End of the Century (43 page)

“The city's become dreadfully crowded, wouldn't you say, Blank? All of these well-meaning well-wishers underfoot. I don't know about you, but I think I could fancy a little excursion. Say, to Somerset?”

Blank cocked an eyebrow.

In response, Miss Bonaventure turned around the section of paper she'd been reading and indicated a small article with an outstretched finger.

Blank nodded, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth.

“You know, Miss Bonaventure, they say Taunton is lovely this time of year.”

The brief article, dated the first of May, concerned a murder that had taken place in Taunton, in Somerset. A body had been discovered in Taunton Castle, the home of the Somerset Archeological and Natural History Society. Otherwise unremarkable, the report made mention of the fact that the victim's left hand, and right arm below the elbow, had been completely severed, the bones and flesh cleanly sheared away. The severed appendages had been found nearby the body the following morning, and the county coroner had been unable to account for how they had been removed, concluding that some inordinately sharp blade much have been utilized with considerable force.

The fact that the incident predated the earliest reported murders of the Jubilee Killer by some weeks, and had taken place hundreds of miles to the west, suggested to Blank and Miss Bonaventure that they might have been looking in the wrong place for clues, all along.

The trains and stations were congested with travelers returning home from coming to the city to see the Jubilee Procession, and so it was later that week before Blank and Miss Bonaventure were able to book passage on the Great
Western Railway. The journey from London to Taunton was scheduled to take a little under four hours, barring mishap, and so along with their overnight bags the pair brought along novels they'd purchased at a bookstall in the station to keep themselves entertained en route.

Miss Bonaventure had purchased a recent edition of
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
, by the Sieur Louis de Conte, published the previous year by Chatto & Windus of Piccadilly. Mark Twain was credited as “editor,” but it was apparent that de Conte was himself a fiction, as likely was the Jean Francois Allen who was credited with translating the work from the original French. Blank remembered what Michel had told him about Joan, years before, and on seeing the image of the young girl embossed on the cover, a sword in her hand and a halo round her head, he could not help feeling sorry for the poor thing. It must have been a terrible thing to have been plagued for so long by voices one could never understand.

For his part, Blank had selected a copy of Bram Stoker's
Dracula
, published only the month before. From the character's physical description and mannerisms, it seemed apparent that the author had based his count upon the thespian Henry Irving, who so often trod the boards at Stoker's Lyceum. Less apparent, though clearly evident on further reading, was the fact that the author seemed to have been inspired, at least in part, by the real-life events of the Torso Killings of the previous decade. When he reached this unsettling conclusion, Blank found his taste for the fiction altogether lost, seeing too easily the skeleton of fact beneath the skin, and so closed the book with an expression of distaste. He remembered the events of those days too well to need reminding of them.

Miss Bonaventure saw him set the book aside and closed her own book on her finger. “Not Stoker's best, I take it?” she asked, knowingly.

Blank recovered himself and shook his head. “No, it's not that. Not to my personal tastes, perhaps, but for a reading public that hungrily devours the exploits of Varney and Sweeney Todd, I'm sure it will be quite appetizing. But I'm afraid that I find myself longing for the more dulcet arabasques of his earlier work. Did you ever read ‘The Crystal Cup'?”

Miss Bonaventure shook her head.

“Published in pamphlet form by the London society some years ago. A
charming little dream fantasy, though, as Oscar later observed, it could have used quite a bit more fantasy and a touch less dream.”

Miss Bonaventure raised her eyebrow, and Blank realized that he'd said more than he intended.

“Wilde, do you mean?” she asked. “Oh, yes, he and Stoker were both betrothed to the same woman, weren't they? At different times, of course.”

Blank nodded. “And she's married to Stoker still, as I understand it.”

“Hmm.” Miss Bonaventure mused. “You know, I've always wondered something and never thought to ask. I know that you've served as inspiration for fiction a time or two, with bowdlerized versions of your exploits finding their way into the work of Conan Doyle and Hal Meredith, but it's always seemed to me that there was a little something of you in Wilde's Dorian Gray.”

Blank stiffened, almost imperceptibly, but managed to keep his expression neutral, only pursing his lips thoughtfully. “Really?”

“Well, there's his surname, which is certain suggestive of your habitual shade.” She indicated his suit coat, vest, trousers, and hat, all of a uniform gray. “And the description of Gray's rooms is certainly reminiscent of your own in York Place. Come to think of it, you've both got locked rooms in your upper floors which you refuse to allow anyone to see.” She grinned. “Admit it, Blank. Do you have a portrait secreted away up there, which makes plain all the sins your smooth features conceal?”

Blank knew she was only joking, but he couldn't help shifting uncomfortably on his seat. “My dear, I'm sure any portrait of me would be perfectly hideous in any event, without the addition of the marks of sin.”

She playfully swatted his knee with her closed book. “There's a little too much of the dandy in your character for you to wear modesty easily, I'm afraid. But joking aside, you mention Wilde by his Christian name. Were you acquainted?”

Blank's gaze slid to the corners of their compartment and found something of interest in the countryside streaming past their window. “We knew each other,” he said at length. “Distantly. For a time.”

Miss Bonaventure took him at his word. With a shrug, she returned to her book, reading about the little girl who heard voices that drove her to do great things. Blank leaned his head against the cool glass of the window and closed his eyes, trying to forget that any such voices had ever existed.

It was early afternoon when they arrived in Taunton, and after depositing their overnight bags at the inn where they'd secured rooms for the night, Blank and Miss Bonaventure made their way to Taunton Castle.

On this site in the eighth century, or so the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers recorded, the Queen Etherlburge overthrew Taunton, which Ina had built. Later, in the twelfth century, Henry de Blois, the Bishop of Winchester and warlike brother of King Stephen, had constructed a mighty Norman fortress. The gatehouse with its drum towers was built at the close of the thirteenth under Edward I but restored with additions two centuries later in the days of James IV. In the civil war, it had been a stronghold of forces loyal to the Parliament, and in the aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion of the late seventeenth, it had been the scene of many of the trials of the Bloody Assizes, when hundreds were sent to their deaths by Judge Jeffreys. There was some irony in the fact that, having been the site of so much history, it was only saved from destruction by the intervention of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, who purchased it for use as their headquarters and to house the society's museum and library.

Ivy had begun to creep up the castellated walls and turrets and left unchecked would cover the structure entirely.

“After you, my dear,” Blank said, bowing and holding open the immense castle door. Miss Bonaventure gave him an abbreviated curtsey and stepped inside.

It was cool within the walls of the great, tumbledown castle, and dark. That the society had been able to effect some repairs was evident, as was the fact that they had a great deal of work left to do. The most recent efforts seemed to have concentrated on the newly christened Somerset Room, formerly the great chamber of the castle, which was now crowded with display cases that lined the walls and dominated the floor, and hung with various and sundry antique battle flags. It was here that they found Arthur Bulleid in close conversation with Harold St. George Gray, who was introduced to them as the assistant to the notable Augustus Pitt Rivers, Britain's first Inspector of Ancient Monuments.

The two men, Bulleid and Gray, both members of the society, were evidently planning a forthcoming archeological expedition to the nearby Somerset Levels which, while they were lowlands of moor and marsh in the modern day, in ancient times appeared to have been completely submerged for long periods of time. To the ancients, the hills and prominences of Somerset—Athelney, Brent Knoll, Glastonbury Tor—would have appeared to be islands, surrounded by waters that stretched all the way to the coast. It might have been possible, in fact, in a boat with a sufficiently shallow draw, to sail all the way from the open waters of the Atlantic to the middle of Somerset County.

All of which was fascinating, Blank assured them, but unfortunately he and his associate Miss Bonaventure were somewhat pressed for time, and presently more concerned with those more recently deceased, rather than those who passed away millennia before.

Gray and Bulleid were somewhat humbled, especially considering that the dead man had been their acquaintance, if not perhaps a close friend. The victim in question had been a man named Wilford McCall, who had been employed as a custodian of Taunton Castle by the society. To all appearances, McCall had interrupted the killer in the act of robbing the castle, though when the premises were searched the following morning it appeared that nothing had been stolen but a report concerning a recent archeological dig on Glastonbury Tor.

Blank raised an eyebrow. “But you say that the body wasn't found until morning?”

The two men nodded.

“What were McCall's normal hours of employment?” he asked.

Gray replied that McCall's schedule was somewhat flexible, but that he was never known to miss a last jar at the Tudor Tavern public house over on Fore Street. Never before that night, of course.

“So if McCall came upon the killer in the course of his usual rounds, it would have been sometime in the evening, at the latest? In which case the murder would have occurred well before midnight, and the killer would have had the free run of the castle until the morning.”

The two men allowed that Blank's assessment seemed reasonable.

Blank looked around the Somerset Room. The antiquities on display, while none of them priceless, included bits of gold and silver, diamond and
emerald, any one of which would have been worth any thief's time to pick up and pocket. And yet they all had been left unmolested.

“Gentlemen,” Blank said with a smile, “I wonder if you couldn't tell me everything, absolutely everything, that you know about this archeological dig on Glastonbury Tor.”