The Angel of Highgate

35 THE STORM BREAKS

A late afternoon of turmoiled weather.

It was only four p.m., yet a weird twilight came and went. At times bright sunshine cast sharp-edged shadows. Minutes later, the world dimmed and gusting winds snapped the Union flags flying above Trafalgar Square. On the far horizon, a dark armada of towering storm clouds sailed toward London, threatening violence to come. The gloom, slowly suffocating the dying day, matched Thraxton’s mood. After the wedding, he had dropped Aurelia at her home and then driven the brougham to Victoria Station. Here, he had said his last goodbyes to Algernon and his new bride before they vanished in a cloud of white steam as the Dover train thundered from the station.

Now Thraxton stared through stray raindrops streaking the windows of his carriage, his fingers restlessly twisting and untwisting the phoenix head of his walking stick as the blue brougham trundled through London traffic. By the time the carriage turned into Soho Square, the lamplighters were already making their rounds. When the brougham clattered to a halt outside Aurelia’s house the front door yawned wide and then Robert Greenley staggered out, his clothing disheveled, his eyes squeezed tight, face contorted with pain.

Thraxton sprang from the brougham and ran to him.

“Mister Greenley?”

“The doctor! A scoundrel. An imposter. He has Aurelia! You must stop him!”

Puzzled, Thraxton looked around just in time to see a tall man bundle Aurelia into a hansom cab. The man jumped aboard and threw a retreating glance over his shoulder — his eye fixing upon Thraxton. He had on a white top hat and rose-colored pince-nez spectacles. Thraxton remembered seeing that face before.

Wimbledon Common.

Mist-shrouded fields.

The duel.

The confrontation with Greenley. The doctor had been there, also.

The world slowed and froze. The cries of costermongers, the rattle of traffic in the streets drained into silence. The man stared at Thraxton, the lenses of the rose-tinted pince-nez glowing red in the flickering gas light. A voice spoke in his ears, and Thraxton could not tell if he heard it or merely remembered the words:

Death will not be mocked, nor sneered at. And there are many doors death can enter by… as you will learn at your cost.

The brakes released and the world lurched forward, set in motion once again. Sound surged back into Thraxton’s ears with a rush.

He ran to his waiting brougham and vaulted onto the driver’s seat next to his servant. “Harold! Quickly, after the cab!”

Harold looked flummoxed, but cracked the whip over the horses’ heads. The carriage lurched away, almost colliding with a goods wagon loaded with beer barrels. The driver screamed a mouthful of Billingsgate and shook his fist at them. Thraxton ignored him, straining through the failing light to keep his eyes affixed to the hansom. Traffic was heavy and wagons and carriages stretched as far as the eye could see. Still, through Harold’s skilled driving and judicious use of the whip, weaving wildly past slower carriages, they hove within a dozen lengths of the black cab. But as the traffic squeezed beneath a railway bridge, a flock of sheep being driven to Smithfield Market flooded the roadway, stopping the traffic ahead of them, while the hansom they were pursuing managed to slip through.

“Damn and bloody blast!” Thraxton yelled and jumped down. He threw a desperate look up at his servant. “Harold, return to Mister Greenley’s house. Take him to the nearest police station.”

“What will you do, sir?”

“Follow on foot and hope the hansom will also be held up.”

Thraxton left the stalled brougham and dashed on ahead, running pell-mell through the frozen traffic. He reached the milling flock and barged his way through the mindless press of baaing sheep. As he ran beneath the railway bridge a train roared overhead, showering soot and fiery cinders on everything below. He plunged out of the gloom of the bridge and was just in time to see the hansom turn onto Wellington Street.

He knew instantly where it was headed — the River Thames.

Minutes later, he arrived at Waterloo Bridge, breathless, sweat salting his eyes. He was in luck: it looked as though every carriage, brougham, omnibus and horse cart in London was trying to squeeze across the bridge. Traffic in both directions was at a standstill. He spotted the hansom cab, snarled with the rest and ran up to it, snatching the door open.

Empty.

“You there, driver!” Thraxton shouted up. “You had a fare, a man in a white top hat and a young lady. Where did they go?”

The cab driver pushed his bowler onto the back of his head.

“Got off at the steps, sir. Just before the bridge. Looked like they was headin’ for the steamer dock.”

At that instant a steam whistle shrieked. Thraxton ran to the bridge railing and looked out just in time to see a passenger steamer pull away from its pier and chug north up the river. As it passed beneath Waterloo Bridge, he could see passengers standing at the railing. Among them, a figure in a white top hat with his arm around the shoulders of a small figure in a black dress who slumped against him, head lolling. As the steamer passed beneath the bridge, the tall man looked up at him, raised his white top hat and waved it jauntily — Doctor Garrette.

Thraxton pounded down the steps. A small paddle-wheel steam-tug drifted a foot from one of the piers, smoke billowing from its stack. The boat’s skipper, an abbreviated stump of shoulders and brawn whose physiognomy mirrored his vessel, stood gripping the tiller, smoke billowing from a pipe jammed in his mouth. Thraxton leaped from the end of the pier and landed sprawled on the deck at his feet.

“Sir,” he said, breathlessly. “I need to hire your boat. A lady’s life depends upon it.”

The pursuit was short in distance, but prolonged in time. The steam-tug Cricket was powerful but slow. It trailed behind the larger steamer, which steadily drew away. But the captain of the tug knew where the steamer was heading, to Cadogan Pier just a few miles down the river in Chelsea.

They were drawing stares, and that was bad.

Silas Garrette knew that he and Aurelia presented an incongruous spectacle that pulled the eyes of the other passengers to them like iron to a lodestone: the tall, gangly man in the white top hat (which made him seem even taller than his six foot six height) and the pale-skinned, diminutive young woman who dangled in his arms, limp as a child’s rag doll.

The couple standing at the railing had been watching them since they boarded. They appeared to be of the lower classes but were dressed up in their best finery: the woman in gaily colored dresses over crinolines and a flowery bonnet unseasonal for late October; the man in a bowler and scratchy tweed suit that stretched tight across his barrel chest, his muscular arms squeezed into sleeves too narrow. The man’s mustachios were trimmed in a military style and Garrette guessed he was likely an ex-army man and probably very handy with his fists. His inkling that this could be a danger was confirmed when the man whispered something to the woman and then left his place at the railing and approached.

“Here,” the man said. “What’s your game, then?” He indicated Aurelia’s limp form with a nod.

Garrette’s right hand reflexively dipped into his pocket and fondled the cold smooth steel of his scalpel. His eyes focused not on the uncouth face but on the carotid arteries — swollen tributaries of blood pulsing in the man’s throat. So readily accessible. A quick slash and the churlish oaf would bleed out in seconds.

“I am a doctor. This young lady is my patient.”

Despite the authoritative tone of Garrette’s voice, the military man remained skeptical.

“She looks drunk to me. Or maybe you slipped her somethin’?”

“Perhaps you should mind your own business.”

Step a little closer, fool, Silas Garrette thought as he began to ease the scalpel from his pocket. I’d laugh to see the look on your face when I open your throat.

“I think this young lady needs help. I think maybe she is my business.”

Aurelia’s droopy-lidded eyes opened a little. She started to make mewling sounds of protest, but Garrette pressed the chloroform-soaked mask over her nose and mouth to stifle them, and her body slackened in his grip as she breathed in the vapors.

The man’s eyes widened as he watched the mask press over Aurelia’s face. The huge hands balled into fists and he took a step forward.

“She has the consumption. It is highly infectious. I would keep my distance if I were you.”

At the mention of the word “consumption,” the man’s face paled and he stumbled backward. The other passengers sitting close also quickly vacated their seats and moved away. The military man took his female companion by the arm and drew her farther along the railing.

Silas Garrette allowed himself a smile. He was quick with the scalpel — a few seconds’ work — but he needed to secure a new glass womb to supplant the flesh one he would rip his child from. He threw a look over the stern of the boat. He could see the tiny figure of Thraxton on the deck of the pursuing tug, but the slower boat was falling further behind.

What’s more, they were steaming toward a place Silas Garrette knew it would be impossible for Thraxton to find them.

In the skies above London, daylight grappled with night. At times bruise-colored clouds swamped the sun, suffocating the light. At other times, the clouds tore apart, shafts of sunlight shot down and bright day returned. The air smelled like rain. Ragged scraps of dark cloud scudded low. Now and then the sky shook with a distant rumble, a premonition of stormy weather moving in. On either side, steamboats chuffed up and down the Thames, venting smoke like watery dragons.

“Can you go no faster?” Thraxton shouted above the rattle and wheeze of the steam engine.

“Not without risking the boiler,” the captain replied. “The old gal’s ailing of late.”

By the time the Cricket drew alongside Cadogan Pier, the steamer had discharged all of its passengers. Thraxton jumped from the deck, dashed up the pier, and was just in time to see Garrette drag Aurelia through the gates of the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens. Now he understood the madness behind Dr. Garrette’s method. The Cremorne Gardens was a popular public entertainment which featured park-like pavilions, dancing platforms, and acres of gardens, grottoes and tree-lined boulevards to promenade. Once lost amongst the thousands of Londoners that flocked to the place, it would be nigh impossible to find them again. As he sprinted through the iron gates, someone bellowed: “Oi! You there. A shilling for entrance!”

The uncouth voice emanated from the barred cave opening of a ticket kiosk. Thraxton scrabbled in his pockets, seized a handful of coins and flung them through the bars, then ran up the main pathway, scanning the crowd.

Doctor Garrette had found the perfect place to hide.

Everywhere men in top hats and frock coats walked arm in arm with ladies. But then, in the distance, Thraxton saw a single white hat carried along on a river of black toppers.

At the side of the path a wooden hand pointed the way above the words: Pagoda and Dance Platform. He could already hear the strains of an orchestra striking up. They were playing a waltz. Thraxton had visited the Cremorne many times, and had danced on the very same platform. Here the crowds were always the thickest. He hurried in pursuit.

In the gathering dusk all the gas lamps were lit; colored globes strung from trees and atop poles illuminated the grounds like a fairyland. Hundreds of dancing couples whirled counterclockwise around the circular dance platform. At its center, an orchestra played inside a brightly lit pagoda of the eastern fashion. Thraxton dodged through the crowd toward the iron railings that bordered the dance platform. Up close, he spotted a figure in a white top hat swaying to the music. But when he reached the spot, the man proved to be one of three drunken swells ogling the women and braying with laughter. Thraxton knew the man in the white top hat, or at least he knew Thraxton, for the man seized his arm and blathered, “Geoffrey! Come along and have a drink with your old friends.”

A gap opened in the dancers and he glimpsed the man in the white top hat, who met his gaze, smiled and whirled Aurelia away, who sagged in his arms like a broken doll. Thraxton snatched his arm from the drunken swell’s grip and pushed him away roughly. He barged his way in among the dancing couples, fighting the counterclockwise flow, earning himself angry shouts and slaps from some of the dancers, but the white top hat was moving toward him. He lunged through a gap in the dancers and seized the man’s shoulder.

“What the deuce!” The alarmed face that looked into his was not Doctor Garrette. The woman was not Aurelia.

Stunned, Thraxton released the man and looked around just in time to see Aurelia being dragged off the dance floor. But by the time he had fought his way off the dance platform and back on the other side of the iron railings, Aurelia and her abductor were nowhere to be seen. Thraxton ran along the sylvan avenues, eyes scanning for a white top hat, but it was no use.

They had vanished.

Exhausted and despondent, he flopped onto a park bench, walking stick laid across his lap, his head in his hands. A thousand fears and recriminations tumbled through his mind.

Directly across from the bench, a brightly colored poster plastered on a wooden hoarding depicted a gas balloon rising against a night sky bursting with skyrockets. An elaborately flourished script announced: Fireworks at dusk. Balloon Ascents Nightly (weather permitting). Beneath the balloon, a hand indicated the way. Something about the poster leaped out at Thraxton. He jumped to his feet and ran in the direction the finger pointed.

When he reached the large lawn from which the balloon ascents took place, a crowd of spectators milled. The balloon, filled with lighter-than-air hydrogen gas, was a royal blue color emblazoned with winged sylphs cavorting around its mid-section. Below the gas envelope a wicker basket large enough to accommodate five or six adults hung suspended and now paying customers clambered aboard, aided by the balloon pilot and his assistant. The flights were tethered. The balloon, once filled with passengers, was allowed to rise to a height of three hundred feet, providing a night-time aerial vista for adventuresome patrons before being winched back to earth.

Thraxton earned some cutting stares as he roughly pushed to the front of the crowd. His heart somersaulted as he saw a white top hat at the back of the balloon basket, a shorter female figure standing beside. The balloon was already lifting off. Thraxton vaulted the iron railings in time to catch hold of the wicker basket and climb inside. With Thraxton’s added weight, the balloon sagged and bumped back to earth.

The balloon pilot was outraged. “See here! What the devil—?”

“Sir! That man has abducted my fiancée!” Thraxton shouted, pointing. “We must hold him and send for the police.”

All eyes in the balloon turned to the man in the white top hat. With unnerving nonchalance, Silas Garrette drew a scalpel from his coat pocket and pressed the blade to Aurelia’s throat.

A woman shrieked. Yells and shouts followed as passengers panicked.

Thraxton tried to push toward Aurelia, but was shoved back as people leaped and threw themselves over the sides of the basket. When the balloon pilot tried to grab Garrette, the doctor slashed his throat with one quick scalpel stroke, hurling him aside so forcefully he hit the side of the basket and toppled out. Suddenly unweighted, the balloon shot skyward, the handle of the unmanned winch whirring out of control as the tether unreeled.

The doctor kept the blade pressed tight against Aurelia’s windpipe, who looked at Thraxton with sad, helpless eyes. “Shall I sacrifice her now?” he taunted. “So she can bleed to death in your arms like a slaughtered lamb?”

The basket jolted mightily as the tether reached the end of its windings and tore loose of the winch. Unrestrained the balloon continued to climb while a light breeze carried it over the Cremorne Gardens.

As the balloon drifted directly above the fireworks pavilion a fusillade of skyrockets whooshed into the sky and the air around the balloon exploded in starry bursts of fire. Buffeted by the blast, the balloon pitched and rocked, knocking them off their feet. Thraxton used the distraction to leap forward, snatch Aurelia from Garrette’s grip and pull her behind him. In the struggle, Garrette dropped the scalpel. It slid along the floor of the basket and he lunged for it, but Thraxton kicked him in the face, rolling him away. When they both clambered to their feet, Thraxton now held the scalpel in one hand, his walking stick in the other.

Bam, bam, bam… KABOOM! They drifted through choking clouds of gunpowder smoke as more explosions detonated around them. The balloon shuddered as a skyrocket slammed into the ropes holding the basket and snagged, a fiery cone of sparks spraying from its base. Thraxton knew it would explode at any moment and knocked it loose with a blow from his walking stick; it sputtered away and detonated with a deafening bang, sending green and red fireballs whizzing around them, peppering their faces with hot gunpowder.

Through it all, Doctor Garrette laughed uproariously. “You mock death?” he shouted above the din. “We are in a balloon filled with volatile gas, surrounded by exploding fireworks. What a glorious way to die!” He said more, but his words were drowned as a second wave of skyrockets whooshed up from below and blew the sky around them into curtains of glimmering fire.

Their drift had stopped and Thraxton realized that if they remained at that altitude the balloon was doomed. He slashed the cord holding one of the sandbags with the scalpel, releasing it. As its weight fell away, the balloon surged upward. He cut loose a second sandbag and the balloon rushed higher until soon they were looking down on the fireworks bursting below. Climbing past a thousand feet, higher elevation winds caught the balloon and carried it east. The streets and smoking chimney pots of London drifted far below. They were above the lower level clouds now, in a sky lit by the ruddy sun dipping into the cloud tops. Afraid of a fight with Garrette over a sharp blade with Aurelia so close, Thraxton tossed the scalpel away to be rid of it.

“Very clever,” the doctor said. “You have disarmed yourself.” He smiled as he withdrew the leather holster of instruments from his overcoat pocket, unfurled it with a flick, and drew out a small cleaver. “I will carve you into stumps and use what’s left of you as a pillow while I slice open the belly of your whore and take what is mine.”

Thraxton thumbed the release catch on his cane and gave it a twist. He thought he was carrying the sword cane topped by the snarling tiger. Instead, the phoenix head came off in his hand and he found himself holding the slender glass tube filled with brandy.

Dr. Garrette laughed at his befuddlement. “How very chivalrous. Are you going to offer me a drink?”

Thraxton snatched the stoppered glass tube of brandy from the cane and then lunged forward and smashed it across his enemy’s face. The glass tube shattered, its sharp shards slicing open the bridge of Garrette’s nose and dousing his face and chest with brandy. He sputtered, reeling backwards, wiping brandy onto his sleeve.

Now he was furious and came at Thraxton slashing with the cleaver. “Time to jettison the useless ballast.” Thraxton deflected the blow with his walking stick driving the cleaver blade into the edge of the wicker basket where it stuck fast. The two men wrestled, crashing from side to side of the basket as they fought, punching, kicking, clawing at each other’s faces. The two were evenly matched and finally broke apart, gasping for breath. Garrette’s disguise had been destroyed in the fight, and now his false whiskers and eyebrows dangled loose.

“Death is a gift,” Garrette managed between panting breaths. “A gift earned through suffering that cleanses the soul and makes it worthy. I will make you worthy of death — both of you.”

Meanwhile the balloon had continued to climb and now drifted toward the armada of anvilhead storm clouds, towering and mighty. As they passed beneath one, the hair on Aurelia’s head stood on end as the air grew tense with static electricity. Suddenly a jagged bolt of lightning flashed just below the balloon with an almost instantaneous crack of thunder.

“Roar! Roar on!” Garrette laughed. “Death is awakened and has come for us all.”

Aurelia pressed her face into Thraxton’s chest, her small body trembling. “Geoffrey,” she whispered, “I am ready to die with you… but I want our child to live.”

Thraxton looked down into her face. “Our child shall live. We shall live.” He gently pushed her away and crouched down, gathered the pieces of his walking stick, and screwed the phoenix head back into place. Then he raised the stick to strike at Garrette.

“Geoffrey!” Aurelia called. “Look!”

When Thraxton turned his head, the brass phoenix was surrounded by a glowing ball of St. Elmo’s fire.

Garrette unleashed a snarl and sprang forward while his adversary was distracted. The two wrestled for the walking stick, crashing from side to side, until Garrette pinned Thraxton to the floor of the wicker basket. With inhuman strength he pressed the walking stick into Thraxton’s throat, crushing his windpipe.

“Life is weak, but Death is strong!” Garrette said. He shifted his weight until his thin knees straddled the walking stick. Thraxton’s face purpled as his windpipe was crushed flat.

The doctor calmly snatched up his white top hat and settled it upon his bald pate. “Die slowly, Lord Thraxton. I do enjoy a good prolonged death.”

“Geoffrey!” Aurelia screamed. She looked around the inside of the basket for a weapon but there was nothing. In desperation, she snatched the gold Ankh from her neck, breaking the chain, and flung it at Dr. Garrette. It hit him in the face. By reflex, he grabbed it.

“What’s this?” he said, pulling the chain away and staring at it. “A pagan charm?”

Just then the tiniest of sparks leapt from the gold Ankh and Dr. Garrette’s clothes, splashed with brandy and permeated with volatile chemical vapors, ignited. He leaped up from the floor of the balloon and staggered drunkenly around the basket, yelling, hands beating at his face and chest which crawled with a weird blue flame. Aurelia rushed to help Thraxton sit up. By now, the doctor was fully engulfed. Realizing that the balloon would be the next to catch fire, Thraxton burst upward, slammed a shoulder into the doctor’s stomach driving him up and over the side of the basket.

Silas Garrette fell earthward trailing a faint comet’s tail of gray smoke. The white top hat, also burning, tumbled slowly after. He plunged through the top of a small black cloud and out the bottom, screaming all the way — a scream not of fear but of impotent rage. Thraxton watched the meteoric plummet until Garrette vanished from sight in the glimmering constellation of gas lights burning in the streets of London.

“Geoffrey!”

He pulled Aurelia into a crushing, desperate embrace. But now, suddenly loosed of the weight of a grown man, the balloon rocketed upward faster than ever. Above them towered a thunder cloud the size of a mountain. The base of the cloud concaved in a dome that could have swallowed St. Paul’s Cathedral and a dozen more. The balloon began to lash and writhe as it hit the swirling vortex of air being sucked up into the cloud. The light turned a sick, ominous green, and Thraxton realized with dread that they were about to be drawn into a thundercloud from which there could be no survival.

“We are going to die, are we not, Geoffrey?”

“I had a life, but never lived until I met you.”

Thraxton looked into Aurelia’s violet eyes, bright and unafraid. “It does not matter… because I am here with you, and I shall never let you go.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“And I shall never let go of you.”

They were ascending at tremendous speed, sucked into the cloud’s converging updrafts.

Their embrace tightened as the world turned opaque white, faded to gray and then black. For a time there was nothing but darkness and then a deafening concussion as the world exploded in a blinding white dance of luminous atoms.