any number of men to bits.”
“You picked up the clock yesterday,” said the squinting butler, “and you’re telling me this about heat and pressure and blowing up? There isn’t an hour’s labor here. Not half that.”
“In fact,” said St. Ives, brassing it out again, “that’s what you’re paying for. There’s not another clocksmith in London who could have gotten it done so quick. I believe I mentioned it’s a complex process. Great deal of heat. Exorbitant, really.”
The butler turned in the middle of St. Ives’ mumbling and stepped out of the kitchen toward the interior of the house. St. Ives followed him, hoping that the domino player would go back to his game and that the bulbous cook would abandon her diddling with meat cleavers and attend to her baking. The butler passed on into a long hallway, apparently oblivious to St. Ives having followed him. Voices drifted out from unseen rooms. A carpeted stairway angled away at his left.
St. Ives’ heart thundered like a train in open country. He decided upon the stairs. He’d have a quick look and then pretend to have gotten lost. What would they do, shoot him? It was hardly likely. Why should they? He took the steps two at a time, still clutching the clock, and arrived at a landing illuminated by leaded windows beneath which sat a heavy, oaken Jacobean settle. A deserted hallway ran off in either direction revealing on the right a half-dozen closed doors, and on the left a stretch of plaster wall hung with brass sconces that lit, finally, a wooden balustrade that overlooked what appeared to be a broad, high-ceilinged room.
St. Ives hesitated. Would he ascend another flight, or have a look over the balustrade? A door slammed. He turned toward the stairs once again, putting a foot down silently on an immense copper-colored rose in the stair runner. Three steps farther up he paused, crouched, and, hidden by the angle of the ascending wall of the stairwell, peered between two turned posts. Along the hallway toward the landing below staggered the old man who’d elbowed him into the gutter the previous day. He seemed mesmerized, vacant, and he walked with a hesitating step. He wore a haggard, drawn expression in his eyes and in the downward curve of his mouth, as if consumed with remorse or disease — possibly both. His cloak was rumpled and stained, and his hand shook with palsy or fatigue. St. Ives at first was prompted to ask him if he needed support; he’d surely pitch down the stairs head first if he attempted to navigate them. But the atmosphere of evil and dread in the house pushed him deeper into shadow instead. This was no time for chivalry. The old man slumped against the wall, brightened a bit, and licked his lips. He wiped a hand across his face, leaving on it a feral, satisfied look.
St. Ives rose slowly to his feet, determined to see the top of the stairs. He’d left the kitchen a minute or so earlier; surely they’d be after him at any moment. Facing downward, he trod backward onto the step above, planting his heel firmly onto the top of someone’s boot.
“There you are!” he half shouted, making a bluff, if idiotic, show of poise and half expecting to be precipitated down the stairs himself. He turned to look into the face of an incredibly fat man in a turban. Another man with a mangled arm stood on the stairs above. Both stared at him, or past him, St. Ives couldn’t say which. He stared back, then looked over his shoulder to see if there was something ascending the staircase who was worth staring at with such fixed attention. There wasn’t.
Their faces were ghostly, a lifeless white, faintly marbled with fine blue veins, and their eyes were fixed, as if made of glass. St. Ives could see a throbbing pulse beating along the neck of the turbaned man, slowly and rhythmically as if he’d been gilled in some earlier larval stage. A hand clamped onto St. Ives’ arm, and the man took a step downward. Had St. Ives not stepped back himself, he would have been trodden on, and the two of them would have tumbled together down the stairs. His two companions said nothing, simply propelled him along. The old man, somewhat recovered, met them on the landing. He looked suddenly fierce, scowling at St. Ives.
“This is a nest of unspeakable sin,” he croaked.
St. Ives smiled at him. “I’ve fixed this clock,” he began, but the old man paid him little heed. He was obviously less inclined to listen than to speak.
“My children,” he said to the pale men. Both of them gave him a little trilling bow, but neither spoke.
“I’m owed two pound six for my attention to the clock here,” said St. Ives, suddenly wondering if the old man weren’t some sort of proprietor. He seemed far too familiar with the place to be a mere customer.
“I know nothing of that,” came the reply. “What do I care for clocks? For time? It’s the infinite I pursue. The spiritual. Help me down the stairs, my child.” The man with the twisted arm stepped at once out over the stairs — entirely past the first tread — and toppled forward, rolling end over end like a sack of onions, somersaulting off the bottom landing into the room below. He lay still. His companion in the turban seemed hardly to notice. The old man, however, grappled the banister with both hands and creaked down the stairs as hastily as he could, oh-oh-ohing. St. Ives and his captor followed mechanically.
The absent butler stormed into the room just then, followed by the domino player, who wore his tilted hat and carried a pistol in his right hand. The old man waved them off and bent over the still body. The injured man shook himself, rose unsteadily to his knees, then to his feet, and walked squarely into a long, drop-front desk against the wall, kicking one of the legs out from under it and going down once again, pulling the desk with him in a rattle of ink and blotters and books.
The front of the desk fell forward on its hinge and cracked him in the head. Loosed from the interior was an assortment of unidentifiable artifacts: an India rubber face with immense, yawning lips; a stupendous corset hung with whalebone stays and brass hooks; a leather halter of some inconceivable sort, attached to a block and tackle affair as if the halter and its wearer could be suspended, perhaps, from the ceiling; and finally, a brass orb the size of a grapefruit from which issued a quick spray of sparks. The butler and the old man went for the orb simultaneously, but the butler snatched it up first and pushed the other away, shoving the orb back into the fallen desk and slamming the front. What on earth, wondered St. Ives, bewildered as much by the unfathomable litter as by the flopping man it now entangled.
The butler, enraged, latched onto the back of the old man’s cloak, preventing him from wading in to the injured man’s assistance. “My child,” the old man sobbed. “My boy! My sweet,” But the sentence was left unfinished. Chimney pipe, his face frosted with a vacant grin, shoved his pistol into his coat, bent over, and hauled the man free, dragging him out of the tangle of paraphernalia by his ears, one of which tore off in his hand. He pitched it down in disgust and kicked his victim in the side of the head. No blood flowed from the rent where the ear had been severed. Mystery upon mystery. St. Ives began to think of the alley behind the house. He’d have to remember not to run toward the walled end. No one was going to give him two pound six for the clock. No one was going to give him anything at all for the clock. His hope was that the old man — whoever he was — and his two strange charges were of more immediate concern to the butler and his vicious accomplice, who, at that moment, was methodically beating the daylights out of the collapsed, half-earless man on the floor.
St. Ives disengaged his arm, surprisingly easily as it turned out, and edged around a chair, holding the heavy clock in both hands.
“Get these scum out of here,” hissed the butler at the old man, who mewled helplessly, clinging to his turbaned friend for support. “Don’t bring them here again. Your privilege doesn’t extend that far.”
The old man pulled himself straight, threw his cloak back theatrically, and began to rage in a hoarse voice about damnation. St. Ives disappeared into the kitchen to the sound of the butler’s cursing and to shouts about who would teach whom about damnation. He sprinted for the back door, but met, halfway there, the leering figure of the toothless, befloured cook, slapping the flat edge of her cleaver onto her meaty palm.
St. Ives wasn’t inclined to chat. He bowled straightaway into her, and the hastily swung cleaver rang off the iron case of the clock, dead between St. Ives’ curled fingers. He shouted inadvertently, dashing the clock to the floor, and burst out into the yard, gathering the hem of his greatcoat with his right hand and leaping over the stile into the alley, loping toward its exit a hundred feet down, lost now in a swirl of fog. And as he ran, not daring to look back, thinking of the pistol in chimneypipe’s coat, he understood suddenly who the bully was — could see that same malevolent face outlined in Keeble’s garret window, a crack of lightning illuminating the rainy night sky around it.
SIX
Betrayal
Captain Powers’ shop was dense with tobacco smoke — indicative, thought St. Ives, of the serious nature of
