James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

“I’m afraid I haven’t any brandy. Or gin, either. I’ve brought this jar of beef broth, though.” He pointed at the jar where it sat beneath the window.

“What is it?” She looked at him doubtfully, as if she couldn’t have heard what she thought she heard.

“Beef broth. It’s an elixir, actually, for the child.” He nodded at the sleeping boy, who had turned over now and had his face against the floor molding. “Your son is very sick.”

Vaguely, she looked in the child’s direction. “Not so sick as all that.”

“Far sicker than you realize. In two weeks he’ll be dead unless we do something for him.”

“Who the devil are you?” she asked, finally closing the door and lighting a lantern on the sideboard. The room was suddenly illuminated with a yellow glow, and a curl of dirty smoke rose toward a black smudge on the ceiling. “Dead?”

“I’m a friend of your husband’s,” he lied, the notion coming to him out of the blue. “I promised him I’d come round now and then to check on the boy. Three times I’ve been here, and each time there was no one to answer my knock, so this time I let myself in by the window. I’m a doctor, ma’am, and I tell you the boy will die.”

At the mention of her husband, the woman slumped into a chair at the table, burying her face in her hands. She remained so for a moment, then steeled herself and looked up at him, some of the old anger rekindled in her eyes. “What is it that you want?” she asked. “Have your say and get out.”

“This elixir,” he said, setting to work on the child, “is our only hope of curing him.” The boy awoke just then, recoiling in surprise when he saw St. Ives huddled over him.

“It’s all right, lamby,” his mother said, kneeling beside him and petting his lank hair. “This man is a doctor and a friend of your father’s.”

At the mention of this, the child cast St. Ives such a glance of loathing and repugnance that St. Ives nearly toppled over backward from the force of it. The complications of human misery were more than he could fathom. “Do you have a cup?” he asked the mother, who fetched down the tumbler from the sideboard — the same tumbler that St. Ives, a week from now, would use to…

What? He reeled momentarily from a vertigo that was the result of sudden mental confusion.

“Careful” the woman said to him, taking the half-filled tumbler away.

“Yes,” he said. “Have him drink it down. All of it.”

“What about the rest of it?” she asked. “A horse couldn’t drink the whole jar.”

“Two of these glasses full a day until the entire lot’s drunk off. It must be done this way if you want the boy to live.”

She looked at him curiously, hesitating for a moment, as if to say that life wasn’t worth so much, perhaps, as St. Ives thought it was. “Right you are,” she said finally, returning the glass to the sideboard. “Go back to sleep now, lamby,” she said to the boy, who pulled the blanket over his head and faced the wall again. She patted her hair, as if waiting now for St. Ives to suggest something further, as if she still held out hope that he might be worth something more to her than the half crown she had lost along with the sailor.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, stepping toward the window. “I’ll just…” He looked down at the jar again. In his haste to leave he had nearly forgotten it. Now he was relieved to see it, if only to have something to say. “This has to be kept cold. My advice is to leave it on the roof, outside the window.”

In truth, the room itself was nearly cold enough to have done the trick. It was a good excuse to swing the window open and step through it, though. Hurrying, he nearly fell out onto the slates. He stood up, brushing at his knees, and leaned in at the window.

“Leaving by way of the roof?” she asked, making it sound as if she had been insulted. It was clear to her now that this was just what St. Ives was doing. He wasn’t interested in what she had to sell. He had chased off the sailor, and to what end? Now she would have to go down into the street again…“Stairs aren’t good enough for you?” she asked, raising her voice. “Don’t want to be seen coming down from the room of a whore? Precious bloody doctor…”

He nodded weakly, then checked himself and shook his head instead. “My…carriage.”

“On the roof, is it?”

“Yes. I mean to say…” He hesitated, stammering. “What I meant to say was that there was the matter of the money.”

“To hell with your filthy money. I wouldn’t take it if I were dying. Lord it over someone else. If the boy gets well, I’ll thank you for it. But you can bloody damn well leave and take your money with you.”

“It’s not my money, madam, I assure you. Your husband and I wagered a small sum four years back. I’ve owed him this, with interest.” St. Ives pulled out the purse he’d taken from his study in Harrogate, full of money that would no doubt mystify her. She would make use of it, though. Here goes another twenty, he thought, handing it in to her. She paused just a moment before snatching it out of his hand. It would buy a lot of gin, anyway…Ah well, he would win it back from Fleming someday in the hazy future. Time and chance, after all…

He tipped his hat and walked away across the roof, having nothing further to say. He would trust to fate. He climbed in through the hatch and calibrated the instruments, his head nearly empty of thought. Then he realized that during the entire exchange in the room he had never once associated the sick child with Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. There seemed to be no earthly connection between the two. Even the look on the child’s face at the mention of his father — a shadow so deep and dark that it belied the child’s age. Well…it didn’t bear thinking about, did it?

As he switched on Lord Kelvin’s machine, he glanced out one last time through the porthole. There was the woman, holding the purse, staring out through the open window with a look of absolute and utter amazement on her face. Then, along with the rest of the world, she vanished, and he found himself hurtling up the dark well of time, her face merely an afterimage on the back of his eyelids.

There was one more task ahead of him before the end. He would pay a visit to Mrs. Langley. Into his head came the vision of her stumping across the grass toward the silo, ready, on his behalf, to beat men into puddings with her rolling pin. He wondered suddenly how it was that virtues seemed to come so easily to chosen people, while other people had to work like dogs just to hold on to the few little scraps they had.

He reappeared directly outside his study this time, on the lawn, and he sat for a moment in the time machine, giving himself a rest. The silo, right now, contained its own past-time version of the bathyscaphe, which would right at that moment be in the process of itself becoming incorporeal. As his future-self had pointed out in the nastily written note, it wouldn’t do to drop straight into the middle of it.

He sat for a moment orienting himself in time. Soon, within the next couple of hours, his past-time self would wander shoeless over to Lord Kelvin’s summerhouse and would hit upon the final bit of information he would need to make the machine work. But right now, his past-time self was disintegrating into atoms, crawling unhappily toward the window. Well, it couldn’t be helped. If his past-time self was irritated at this little visit, then he was a numbskull. It was his own damned fault, treating Mrs. Langley as if she were a serf.

After another few moments, he climbed out onto the ground, nervously keeping an eye open for Parsons even though he knew from experience that he would easily accomplish his task and be gone before Parsons came snooping around. He checked his pocket watch, calculating the minutes he had to spare, then climbed in through the window. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the desk. It was a mess of broken stuff from when he’d hammered everything with the elephant.