The City of Dr Moreau, page 4
“Of course,” Vaughan said. Then he grinned, almost blasphemously. “And how very comforting it must be to be able to believe that.”
At this retort, Woodgrove felt an uncharacteristic (though in recent years, far from unprecedented) surge of anger. “Really, Vaughan, I can’t for the life of me see why you came today. Not if you mean only to sneer.”
Vaughan put up both his hands, palms outwards, in a gesture of emollient surrender. “Forgive me,” he said, even sounding for a moment as though he might mean it. “I wanted to provoke no offence. I dare say I’ve grown a little cynical – even a little jaded – since… well, since we saw what we saw.”
Woodgrove nodded, that quick flush of anger receding as swiftly as it had arrived. “I dare say we all have.”
“As for the reason for my presence here today, I only wanted to pay my respects in person. I can’t say that Dr Bright and I were ever close friends but I like to think that there was a certain kinship between us all the same. I like to think that he’d have wanted me to attend.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course. That’s quite right.”
“Come along,” Vaughan said, his tone still one of mild contrition. “Shall we walk? It’s a pleasant day for it and we’ve at least an hour before your train to London.”
“A fine suggestion,” said Woodgrove and the two men rose as one.
They strolled first around the churchyard (careful to go clockwise about the structure and not, though Woodgrove would once have scoffed at such skittish superstition, to walk about it widdershins) and then into the village beyond. It was a calm, picturesque settlement, its houses and solitary inn clustered around a large area of common ground, a pond and a well at the heart of it. They passed no other mourners but only the occasional local who nodded as they went with gruff hospitality. As they walked it seemed to Woodgrove to grow colder. Their breath billowed from their mouths.
“Distinct nip in the air, isn’t there?” said Vaughan.
Woodgrove agreed that this was so.
“Brandy?” In some deft magician’s movement, Vaughan had produced a silver hip flask which he was holding out now to the Reverend Woodgrove.
“Obliged,” the vicar said, taking the proffered vessel and taking two swift swigs, medicinal and welcome. Mr Vaughan did the same and the flask disappeared again.
“You’re keeping well, I hope,” said the alienist. “Your parish in the city… your responsibilities…?” He spoke as though he had but the vaguest idea of what these might be and Woodgrove reflected that Vaughan had most likely already forgotten such details had he ever known them. He was, after all, the kind of fellow who retained only information that was of direct personal use. Everything else would be jettisoned in order to ensure the maximisation of clarity and efficiency.
“Quite well, thank you,” was all that Woodgrove said in response.
“I hear you’re thinking of going abroad when you retire. To the Continent?”
“However did you hear of that?”
Vaughan shrugged. “One hears things… mutual friends…”
Woodgrove could not think of a single friend whom he had in common with Mr Vaughan (none, at least, who was still living) but he did not say as much. His time with the alienist was coming to an end and, once they had parted, he told himself that he would go to some considerable trouble to avoid encountering him again. This, he knew, was certainly an unchristian sentiment but there was something about the man which was profoundly unsettling, almost reptilian. He supposed that he had always thought this to a degree, even if, on early acquaintance, he had done his utmost to give the man the most generous benefit of the doubt.
“As it happens,” the vicar said, rather stiffly, “I do intend to move. Somewhere quite different. Away from London. Somewhere with fresher, cleaner air. Somewhere I can serve my Creator in a different way.”
“I wish you joy of it,” Vaughan said. “If anyone has earned a peaceful retirement it’s surely you.”
Woodgrove murmured his thanks. “And you?” he asked. “You’re keeping as busy as ever. Your practice goes from strength to strength?”
“Most certainly,” said Vaughan, with no false modesty. “But I find that I have other interests now.”
“Oh yes? What kind?”
“I’ve begun to do a little work for our government. As a kind of consultant. More than that I’m really not supposed to say.”
“Indeed? Well, you always were ambitious,” said Woodgrove, before adding hastily: “and that’s no bad thing, not at least so long as one remembers in whose service it is that you labour.”
Vaughan pointed puckishly upwards. “Always,” he said with a kind of playful insincerity which, although it rankled with Woodgrove, the priest pretended not to have seen.
They had by now reached the inn at edge of the common. The name of the place is lost but it was of a very familiar type: a stout old building with leaded windowpanes and an air of cheerful dilapidation. A sign outside hung unmoving in the still, wintry air.
“How about a drink?” Vaughan asked.
Woodgrove reached for his pocket watch. “It’s been a pleasure to see you again, Vaughan, in spite of the circumstances.” (This lie seemed, to the Reverend, to be a white one.) “But I really think I ought to be making my way to the train station. It’s an hour’s walk and I want to get there in good time and before we lose the light.”
“Nonsense,” said Vaughan, speaking with an odd, clubbable sort of heartiness which hardly suited him. “Firstly, I don’t know why on earth you insist on walking when you can surely afford to be driven not just to the station but to your own blessed front door.”
“Vanity, vanity…” murmured Woodgrove.
“Secondly, I am myself being collected from this very common by some associates of mine who will be only too delighted to take you at least as far as you want to go. And thirdly…” His words tailed away and Mr Vaughan seemed suddenly pensive.
“Yes?” Woodgrove felt unaccountably nervous at the pause. “What is the third tranche of your argument?”
Vaughan looked almost blankly at him. “I have the strong sensation that we won’t meet again. Not after today. And so I think it behoves us to mark the occasion with a proper drink.” Without waiting for a response, Vaughan stamped towards the public house and pushed open the door. It jingled and clanked as he did so. Woodgrove, urged onwards not only by ingrained courtesy but by a considerable amount of curiosity, followed.
At the threshold, he hesitated and, on instinct, glanced over his shoulder. Somebody else was on the common: a bulky, heavyset man who was standing quite still. Another mourner? Woodgrove did not recognise him from the church. A villager out for a stroll? He scarcely seemed the type.
Woodgrove peered closer but the man did not move, standing still in the manner of a scarecrow.
“Reverend!” The voice of Mr Vaughan came from within. “What are you drinking today?”
Woodgrove watched the man on the common an instant longer. At last, the fellow walked away but at an idling, halfhearted pace, as if he meant to reverse his course as soon as Woodgrove was out of sight. Telling himself that he was growing old and foolish, jumping at shadows and that his nerves had never been the same since Ratcliffe, the vicar turned his head away and walked into the tavern where the alienist was waiting.
II
“You said that there were rumours…”
Halfway into his pint of porter and with a little of his guard down at last, the Reverend Woodgrove finally nudged Mr Vaughan back onto that conversational line which he had earlier, when still entirely sober, rejected so emphatically.
“Rumours?” Vaughan seemed delighted by the remark, for all that he feigned ignorance. “Concerning what exactly?”
They were seated at a table in a corner of the inn, away from the fire and the small group of locals who sat before it, nursing their drinks and rehearsing old stories. The landlord, a pale, spindly fellow, glared at them from behind the bar as if suspecting that they might at any moment express an opinion with which he fiercely disagreed.
“Rumours about him,” Woodgrove said. “About what had happened to him.”
“Oh, you mean poor Bright, I suppose?”
“Vaughan!”
The alienist smiled. “Yes?”
“You know precisely to whom I am referring. I do not think it necessary to speak his name aloud.”
“Yes.” Vaughan smiled. “I believe I know exactly who you mean. But I mentioned it earlier and you waved the matter away as though it was of no issue at all.”
Woodgrove, who saw no need to apologise for anything whatever, said nothing in reply.
“But perhaps your curiosity has got the better of you now, eh?”
“If you know something, Vaughan, let’s hear it.”
“Nothing more than whispers really… Gossip, I suppose, and a few tall tales.”
It seemed to the Reverend Woodgrove that several of the locals had fallen quiet and were sitting in deliberate silence, waiting to hear what the alienist would say next. “Lower your voice, Vaughan. We’re guests here, after all.”
Mr Vaughan leaned forwards and spoke more softly. “He got clean away, of course. Just as we suspected.”
Woodgrove, who had long ago reached the same conclusion, nodded. “Out of the country?”
“So I hear.”
“Through your… government connection?”
Mr Vaughan tilted his head in such a way that might be interpreted, depending on the agenda of the observer, to mean variously “yes”, “I can’t say” or “what do you think?”
The Reverend Woodgrove decided to take the first of these as true. “Do you have any idea whereabouts exactly?”
“We think… an island… a rather remarkable island… in the South Pacific. Or, at least, somewhere in that general vicinity.”
“And are you… I mean, can I ask, are these high-ranking friends of yours intending to track him down and bring him to justice? By God, Vaughan, a reckoning with that blackguard is long overdue.”
Mr Vaughan looked at the priest as though he were a very simple soul indeed. “Not exactly,” he said, then fell silent as though these two words ought really to be considered the finish of the matter.
“What are you talking about?” Woodgrove asked, his voice filled with real exasperation. “What have you heard? What exactly do you know?”
Vaughan’s face lacked any discernible emotion. “The only thing I know is this. There are people in the British Government who know where that man is and something of what he is doing. It’s their belief that he might still be of some use to us…”
“Use to who? To what? You can’t be serious.”
“Woodgrove, you ought to lower your voice. You’re aware, I think, that we’re attracting attention.”
The priest turned around and saw that the locals were indeed observing the men with unembarrassed curiosity, seemingly relishing the spectacle.
“We should drink up,” said Vaughan. “The coach will be here soon.” He raised his glass to his lips and drank more quickly than was probably wise, for all that he seemed afterwards to be wholly unaffected by the liquor.
Woodgrove, uneasily, did the same, though he left a fair portion of it in the end.
Mr Vaughan stood up, consulted his pocket watch and said: “Well, it’s really been most pleasant to see you again, Woodgrove, but I think it’s probably time we were leaving.”
Woodgrove agreed that this was so and the two men walked, with no small amount of self-consciousness, out of the inn and back into the open air. Dusk awaited them, and something else too: an elegant horse and carriage which seemed quite out of place in this modest rural scene, the kind of vehicle which, while a familiar enough sight in the most well-heeled quarters of London, was rarely seen this far from the metropolis.
“Yours, I presume?” Woodgrove said.
“Good Lord, no,” said Mr Vaughan. “Though it does belong to friends of mine.”
Woodgrove glanced again at the contraption and thought that he saw in the figure of the hooded coachman a familiar outline which he had seen not long before. The man who had observed them from the common? At the growth of this suspicion, the priest felt a great desire to be shot of the whole thing, to get as far away as he could from the little alienist and his mysterious, hinted-at knowledge, away from the memories of the past and the vile, slithering things that had greeted them in Ratcliffe. As had occurred with increasing frequency of late, he felt the siren call of the continent; not for the first time, he considered how his God would judge him, a man who wishes only to wash his hands of it all, a man who is prepared to look the other way in order to ensure a quiet life.
Vaughan was asking him again whether he would like to be taken to the station.
“No, no, thank you, I do believe I’ll walk.” Then, without understanding exactly why, Woodgrove added: “It was you who moved the dog, wasn’t it? That abominable creature.”
Vaughan looked at him thoughtfully. “It was,” he said. “You’re quite right.”
“May I ask why?”
“I didn’t want the kind of officials who I assumed you’d be bringing to that place to see the extent of the doctor’s work.” Vaughan spoke as though this was the simplest, most straightforward of conclusions which any right-thinking fellow might have reached.
“Why ever not?”
“The public isn’t ready for the truth. Not yet and not in so unvarnished a state. It could take years for everything to come out. Long, perhaps, even after we’ve both joined Bufford and Kelman and the rest of the majority.”
Behind him, the coach door opened and a man stepped out. He looked over inquisitively.
“Your friends grow impatient,” Woodgrove said.
“Then I must away,” said Vaughan, though he sounded not in the least anxious or impatient. “It’s been a pleasure seeing you again, Reverend. My warmest best wishes for your retirement.”
“Thank you. And thank you for coming today. In his own way, I fancy that poor Bright would have appreciated it.”
Vaughan nodded, turned away and walked towards the waiting coach. The tall man with the flaxen hair stood back in a deferential gesture as Vaughan approached.
Woodgrove called after him. “Vaughan!”
The alienist stopped but did not turn his head. “Yes?”
“Were you acting for them? For whoever these people are? Even back then?”
Vaughan offered no satisfactory response to this. “Safe journey, Reverend!” he called and then stepped on, into the coach. The other man did the same and closed the door behind him. Immediately the coach rattled away. Woodgrove watched it leave, paused for a moment on the common before, grateful to be rid of the day, he began to walk in the direction of the railway station.
III
Later, on the train home, as the fields of England slipped by and transmuted gradually into the inky sprawl of the city, Woodgrove considered the many oddities of the day.
For some weeks, he had started to sleep a little better at night, and it had been whole months since he had last awoken himself by the sound of his own screams. Somehow he did not believe that he would sleep so heavily or so well tonight.
Yet how was it, he wondered, that it was not the memory of those physical horrors which he had once seen (and which had, he suspected, driven poor Dr Bright to the brink and beyond) but rather the clever, almost playful face of Mr Vaughan which troubled him now more greatly? Why was he fearful tonight not of the past but for what was yet to come? Why, as the journey wound on, even as the welcoming lights of London appeared like rows of lighthouses to welcome home lost mariners, did the Reverend Woodgrove find himself considering the possible limits of Vaughan’s ambition, of his ruthlessness, of what appeared to be his troubling proximity to power? And why, as the train finally drew in to the station at Paddington, was Woodgrove discovered by a bewildered ticket inspector, leaning forwards in his seat with his eyes closed and murmuring, with a zeal which he had not truly felt for many years, a desperate prayer for the future?
19TH SEPTEMBER, 1890
LONDON
I
When one lives and works in a large, austere, almost empty house in Kensington, in an atmosphere of sustained gravity and importance, one will naturally long for escape, for a burst of good humour and a taste of friendly companionship. And when the daily life of the house in question has about it not only that air of high seriousness but also certain undercurrents of something like corruption and decay, the desire (no, the necessity) to get away from its confines grows to an all but intolerable degree.
These, at least, were the truths of the life of Mr Jacob Berry, a tall, saturnine fellow who dressed, quite deliberately, rather like an undertaker, and who was at this time amongst the highest paid valets in London.
It was the money, of course, which kept him in his current, unsettling and sometimes bizarre place of employment. He was of this fact neither especially proud nor particularly ashamed for he still lived by his late father’s dictum: “You play the hand you’re dealt in life, and you keep as many of your winnings as you can.”
Mr Berry’s current employer (Berry had had five before him, all very wealthy, three of them titled) seemed to arrange his own affairs along similar lines. Certainly, he had always been honest with his manservant, sometimes to a discomfiting degree. In their first meeting (it was not quite an interview since it was well known that, at this juncture in his career, Mr Berry might have his pick of gentlemen) his future employer had stressed the oddities which would be daily bread in his household and the concomitant need for absolute discretion.
“You will see and hear many strange things during your time with me,” he had said when they had met, in a private room in Claridge’s, away from the prying eyes of city gossips, “and you may even find yourself routinely intrigued and made curious by them. Yet I would ask you to tell no-one of what you see whilst in my employ and to ask me no questions concerning that which you witness. Do you think, Mr Berry, that you can do these things for me?”
In response, Berry had all but waved the question away as something like an insult to his professional pride. “You need not have asked the question, sir,” he said, colouring his words, quite deliberately, with a shade of reproof.
At this retort, Woodgrove felt an uncharacteristic (though in recent years, far from unprecedented) surge of anger. “Really, Vaughan, I can’t for the life of me see why you came today. Not if you mean only to sneer.”
Vaughan put up both his hands, palms outwards, in a gesture of emollient surrender. “Forgive me,” he said, even sounding for a moment as though he might mean it. “I wanted to provoke no offence. I dare say I’ve grown a little cynical – even a little jaded – since… well, since we saw what we saw.”
Woodgrove nodded, that quick flush of anger receding as swiftly as it had arrived. “I dare say we all have.”
“As for the reason for my presence here today, I only wanted to pay my respects in person. I can’t say that Dr Bright and I were ever close friends but I like to think that there was a certain kinship between us all the same. I like to think that he’d have wanted me to attend.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course. That’s quite right.”
“Come along,” Vaughan said, his tone still one of mild contrition. “Shall we walk? It’s a pleasant day for it and we’ve at least an hour before your train to London.”
“A fine suggestion,” said Woodgrove and the two men rose as one.
They strolled first around the churchyard (careful to go clockwise about the structure and not, though Woodgrove would once have scoffed at such skittish superstition, to walk about it widdershins) and then into the village beyond. It was a calm, picturesque settlement, its houses and solitary inn clustered around a large area of common ground, a pond and a well at the heart of it. They passed no other mourners but only the occasional local who nodded as they went with gruff hospitality. As they walked it seemed to Woodgrove to grow colder. Their breath billowed from their mouths.
“Distinct nip in the air, isn’t there?” said Vaughan.
Woodgrove agreed that this was so.
“Brandy?” In some deft magician’s movement, Vaughan had produced a silver hip flask which he was holding out now to the Reverend Woodgrove.
“Obliged,” the vicar said, taking the proffered vessel and taking two swift swigs, medicinal and welcome. Mr Vaughan did the same and the flask disappeared again.
“You’re keeping well, I hope,” said the alienist. “Your parish in the city… your responsibilities…?” He spoke as though he had but the vaguest idea of what these might be and Woodgrove reflected that Vaughan had most likely already forgotten such details had he ever known them. He was, after all, the kind of fellow who retained only information that was of direct personal use. Everything else would be jettisoned in order to ensure the maximisation of clarity and efficiency.
“Quite well, thank you,” was all that Woodgrove said in response.
“I hear you’re thinking of going abroad when you retire. To the Continent?”
“However did you hear of that?”
Vaughan shrugged. “One hears things… mutual friends…”
Woodgrove could not think of a single friend whom he had in common with Mr Vaughan (none, at least, who was still living) but he did not say as much. His time with the alienist was coming to an end and, once they had parted, he told himself that he would go to some considerable trouble to avoid encountering him again. This, he knew, was certainly an unchristian sentiment but there was something about the man which was profoundly unsettling, almost reptilian. He supposed that he had always thought this to a degree, even if, on early acquaintance, he had done his utmost to give the man the most generous benefit of the doubt.
“As it happens,” the vicar said, rather stiffly, “I do intend to move. Somewhere quite different. Away from London. Somewhere with fresher, cleaner air. Somewhere I can serve my Creator in a different way.”
“I wish you joy of it,” Vaughan said. “If anyone has earned a peaceful retirement it’s surely you.”
Woodgrove murmured his thanks. “And you?” he asked. “You’re keeping as busy as ever. Your practice goes from strength to strength?”
“Most certainly,” said Vaughan, with no false modesty. “But I find that I have other interests now.”
“Oh yes? What kind?”
“I’ve begun to do a little work for our government. As a kind of consultant. More than that I’m really not supposed to say.”
“Indeed? Well, you always were ambitious,” said Woodgrove, before adding hastily: “and that’s no bad thing, not at least so long as one remembers in whose service it is that you labour.”
Vaughan pointed puckishly upwards. “Always,” he said with a kind of playful insincerity which, although it rankled with Woodgrove, the priest pretended not to have seen.
They had by now reached the inn at edge of the common. The name of the place is lost but it was of a very familiar type: a stout old building with leaded windowpanes and an air of cheerful dilapidation. A sign outside hung unmoving in the still, wintry air.
“How about a drink?” Vaughan asked.
Woodgrove reached for his pocket watch. “It’s been a pleasure to see you again, Vaughan, in spite of the circumstances.” (This lie seemed, to the Reverend, to be a white one.) “But I really think I ought to be making my way to the train station. It’s an hour’s walk and I want to get there in good time and before we lose the light.”
“Nonsense,” said Vaughan, speaking with an odd, clubbable sort of heartiness which hardly suited him. “Firstly, I don’t know why on earth you insist on walking when you can surely afford to be driven not just to the station but to your own blessed front door.”
“Vanity, vanity…” murmured Woodgrove.
“Secondly, I am myself being collected from this very common by some associates of mine who will be only too delighted to take you at least as far as you want to go. And thirdly…” His words tailed away and Mr Vaughan seemed suddenly pensive.
“Yes?” Woodgrove felt unaccountably nervous at the pause. “What is the third tranche of your argument?”
Vaughan looked almost blankly at him. “I have the strong sensation that we won’t meet again. Not after today. And so I think it behoves us to mark the occasion with a proper drink.” Without waiting for a response, Vaughan stamped towards the public house and pushed open the door. It jingled and clanked as he did so. Woodgrove, urged onwards not only by ingrained courtesy but by a considerable amount of curiosity, followed.
At the threshold, he hesitated and, on instinct, glanced over his shoulder. Somebody else was on the common: a bulky, heavyset man who was standing quite still. Another mourner? Woodgrove did not recognise him from the church. A villager out for a stroll? He scarcely seemed the type.
Woodgrove peered closer but the man did not move, standing still in the manner of a scarecrow.
“Reverend!” The voice of Mr Vaughan came from within. “What are you drinking today?”
Woodgrove watched the man on the common an instant longer. At last, the fellow walked away but at an idling, halfhearted pace, as if he meant to reverse his course as soon as Woodgrove was out of sight. Telling himself that he was growing old and foolish, jumping at shadows and that his nerves had never been the same since Ratcliffe, the vicar turned his head away and walked into the tavern where the alienist was waiting.
II
“You said that there were rumours…”
Halfway into his pint of porter and with a little of his guard down at last, the Reverend Woodgrove finally nudged Mr Vaughan back onto that conversational line which he had earlier, when still entirely sober, rejected so emphatically.
“Rumours?” Vaughan seemed delighted by the remark, for all that he feigned ignorance. “Concerning what exactly?”
They were seated at a table in a corner of the inn, away from the fire and the small group of locals who sat before it, nursing their drinks and rehearsing old stories. The landlord, a pale, spindly fellow, glared at them from behind the bar as if suspecting that they might at any moment express an opinion with which he fiercely disagreed.
“Rumours about him,” Woodgrove said. “About what had happened to him.”
“Oh, you mean poor Bright, I suppose?”
“Vaughan!”
The alienist smiled. “Yes?”
“You know precisely to whom I am referring. I do not think it necessary to speak his name aloud.”
“Yes.” Vaughan smiled. “I believe I know exactly who you mean. But I mentioned it earlier and you waved the matter away as though it was of no issue at all.”
Woodgrove, who saw no need to apologise for anything whatever, said nothing in reply.
“But perhaps your curiosity has got the better of you now, eh?”
“If you know something, Vaughan, let’s hear it.”
“Nothing more than whispers really… Gossip, I suppose, and a few tall tales.”
It seemed to the Reverend Woodgrove that several of the locals had fallen quiet and were sitting in deliberate silence, waiting to hear what the alienist would say next. “Lower your voice, Vaughan. We’re guests here, after all.”
Mr Vaughan leaned forwards and spoke more softly. “He got clean away, of course. Just as we suspected.”
Woodgrove, who had long ago reached the same conclusion, nodded. “Out of the country?”
“So I hear.”
“Through your… government connection?”
Mr Vaughan tilted his head in such a way that might be interpreted, depending on the agenda of the observer, to mean variously “yes”, “I can’t say” or “what do you think?”
The Reverend Woodgrove decided to take the first of these as true. “Do you have any idea whereabouts exactly?”
“We think… an island… a rather remarkable island… in the South Pacific. Or, at least, somewhere in that general vicinity.”
“And are you… I mean, can I ask, are these high-ranking friends of yours intending to track him down and bring him to justice? By God, Vaughan, a reckoning with that blackguard is long overdue.”
Mr Vaughan looked at the priest as though he were a very simple soul indeed. “Not exactly,” he said, then fell silent as though these two words ought really to be considered the finish of the matter.
“What are you talking about?” Woodgrove asked, his voice filled with real exasperation. “What have you heard? What exactly do you know?”
Vaughan’s face lacked any discernible emotion. “The only thing I know is this. There are people in the British Government who know where that man is and something of what he is doing. It’s their belief that he might still be of some use to us…”
“Use to who? To what? You can’t be serious.”
“Woodgrove, you ought to lower your voice. You’re aware, I think, that we’re attracting attention.”
The priest turned around and saw that the locals were indeed observing the men with unembarrassed curiosity, seemingly relishing the spectacle.
“We should drink up,” said Vaughan. “The coach will be here soon.” He raised his glass to his lips and drank more quickly than was probably wise, for all that he seemed afterwards to be wholly unaffected by the liquor.
Woodgrove, uneasily, did the same, though he left a fair portion of it in the end.
Mr Vaughan stood up, consulted his pocket watch and said: “Well, it’s really been most pleasant to see you again, Woodgrove, but I think it’s probably time we were leaving.”
Woodgrove agreed that this was so and the two men walked, with no small amount of self-consciousness, out of the inn and back into the open air. Dusk awaited them, and something else too: an elegant horse and carriage which seemed quite out of place in this modest rural scene, the kind of vehicle which, while a familiar enough sight in the most well-heeled quarters of London, was rarely seen this far from the metropolis.
“Yours, I presume?” Woodgrove said.
“Good Lord, no,” said Mr Vaughan. “Though it does belong to friends of mine.”
Woodgrove glanced again at the contraption and thought that he saw in the figure of the hooded coachman a familiar outline which he had seen not long before. The man who had observed them from the common? At the growth of this suspicion, the priest felt a great desire to be shot of the whole thing, to get as far away as he could from the little alienist and his mysterious, hinted-at knowledge, away from the memories of the past and the vile, slithering things that had greeted them in Ratcliffe. As had occurred with increasing frequency of late, he felt the siren call of the continent; not for the first time, he considered how his God would judge him, a man who wishes only to wash his hands of it all, a man who is prepared to look the other way in order to ensure a quiet life.
Vaughan was asking him again whether he would like to be taken to the station.
“No, no, thank you, I do believe I’ll walk.” Then, without understanding exactly why, Woodgrove added: “It was you who moved the dog, wasn’t it? That abominable creature.”
Vaughan looked at him thoughtfully. “It was,” he said. “You’re quite right.”
“May I ask why?”
“I didn’t want the kind of officials who I assumed you’d be bringing to that place to see the extent of the doctor’s work.” Vaughan spoke as though this was the simplest, most straightforward of conclusions which any right-thinking fellow might have reached.
“Why ever not?”
“The public isn’t ready for the truth. Not yet and not in so unvarnished a state. It could take years for everything to come out. Long, perhaps, even after we’ve both joined Bufford and Kelman and the rest of the majority.”
Behind him, the coach door opened and a man stepped out. He looked over inquisitively.
“Your friends grow impatient,” Woodgrove said.
“Then I must away,” said Vaughan, though he sounded not in the least anxious or impatient. “It’s been a pleasure seeing you again, Reverend. My warmest best wishes for your retirement.”
“Thank you. And thank you for coming today. In his own way, I fancy that poor Bright would have appreciated it.”
Vaughan nodded, turned away and walked towards the waiting coach. The tall man with the flaxen hair stood back in a deferential gesture as Vaughan approached.
Woodgrove called after him. “Vaughan!”
The alienist stopped but did not turn his head. “Yes?”
“Were you acting for them? For whoever these people are? Even back then?”
Vaughan offered no satisfactory response to this. “Safe journey, Reverend!” he called and then stepped on, into the coach. The other man did the same and closed the door behind him. Immediately the coach rattled away. Woodgrove watched it leave, paused for a moment on the common before, grateful to be rid of the day, he began to walk in the direction of the railway station.
III
Later, on the train home, as the fields of England slipped by and transmuted gradually into the inky sprawl of the city, Woodgrove considered the many oddities of the day.
For some weeks, he had started to sleep a little better at night, and it had been whole months since he had last awoken himself by the sound of his own screams. Somehow he did not believe that he would sleep so heavily or so well tonight.
Yet how was it, he wondered, that it was not the memory of those physical horrors which he had once seen (and which had, he suspected, driven poor Dr Bright to the brink and beyond) but rather the clever, almost playful face of Mr Vaughan which troubled him now more greatly? Why was he fearful tonight not of the past but for what was yet to come? Why, as the journey wound on, even as the welcoming lights of London appeared like rows of lighthouses to welcome home lost mariners, did the Reverend Woodgrove find himself considering the possible limits of Vaughan’s ambition, of his ruthlessness, of what appeared to be his troubling proximity to power? And why, as the train finally drew in to the station at Paddington, was Woodgrove discovered by a bewildered ticket inspector, leaning forwards in his seat with his eyes closed and murmuring, with a zeal which he had not truly felt for many years, a desperate prayer for the future?
19TH SEPTEMBER, 1890
LONDON
I
When one lives and works in a large, austere, almost empty house in Kensington, in an atmosphere of sustained gravity and importance, one will naturally long for escape, for a burst of good humour and a taste of friendly companionship. And when the daily life of the house in question has about it not only that air of high seriousness but also certain undercurrents of something like corruption and decay, the desire (no, the necessity) to get away from its confines grows to an all but intolerable degree.
These, at least, were the truths of the life of Mr Jacob Berry, a tall, saturnine fellow who dressed, quite deliberately, rather like an undertaker, and who was at this time amongst the highest paid valets in London.
It was the money, of course, which kept him in his current, unsettling and sometimes bizarre place of employment. He was of this fact neither especially proud nor particularly ashamed for he still lived by his late father’s dictum: “You play the hand you’re dealt in life, and you keep as many of your winnings as you can.”
Mr Berry’s current employer (Berry had had five before him, all very wealthy, three of them titled) seemed to arrange his own affairs along similar lines. Certainly, he had always been honest with his manservant, sometimes to a discomfiting degree. In their first meeting (it was not quite an interview since it was well known that, at this juncture in his career, Mr Berry might have his pick of gentlemen) his future employer had stressed the oddities which would be daily bread in his household and the concomitant need for absolute discretion.
“You will see and hear many strange things during your time with me,” he had said when they had met, in a private room in Claridge’s, away from the prying eyes of city gossips, “and you may even find yourself routinely intrigued and made curious by them. Yet I would ask you to tell no-one of what you see whilst in my employ and to ask me no questions concerning that which you witness. Do you think, Mr Berry, that you can do these things for me?”
In response, Berry had all but waved the question away as something like an insult to his professional pride. “You need not have asked the question, sir,” he said, colouring his words, quite deliberately, with a shade of reproof.
