The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 3

  Mrs. Harvill was white, hand tightly gripping her daughter’s, eyes screwed shut. Her terror reminded Charles of Davey’s, last night, when he felt threatened. Sairey hugged her mother, but detached herself.

  “You stay here, Mam. Me and Phil’ll talk with the lad. The gentlemen will look after you.”

  Sairey passed her mother on to Rud.

  Mrs. Harvill embraced the practitioner, discomfiting him, pressing her face to his shoulder. She sobbed, silently.

  Sairey, slow and graceful in her enlarged state, took her husband’s arm and stepped into the parlour. Davey started out of his seat, a broad smile showing his impossible teeth-buds.

  “Sairey, Phil...”

  Charles closed the door.

  Rud sat Mrs. Harvill on a chair and went upstairs to fetch a something to calm her. The woman composed herself. She looked at Charles, paying him attention for the first time.

  “Who are you?” she asked, bluntly.

  “Charles Beauregard.”

  “Oliver said that. I mean what are you?”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “Where are my children? Are they safe?”

  “That’s what we are trying to determine, Mrs. Harvill.”

  The answer didn’t satisfy. She looked away, ignoring him. In her pettishness, she was like Davey. Charles even thought he heard her crooning “My mother said...” under her breath. She had found a fetish object, a length of rope with a handle. She bound her hand until the fingers were bloodless, then unwound the rope and watched pink seep back.

  Rud returned and gave Mrs. Harvill a glass of water into which he measured three drops from a blue bottle. She swallowed it with a grimace and he rewarded her with a sugar-lump. If her son had been transformed into an adult, this business had turned her—in some sense—into a child.

  A muffle of conversation could be heard through the door. The temptation to eavesdrop was a fish-hook in the mind. Charles saw that the doctor felt the tug even more keenly. Only the soldier was impassive, bored with this duty but grateful to be inside in the warm.

  “What can be keeping them?” said Mrs. Harvill.

  She fiddled again with her fetish, separating the rope into strands as if undoing a child’s braid. The rope was Davey’s new whip, which had been found in Hill Wood.

  Charles could only imagine how Violet Harvill felt.

  Pamela had died, along with their newborn son, after a botched delivery. He had blamed an incompetent doctor, then malign providence, and finally himself. By accepting the commission in the Hills, he had removed his family from modern medicine. A hot, hollow grief had scooped him out. He had come to accept that he would never be the man he was before, but knew Pamela would have been fiercely disappointed if he used the loss as an excuse to surrender. She had burst into his life to challenge everything he believed. Their marriage had been a wonderful, continuous explosion. In the last hours, clinging to him—biting deep into his forearm to staunch her own screams—and knowing she would die, Pamela had talked a cascade, soothing and hectoring, loving and reprimanding, advising and ordering. In London fog, he had lost the memory for a while. An engagement to Pamela’s cousin, Penelope Churchward, had been his first effort at reforming a private world, and its embarrassing termination the spur to think again on what his wife had tried to tell him. As he found himself deeper in the affairs of the Diogenes Club, Pamela’s voice came back. Every day, he would remember something of hers, something she had said or done. Sometimes, a twinge in his arm would be enough, a reminder that he had to live up to her.

  Looking at Mrs. Harvill, he recalled the other loss, eclipsed by Pamela’s long, bloody dying. His son, Richard Charles, twelve years dead, had lived less than an hour and opened his eyes only in death, face washed clean by the ayah. If he had been a girl, she would have been Pandora Sophie. Charles and Pamela had got used to calling the child “Dickie or Dora.” As Pamela wished, he had served mother and child in the Indian manner, cremating them together. Most of the ashes were scattered in India, which she had loved in a way he admired but never shared. Some he had brought back to England, to placate Pamela’s family. An urn rested in the vault in Kingstead Cemetery, a proper place of interment for a proper woman who would have been disowned had she spent more time at home expressing her opinions.

  But what of the boy?

  Losing a child is the worst thing in the world. Charles knew that, but didn’t feel it. His son, though born, was still a part of Pamela, one loss coiled up within the other. If he ached for Dickie or Dora, it was only in the sense he sometimes felt for the other children Pamela and he would have had, the names they might have taken. The Churchwards ran to Ps and there had yet to be a Persephone, Paulus, Patricia, or Prosper.

  Now he thought of the boy.

  It was in him, he knew, wrapped up tight. The cold dead spot. The rage and panic. The ruthlessness.

  Violet Harvill would do anything.

  She seemed to snap out of her spell, and tied Davey’s whip around her wrist, loose like a bracelet. She stood, determined.

  Rud was at the parlour door.

  “If you feel you’re up to this, Violet...”

  She said nothing but he opened the door. Sairey was laughing at something Davey had just said. The lad was smiling, an entirely different person.

  “Mam,” he said, seeing Mrs. Harvill.

  Charles knew disaster was upon them. He was out of his chair and across the hall, reaching for Mrs. Harvill. She was too swift for him, sensing his grasp and ducking under it. A creak at the back of her throat grew into a keening, birdlike cry. She flew into the parlour, fingers like talons.

  Her nails raked across Davey’s face, carving red runnels. She got a grip on his throat.

  “What’ve you done with them?” she demanded.

  A torrent of barrack abuse poured from her mouth, words Charles would once have sworn a woman could not even know—though, at the last, Pamela had used them too. Violet Harvill’s face was a mask of hate.

  “What’ve you done?”

  Sairey tried to shift from her chair, forgetting for a moment her unaccustomed shape. With a yelp, she sat back down, holding her belly.

  Riddle and Rud seized Mrs. Harvill and pulled her away. Charles stepped in and prised the woman’s fingers from Davey’s throat, one by one. She continued to screech and swear.

  “Get her out of the room,” Charles told the doctor. “Please.”

  There was a struggle, but it was done.

  Davey was back in his huddle, knees up against his face, eyes liquid, sing-songing.

  “Naughty girl to disobey... dis-o-bey! Naughty girl...”

  Sairey, careful now, hugged him, pressing his head to her full breast. He rocked back and forth.

  Charles’s collar had come undone and his cravat was loose.

  He was responsible for this catastrophe.

  “He’m Davey, mister,” said Sairey, softly. She didn’t notice she was weeping. “No doubt ‘bout it. We talked ‘bout what you said. Family things. When I were little, Dad do made up stories for I, stories ‘bout Silas Gobbo, a little wood-carver who lives in a hollow tree in our garden and makes furniture for birds. Dad’d make tiny tables and chairs from offcuts, put ‘em in the tree and take I out to the garden to show off Silas’s new work. Dad told the tales over, to Davey and Maeve. Loved making little toys, did Dad. No one but Davey could’ve known ‘bout Silas Gobbo. Not ‘bout the tiny tables and chairs. Even if someone else heard the stories, they couldn’t love Silas. Davey and Maeve do. With Dad gone, loving Silas is like loving him, remembering. Maeve used to say she wanted to marry Silas when she grew up, and be a princess.”

  “So you’re convinced?”

  “Everythin’ else, from last week and from years ago, the boy still has in ‘en. Mam’ll never accept it. I don’t know how I can credit it, but it’s him.”

  She held her brother close. Even shaved, he seemed to be twice her age.

  Charles fixed his collar.
<
br />   “What does he say about Maeve?”

  “She’m with Silas Gobbo. He’m moved from our tree into Hill Wood. Davey says Maeve be a princess now.”

  * * * *

  v: “filthy afternoon”

  It was a dreary, depressing day. Clouds boiled over Hill Wood, threatening another snowfall. The first flakes were in circulation, bestowing tiny stinging kisses.

  Charles walked down Dark Lane, towards Fair Field Track. A thin fire burned in a brazier, flames whipped by harsh, contradictory winds. The fusiliers on guard were wrapped in layers of coat and cloak. The youth who had tried to make time with Rud’s tweeny was still red-cheeked, but now through the beginnings of frostbite.

  Sergeant Beale, elaborately moustached and with eyebrows to match, did not feel the cold. If ordered to ship out, Beale would be equally up for an expedition through Arctic tundra or a trail across Sahara sands. Men like Major Chilcot only thought they ran the Empire; men like Beale actually did.

  “Filthy afternoon, sir,” commented the Sergeant.

  “Looks like snow.”

  “Looks and feels like snow, sir. Is snow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not good, snow. Not for the little girl.”

  “No.”

  Charles understood. If this Christmas card sprinkle turned into blizzard, any search would be off. Hope would be lost. The vanishing of Maeve Harvill would be accepted. Chilcot would pack up his soldiers and return to barracks. Charles would be recalled, to make an inconclusive report. The Small Man could open all hours of the night.

  An April thaw might disclose a small, frozen corpse. Or, under the circumstances, not.

  Charles looked over the trestle and into the trees.

  The men of Eye and the fusiliers had both been through Hill Wood. Now, Charles—knowing he had to make sure—would have to make a third search. Of course, he wasn’t just looking for the girl.

  “I’ll just step into the wood and have a look about, Sergeant.”

  “Very good, sir. We’ll hold the fort.”

  The guard lifted the trestle so Charles could pass.

  He tried to act as if he was just out for a stroll on a bracing day. but could not pull it off. Pamela nagged: It was not just a puzzle: wounded people surrounded the mystery; they deserved more than abstract thought

  Footprints were everywhere, a heavy trample marking out Fair Field Track, scattering off in dispersal patterns to all sides. Barely a square foot of virgin white remained. The black branches of some trees were iced with snow, but most were shaken clean.

  Charles could recognise fifteen different types of snake native to the Indian subcontinent, distinguishing deadly from harmless. He knew the safest covert routes into and out of the Old Jago, the worst rookery in London. He understood distinctions between spectre, apparition, phantasm, and revenant—knowledge the more remarkable for being gained firsthand rather than through dusty pedantry. But, aside from oak and elm, he could identify none of the common trees of the English countryside. Explorations of extraordinary fields had left him little time for ordinary ones.

  He was missing something.

  His city boots, heavily soled for cobbles, were thin and flexible. Cold seeped in at the lace-holes and seams. He couldn’t feel his toes.

  It was a small wood. No sooner was he out of sight of Beale than the trees thinned and he saw the khaki tents pitched on Fair Field. Davey and Maeve had been detained here, somehow. Everyone was convinced. Could the children have slipped out unnoticed, into Fair Field and over the stile or through a gate, disappearing into regions yet to be searched? If so, somebody should have seen them. No one had come forward.

  Could they have been stolen away by passing gypsies?

  In Eye, gypsies or any other strangers would be noticed. So, suspicion must range closer to home. Accusations had begun to run around. Every community had its odd ones, easy to accuse of unthinkable crimes. P.C. Throttle still said it was the Dandos, a large and unruly local clan. Accusing the Dandos had solved every other mystery in Ashton and Moreton in the last thirty years, and Throttle saw no reason to change tactics now. The fact of Davey’s return had called off the witch-hunt. Even those who didn’t believe Davey was who he claimed assumed he was at the bottom of the bad business.

  If Davey was Davey, what had happened?

  Charles went over the ground again, off the track this time, zigzagging across the small patch. He found objects trampled into muddy snow, which turned out to be broken pipes, a single man-sized glove, candle-stubs. As much rubbish was tossed here as in a London gutter. The snowfall was thickening.

  Glancing up, he saw something.

  Previous searches had concentrated on the ground. If Maeve had flown away, perhaps Charles should direct his attention upwards.

  Snowflakes perished on his upturned face.

  He stood before a twisted oak. A tree he could identify, even when not in leaf. An object ringed from a branch, just out of his reach. He reached up and brushed it with his fingers.

  A wooden band, about eighteen inches in diameter, was loose about the branch, as if tossed onto a hook in a fairground shy. He found footholds in the trunk and climbed a yard above the ground.

  He got close enough to the band to see initials burned into its inner side. D.H. Davey’s birthday hoop.

  Charles held the branch with gloved hands and let go his knee-grip on the trunk. He swung out and the branch lowered, pulled by his weight. His feet lightly touched ground, the branch bent like a bow. With one hand, he nudged the hoop, trying to work it free. The branch forked and the hoop stuck.

  That was a puzzle.

  The obvious trick would be to break the hoop and fix it again, around the branch. But there was no break, no fix. In which case, the toy must have been hung on the tree when it was younger, and become trapped by natural growth.

  The oak was older than Davey Harvill, by many human lifetimes. It was full-grown when Napoleon was a boy. The hoop had not been hung last week, but must have been here since the Wars of the Roses.

  He let go of the branch. It sprang back into place, jouncing the hoop. Snow dislodged from higher up.

  The tree creaked, waving branches like a live thing.

  Charles was chilled with more than cold.

  About twenty feet from the ground, packed snow parted and fell away, revealing a black face. A pattern of knot-holes, rather, shaped into a face.

  We see faces in everything. It is the order we attempt to put on the world—on clouds, stains on the wallpaper, eroded cliffs. Eyes, a nose, mouth. Expressions malign or benevolent.

  This face seemed, to Charles, puckish.

  “Good afternoon to you, Mr. Silas Gobbo,” he said, touching his hat-brim.

  “Who, pray, is Silas Gobbo?”

  Charles turned, heart caught by the sudden, small voice.

  A little girl stood among the drifts, braids escaping from a blue cap, coat neatly done up to her muffler.

  His first thought was that this was Maeve!

  It struck him that he wouldn’t recognise her if he saw her. He had seen no picture. There were other little girls in Eye.

  “Are you looking for Maeve Harvill?” he asked. “Is she your friend?”

  The little girl smiled, solemnly.

  “I am Maeve,” she said. “I’m a princess.”

  He picked her up and held her as if she were his own. Inside, he melted at this miracle. He was light-headed with an instant, fast-burning elation.

  “This is not how princesses should be treated, sir.”

  He was holding her too tight. He relaxed into a fond hug and looked down at the fresh footprints where she had been standing. Two only, as if she was set down from above, on this spot. He looked up and saw a bramble-tangle of black branches against dirty sky.

  He cast around for the face he had imagined, but couldn’t find it again.

  Maeve’s Dad would have said Silas Gobbo had rescued Maeve, returned her to her family.

  It was t
he happy ending Charles wanted. He ran through his joy, and felt the chill again, the cold chill and the bone chill. He shifted the little girl, a delicate-boned miniature woman, and looked into her perfect, polite face.

  “Princess, have you brothers and sisters?”

  “David and Sarah.”

  “Parents? Mam and Dad.”

  “Father is dead. My mother is Mrs. Violet Harvill. You would do me a great service if you were to take me home. I am a tired princess.”

  The little bundle was warm in his arms. She kissed his cheek and snuggled close against his shoulder.