Ancient Appetites (13 page)

T
he cemetery was thronged with people. A second, smaller explosion punched up through the ground nearby, followed by another two in quick succession. They did no damage but added to the panic. Most of the injured were making their feelings felt: screams and moans carried through the air. But some of those stretched out on the ground lay without moving, and made no sound at all.

Nathaniel strode through the chaos towards his father. Edgar was standing, leaning on his cane and smoking a cigar. His claw clicked in a steady rhythm. Coated in a layer of dirt, he dominated the scene like a battle-hardened general, barking orders to those around him:

'Warburton! Enlist the help of any other doctors we have on hand. See to the most seriously wounded only – let the servants deal with the rest. Gideon, you and Roberto take some men and get these crowds back, damn it. It's like a bloody circus in here! O'Keefe, I want teams for heavy lifting for those who are trapped, and assign some men skilled in explosives to explore every inch of this area and make it safe.

'Eunice, supervise the women. See that brandy, blankets, smelling salts and bandages are brought out for those who need them and inform the housekeeper to make the West Hall ready for casualties. Where's the Viceroy? I want troops from the Royal Barracks here to secure the area within the hour. Gerald! Where's Gerald?'

'Here, Uncle Edgar.'

The Patriarch turned to find his nephew standing behind him.

'Ah,' he grunted. 'You will assist Warburton for as long as he needs you, then I'm putting you in charge of the remains that this cataclysm has spewed out all over the cemetery. You will be responsible for uniting each corpse with its respective components and seeing that they are laid to rest once more in the state they enjoyed before they were so suddenly exhumed.'

'Yes, Uncle Edgar.'

'Now where the hell is Nath—?'

'I'm here, Father,' Nate announced as he walked up.

'You will—'

'Melancholy is trapped, sir,' Nathaniel cut in, taking some satisfaction in being able to interrupt his father. 'I need some men to free her.'

Edgar stared at his son with his one good eye for a moment and then nodded. Reaching up with his claw, he took the cigar from his mouth.

'Then take them,' he growled: 'Take what men you need and make good use of them.'

Daisy kept her eyes fixed on the ground, her cheeks blushing a stark crimson.

'You said you'd be
discreet,'
she muttered between clenched teeth.

'I could have kept your situation to myself altogether,' Nathaniel replied. 'But some blackguard might have come along and taken advantage of you in your exposed condition.'

'So you decided to set an example?' she hissed.

In fairness, he thought, I could have brought the whole crowd. He had called over the eight strongest-looking men he could find to help him lift God's messenger off his sister-in-law. The navvies were treating the situation as delicately as they could, doing their best to avert their eyes from her misfortune. But Nate knew that Daisy would be the talk of the town before the day was out. He took her hands and nodded to the man nearest him as the navvies gripped the angel's wings.

'One . . . two . . . three . . . Heeaave!'

The marble sculpture slowly came up, the stone sliding from the earth with a soft grating sound – but their strength failed and it slipped back down again with a slushy thud.

'And again!' Nate urged them. 'On three!'

They all counted off once more and, with a concerted effort, hauled the statue up far enough to free the folds of Daisy's dress and allow Nate to pull her free. The sculpture toppled down onto its front as he helped her get to her feet. He was all ready with his next jibe when he saw Clancy walking towards them. The footman's face was as inscrutable as ever, but Nate felt suddenly ashamed of himself. Looking down into Daisy's face, he saw that it was taking all her strength to keep from bursting into tears. She had been dreadfully humiliated, and instead of trying to ease her distress, he had made fun of her.

He picked up his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. Clancy stopped just short of them, his eyes fixed on Nathaniel. The manservant glanced diffidently at Daisy, nodded towards the navvies and then looked pointedly back at his master. Nate got the message and felt even more embarrassed; as a gentleman, this was his situation to deal with. Clancy should not have to point out his duties. Nate glanced around; it appeared that no one else had noticed Daisy's plight.

'Ah, there you are, Clancy,' he said. 'Take these men up to the house. Give them five shillings apiece and a stiff drink. Note down their names so that they may be commended to their foreman . . . and thank them for their discretion.'

'Thank . . . thank you very much, sir,' one of the navvies stuttered.

The others mumbled their thanks, but they had received the warning loud and clear. If word got out about what had happened to Daisy, they would lose their jobs.

'Yes, sir,' Clancy replied.

He didn't move an inch. Nathaniel was at a loss for a moment. Had he forgotten something? Clancy would never speak up in front of the workers, but— Nate could have kicked himself.

'I will escort Miss Daisy to the house myself,' he added.

'Very good, sir.'

Daisy clung onto his arm as the others walked away. Then he led her through the ruined graveyard towards the church.

'We should tell Roberto,' he said softly to her. 'He needs to know'

'He didn't come looking for me, did he?' she whispered back, her throat tense. 'Anyway, it's probably just as well he wasn't there – he'd only have got all melodramatic. You know what he's like. I'll tell him when I'm ready'

There were tears streaming down her face now. They both fell silent. He gave her his handkerchief, wishing he had done more to ease her embarrassment. His conscience always seemed to rear its head too late. As the two of them walked, their feet sank into the dark brown earth that had been sprayed over the grass by the explosion. The crowd of gawking onlookers stood behind a cordon of footmen, eager to see as much of what had happened as possible. They would be drinking on this for weeks.

Nathaniel noticed that the ground was covered with hats, caps and bonnets – all knocked off heads by the blast. He had lost his own, he realized. The carriages were gone: the horses and velocycles had obviously bolted. They would have to walk up to the house. It would probably do Daisy good to walk for a bit. His Aunt Eunice was moving to intercept them, some rolls of bandages in her arms.

'Daisy, my dear,' she called. 'This is no time to be a weeping willow. We've all had a shock. Chin up! You must
compose
yourself, young lady.'

Nathaniel could see flecks of earth caught in his aunt's dentures. He felt a sudden contempt for this petty, overbearing woman.

'Wildenstern ladies must set an example, my dear,' Eunice went on. 'Stop your crying now. Stop it! You have to be made of stronger stuff than this!'

'You have soil in your teeth, Aunt Eunice,' Nate said to her, and led Daisy straight past as the elderly woman dropped the bandages and hurriedly took out a compact mirror to examine her mouth.

'Don't pay her any mind,' he said quietly to Daisy.

'No.' Daisy stopped abruptly. 'She's right – I should be helping.'

She wiped the last of her tears away and took off Nathaniel's jacket, handing it to him.

'I'll be fine, thank you.'

Roberto, who had been supervising the cordon with Hennessy, spotted Daisy and started to hurry across the lawn towards them, concern written all over his face. Before he reached them, Edgar appeared with his black servants looming behind him.

'Miss Melancholy' He bowed his head to her. 'I trust your predicament was handled with sufficient propriety?'

'Yes, Father,' she answered, glancing sidelong at Nathaniel, who swallowed nervously.

But Daisy had no wish to embarrass him here and now. She fervently wished she could just escape the whole damned lot of them. She would get back at Nate in her own good time.

Nathaniel surveyed the chaotic scene around them. The damage would take weeks to repair. He shook his head in disbelief, flabbergasted by what had happened. Marcus's funeral had been
bombed. The
enormity of the situation was still sinking in. He found his entire body was shaking; his grief for his brother turning into a terrible rage.

'We have to find whoever did this,' he growled through clenched teeth. 'We have to find these rebels, these
curs
and . . . and . . .
destroy
them. There must be hell to pay for this.'

'The perpetrators will be dealt with,' Edgar told him in a matter-of-fact way. 'The situation is well in hand.'

The Patriarch turned to look round for a moment and Nate followed his gaze. Standing by the corner of the church was a broad-shouldered figure dressed in a suit and bowler hat. It was Slattery, the man Nate had met outside his father's office a few days before. He gave Nathaniel a friendly grin, showing off his gold teeth, and then disappeared round the corner.

'The situation is well in hand,' Edgar said again.

F
our people had been killed in the funeral explosion. Dr Warburton said it could have been much worse. The rebels who had perpetrated the attack had set off some explosives in the old treasury. The money and valuables had been cleared out so that the space could be used to store the black powder the engineers used for blasting out the tunnels. The entire stock of powder had exploded. It was pure chance that more people had not been standing on the ground over the store when it was detonated.

Two days later, Nathaniel was prowling the corridors of Wildenstern Hall, his mind seething with frustrated rage. The rebels had gone too far this time. Over the last few years there had been the odd revolt – raids on food stores or bands of resistance organized against evictions – but they had never attempted anything like this before.

The nearest comparison anyone could draw was the famous gunpowder plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes and some English dissidents had tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. To Nate, killing the King and a gaggle of politicians had some kind of logic to it. At least, if you were of the revolutionary persuasion. But who in their right minds would attack a funeral? A
funeral,
for God's sake!

He kept turning the event over and over in his mind, striding relentlessly down one hallway after another. On top of everything else, he was still no closer to finding Babylon, in spite of numerous enquiries. And even if he did, Marcus's cryptic message had given him no clue as to how a childhood plaything would help catch his killer.

Tired and dispirited, he eventually found himself near Gerald's quarters. Nate knew what he needed to do to ease his mind and he decided to try and convince his cousin to come along.

Gerald was standing in his laboratory, in the light of the tall windows. He was wearing an apron over his clothes and was gazing up at the overcast sky, lost in thought. On the tables around him were the remains of the corpses disinterred by the explosion. They were in various states of decomposition. Even the skeletons varied in age, some a stark yellow-white, others turning a dirty brown. Nate wrinkled his nose at the smell of old decay.

Gerald did not notice him until he was halfway across the room.

'Welcome to my mortuary,' he said, turning round and blinking as if waking from a sleep.

'Enjoying the work?' Nate asked him.

'I am, actually,' his cousin replied, gesturing towards the nearest table. 'I was a bit irritated at having to put aside my work on engimal behaviour, but this is pretty fascinating stuff. Fitting the skeletons back together was easy, where the bones are intact. But piecing together the fragmented bones is proving a little more difficult. A bit like a jigsaw in three dimensions. And I'm not sure if you're supposed to use
glue
on mortal remains or not.'

'Probably sacrilege,' Nate commented. 'Still, you always did like puzzles.'

'Mm.' Gerald nodded. 'But there's an even bigger puzzle. All the graves in this cemetery have been recorded and marked down on a map. The family has always been diligent about its record-keeping – it's one of the reasons we're so rich. And as far back as records on this graveyard go, we can account for all the people buried here. The explosion unearthed the graves of eighteen people. We know this for certain.'

'So?' Nate asked.

'So why' Gerald continued, 'do we have twenty-two bodies?'

Nate shrugged.

'The records must be wrong, or someone chucked an extra few bodies into the graves without telling anybody. That's no great mystery'

'I don't think so,' Gerald said, shaking his head. 'Have a gander at this.'

He walked down to the end of the room, where two long tables were draped in sheets. Lifting off the covers, he folded them carefully and laid them aside. Stretched out on the tables were four cadavers. Nathaniel leaned over, studying each one.

They were different from the rest of the corpses. The others were little more than skeletons, if that. These four were remarkably intact. Each one was caked in mud, but still had flesh on its bones. The skin was dark brown, tough and wrinkled like old leather, the teeth bared as if in a grimace. The bodies had a flattened appearance, as if they had been crushed and even folded in places. Hair and fingernails and even eyelashes were still visible, and their clothes had not fully rotted. There was metal around their necks and wrists that looked like the remains of jewellery. Two of them were unmistakably women, the other two men.

'They're bog bodies,' Gerald told him. 'This whole area was peat bog once, before it was drained and converted into farmland. And then the church and the cemetery were built here. But these people were buried before that. . . and without coffins. I haven't had time to clean them properly yet; it's delicate work. Bogs can preserve corpses from decay for millennia; that's why they look the way they do.'

'Why are they flattened like that?' Nate asked.

'It's from the weight of the ground as it settled and built up around them,' Gerald told him. 'And the shifting over the centuries distorts their shapes too. Even so, I've never heard of a single body as well preserved as these – and to find
four
of them! We're looking at a piece of history here, Nate.'

'How do you know so much about these things?'

'I read,' Gerald replied.

He took out his cigarette case, drew one out and lit it up. His face was solemn as he regarded the leathery corpses. Nathaniel knew that this was the kind of intellectual challenge that his cousin thrived upon, and he was keen to interrupt Gerald's obsessive curiosity before it really took hold.

'I want to get drunk,' he declared.

'So get drunk.'

'No, I mean completely and utterly, unhealthily out-of-my-face drunk,' Nate explained. 'Let's go into town – we could go on the tear in Monto.'

Gerald looked reluctant to give up his work. He eyed the bog bodies with a longing that Nate found a little disturbing. Pulling his watch from his waistcoat pocket, he checked the time. It was after five.

'You'll turn into a prig if you spend all your time in the lab,' Nate persisted. 'Come on, let's get buckled. It's how Marcus would have wanted it. And we can take Flash into town and show it off to the girls.'

Gerald raised an eyebrow.

'Will you let me ride it?'

'I don't think it'd have you,' Nate retorted. 'Besides, I'm not that desperate for your company. I'll let you tell everyone the story of how we caught it, though – you can embellish your part in it if you wish. Look, we haven't hit the town together in over a year and a half; I need to know if you can still cut the mustard. Now are we getting drunk or what?'

'Well, since you asked so nicely' – Gerald slapped his thigh in mock jollity – 'I suppose I could do with an evening of dolly-mops, booze and belly-timber. Besides, these old codgers won't be getting any deader tonight. Let's hit that town then!'

Monto was a sprawling neighbourhood of ill repute in north Dublin, centred on Montgomery Street. Ireland had long been the most irritating thorn in the backside of the British Empire and it was reflected in the large numbers of troops stationed in the country's capital. There was good money to be had for supplying the kind of bawdy entertainment that all these soldiers demanded, and much of that money was made in the streets of Monto after sundown.

The pubs, clubs and opium dens that nestled in this pit of sin also offered noble young gentlemen – even some who were still in their teenage years – the chance to experience the seedier side of life with relative anonymity . . . if they were discreet about it. Nathaniel and Gerald were not. As they rode down the centre of Montgomery Street on velocycles, their engines roaring with machismo, the two young gentlemen quickly became the centre of attention. Their wealth had always given them a certain celebrity status, and velocycles were not unheard of among the rich and famous, but one look at Flash told the spectators they were seeing something special. Whispers drifted about that this was none other than the Beast of Glenmalure. The savage velocycle growled at the people on either side as it rolled down the street, overtaking hansom cabs and horse-drawn trams. The crowds made it nervous.

After riding up and down the street a few times to flaunt their machines to curious women and envious men, the two riders turned down a lane and pulled up at the door of a gentleman's club. A small crowd of admirers followed them at a safe distance. Whipping off their insect-flecked goggles, they carefully chained their mounts to a lamppost – both to stop them wandering and to prevent them from being stolen. Taking off his leather riding cap, each man opened a box on the back of his saddle and took out a fashionable top hat.

'Right,' said Nathaniel, ignoring the people behind them. 'A bottle of wine and a slap-up meal and then we go looking for some ladies to impress.'

He took off his coat, which was spattered with mud.

'There'll be no
ladies
in these parts,' Gerald told him.

'Then we'll just have to make do with whatever fillies we can find,' Nate replied. 'Come on, let's get buckled.'

A racy waltz was being played inside the club and they could hear the sound of dancing feet on a wooden floor. They were welcomed in by the doorman, who was trained to recognize important faces and treat them accordingly. The social columns in the local papers had already announced Nathaniel's return. The doormen of Monto could earn some extra income by informing the gossipmongers which teenage playboys were out on the town, and what kind of mischief they created in the process.

But another set of eyes was watching Nathaniel and his cousin with a burning resentment. Shay Noonan peered out from a shadowed doorway as the two gentlemen entered the club. He had been about to walk out of the offices of a moneylender, having just paid off his debts, when he saw them arrive. Shay still had plenty of money left over and was intending to put some of it on a cock-fight in town. When he saw the velocycles, he decided to change his plans.

He had not slept for two nights and there were dark bags under his eyes. It was a close evening, and his collar and the band of his cap were damp with sweat. The word in town was that Slattery, the bailiff, and his men had been asking questions. Jimmy and the other lads involved in the disastrous heist were dead and they had already been reported missing. Anybody who knew Jimmy would be aware that he worked with Shay. The moneylender who had taken the engimal lamp off his hands for a tidy sum would keep his mouth shut, but sooner or later somebody would talk. Shay needed to get out of town. Everybody thought the explosion had been the work of the rebels. If Slattery's lads got hold of him, he was a dead man – if he was lucky.

But Shay couldn't stop thinking about his friends. All they'd wanted was to score some loot; to take some money from a family that had more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. Instead, his mates had been blown to pieces. The memory of it was like a physical pain to him.

This was the Wildensterns' doing – them and the whole system that had driven him into a life of crime. Watching these young lords cavort with careless ignorance of the poverty and misery around them made him sick to his stomach. He'd get out of town all right; but not before he'd pulled off one final job. Something that would hurt and humiliate the swells he despised so much.

Waiting for the group of spectators to depart, he checked that the doorman had gone back inside and crept up to the velocycles, looking them over. Their front legs were chained to the lamppost, but the lock would be easy for him to pick. Having seen the gentlemen riding them, he figured they were tame enough. The smaller of the two was obviously a little afraid of its companion. It was careful to keep the post between them. The big one was a beauty; easily worth ten times what the moneylender had paid for the bright-eye. It shone its eyes at him and growled quietly as he came closer, but he wasn't impressed. He admired its sweeping lines and powerful bulk.

'Right you are, then,' Shay said softly. 'You'll do nicely'

Stroking its head, he leaned over to take hold of the lock.

The engimal roared and pivoted to the side, slamming him up against the lamppost. Shay cried out as he felt something crack in his chest. He staggered back but was caught as the machine bounced off its back wheel and hit him again, knocking him to the ground. In a moment he was back on his feet, stumbling away. The velocycle struck out once more with its rear wheel, spinning it at high speed as it kicked Shay up the backside. The racing wheel added to the force of the kick, and he was hurled across the laneway and spilled face-first into the mud.

The engimal pulled at its chain, snarling ferociously. The racket did not go unnoticed, but by the time the doorman came out to investigate, Shay had limped out of sight round a corner. He hurried away into the darker alleys of Monto. A clicking just over his heart told him he had broken a rib – one more point to the Wildensterns. But this wasn't the end of it, he swore to himself . . . not by a long way.

It was the early hours of the morning when Nathaniel and Gerald, drunk and exhausted, made their unsteady way back down the laneway to their velocycles. They had gone from one venue to the next and tasted the best that Monto had to offer; now they wanted to go home. A drizzly rain was starting to fall and the air was swollen with the smell of an oncoming storm. The engimals' eyes lit up and they whined plaintively as their chains were undone, eager to go for a run.