The Aylesford Skull

troubling.

The minutes passed, and the road remained empty – no dust, no sound but the rattling and creak of the wagon and Logarithm’s hooves as he cantered along. St. Ives’s mind calmed now that the storm was past, and he clambered back onto his seat, leaving the portmanteau open.

“Narbondo is beyond our reach now,” he said flatly.

“Indeed, sir, although I would wager that he was well beyond it as soon as we turned off the highway in Wrotham. He no doubt passed along the London Road as we first assumed.”

Ahead of them lay a proper road now. When they came up to it they saw a sign at the juncture that read “Harvel,” with an instructive arrow pointing west. They turned in that direction, bound once again for the Gravesend Road. Another wagon moved along ahead of them in the near distance, and there were farms on either side once again. They were safe from another surprise, but two hours out of the way now – a fact that St. Ives forced out of his mind.

“Fred and George needn’t have followed us,” he said to Hasbro. “That seems to be telling. We were doing well enough on our own once we had taken their advice.”

“Precisely, sir. We were gone off on a fool’s errand, and would have found ourselves in this very spot in any event.”

“Which means that they intended to lure us into the countryside in order to murder us, not merely to slow us down.”

“It would seem so.”

“Narbondo is certainly capable of murdering us for mere sport,” St. Ives said, “but it seems wasteful to send five men to accomplish it.”

“I believe that you miscalculate, sir. His desire to murder for pleasure is a weakness in the man. Certainly Narbondo has reason to hate the both of us, but I’m convinced that he fears us as well, or something like it. We’ve repeatedly interfered with him, and he was very nearly brought to bay at the Chalk Cliffs and was thwarted on Morecambe Bay. He must by now suspect that he overreached himself when he lingered dangerously in Aylesford. When he kidnapped Eddie, he put a spade through the hornets’ nest, sir, and he knows it.”

St. Ives thought again of his conversation with Mother Laswell, and his words to Alice came back to him. The entire business of the Aylesford Skull and the portal to the land of the dead might well be nonsense, as he had insisted – surely it was – but Narbondo did not see it as nonsense. He saw it as something considerably more dangerous than that – something worth sending five men to waylay them on the road. Hasbro was in the right of it again. This was something much more than old grudges. St. Ives had trivialized it to his own and his family’s peril. But John Mason hadn’t trivialized it, nor had Mother Laswell or her vivisectionist husband, nor did Narbondo. There was a trail of dead people down the years, and St. Ives and Hasbro had nearly joined their ranks, because St. Ives had compelled himself to see the entire business as tiresome nonsense.

As if he had just learned a useful lesson in the dangers of stupidity, easy assumptions, and shallow logic, he thought again of his ill-fated interlude two weeks ago in London – of the notebooks and their theft and the part he had played in the entire wretched business. The thing was clear to him suddenly, as if a shade had been drawn back. It had been a night-and-day swindle – the notebooks, their disappearance, and the botched attempt to buy back something that quite likely hadn’t been worth a tinker’s dam to begin with – a swindle that had ended in bloody death for a desperate man who was a mere pawn, and a cartful of regret for St. Ives.

The whole thing had the virtue of being a multifarious lesson, however, and, if nothing more, he knew now the place where they were bound in the great city of London, and how they might come to terms with the man they would find there after stabling their horse and wagon. It was the first sensible thing that had come into his mind since he had heard Mrs. Langley pounding away on the scullery door. It wasn’t much of a victory, but he had been a damnably dull creature this past twenty-four hours, and even this small victory put an edge on him again.

FIFTEEN

THE GOAT AND CABBAGE

The fish and seaweed reek of Billingsgate Market hung in the warm air along the Thames, the stone walls of the vast fish market doing little to contain it. The smell filled Finn with memories, recalling the days that he had worked with Square Davey, the oyster dredger, and had spent his time on the river, or loitering along Lower Thames Street, watching the boats come into the Custom House or the sunset from London Bridge or the hundreds of tall ships in the Pool. At night there was Toole’s Theatre, and Mr. Woodin’s Carpet Bag Wheeze, Mr. Woodin diving into his bag in the disguise of Martha Mivens and climbing out moments later as Major Bluster, better than anything old Duffy had put up during Finn’s years in Duffy’s Circus. It had been easy enough to sneak into Toole’s and save the odd penny, and he smiled at the memory of it, although it was not a thing he would readily tell Alice or the Professor. He wondered, though, what was playing at Toole’s this evening and whether the old dodge would still serve. But there was no discovering it, no going back.

A score of oyster boats were moored along the wharf that was commonly called “Oyster Street.” Early this morning they would have been swarming with people looking to purchase oysters by the bushel basketful, dripping with sand and sludge, brought upriver from the Thames Estuary, the best from Whitsable and points farther south. Finn could easily picture the early morning crowds, the sailors taking their ease, the salesmen shouting, the baskets drawn dripping from the hold, the coffee houses serving out coffee and bread and butter.

By ten o’clock this morning, though, it would have been over, and it was late now – three in the afternoon, the market finished, the coffee houses nearly empty of custom. Davey’s oyster boat lay among the others, its blue- and-red-checked stripe along the waterline making it easily visible. Davey wasn’t aboard, not surprising given the hour. He hadn’t been in Rodway’s Coffee House, either, which meant that he was likely in the Goat and Cabbage, an old, ramshackle public house in Peach Alley, named not for the fruit, but because it had been a haunt of Judases. Guy Fawkes had been betrayed there for a handful of shillings, or so Finn had been told by Square Davey, who was a great man for spinning tales.

He stepped into the mouth of the narrow alley, the old buildings leaning in overhead to block out the sky, all but a ribbon of it. In the winter months it was either dusk or night in Peach Alley, and even now, in midsummer, the alley lay in shadow, the sun shining only on the top row of dirty, heavily mullioned windows. A dead, half-eaten cat lay in the gutter, which was aswim with filth. Finn stepped over it and made his way down the cobbles, wary of whom he might see, or who might see him. The carved wooden sign depicted a lewd-eyed, bearded goat with a cabbage leaf for a cap. The weathered door opened abruptly, and a man wearing a battered slouch hat staggered out, his red eyes weeping gin, his clothes stinking. He looked back angrily, said something hard, stumbled on the broken curb, and lurched away muttering. Finn felt the hilt of his oyster knife on his belt, well covered by his shirt, and he stepped inside, prepared to slip back out again if Square Davey wasn’t at his usual table – and in that case he would have come to the end of things, with nothing for it but to step aboard Davey’s boat in order to wait and to regret the time slipping away.

“Finn Conrad, as I live and breathe!” said a voice from the shadows, and he saw Davey sitting in the corner alone, a pint glass half full in front of him. There was a look of surprise on the man’s face, which quickly turned to a smile, and he nodded broadly. As ever, he smoked a bulldog pipe, and the reek hovered in a small cloud over his head. He wasn’t a tall man, but was broad shouldered and heavyset, and he had almost no neck, hence his nickname. His shock of hair was white, although he didn’t have the appearance of being old. Finn had no notion of his age. He looked around for less welcoming faces, didn’t see any, and made his way to the table, where Davey gestured at a chair.

“A pint of plain for the boy!” Davey shouted at the man behind the bar, who was surly looking and missing an eye. A patch would have made him less hideous, although he could do nothing about his teeth, which were mainly snags. Finn got up to fetch his own pint, which he had no taste for, and then sat back down again. There were two women, tarted up and older than they first appeared, sitting alone some distance away, both of them casting him lascivious looks. He nodded politely and looked away.

“Ham sandwich, son?” Davey asked. “There’ll be a lad on the street with sandwiches made up fresh. It’s coming on teatime.”