Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (37 page)

 
          
 
Vaguely, she looked in the child's direction.
"Not so sick as all that."

 
          
 
"Far sicker than you realize. In two
weeks he'll be dead unless we do something for him."

 
          
 
"Who the devil are you?" she asked,
finally closing the door and lighting a lantern on the sideboard. The room was
suddenly illuminated with a yellow glow, and a curl of dirty smoke rose toward
a black smudge on the ceiling.
"Dead?"

 
          
 
"I'm a friend of your husband's," he
lied, the notion coming to him out of the blue. "I promised him I'd come
round now and then to check on the boy. Three times I've been here, and each
time there was no one to answer my knock, so this time I let myself in by the
window. I'm a doctor, ma'am, and I tell you the boy will die."

 
          
 
At the mention of her husband, the woman
slumped into a chair at the table, burying her face in her hands. She remained
so for a moment, then steeled herself and looked up at him, some of the old
anger rekindled in her eyes. "What is it that you want?" she asked. "Have
your say and get out."

 
          
 
"This elixir," he said, setting to
work on the child, "is our only hope of curing him." The boy awoke
just then, recoiling in surprise when he saw St. Ives huddled over him.

 
          
 
"It's all right, lamby," his mother
said, kneeling beside him and petting his lank hair. "This man is a doctor
and a friend of your father's."

 
          
 
At the mention of this, the child cast St.
Ives such a glance of loathing and repugnance that St. Ives nearly toppled over
backward from the force of it. The complications of human misery were more than
he could fathom. "Do you have a cup?" he asked the mother, who
fetched down the tumbler from the sideboard—the same tumbler that St. Ives, a
week from now, would use to . . .

 
          
 
What? He reeled momentarily from a vertigo
that was the result of sudden mental confusion.

 
          
 
"Careful!" the woman said to him,
taking the half-filled tumbler away.

 
          
 
"Yes," he said. "Have him drink
it down. All of it."

 
          
 
"What about the rest of it?" she
asked. "A horse couldn't drink the whole jar."

 
          
 
"Two of these glasses full a day until
the entire lot's drunk off. It must be done this way if you want the boy to
live."

 
          
 
She looked at him curiously, hesitating for a
moment, as if to say that life wasn't worth so much, perhaps, as St. Ives
thought it was. "Right you are," she said finally, returning the
glass to the sideboard. "Go back to sleep now, lamby," she said to
the boy, who pulled the blanket over his head and faced the wall again. She patted
her hair, as if waiting now for St. Ives to suggest something further, as if
she still held out hope that he might be worth something more to her than the
half crown she had lost along with the sailor.

 
          
 
"Well," he said awkwardly, stepping
toward the window. "I'll just ..." He looked down at the jar again.
In his haste to leave he had nearly forgotten it. Now he was relieved to see
it, if only to have something to say. "This has to be kept cold. My advice
is to leave it on the roof, outside the window."

 
          
 
In truth, the room itself was nearly cold
enough to have done the trick. It was a good excuse to swing the window open
and step through it, though. Hurrying, he nearly fell out onto the slates. He
stood up, brushing at his knees, and leaned in at the window.

 
          
 
"Leaving by way of the roof?" she
asked, making it sound as if she had been insulted. It was clear to her now
that this was just what St. Ives was doing. He wasn't interested in what she
had to sell. He had chased off the sailor, and to what end? Now she would have
to go down into the street again . . . "Stairs aren't good enough for
you?" she asked, raising her voice. "Don't want to be seen coming
down from the room of a whore? Precious bloody doctor ..."

 
          
 
He nodded weakly, then checked himself and
shook his head instead.
"My . . . carriage."

 
          
 
"On the roof, is it?"

 
          
 
"Yes. I mean to say . . ." He
hesitated, stammering. "What I meant to say was that there was the matter
of the money."

 
          
 
"To hell with your
filthy money.
I wouldn't take it if I were dying. Lord it over someone
else. If the boy gets well, I'll thank you for it. But you can bloody damn well
leave and take your money with you."

 
          
 
"It's not my money, madam, I assure you.
Your husband and I wagered a small sum four years back. I've owed him this, with
interest. "St. Ives pulled out the purse he'd taken from his study in
Harrogate
, full of money that would no doubt mystify
her. She would make use of it, though. Here goes another twenty, he thought,
handing it in to her. She paused just a moment before snatching it out of his
hand. It would buy a lot of gin, anyway . . . Ah
well,
he would win it back from Fleming someday in the hazy future. Time and chance,
after all . . .

 
          
 
He tipped his hat and walked away across the
roof, having nothing further to say. He would trust to fate. He climbed in
through the hatch and calibrated the instruments, his head nearly empty of
thought. Then he realized that during the entire exchange in the room he had
never once associated the sick child with Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. There seemed to
be no earthly connection between the two.
Even the look on
the child's face at the mention of his father—a shadow so deep and dark that it
belied the child's age.
Well ... it didn't bear thinking about, did it?

 
          
 
As he switched on Lord Kelvin's machine, he
glanced out one last time through the porthole. There was the woman, holding
the purse, staring out through the open window with a look of absolute and
utter amazement on her face. Then, along with the rest of the world, she
vanished, and he found himself hurtling up the dark well of time, her face
merely an afterimage on the back of his eyelids.

 
          
 
THERE WAS ONE more task ahead of him before
the end. He would pay a visit to Mrs. Langley. Into his head came the vision of
her stumping across the grass toward the silo, ready, on his behalf, to beat
men into puddings with her rolling pin. He wondered suddenly how it was that
virtues seemed to come so easily to chosen people, while other people had to
work like dogs just to hold on to the few little scraps they had.

 
          
 
He reappeared directly outside his study this
time, on the lawn, and he sat for a moment in the time machine, giving himself
a rest. The silo, right now, contained its own past-time version of the
bathyscaphe, which would right at that moment be in the process of itself
becoming incorporeal. As his future-self had pointed out in the nastily written
note, it wouldn't do to drop straight into the middle of it.

 
          
 
He sat for a moment orienting
himself
in time. Soon, within the next couple of hours, his
past-time self would wander shoeless over to Lord Kelvin's summerhouse and
would hit upon the final bit of information he would need to make the machine
work. But right now, his past-time self was disintegrating into atoms, crawling
unhappily toward the window. Well, it couldn't be helped. If his past-time self
was irritated at this little visit, then he was a numbskull. It was his own
damned fault, treating Mrs. Langley as if she were a serf.

 
          
 
After another few moments, he climbed out onto
the ground, nervously keeping an eye open for Parsons even though he knew from
experience that he would easily accomplish his task and be gone before Parsons
came snooping around. He checked his pocket watch, calculating the minutes he
had to spare,
then
climbed in through the window. He
couldn't bring himself to look at the desk. It was a mess of broken stuff from
when he'd hammered everything with the elephant.

 
          
 
Suddenly he staggered and nearly fell. A wave
of vertigo passed over him, and he braced himself against the back of a chair,
waiting for it to subside. For a moment he was certain what it meant—that one
of his future-time selves was paying him a
visit, that
in a moment there would be two invisible St. Iveses lying about the room. The
time machine would sit on the lawn unguarded, except that it, too, would
disappear. The whole idea of it enraged him.
Of all the
stupid . . .

 
          
 
But that wasn't it. The vertigo passed. His
skin remained opaque. He didn't disappear at all. This was something else.
Something was wrong with his mind, as if bits of it were being effaced. It
struck him suddenly that his memory was faulty. Expanses of it were dissipating
like steam. Vaguely, he remembered having gone to Limehouse twice, but he
couldn't remember why. The events of the last few hours—the trip to
Oxford
, then back to Limehouse to dose the
child—those were clear to him. But what did he even mean by thinking, ''back to
Limehouse"? Had he been there twice?

 
          
 
Now for an instant it seemed as if he had,
except that one of his visits had the confused quality of a half-forgotten
dream that was fading even as he tried desperately to hold on to it. Fragments
of it came to him—the smell of the sick child's room, the sensation of treading
on the sleeping form, the cold tumbler pressed against his ear.

 
          
 
All this, though, was swept away again by an
ocean of memories that were at once new to him and yet seemed always to have
been part of him. These new memories were roiled up and stormy, half-hidden by
the spindrift of competing, but fading, recollections that floated and bobbed
on this ocean like pieces of disconnected flotsam going out with the tide: the
tumbler, the candle, his stepping across to open a heavy volume lying on a
decrepit table. Beyond, bobbing on the horizon, were a million more odds and
ends of memory, already too distant to recognize. For a moment he was neither
here nor there, neither past nor present, and the storm tossed in his head.
Then the sea began to calm and authentic memory took shape, shuffling itself
into order, solid and real and full.

 
          
 
Those bits of old flotsam still floated atop
it, though, half submerged; he could still make a few of them out, and he knew
that soon they would sink forever. Frantically, he searched the desk for a pen
and ink. Then, finding them, he began to write. He forced himself to recall the
hard, cold base of the tumbler against his ear. And with that, the memory of
his first past-time trip to Limehouse ghosted up once again like a feebly
collapsing wave, a confused smattering of images and half-dismantled thoughts.
The pen scratched across the paper. He barely breathed.

 
          
 
Then, abruptly, it was gone again, whirled
away. The very idea of the tumbler against his ear vanished from his head.
Weirdly, he could recall that the image of a tumbler had meant something to him
only seconds ago; he even knew what tumbler it was that his mind still grappled
with. He could picture it clearly. But now it was half full of beef broth, and
the mother was feeding it to her sick child, calling him pet names.

 
          
 
Hurriedly, he read over the notes he had
scrawled onto the paper—fragments of memory written out in half sentences.
"Woman in bed, snoring.
Stepping on child.
Child nauseated, feverish.
Pneumococcal meningitis
diagnosed.
Child near death.
Inflamed meninges cause
spinal deformity; hence Nar-bondo the hunchback?
Left coat,
money on table.
Watch for Parsons snooping along the window ..."
There was more of the same,
then
the writing died out.
What did it all mean? He no longer knew. It was all fiction to him. It had no
reality at all. What coat? He was wearing his coat—or what would become his
coat, anyway.
Hunchback?
Narbondo a
hunchback?
He cast around in his mind, trying to make sense of it all.
Narbondo was not a hunchback. And why would Parsons come snooping along the
window? Parsons was no stranger at the manor, not since Lord Kelvin had
discovered that St. Ives possessed the machine. Parsons was petitioning him
daily to give it up.