“For God’s sake, Newbury! Look at the state of this place.”
Bainbridge thumped into Newbury’s drawing room with a thunderous roar, like a bear with a proverbial sore head. He strode first towards the sideboard, which was heaped with dirty wineglasses and plates, then to the fireplace and Newbury’s favourite armchair, around which thirty or forty newspapers had been discarded haphazardly on the floor. He knocked a heap of tobacco ash off the arm of the chair with his cane.
Veronica sighed. Just when she thought he’d finally begun to calm down.
“Mrs. Bradshaw!” Bainbridge continued to bellow at the top of his lungs. He charged towards the door, flung it open, and shouted down the stairs, calling for Newbury’s housekeeper. “Mrs. Bradshaw! Get up here at once!” He turned to Newbury. His voice lowered a fraction, but his tone was still harsh, critical. “I know you’re no disciplinarian, Newbury, but this really is unforgivable. What happened here?”
Veronica tried to take in the situation. Bainbridge was right: The place was in a miserable state. The curtains were still drawn, even though it was now midafternoon, and the room smelled of stale tobacco smoke and sweat. It clearly hadn’t been aired for days. Worse were the stacks of dirty plates and unwashed glasses and the smaller piles of tobacco ash from Newbury’s pipe, left spotted around the room in various bizarre locations: the windowsill, the coffee table, the arm of his chesterfield. It was as if Mrs. Bradshaw had given up trying.
“Mrs. Bradshaw!” Bainbridge was beginning to grow red in the face.
Newbury crossed the room and put a placating hand on his friend’s shoulder. “She’s gone, Charles.”
Bainbridge looked flustered and confused. “Gone? Where? Have you granted her leave?”
Newbury shook his head, and Veronica felt a pang of sadness as the gravity of his situation sank in. She really had gone. He’d chased her away. “She gave up on me, Charles,” Newbury continued, “and I can’t say I blame her. I kept unsociable hours. I had the most irregular habits…” He trailed off. Veronica knew that he wouldn’t be able to give voice to the real reason Mrs. Bradshaw had left his service, but they were all very much aware of it. She could not watch his descent into addiction, or what it had made of him.
Something seemed to break, then, inside Bainbridge. His expression softened. All the rage, all the disdain seemed to pass out of him, and all that was left was the deepest concern for his dear old friend. Veronica watched as he placed his arm around Newbury’s shoulders. “Buck up, old chap. We’ll put it right. We’ll get things back on track.”
Newbury sighed. “Pop the kettle on, Charles. I haven’t had a good pot of Earl Grey for some time.”
Bainbridge gave him a hearty slap on the back. “I’ll get to it, Newbury. Right away. I’m sure Miss Hobbes here will run you a bath in the meanwhile.”
Newbury smiled thankfully. “And Charles?”
“Yes, Newbury?”
“I fear you may have to wash a few cups and saucers.”
Bainbridge chuckled, but Veronica could hear the undercurrent of sadness in the laughter. “Good God, it’s a few years since I’ve had the pleasure.” He set off in the direction of the kitchen.
Veronica stared at Newbury, and he looked back, his eyes filled with the apology he couldn’t offer. “He’ll be alright, you know,” she said. “He just doesn’t understand.”
“Do you?” Newbury looked away, staring into the cold, open grate of the fireplace.
“No. But I’m trying to.” She became aware that she was bunching her hands into fists by her side. She inhaled deeply to steady herself. “Right. A bath. And then Regent Street.”
Newbury nodded. “Quite so, Miss Hobbes. Quite so.”
Veronica eyed the object on the table and tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder. She wished she hadn’t seen it, and now that she had, she wished she could simply ignore it. But things were never that simple where Newbury was concerned.
She hadn’t known where to start. The drawing room was an intolerable mess, but she didn’t have the time-or, if she were truly honest with herself, the will-to clean it up. Instead, she had resolved to discuss the matter with Bainbridge and plot a means by which to recover Mrs. Bradshaw-or, if that proved too difficult-to make alternative arrangements on Newbury’s behalf. But then she had realised that there wasn’t even a place to sit, her sense of duty got the better of her, and she began to tidy up regardless. She’d started with the landslide of discarded newspapers beside Newbury’s favourite armchair, collecting them up into a tidy stack. And that’s when she saw it: the thing resting on the coffee table, as if it had always been there. A human hand, dismembered at the wrist, fingers in the air like the legs of a dead spider. It had been carefully dressed and arranged, the pale flesh inked or tattooed with a variety of arcane symbols.
Now Veronica was perched on the edge of the chair, staring at the object with a growing sense of unease. What was Newbury up to? Where had he gotten such a thing? She knew she shouldn’t be surprised: Newbury had a study full of bizarre objects, the trophies of many years. But this was different. Strange words had been written on the fingertips in Newbury’s own handwriting.
Veronica reached over and tentatively picked it up. The flesh was cold and pliable; the hand had been treated with some sort of chemical preservative. A pentagram had been neatly drawn on the palm in black ink. Various objects had been wedged between the fingers: a penny, a holly leaf, a sprig of parsley, a rolled-up fragment of parchment. She was careful not to dislodge any of them. Where the wrist had once been, the stump was carefully wrapped in waxed paper and bound with rough string. She was thankful for that.
Veronica carefully turned the hand over. More strange symbols had been drawn on the back of it, and again she recognised Newbury’s handwriting. The symbols meant nothing to her; she had no way of discerning meaning from what she saw, no frame of reference against which to judge them. But they worried her nonetheless. They signified that Newbury was once again dabbling in the occult, and the implications of that were too dreadful to even contemplate. Her duty to the Queen was to keep a discreet eye on Newbury, to ensure he didn’t stray too far from what Her Majesty deemed to be an acceptable path. Veronica had already failed in that duty by neglecting to report Newbury’s recent escalation of opium abuse. Discovering this grotesque, dismembered hand meant that she now either had to report to the Queen or pretend that she hadn’t seen it. She knew that she should tell the monarch, but also that she wasn’t very likely to. Nevertheless, that still left her with a question. Should she tackle Newbury on the issue and try to put a stop to it herself?
In the end, the decision was made for her when she heard a polite cough. She looked up to see Newbury framed in the doorway, grinning and dressed in a smart black suit, hair swept back from his face. “I see you’ve found Angus,” he said, his voice now filled with the confidence it had been lacking since they’d pulled him out of Johnny Chang’s earlier that morning.
“Don’t be so morbid,” she scolded in reply.
“You’re the one holding the body part,” he reminded her, laughing.
She placed it hastily back on the table. “What is it? What’s it for?”
Newbury crossed the room, coming to perch on the arm of the chair beside her. He looked suddenly serious, all sign of his recent levity gone. He searched her face as if looking for a sign in the way she returned his gaze. “I have the notion that something dreadful is going to come to pass, Veronica. This-” He gestured towards the mummified hand on the occasional table. “-this experiment was an attempt to divine some meaning from all that, to give substance to my instincts.”
Veronica frowned. She measured her next words very carefully, in a level tone. “Forgive me, Sir Maurice, if I speak frankly… but couldn’t this simply be the effects of the Chinese weed? Lucid dreams, hallucinations, that sort of thing? You have to admit, you’ve not exactly been yourself of late. Couldn’t the drug have inspired a kind of paranoid delusion?”
Newbury looked pained. “On the contrary, my dear Veronica. I believe the weed has helped me obtain a certain measure of clarity in the matter. The skein between this world and the supernatural world is thin, and sometimes, under the influence of the drug, I feel that veil lifting. I see… other things, glimpses of the spirit world, of the future and the past. It’s beguiling, like a siren song. The weed is a medium for that. Nothing more.”
“And did it work, this experiment of yours? Did you come to any conclusions?” Veronica didn’t know what to make of his words. She couldn’t easily discount them. She, who had a clairvoyant sister locked away in an institution, channelling visions of the future through her seizures. She, who had fought Newbury’s predecessor, Aubrey Knox, the rogue agent who had lost himself to the mysteries of the occult and become obsessed with the pursuit of power through ancient pathways.
The Queen would not have appointed her to monitor Newbury’s interest in the dark arts if she was not concerned that there was real power to be gained from its exploitation. A siren song, as Newbury had called it, luring him towards the rocks, full of promises of enlightenment. That was exactly what the Queen feared.
But this? It sounded more like the delusions of a man who had given himself over to the vagaries of the poppy than anything rational.
As if hearing her thoughts, Newbury put his hand on her arm. “The only conclusion I could draw was that we need to pay a visit to your sister at the Grayling Institute. She is perhaps the one person who could shed some light on the matter-the only one who can tell me if I’m going mad, or if we really are on the precipice of something disastrous.” He smiled. “Assuming you have no objections, of course.”
Veronica tensed. She hadn’t expected this. And of course, she trusted Newbury implicitly. But Amelia was ill, terribly, terribly ill, and Dr. Fabian had insisted that she stay away. More than that, in fact: he had insisted on her complete and total isolation from Amelia while she underwent her treatment. The notion did not sit easily with Veronica, but she had observed the doctor’s wishes, hoping to do the right thing for her sister’s recovery. And now Newbury, the man who had done so much for Amelia, needed something from her in return.
Veronica didn’t know how to respond. She would do anything for Newbury, of course. But was he thinking straight? To jeopardise her sister’s treatment on a whim, a simple search for validation…
“I-” She turned at the sound of clinking china, thankful for the interruption. Sir Charles shouldered open the door, carrying a silver tray filled with teacups, saucers, milk jugs, and sugar bowls. His cane was dangling from the crook of his arm. He glanced over at the two of them and saw Newbury sitting on the arm of her chair, freshly dressed and shaved. “Ah, Newbury. Much better, old chap. Come and give me a hand.”
Newbury smiled at her, a twinkle in his eye, and went to rescue his old friend from the embarrassment of having anything more to do with making the tea.
Veronica gave a sigh of relief. She would consider her next move carefully. If Newbury was right-if something awful was going to happen-surely Amelia would be able to help, to offer them an insight of some kind. But she feared that any instincts of Newbury’s might be compromised by his growing addiction to the opium poppy. And that left her with a horrible quandary. For if she couldn’t trust Newbury, whom on earth could she trust?
She watched the two men bustling around each other as they poured the tea, just like old times. It was a case of taking things a day at a time. That was all she could do. Newbury was there, and he was more like himself than she had seen him in months. They had a mystery to solve. That was enough for now. The rest could wait.
At least until after tea.