Текст книги "The Bedlam Detective"

Автор книги: Stephen Gallagher

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

WHERE CAN I FIND DETECTIVE REED?” SEBASTIAN ASKED when he finally reached the Sun Inn, late the next morning. “I have something for him.”

“He’s over at the assembly rooms,” Dolly the cook said. “He’s been looking for you, too. I had to tell him your bed wasn’t slept in.”

“I spent the night elsewhere. Though not by design.”

She looked him over.

“So I can see,” she said, and she reached across the bar counter and plucked a piece of straw from his lapel. She said, “You missed all the excitement.”

“What excitement?”

“Over the murderer, of course. They’ve caught him.”

That snapped him to full attention. Sebastian had been fighting the urge toward a hot bath and a shave, after sleeping in his clothes in one of the traveling fair’s spare wagons. Midmorning he’d transferred to a boneshaker of a bus that served the valleys. It had dropped him within half a mile of the town, and he’d walked the rest of the way. Sir Owain would be getting a strongly worded note about his driver’s behavior.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Some gypsy,” she said. “Just like everyone thought.”

THE INQUEST had taken place earlier that morning, in the main hall of the assembly rooms. At one point the jury had trooped through to the back room to view the bodies. Even as the coroner had been reviewing the events leading to the girls’ discovery, the detectives had been making their arrest. Now there was a police van outside the assembly rooms, and all of the doors had been thrown open to air the place. A caretaker was scrubbing down the corridors. Sebastian had to step around him to get to the back rooms, where Stephen Reed was labeling his evidence boxes for transfer to the waiting vehicle.

Sebastian said, “I’m told you’ve got your man.”

“An itinerant,” Stephen Reed said. “A rag-and-bone man with a puppet peep show. We’re pressing him for a confession, but he’s a simpleton.”

“You’re not happy.”

“Of course I’m happy,” Stephen Reed said with ill-concealed bitterness. “In my experience, a simpleton’s good for a confession to anything. In fact the same can be said of any man, if you go at him for long enough.”

Sebastian said, “Is there a witness? Or any evidence?”

“Evidence enough for an arrest,” Stephen Reed said. “He had some of the girls’ clothing on his cart. The parents have looked at the pieces and identified them.” He tilted one of the unsealed boxes to show the tagged and labeled clothing inside it.

“I came to return this to you,” Sebastian said, and set the moving-picture camera down on the table.

Stephen Reed looked at it. “Did you find anything?”

“A few domestic scenes. And, at the end, a few seconds of an indistinguishable shape, flying toward the picture-taker. The people I consulted did their best, but they’re show folk. A scientific analysis might tell us more.”

The young policeman nodded slowly.

“I see,” he said, turning away. “Well, it’s all academic now. As you say, we have our man.”

Sebastian placed his hand on the younger man’s arm and surprised him with the strength he used to keep him in place. He checked the room behind them and then lowered his voice. “What do you think?”

Stephen Reed hesitated for a while, as if at a door that he knew he might regret opening.

Then he said, “There’s no way that the man we’ve arrested could also have carried out the attack on Evangeline and Grace. At that time he was in the king’s navy, far overseas. Receiving the wounds that have addled his brain.”

“Then perhaps they’re unrelated after all?”

“Evangeline and Grace may not have died, but they were cruelly handled in a similar way. Their hands were tied behind them and bags were placed over their heads. And whether they remember it or not, someone interfered with them. A doctor inspected them and there can be no doubt of it. After the assault they were thrown alive into a gully where gorse bushes broke their fall. They struggled free and made their way back home. They reappeared all scratched and torn and claiming no memory of where they had been.”

“Then what—”

“Both incidents even began with the same childish dare. The one back then, and the one this week. Both pairs of girls made a camp on the moors. Their plan was to sit up to watch …”

“For a beast?” Sebastian said, with a suddenness that surprised even him.

“Our local legend,” Stephen Reed said. “Beasts, and rumors of beasts. But never any proof of beasts. Personally, I’ve never seen a thing on the moor. But then I’ve never been a drinking man.”

“So who do you favor for it?”

“Oh, Mister Becker,” Stephen Reed said. “Given a free choice in a perfect world, we both know who I’m starting to favor for it. Him and his beasts and his trail of the Amazon dead. The problem is, I don’t have a scrap of evidence to offer in support.”

“Where was Sir Owain on that first occasion?”

“All I can establish is that he was in residence at Arnside Hall,” Stephen Reed said. “Fresh back from his South American jaunt but with his memoirs unwritten and his reputation still intact. But why should I worry? The rag-and-bone man did it.”

“It’s time I spoke to your superintendent.”

“Good luck with that,” Stephen Reed said.

THE MAN waxed his mustache. In Sebastian’s book, that was never a good sign. His name was George Hartley and he accepted Sebastian’s credentials at a glance, without seeming to be impressed by them.

“I know the Visitor’s role,” he said. “It’s to protect the business affairs of lunatics. What have you to offer me? I can spare you five minutes.”

“I fear that a wider issue is being overlooked.”

“You think so? Convince me.”

“I have a list of earlier incidents from this area. All of them with some aspect in common with your case.”

“I’ve seen your list. There are no actual murders on it. Whereas for this one I have a culprit, and I have his confession.”

“A confession from an ill-educated man who’s probably yet to grasp, in any meaningful way, that his eagerness to comply with his captors will send him to a hanging.”

“His education has nothing to do with it.”

“There are many similarities between this and the one fully documented case on that paper.”

“And many differences, too.”

“They don’t undo the comparison, or make it any less valid. I think they give a tantalizing picture of a madman’s mental process. The differences make sense if you take them as evidence of an evolving state of mind.”

Sebastian went on to explain. With Evangeline and Grace, their assailant had tied their hands and thrown them alive into a gorse-filled gully on a forlorn part of the moor. He had not killed them, but had surely meant for them to die. It was the action of a man who wanted a certain result, but not to feel responsibility for it. He did not consider himself a murderer. By some peculiar logic, he probably felt that he could avoid guilt by being elsewhere when death finally came.

It was their survival and return that had forced a change in his method the next time. Only luck had saved him from discovery. This time, he’d battered them to be sure. Bagging their heads had saved him from seeing their faces when he did it. He still did not consider himself a murderer. A man who killed when forced to it, perhaps. But in his mind the fault lay with the forces, not with him.

On both occasions, Sir Owain Lancaster had entered the story uninvited and shown his concern for the victims. He was a prominent local figure, and both discoveries had been made on land that was part of his estate. But the fact that he blamed imaginary creatures, and was now under investigation by the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, must surely call his innocence into question.

George Hartley said, “There’s nothing here I haven’t heard before. What’s your game, Mister Becker? What exactly were you sent here to achieve?”

“I’ll be open with you, sir. My task was to establish whether Sir Owain Lancaster is merely a harmless fantasist or a man capable of expressing his madness by causing suffering in others.”

“And you have not done so. Good day to you, sir.”

THEN SEBASTIAN and Stephen Reed took a shortcut up a winding flight of steps behind the Ship Hotel and the Methodist church to the houses above the town, with the intention of calling on Evangeline Bancroft.

She wasn’t at the house. No one was. Stephen Reed looked in the shed, and her bicycle was there.

“Perhaps she’s meeting her mother for lunch,” Sebastian suggested.

“Perhaps,” Stephen Reed said.

They went down to the library. There were four or five browsers, and one reader at the tables. Lydia Bancroft was busy in the restricted section, where the rare editions and the mildly racy subjects kept company on the shelves. She was visibly pleased to see Stephen Reed. Less pleased to see Sebastian. And she had surprising news for them.

“Evangeline’s already gone,” she said.

“Gone where?” Stephen Reed said.

“She took an early train back to London. She asked me to give you this.”

She held out an envelope with Stephen Reed’s name on it. The young policeman hesitated, and then took it. He hooked his little finger under the flap and tore it open to read there and then.

As Stephen Reed moved aside, Sebastian said to Lydia Bancroft, “I’m sorry that I missed her. We had something of great importance to discuss. Can you give me your daughter’s address in London?”

“I’m sorry,” Lydia said. “She specifically asked me not to.”

“The address of her employer, then?”

“That, too. She doesn’t want you contacting her at all, Mister Becker. No one appreciates being misled. Everyone knows who you are now. You’re the special investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy. You didn’t come here to save children. You came here to harass a decent man with a view to depriving him of his liberty.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Sebastian said.

“And I’m sure you imagine that’s an apology,” Lydia Bancroft said. She turned to Stephen Reed, who was now replacing Evangeline’s letter in its envelope.

“Stephen,” she said, “if you want to write to Evangeline, I can forward any letters.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Bancroft,” Stephen Reed said, and gave a glance to Sebastian that suggested they should leave.

OUTSIDE ON the street, he gave Evangeline’s note to Sebastian.

In black ink with a neat hand, she had written,

I learned this morning that the police have their man and that is that. This alone would not have caused me to leave without further discussion, but I have to tell you that I do not appreciate the efforts of Mr Becker to make me his spy against a troubled man who has shown nothing but kindness to many. For you, Stephen, I will simply tell you this: you asked me to say if I remembered anything, and I think I have. I remember that Sir Owain came to the house after Grace and I had been found. I was lying in bed with that peculiar feeling one has when trying to remember a dream. I heard him speaking to my mother downstairs. I think he may have offered her some money in an act of simple charity. I expect he was more prosperous then. But my mother would not accept his offer. If he made the same financial gesture to Grace’s father, I expect he drank it. Please watch out for Grace, and do not allow Dr Sibley to drive her from her father’s land. She is a sad soul, and she has suffered enough

.

Sebastian said, “We can’t lose her. There’s too much at stake. An innocent man will hang and more children will probably suffer. I have an idea.”

BUT THE local postmistress was unable to give them Evangeline’s London address, even though she must have hand-franked a hundred or more of Lydia Bancroft’s letters. Sebastian had a suspicion that she’d been warned and wasn’t being entirely honest with them. She could remember that it was somewhere in Holborn, she said, but was blank on the name of the street.

“Thank you, anyway,” Stephen Reed said. “And please don’t tell Mrs. Bancroft that we were asking.”

He’d already assured Sebastian that Lydia Bancroft would learn of their ruse before the day was out.

Sebastian said to the postmistress, “I understand you keep a monster book. A book of beasts?”

“I put it out in the holiday weeks,” the postmistress told him. “For visitors to read.”

“Did Florence Bell and Molly Button ever come in and look at it?”

“I expect they did,” she said. “All the children do.”

At his request, she brought it out. It was a scrapbook of handwritten stories and newspaper clippings, going back over some thirty years. He skipped the stories, which were mostly inconclusive observations, secondhand reports, or obvious fabrication. Some way back in the book he found something that caught his attention, a yellowed cutting from the area’s local newspaper. The glue that fixed it to the album was old and discolored, and was showing through. But the print was still readable.

It was a diary piece, written to amuse, and it went:

If you lack for entertainment, go out to Arnmouth and spend a few pennies in the bar of the Harbor Inn. For the price of a pint of the local ale, horse breeder Edward Eccles will tell you his tale of a beastly encounter on the moors; and a fine tale it is, that grows in embellishment with every retelling. In fact, we are confident that by the summer’s end, the Beast of Arnmouth will have sprouted a brood of fine children and be Mayor of the Borough. Tootle pip!

Edward Eccles, breeder of horses; almost certainly the father of the foul-mouthed Grace. At the foot of the column was a humorous note from the editor, offering a cash prize to any visitor or local able to provide a picture or other conclusive proof of the Arnmouth Beast’s existence.

Four young girls, separated by time. Two survived, two now gone.

All torn by some beast.

The police were leaving, the bodies were gone … the grieving relatives had ended their summer early and returned to the capital. Stephen Reed nursed his doubts, and a tinker sat in a police cell. The law was satisfied, even if others were not.

On the pavement outside the post office, Sebastian said, “Don’t give up. I’ll find Evangeline in London, and I’ll press her for whatever was said. And I’ll take the printed copy of the moving-picture film and see what it can yield.”

Stephen Reed said, “Good luck with that. I have duties now. I’ll be lucky if I even get to say good-bye to my dad.”

SEBASTIAN COLLECTED his bag from the inn and made his way to the pickup point for the railway’s station wagon, marked by a folding board on the pavement outside the apothecary’s store. The wagon arrived a few minutes later. Its driver was not the sullen ostler who’d brought him here, but the blue-eyed young railwayman. He was in a clean collar and scrubbed of his layer of soot.

Sebastian shared the ride out with three newspapermen returning to London, and on the ten-minute journey he almost dozed. At the end of the ride, the newspapermen went into the waiting room and raised a fog of tobacco smoke while Sebastian stayed out in the fresh air.

He walked to the end of the platform and stood looking at the coal yard beyond it. There was a coalman’s shed, with an iron roof and a stone chimney. It was a building that might easily have been a poacher’s cottage in the country were it not for the fact that its kitchen garden was in walled sections, each section containing a heaped-up mountain of glittering black spoil.

When Sebastian came back down the platform, the young railwayman was lining up dry goods and mailbags for loading onto the branch line service.

He was a hard worker. Sebastian found himself thinking back to the half hour when the fairgrounds began to empty and the stalls to shut down, when he’d made his way to the Electric Coliseum and waited out the final show. Once again, the plumber ran from the lunatics. His antics never changed. But nor did he age, or get drunk on the job. And, Sebastian supposed, he performed nightly and forever for his single day’s wage.

Sebastian said, “Do you know much about Sir Owain Lancaster?”

The young man didn’t pause in his work. He said, “Anyone who grew up around here knows Sir Owain.”

“And what do they think of him?”

“A kind man, and a generous one,” the railwayman said. “We don’t care what they say in London. There are things in this world that no one can dispute with any certainty. If he says he saw monsters in the jungle, then I for one am happy to believe him.”

Attn: S Greenhough Smith Esq

George Newnes

,

Ltd 3–13 Southampton Street

London WC2

Dear sir

,

I write to you at the suggestion of my employer, Sir James Crichton-Browne, whom I serve in the capacity of Special Investigator. This concerns my son, Robert, who is eighteen years old. I will be grateful if you will consider him for a position in your archive or editorial departments, should one become available. Although his temperament is not well suited to responsibility, his grasp and retention of detail will, I believe, make him an asset to your editorial staff in matters of proofreading or record keeping

.

I will welcome any opportunity to discuss the matter with you

.

Sincerely

Sebastian Becker

SOUTHWARK, THAT “VAST AND MELANCHOLY PROPERTY” SOUTH of the Thames, would never have been Sebastian’s first choice for an area in which to lodge his family. In any ranking of desirable London boroughs, it could not be placed much above the lowest. But at least it wasn’t the East End. And for a weekly rent that might just have covered the meanest garret in Bloomsbury, they had a suite of rooms with clean water and relatively honest neighbors. Compared to the squalid courts and alleys and the tenement blocks that surrounded them, they had hygiene and comfort. But that was only in comparison. One day he hoped to move the household to some better address across the river.

One day.

Sebastian tried not to look too far ahead. Ambition was a young man’s game. These days he was more concerned with the continuing survival and security of those he loved. It was no longer so much a matter of dreaming of how high he might climb, as of always keeping in mind how far they might fall.

Every morning, beginning at around five A.M., the population of Southwark began to move. To the breweries and the printing shops, to the wharves and the warehouses. To the vinegar works, to the iron manufacturers in Union Street, to the leather factories in neighboring Bermondsey, and across the bridges into central London and the City.

They were all kinds of people. Butchers, laborers, compositors, office cleaners, and artisans. Their hours were long and their pay was small. At the end of the day, when all were coming home, the Thames bridges grew so dense with bodies that it was hard for one person to cross against the flow.

Most were honest. Many were not. Almost all shared the same thought: to better themselves, and to leave.

On his way home that evening, Sebastian stopped by the pie stand under the railway bridge on Southwark Bridge Road. Though he had an office of sorts in the nearby Bethlem asylum, the accommodation was in a basement room that he shared with the unclaimed belongings of deceased inmates. He visited it as infrequently as possible. The pie stand opened all hours to cater to the cab trade, and he had an arrangement to pick up his messages there. He was given three, including a note from Sir James Crichton-Browne.

Crichton-Browne was one of three Lord Chancellor’s Visitors—two eminent doctors, and one lawyer—who carried out a yearly examination of every detained psychiatric patient of significant means. Their remit covered those in institutions as well as those, like Owain Lancaster, in private care. Any deemed incompetent to manage their own affairs were placed under the control of a Master of Lunacy appointed by the Lord Chancellor. Sir James was the busiest of the Visitors; even at the age of seventy-two, he kept a punishing schedule.

Sebastian was the first of the family to arrive home that evening. Their rooms over the shop were empty. The fire was laid, so he lit it.

Frances and Robert arrived shortly after. Frances acknowledged his greeting and then busied herself preparing the evening meal, leaving Sebastian alone with his son.

Observing the boy’s mood, he said, “A good day today, Robert?”

“The best, father,” Robert said. “Absolutely the best. Even though Frances was late and I had to wait.”

Sebastian glanced toward the kitchen. “Is she upset about something?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “Is she?”

“Hang up your coat.”

Robert had turned eighteen now. Almost a grown man, and not so much a boy anymore. He attended a private institution in South Hampstead where he received an education designed around his needs. Here, for once, his talents were recognized, and his abilities explored and developed in ways that no one else had ever considered. The only advice they’d received, when Robert had been small and manifestly strange, had been to treat him as feebleminded and hide him away.

After he’d hung up his coat, Robert said, “I’d like to read for a while if I may, Father.”

“Wait until after supper.”

“But that will leave me with nothing to do now.”

“Ask Frances if she needs any coal brought up.”

Last year, under the supervision of the college principal, they’d tried Robert in a brief period of employment. Very brief. Placed in a job as a waiter in a middle-sized commercial hotel, he hadn’t lasted a morning. He’d taken everyone’s orders and then sat down to his own breakfast.

Returning from the kitchen, Robert said, “Frances says she brought in coal this afternoon. What else can I do?”

“Tell me what you’re reading.”

“There’s a serial in the Strand. I’m collecting all the parts. The Smith’s lady is ill and no one had saved my copy, so we had to go to Waterloo.”

Ah. No wonder Frances seemed irritated. Elisabeth’s sister was a saint, but Robert’s obsessions could wear out the patience of one. In America, he’d collected dime magazines. Here he’d transferred his obsession to the likes of Rider Haggard, Verne, and Wells.

He said, “May I read my serial now, father?”

Sebastian gave in.

“Be sure to stop when your mother gets home,” he said.

Robert settled in a chair by the window with his magazine, and Sebastian took a letter opener and started on the day’s post. When Elisabeth arrived a few minutes later, Robert didn’t even notice.

When he saw her coat, Sebastian said, “Is it raining?”

“When is it not?” Elisabeth said, and went into the kitchen.

Within a minute he heard voices being raised. Then he heard Elisabeth’s affronted cry of “Mince?” Moments after that, Frances emerged from the kitchen and stamped up the back stairs to their attic rooms.

Sebastian went into the kitchen.

“What’s this about?” he said.

For no reason he could see, Elisabeth was moving all the evening’s raw food from the place where Frances had laid it out to another. She said, “The butcher gave our order to someone else. So forget your chops, it’s mince.”

“I don’t mind mince.”

“What’s the matter with her? I can’t trust her with the simplest task. I have to do everything myself.”

Sebastian knew better than to defend one sister to the other right now, but he was still at a loss to see the younger woman’s crime.

Elisabeth added, “And if there’s a shirt you want to wear again, you’d better go and rescue it from the wash.”

He went upstairs. Frances heard him and, when he entered the larger of the attic bedrooms, stepped back from the laundry basket with her hands lifted in the air in an end-of-the-tether, All right, what now? gesture.

He said, “May I speak?”

Frances waited without moving, looking down.

Sebastian said, “Forgive your sister, Frances. She spends all her days being harsh with people. It takes her a while to return to herself.”

For a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to reply.

Then she said, “Then perhaps we should move away from the borough.”

“Why?”

“So she’ll have a longer walk home and more time to adjust her foul mood.”

Then she gave him a glance, to see how that had gone down. He realized that she was making a joke, of a kind. It was hard to tell with Frances. She was the quiet sister, the younger one. But she was in her thirties now, with a gray hair or two that she didn’t bother to conceal. Somehow along the way, without anybody planning it, the younger woman’s practical room-and-board arrangement had turned into a spinster’s life.

He said, “It could be worse. Wait until she next sees the butcher. I wouldn’t want to be in his apron.”

That drew another look, and a rueful smile. Or a half smile, anyway, which he suspected came more out of politeness than anything else.

As he descended the attic stairs to the smell of frying mince, it seemed to Sebastian that such fallings-out were becoming more frequent these days. He was required to play the peacemaker whenever he was at home.

Since the household seemed to run perfectly well during his absences, he wondered if these arguments flared up only because, with him around, they could. Elisabeth and her sister were like two fighters who would never engage without a ring and a referee. Without those, to strike out would be to injure. But with Sebastian in the middle, they could vent their feelings in relative safety.

AFTER THEY’D DINED, Frances took up her sewing and Robert went to his bedroom, an extension to the apartments that was little more than a cubby built out over the shop’s front. He took his newest magazine with him, to read for the second time.

When Robert was out of their earshot, Sebastian said, “I’ve had a reply from the publishing house.”

“Saying they won’t take him.”

He showed her the letter. “They’ll write to us if a position becomes available,” he said.

She looked at the letter, but she didn’t take it from him or read it.

“They always say that,” she said, and gathered up the last of the plates to take back to the kitchen.

He rose, and followed her. All through the meal he’d been sensing that there was more to this than weariness or frayed nerves.

He said, “What happened today?”

“Nothing.”

“Elisabeth.”

“I said, nothing.”

He waited, and then she said, “We had to have the police in.”

“For?”

She stopped what she was doing, and took a moment.

Then she said, “A man came in wanting to take his child away. He was stinking of beer and he wouldn’t be told. He said that the doctors were killing her and her place was at home. Said he had a knife, although he didn’t show it. Two of the nurses kept him talking while I ran for the police.”

“What’s wrong with his child?”

“She’s dying.”

“Nothing the doctors can do?”

“No.”

“Then why not let him take her, if there’s nothing to be done?”

“His home is a sty. And his children only matter when he’s drunk. And the more drink he takes, the more sentimental he becomes. He’s the kind of man whose love is all noise and self-pity; at least she’ll die where the sheets are clean.”

He touched her shoulder. “You’re worn out,” he said. “You should go to bed.”

“I think I will.”

She went about half an hour later. In many people’s minds, working in a charitable children’s hospital was an extended fantasy of rescued orphans and grateful Tiny Tims. But the truth of it was not for the soft of heart.

Sebastian was left with the publishing-house letter in his hand. There was no point in pushing Elisabeth to read it; unlike him, she wouldn’t take courtesy for encouragement. Not today, at any rate.

He became aware that Frances had paused in her work and was looking at him. Then she quickly pretended that she wasn’t and returned her attention to her decorative embroidery, held only inches from her face.

He said, “Have you enough light?”

“Enough for what I need,” she said.

He had a rolltop bureau in the corner of the room. When he was home, it served him for an office. He put the letter in one of its drawers and then picked up his copy of Owain Lancaster’s book.

It was a nice piece of binding, in blue cloth with printed boards and a number of tipped-in illustrations on slick paper. He’d bought it at Wilson’s on Gracechurch Street, billing it to his employer. He opened it at the copyright page. Due in part to the scandal that had driven its author from town and from London society, the book had sold in its thousands and was now in its fifth impression.

He closed up the desk and then moved to the doorway.

“Good night, Frances,” he said.

She laid the fancy work in her lap. “Good night, Sebastian.”

Before going upstairs, he moved toward Robert’s room with the book in his hand. It was “fancy work” of a different kind. As fiction, it would be a commendable account of a fantastical expedition to a far-off land. One that had involved perils and wonders, tragic loss and heroic survival. The maps and doctored photographs would have enhanced its grip on the imagination.

But Sir Owain had insisted it was no fiction. He’d even been prepared to take the Royal Society to court for casting doubt on his word. His vigorous defense had led to a public accusation of fraud and the equally public destruction of his reputation. He’d sued the Society and several newspapers, and lost every action.

And now here he was, withdrawn from public life, struggling to preserve his liberty and to retain control of his fate and his finances.

Sebastian tapped on Robert’s door before going in. Robert was writing. His bed was covered in slips of paper, all crammed with lines in his neat hand.

“I thought you were reading,” Sebastian said.

“I’ve read my serial. I’m not ready for anything else just yet.”

“I know what you mean,” Sebastian said. “It doesn’t do to rush onward. It’s nice to stay in the tale.”

“At least for a while. My favorite time of the day is when I’m waiting to go to sleep. I like to just lie there and think.”

“What about?”

“Things,” Robert said.

Sebastian knew that he made stories of his own, but he wouldn’t share them. Sebastian had sneaked a look at some of his writings, once. It was all gangs and pirates and Martian war machines, jumbled together in a single tale.

Sebastian said, “I have a job for you. It’s worth a shilling or two.” He handed over Sir Owain’s book and said, “Tell me what you think of this. Have you read it before?”

Robert turned it around and looked at the title.

“No,” he said.

“The author would have us believe that it’s a true account of his adventures. He travels to the Amazon, and his party is attacked by monsters unknown to science. He speaks of members of his expedition being discovered, torn by beasts. See if you can tell me the point where the truth ends and his fantasy begins.”