The Curse of Christmas (29 page)

He had called round in the
afternoon only to be told she had gone to Marlborough House for tea
with the Princess of Wales. If he thought the Vanderlindens and the
Cazenoves were out of his league, well, the Wales’s definitely
out-ranked him. He was thinking of calling it quits with her before
she snubbed him completely. Her Christmas Eve bash would be a
glittery affair with an illustrious guest list starting with the
Prince Regent. She didn’t need him anymore – a provincial Scottish
doctor…he felt his cheeks burn with shame, regret and rancour.

He tossed up whether to turn up
at Crossbones. He couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on.
So what if Joff and Crick buried dead babies? It was better than
tossing them in the river. So what if corpses were being swapped?
Joff and Crick probably got it wrong and simply wrapped the wrong
bodies. So what if candlelight burned inside the church late at
night? Reverend Paterson was probably writing a sermon. Some people
took inspiration at the oddest hour. So what if Deacon Throstle had
bulging eyes? It didn’t make him a criminal.

They had been called in by
Mycroft to protect the heir to the throne, not chase after fetches
and phantoms and missing cadavers with red hair.

He made himself a promise. If
the weather was fine he would go. If it rained he would stay in and
go to bed early for a change. Fate would decide.

Xenia took the carriage in time
to arrive at the viaduct for eleven o’clock. She had purchased all
the necessary accoutrements for the charade while her mistress
enjoyed tea at Marlborough House. The evening was bitterly cold but
the clouds were too high for rain. The usual noxious blend of soot,
smoke and fog blanketed the city.

The Countess delayed dinner,
expecting Dr Watson to knock on the door any minute, but he failed
to show. She ate sparingly and waited for the footman to hail a
hansom on Old Park Lane before stepping out to face the winter
night, wondering what could have waylaid her sleuthing counterpart
and concluded the only thing she could - he intended to meet her at
Crossbones.

Sightseers and newspapermen who
had been camping outside number 6 all day had finally given in to
the deep freeze and decamped to some place warmer. Two policemen
who had been guarding against troublemakers were still on duty.
Ponsonby was making sure a supply of hot meaty broth came their way
at regular intervals.

The hansom arrived at her door
and she hurried out, dressed in a full length Canadian mink coat,
fur toque and matching fur muff. She climbed into the carriage and
was about to pull up the knee hatch to protect her legs from
flurries of mud when a man dressed in a black riding coat emerged
from the shadows, leapt into the carriage and gave her the fright
of her life.

“Colonel Moriarty!”

Alert and alarmed, the footman
immediately launched himself at the stranger, caught hold of his
arm and attempted to haul him out of the carriage. The clumsy
attempt earned him a kick to the ribs. He fell backwards onto the
cobblestones with a hefty thud. Cries for help summoned the
policemen.

“What’s going on?” said the
cabbie, trying desperately to calm his horse.

“Just drive!” barked
Moriarty.

“Drive where? No one has given
me an address!”

“Anywhere! Just drive! Now!”

The wooden wheels rolled and
picked up speed just as two helmeted Bobbies appeared out of the
fog and gloom. The footman picked himself up and all three set off
in pursuit but it was futile. The hansom turned a corner and was
swallowed up by winter ghosts.

Twin lanterns fixed to the side
of the hansom illuminated a ghastly white face tense with emotion
before the colonel fell back into the seat beside her and caught
his breath. “I was halfway to the coast when I read the news!”

There was no point pretending
she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Then you should have
kept going.”

“Don’t play coy games!” he
barked back, anger looking for a vent since it could no longer be
channelled through physical exertion. “You were no more in that
carriage in Southwark than I was!”

“How would you know unless you
had been following me – have you been spying on me, Colonel
Moriarty?”

“With those words you just
condemned yourself – you admitted you weren’t there.”

“I did no such thing. I
expressed you wouldn’t know whether I had been there or not unless
you had been following me. Have you?”

“This isn’t about me! If General
de Merville or Freddy Cazenove has put you up to this then -”

“No one has put me up to
it.”

He was about to challenge her
silky denial when the cabbie pulled up by the gutter.

“Where to now? We’ve come to
Piccadilly.”

“Go right,” directed
Moriarty.

“Left!” contradicted the
Countess. She didn’t want to arrive late at Crossbones. Nor did she
want to arrive with Colonel Moriarty in tow. His gung-ho,
bully-boy, derring-do tactics would ruin everything.

The cabbie turned into the wide
thoroughfare of Piccadilly and the horse broke into a brisk trot.
The colonel picked up where he’d left off.

“They’re using you! Can’t you
see! They’ve made you the scapegoat for the prince of pricks!”

She remained outwardly calm;
inwardly her brain was in turmoil. How could she get him to leave
the carriage before they crossed London Bridge into Southwark, and
what if next time he bullied the cabbie to go in a different
direction and she missed her rendezvous altogether?

“What business is it of
yours?”

“I made you my business the
moment we met.”

“Then you need to unmake me your
business. We are friends; that is all. Do not presume to be more to
me than what I choose to make you.”

“Oh, that’s right,” he snarled
bitterly. “I had best not rise above my station. Well, don’t
presume that because I am a penniless Irish colonel I will follow
the dictate of a woman.”

“You are free to leave my
dictate anytime you choose.”

“And you are free to make your
own mistakes.”

“So be it. Driver, stop
here!”

“Carry on, driver!”

The confused cabbie reined in
his horse then whipped the beast up again. They had just gone past
Clarges Street and were getting to the end of Green Park. Moriarty,
like most men, took strength from being obeyed.

“Ha! I should leave you to stew
in your own juices! I should go back to Ballyfolly and wait for you
to come crawling, begging me on your knees to take you in,
desperate for a place to hide when all of London shuns you!”

Of course! The quickest way to
get him to abandon her to stew in her own juices would be to prick
his Irish arrogance.

“Bravo, Colonel Moriarty, you
are becoming quite the poet, but take care you don’t become the new
Oscar Wilde. You know where his Irish arrogance ended up.”

“I will never be the new Oscar
Wilde - and not because of my inability to distinguish a metaphor
from an allusion, analogy or simile – but because my preference
runs only to women.”

“Good for you.”

The driver slowed the horse.
“Right at St James’s here and into Pall Mall again?”

Moriarty wondered if the cabbie
had lost his mind; nothing would have surprised him on this day of
utter madness; he had been going pell-mell for three hours, pushing
his horse harder than he had ever done in the hope of saving her
from herself – only to arrive and find her house besieged, the
butler acting as guardian, two policemen patrolling the mews, and
when she finally does appear, he finds her totally unconcerned. Her
coyness had come like a slap to the face. He still felt rattled. If
not de Merville and Freddy, then who had put her up to it?

“Keep going straight, driver,”
she called.

His brows drew down in
puzzlement when the cabbie’s words registered. “Why did he say it
like that?”

“Like what?”

“Coyness doesn’t become you and
neither does stupidity,” he shot back. “Pall Mall-again-St
James’s-here…like that.”

She shrugged. “He must have
gotten mixed up with his previous fare. One passenger must look
like another.”

“Stop the carriage!”

The driver reined in the poor
confused beast. “Stop, go, yes, no, left, right – for pity’s sake!
Are you sure?”

Moriarty suddenly realized she
was not in her own carriage. She was taking a common hansom. He
studied her clothes for the first time. She was dressed for going
out but not to an après theatre supper or late night Christmas
ball. She was dressed as if for an outdoor tryst. He had lost track
of time – it got dark early now and the lamps were lit at four
o’clock – so he checked his pocket watch. It startled him to
discover it was almost midnight.

He opened the little
window-hatch to question the cabbie. “Why did you just ask if we
wanted to go to Pall Mall
again
?”

The cabbie picked up on the
hostile tone; this gent had been itching for a fight ever since
leaping into the cab. The way he booted that poor footman was proof
of a violent Irish temper. “I dunno, sir. It’s late and I been
going since dawn. I just thought…”

“Thought what?”

“Thought nothing, sir. I wasn’t
thinking at all, sir. Is it straight down Piccadilly, you and the
lady wish to go?”

“Yes,” she replied firmly, “but
this gentleman will be leaving here.” She turned to him, full of
hauteur, frosty-eyed, more frigid than winter. “Good bye, Colonel
Moriarty. I’m sorry to have caused you any inconvenience. I wish
you a merry Christmas in Ballyfolly.”

He prepared to go then swung
back. “If you are meeting up with Freddy you are making a grave
error of judgment,” he warned solemnly, studying once again at her
mink coat, hat and muff. “I say that to you as a friend, possibly
the only true friend – apart from Dr Watson – that you have in
London. Freddy won’t give a toss what happens to you once the dust
from this sordid business settles. The Prince won’t even remember
your name. As for General de Merville, he will turn a blind eye to
anyone who doesn’t have blue-blood running though their English
veins. Your wealth won’t be enough to save you. Your foreign
connections will be worthless. When you are looking for somewhere
private to lick your wounds you will find the kitchen door to
Ballyfolly is never locked. I
would
wish you a Merry
Christmas but it would sound hollow. You have brought the curse of
Christmas down upon your own head, Countess.”

Crossbones Cemetery was not only
bursting with bones, it was bursting at the seams by the time the
Countess pulled up in a common hansom. A grey veil seemed to hang
over the neglected boneyard like a dirty shroud over a decaying
corpse. But when she passed through the gate of the sad little
waste-ground the place seemed transformed; she saw it washed clean
in a fiat of bright new light.

Reverend Paterson, dressed in
his best surplice, was standing by the upright headstone. A
hurricane lantern on the grave turned the pockmarked stone into
liquid gold. Aureoles bathed him in messianic light that made him
look like a fierce Old Testament god. He was leading everyone in a
Christmas carol – Silent night; Holy night - which seemed oddly
appropriate given the place and time.

Deacon Throstle was handing out
candles which he carried in a basket, lighting the wick of one
candle before handing out the next, cupping the flickering flame
with his hand until the receiver could take over. The night was
windless and still, with a cold air current barely ruffling the dry
weeds. The candle flames danced in the dark.

Fedir was standing at the back
on his own surrounded by thistles, guarding the pine coffin which
concealed Sukie. Molly was nowhere to be seen; hopefully she was in
position on the train track somewhere, ready to light her lantern
and appear as the ghostly fetch when the time came.

Joff and Crick were leaning
against the fence closest to the gate as if to make a quick getaway
once proceedings were over. They held a candle in their hands and
had another tucked into their pockets.

Standing near to them was a
threesome: Langdale Pike, Miss Pike and Dr Gregory.

Mrs Kronski, like Mother Goose
with all the goose-girls from the brothel gathered closely together
to keep warm, was standing by the fence that ran along Redcross
Way. She was wearing a blue wool cloak with dyed blue fur around
the hood. A lantern glowed at her feet and threw a shaft of
hallowed light up to her face. She could have been Mary Magdalen or
Madonna of the Rocks.

Pennyrose was standing to the
side, a little removed from the rest. Her glorious ruby waterfall
of hair throbbed and glowed red in the candlelight that softened
her care-worn face, puffy from weeping, and made it seem for a
brief moment in time young, pretty and innocent again, glowing with
supernatural love, full of the wonder of life, the goodness of men,
the kindness of hearts and the joy of Christmas.

And dear Dr Watson was there
too. He didn’t have a candle and she didn’t notice him till last.
He was standing on the other side of the gate, out of the way. She
had feared for a moment he had forgotten or stayed away
deliberately. He still hadn’t forgiven her for being the scapegoat.
In that moment when he had dared to question Mycroft in the Temple,
she knew then how much he cared. No girl could ask for a better
friend. But since that time something intangible had happened.
Something had changed between them.

“You’re late,” he said when she
joined him.

“Some last minute details to
take care of,” she lied, wondering about Moriarty’s friendship too.
What did he really know about General de Merville and Freddy
Cazenove? Why was he so concerned she might be being used? Used for
what? He certainly knew more than he was willing to say. If not for
this wretched blessing of the outcast dead she might have
questioned him thoroughly. And she might have worried about it more
except the scapegoating had been her own idea. Mycroft hadn’t
planted it in her head.