The Isle of Blood (Monstrumologist)

conspicuous pair of spies—big Rurick with that red hair, and short little Plesec and his shiny scalp.”

He closed his eyes. “I am sure Arkwright thought the worst was over, that all that remained was to convince von Helrung that I had died on the quest. He hadn’t had much trouble selling von Helrung everything else—‘Thomas Arkwright of the Long Island Arkwrights’!”

“It was me, sir. Arkwright lied about the Monstrumarium, and that meant he lied about everything else. It meant he knew about the nidus before he even met you, and that meant—”

His eyes came open and fixed upon my image in the window. “You suspected him? Not von Helrung? Not Torrance? You?”

I nodded. “Dr. von Helrung wouldn’t listen at first, but then the telegram arrived saying you were dead. I didn’t believe it. And Dr. Torrance didn’t either, once I explained it to him. He told me I would make a fine—”

“Yes, that troubled me too—Arkwright’s seemingly serendipitous arrival upon Meister Abram’s doorstep around the time Mr. Kendall showed up on ours. I’ve been kicking myself for missing the many subtle blunders Arkwright committed, but I was understandably distracted and completely focused on the task at hand—finding Jack Kearns and the home of the magnificum.”

“Did you find him—Dr. Kearns?”

He shook his head. “Kearns vanished the day after he dispatched Mr. Kendall with his special delivery. I am uncertain where he went first—most likely it was Saint Petersburg to make the necessary arrangements—but I am fairly certain where he is now. We will see our old friend on the isle of Socotra.”

Upon their arrival in London, Warthrop and Arkwright had stopped by their hotel only long enough to drop their bags, and then they’d split up—Arkwright to Dorset Street in Whitechapel to locate Kearns’s flat and discover what, if any, clues he may have left behind; Warthrop to the Royal London Hospital to question Kearns’s colleagues and interview the hospital director, the man responsible for overseeing Kearns’s work. Warthrop learned how well-liked Kearns had been, how popular with the staff—particularly the female staff—how admired by the other doctors, what a fine physician he was, in addition to being one of the best trauma surgeons the director had ever seen. No, Dr. Kearns had not given notice or any indication whatsoever he was leaving. One day he was there; the next he was not. My master, posing as an old chum of Kearns’s from the States, informed the director he had been asked by Kearns to consult on a most unusual case, one he was certain the director would remember.

“It had been nagging at me since the night we’d met Mr. Kendall,” the doctor told me. “The remark about the yeoman with the case of ‘tropical fever.’ The director remembered the case well. ‘Baffling and tragic,’ he called it, though he did not recall the man being a seaman. He then went on to describe the symptoms, and I knew I had found the owner of the nidus.”

“Pwdre ser,” I whispered.

“Yes. He was in the final stages of exposure when he was brought in—was quite beyond coherent thought or speech. There was nothing on his person to identify who he was, and he refused to give—or could not remember, probably—his own name. The only thing the director recalled the man saying was the words, ‘The nest! The bloody human nest!’ It obviously piqued Kearns’s curiosity. He is no monstrumolo-gist; I’ve no idea if he had ever heard of the nidus ex magnificum, but the sailor’s anguished cries and dramatic symptoms probably alerted Kearns that he was dealing with something of a monstrumological nature.”

The man died within hours of his arrival at the hospital. Kearns signed the order to have the body cremated, the usual precaution when dealing with an unknown disease.

“And then he did precisely what I would have done,” the monstrumologist said. “What I did do that same afternoon. Of course, you already have guessed what that is.”

I had not. I decided to try. “You went to the naval department to research recent—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Will Henry! Really. You have been listening, haven’t you? Neither Kearns nor the director knew at that point he was a yeoman with the navy.”

“But Kearns told Mr. Kendall—”

“Yes, after he had found out who he was. That is my question. How did he—and I— find out who this man was?”

I took a deep breath and tried again. “He did not give his name. He had no papers when he was brought— Someone brought him in?”

He smiled. “Much better. Yes, he was brought there by one Mary Elizabeth Marks, who claimed she’d discovered him lying in the gutter a block from her flat, at number 212 Musbury Street, less than a mile from the hospital. She claimed she didn’t know him, had never seen him before, was playing the Good Samaritan, et cetera, et cetera. Kearns found her—as I did months later—and it did not take him long—or me—to bully the truth out of her. The patient had been a customer of hers. Miss Marks, you see, makes her living by… entertaining young, and not so young, sailors… or any other members of the armed forces, or civilians, who enjoy… being entertained by ladies who… entertain.”

He cleared his throat.

“I would rather not know. Yes, she was a lady of the evening. She stuck to her story at first, until I told her I knew Kearns, and then her whole demeanor changed, from surly thoolgirl giddy.

“‘Oh, you mean Dr. Kearns. Now, he’s the regular charmer, that one,’ she said, giggling. ‘An’ quite the looker, too!’

“‘He is an old friend of mine,’ I told her, to which she replied, laying her hand upon my arm, ‘Well, any friend of Dr. Kearns’, guv’na…’

“She confessed that the man had been a regular customer; that he had, in fact, been staying with her in the flat on Musbury Street since his discharge from the navy a week before he became ill; and that she had hidden the truth based on her fear that her landlord would evict her for living with a man outside the sanctity of holy matrimony. She began to cry at the mention of marriage. She had loved Tim; there had been talk of a wedding. I did not understand, she told me, how cruel life had been to her, how her father had beaten and then abandoned her mother, how her mother had subsequently died from consumption, leaving Mary on the streets to beg for food, and later to sell her own body for it. Timothy was to be her savior, and then her savior died.”

He shook his head; his dark eyes flashed. “She had kept his trunk with all his things, including oddities and