The Captain fell silent and collapsed into an armchair, precipitating a little cloud of dust. He buried his face in his hands, his anger apparently having fled in the face of St. Ives’ question. The Captain looked up at his congregated friends, started to speak, glanced at Jack, and shook his head. “Leave me to think,” he said simply, and slouched deeper into his chair, suddenly tired and old, his face lined with a hundred thousand sea miles and the weather of countless storms and suns.
Thunder rattled the casement, and the party gathered coats and hats and silently made ready to bend out into the road, awash now with the downpour. Jack and Keeble had only to cross Jermyn Street to shelter, but St. Ives and Godall had a longer journey. The muffled chiming of a clock could be heard through the pelting rain — two doleful peals that announced, more than anything else, the certainty that hansom cabs would long since have ceased to run, and that the walk, for St. Ives at least, would be a long and sodden one. The Bohemian Cigar Divan lay some half mile to the northeast, and the Bertasso in Pimlico some three miles to the southeast, but for six blocks or so, Godall and St. Ives walked together down Jermyn toward Haymarket. Neither was satisfied with the half-finished meeting. Things were hotting up at such a rate that action of some sort seemed to be called for. Biweekly meetings over cigars and ale would avail them little.
St. Ives knew almost nothing of Godall, who was a friend, after all, of Captain Powers, and a fairly recent friend at that. But he was very apparently enmeshed in the Narbondo-Drake business, for reasons St. Ives couldn’t entirely fathom. Why, in fact, was Captain Powers so thoroughly caught up? Why
Just that afternoon had come a note from the Royal Academy. On the strength of his knowledge of Birdlip and his friendship with the uncommunicative William Keeble, St. Ives was invited to participate in certain programs involving the study of Birdlip’s amazing craft, which had been sighted over the Denmark Strait far up into the thin air of the stratosphere, swinging toward Iceland on a course that would sweep it once again over Greater London. Balloon expeditions were being readied in Reykjavik. There was some reason to suppose that the blimp would ultimately descend, perhaps land, in the following weeks. It might — who could say? — simply fall onto London rooftops like a spent balloon. The professor’s particular knowledge might be useful. And didn’t he know the toymaker William Keeble? Couldn’t he, perhaps, use his influence…Coersion is what it was. Here was an offer. St. Ives was to drop his work, lock the doors of his laboratory, send Hasbro to Scarborough on holiday. And in exchange, the Royal Academy would blink the ignorance and scientific prejudice out of their eyes, clean their spectacles, and agree to consider him something more than a lunatic eccentric. Why couldn’t a man just go about his work? Why must he always be meddled with? Who were all these people and what legitimate claim had they on his time? None whatsoever. The answer was clear as Whitefriar’s crystal, and yet hardly a day went by but what some new mystery, some complaint, some request arrived by post, some odd man in a chimney pipe hat peered in the window at you, or some long lost Kraken appeared from an alley and stole an unidentifiable trifle from a friend on the most rainy, miserable night imaginable — a night that had no business showing its face in the spring, for God’s sake.
Water ran from the brim of his felt hat like a beaded curtain and soaked his overcoat until it hung heavy as chain mail. And just when it seemed that the rain was letting up and the shadows of recessed doorways in the houses across the street began to solidify out of the mists, there was a bang and a crash as lightning lit the rooftops and ripped to bits whatever forces had attempted to subdue the weather. Wind tore along the street, whipping the tails of St. Ives’ coat and sending a chill through him that anticipated a lancing deluge from the starless heavens. The two men bounded as one into the doorway of a dark house where the wind and wet, at least, were powerless to follow.
“Deadly night,” said St. Ives blackly.
“Mmm,” responded his companion.
“What do you suppose Kraken stole?” asked St. Ives. “Not that it’s my business entirely — although I have a sneaking suspicion it will become so. It’s just that the Captain seemed so peculiarly…devastated by it. It’s a side of him I hadn’t seen.”
Godall lit his pipe in silence, his tobacco, pipe, and equipment miraculously dry. St. Ives didn’t bother to look at his own. Some day soon — after the successful launching of the starship — he’d set about developing a method to maintain the suitability of his smoking apparatus in even the most hellish weather. There would then be one thing in his life that was a certainty, a constant, that the forces of weather and chaos couldn’t make a hash of.
“I’m not at all sure how you’ve managed to keep your tobacco and matches dry,” said St. Ives, “but my own are muck.”
“Here, my good fellow,” responded Godall graciously, offering his open pouch. “Thank the Captain. It’s his blend. Superior to any of my own, too.” The two men passed matches and tampers back and forth, speaking in low tones and watching the rain roar down in an undulating, opaque curtain, looking for all the world as if the gods were shaking out a cosmic sheet in the roadway.
“I’m not certain about the theft,” said Godall, when St. Ives’ pipe was alight. “But you’ve struck it, I believe, when you said it would become our business soon enough. The next few days should clarify things a bit, though I suppose the clarification will only serve to deepen the mystery.” Godall paused for a moment, contemplating, then said: “Those men at The Blood Pudding. They were dead men; I’m certain of it. And your reading Owlesby’s narrative tonight is what makes me so certain. What do you think, as a man of science?
“If Sebastian said he could, he could’ said St. Ives simply. “How he did it I’m not certain, but it involved enormous carp, somehow. And the homunculus, the thing in the box, wasn’t required. It’s apparent from the manuscript that Owlesby thought the creature would reveal the secret of perpetual life to him. Keeble thought so too. What Keeble did, or attempted to do with engines — that’s what Owlesby would accomplish with human beings. That’s partly the explanation of poor Keeble’s decline — forgive me for speaking in such terms of a friend. But damn me, this business has been ruinous. Keeble blames himself, I think, for having put Owlesby onto the creature in the first place, for having filled Owlesby with notions of overcoming inertia.”
“And so his caring for Jack these past fifteen years,” said Godall.
St. Ives shrugged. “Yes and no. He’d have done so anyway. The two of them — Keeble and Owlesby — were close as brothers, and Winnifred Keeble and Nell were inseparable since childhood.”
“Ah, Nell,” said Godall, nodding almost imperceptibly. “Well, there it is. The men at The Blood Pudding were dead men, as I say, and I watched Narbondo through the curtain two days ago revive what was almost certainly a corpse. How Drake ties in I’m not yet sure, although it seemed to me that the two were striking some sort of bargain there — that Narbondo, perhaps, supply Drake with an army of willing workers — workers the union bosses would find unmalleable. Or, now that I listen to your story of the creature in the box, it’s entirely possible that Drake hopes to purchase that which Owlesby desired, and that he believes Narbondo can deliver it. In which case the landing of this blimp might prove interesting, if, as you say, the hunchback understands the homunculus to be aboard.”
“He might,” said St. Ives. “But there’s no certainty of it.”
“And there’s another party,” said Godall, “a self-styled messiah with the unlikely name of Shiloh, who has a hand in the mystery. He’s the one, by the by, who brushed you into the roadway moments before I appeared in front of Drake’s brothel.”
“The old man!” cried St. Ives, the nature of the two empty-eyed men on the stairs and of the bloodless ear suddenly revealed. St. Ives shook his head. It was a loathsome business, but none of it precluded his being on the express next morning, bound for Harrogate. He’d be only hours out of London, in terms of clock time, and could sail back in, pistol in hand, as it were, when the call came. In figurative terms, thank heaven, Harrogate was light years distance from London, and such was the nature of reality that he’d traverse the miles in little over four hours, and eat cakes and tea in a room hung with star charts and bookshelves.
“When do you return?” asked Godall suddenly, breaking in upon St. Ives’ reverie.
“I hadn’t thought much along those lines,” the physicist admitted.
“I rather fear for this man Kraken,” said Godall. “He struck me as being a bit mad, in truth, but harmless.
