The street lay deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute and a half. Rain began to pour down (I’ve already described it; it was the same rain that saved the baker’s shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean, no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal Academy—a machine works—had been broken into and a complicated piece of machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited…It was thought at first (by anyone who wasn’t certifiable) that this business of the flying iron might be connected to the theft of the machine.
The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman from the Royal Academy—the secretary, Mr. Parsons—denied it flat out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the
Standard
by nightfall. There wasn’t any connection, he said. Couldn’t be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn’t hold with flying door knockers.
Tell that to the man laid out by the iron post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives’s gentleman’s gentleman.
But this is where art leans in and covers the page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. “All in good time” has ever been the way of art.
***
And anyway it wasn’t until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain—absolutely certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives from the scientific. I wasn’t certain of anything yet.
I was sitting on one of Godall’s sofas, I remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once, their business having nothing to do with me—or with this story except in a peripheral way.
My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It was funny to look at, though.
I remember wondering what it would have been like if Keeble himself had built it, and thinking that I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully, entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up Rupert Street toward Brewer.
A minute passed, neither of us noticing the parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand. I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves wouldn’t muck up the brew. The proprietor
read
tea leaves, though, as well as palms and scone crumbs, and wasn’t at all interested in the invention, although I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down, thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.
There at the side of the street, half a block up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman, but it wasn’t; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around him—the cab, the buildings along Rupert Street, me—signified something to him. His glance shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering, “What is that?”
He was looking up the street at the time, so I looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. “Beg your pardon,” I said.
“That there.”
He peered down the street now, so I did too.
“There.”
Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a cigar.
“Him?” I asked.
He gave me such a look that I thought I’d landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.
“That. In your hand.”
The elephant. He blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. “I like that,” he said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face, too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness, somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.
I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth, and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I’ll admit, that he’d give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard from him no more. I knocked once on the door. “Go away,” he said.
So I did. He wanted the creature more than I wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That’s the sort of thing I told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn’t want to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into Godall’s shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.
I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn’t the fellow in the truck; she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though, and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.
She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling that I’d been cut, although you’d suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn’t count for much—any more than having one’s rubber elephant stolen by a madman counts for anything.
“A man like that ought to be brought to justice,” she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised his eyebrows at me.
“This is Mr. Owlesby,” he said to the woman. “You can speak freely in front of him.”
She paid me no attention at all, as if to say that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no one would stop her. I sat down.
“Brought to justice,” she said.
“Justice,” said St. Ives, “was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back. He died in Scandinavia. He fell into a lake where he without a doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I…I saw him tumble into the lake myself. He didn’t crawl out.”
“He did crawl out.”
“Impossible,” said St. Ives—and it
was
impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr. Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word
impossible,
and St. Ives knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice’s vegetable garden, but the effort had cost him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn this last into a metaphor of the great man’s life over the last couple of years, but I won’t. I promised to leave tragedy alone.
“Look here,” the woman said, handing across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years, in someone’s pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the point as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most disinterested way imaginable.
She handed over a second letter, this one fresh from last week’s post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside, including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the man who had written the first missive. It didn’t take an expert to see that. There was a flourish in the
T’s,
and the uppercase
A,
of which there were two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however, was different. “H. Frost,” it read, with a scattering of initials afterward that I don’t recall.
The text of this second letter was interesting. It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at Edinburgh University, a chemist, and had heard rumors that papers belonging to our madwoman’s father were lost in the vicinity of the North Downs some forty years ago. He seemed to think that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved a certain notoriety that he’d never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so, in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, “H. Frost.”
St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the letters at all. “The doctor is dead, madam,” was what he said finally.
She shook her head. “Those letters were written with the same hand; anyone can see that.”
“In fact,” said St. Ives, “the more elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it’s the subtleties that are difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor’s hand, I don’t know. It’s an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn’t concern me. My suggestion is to ignore it utterly. Don’t respond. Do nothing at all.”
“He ought to be brought to justice is what I’m saying.”
“He’s dead,” said St. Ives finally. And then, after a moment of silence, he said, “And if this mystery were worth anything to me at all, then I’d have to know a great deal more about the particulars, wouldn’t I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were lost in the North Downs forty years ago?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a good deal that she wasn’t saying. Bringing people to justice wasn’t her only concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment, pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing anything at all. “My father’s name was John Kenyon. He was…misguided when he was young,” she said. “And then he was misused when he was older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding. He went over to Rome…”
“Moved to the Continent?” asked St. Ives.
“No, he became a papist. He repented of all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn’t have it. His manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I’m certain he didn’t, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing
what
he intended to do.
“But my father was a weak man, a worm. He saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to London and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I remember, and penitent, and I married and moved away within the year and didn’t see him again until he was an old man and dying. My mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself that killed her—and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by the Royal Academy. A man named Piper, who had a chair at Oxford, wanted the formulae for himself, and had got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my father said, so that he might rest in peace.