James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

“Nothing aside from its reputation.”

“It’s worse than that, sir. Take my word. It’s tolerably close quarters, with the houses packed together, and each crowded with thieves and cutthroats. I didn’t meet the Doctor at his lodgings, but near enough, in Angel Alley, above Whitechapel Road. We struck a bargain and he disappeared for a nonce while I stood waiting, although I had my eyes wide open for villainy. There was a courtyard with a broad stone wall across it, with an open arch and another courtyard beyond. I’m main certain that he went into a shabby-looking entryway under that arch, although when he found me again he came from farther off, out of George Yard, I’d warrant, which confounded me. I advise you to take several stalwart friends with you when you seek him out. By midnight, mark my words, the populace will be far gone in drink, and won’t scruple to murder you, no matter how many of you there are. They’ll set the dogs on you, which don’t care a fig about a bullet. And as for the Doctor, he won’t be found unless he wants to be found, and by then you’ll be in it up to the withers, and no way out.”

Merton’s Rarities, Thames Street, near London Bridge, was empty of trade and at first appeared to be closed for the evening except for a lamp glowing in the back of the shop, in what would be Merton’s workroom. Merton had been a purchasing clerk in the British Museum in his youth, and had established connections to various purveyors of antiquities and curiosities that were out of the regular line. Hence the clientele of Rarities was an eccentric lot. The shop, standing near the London Docks, was much frequented by sailors returning to port from exotic lands, looking to sell rather than buy, knowing that Merton would pay ready money for a well-preserved whale’s eyeball or stuffed ape, or better yet for something particularly out of the ordinary – clean human skeletons, well assembled, fetching upwards of sixty pounds these days and worth half that at wholesale.

St. Ives had heard that Merton did a fair trade in severed heads bought dearly from Paris, fresh from the guillotine and preserved in double-refined spirits. He rapped on the door now, loudly, peering inside past the skeleton of some variety of great ape – almost certainly an orangutan. To St. Ives’s certain knowledge, Merton was a cartographer, a forger, and a dealer in rare books as well as curiosities – in short, a good man to know under the right circumstances. A year ago Merton had passed on a valuable map to St. Ives, who had profited from it, and St. Ives was loathe to do him an injury now, or to confront him with anything having the odor of extortion. But time was short. Within the shop, all was silent and still. Behind them, a fog rose from the Thames, drifting inland.

If Merton weren’t in, then it was even odds he was either at home with Mrs. Merton eating an early supper, or else in his second shop open only to “the trade” – several subterranean rooms accessible from the back of a haberdashery on Threadneedle Street, where he kept certain species of merchandise well hidden. It was there that he was visited by hangman’s assistants trundling Saratoga trunks. St. Ives was determined to run him to ground tonight, and time was ticking away. He and Hasbro were meeting with two “stalwart friends” in a little over an hour at Billson’s Half Toad Inn in Smithfield, for supper and a council of war. The business at Slocumb’s had taken longer than he had hoped, but it had borne fruit, although whether pears or apples he couldn’t yet say.

Merton didn’t travel; he had told St. Ives proudly that he had never in his life been out of Greater London, except on occasion to visit various aunts and uncles in the Midlands, which scarcely counted as travel. The world came to him , Merton liked to say, rarely the other way around. St. Ives wondered whether to climb over the garden wall from the side street and force the rear door, the mountain coming to Merton, so to speak. Merton might easily be in hiding if he had got wind of St. Ives’s part in the notebooks fraud.

No sooner than he conceived the idea, however, than a shadow passed in front of the lamp in the workroom and remained there. St. Ives could just make out the half circle of Merton’s round face, looking out at them. The rest of him stood mostly hidden by the edge of the door. St. Ives waved at him, and after another moment Merton apparently identified them. He hurried forward, unlocked the door, and ushered them in, wiping his hands on a piece of towel and gesturing toward a little grouping of stuffed chairs and deal tables in an alcove in the front of the shop. His sparse hair stood up nearly straight on his head, a slump-shouldered man of perhaps fifty years. He wore thick spectacles, his eyesight the victim of the close work he did as a sometimes forger. His lab coat had once been white, but was a palette of colors now, and despite the towel his hands were stained from whatever task he had been up to in his workroom.

“Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting,” he said. “A man can’t be too careful once the sun sets. Glass of something?”

“Nothing for me, thank you,” St. Ives said. “I don’t mean to turn down a pleasant offer, but we’re rather in a hurry, I’m afraid, and I for one need my sensibilities intact. We’ve urgent business to transact before we have the luxury of rest.”

Hasbro waved the offer away as well, at which Merton said that perhaps they wouldn’t mind if he took a dram. He poured a measure of whisky into a cut glass snifter, tipped a bit of water into it from a nearby bottle, and took an appreciative swallow and sat down. “I needed an excuse to be quits with the day,” he said, heaving a sigh. “How can I help you two?”

“We have business with Dr. Ignacio Narbondo,” St. Ives said flatly.

The smile left Merton’s face. He set the glass down on a table, sat back in his chair, pressed his hands together in front of his mouth and blew air through them. “I scarcely know the man,” he said.

“His own mother said the same thing to me just last night,” St. Ives said, “but you and I have both had dealings with him in one way and another.”

“Not for a good long time,” Merton said.

“We talked to Mr. Slocumb,” Hasbro told him. “Looked him up directly we got into the City.”

Merton blinked at him, considering this.

“He was of your same mind,” St. Ives put in. “When it comes to Narbondo, the less said the better. I understand that fully. But I have no time for scruples, Harry. My son has been kidnapped by the Doctor, early this morning. We believe him to be somewhere in Spitalfields. We’ll do our best to run him to ground tonight. You cannot help us there, of course, but I discovered at Slocumb’s that the mystery is deeper than I had thought. Under coercion he revealed the business of the lost steam launch and the contraband you attempted to smuggle into London…”

“I deny it!” Merton cried. “Smuggling, forsooth! Slocumb has misinformed you. He was ever the ungrateful…”

“No, sir, he has not misinformed us, and he seems to me to be a singularly forthright man. I threatened him, do you see? I offered to reveal the details of the Joseph Banks fraud to the Royal Society. That would have finished him, and I believe it would finish you.”

Merton looked at him in astonishment. “You’re a difficult man, Professor. I had no idea that an old friend of your standing would fling such a threat in my face after…”

“His son has been kidnapped by a murderer, sir,” Hasbro said, his voice like a sword thrust. “The boy’s life hangs in the balance.”

Merton seemed to catch his breath now, and he blinked heavily several times before picking up his glass and draining the contents at a gulp. “Just so,” he said. “I quite understand. I meant no…”