The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs Read online

  “Of course,” the man said. “I can see you gents are preoccupied. I… Say!” he said, suddenly bending forward and gaping at the professor. “Ain’t you that chap St. Vitus? Wait! That isn’t it! St. Ives! I knew I’d get it! I had the good fortune of perusing your likeness in The Graphic, sir, some months back. Story about a sort of enormous skeleton…? On the riverbank, I believe it was, out in Germany. I’m honored, sir.” He thrust out his hand, looking admiringly at St. Ives. Then, slowly, his visage took on the air of commiseration. “Asking your pardon, sir,” he said, more quietly now, “but you ain’t waiting for a Heathfield traveler, are you? You look worn down by care, as they say.”

  “What do you know of Heathfield travelers?” I asked him. I’ll admit that I didn’t like the look of him, although I myself had written the account published in The Graphic concerning our exploratory trip down the Danube the previous year, from which we had returned with a giant human femur and a lower jaw set with teeth the size of dominoes. At least our watch salesman had the good sense to have read the piece.

  “Only that there weren’t no Heathfield travelers aboard, mate,” he said in my direction. “Not tonight there weren’t. The train went past Heathfield like a racehorse. Scarcely slowed down.”

  “Why would it do such a thing?” Tubby asked. “Damned strange behavior for a train.”

  The man hesitated for a moment, and then looked around conspiratorially. “They’re keeping it on the quiet,” he said in a low voice. “Mum’s the word down south, don’t you see? Some sort of contagion, apparently.”

  He had St. Ives’s attention now. “Contagion?” the Professor asked. “What variety?”

  “I don’t know the particulars,” he said. “But I’ll tell you that in my way of business I talk to some…interesting people, so to say. And one of these people let on that the village was one great Bedlam, the entire population picking straws out of their hair and crawling about on their hands and knees. Madness by the bucketful. Mayhem in the streets. I wouldn’t have stopped in Heathfield for anything for fear of getting a dose of it. And mark my words, now that I know what I know, tomorrow morning I’m going back home to Hastings, and you can be certain it’ll be by way of Maidstone, and not Tunbridge Wells.”

  St. Ives seemed to reel at the news, and Hasbro put a supportive hand on his arm. We all gave each other a look, what with Tubby’s story of the recent horror at the Explorers Club still fresh in our minds.

  Wait!” the man said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a loved one in Heathfield, sir?”

  “His own wife,” Tubby said.

  “Good Lord, sir! You’d best get her out, and no delay.”

  “Anything more you could tell us, then?” Hasbro asked him, keen for information.

  “Well, sir,” the man said, dropping his voice again, “you didn’t hear it from me. But seeing as who you are, and that you’re worried for your poor wife, and rightly so, I’ll be straight with you. Like I said, the village is closed down tight—roads blocked, soldiers patrolling. If you go down that way by rail, as perhaps you must, you’d best get off at Uckfield and make your way to the village at Blackboys. This chap I know, my sister’s gentleman friend, I’m ashamed to say, who does some work in the sneak thief and housebreaking line when he ain’t poaching, reckons that a man could find his way into Heathfield through the forest—past the coal fire pits alongside of Blackboys there. It’s easy pickings in Heathfield with the village in an uproar, is what he told me. ‘In through the front door and out again with the swag’—them was his very words. You’ll say I should have him jailed, of course, given what I know, but that’s not my way. What a man tells me in confidence is just that, if you understand me. Now, do you know the open country around Blackboys?”

  “Tolerably well, yes,” Tubby put in. “I’ve got an uncle in the smelting way at the Buxted Foundry. Produces railway steel for the Cuckoo Line. He’s got a house there in Dicker. I’ve hunted my share of grouse in and about Blackboys.”

  “Then you know something of the place.” He nodded, as if relieved to hear it.

  “Why would this…acquaintance of yours chance going into the village at all?” I asked skeptically. “Never mind the authorities, it’s the contagion I’m thinking of.”

  “It’s a brain fever, you see. This fellow I’m talking about has fixed himself a cap out of those great heavy gloves they wear at the kilns. Lined with woven asbestos, they are—amianthus some call it. Split open and pulled down over the ears, it’ll keep out the lunacy molecules like leather keeps out the wind. If you’re in the mood to go into Heathfield, he’s the fellow you’ll be wanting to see down in Blackboys. People call him the Tipper. He’s a small man, not above so.” He held his hand waist high. The man was apparently a dwarf. “He’s not unacquainted with the Old Coach Inn, there on the High Street. If you look him up, tell him you’re a friend of Peddler Sam Burke. Give him this.” He dipped into a pocket in his coat then and pulled out a card with his name on it: “Sam ‘the Peddler’ Burke: Watches, Jewelry, and Pawn.”

  And with that he once again became the man “in the timepiece line.” He said loudly, “No one fancies a pocket watch, then? Very fine works. Austrian made.” But he was already folding up the portmanteau, knocking the legs back in, having lost interest in us. He walked off toward the ticket counter without looking back.

  “My God!” St. Ives muttered, knuckling his brow. “Here it is again. Madness springing up like a plague.”

  Tubby gave me a hard look. “Poisoned punch, forsooth!” he said.

  “Should we send to the Half Toad for our bags, sir?” Hasbro asked St. Ives, who nodded decisively.

  “If you’d like another hand,” Tubby said to Hasbro, “I’m your man. I know the way of things down there, and I’ve always got a bag packed and ready. I’ll bring my blackthorn stick, if you follow me.”

  “A generous offer, Sir. There’s a late train south—an hour from now, I believe.”

  “I’ll need half that,” Tubby said over his shoulder, already hurrying toward the street, bowling through the slow-footed like a juggernaut.

  “I’ll fetch the tickets,” I said, and went along in the direction taken by the Peddler, who had apparently purchased his own return ticket and gone about his business by then. I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have given him two shillings for one of his “Austrian-made” timepieces. His consorting with thieves didn’t recommend him, either.

  The man behind the glass sat on a high stool, reading a newspaper. He glanced up at me without expression. “I’m looking for a gent,” I told him, the idea coming into my mind at that very moment. “He might have got off the last train. Large, round head, sandy hair, red-faced. He generally dresses in oatmeal tweed, perhaps a little on the shabby side. He might have tried to sell you a pocket watch before buying a ticket to Hastings.”

  “You’re three minutes late,” he told me. “Your man’s out on the street by now. And you mean Eastbourne, and not Hastings. He bought a ticket on tonight’s train, the Beachy Head Runner.”

  “Beachy Head?” I said stupidly. “Tonight’s train?” He scowled just a little, as if I’d accused him of a lie, and so I sensibly let the matter drop. Perhaps the Peddler had meant Eastbourne by way of Hastings. Perhaps he meant anything at all. Probably he was the fabulous liar of the world, about as genuine as his timepieces.

  An hour later the four of us were bound for East Sussex on the very train that the Peddler himself had bought a ticket for, although I hadn’t seen him board. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I thought. In Eridge we would abandon our train for a seat on the aptly named Cuckoo Line, into Uckfield, where we’d strike out overland on foot toward Blackboys if it was too late to hire a coach. With any luck, the mysterious contagion would evaporate, as it evidently had at the Explorers Club, and our sojourn would amount to nothing more than wasted hours.

  I was deeply asleep, my head bumping against the window, before we were out of London.

  §

  W
hen I came awake in the dim coach, we were sitting dead still, the night outside dark and lonesome. For a moment I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there, but the sight of my sleeping companions brought me to my senses, and I sat in the lovely silence for a time and gazed out the window. I saw that I was looking out on a heath, and I could distinguish a line of trees in the distance, and a star or two in the sky, which was full of scudding clouds.

  It came into my mind that I’d soon have to find the necessary room, which was situated aft. I arose quietly and made my way down the aisle, passing into the darkness at the back of the car, and trailing one hand along the wall to steady myself, expecting at any moment that the train would start forward and pitch me onto the floor. Abruptly I ran out of wall, and my hand fell away into a void. I lurched sideways, temporarily off balance, and at once heard a shuffling noise and was abruptly aware that someone—a shadow—was standing near me, hidden by the darkness. A hand gripped my arm, I was pushed sideways so that I spun half around, and before it came into my mind to cry out, I was knocked senseless.

  Chapter 3

  The Journey South

  Jackie!” a voice said, sounding distant and dreamlike. It occurred to me that the name was my own, or had been in some dim, earlier life. Soon after I recalled that I had eyes, and I opened them and squinted up into the worried face of Tubby Frobisher, who looked down at me, holding his blackthorn stick in his hand. My first thought was that Tubby had beaten me with it, but on second thought it seemed moderately unlikely. The train was moving along now, slowly picking up speed.

  “I knocked the bugger sideways,” Tubby said to me. “Broke his wrist for him, I warrant you. But he leapt out the carriage door straightaway and disappeared. A railway thief, no doubt. The man had his weapon raised to strike you again, by God, but I put an end to his filthy caper.”

  I managed to sit up now, but reeled back against the wall, shutting my eyes at the sudden spasm of pain in my skull. On the floor beside me lay a piece of rusty iron pipe wrapped in greasy newsprint that smelled unhappily of fried cod. There was a spray of blood on the newsprint—my blood, I realized. I scrabbled weakly in my coat pocket and discovered that my watch was missing, and of course my purse with it. To put it simply, I’d been bludgeoned and robbed. By now my assailant had no doubt gone to ground in Ashdown forest through one of the common gates.

  If I could have felt anything past the pain in my head, I would have felt like a fool, a richly deserving fool. It was no secret that railway thieves booked passage on the South Eastern Railway for no other purpose than to waylay nighttime travelers at carefully chosen spots along the track. East Sussex is full of forests and empty heath, you see. There’s no point in stopping the train to give chase, or to report the incident at the next station, because there’s damn-all that anyone can do to put things right. In that part of the country, railway thievery is perhaps the safest line of work there is, unless you’re unfortunate enough to run into Tubby Frobisher and be laid out by a blackthorn stick.

  Tubby helped me back to my seat, where my companions voiced a general concern. St. Ives probed the back of my head and announced that my skull wasn’t crushed. I’d been dealt a sort of sideways blow, to my great good fortune, he said, due to my falling away from the man even as he struck me. To my mind my fortune would have been considerably improved at that moment had I been spared the entire experience.

  “What’s this now?” St. Ives asked, looking at the newsprint-wrapped pipe, which Tubby had brought away with him.

  “The weapon,” I muttered stupidly, but then I saw that he didn’t mean the length of pipe, but rather the newspaper. He held it up gingerly and unfolded it—the Brighton Evening Argus, it turned out to be, from two days past. It was the story on the front page that interested him, and he read it in silence for a time and then laid the newspaper down and looked away. “Of course,” he muttered and shook his head tiredly.

  Hasbro picked the Argus up again and said, “Might I, sir?” St. Ives nodded but said nothing. The salient bits of the remarkable story went thus: A merchant ship, the India Princess, out of Brighton, had driven up into the shallows below Newhaven and had stuck fast near where the River Ouse empties into the Channel. She was hauled free when the tide had risen the following morning, with tolerably little damage done to the hull or cargo. Virtually the entire crew had drowned or disappeared, and that was the puzzler. The ship wasn’t wrecked. There had been no storm, no foul weather. As remarkable as it might be, they had apparently leapt or fallen over the side shortly after the ship had rounded Selsey Bill, several miles from shore, the lot of them shouting and carrying on like candidates for head nutter at Colney Hatch.

  The ship’s boy, the sole known survivor of the tragedy, had been asleep, and had awakened when he heard the ruckus. He reported that a fit was even then upon him. He found himself laughing hysterically at nothing and then reeling in sudden terror when his old uncle, dead three years earlier, dressed now in knickers and wearing a fright wig, descended the companionway, grinning fearsomely. In his terror the boy had rushed straight through the apparition and up the companionway to the deck, only to see the first mate and the captain, wrapped in apparently bloody pieces of sail canvas, dancing a hornpipe on the railing. The cook was beating time on an overturned tub, wearing a swab on his head, his face garish with rouge. Other members of the crew staggered about the deck singing and groaning, tearing their hair, jigging in place to the strains of a phantom fiddler. As the boy watched, the two dancing men lost their balance and pitched straight overboard into the sea. The cook, his eyes whirling, picked up the kettle and advanced upon the boy coquettishly, mouthing insanities and beating his head with an enormous galley spoon. His nankeen trousers and shirt were stained with bloody red streaks. The boy trod backward in fear, stepped into the open hatch, and plunged to the lower deck, where he was knocked insensible.

  When he came to consciousness he found that the entire crew had disappeared, although the boats were still aboard. His own fit had passed away, and the ghost of his uncle with it. The deck was scattered with trash and overturned kegs. The cook’s tub and most of the kitchen tools were thrown about, a cleaver imbedded in the mast. Someone had painted a grinning moon-face on the mainsail, making a general mess of the deck with red paint so that it appeared as if a bloody battle had taken place. Finding that the ship was adrift, the sails flapping, the boy did his best to take her into Brighton, but was at the mercy of the winds, and couldn’t manage it alone. The fates favored him, however, because the ship ran on up the Channel, going aground on sandy bottom without disaster. He made his way into Newhaven where he reported the incident, and was immediately taken up on suspicion of having engineered the thing himself. The following morning the drowned bodies of the captain and the cook washed ashore near Littlehampton, their costumes confirming the boy’s strange tale. It was a mystery comparable to the recent case of the Mary Celeste, and the maritime authorities were at a loss to explain it.

  “Well now,” Tubby said when Hasbro had finished reading the piece. “Here’s another outbreak of lunacy—the third. To my way of thinking the third of anything smacks of a plot, unless this contagion, as they call it, is carried on the wind and weather.”

  “Yes indeed,” St. Ives muttered ambiguously, and then he disappeared down into himself again and fell silent, apparently deep in troubled thought. “A plot,” he said a moment later. “Poor Alice.” Then he said, “A word with you, Hasbro,” and the two of them huddled together and spoke in low voices, Hasbro nodding in solemn acquiescence to whatever St. Ives was telling him. I could make out little of what the Professor said beyond his asking Hasbro whether he recalled the death not long past of Lord Busby, Earl of Hampstead, or the Earl of Hamsters, as the press laughingly referred to him. The rest of the talk was mere muttering. It seemed a little thick to me that I was left out of the conversation, although Tubby didn’t apparently mind, because he was asleep.

  The train soon arrived in Eridge,
and we abandoned her for the Cuckoo line to Uckfield, all of us but Hasbro, that is. He mysteriously boarded a London-bound train without so much as a by-your-leave the moment that we climbed down onto the platform. The four of us were now three.

  “Hasbro is returning to Chingford to fetch along something that I hope we won’t require,” St. Ives said. I waited for the explanatory sentence that would surely follow, but it didn’t come. It would in the fullness of time, of course, but it was damned strange being left out of things. I was leery of playing the Grand Inquisitor, though, and anyway was too tired to speak. We had been traveling for days it seemed, with only that brief respite at the Half Toad, and the hours had heaped up into a heavy weariness. Tubby was snoring again directly we got underway, and despite the pain in my head I sank toward sleep myself, caught up in a recollection of the shocking condition of Lord Busby’s two-days-old corpse when we’d found it.

  Busby had been engaged in experiments involving the production of various rays, both visible and invisible, created by the use of large, precious stones. The stones, to the value at tens of thousands of pounds, had been stolen along with his papers and apparatus at the time of his murder. Scotland Yard suspected that he was in league with certain Prussian interests, who were financing his experiments, and St. Ives was of a like mind. The Prussians, perhaps, had simply taken what they wanted when Busby’s work had born fruit, and for his efforts had paid poor Busby in lead, as they say.

  I tell you this now because my mind is fresh, and because it has a bearing on our story, but there in the train car, at the edge of sleep, I didn’t care a brass farthing about Busby one way or the other, given that the man was a traitor, or had been setting up to become one. Take a long spoon when you sup with the devil, I say. In short, I faded from consciousness and slept the sleep of the dead until the train stopped in Uckfield well past midnight.