James Blaylock - The Aylesford Skull

“St. Ives credits it, or at least believes that some such thing is coming to pass, and that’s good enough for me.”

“Then I’ll celebrate your sagacity by sampling the tarts and the Welsh rabbit, if only to make sure that they’re up to Billson’s usual standard. I suppose it’s only fair that we lay aside a crumb or two for poor Doyle, given that he’s doing the real work.”

“Here’s our man now,” Jack said, nodding in the direction of the stairs.

Tubby poured ale into Doyle’s glass and said to him as he sat down, “Jack was hungry as a wolf, and I was forced to prevent him from swallowing the entire breakfast and then eating the table into the bargain. What did you discover?” He heaped food onto Doyle’s plate and handed him his fork.

“It was a simple transposition cipher,” Doyle said, giving each of them a sheet of foolscap with two paragraphs written out on it. “The letters were separated into five lines and were often mingled with musical notes, which was confounding at first, but they gave the business away when I realized that they must be transposed along a five-line staff, do you see, like a piece of music, and not the usual three-line arrangement.”

“Fascinating,” Tubby said. “Eat up, old man. Time is passing.”

“The notes were superfluous to the meaning,” he said, “meant to confuse, although I saw something in them, and I suspected that ‘Guido Fox’ was a little too proud of himself. The notes were transposed in a manner of their own, distinct from the verbiage, but when it was all shifted along the five-line staff, you could sing the result in the manner of the old Irish Guy Fawkes song, ‘The Ballynure Ballad.’”

“I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing it sung,” Tubby said, “and I’m not sure I have the stomach to hear it sung now, so I’m happy you’ve written it out plain like this. Have one of these capital curry tarts, Mr. Doyle, and a glass of ale, and give us the gist of it.”

“The gist of it,” Doyle said, swallowing a mouthful of tart, “isn’t plain. It was sketchy enough so that I can only guess at the meaning, although no doubt it’s obvious to both Lord Moorgate and the person who sent it – this self-styled Guido Fox. They mean to cause an outrage, probably explosive, and not on the fifth of November. Soon, I believe. There’s no mention of a date and we don’t know when the cipher was composed, but there is a reference to a Tuesday, which, as both of you are aware, is the very day of the week that Guy Fawkes was to blow up the House of Lords.”

“Tomorrow!” Jack said.

“If it’s not next week,” Tubby put in. “Tuesdays come along with some regularity.”

“Here’s a reference to a ‘Colonel W.O.,’” Jack said, looking at the paper that he held in his hands. “What do we make of that? A man’s initials, I suppose. He seems to have assured Mr. Fox that his men will see to the ‘crowd’s cooperation when the dust begins to fly, along with the martyrs,’ and that the stated sum is acceptable.”

“How many colonels with the initials W.O. can there be in London?” Tubby asked. “Seems to me that it would be impossible to run them all to ground in order to ask them if they’re involved in a crime. Flying martyrs! Have another of these Welsh rabbits, Mr. Doyle.”

As he shifted his plate so that Tubby could slide the morsel onto it, Doyle said, “As Jack pointed out, the initials might mean anything: ‘War Office,’ for example. What that would tell us is that there are soldiers involved, and that they’ve been bribed.”

“There were four with de Groot this morning,” Jack pointed out.

“It’s a restful day in London when no one’s being bribed,” Tubby said.

“Here at the end,” Doyle said, “he writes, ‘Gladstone will reap the whirlwind.’ I suggest that they mean to shift the blame for the outrage to the prime minister, who, we’ll remember, has had a rocky time of it. They’ll make him out to be a Fenian and he’ll be tarred with the brush of a dozen infernal devices.”

“We should settle the bill if we mean to be on the river at nine o’clock in order to catch the ebb,” Jack said.

Tubby reached into his coat and withdrew de Groot’s purse, from which he took a sheaf of banknotes. “Narbondo has his Moorgate to supply the odd five bob,” he said, “and we have our de Groot, who is a capital fellow, ha ha. Did you catch that, Jack? – capital fellow. He’s investing in our dealings, do you see?”

“I do see,” Jack said, “and I’m sensible to the brilliance of the wordplay. How much has the fellow contributed?”

“Ninety pounds sterling!” Tubby said.

“I for one cannot steal the man’s money,” Doyle objected.

Tubby stood up out of his chair and gave him an incredulous look. “Steal? Nor could we,” he said. “I assure you. A gentleman wouldn’t consider it, although I cannot speak for Jack. But the man’s given it freely, or at least he gave no objection, which is much the same. And I’ll remind you that none of us are wealthy men, and we’ve got to pay William Billson for this food and drink, and also the captain of the steam yacht who’s waiting to take us downriver. And if we hurry we still have a moment to stop at Gleeson’s Mercantile to lay in a hamper of food and drink, since we oughtn’t to drop in on Uncle Gilbert like a parcel of beggars. What money’s left over we’ll give back to de Groot when we encounter him next, except we’ll pay him in coin, a great lot of it delivered to the back of his skull by way of a leather bag. We’ll do him the favor of knocking some sense into him in measured doses.”

“Ihad another of the dreams last night, Bill,” Mother Laswell said, “and it put me off my feed.” She watched the landscape of the Cliffe Marshes pass by the train window – grasslands and scrub and pond water, with here and there a copse of small trees or a line of forest in the distance. Sheep in plenty wandered the marsh along random trails and across meadows. This branch of the South Eastern Line was new, with debris left lying in heaps, already up in weeds and rust.

“The same dream, was it?” Kraken asked her.

“The same and different. The door was there, and the fire within, but it opened in the air above a city street. Full of brimstone and smoke. Things flew out, bats, worse things – the spawn of Hell.”

“The black goat?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was a vision of what we fear, a-coming to pass.”

“Perhaps it was,” Mother Laswell said. “It’s what I’ve come to fear, in any event, and maybe I put it into the minds of others who have troubles enough as it is. I’m wondering, Bill, was it me who put it in my own mind to fear it – to dream the dream? Or was it a true vision? A prophecy? That’s the rub, isn’t it? We all of us carry a portmanteau full of fears and hopes with us, lying loose on either side, and we open the satchel ourselves, Pandora-like, not knowing what will fly free, although it’s soon enough that we find out.”

Kraken apparently had no answer to this except to look unhappy, and it occurred to Mother Laswell that she was being both morbid and philosophical, when Bill was neither of these things.

“Just listen to me,” she said. “I sound like a perfect little whiner. You know I don’t half mean it, Bill.” She patted Kraken on the knee and winked at him to show that she saw through her own nonsense, but it did little to cheer him. They passed a cement works, followed close on by a chalk quarry, both of them hideous blights on the countryside. Although the relentless ruination of the God-given beauty of the world did not make her long for death by any means, certainly it made death more palatable. Hereafter Farm was a biscuit-toss to the south – twelve miles in all from Cliffe Village. She could walk the distance and be home before dark. Home before dark – the phrase had a compelling but fearful ring to it. She missed the youngsters and Ned Ludd something terrible, and the peace of the farm as well.