Helen sat down on the pew behind them, gesturing with the pistol for Alice to do what was asked of her.
“As you say,” Alice said, sitting down next to Eddie. She saw in the south wall a vast window of stained glass, depicting the execution of the Martyrs in Smithfield. Alice couldn’t remember their names, but one, she recalled, had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, very nearly a neighbor since they had moved to Aylesford, although a few centuries removed. She recalled reading that the window had been designed by Millais.
“Pray tell me why we’re here, if you’d be so kind, Helen,” Alice asked now, turning to look at her. “Something to do with chub, perhaps?” Helen held the pistol in her lap. She could raise it easily enough, of course, but she seemed to have lost interest in it, as if something were on her mind. Alice slipped the hatpin out of her sleeve and held it tightly, hidden by her hand and wrist.
“The Cathedral is opening today with great fanfare,” Helen said. “I’m told that the Queen was to attend, her first public appearance since her unfortunate fall on the stairway at Windsor Palace.”
“
“There was word of a plot against her, unfortunately – the work of unhappy Fenian anarchists funded by Gladstone himself. Almost unbelievable, isn’t it? The several soldiers that you see milling about have been searching for an infernal device, but they’re apparently failing to find such a thing, although the doors will remain locked until it’s quite safe for the crowds to be let in. They’ll be wet as seals by then, poor hens. I for one don’t believe that there’s a respectable Fenian between here and Hampstead Heath, not on a day like today, with such appalling weather.”
As she said this there was a bolt of lightning in the sky, illuminating the interior of the dim cathedral, followed ten seconds later by a distant clap of thunder.
“What if I were to call on one of the soldiers, for assistance, then?” Alice asked. “Surely you can’t shoot all of us.”
“He’ll prove to be mute, I do assure you. He’s been given fifteen years’ soldier’s pay for taking part in Dr. Narbondo’s little entertainment, as have his helpmates and the two standing guard outside the door. You, on the other hand, are given nothing. I ask you to bear in mind that I find your tone slightly too sardonic for my taste. I’ll murder your son in an instant if you give me cause, and then, once you’ve seen him die, I’ll murder you as well.”
Hearing this, Alice instinctively grasped Eddie’s hand, and Helen said to her, “Don’t look appalled, my lady. I was given a great sum to play my part, and I’m to be given more when the curtain falls and the play is done, although I forfeit all if I make a blunder, and, I don’t doubt, my life would be forfeit with it. Do you quite understand me?”
“
Helen stared at Alice with intense hatred and began to utter another threat, but at that moment there sounded the rising shriek of the organ, Beaumont apparently finding his way around the keys. He struck out the first notes of the Fugue, paused, and started again, settling into it, the voice of the organ rising in volume as air filled the pipes. Alice was astonished by it – the very idea of Narbondo’s coach driver playing the great organ was unimaginable, and yet it was so, the steady volume of sound filling the cathedral. Narbondo, she realized, had orchestrated the entire thing. Helen was a mere pawn.
And now, from out of the throats of the pipes – some very near the base, some near the top – issued what appeared to be black vapor, pouring out and rising into the air. Alice watched it curiously for a moment. An illusion? She had no sooner formed this question, however, when she was astonished to see, as if in a dream, the front of a building some distance up the street explode outward in a gush of smoke and debris, hurtling people before it.
FORTY-TWO
Dr. Narbondo looked down the barrel of his rifle, a Martini-Henry, the solid brass cartridges loaded with .30 caliber bullets tipped with white phosphorous. They were crude, but he knew from experience that they were serviceable. He peered over the sight at a leaded, stained-glass window depicting the death of Thomas Cranmer, the bald-headed, heavily bearded martyr who had been Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of Queen Mary’s reign, and who had tried to avoid being burned as a heretic by recanting his faith. When it was decided that he would burn anyway, he had recanted his recantation, no doubt facing immolation in a sad muddle. Narbondo had always found the archbishop’s story one of the more amusing burning-at-the-stake tales.
The tip of the rifle barrel was steadied atop a tripod that stood in the window, and he aimed it now at Cranmer’s left eye, which, when it blew out, would make for a round hole in the pane too small to release any troubling amount of coal dust. If his aim was off, and he shot Cranmer through the nose or the ear, or even the forehead, the result would be much the same, since the very glorious window – all the very glorious windows – would cease to exist within a few seconds of the flaming bullet passing through, given, of course, that there was enough suspended dust. He had a number of bullets, however, and the three martyrs had numerous, lead-encircled body parts, so in the end he would prevail.
He set the rifle on the floor, tilted against the wall. Nearby stood an assemblage of heavy gears operated by an iron lever. The mechanism opened a trapdoor in the floor, the door raised at the moment, standing ready. Within, built into a hollow in the walls in the floors below, was a long slide that led to the deep cellar, through which he could disappear beneath the city. Today, however, he intended merely to shield himself from danger, to be traveling downward when the inferno blew the cathedral apart, and away beneath the street and up again into the devastation.
Lower in the tripod he had fixed a triangular shelf, canted forward, on which sat the skull of his brother Edward, the boy’s ghost entrapped within the bone and silver and crystal, longing to find its way into the afterlife. Narbondo would do his best to set the spirit free at last, for which the ghost would no doubt be grateful, if ghosts were capable of gratitude, which was doubtful.
He looked at his pocket watch, the minute hand just then finding its way to the top of the hour. He heard the organ commence. The rising sound of the Fugue muted by glass and distance, but distinguishable even so. The greatest of the pipes, thirty feet in length, had a deep base resonance that shook one’s bones. Twenty seconds into the piece the counterpoint melody came in, and Narbondo smiled and nodded, moving his right hand as if conducting an orchestra and happy that he had allowed Beaumont to choose the piece. The man was bound for glory along with the cathedral.
Narbondo activated the lamp within the skull now. The beam could be detected only dimly in the rainy air, but he could see it quite clearly where it shone on the golden raiment of the pews. He also saw, to his intense happiness, coal dust pouring from the mouths of the organ pipes.
Suddenly there was a shattering explosion – not unexpected – on Tallis Street. It would be the Nabob Pub ceasing to exist, along with many of its patrons, the cellar having blown to pieces. He consulted his watch and then glanced out of the window to view the sudden madness that had infected the mob, people running and screaming, soldiers shouting and holding up their hands to stop the rout, swept aside by the fleeing crowds. London was in a sad state, cowed by the numerous anarchist atrocities of the past months and ready to flee at the sound of a sneeze.
He glanced at the watch again and counted slowly to five, at which point another explosion sounded, this one farther up the road, a boarding house that was almost certainly frequented by prostitutes, run by a woman who had sneered at Narbondo openly one afternoon. He was deeply pleased with himself, and he hung bodily out of the open window to see what havoc the second explosion had wrought. The crowd that had fled west had been turned back by it, and now, God help them, by a third explosion, which Narbondo witnessed quite clearly: north up Carpenter Street, the roof of a butcher’s shop blowing off entire, disintegrating in the air and showering down onto the devastated shop and the buildings around it. He saw bodies on the pavement, some endeavoring to drag themselves away, people vaulting over them as they ran helter-skelter toward the river, impeding each other,
