“Take a look at the man,” Parsons said. “He’s been blown to pieces.”
“I mean do we know it was an anarchist’s device? Why would anarchists blow up a palm house?”
“Because they’re imbeciles. They exist to be imbeciles. No one but an imbecile would detonate a bomb in a hollow tree near Marble Arch, but the thing was done.”
Parsons and Tubby moved away toward where a policeman was just then laying a coat across Shorter’s body. It occurred to St. Ives that the totality of the old man’s begonias lay in fragments amidst the rubble. He would gather pieces of them up before he left, he thought, and Alice could carry on with them – something saved from this carnage. He stepped down onto the floor of the ruined glasshouse and looked around, seeing at once that there was a wash of fine black dust on the ground, despite the turbulence of the blast, which must have thrown most of it into the atmosphere. Several clay pots that had miraculously survived the blast burned with an orange flame, which was damned odd. He smelled a wisp of rising smoke. Greek fire? Sulfur, surely. He tried to recall the ingredients of the incendiary fluid – pitch? Resin? The smell of sulfur overrode the others. He recalled that the interior of the glasshouse had been uncommonly dark when he had looked out at it through the window. Coal gas was a filthy substance when it burned, but that scarcely explained things here, unless it had been leaking badly.
He stepped across and peered into the sewer, although it was too dark to see more than a few feet in either direction. The brick floor of the enormous pipe was so broad as to be nearly flat, with a depression in the floor along which the Westbourne rippled in its channel. There was a litter of wet brick lying about and more of the black dust. He crouched at the edge of the ragged hole and bent into the pipe, looking back upriver into utter darkness. A person could trudge all the way to Hampstead Heath in that direction, to where the Westbourne rose at Whitestone Ponds, but it would be a long and tiresome journey. He turned to look downriver, and immediately saw a light in the far distance: the mouth of the sewer, perhaps, where it emptied into the Thames below the Chelsea Embankment.
Abruptly the light shifted, however, then disappeared entirely, and then winked back on – not the mouth of the sewer at all, but a lantern some distance away, moving in the direction of the Thames. Perhaps a lone anarchist.
St. Ives stepped into the sewer, down the several feet to the floor, and set out into the musty air, the light through the hole in the sewer wall giving up almost immediately so that he quickly found himself in darkness. His going back after a lantern would simply waste time – no value in even thinking about it. And besides, a lantern would give him away. It was stealth he wanted. He trailed his left hand along the wall, watching the lantern light ahead, unable to gauge its distance. Thank God, he thought, that the moving water smelled as if it were more river than filth, but he was careful where he stepped – as careful as was possible in the darkness.
He hastened forward, emboldened by the comparatively smooth brick floor, but almost immediately he stumbled over an impediment and fell to his knees, scraping his palms on the bricks and letting out a muffled shout, cursing himself under his breath, and then staying very still. The lantern in the distance went on apace. He looked back, but could see nothing behind him now, the tunnel curving slightly to the west as it ran beneath Hyde Park. That he could still see the lantern meant that it was closer than he had thought; otherwise it, too, would be hidden by the swerve of the tunnel wall.
He pushed himself to his feet, flexing his bruised knees, and went quietly on, listening hard. The awful picture of Shorter lying dead on the lawn came into his mind, and abruptly he wished that he had a weapon of some sort. He thought of Tubby Frobisher, who was as fearless as a water buffalo and nearly as vast. Tubby would have come along with him in a cold moment if only St. Ives had thought to summon him before setting out. But there was nothing for it but to go on. Nothing ventured, he thought, nothing gained – aside from a knife in the ribs.
It came to him now that he could hear a squeaking and rattling, like axles turning, as if the moving lantern were fixed on a cart. Had they brought machinery with them? To what end…?
He heard a sharp, scraping sound behind him now. He turned, seeing too late a moving shadow lunging toward him, a man’s narrow face slightly pale against the darkness. St. Ives was borne over backward, the back of his head banging down onto the brick floor so that his skull rang with the force of it. Before he could come to his senses he was rolled bodily into the river, his assailant clutching him by the hair, pushing his head beneath the surface of the water.
St. Ives flailed with his hands, seeking a purchase on the brick, which scraped past beneath him as he was swept downward in the flood, pulled from the grip of the man who was endeavoring to drown him. He lurched upward, gasping in a breath of air and twisting around, getting his feet under him so that he managed to half stand up. Immediately he was struck hard on the right cheek with something heavy and flat – the blade of a shovel? – and he reeled back against the wall of the tunnel, his cheek throbbing with pain, holding out his hands to keep the blade away from his face, hoping that his assailant was equally blind and that it had been a lucky blow.
He saw that the distant lantern bobbed toward him now – almost certainly a second assailant, coming at a run to finish him off. The word “imbecile” was no doubt writ large on his own face where the shovel had struck him. Then he realized that he was looking upriver and not down – that the lantern was coming down from
TWO
“You say that you followed these men into the darkness alone, Langdon?” Alice asked.
“Not
“But you said that you believed one to be pushing a cart with a lantern on it while the other one lurked behind to waylay you. I count two.”
“Lurkers are clever that way,” she said. “They’ve been schooled in the art of lurking. That’s why one doesn’t wade into dark tunnels to seek them out. You’ve still got black grit along the edge of the wound.” She dipped a cloth in a basin of water and wiped gingerly at the dried blood.
The wind had come up outside, and the night beyond the wall was alive with moaning and creaking. It had been a hellish trip out from London – a three-hour wait outside Gravesend for repairs to be made to the tracks, and with every hour that passed St. Ives had regretted not having taken a coach. Walking would have made considerably more sense than waiting, or at least wouldn’t have been so wretchedly frustrating. Despite the noise of the wind, Alice had opened the front door the moment she heard him step up onto the veranda half an hour ago. She had been up waiting for him, perhaps watching from the bedroom window upstairs.
“You’re quite fortunate that you were turning away from him,” she said, peering closely at his face. “He might easily have disfigured you. You’ll have an untidy scar.”
Her dark hair was tousled from sleep, giving her a slightly wild air, and she wore a silk robe that made her appear… lithe, perhaps. She was tall, nearly six feet, and under certain circumstances could appear to be quite formidable – at the present moment, in fact – largely because of her eyes, which had the keenness of those of a predatory bird, and were intensely beautiful. It seemed to him now that he had been away a foolishly long time, and he wondered what she was wearing beneath the robe.
“What I feel most,” he said, shifting the subject into a safer realm, “is the death of the book thief. I didn’t want that. I’m certain that I behaved as a complete flat throughout. The escapade seems to me too contrived, elaborately choreographed up until the point of the man’s death, which was a grotesque accident.”
“But it’s done now, if I follow your story correctly.”
“Done and done, as was I – done to a turn.”
“Indeed. First by this mysterious book thief, and then by yourself, and then by a man with a coal
