece of luck if it were so. He depressed the tiller, and the balloon canted downward, St. Ives turning the wheel to port, watching the compass and feeling the wind. It would be a bad business to hurry it out of anxiety, only to be blown back to the west, and have to rise to the higher altitude again in order to take another run at it. Dawn was three hours away.

They descended through scattered clouds, the gondola bouncing and jigging erratically, and then abruptly they were caught by the wind off the Channel – the same that had blown them so far off course hours ago. But it was their ally now that they were far enough southward, and St. Ives carefully brought the airship around farther, contemplating a sensible course for London. The starry sky overhead seemed to him to be darkening by degrees, and very soon the stars ahead of them disappeared behind massed clouds. The storm he had seen from his dune beside Egypt Bay would soon be upon them, for they were heading straight into it with the wind nearly at their back.

Rain began to fall, although they were running before it, for the most part, and for a time it spattered against the rear windows, which were already closed. Soon, however, drops began to sail in through the front windows also, falling onto the balloon above and washing down the sides. St. Ives closed them with the hinged frames of glass, his mind revolving on the general subject of windows, on the more sensible ports and portholes – whether the window was the hiatus itself, or the wood-and-glass barrier that filled it. It was a question that seemed philosophical, and he was on the verge either of coming at it or falling asleep when he realized that his vision was obscured by the rainwater coursing down the glass. He could perhaps fly by the compass...

“Can you see anything telling?” he asked Finn, the telescope being fit quite sensibly with a hood.

“I believe I see London, sir, in the far distance, away off to the right, off to starboard, I mean. A vast field of lights, and the river, I believe, snaking through it.”

St. Ives felt a monumental relief. Their success wasn’t assured by any means, but by God they had managed a bit of smart navigation. Some few minutes after that thought had receded from his mind, he saw the first bolts of lightning descend from the clouds ahead of them.

FORTY