Chapter 31
Chapter
Stoker and I exchanged glances, both of us understanding instinctively that we must proceed with all caution if we were to emerge from our current predicament alive.
The air was not quite as foul as I thought at first, and I looked up, spying a grille set into the ceiling in the corner.
Through it, fresh air flowed. At least we would not suffocate here, I decided.
Stoker noticed the direction of my gaze.
“Bolted,” he mouthed, and I realised he had already assessed this as a means of egress and found it lacking.
We should have to wait to be rescued, and whilst we waited, we should have to engage with Miles Hegarty, a proven murderer, who now had nothing to lose from adding to his roster of victims. In fact, he would have been wise indeed to do away with us if he meant to pursue a scheme of revenge against his inamorata.
I eyed him warily as he sat, completely poleaxed by the loss of his beloved.
He seemed broken, but I trusted him as much as I would a cornered cobra, which is to say, very little and with great reluctance.
Stoker, with his usual innate courtesy, removed one of his enormous red bandanna handkerchiefs from his pocket and draped it gracefully over Johnson’s face, concealing the emptiness of those blank, staring eyes.
“Thank you,” Hegarty said. “Thank you.”
“He deserves dignity,” Stoker said simply. “The dead always do.”
Hegarty gave him a bitter smile. “Unlike Von Hilsing, you mean. God, it was a nasty business, leaving him in that house. But what else were we to do? Burying him in his garden seemed worse. At least in the house, he will be discovered in due course and he can be buried. It was the most decent thing we could think of to finish an indecent act.”
I cocked my head as I looked at him. “Shall we call you Ruthven? Or should we dispense with the deceit, Mr. Hegarty?”
His brows rose a little in surprise. “Ah, the book in my dressing room. I thought you had moved it. But you were looking at the stamp inside, were you not? Clever. I presume you paid a visit to the school?”
“They told us nothing at Little Saints. But we met Professor Baddlesmere. He said you were a teacher there once. He described your tenure as unsettling.”
“It seems a century past and yet a second ago,” he said dreamily.
“It started as parlour tricks, the attempts at mesmerism. Gullible little fools,” he said, but without heat.
“I treated the boys kindly because I thought it could make a favourable impression upon their fathers. Schoolmasters, as you might imagine, collect precious little in the way of remuneration. And I have always had a fondness for nice things.” Without seeming to know what he was doing, he stroked the fabric of his own sleeve, his fingertips moving along the weft of the silk.
“But you were asked to leave,” Stoker said. “Pressed your luck too far?”
“Something like that. I like to think I would have left of my own accord, but of course, I would like to think that, wouldn’t I?” He paused, sighing. His gaze fell to his beloved and he reached for Johnson’s body, rocking him slightly as a mother will a child.
“What happened? After you left Little Saints,” I asked.
He shrugged. “I hardly remember. None of it was important. I tutored privately, took other positions in other schools. It all seemed so terribly dull, so pointless. And then I met Asphodel. And then—” He paused, his gaze dropping to the corpse he cradled.
“He was the one who persuaded me we could make something of the—of Ruthven.”
“You think of him as something apart from yourself?” I was intrigued. “Like a sort of character you created?”
“As much as if I’d been in a pantomime,” he replied. “There was none of it that was real. But it was a way to gain influence over a very particular sort of person.”
“Disaffected young men,” Stoker said.
“It was a truth I learnt whilst teaching. Boys want someone to look up to, a focus for their aspirations. And if they cannot have that, they want someone to fear. Ruthven gave them both.”
“So you established the Harpocrates Society to attract—what? Easy marks?” Stoker said.
“Seekers,” Hegarty corrected. “We wanted those who believed there was more to the world than toiling away in the service of others. We found clerks and secretaries and other young men who were firmly under the thumbs of their elders, men who stifled and suffocated them. And we promised them something better.”
“Eternal life?” I could not help the derision in my tone.
“Yes,” he replied with a touch of indignation. “We had to dazzle them. Promising them riches or fame was a shallow and silly business. But the sheer theatricality of what we offered—the possibility to live forever. It was bewitching.”
“It was daft,” Stoker retorted.
“You would be surprised what people can persuade themselves to believe,” Hegarty said mildly.
“Like curses,” I put in. “Quincey must have believed he was cursed—he wore a Romany witch’s charm against harm. And Harkness was so credulous all it took was a scrap of a dried plant to make him destroy himself.”
Hegarty shrugged. “He was an unhappy young man. His wife does not love him, he is held under his father’s thumb. He claimed he came to the society for learning occult secrets, but he came for escape. They all did.”
“You gave them the illusion they could be free of their problems,” I pressed. “But what did you take?”
“Money, mostly,” he said with an openness I had not expected.
With Johnson dead and his secrets exposed, the fight seemed to have gone out of him.
“They sold their trinkets. Sometimes they stole things from employers or miserly parents. Sometimes they did favours, such as arranging the lease of the house or making a tailor’s bill disappear.
And sometimes they paid us in secrets, information we could use. ”
“All of this theatricality,” I said with a gesture towards his robes. “And all the while you were just common blackmailers promising your accomplices the secrets to eternal life.”
“Surely only the most gullible, grass-witted, nonsensical fools would have believed you for a moment,” Stoker said.
“But that was the point, was it not?” I asked Hegarty. “Anyone clever or careful enough to see through your charade was someone you could not have manipulated into doing your bidding. You set yourself up as a vampire and Asphodel as a witch because you needed people who would believe in you.”
His tone was flat when he spoke, his face expressionless.
“Yes, that was the point. There were one or two sceptics, but they did not last long. We weeded them out very carefully, keeping only those who were suggestible, those who would succumb to our encouragements. We presented it all very logically, of course. History tells us there were witches—we have the records of those who were burnt. Who is to say they did not actually cast spells and fly upon their brooms? And in the mountain villages of Europe, vampires are feared even today. Are they creatures of fantasy and folklore? Only a fool would be so quick to dismiss the idea. All we had to do was dangle the possibility in front of them and see who snapped like a carp at a bit of bait.”
I raised a new point. “How did you explain the need for Quincey’s death to Asphodel? How did you persuade her to send the wolfsbane to Harkness?”
“Seward was unlucky. He thought to steal the jewel from Von Hilsing’s safe and abscond to greener pastures after the old fellow left for America, but Quincey would not wait.
So Seward removed it from the safe, and in the act, he was surprised by Von Hilsing.
He struck him a blow, and it killed the poor man.
Accidentally.” His voice broke, and he put the back of his hand to his eyes, dashing away quick tears. “Sorry,” he muttered.
Stoker and I exchanged glances.
“Mr. Hegarty, I am afraid that is not true,” I said. “Von Hilsing’s death was not an accident.”
He blinked furiously. “Of course it was. Seward told me that is what happened, just as I have told you.”
“Von Hilsing died of arsenical poisoning,” Stoker told him. “I ran the tests myself.”
“That is not possible—unless, maybe he was desperate, maybe he stirred up a quick dose just to finish him off,” he babbled, grasping at anything to make the truth more palatable.
“It was chronic arsenical poisoning,” Stoker said firmly. “Johnson had been working at killing his employer for quite some time.”
“Nothing about this was sudden or accidental,” I added. “Johnson meant to kill Von Hilsing, but if he was willing to let Asphodel have the jewel, then that theft was not the purpose of murdering his employer.”
Hegarty swallowed hard a few times before finding his voice.
“He said we would go to New York, then immediately travel to Canada, where no one knew Von Hilsing personally. I was supposed to impersonate him, take money from his accounts. And then we would disappear. South America, he said. It would be easy to reinvent ourselves, and even when Von Hilsing’s body was discovered, there would be no reason to connect him to Miles Hegarty.
Seward would be suspected, but he said it would be a simple matter to make it seem he had disappeared into the Canadian wilderness.
With new identities, we would be free—and rich.
He used to talk about such things when we first—” He paused to rub his face.
“He used to imagine Von Hilsing would die and leave him a bequest which would set him up for good. He painted such a pretty picture of us together, the life we would lead. I never really thought he meant it. He knew I cared for Asphodel, but he wore me down. He kept saying she was an anchor upon me, unworthy of my affection.”