Chapter 25
Chapter
Stoker and I took our leave of the professor much later than intended. After we concluded our discussion of Miles Hegarty, Professor Baddlesmere encouraged us to meet his bees and after that prevailed upon us to partake of a light supper.
“It is only a bit of ham and egg pie my housekeeper has put by—today is her day out, you see—but she does make a very good pie, and you would be most welcome.”
It occurred to me that the professor might have been a trifle lonely, but that thought was a fleeting one, banished by no fewer than three guests stopping in during the course of our evening together.
The daughter of the local big house called to ask if the professor would make a foursome for whist the following day; the doctor came to say he had finalised arrangements for a walking tour of the Lakes for the summer and wanted the professor to accompany him.
And the vicar appeared with a question about a Latin phrase meant for Sunday’s sermon.
“Ah, I did not realise you have guests, Charles! I shall leave this with you and be on my way,” the vicar said with a cordial glance in our direction.
“Not at all,” Stoker said, rising from where he had been comfortably resting after consuming an enormous quantity of ham and egg pie, a salad of early cress, a plate of roasted vegetables and potatoes, several slices of cold beef, and half a basin of rice pudding.
“We must take our leave if we are to make the last train to London this evening.”
The professor turned to the vicar. “These two have come about Miles Hegarty.”
“Ah! Rackety fellow who thought he was a vampire?”
The professor tutted at him. “Now, Clarence, do not spread fancies. Hegarty did not think he was a vampire—some of the lads did.”
The vicar bristled. “And bloody stupid they were about the whole thing.” He turned to us.
“Took me the better part of a term to convince them there are no such things as vampires and that he could not enslave their souls. And I still do not think they were really persuaded. They humoured me and seemed to believe he was human enough, but I still say if Hegarty had told them to leap from a cliff, they’d have made fine lemmings of themselves. ”
Stoker opened his mouth to speak—he is forever correcting people who misunderstand the complex social behaviour of lemmings—but I headed off any possible lecture on the subject with a quick question of my own.
“Pardon me, Vicar,” I said. “But the boys were really so easily persuaded as to his abilities?”
The vicar smiled. “You must not have brothers, my dear. There is no soul on earth as gullible as a schoolboy who has been told a grisly story. They are ghouls, the lot of them. Ghosts, goblins, faceless wraiths—they sup it with a large spoon, believe you me. The nastier the tale, the quicker they are to believe, and the harder to wean from it.”
“Only two or three of them were really convinced,” the professor put in.
“But the reverend is correct. Those who believed were difficult to sway. And in the end, one cannot control what they believe, only what they repeat. We saw to it they did not influence the other boys, and with Hegarty gone, the matter seemed to resolve itself, and I thought no further upon it.”
“You were right to send him away,” the vicar said suddenly, his mild expression suddenly sober.
“Because he was a disruptive presence?” I asked.
“Because when he was at Little Saints, I had a feeling of great oppression,” the vicar replied.
“It was lumbago,” the professor put in dryly.
“It was oppression,” the vicar corrected with an unexpected firmness. “My spirit felt the weight of it, in a way I could not articulate even if I wished to try. I have seldom been in the presence of something truly dark, but I can say without reservation that Miles Hegarty had no light in him.”
A heavy silence fell until the hour chimed from the mantel clock and we rose.
“Thank you,” Stoker said. “You have been most helpful, gentlemen.”
“We really must go now,” I said, shaking hands with both of them.
It was fully another quarter of an hour before we made it through the door—the professor insisted upon presenting us with a jar of honey from his bees and an extra wedge of pie wrapped daintily in a napkin.
“In case you feel peckish on the return,” he said to Stoker.
The result was that we had to run for the train and very nearly missed it, flinging ourselves into our compartment just as the train was gathering speed, pulling away from the platform and leaving Peasgreen behind.
“A most productive visit,” I said, settling happily into the seat across from Stoker.
“Except that I have sat upon my pie,” he said with a mournful look into his pocket.
“You have eaten enough pie to credit a regiment,” I told him.
He fixed me with a reproachful look. “Veronica, one can never have too much pie.”
In that, I reflected, he was entirely correct.
* * *
It was past midnight when we stumbled into Bishop’s Folly, but the lamps still burnt in the Belvedere, and I realised J.
J. would want an accounting of our expedition.
To my surprise, Mornaday was there, regaling her with stories of the cutpurses and footpads apprehended during his early days at the Metropolitan Police.
The dogs—all seven of them—were comfortably scattered about, some on laps, some on the floor, all of them asleep, paws and noses twitching gently.
J. J. was smoking a pipe and Mornaday had removed his shoes, the better to mend one of his socks, lending a note of gentle domesticity to the scene.
“How very enterprising, Mornaday,” I said, taking off my coat. “I had no idea you knew how to darn.”
“Taught at the knee of my mammy,” he said, thrusting the darning needle with its load of wool once more into the fabric of his sock. “But you’ve no proper darning egg, so I had to make do with this,” he added, pulling an ovoid shape from inside his sock.
“That is the fossilised egg of a creature I believe to be archaeopteryx, although I have yet to prove it,” Stoker told him severely. “And worth more than the whole of your person.” He plucked it from Mornaday’s grasp and replaced it with a gutta-percha ball of some antiquity.
Mornaday studied it carefully. “This looks ancient too. Is it very valuable?”
“Considering the fact that it is used as a shuttlecock by his lordship’s children when they play at badminton, I should think not,” Stoker informed him.
“What have you discovered?” J. J. demanded. She looked faintly desperate for news, but that was to be expected. Listening to Mornaday’s tales of derring-do whilst watching him darn a sock of dubious cleanliness was enough to challenge the sangfroid of any woman.
“That Lord Ruthven is most certainly a fraud,” Stoker said in some satisfaction.
“He is a former schoolmaster by the name of Miles Hegarty, once engaged as a teacher at an establishment called Little Saints in the village of Peasgreen in Surrey. He was discharged more than a decade ago for exerting an unhealthy influence over some of the boys there. Apparently, he had them convinced he was a vampire.”
Mornaday guffawed, but J. J.’s expression was thoughtful.
“Vampires sell copies,” she said sagely.
“You cannot write of this for the newspaper,” I reminded her. “At least not yet. Too much remains to be discovered.”
“And even when it is finished, I’ll thank you not to start a vampire panic in the capital of the British Empire,” Mornaday returned tartly.
J. J.’s features rearranged themselves into a picture of wounded loftiness. “I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.”
Stoker gently cleared his throat. “As I was saying, Hegarty was apparently practising and perfecting his tricks upon the schoolboys of Little Saints until his dismissal.”
“To what end? Seems a dangerous sport for no better reward than a bit of pocket money,” Mornaday remarked.
“But schoolboys have affluent fathers,” J. J. pointed out. “Perhaps he thought to influence them to perform a little pilfery in their homes and bring him the spoils.”
“Entirely possible,” I said graciously, although I confess I was slightly annoyed that neither Stoker nor I had considered such a thing.
“But you forget one significant fact about schoolboys: they grow up. Perhaps he thought to parlay their connections into some advantage for himself once they were established in their careers.”
“A tenuous motive for ensorcelling young minds,” Stoker put in.
“Perhaps it was simply meant as a bit of entertainment,” Mornaday suggested.
“Or perhaps he is the sort of person who enjoys having a hold over others,” J. J. said.
“And possibly all of these motives and more,” I said. I turned to J. J. “Did you ever discover the other plant that was included with the wolfsbane in Harkness’s missive?”
J. J. set Al-‘Ijliyyah, the little Italian greyhound, gently onto the floor, then began to rummage in her notes.
They were haphazard, scrawled onto the backs of envelopes, theatre programmes, and long sheets of blank newsprint that Stoker used for his sketches, but J.
J. insisted she knew precisely where to find exactly what she wanted, and in a very few seconds she unearthed a tourist map of London parks.
She studied the scribbles over Hyde Park and nodded.
“Solanum dulcamara. Commonly known as bittersweet or bitter nightshade. And the meaning,” she said triumphantly, “is death.”
“It was a threat on his life in botanical form,” Mornaday said. “Just like the wolfsbane.”
“Precisely,” Stoker agreed. “And Harkness took it seriously enough to take his own life rather than wait for death to come to him.”
“Why not just flee the country?” Mornaday queried.