The Angel of Highgate (14 page)

A
ll that day Algernon rehearsed exactly what he would say to Thraxton. They had been friends for far too many years, and their friendship was far too valuable to attempt to conceal something of this magnitude. He would simply have to tell Thraxton, and let the consequences play out as they may.

But now as the hansom cab clopped along the avenue towards Thraxton’s home on Belgrave Square, he began to have second thoughts. What if Geoffrey flew into a rage? What if he simply took umbrage and turned his back, never to speak to him again? Algernon owed him so much—too much. He regretted putting himself into such a state of indebtedness to another man, and yet it had never seemed that way at the time.

The spiked railings that marked the fronts of the row of houses of which Thraxton’s was one hove into view and his mouth was suddenly dry, his pulse thudding.

Damn it
, he thought.
I will tell Geoffrey, no matter what the consequences. I will open my heart and inform him that Constance Pennethorne has given me certain signs of encouragement and that I mean to press my suit with her. Yea, that I will marry her, if she would have me.

The cab jerked to a halt outside Thraxton’s residence. But as he paid the driver and stepped down, his resolve began to crumble and dissolve.
What if I am mistaken? What if I have misread her signs? Women are wont to flirt, to tease. Many delight in making fools of men.

As he lifted the heavy brass ring clamped in the lion’s jaws and brought it down upon the striker plate several times, his misgivings grew.
What if Constance is such a woman? What if I destroy a lifelong friendship for naught?

He heard movement from within, the thunder of footsteps approaching at a run. He was surprised when the door was opened not by Harold, the manservant, but Thraxton himself, his face flushed with excitement. “Good heavens, Geoffrey! Whatever’s the matter?”

Thraxton ignored the question, his eyes falling instead upon the cab which he restrained from moving away with a violent wave. “Proof, Algy!” Thraxton cried. “That’s what the matter is.”

“Whatever are you babbling about?”

“This!” Thraxton said, holding up the white bloom.

Algernon cast the flower a cursory glance, but then looked again, closer.

“What kind of flower is it, Algy?” Thraxton asked.

“Good Lord.” Algernon’s brows knotted in puzzlement. “I don’t know. It may not be from the spirit world, but it is quite unearthly.”

* * *

The specimen room at Kew was lined floor to ceiling with cabinets containing wide, shallow drawers filled with plant specimens harvested from the four corners of the earth. Algernon had the white bloom set on top of a cabinet. Next to the bloom he paged through a huge volume filled with exquisite watercolor paintings of different genera of flowers. Thraxton looked over his shoulder as Algernon leafed through the heavy pages.

“I have never seen the like of it. Certain species of cactus have flowers somewhat like this. On the other hand, it does also resemble a genus of tropical orchid.” As he flipped another page, a sudden thought struck him. Without another word he abandoned the book and the white flower and walked over to one of the cabinets and began opening and closing drawers as he quickly surveyed their contents. Solidly in Algernon’s world, Thraxton followed him around in silence.

“Then again,” he said, opening another drawer, quickly scanning the contents then banging it shut and moving to the drawer above, “it is so exotic and exquisite it could be from some far-flung place, such as from the Galapagos Islands. I believe we have a rather spectacular collection… somewhere.”

Not finding what he was looking for, Algernon slammed the last drawer shut and quickly set off, moving deeper into the specimen room, ducking in between rows of tall cabinets, and crossing to the very back of the room where the cabinets reached to the ceiling a good thirty feet and had to be scaled by a ladder that leaned up against them. “Stay there, Geoffrey.”

Thraxton waited passively while Algernon scampered to the top of the creaking ladder and began rummaging through some high drawers near the ceiling. He lifted out one of the blooms and inspected it. “No, these are clearly not the same,” he called down. “The leaves are quite different in structure.”

“What if it really was a spirit, Algy? An angel made flesh?”

Algernon slammed the drawer shut and descended. He threw Thraxton a withering look as he stepped from the ladder. “The only spirit present that night was the spirit you keep in that walking stick of yours.”

“I was not drunk, Algy. I swear I wasn’t. Not one drop passed my—well, all right, perhaps a drop or two—but I was not drunk.”

Algernon stood with his arms crossed on his chest, a hand to his chin as he thought for several long minutes without speaking. “A hybrid!” he announced at last.

“What?” asked Thraxton.

“A hybrid. The flower. It could well be a hybrid. The creation of some clever horticulturist. Perhaps that’s why I cannot find its analogue anywhere in our collection.”

Algernon strode quickly in the direction of where he had left the bloom next to the open catalogue. Thraxton hurried to keep up with him. “If so,” he continued, “it really is a remarkable piece of work. I certainly have never seen the like—” He suddenly stopped. The catalogue lay open on the desk where he had left it, but the white bloom had mysteriously vanished. “It’s gone!”

He and Thraxton exchanged stunned looks.

“I left it right here and now it’s gone!”

“Someone must have taken it,” Thraxton said.

Algernon looked around as if not quite believing what was transpiring. “But you and I are the only ones in this room, Geoffrey.”

Thraxton thought for a second, and then looked up at Algernon. “Perhaps… the spirit?”

Algernon sighed. “Geoffrey, I assure you it was no spirit you saw that night at Highgate, and no spirit who just now took the bloom. Most likely Parkinson or one of the other botanists came in while we were in the back, saw it lying out and put it away in a drawer somewhere.”

Both men looked about. The specimen room was huge and was filled with thousands of drawers. The door from the specimen room led into one of the smaller greenhouses. Through the glass window set into the door, Algernon spotted someone working. He went over to the door and opened it. Mister Greenley, the man who had chased Thraxton with a rake the day of his au naturel romp, was repotting some ferns and looked up when he heard his name called.

“Mister Greenley!”

“Yessir?”

“Mister Greenley, we were just examining a specimen, a flower with a white bloom. It… it seems to have gone missing. Did you see anyone come in here?”

Mister Greenley rubbed at his chin, leaving a smudge of dirt. “No, sir. I’ve been the only one here.”

Algernon’s face registered his disappointment. “Ah, I see. Thank you.”

Mister Greenley continued to stare expectantly.

“Do carry on, Mister Greenley.”

Algernon closed the door to the greenhouse and turned back to Thraxton, a baffled look on his face.

* * *

“We will find it, Geoffrey,” Algernon said as he loaded Thraxton into his waiting brougham outside the Palm House at Kew. “The flower will turn up somewhere, I promise you.”

Thraxton settled himself into the seat. Algernon was about to slam the carriage door when Thraxton was struck by a sudden thought.

“Hold on a moment! That chap you spoke to. His name is Greenley?”

“Yes. He is my head gardener.”

“The grave where we found the flower, did you happen to notice the name on the headstone?”

As a scientist, Algernon was rather embarrassed to admit that his powers of observation had been lax. He shook his head.

“Greenley,” Thraxton said slowly. “Florence Greenley.”

Algernon’s eyes widened in surprise. “Really? I understand that Mister Greenley is a widower…” He shook his head. The idea was patently absurd. “But I know the man. He is gruff and plain-speaking, but scrupulously honest and a strict teetotaler. Why on earth would he steal the flower?”

“Why indeed?” Thraxton asked, suddenly very suspicious. “Tell me. Do you perchance know where our Mister Greenley lives?”

H
e was ambushed from behind as his key turned in the lock of his office door.

“Ah, Doctor Garrette, you are returned.”

Garrette stiffened. He had the door half open and now he pulled it shut and turned to face his ambusher. By the wheedling voice and asthmatic breathing, he could guess who it was. “Mrs. Parker… I believe I paid this month’s rent already.”

Rose Parker was his landlady, a jovial widow of extra-generous proportions who took a great interest in all her tenants—too much interest for Silas Garrette’s tastes. “On time as always,” Mrs. Parker said, and chuckled, setting her multiple chins into oceanic motion. “I don’t know how you manage it, I never see any patients come to your office.”

As soon as his key scratched in the lock, the children must have heard, for they began calling to him from the other side of the door:
Father, father!
Garrette blanched inwardly. Surely she must hear them, too.

“As I have already explained, Mrs. Parker, I make a great many house calls.”

“You must be exhausted then, tramping all over the city.”

“Yes. I am very tired.”

Father… Father are you there?
the thin, reedy voices called as one.

“I would love to see how you have fixed up the premises—”

He was frantic to get away, before his prying landlady could ask about the childish voices emanating from inside the office. “Some other time, Mrs. Parker. As I just said, I am extremely tired.” And with that he slid in through the door and snatched it shut behind him before she had a chance to detain him any longer.

Dr. Garrette’s hands shook as he locked the door from the inside.

Father… welcome home, Father
. The children waited behind another locked door, yet Silas Garrette could hear them plainly. He strode across the office to a second door, produced a heavy iron key and unlocked it. The door opened on a dark, windowless room, little more than a deep, narrow closet.

Papa, we have missed you
, the children droned as one.

As he swung wide the door, the astringent smell of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, and other noxious chemicals bowled over him in an invisible cloud. He paused for a moment, allowing fresh air to swoosh in and intermingle before he stepped into the closed space.

Papa… Papa…
the voices called from the darkness.

“Patience, my lovely children,” Dr. Garrette muttered. His hand groped across a work bench until his fingers closed upon a box of matches. He struck one and lit the gas mantle. The flame blossomed, illuminating the darkness.

The room was long and narrow with the work bench on one side. Atop the bench sat a gleaming row of glass vessels. Inside each one, a fetus floated in a clear preserving liquid.

His children.

They were all freaks; examples of gross deformities that nature would not allow to reach full-term: conjoined twins, fetuses with heads like baby pigs, one with four arms next to a worm with no arms or legs, a Cyclops… Each one a mother’s nightmare. A father’s despair.

“My beautiful children,” he breathed, stroking each jar in turn. He reached the final jar and lifted it to the light, gazing at the fetus floating within: his favorite, called Janus, a conjoined twin with two faces on one head. He did not consider them freaks, but believed them to be nature’s attempt at the next leap in human evolution. The god-like spawn of a future race.

Garrette held the jar close to his ear, listening. “What is that you said, Janus? Ah, yes, when will your new sibling be joining our little family? Soon, Janus, very soon.”

He kissed the fetus’ jar, which was covered with a sticky residue that left a bitter chemical taste in his mouth. The preserving liquid was his own experimental formulation—mostly ethyl alcohol mixed with chloroform and several other compounds. It worked reasonably well, although now, after many years, the liquid was becoming cloudy and increasingly turbid as the specimens within slowly decayed and disintegrated. He set the jar down carefully and stepped to the back of the room.

A mirror hung on the far wall and Silas Garrette studied a reflection split in two by a fine crack running diagonally across its wavy surface. He removed the rose-colored pince-nez spectacles and tucked them into a breast pocket. Then he doffed the white top hat. Two white phrenology busts sat on a table beneath the mirror. Dr. Garrette set the white top hat atop one. Next, he drew off the brown wig and draped it over the other bust. Following a long-established ritual, he peeled off false eyebrows, moustaches and then the elaborate side-whiskers which had been glued on with spirit gum. When he had finished, the visage that looked back from the mirror was unrecognizable. The head was completely bald and hairless—down to the lack of eyelashes. A tracery of fine red scars veined the skin of his scalp and crept down one side of his face: a souvenir from the Crimean War of an incendiary shell that had exploded over the hospital tent he had been working in. The tent had burned to the ground killing all inside, both wounded and medical staff. By a twisted miracle, he had survived. They found him a mile away, catatonic, staring into a dark wood, clothes smoldering, hair singed off.