The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs (9 page)

The blow that felled Tubby was the last that the keeper would strike, for as soon as Tubby no longer stood in the way, Uncle Gilbert stepped forward and skewered the man in the shoulder, wrenching out the sword and drawing it back, watching the belaying pin clatter to the paving stones. The keeper’s face had a stupefied look on it, his doom writ plainly on Gilbert’s face.

“Greetings from Captain Sawney!” the old man shouted, and swung the sword at the keeper’s neck, lunging forward to throw his vast weight into the blow. But the keeper wisely dropped to the stones, sitting down and rolling sideways, and the sword passed harmlessly through the air, spinning Uncle Gilbert half around. The keeper scrambled away crablike, lurching to his feet and grasping his shoulder, backing away onto the meadow and turning to run before the old man was after him again.

It was then that Hasbro loomed up out of the fog, holding the pistol. Tubby was just then coming round, his face awash with gore, as was Uncle Gilbert’s, who stood there panting for breath, his chest heaving with exertion. After a moment he walked the several steps to the fallen sheath and once again turned his sword into a cane. Tubby heaved himself up with an effort, and they made their way to the cottage, the door standing open now.

“By God someone’s come out of here while we were busy,” Tubby said. “He must have been hidden by this bloody fog.”

“Perhaps,” replied Hasbro, who looked into the interior warily, his pistol at the ready as they entered. It was a single, open room, with a fireplace dead center in the opposite wall, burned-down logs still aglow. A bedchamber stood off to the side, built as an open, lean-to closet with a curtain half drawn across it and a long cord hanging down alongside to tie it back. The door of a privy opened into a second closet, the door ajar, revealing that the small room was empty. There was a narrow dining table with a pair of chairs standing beneath a window looking east, an upholstered chair near the hearth, and a sideboard with plates and cups that stood beside an iron stove. A bowl and pitcher sat on a three-legged table, with a towel hanging alongside. Shoved into a corner sat several open wooden crates stuffed with excelsior. Nondescript pieces of brass and iron poked out of the stuffing.

“There’s your evidence,” said Uncle Gilbert nodding at the crates. “Our man here is an assassin, or I’m King George.”

Hasbro stepped across to the curtain that half-hid the bedchamber, drawing it back slowly, his pistol at the ready. No one was there. Someone had been in the cottage earlier, but whoever it was had fled like a coward rather than to take the keeper’s side in the battle.

“Take a seat in that chair, my good fellow,” Tubby said, gesturing at the stuffed chair with his blackthorn. The keeper sat down heavily, still holding his shoulder, although there was no longer any apparent flow of blood.

Hasbro put away his pistol in order to take a look into the top crate, which yielded short lengths of glass and metal pipe of various dimensions and what appeared to be a three-sided mirror that filled the palm of his hand. The words “Exeter Fabricators” were burned into the wooden slats of the crate.

“That’s as has to do with the light up topside,” the keeper said, jerking his head upward. “Property of the Crown.”

“Property of Lord Busby if you ask me,” Uncle Gilbert said. “But we’ll get to the bottom of it in due course.”

Hasbro nodded. “Indeed,” he said. “I’ll just be off, then, if you gentlemen have everything in order. My companions will be wondering what I’m about. You’ll want to take a look at the light, perhaps? If the device is still there, you’ll do well to dismantle it, but I don’t hold out much hope. The rendezvous, then?”

“Just so,” Tubby said. “We’ll be out of the way when the time comes.”

With that Hasbro stepped through the door and disappeared into the mist.

Uncle Gilbert looked out after him for a moment and then closed the door quietly. “We both need a swab, Tubby,” he said, and he walked to the three-legged table, poured water into the basin, and dipped the towel into the water, wiping the drying blood off his face while peering into a mirror that hung on the wall. Tubby stood by, ready to cave in the keeper’s skull with the blackthorn if the man invited it. Then they traded places and Tubby washed himself, the keeper looking back and forth nervously, first at one and then the other.

“Do you mind if a man has a pipe of tobacco?” he asked.

“Which man would that be?” Uncle Gilbert said to him. “There are only two of us here, and neither of us has the habit.”

The keeper looked at him blankly. “I just thought I might…”

“Ah!” Uncle Gilbert said, leaning heavily on his cane. “Your use of the word ‘man’ confounded me. But I suppose that even a dull-witted reptile like yourself might have learned to stuff a pipe. By all means, then.”

The keeper removed a briar from his coat pocket, all the while looking nervously at Uncle Gilbert. The old man’s face was a grimacing mask as he watched the keeper load tobacco into the bowl and tamp it down with a ten penny nail, setting the pipe between his teeth and producing a Lucifer match from his vest. He lit the match on his shoe sole and put it to his pipe. Uncle Gilbert whipped the sword cane upward then, knocking the pipe out of the man’s mouth. It clattered away onto the floor, spinning to a stop near Tubby’s foot. Tubby picked up his blackthorn and smashed the heavy end against the pipe, shattering the bowl into pieces and cracking off the stem. “It’ll draw like a chimney now,” Tubby said, nodding heartily and hanging the towel on its hook.

“Knock him into the Channel if he moves,” Uncle Gilbert said. With that he strode toward the bedchamber, unsheathed his sword, and hacked through the cords that hung next to the curtain. He returned with the pieces and set about tying the keeper into the chair, the man dead silent, his eyes moving from Tubby to Uncle Gilbert and back again, full of loathing and fear.

“Be a good lad and stoke up that fire, Tubby,” Uncle Gilbert said heartily. “We’ll want it as hot as the hinges of Hades after we’ve had a look upstairs at that light. We’ll see whether our fellow here can sing.” He grinned into the keeper’s face. Tubby piled split logs onto the dog grate and the fire swept up around it, throwing sparks up the chimney. The two men filed out through the door onto the meadow again, hurrying around to the lighthouse door and stepping inside the vestibule.

Several more of Busby’s crates lay on the floor, empty but for tangles of excelsior. The spiral stairs wound away upward, and the two set out, climbing slowly, Uncle Gilbert wheezing but coming along manfully. The great lights burned with good lengths of wick, the oil recently topped off. There was a broad balcony that ran around the outside, and they stepped out onto it, seeing immediately that a platform had been set up there in the open air, bolted to the railing for the sake of stability. Atop the platform stood what appeared to be a large and very finely calibrated compass, vast as a barrow wheel, with a rotating face. There was a second platform fixed above it, studded with bolts and with a confusion of gears and a crank for the purpose of tilting and swiveling. The second platform was empty. But the debris in the crates downstairs had made the thing clear: Busby’s ray-producing lamp had almost certainly been moored to this second platform, where it could be aimed like a precisely-manipulated cannon.

They descended the stairs and went out onto the meadow again, the spring sun having melted away most of the fog now. The morning was wearing on. Uncle Gilbert threw the cottage door open in order to have a telling effect on the lighthouse keeper, who back pedaled with his feet, as if to scurry out of range.

“Thrust that poker into the fire, Tubby!” Uncle Gilbert cried. “We’ll melt his eyeballs out like jellies, the lying dog!” He laughed hard into the keeper’s face, then stood back and regarded him through squinted eyes. “Say your prayers, my man, if you have any to say. It was you who murdered Captain Sawney. You’ll admit it before we’re done with you.”

“Captain bloody
Sawney
?” the man said. “I didn’t know the man. You’re daft!”

“He was your predecessor, you lying toad!” Uncle Gilbert said. “The man you threw down the cliff.”

“
Down the cliff?
I was sent out by Trinity House, by God! I was second man at the Dover light, and they sent an agent up from Eastbourne to fetch me. I was told that Cap’n Sawney had come a purler off the top of the Head, and I was filling in, temporary like, till I passed the trial. I swear on my old mother’s grave!”

“What’s your name, then?” Uncle Gilbert asked, abruptly pleasant and smiling.

“Stoddard. Billy Stoddard, your honor.”

“Billy, is it? Sounds like a name for one of the lads, doesn’t it? Fancy a murderer with a pleasant name like Billy. Scarcely stands to reason. How’s that poker coming along, Nephew? Hot?”

“Red hot, I should think,” Tubby said, holding up the glowing iron.

“Isn’t that grand! We’ll start with his eyeballs then. He’s got two of them. When the first one bursts it’ll give him a chance to consider his ways, like the Old Book advises. Ever see a sheep’s eyeball burst when the head’s on the boil, Billy?”

The man sat gaping at him.

“It swells up first, you see, to twice the size. Then it pops right out of the socket and splits open like a banger on a griddle. The French are fond of an eyeball. They eat them with periwinkle forks. I’m told that a well-turned sheep’s eyeball has the consistency of mayonnaise, but a distinctly muttony flavor, which doesn’t surprise one. I’ll take it now, nephew, before it cools down. We’ll want the full sizzle.”

Tubby handed it over gingerly, more than slightly ill at ease. Uncle Gilbert seemed to have come unhinged—an unfortunate state of affairs for the keeper.

“Clutch a handful of his hair, Tubby, and hold fast,” the old man said. “He’ll make a mighty by-God effort to fly when the poker slides in past the eyeball. It’ll take all your strength. If he pulls away, though, it’ll fry his brainpan, and he’ll be no good to us nor anyone else, the poor sod.”

Tubby did as he was told. If Uncle Gilbert had gone off his chump and actually meant to burn the man’s eyes out, he would pull the keeper over backward in the chair….

Squinting at the smoking end of the poker, the old man inched it toward the keeper’s face, regarding him with a wide-eyed, sideways stare as if concentrating utterly on his task. “Hold him still now!” he cried.

Tubby held on tightly, bracing the toe of his boot against the chair leg.

The keeper shut his eyes tight and cringed away as best he could. “It’s better to save the eyelid, Billy,” Uncle Gilbert shouted into his face. “But if you don’t care for it, it’s not my lookout. Latch on, now, Tubby! His time has come!”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
the keeper shouted, and then began to gag, his head rotating on his neck as if he were augering a hole in the sky.

“I believe he’s swallowed his tongue,” Uncle Gilbert said matter-of-factly. He handed the poker to Tubby with instructions to put it back into the fire. The keeper looked up now, one eye open, gasping for air. “Now, my man, what do you know of the death of Captain Sawney? Mark me well, you’ll by-God tell us or you’ll go out eyeless onto the Downs like a beggar man!”

“Not a bloody damned thing, mate,” the keeper gasped out. “I swear to you. They told me that he’d gone off the top of Beachy Head. Trinity House give me a trial. Half a year at half keeper’s pay and a tight-knit little cottage—better than second man at Dover, says I, and down I come with my kit.”

“And yet here you are tied into a chair, Billy, close as a toucher to losing your eyeballs and the good Lord knows what all else. You assaulted the two of us on the porch outside when we asked you a civil question, and you’ve got these wooden crates full of Lord Busby’s goods. It doesn’t stand to reason that you’re innocent, Billy.”

“
Lord Busby!
I don’t know him neither. And they ain’t mine, them crates. Them others brought that trash round, don’t you see? Them damned scientists. They set up shop up in the lighthouse. They give me a few quid, maybe, to watch out, but murder…? I swear to God it ain’t in me to kill a man.”

“You gave it a try not long back when you laid us both out with that belaying pin,” Uncle Gilbert said.

“You was a-beating of me!”

“Who was in the cottage, then?” Tubby asked.

“A bloke. Just a bloke. One of them as I told you.”

“What sort of bloke? What’s his name? Quick-like!”

“The Tipper they call him. He’s a man does odd jobs for the others.”

“Which others would that be, Billy?” Uncle Gilbert asked.

“There’s three that I knows of besides the Doctor, him what set up the device.”

“The Doctor is it?” asked Tubby. “The Doctor came and went? Left you to mind the shop?”

“Just so. Past few days.”

“They must be bivouacked somewhere nearby then.”

“Eastbourne, I’d think…” the keeper started to say, but Uncle Gilbert shook his head into the man’s face to stop him.

“It won’t do, Billy. They didn’t flog up and down from Eastbourne. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t call it a
damned
lie that you’re telling us, but it’s some such.” He shook his head tiredly. “Well, as the poet said, red-hot pokers doth make falsettos of us all.”

“He’ll
do
for me, don’t you see!”

“
Who
will, Billy?”

“
The bleeding Doctor
. You don’t know him. I can see that. If you knew him you wouldn’t be using me so. You’d ken what I’m up against.”

“I ken it well,” Uncle Gilbert said. “I can see it with my own eyes. You’re tied into a chair and I’m about to burn your deadlights out. What’s not to ken? But you’ve already peached on the Doctor, don’t you see, Billy? He’ll know you’ve been a-talking with us. There’s precious little the Doctor doesn’t know. If I were you I’d say what
I
know and skedaddle. They’re always looking for hands on the docks in Eastbourne. A two-year cruise might answer. Difficult for a blind man to find a berth, though….”

“By God that’s
just
what I’ll do,” the keeper cried. “I don’t half like this work, and I don’t half like the Doctor. Ask me a question and I’ll tell you fair, but I didn’t kill no Captain Sawney.”