Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02

 
          
 
Murder in the Seven Dials

 
          
 
RAIN HAD BEEN falling for hours, and the
North Road
was a muddy ribbon in the darkness. The
coach slewed from side to side, bouncing and rocking, and yet Langdon St. Ives
was
loathe
to slow the pace. He held the reins
tightly, looking out from under the brim of his hat, which dripped rainwater in
a steady stream. They were two miles outside Crick, where they could fmd fresh
horses—if by then it was fresh horses that they needed.

 
          
 
Clouds hid the moon, and the night was
fearfully dark. St. Ives strained to see through the darkness, watching for a
coach driving along the road ahead. There was the chance that they would
overtake it before they got into Crick, and if they did, then fresh horses
wouldn't matter; a coffm for a dead man would suffice.

 
          
 
His mind wandered, and he knew he was tired
and was fueled now by hatred and fear. He forced himself to concentrate on the
road ahead. Taking both the reins in his left hand, he wiped rainwater out of
his face and shook his head, trying to clear it. He was foggy, though. He felt
drugged. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head again, nearly tumbling
off the seat when a wave of dizziness hit him. What was this? Was he sick?
Briefly, he considered reining up and letting Hasbro, his gentleman's
gentleman, drive the coach. Maybe he ought to give it up for the rest of the
night, get inside and try to sleep.

 
          
 
His hands suddenly were without strength. The
reins seemed to slip straight through them, tumbling down across his knees, and
the horses, given their head, galloped along, jerking the coach behind them as
it rocked on its springs. Something was terribly wrong with him—more than mere
sickness—and he tried to shout to his friends, but as if in a dream his voice
was airy and weak. He tried to pluck one of the reins up, but it was no use. He
was made of rubber, of mist . . .

 
          
 
Someone—a man in a hat—loomed up ahead of the
coach, running out of an open field, up the bank toward the road. The man was
waving his hands, shouting something into the night. He might as well have been
talking to the wind. Hazily, it occurred to St. Ives that the man might be
trouble. What if
this were
some sort of ambush? He
flopped helplessly on the seat, trying to hold on, his muscles gone to pudding.
If that's what it was, then it was too damned bad, because there was nothing on
earth that St. Ives could do to save them.

 
          
 
The coach drove straight down at the man, who
held up a scrap of paper—a note, perhaps. Rainwater whipped into St. Ives's
face as he slumped sideways, rallying his last few remnants of strength,
shoving out his hand to pluck up the note. And in that moment, just before all
consciousness left him, he looked straight into the stranger's face and saw
that it wasn't a stranger at all. It was himself who stood at the roadside, clutching
the note. And with the image of his own frightened face in his mind, St. Ives
fell away into darkness and knew no more.

 
          
 
THEY HAD TRAVELED cilmost sixtecn milcs since
four that afternoon, but now it was beginning to seem that continuing would be
futile. The black night was cold, and the rain still beat down, thumping onto
the top of the coach and flooding the street six inches deep in a river that
flowed down High Holborn into the Seven Dials. The pair of horses stood with 4
LORD Kelvin's machine their heads bowed, streaming rainwater and standing
nearly to their fetlocks in the flood. The streets and storefronts were empty
and dark, and as Langdon St. Ives let the drumming of raindrops fill his head
with noise, he dreamed that he was a tiny man helplessly buried in a coal
scuttle and that a fresh load of coal was tumbling pell-mell down the chute ...

 
          
 
He jerked awake. It was two in the morning,
and his clothes were muddy and cold. On his lap lay a loaded revolver, which he
meant to use before the night was through. The coach overturning outside Crick
had cost them precious hours. What that had meant—seeing the ghost of
himself
on the road—St. Ives couldn't say. Most likely it
meant that he was falling apart. Desperation took a heavy toll. He might have
been sick, of course, or tired to the point of hallucination, except that the
fit had come over him so quickly, and then passed away entirely, and he had
awakened to find himself lying in the mud of a ditch along the roadway,
wondering how on earth he had gotten there. It was curious, but even more than
curious, it was unsettling.

 
          
 
Long hours had gone by since, and during those
hours Ignacio Narbondo might easily have spirited
Alice
away. He might have . . . He stared out
into the darkness, shutting the thought out of his mind. The chase had led them
to the Seven Dials, and now the faithful Bill Kraken, whose arm had been broken
when the carriage overturned, was searching through a lodging house. Narbondo
would be there, and
Alice
with him. St. Ives told himself that, and heedlessly rubbed the cold
metal of the pistol, his mind filled with thoughts even darker than the night
outside.

 
          
 
Generally, he was the last man on earth to be
thinking about "meting out justice," but there in the rainy Seven
Dials street he felt very much like that proverbial last man, even though
Hasbro, his gentleman's gentleman, sat opposite him on the seat, sleeping
heavily, wrapped in a greatcoat and carrying a revolver of his own.

 
          
 
And it wasn't so much a desire for justice that
St. Ives felt; it was cold, dark murder. He hadn't spoken in three hours.

           
 
There was nothing left to say, and it was too
late at night, and St. Ives was too full of his black thoughts to make
conversation; he was empty by now of anything save the contradictory thoughts
of murder and of
Alice
, and he could find words for neither of those. If only they knew for
certain where she was, where he had taken her . . . The Seven Dials was a
mystery to him, though—such a tangle of streets and alleys and cramped houses
that there was no sorting it out even in daylight, let alone on a night like
this. They were close to him, though. Kraken would root him out. St. Ives
fancied that he could feel Narbondo's presence in the darkness around him.

 
          
 
He watched the street past the wet curtain.
Behind them a mist-shrouded lamp shone in a second-story window. There would be
more lamps lit as the night drew on into morning, and for the first time the
thought sprang into St. Ives's head that he had no desire to see that morning.
Morning was insupportable without
Alice
.
To hell with Narbondo's
death.
The gun on St. Ives's lap was a pitiful thing. Killing Narbondo
would yield the satisfaction of killing an insect—almost none at all. It was
life that mattered,
Alice
's life. The life of the
London
streets on an April morning was a phantasm.
Her life alone had color and substance.

 
          
 
He wondered if he was bound, ultimately, for a
madhouse, following in the sad footsteps of his father.
Alice
was his sanity. He knew that now. A year ago
such a thought would have puzzled him. Life had largely been a thing of beakers
and calipers and numbers. Things change, though, and one became resigned to
that.

 
          
 
There was a whistle. St. Ives sat up, closed
his fingers over the revolver handle, and listened through the rain. He shoved
half out through the door, the coach rocking gently on its springs and the
sodden horses shaking themselves in anticipation, as if finally they would be
moving—somewhere, anywhere, out of the flood. A sudden shout rang out from
ahead, followed by the sound of running footsteps. Another shout, and Bill
Kraken, looking nearly
drowned,
materialized through
the curtain of water, running hard and pointing wildly back over 6 LORD
Kelvin's machine his shoulder.

 
          
 
"There!" he shouted. ''There! It's
him!"

 
          
 
St. Ives leaped into the street and slogged
after Kraken, running heavily, the rain nearly blinding him.