The Aylesford Skull (50 page)

THE CATHEDRAL OF THE OXFORD MARTYRS

A
lice had prepared herself, knowing they would come for her and Eddie at nine o’clock, Narbondo having had no reason to lie about it last night, when he had shown them to their room. She had prepared Eddie, too, choosing her words carefully, only to discover that he was surprisingly game, although he was perfectly aware that he had been threatened with murder just yesterday by the very man in whose house they were now held prisoner. He told her about how Finn Conrad had stowed away on the coach, and how Finn had shattered the glass and come through the inn window to fetch him, and how he and Finn had escaped from the cellar and beaten the man named the Crumpet. “I hit him with a great branch,” he said.

“Good
for you,” Alice told him, “although it was a dangerous thing to do when you had already run away.”

“I
know
,” Eddie said, doubly happy, it seemed. He was perhaps a bit too anxious to engage the enemy again, and Alice explained to him about the virtues of prudence and living to fight again another day. But he wanted to know what the difference was between fighting today or tomorrow, which seemed much the same to him.

“Best not to fight at all, if there’s a way to avoid it honorably,” she said. That led to further questions and further answers, which couldn’t be resolved, but which passed the time agreeably – better than letting one’s mind run, certainly.

There was the sound of a key in the lock, but when the door swung open it wasn’t Narbondo holding the key; it was Helen, the familiar pistol in her hand. She ushered them through the house, in which direction Alice couldn’t say, until they crossed before a window that looked out onto the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs. In the street below was a milling crowd, and she wondered whether Helen would try to take her and Eddie in among them. That would be Alice’s opportunity, surely.

But no such opportunity came. Beaumont met them on the first floor, where he stood alongside the paneled wall of a vast staircase. He pushed on the edge of a panel in the wall, and it sprang inward and slid past the adjacent panel, opening a passageway beneath the stairs. Inside, on a shelf, sat an oil lamp and a tray of matches. Beaumont lit the wick of the lamp, adjusted it, and said, “Watch your step now, ma’am. Hold onto the boy. This here is a steep go.” He proceeded down a set of stairs with stone treads, followed by Alice and Eddie and then Helen. Alice counted the narrow steps – twenty-six before they arrived at a landing, where the stairs jogged to the left. Another dozen steps down, and they reached a level passage again, this time with a floor of packed dirt, the low roof shored up with oak boards and posts, the wood still fresh enough so that Alice could smell the cut ends. She wondered how far beneath the street they were – thirty feet, given the number of stairs? She heard the sound of what must be a steam engine nearby, working steadily, its sound muffled. Where it was located she couldn’t say.

“Do you hear it, ma’am?” Beaumont asked, holding his lantern aloft, and glancing back at Alice. “That’s the wind, you know.”

“It sounds very much like an engine.”

“That it does, ma’am, an engine to drive the wind through the organ. The pipes want wind, do you see? I’m to play the instrument today – a vast great organ with a bellows the size of a four-horse wagon and a wind system that no one would believe without they saw it. Driven by steam, it is. I played the organ as a lad, in the old church in Brighton. I was the bellows boy for a time when my father played. It was a blessing to hear him, ma’am. When he was jailed they took pity on me and gave me a chance at it. But it didn’t last, as they say, for I was taken up for selling clothes to the dolly shops and never went back to the organ. These here bellows in the Martyrs is too much for a man to push, though – too much for a dozen men, so as I say they use the steam. It’s me that’ll play the instrument, though.”

“In the cathedral?” Alice asked. “Today?”

“It’s the ceremony today, ma’am, where we’re a-going now, with the Queen and all. Do you know Bach?”

“A passing familiarity. You’re to play Bach, then?”

“The ‘Fugue in G-Minor’ – what they call the ‘Little Fugue.’”

They began to ascend along the tunnel, and shortly came upon a stairway leading upward. Still holding Eddie’s hand, Alice glanced behind her as they went up, seeing that Helen was still at her station directly behind. It occurred to her that she might wheel around and kick Helen downstairs, although certainly it was better to wait until they reached the top. Then she thought of Beaumont, who was evidently loyal to Narbondo, and saw that nothing would come from kicking Helen downstairs, aside, perhaps, from momentary satisfaction.

They reached the top now, where there was a landing that stood before a closed door, which Beaumont opened with a key. A room lay beyond, empty but for a wicker basket with a nondescript metal vase lying in it. The room was paneled from floor to ceiling, a large wooden box with no apparent function except as a sort of way station meant to disguise the door, which was utterly hidden within the paneled wall when Beaumont shut it. The sound of the steam engine was louder now.

Beaumont manipulated one of the panels in the opposite wall, and it slid open quietly. Alice wondered how many of the panels in the cathedral walls were secret doors, and how Narbondo, and hence Beaumont, had come to understand them so thoroughly. Narbondo had evidently been at work here for a very long time, although it scarcely seemed possible that he had worked in secret. And to what end?

They stepped through the opening, into the interior of the Cathedral of the Oxford Martyrs, Alice holding tightly to Eddie’s hand. A passage lay to the left, but they turned away from it, out into the nave, which was vaulted with lacey white arches that seemed far too delicate to support the immensely high glass ceiling, the transparent walls soaring away on three sides. The altar stood some distance away, gold and white, stretching across the great, raised transept, a half dozen broad stairs across the front of it. The altar itself was built of massively heavy stone and was easily thirty feet long and eight wide, supported by a low marble wall with arches that called an aqueduct to mind. Great chandeliers that must hold a thousand candles, as yet unlit, hung on golden chains above it.

The pews stretched away in either direction, delicately built, white-painted iron with golden cushions. Alice looked up into the heavens through the clear ceiling where a picturesque mass of clouds moved beyond the rain-washed glass. She heard steps trailing away – Beaumont hurrying along the passageway, his beaver hat bobbing atop his head.

Their being here made not one bit of sense to her, nor did the subterranean tunnel that connected the cathedral to Narbondo’s lair. Simply walking across the street would have saved fifteen minutes, which meant, of course, that they ought not to be here, nearly alone in the cathedral, the doors closed to everyone else and guarded. She saw two soldiers inside the cathedral, thirty yards away, apparently searching for something. One looked back at her, stared for a moment, and went about his business again, which was strange.

Despite the rain there were hundreds of people on the street, standing about, the mob stretching away toward the Embankment and Blackfriars Bridge. Behind her stood the solid, fourth wall of the cathedral, the framed, wooden panels painted white and decorated with gilt filigree, the entire thing a backdrop for an enormous pipe organ on a scale that she wouldn’t have believed possible – Beaumont’s instrument, or the voice of it. The thousands of golden pipes stretched away twenty and thirty feet overhead, higher, possibly, the largest of the pipes being of massive circumference, like gilded smokestacks. The organ itself was invisible, its steam engine only barely discernable now, something she felt rather than heard.

She saw then that the organ itself stood on a dais with a domed roof hung high on the wall. Six marble columns supported the roof. On the floor below stood an identical domed portico, supported by the same marble colonnade. Beaumont appeared, very small and distant upon the dais. He looked out over the cathedral, bowed to an imaginary audience, and sat on the bench. His beaver hat was settled over his ears, and was visible over the waist-high parapet behind him.

“You’ll take a seat, if you please,” Helen said, “in this row of pews, here on the end with the boy beside you.” Helen sat down on the pew behind them, gesturing with the pistol for Alice to do what was asked of her.

“As you say,” Alice said, sitting down next to Eddie. She saw in the south wall a vast window of stained glass, depicting the execution of the Martyrs in Smithfield. Alice couldn’t remember their names, but one, she recalled, had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, very nearly a neighbor since they had moved to Aylesford, although a few centuries removed. She recalled reading that the window had been designed by Millais.

“Pray tell me why we’re here, if you’d be so kind, Helen,” Alice asked now, turning to look at her. “Something to do with chub, perhaps?” Helen held the pistol in her lap. She could raise it easily enough, of course, but she seemed to have lost interest in it, as if something were on her mind. Alice slipped the hatpin out of her sleeve and held it tightly, hidden by her hand and wrist.

“The Cathedral is opening today with great fanfare,” Helen said. “I’m told that the Queen was to attend, her first public appearance since her unfortunate fall on the stairway at Windsor Palace.”

“
Was
to attend?”

“There was word of a plot against her, unfortunately – the work of unhappy Fenian anarchists funded by Gladstone himself. Almost unbelievable, isn’t it? The several soldiers that you see milling about have been searching for an infernal device, but they’re apparently failing to find such a thing, although the doors will remain locked until it’s quite safe for the crowds to be let in. They’ll be wet as seals by then, poor hens. I for one don’t believe that there’s a respectable Fenian between here and Hampstead Heath, not on a day like today, with such appalling weather.”

As she said this there was a bolt of lightning in the sky, illuminating the interior of the dim cathedral, followed ten seconds later by a distant clap of thunder.

“What if I were to call on one of the soldiers, for assistance, then?” Alice asked. “Surely you can’t shoot all of us.”

“He’ll prove to be mute, I do assure you. He’s been given fifteen years’ soldier’s pay for taking part in Dr. Narbondo’s little entertainment, as have his helpmates and the two standing guard outside the door. You, on the other hand, are given nothing. I ask you to bear in mind that I find your tone slightly too sardonic for my taste. I’ll murder your son in an instant if you give me cause, and then, once you’ve seen him die, I’ll murder you as well.”

Hearing this, Alice instinctively grasped Eddie’s hand, and Helen said to her, “Don’t look appalled, my lady. I was given a great sum to play my part, and I’m to be given more when the curtain falls and the play is done, although I forfeit all if I make a blunder, and, I don’t doubt, my life would be forfeit with it. Do you quite understand me?”

“
Understand
you?” Alice said. “Not at all, I assure you. It’s not within my powers to understand you. If you ask me do I take your meaning, do I understand that you’re a murderous, grasping wretch who has sold her soul for money, then, yes – I’m afraid I very much understand you in that regard.”

Helen stared at Alice with intense hatred and began to utter another threat, but at that moment there sounded the rising shriek of the organ, Beaumont apparently finding his way around the keys. He struck out the first notes of the Fugue, paused, and started again, settling into it, the voice of the organ rising in volume as air filled the pipes. Alice was astonished by it – the very idea of Narbondo’s coach driver playing the great organ was unimaginable, and yet it was so, the steady volume of sound filling the cathedral. Narbondo, she realized, had orchestrated the entire thing. Helen was a mere pawn.

And now, from out of the throats of the pipes – some very near the base, some near the top – issued what appeared to be black vapor, pouring out and rising into the air. Alice watched it curiously for a moment. An illusion? She had no sooner formed this question, however, when she was astonished to see, as if in a dream, the front of a building some distance up the street explode outward in a gush of smoke and debris, hurtling people before it.

FORTY-TWO