“I’m a friend of Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, in fact. He’s sent me round with another communication.”
Beezer squinted at him. The word
“Is that right?” he said.
St. Ives bowed, clapping a hand hastily onto the top of his head to hold his wig on.
“Bugger off, will you, Clyde?” Beezer said to his friend.
“That drink…” came the reply.
“Stow your drink. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll drink two. Now get along.”
The man turned away regretfully, despondent over the lost drink perhaps, and St. Ives waited to speak until he had crossed Whitefriars and his footsteps faded. Then he nodded to the still-scowling Beezer and set out on the sidewalk again, looking up and down the street as if to discern anything suspicious or threatening. Beezer fell in beside him. “It’s about the money,” said St. Ives.
“The money?”
“Narbondo fears that he promised you too much of it.”
“He’s a filthy cheat!” cried Beezer, eliminating any doubts that St. Ives might have had about Beezer’s having received Narbondo’s message, mailed days past from Dover.
“He’s discovered,” continued St. Ives, “that there are any of a number of journalists who will sell out the people of London for half the sum. Peabody at the
“The filthy scum-sucking cheat!” Beezer shouted, waving a fist at St. Ives’s nose. “Peabody!”
“Tut, tut,” admonished St. Ives, noting with a surge of anxious anticipation the darkened mouth of the alley some thirty feet distant. “We haven’t contracted with Peabody yet. It was merely a matter of feeling out the temperature of the water, so to speak. You understand. You’re a businessman yourself in a way.” St. Ives gestured broadly with his left hand as if to signify that a man like Beezer could be expected to take the long view. With his right he reached across and snatched the lapels of Beezer’s coat, yanking him sideways. Simultaneously he whipped his left hand around and slammed the startled journalist square in the back, catapulting him into the ill-lit alley.
“Hey!” shouted Beezer, tripping forward into the waiting arms of Jack Owlesby, who leaped in to pinion the man’s wrists. Hasbro, waving an enormous burlap bag, appeared from the shadows and flung the bag like a gill net over Beezer’s head, St. Ives yanking it down across the man’s back and pushing him forward off his feet. Hasbro snatched at the drawrope, grasped Beezer’s shoulders, and hissed through the canvas, “Cry out and you’re a dead man!”
The struggling Beezer collapsed like a sprung balloon, having an antipathy, apparently, to being a dead man. Jack clambered up onto the bed of a wagon, hauled open the lid of a steamer trunk, and, along with St. Ives and Hasbro, yanked and shoved and grappled the feebly struggling journalist into the wood and leather prison. He banged ineffectively a half-dozen times at the sides of the trunk, mewling miserably, then fell silent as the wagon rattled and bounced along the alley, exiting on Salisbury Court and making away south toward the Thames.
A half hour later the wagon had doubled back through Soho, St. Ives having set such a course toward Chingford that Beezer couldn’t begin to guess it out from within his trunk. Hasbro, always prepared, had uncorked a bottle of whiskey, and each of the three men held a glass, lost in his own thoughts about the warm April night and the dangers of their mission. “Sorry to bring you in on this, Jack,” said St. Ives. “There might quite likely be the devil to pay before we’re through. No telling what sort of a row our man Beezer might set up.”
“I’m not complaining,” Jack said.
“It was Dorothy I was thinking about, actually. We’re only weeks finished with the pig incident, and I’ve hauled you away again. There she sits in Kensington wondering what sort of nonsense I’ve drummed up now. She’s a stout woman, if you don’t mistake my meaning.”
Jack nodded, glancing sideways at St. Ives, whose voice had gotten heavy with the sound of regret. St. Ives seemed always to be on the edge of a precipice, standing with his back to it and pretending he couldn’t see that it was there, waiting for him to take an innocent step backward. Work furiously — that had become the byword for St. Ives, and it was a better thing, perhaps, than to go to pieces, except that there was something overwound about St. Ives sometimes that made Jack wonder if it wouldn’t be better for him to try to see into the depths of that pit that stretched out behind him, to let his eyes adjust to the darkness so that he might make out the shadows down there.
But then Jack was settled in Kensington with Dorothy, living out what must look to St. Ives like a sort of storybook existence. The professor couldn’t help but see that Dorothy and Alice had been a lot alike, and Jack’s happiness must have magnified St. Ives’s sorrow. If Dorothy knew, in fact, what sort of business they pursued this time, she probably would have insisted on coming along. Jack thought of her fondly. “Do you know…,” he began, reminiscing, but the sound of Beezer pummeling the sides of the trunk cut him off.
“Tell the hunchback!” shrieked a muffled voice, “that I’ll have him horsewhipped! He’ll be sulking in Newgate Prison again by the end of the week, by God! There’s nothing about him I don’t know!”
St. Ives shrugged at Hasbro. Here, perhaps, was a stroke of luck. If Beezer could be convinced that they actually
Early in the predawn morning the wagon rattled into Chingford and made for the hills beyond, where lay the cottage of Sam Langley, son of St. Ives’s longtime cook. The cottage was dark, but a lamp burned through the slats in the locked shutters of a low window in an unused silo fifty yards off. St. Ives reined in the horses, clambering out of the wagon at once, and with the help of his two companions, hauled the steamer trunk off the tailgate and into the unfastened door of the silo. Jack Owlesby and Hasbro hastened back out into the night, and for a moment through the briefly open door, St. Ives could see Sam Langley stepping off his kitchen porch, pulling on a coat. The door shut, and St. Ives was alone in the feebly lit room with the trunk and scattered pieces of furniture.
“I’m going to unlock the trunk…,” St. Ives began.
“You sons of…,” Beezer started to shout, but St. Ives rapped against the lid with his knuckles to silence him.
“I’m either going to unlock the trunk or set it afire,” said St. Ives with great deliberation. “The choice is yours.” The trunk was silent. “Once the trunk is unlocked, you can quite easily extricate yourself. The bag isn’t knotted. You’ve probably already discovered that. My advice to you is to stay absolutely still for ten minutes. Then you can thrash and shriek and stamp about until you collapse. No one will hear you. You’ll be happy to know that a sum of money will be advanced to your account, and that you’ll have a far easier time spending it if you’re not shot full of holes. Don’t, then, get impatient. You’ve ridden out the night in the trunk; you can stand ten minutes more.” Beezer, it seemed, had seen reason, for as St. Ives crouched out into the night, shook hands hastily with Langley, leaped into the wagon, and took up the reins, nothing but silence emanated from the stones of the silo.
Two evenings earlier, on the night that St. Ives had waylaid Beezer the journalist, the comet had appeared in the eastern sky, ghostly and round like the moon reflected on a frosty window — just a circular patch of faint luminous cloud. But now it seemed fearfully close, as if it would drop out of the heavens toward the earth like a plumb bob toward a melon. St. Ives’s telescope, with its mirror of speculum metal, had been a gift from Lord Rosse himself, and he peered into the eyepiece now, tracking the flight of the comet for no other reason, really, than to while away the dawn hours. He slept only fitfully these days, and his dreams weren’t pleasant.
There was nothing to calculate; work of that nature had been accomplished weeks past by astronomers whose knowledge of astral mathematics was sufficient to satisfy both the Royal Academy and Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives wouldn’t dispute their figures. That the comet would spin dangerously close to the earth was the single point that all of them agreed upon. His desire in watching the icy planetoid, beyond a simple fascination with the mystery and wonder of the thing, was to have a look at the face of what might easily be his last great nemesis, a vast leviathan swimming toward them through a dark sea. He wondered if it was oblivion that was revealed by the turning earth.
Hasbro packed their bags in the manor. Their train left Kirk Hammerton Station at six. Dr. Narbondo, St. Ives
