The Monstrumologist (21 page)

“Oh, Mr. Flanagan!” she boomed when she saw me. “It’s only Will Henry.”

“
Only
Will Henry. Listen to you, Missus.” He smiled at me. “Don’t listen to her.”

“No, sir,” I responded automatically. Thinking this might offend his knife-wielding Amazonian mate, I quickly appended, “Hello, Mrs. Flanagan; how are you, ma’am?”

“I would be much better without these constant interruptions,” she roared. “My husband, whom my sainted mother
warned
me not to marry, thinks I’ve nothing better to do than be the brunt of his silly jokes and ridiculous riddles all day.”

“She’s in a bad mood,” whispered the grocer.

“I’m always in a bad mood!” she shouted back.

“Has been since the potato famine of ’48,” whispered Flanagan.

“I heard that!”

“Forty years, Will Henry. Forty years,” said he with a theatrical sigh. “But I love her. I love you, Missus!” he called.

“Oh, stop it. I can hear every word you say, y’know! Will Henry, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you? Be honest, now.”

“No, Mrs. Flanagan,” I said. “I’ve just grown a bit.”

“That’s it, Missus,” interjected Flanagan. “It isn’t lost; it’s just
redistributed
, eh? Right!”

“Oh, nonsense,” she rumbled. “These eyes aren’t
that
bad yet! Look at him, Mr. Flanagan. Look at his hollow cheeks and bulging forehead. Why, his wrists are no wider round than a chicken’s neck. Talk of famine! There’s one going on right now in that horrible house on Harrington Lane.”

“More than just famine, if the tales I hear have but a smidgen of truth to them,” ventured Flanagan with an elevation of an elfish eyebrow. “Eh, Will Henry? You know the stories we hear: mysterious comings and goings, packages delivered in the dark, midnight callers and the sudden, long absences of your master—you know, don’t you?”

“The doctor doesn’t discuss his work with me,” I said carefully, remembering his counsel:
Some falsehoods are borne of necessity, not foolishness.

“The
doctor
, aye. But what exactly is he a doctor
of
?” barked Mrs. Flanagan, eerily echoing Erasmus Gray.

And I echoed the same feeble reply, “Philosophy, ma’am.”

“He’s a deep thinker.” Mr. Flanagan nodded gravely. “And God knows we need all of those we can get!”

“He’s a queer man with queerer habits,” she countered, shaking her blade at him. “As was his father
and
his father’s father. All the Warthrops were queer.”

“I rather liked his father,” said her husband. “Much more—oh, what is the word?—
personable
than Pellinore. Very friendly, though in a regal kind of way. Reserved, to be sure, and a bit—oh, what do I need?—
aloof
, but not in any haughty or lordly way. A man of culture and breeding. From good stock, you could say.”

“Yes, husband, you could
say
whatever you like, and usually do, but Alistair Warthrop was no different from any of the other Warthrops. Miserly, stuck-up, and standoffish is what he was, a friend to no one save the unsavory transients who oft darkened his door.”

“Gossip, Missus,” insisted Flanagan. “Gossip and idle rumor.”

“He was a sympathizer. That much isn’t gossip.”

“Don’t listen to her, Will,” he cautioned me. “She loves to go on.”

“I heard that! My ears work as well as my eyes, Mr. Flanagan.”

“I don’t care whether ye heard or not!” he yelled back.

Nervous now in the presence of this escalating domestic brawl, I grabbed an apple from the bin beside me. Perhaps if
I selected my purchases, the fight might dissipate under the onslaught of commerce.

“They came asking after him,” rejoined his wife, her wide face turning the color of the Red Delicious in my hand. “You remember as well as me, Mr. Flanagan.”

Flanagan did not answer. The twinkle in his smiling Irish eyes had vanished. His lips were painfully pursed.

“Who came asking after him?” I blurted, unable to help myself.

“No one,” growled Flanagan. “The missus is—”

“The Pinkertons, that’s who!”

“—stirring tempests in teapots,” he finished with a shout.

“Who are the Pinkertons?” I asked.

“Detectives!” she answered. “A whole troupe of them.”

“There were two,” said Flanagan.

“All the way from Washington,” she continued, ignoring him. “In the spring of’61.”

“The spring of’62,” corrected her spouse.

“With orders from the War Department—from Secretary Stanton himself!”

“No, it wasn’t Stanton.”

“It most certainly was Stanton!”

“Then it couldn’t have been the spring of’61, Missus,” said Flanagan. “Stanton wasn’t made secretary till January of’62.”

“Don’t tell me, Mr. Flanagan. I saw the orders myself.”

“Why would undercover men for the government show you, a grocer’s wife, their orders?”

“What did they want?” I asked. The year (or years) in question nearly coincided with the mission to Benin. Could it have been mere coincidence, the proximity of the two events, the visit from the detectives on behalf of the Union, and the sailing of the
Feronia
but two years later? Had the government somehow learned of the elder Warthrop’s plan to bring
Anthropophagi
to America? My heart began to race, for it seemed that this serendipitous encounter might provide the key to unlocking the riddle plaguing the doctor, the answer to the anguished
Why?
at the dying captain’s bedside. What would he think if I returned with the answer to that conundrum, after intimating that I had little between my ears; that I was, in essence, a silly, stupid child who could not answer a simple question without becoming befuddled and tongue-tied? How much would my stature grow in his eyes! I might prove myself truly “indispensable.”

“They wanted to know if he was a true Union man, which he was, through and through,” replied Flanagan before his agitated wife could. “And it really wasn’t about him they were asking, if you remember, Missus. It was those two Canadian gentlemen … can’t recall their names now, but it’s been nigh twenty-six years.”

“Slidell and Mason,” she snapped. “And they weren’t Canadian, sir. Rebel spies is what they were.”

“The Pinkerton men never said as much,” he indicated to me with a wink.

“Both were seen at that house,” she said. “That house on Harrington Lane. More than once.”

“Doesn’t prove anything about Warthrop,” he argued.

“It proves he associated with agitators and traitors,” she shouted back. “It proves he was a sympathizer.”

“Well, you may think so, Missus, and say so, like now, like everyone did back then, but it doesn’t necessarily make it so. The Pinkertons left town, and Dr. Warthrop stayed, didn’t he? If they had proof of anything, they’d’ve carted him away. Right? Now you go on about this man—this good man who never did harm to anyone that I know of—but that’s all it is. Just going on. It isn’t right, Missus, speaking ill of the dead.”

“He was a rebel sympathizer!” she insisted. My ears had begun to ring from all her shouting. “He was different after the war, and you know it, Mr. Flanagan. Holed up in that house for weeks at a time, and when he did come out, moped around town like someone who’s lost his best friend. Never so much as a ‘how do you do’ crossed his lips, even when you passed right by him on the street, like he’d been dumbstruck, like a man whose heart’s been broken.”

“That may be so, Wife,” conceded Flanagan with a heavy sigh. “But you can’t say it was because of the war. A man’s heart is a complicated thing, a little less so than a woman’s, I’ll admit, but complicated it still is. Perhaps something did break it, as you say, but you can’t say what it was that broke it.”

I could not say, either, but thought I had a good idea: By the war’s end, Alistair Warthrop’s hands were stained with blood. Not blood spilled upon the battlefield but poured out by the gallon aboard the
Feronia
—that blood, and the blood belonging to all the future victims of the monsters he’d worked so tirelessly to bring to our soil, all the victims sacrificed upon the altar of his “philosophy.”

I found the doctor in his study, sitting in his favorite chair by the window. The blinds were drawn and the room quite dark; I almost missed him when I glanced inside. I had looked for him first in the basement and, finding nothing but overturned boxes and files strewn upon his worktable, checked the library next, which I found in a similar state of disarray, books thrown from the shelves, old newspapers and periodicals scattered pell-mell upon the floor. The study had not fared much better than the library; the contents of every drawer and cabinet lay in jumbled piles on every available surface. The entire house appeared to have been ransacked by bandits.

“Will Henry,” he said. He sounded weary beyond words. “I hope you fared better in your quest than I have in mine.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied breathlessly. “I would have been back sooner, but I forgot to stop by the baker’s, and I know how much you like his raspberry scones, so I went back. Got the last one, sir.”

“Scones?”

“Yes, sir. And I stopped by the butcher’s, too, and Mr. Flanagan’s. He sends his regards, sir.”

“Why are you gasping like that? Are you sick?”

“No, sir. I ran home, sir.”

“You ran? Why? Were you chased?”

“It was something Mrs. Flanagan said.” I was near to bursting. His melancholy would soon be swept away by my intelligence, I was certain.

He grunted. “Something about me no doubt. You should not talk to that woman, Will Henry. Talking to women in general is dangerous, but with that one it is a particular hazard.”

“It wasn’t about you, sir, at least not the important part. It was about your father.”

“My father?”

I told him everything in a breathless rush, of Slidell and Mason and the Pinkerton detectives’ inquiries around town (confirmed by Noonan the butcher and Tanner the baker), of the generally held belief that his father had been a Confederate sympathizer, of his father’s hermetic and heavy-hearted reaction to the South’s fall, all of which coincided with the expedition of the
Feronia.
The doctor interrupted only once, to have me repeat the names of the men with whom his father was accused of associating; otherwise he listened with unchanging expression, impassively studying me over his folded hands. I waited with bated breath upon the conclusion of my tale, sure he would leap from his chair,
throw his arms around me, and bless me for untying the Gordian knot.

Instead, much to my chagrin, he shook his head and said softly, “Is that it? Is that why you rushed here, to tell me this?”

“Did you already know?” I was crestfallen.

“My father was guilty of many things,” he said, “but treason was not one of them. It is possible he met with these men, and it is also possible their errand was of a seditious nature. Perhaps they had some insidious purpose in mind—his peculiar calling was not unknown in certain circles—but any scheme they proposed he would have rejected out of hand.”

“But how can you know that, sir? You weren’t living here.”

He frowned at me. “How would you know where I was living?”

I dropped my head to avoid the intensity of his glare.

“You told me he sent you away to school during the war.”

“I don’t recall telling you that, Will Henry.”

Of course, he had not; I had deduced it from the letter I had purloined from the old trunk. But some lies are borne of necessity.

“It was a long time ago,” I offered meekly.

“Well, it must have been, for I have no memory of it. At any rate, the two events being proximate does not mean one is related to the other, Will Henry.”

“But it could have something to do with it,” I insisted. I was determined to impress him with the elegance of my reason. “If they were Confederate spies, he wouldn’t have told anyone or left any record of his contract with Captain Varner. It’s why you can’t find anything, sir! And it could explain why he wanted more than one of the things brought back. You said they couldn’t have been for study, so what were they for? Maybe they weren’t for your father at all, but for
them
, Slidell and Mason. Maybe
they
wanted the
Anthropophagi,
Doctor!”

“And why would they want that?” he wondered, watching me hop from foot to foot in my agitation.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “To breed them, perhaps. To raise an army of them! Can you imagine the Union troops in the face of a hundred of those things, let loose in their ranks in the dead of night?”

“The
Anthropophagi
produce only one or two offspring a year,” he reminded me. “It would require quite some time to produce a hundred, Will Henry.”

“It took only two of them to wipe out the entire crew of the
Feronia.”

“A lucky circumstance—I mean, of course, for the
Anthropophagi
. They would not have fared as well against a regiment of battle-hardened soldiers. It is an interesting theory, Will Henry, unsupported as it is by any facts. Even if we assume these mysterious callers sought out my father to supply the rebellion with creatures to kill or terrorize
the enemy, there are half a dozen he might have procured for them that did not entail the same risk and expense as a breeding pair of
Anthropophagi.
Do you follow, Will Henry?
If
that was their goal, given everything I know about him, he would have rejected it. And even
if
he had accepted, he would not have chosen this particular species.”

“But you can’t know for sure,” I protested, unwilling to drop the matter. I wanted desperately to be right, not so much to prove the doctor wrong, but to be
right
.

His reaction was immediate. The doctor shot up from the chair, his angular face contorted in fury. I blenched: I had never seen him so angry. I fully expected him to strike me across the cheek for my recalcitrance.

“How dare you speak to me like this!” he cried. “Who are
you
to question my father’s integrity? Who are
you
to besmirch my family’s good name? It’s not enough the entire town spreads calumny against me; now my own assistant, the boy to whom I have shown only kindness and pity, with whom I share my house and my work, for whom I have sacrificed my sacred right to privacy, stoops to join in their slanderous conduct! And if that weren’t enough, the boy who owes me
everything
, even unto his very
life,
disobeys the one injunction—the
only
injunction—I gave to him! What was it, Will Henry? Do you remember, or were you so distracted by your lust for scones that you forgot? What did I say to you before you left?”