Fatal Enquiry (24 page)

“You’ve taken a serious beating,” he said. “Who did this to you?”

“I did it to myself,” I told him, which, as far as I was concerned, was accurate under the circumstances. Delivering myself to Nightwine’s gang had been entirely my own fault.

“Oh, I can see we’ll have some fun with you. I may have to deputize this young woman to keep you in line.” He turned to look at her. “Keep his spirits up, if you can, but don’t coddle him. Patients grow insufferable if you coddle them.”

“He’s insufferable now.”

He moved to the door and then turned back again. “He’ll live,” he pronounced, and departed.

“You do insist on getting yourself in trouble, don’t you?” asked Sofia. “You didn’t have to march into my father’s garden like that, you know.”

“I was hunting for the Elephant and Castle gang.”

“Well, you certainly found them. I almost feel responsible for what happened to you. He’s my father, after all.”

“How did you find me?” I asked, wishing I could remove the bandages that constricted the movement of my face. My hands, however, weren’t quite up to doing anything useful yet.

“One of the Elephant Girls saw you being put into a priory vehicle at Charing Cross Hospital.”

We sat quietly for a minute or two. I was having trouble concentrating. As I lay there, her face swam in and out before me.

“I’m tiring you. I shall give you your medicine and leave you to rest. Open your mouth like a good boy.”

I obeyed. She inserted a spoon of laudanum and I swallowed, grimacing at the taste.

Then she stood and collected her reticule. “I shall be back in the morning.”

She leaned over and kissed the top of my head. After she was gone, I could still feel the moist print of her lips.

“Quite a nice young lady,” the doctor remarked, coming back into the room. “Ah, and reliable, as well. She got you to take your medicine.”

My memories of that afternoon are disjointed. I recall a monk with a long beard and spectacles coming in to change my bandages. The gauze he took away was bloody and stained with discharge. It turned out I was something of a mess. He told me I had three broken ribs, a broken nose, the muscles and ligaments in my jaw were torn, my lip was split, two cut and rope-burned wrists, and most of my face and chest deeply bruised. I blamed it on the spectacles I gave to Soho Vic. If I hadn’t been so proud of myself over them, I would not have been foolhardy enough to think I could investigate on my own. Perhaps I had underestimated Sebastian Nightwine. His hatred of my employer was greater than I realized. There was no possibility of my being any use to Cyrus Barker at all in my current condition.

“How did I get here?” I asked the monk through clenched teeth.

“You were brought here from Charing Cross Hospital.”

“Why?” I asked. “Who sent for me?”

“That’s priory business, I’m afraid. You’d have to ask the Order of St. John.”

As I lay in bed and the laudanum wore off, I began to think. If my grasp of history was correct, the Order of St. John was also known as the Knights Hospitaller. They had been formed during the Crusades to recapture the Holy Land. It was beginning to come back to me. The Crusades themselves had been planned in this very building. The Knights Hospitaller were a brother order of the Knights Templar, but later the pope ordered the Templars destroyed because they had grown too powerful and rich. In spite of it, the remnant of the Templars had fused with the Hospitallers later to form one single order. The Masonic order. I had worked it out. It was Pollock Forbes. He was the one who had seen that I was brought here.

I passed a long and fitful night, alternately staring at the ceiling and having strange dreams. Normally, one’s day is broken down into minutes and quarter hours, but in hospital, time has no relevance. There were sounds that night that I couldn’t identify, probably not unusual for a building as old as this one. A draft came in from the corridor every time someone opened the door. Through the darkness, I could see nothing clearly. Someone seemed to look in now and again, but did not approach the bed so as not to disturb. I slept again, having no idea how much time had passed until I woke. One minute, I was alone, and the next Sofia was there again.

“Good morning,” she said quietly.

“What o’clock is it?”

“A little after ten,” she responded, resting her elbow on the bed close to my face in an intimate gesture. She wore a three-quarter-sleeve dress and I saw my breath move the short white hairs on her forearm.

“You came again.”

“I have. Here, take your medicine.”

After I swallowed the bitter dose, she dared lift the bandage on one eye to inspect my face, which had been painted in iodine.

“To tell the truth, I think you are in more danger here than you were in my father’s basement. I’m afraid they’ll neglect you dreadfully when I’m not here.”

“I don’t care for hospitals,” I admitted. My head still felt fuzzy, but I liked the sound of her voice. I could have listened to it all day.

“Talk to me. Say anything,” I asked her.

“What shall I talk about?”

“Tibet. Tell me about Tibet.”

“Every couple of years, my father goes to Simla, and then up into the Himalayas with bearers and a Sherpa guide. He took me there last year. There is a village along the Tibet-Nepalese border called Karnali, where my father has marshaled a group of men to form an army. He is treated there almost like a king. He has trained them using all the skills he’s acquired as an officer. It is a beautiful place, Thomas. The mountains must be seen to be believed. I should like to take you there someday. Far away from civilization and its artificial laws—”

Gradually, the opium took effect and I began to fall asleep, carried by her quicksilver voice. I dreamed I was in a monastery on the side of a hill. There were dozens of open rooms there and bridges spanning impossible chasms. Was this Shambhala? There were rows of bald monks in saffron-colored robes chanting in meditation, and a tall screen made of gold, studded with jewels as big as a man’s fist. I wandered into a library filled to the ceiling with books and scrolls. The architecture seemed ancient and yet more advanced than our own, supporting platforms and structures that appeared insupportable.

And all about us were snowcapped mountains that were purple in the distance. The books on the shelves in front of me were classics which had long been lost to time. There was Shakespeare’s
Love’s Labour’s Won,
the collected works of Pythagorus, the lost manuscripts of the Incan empire. A monk murmured in my ear that Sofia was waiting for me and that I should follow him. She stood in a long robe of white silk that pooled at her feet, at the edge of a precipice. As I reached her side, she pulled her gaze away from the scene before her and regarded me with cool golden eyes and impossibly black lashes.

“Thomas, wake up. Can you hear me?”

I tried to open my eyes, but it was no use. I had no defense against the effects of either laudanum or the tantalizing vision of Shambhala.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I awoke sometime later to find myself in a strange bed. I was no longer at the St. John’s Priory, and by the look of the ornate but impersonal furniture in the room, it appeared that I was in a hotel room. Mystified, I looked about, trying to place where I was and to figure out how I had been transported there. Had someone told me I was being moved and I’d simply forgotten it in my haze?

“Hello?” I called out weakly, hoping to rouse someone.

Sofia came in then, wearing an elegant white day dress with an apron tied about her waist and holding a large bowl containing a clear, gelatinous substance.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“You’re at the Albemarle Hotel. I was concerned that they were not taking proper care of you, so I had you moved to a residential hotel. I told them I was your sister.”

“You’re holding me hostage.”

“Don’t be like that. I’m trying to help you.”

“I need a doctor,” I protested.

“I’m well trained in tending wounds,” she said, trying to assure me. “Far better than the priory with its iodine washes. I would not have moved you unless I was sure I could restore you to health.”

She began painting my face with the pungent concoction.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m using a mixture I’ve made up. Your bandages are off so the wounds can air for a couple of days. I know what I am about. I’ve used this before several times. It will minimize the scarring considerably. Your face won’t be the worse for my father beating on it, I promise you.”

I suppose I am a very private person. Before being ushered in front of someone the caliber of Miss Ilyanova, at least in regard to her beauty, I like to be freshly shaven, my hair trimmed, and wearing one of my better suits. Instead, I lay in a strange bed, my face about to be coated in something that resembled aspic, while a woman I barely knew tended to my wounds.

“I should let someone know where I am.”

“Later,” she said, raising a glass to my lips. Unfortunately, I knew that odor. It was Thompson’s Licorice Elixir. I tried to cough it up, but most of it went down my throat anyway. She dabbed at my mouth with a serviette.

“Get some rest, Thomas. It’s really the best medicine for you.”

The next day, she told me later, we repeated almost the entire conversation word for word. Mostly I slept around draughts of laudanum. I was concerned that Sofia was dosing me too readily, but I could do nothing. I was as weak as a kitten. There I was, being tenderly looked after and all my needs met, yet at the same time I knew I was a prisoner. My ribs began to ache exceedingly and in my drug-laced delusions I believed I was being eaten by worms. No amount of assurance from Sofia that the medicine was actually working gave me any peace and I was agitated or sedated all day.

On the third day, I finally felt better and she assured me the worst was over. I was able to sit up and we played cards for a time. She had laid out a strip of oilcloth under my limbs to keep the sheets from being soiled from her concoctions. As bad as the cuts looked, they had stopped bleeding and in no way looked as if they were becoming infected. I began to believe I was actually going to recover from this ordeal. Had Cyrus Barker tried to get in contact with me? Had others noticed my absence? Who knew what sort of mischief Nightwine had gotten into during my convalescence?

“I must go,” I told Sofia when she brought in breakfast.

“Out of the question,” she said. “You still have one more day of treatment with my ointment before you will be properly healed. Anyway, what do you propose to do, hobble about London with broken ribs? I doubt you can even stand.”

To prove she was wrong, I insisted upon standing there and then, but in doing so I proved her point better than my own. While I could stand, it would be a day or two before I could walk properly again, and then upon a stout cane. I sat back on the bed, considering my predicament.

“I’d like a mirror, please,” I said.

She opened her mouth to protest, but saw the determined look in my eye. Opening a drawer in a chest, she pulled out a hand mirror and gave it to me and I surveyed the damage. There was now a bump on the bridge of my nose and the skin under my eyes was yellow and purple. Thankfully, my teeth survived intact. There were various abrasions and a scratch along the left jaw. It was an unpleasant sight after several days of healing. I gave her back the mirror.

“I fear for your reputation, having a man in your rooms for so long. What must the people in this hotel think of us, closeted here?”

She covered her mouth with a hand, hiding her smile. I was still quite callow then, in spite of all I had encountered in life and as Cyrus Barker’s assistant.

“Oh, Thomas,” she responded. “This is residential hotel. I have paid well for whatever opinion they have of us.”

“But are you not concerned about your reputation? This is London, after all.”

“I am a woman of no reputation. I have not so much as spoken to a woman since I arrived. I shall meet nobody of good society while I am here and would not care to impress them if I did. The rules of the English bourgeoisie are of no concern to me. I can do whatever I like and generally do. You need not leave early on that score.”

“Very well,” I said, admitting to the truth of what she said. “But I still must go. I need to get back to the office. Who knows what has happened since I was brought here? Barker might be in trouble.”

“If he were, pray tell me what you could do in the state you are in? You came very close to death a few days ago. I am stronger than you at the moment and will have my way. One more day and you may go.”

“Why am I here?” I countered. “You have not answered that question.”

She looked vexed and for a moment did not speak.

“If I had not brought you here, my father would have had you killed. Your death is not something he would leave unfinished. He despises you.”

“Yes, I never quite got that. Why does he hate me so?”

“You work for Mr. Barker. You’re the one who is the closest to him. I think he may even be jealous of the relationship between you.”

“He should have thought of that before he killed the Guv’s brother.”

“What?” Sofia asked. For once, I had shocked her. “What are you talking about?”

“You hadn’t heard, then?” I told her of the events Barker had relayed to me about himself, his brother, and her father during the Taiping Rebellion. She took it all in and thought it over.

“That’s just like him,” she finally said. “My grandfather had taught him to set aside all feelings of familial bond. He never had brothers or sisters with whom he could experience a relationship. I must admit I have wanted a brother or sister of my own; I covet a family’s bonds.”

“I have nine brothers and sisters.”

“What’s that like?” she asked, moving closer to me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I will not be sidetracked so easily. Thank you, Sofia, for saving me from your father while I was in a weakened state, but I really need to go.”

“Leaving today would be foolhardy. Give me one more day and I will let you go without an argument. I realize you must be at your master’s side, wherever he is, but I seriously doubt you will make it as far as the lobby.”