Mask of the Verdoy (51 page)

‘There you are,’ she said, biting a sizeable chunk from the cake. All eyes were now on that exquisite mouth as it chewed … swallowed—and smiled.

‘
Delicious!
’

She took her seat again and removed a small crumb from her lips with a beautifully manicured fingernail. She looked at her watch and then picked up her handbag.

‘Perhaps now we can draw a line under this whole ridiculous situation? Prime Minister, maybe we could continue our little chat on another occasion? I really must be going now, and—’

‘Don’t you think you need to do something first?’ asked Harley, looking a little concerned.

‘I’m sorry, George, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about … By the way—would anyone mind awfully if I smoked?’

Ramsay MacDonald opened a cigarette case and offered it across the table.

‘No thank you, Prime Minister, I prefer my own brand.’

As Euphemia searched through her handbag she seemed to begin to lose her normal composure, the delicate bow of her eyebrows furrowing together in frustration.

‘Looking for these, by any chance?’ said Harley, tossing a handful of small pink lozenges onto the polished table top in front of her.

Euphemia stared at them for a moment and then began to scratch at the back of her neck.

‘What are they?’ asked Ramsay MacDonald, leaning forward to get a better look.

‘They’re just breath fresheners, cachous … I really have no idea why Mr. Harley felt it necessary to steal them from my bag.’

‘You know that’s not true, Effie. They’re an antidote, aren’t they? To the ergot toxin. And I suggest you take one, right now … Here—take one!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!
Antidote!
They’re nothing of the sort.’ said Euphemia, pushing his hand away so that he dropped the lozenge.

‘Come on, Effie, don’t be so bloody stubborn! You need to take one of these, right now!’ Harley said forcefully, picking up another and holding it in front of Euphemia’s face.

‘Get away from me!’ she shouted, sweeping her hand across the table, scattering the little pink tablets onto the carpet. ‘
Get your filthy hands off me, I say!
’

Euphemia now arched her back in the chair to reveal a rash of ugly red blotches mottling the alabaster complexion of her elegant neck. She jerked her shoulders violently and began to scratch herself again—more vigorously this time—so much so that on withdrawing her hand blood could be seen beneath her fingernails.

‘FW, Pearson—a little help here!’ cried Harley, getting on his hands and knees to retrieve some of the antidote tablets as the aristocrat began to writhe in her chair, emitting a low, menacing howl.

‘My God, her eyes—
look at her eyes!
’ said Ramsay MacDonald, pushing his chair back away from the table. ‘What on earth is happening to her?’

‘Exactly what I said was gonna happen to you,’ said Harley, back on his feet again. ‘Prime Minister—focus now! I need you to pour me a glass of sherry and then use the telephone over there to summon an ambulance. Can you do that?’

‘Of course … of course.’ Replied the PM, regaining his composure. He swiftly poured the drink and handed it to Harley, then moved across to the telephone on Lord Wingord’s desk.

‘Get a good hold FW, try to stop her thrashing about so,’ said Harley, slipping his brass knuckles out of his jacket pocket.

‘Good grief, Harley—no!’

‘What? … Oh, don’t be daft! It’s not for that!’

Harley used the knuckleduster to quickly crush a number of the tablets into a fine powder which he swept into the glass of sherry, mixing it up with his finger. ‘Right, hold her steady, FW. Albert—you pinch her nose … harder … that’s it—keep holding it …’

As Euphemia opened her mouth to gasp for breath Harley poured in the antidote potion. She coughed and spluttered for a while, but most of the mixture seemed to stay down.

‘Alright, let her go—and I’d stand back a bit, if I were you.’

Pearson and Swales stepped aside as Euphemia began to pant like an exhausted dog, beads of sweat breaking out on her brow and her hair falling loose from its clips. She fixed Harley with her bloodshot eyes and let out a frightening chuckle.

‘You’re too late, you idiot! Once the wolf takes hold there’s … no … denying … its … voracious … 
appetite
…’ She slumped forward in her chair.

‘The ambulance is on its way,’ said Ramsay MacDonald, approaching cautiously. ‘Well, she seems to have stopped having the convulsions—that’s a good sign, surely?’

‘I don’t know, Prime Minister,’ said Harley, shaking his head. ‘Saint Clair—what’s the deal with this antidote? Were we in time, d’you think?’

‘What? Oh, I haven’t a clue, old man. After all, how would I know? Most extraordinary behaviour—never seen the like before … Was out in India once—saw a fellow in the grip of typhus—’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake—c
heese it!
Fellowes—keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t get up to anything dodgy.’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ said Fellowes, taking a seat opposite Saint Clair with his pistol in his hand.

Euphemia now sprang to her feet, causing Pearson to leap back and draw his gun. She struck a dramatic pose—turning her face to the ceiling and placing her arms across her chest, with her long fingers splayed out in a commanding fashion. Then she slowly lowered her head and locked eyes with Harley.

‘You’re too late, you fool! There’ll be no turning back now.’

Although full of venom, her voice was now steady, controlled.

‘What are we talking about here, Effie?’ asked Harley, gesturing to Pearson and Swales to move away. ‘The Wolf’s Bite … or the Correction?’

‘We will sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning …’

Now Euphemia slumped back down in her seat, her head low between her knees, her hair tumbling dishevelled to the floor.

Harley moved a little closer and bent down so that she could hear him.

‘You made him up, didn’t you? Your mystery whistler. A little red herring to put me off the scent after Kosevich blew himself up with that unstable dynamite. Clever really. I mean—it took the heat off you, didn’t it? For a while, anyway …’

He now drew a chair from the table and sat opposite Euphemia, who remained still, with her head down.

‘You know, the bit that I don’t get is the eugenics experiments at that clinic. Sterilising all those women—and God knows what else you were getting up to. I mean, the way you deal with those kids, I’ve seen it—it can’t all be acting, can it? You seemed to really care. And you a nurse in the VAD … Isn’t there a nurse’s pledge? Florence Nightingale, weren’t it? Something about devoting yourself to the welfare of those in your care?’

Euphemia sat up and laughed.

‘The trouble with you, George, is you have no vision, no
perspective
.’ She leant forward and rippled her fingers in front of her eyes. ‘There’s that little brain of yours, chugging away at full pelt, processing all those puerile facts like a miniature combustion engine in that thick skull of yours … focussing all the time on the little man, the individual … whereas those with any real intelligence can see that the problem is on a far bigger scale.’ She pushed herself back and clenched the arms of the chair, gripped momentarily in a spasm of intense pain. After a while she relaxed her grasp and continued. ‘
My
pledge—not as some lackey nurse, but as a member of the elite Verdoy—is to devote myself to the welfare of the nation … not of the scabrous offspring of the rookeries, the issue of drunken couplings and casual whoring. After all, aren’t they the very microbes infecting the bloodstream? But now, thankfully, we have a cure!’

‘Your father would have been so proud.’

‘My father? … 
my father?
Oh yes, Sir Richard Daubeney—the great scientist … The man was a fool! More concerned with the welfare of the great unwashed than with centuries of breeding and civilization. Another weak, bleeding-heart liberal applying the sticking plaster to the maimed limb, denying the stench of the gangrene in his nostrils—when what is really needed is to hack the damned thing off!’

She got to her feet, more animated now, spitting the words out with flecks of saliva, making violent chopping actions with her hand.

‘Yes,
hack it off
, I say! Spare the rod and spoil the child.’

‘So is that how you see us all then, Effie—like children?’

‘Yes!’ she said, staring at him, incredulous at his ignorance. ‘Of course you are! Oh, but
you
, George—you’re a little freak of nature, a dancing bear. With your little library of books and all those facts that you gobble up like a child in a sweetshop … Most of the proletariat are lucky if they can read the label on the gin bottle … and yet did that stop the liberal idiots giving them the vote? Oh no!
Universal suffrage?
My God! These people are not genetically equipped to understand complex political concepts.’

‘Where’s that damned ambulance?’ said Ramsay MacDonald, walking to the window and pulling aside the curtain.

‘And then there’s the middle classes,’ said Euphemia, pointing at the Prime Minister and laughing. ‘If the proletariat are the infants then the middle classes are surely the spoilt adolescents of this great nation family.’

The ergot toxin seemed to be taking a stronger hold again, and as she spoke Euphemia began to scratch violently at the palm of her hand, the effects of the poison dancing across her face in tics and spasms.

‘Just look at him … 
look at him!
Our glorious Prime Minister … the bastard offspring of a housemaid and a farm labourer!’

Saint Clair gave a little snort of laughter at this which didn’t go unnoticed by Ramsay MacDonald, who now drained his glass of sherry and sat back down at the table, looking a little shocked.

Euphemia thrashed her arms for a moment and then clawed at her head, tearing out a clump of hair which she thrust towards Saint Clair.

‘
How could we let this happen?
’ she screamed. ‘All those perfect specimens, those beautiful boys—the product of generations of noble breeding, born to rule, born to lead …’ There were flecks of pink foam showing at the sides of her mouth now. ‘Slaughtered … sacrificed … my darling Rupert … Just think of it, Pel—compare our dear Prime Minister there to Rupert … 
Rupert!
And there were thousands like him … gone … they’re gone, do you understand? Gone forever … And what’s left to us? Why, the runts and the mongrels, the stunted and feeble-minded wretches who should have been winnowed out long ago …’ She began to babble now, her words coming in a torrent of shrieks and shouting. ‘And so we must do the winnowing. The few … the extraordinary … the
Verdoy!
We’ll correct the mistake, won’t we, Pel?
Won’t we?
Start again … breed out the runts, the thieves and liars, the whores and drunks, the reds and the imbeciles … Yes! Start again! A rebirth, a renaissance … “
we will sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning
…” and with them will go those childish notions of suffrage and democracy. Good Lord! What more do these people need to convince them that it doesn’t
work? Can’t they see what’s happening to civilisation? You mark my words, unless something is done, this century will kill civilization off. I see it lying there, jaundiced—can you see it, Pel? Jaundiced and morbid on the death-bed of the twentieth century; writhing in its last throes, still clutching desperately to a crumpled manifesto; scrawled in the blood of an empire:
democracy, liberty, suffrage!
But my God! We’re strong enough—aren’t we? We few? We’ll correct it, won’t we? We have the nerve, and the right! We’ll break off that golden bough and start afresh. A new feudal system—that’s it! Then the adults will take charge again. We’ll teach the world again how to rule, how to forge a civilisation … With Pendragon gone we’ll build our new Camelot … Yes, a new Camelot, here … here, on this sceptered isle, this fortress built by nature for herself against infection and the hand of war … 
“we will sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; with a flood … a flood; they are like … like grass that is … like grass
…”’

Euphemia collapsed on the floor and began to thrash around violently, blood streaming from her nose, her mouth now clogged with the pink foaming saliva.

‘Quick, Albert!’ said Harley, kneeling down. ‘Get some cushions! FW, give me a hand here—I’ve got her ankles, try to grab her arms … That’s enough cushions, Albert; throw them on the floor all around her … that’s right. Have you got your manacles? Alright, help FW … that’s it … Right, cuff her—it’ll stop her hurting herself. That’s it … good … I think we can let go now.’

Ramsay MacDonald stood up as the clanging of a bell became audible from the street. ‘Thank God for that! At last!’ he said, pulling the curtain aside. ‘Gentlemen—the ambulance has arrived.’

‘Good!’ said Swales, putting his jacket back on. ‘Pearson, go outside, would you? Bring them straight through. Oh, and get word to the others to call the search off—I don’t think there can be any doubt that George has discovered exactly what we were looking for … I want the reception hall kept clear of guests for when they take Lady Euphemia out to the ambulance. And I want two officers to go with her and to stay with her at the hospital until they receive further orders … and make sure that they’re armed.’

‘Yes sir!’

***

Having been sedated, the patient was bound to a stretcher with leather strops and taken out to the waiting ambulance.

‘My God, what a mess!’ said Ramsay MacDonald, watching the stretcher being loaded into the back of the vehicle from the study window.

‘Indeed,’ said the General, pouring himself a glass of sherry.

‘I’m free to go, I take it, Swales?’ said Saint Clair, getting up from his seat and nonchalantly picking some fluff from his jacket sleeve.

‘No, sir,
you are not!
’ roared Swales, angrily sucking the remnants of the sherry from his copious moustache. ‘You, sir, are under arrest!’

‘Oh yes—on what charge, exactly, old boy?’