Hell bay, p.8
Hell Bay, page 8
As for “Annabel Lee,” one cannot go wrong when reciting Poe. I’ve always thought the man was one part hack and three parts genius. I’m certain most in the crowd had seen the poem performed before in music halls or village fetes, but it never ceases to entertain. Even Lady Alicia, whom I would consider above drawing room entertainments, applauded.
It was not until I got up to perform that I realized we had a second audience. Out in the hall most of the staff had turned the staircase into a seating area. Entertainers on this island were no doubt few and far between. A dozen footmen, maids, scullery workers, cooks, and gardeners sat with Mrs. Albans and Mrs. Tregoweth on the bottom step. Partridge stood at the foot of the stair as if willing to defend them for the impertinence of daring to show their faces at such an event. I gave him a small nod and began.
The poem was well received and I got a smile of approval from Mrs. Ashleigh, which made it all worthwhile. I could have performed a more obscure poem and done so with greater intensity and skill, but the request I had been given was to be good enough and no better. For Mrs. Ashleigh’s sake, I had attempted to fit in, not to stand out.
After the performances were done, the servants scurried away and a few minutes later a treat was brought out from the kitchen: grenadine-glazed hothouse strawberries over sponge cake, a pink perfection, served with coffee. I had two portions.
She had done it, I told myself. Philippa had distracted the entire lot of us from succumbing to thoughts of death. She had that knowledge of organizing things in such a way that it seemed natural and easy when, in fact, it was not. Then she charmed the best out of everyone while making them feel she was doing them a favor by including them.
“Do you intend to use the entire jar of cold cream, Cyrus?” Philippa asked later that evening.
Barker was scooping the contents out of a jar with a spoon. “I shall buy you an entire vat of it when we return to London, my dear.”
I picked up the empty jar and began to read the ingredients. “Olive oil, lanolin, glycerin, sperm whale oil, paraffin…”
“You mustn’t lay bare a woman’s beauty regimen, Thomas,” she said. “And just what do you intend to do with it?”
In answer, Barker crossed to the fireplace and reached up under the flue. He broke off a chunk of soot and began to crumble it into the bowl.
“You intend to go out in blackface, like a minstrel?”
“I intend to cover my face and hands with it, yes. I shall be moving about in the dark, and the two can be easily discerned.”
“What about your shirtfront?” I asked.
“I borrowed some oilcloth from Partridge to cover it with.”
Before we could protest, he tied the cloth about his throat like a scarf and began smearing the mixture all over his face.
“You look ludicrous!” Mrs. Ashleigh wailed. “Do you intend to walk through the halls looking like that?”
In response, Barker went to the window and opened it.
“Surely, you—” Philippa began, but it was too late.
Cyrus Barker had climbed out the window and was gone.
“That man!” she cried in despair.
“I’m going back to my room now,” I told her.
She crossed her arms and looked vexed. So much for good hunting.
CHAPTER TEN
I awoke in the early hours to sounds of disorder in the house. There were snatches of conversation in the hall outside my door and voices raised in concern. We were not at home, however, where we could step into the hall, so Herr Schroeder, Colonel Fraser’s man, and I dressed as quickly as possible to join the servants in the back hall. When we reached the kitchen, it was to find one of the male servants lying across the sill of the back door in a faint and people stepping over him to get in and out as if he weren’t there.
“What has happened?” I asked to anyone who would answer. “Why is this door unlocked?”
It was the housekeeper, Mrs. Tregoweth, who answered for me as she passed by with a small bucket of water and an armful of rags.
“The male servants in the bunkhouse behind us are sick. Very sick, I’m afraid. It must have been something they ate. Could you gentlemen help? It is no place for female staff.”
Without a word I took the bucket from her hand and like all the others before me stepped over the prostrate footman and hurried to the bunkhouse. Nearby another young man had collapsed in the yard near the outdoor water closet, and inside I could hear someone being violently ill. We opened the bunkhouse door and were met by an overwhelming odor of sickness. Stepping inside, we found Dr. Anstruther hard at work, while several young men moaned in agony.
“What’s going on, sir?” I asked.
“It’s poison, I think,” the doctor said. “These men had steak and mushroom pie last night as a treat, but I suspect some toadstools were picked by mistake.”
“How bad is it? Will they be all right?”
“I cannot guarantee that all will survive the night,” he murmured in my ear.
“How can I help?” I asked.
“Collect all the chamber pots you can find, and make up some hot, soapy water and some mops. See if there are any more buckets. Oh, and look for any disinfectant such as bleach borax or ammonia.”
“Yes, sir!” I said. Schroeder and I were glad of the charge to get out of the sour stench of the bunkhouse. In every corner the men were vomiting, their skin pale and sweaty, their eyes rolling in their heads, barely conscious of their surroundings. The butler had removed his jacket and was mopping up the mess from the floor with a determined look on his face. We went back into the house to the kitchen.
Mrs. Albans was pumping water into a pot, to be set on the stove when it was full. The tears were running down her raw face. As gently as I could, I pulled her out of the way and began working the pump myself, while Schroeder went in search of chamber pots.
“Beth sydd o’i le?” I asked her in Welsh, for surely with a name like Albans we were from the same country. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been picking mushrooms since I was a tweeny,” she said in our native tongue. “I recognize a toadstool when I see one! I don’t know how this happened. I was very careful. I always am!”
“It’s awfully easy to confuse the death cap with a normal mushroom,” I said.
“Nae ydy!” she cried indignantly. “Not to me! Isn’t my steak and mushroom pie a blue-ribbon winner at the agricultural fair? Death caps are small. I only picked big ones, to be certain!”
I wanted to state the obvious, that she was in her sixties and might need spectacles, but she was probably already feeling enough guilt from what had occurred. If one of the boys died, she might take to her bed in grief.
“The men are young and strong,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be fine in a couple of days.”
“I made it for them as a treat, for all the extra work required of them this week. You know young men. You’re one yourself. They’re always hungry, and they’ve always been partial to my meat pies.”
“Of course,” I said, letting her talk. Like the young men in the yard, she had to get everything out of her system if she were going to begin to heal.
The tears were dripping off her pudgy face into the pot. I began filling the stove with more wood, knowing this tragedy would keep us occupied for hours. I’d read a few books on poisons on the Guv’s orders. Toadstool poisoning was a particularly nasty and protracted way to die.
I looked up and noticed we were being watched by the housekeeper. I nodded to her to indicate I was trying to keep Mrs. Albans calm. She smiled and nodded in return and went on with her duties. I decided to try a different tack.
“Dr. Anstruther’s a good chap. I’m sure he’s got this matter in hand. But won’t Her Ladyship and the French ambassador be wanting their breakfast soon?”
Her hands went to her face. Her grief had made her forget her normal duties. Immediately she went to the larder and brought out a basket of eggs and a side of bacon. I reached up for the pans hanging overhead and began pulling them down.
“Sarey!” she bellowed to one of the kitchen staff. I left her to get on with her work.
I came upon Cyrus Barker in the yard tending to the fellow I had first encountered in the doorway. The Guv was dressed but without his collar and tie and the coal had been removed from his face. He held the young man by the scruff of the neck as he vomited into a bucket between his legs. There was a large blue bottle in the Guv’s hand. I recognized it. It was ipecac.
“The more poison he gets rid of, the less he will ingest,” he explained.
“The cook claims she can tell a death cap from an edible mushroom. She never made such a mistake.”
“She would if it was already chopped up and added to the other mushrooms,” Barker said.
“The killer—”
“He must have brought the mushrooms he picked himself into the house. I doubt he knew it would be fed to the stable boys and other servants. More likely, he hoped to poison the entire house party.”
“Who is this blasted fellow, and what does he have against this house?” I wondered aloud.
“I wish I had an answer for you. The only thing I know for sure is that he is an excellent marksman, and knows a toadstool from less dangerous fungi.”
“Someone local who knows the island, perhaps? A former employee? He knew just where to go for the toadstools.”
“Perhaps. That’s it, young fellow. You purge that gall from your system!”
The latter was addressed to the young man who was being sick again. If the sheer volume of matter he was expelling was any indication, he would survive the ordeal.
“If this chap had not crawled to the back door and alerted everyone, his bunkmates might have all died in the it beds,” I said.
“Another work of the assassin,” Barker said.
“Assassin,” I said, shaking my head.
“You believe there is no such thing?”
“No, I don’t. Not as an occupation. Maybe in one of Burton’s Arabian Nights tales, but not on an island half an hour’s ferry trip off the coast of England.”
“Not everyone in England is English or lives by our values. Some people grew up in far different circumstances.”
I thought of Barker, growing up as a street urchin in Foochow and traveling all over the China seas before coming to England. Then I thought of Cesar Rojas. England must be a very different place than Rio de Janeiro or wherever it was he came from.
“Perhaps,” I said, which meant “you’re probably right but I don’t feel like surrendering the argument at the moment.”
“Water,” the poor lad beside Barker croaked. I immediately ran into the kitchen and fetched some. By then eggs and bacon and kidneys were sizzling in pans and toast was cooking on the fire, and there was a full staff alongside Mrs. Albans preparing the meal. One would think it was any other day.
I took the water out and he drank it, then was violently ill again because of it. He was on the mend, however, and so too were some of his comrades. There was a good deal of work to be done yet. Over the next couple of hours we mopped and disinfected the bunkhouse, doused every lad in buckets of water, washed them down, dressed them in clean nightshirts, burned the old ones, changed their bedding, opened all the bunkhouse windows, and even brought in a bouquet of fresh flowers from the garden, which the bunkhouse had never seen before.
Then and only then were the women, highborn and low, allowed in to minister to the sick men after we were certain they were out of the shooter’s sights. Their patients were still feverish and perspiring freely. Lady Hargrave, still reeling from the death of her husband the day before, applied cold compresses to their foreheads. Dr. Anstruther hovered about from patient to patient with the aid of his daughters. He still had concerns over two of the servants, whose condition was very grave. Barker and I gathered and emptied the last of the buckets over the side of the cliff, then carried them down some narrow steps to be washed in the sea. There are no duties too humble for anyone when a crisis occurs. When we were done, we carried the cleansed buckets up again.
Eventually, we sat ourselves in the grass by the hut and leaned against the clapboards, exhausted.
“He is improvising,” he said.
“The assassin?”
“Aye. He accurately assassinated Lord Hargrave, but this time he did not succeed. There were not enough toadstools to kill his victims, and the young men were not his intended targets. However, he is creative. He is changing his tactics. I wonder what he might try next.”
We went into breakfast, which was served at nearly ten due to the crisis. There were no footmen present to serve, but I noticed that the coffee was being replaced with a new silver carafe by a maid. The butler, Partridge, had looked grim in the hut, but now his eyes looked glazed. No doubt he was trying to work out how to replace a roomful of male servants. His eyes fell on me. I turned my attention to the conversation.
“We can’t just sit here all day and wait for the blighter to come kill us,” Colonel Fraser was saying. “We have to go out and track him down, successfully this time.”
“Gentlemen, I will put three questions to you. First of all, how did His Lordship come to be shot with his own rifle?”
“My word,” the Colonel muttered. “His own gun! This is intolerable.”
“My second question is, how did the killer know to bring special ammunition for a rifle he knew would already be waiting here for him?
“And lastly, how did the assassin break into a locked cabinet?”
“Where is the key kept?” the French ambassador asked.
“In my nightstand drawer, sir, unless His Lordship specifically requested it,” Partridge said, looking rather deflated. “I haven’t used it since His Lordship attended a hunting party last year.”
“This fellow,” Gascoigne said, “he comes and goes like a ghost. He poisons the staff, he shoots my old friend, he holds us all hostage. It’s almost as if…”
“As if?” Barker repeated.
“As if everything were arranged for him.”
“Aye. It is time we noted who comes and goes on this island. Thomas?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Please prepare a list of every person here, male or female, both guest and servant.”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I noted that Barker was sitting in that way he has when he has been up all night, which occurs often enough for me to recognize. He leans forward just slightly with his chin down, staring over the top of his glasses, totally relaxed. His body uses the smallest amount of energy, enough to keep him upright. Beside him Mrs. Ashleigh was conversing with young Lady Alicia, and I could not be sure whether she noticed the change or not. There were no seats assigned for breakfast so I had filled my plate with eggs, bacon, and black pudding and sat beside him. I hoped he would tell me about his night excursion in his own good time.
“The man’s got himself a hidey-hole on this island, and no mistake,” he finally said to me. “I searched for him for hours late last night. He made no fire. My estimation of him has been decidedly elevated. This is not a random person with a grievance, in my opinion. It is either someone who has made a long and carefully worked out plan or an actual paid killer of some kind, someone with a unique set of skills contracted to come here and eliminate some or all of us.”
“So which is it?” I asked. “All of us?”
“No, or he’d have shot you and Cesar both last night.”
“Does it change matters much if he’s highly trained?”
“I suppose not, but it makes our duty more difficult.”
“Sir, what duty do you mean precisely? I mean which one in particular?”
“We were hired not necessarily to bodyguard Lord Hargrave, but the ambassador. His Lordship was not aware of any plot against himself, although looking in hindsight, there was one.”
“Are you certain it wasn’t a case of mistaken identity? This paid assassin had never clapped eyes on the two men before and mistook one for the other?”
“Perhaps. Stranger things have occurred. Chance is a factor too often discounted. But I doubt it. He is too professional. More so than I. You see, I was slapdash in our contract. Certainly, I was to guard the ambassador, but what of our client? And are we simply to let everyone else on the island perish? Would the ambassador find that morally acceptable?”
“That’s just semantics,” I said.
“It is? Would it hold in a court of law? Lad, we have failed. I have failed. Lord Hargrave is dead.”
“Yes, but you can’t be held responsible for that. You checked the island—”
“I am responsible, Thomas, and so are you. We can no longer hold up our heads among our peers and say that we never lost a client. Someone, in fact someone important, is dead because we failed. I don’t imagine Mr. Gascoigne is much impressed with the cleverness of the common English detective at the moment.”
“We had no reason to think anyone was on the island.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Sometimes people fail.”
Barker thumped the table with his fist, making every utensil jump.
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
I looked up. All eyes in the room were upon us.
“We’ll get him, sir,” I whispered. “Professional or otherwise.”
“We will,” he muttered. “I will accept nothing less.”
Cyrus Barker left me in charge of the house and led a second expedition around the island with most of the men. They were heavily armed. It was important to be seen doing something. Under normal circumstances he would wait out the assassin until he came in on his own or made a mistake, but now we were being watched and graded.
They returned a little the worse for wear. One of the footmen had stepped into a fox trap that was last seen leaning against the fireplace in the bunkhouse. According to Barker it had been well concealed. He’d have blundered into it himself if he had been walking in that direction. I began to be convinced that Lord Hargrave’s killer was an individual with a few uncommon skills.
