I told him I was, and wiped the lathery remnants from his face with a warm towel. He looked in the mirror and gave his reflection a cursory glance.
“A pity,” he mused. “A pity squared: first that I have none to eat and second that I can’t remember eating one to begin with! Where is my shirt, Will Henry?”
“I think I saw it on your wardrobe, sir.”
I trailed behind him into the bedroom. As he buttoned his shirt, I said, “I could run down there now, sir.”
“Run down where?”
“To the market, for some scones.”
He waved his hand, absently dismissal. “Oh, I’m not really hungry.”
“You should eat something, though.”
He sighed. “Must we plow that same tiresome row again, Will Henry? What are you doing now?”
“Nothing, sir.”
He started to say something, and then apparently changed his mind. “Anything in the papers today?”
I shook my head. One of my duties was to scan the dailies for tidbits that might interest him. Of late there seemed to be only one potentially hazardous matter that concerned him. “Nothing, sir.”
“Remarkable,” he said. “Not even in the Globe?”
I shook my head again. It had been more than a fortnight since he had reported the murder to the authorities, and to date only a brief notice and an obituary had appeared in Dedham ’s weekly. The police, it appeared, were not taking seriously the doctor’s allegations of foul play.
“Damn him,” the monstrumologist muttered. I did not know if he referred to Dr. J. F. Starr, the victim, or to Dr. John Kearns, his killer.
Warthrop had promised justice for Hezekiah Varner and those other poor unfortunates suffering behind the heavy padlocked doors of Motley Hill. That promise was kept, though doubtlessly not in the way he had anticipated. Indeed, I do not think that promise was foremost in his mind the morning we arrived in Dedham, three days after the felling of the mother Anthropophagus. It wasn’t justice he sought; it was answers. Not equity, but exorcism.
“Charming,” Kearns commented upon our arrival at the decrepit sanatorium. He had insisted, before taking his leave of New England, on accompanying us. He, too, wanted to verify Warthrop’s revised theory of the case-or so he said. “I was committed once. Have I ever told you, Pellinore? Oh, yes, for three long years before I managed to effect my escape. I was all of seventeen. The entire abysmal episode was my dear mother’s doing, God rest her angelic soul.” He looked down at me and smiled. “She is catalogued with your employer’s Society, under M for ‘Monsters, Maternal.’ Four days after my return she fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”
“Why did she commit you?” I asked.
“I was precocious.”
The erstwhile black-clad Mrs. Bratton showed little surprise at our unexpected appearance upon the sagging stoop. The doctor handed her his card and twenty dollars in gold, and presently we were escorted to the little parlor with its odiferous atmosphere and tired trappings, where the ancient alienist huddled in his dressing gown beneath a threadbare blanket, shivering despite the robust fire dancing in the hearth.
There were few preliminary pleasantries. With a gleam in his charcoal eyes, Kearns introduced himself as Dr. John J.J. Schmidt of Whitechapel.
“And what is your area of expertise, Doctor?” inquired the old man.
“Anatomy,” answered Kearns.
Warthrop deposited two more coins upon the table by Starr’s elbow and immediately inaugurated the interrogation.
“Who were Slidell and Mason?” he asked.
“Madmen,” murmured Starr.
“Is that a formal diagnosis?” wondered Kearns.
“No, but I assure you, Dr. Schmidt, madness is my area of expertise.”
“They were agents of the Confederacy?” pressed the doctor.
“They never claimed to be, Warthrop, at least not to me, but I met them only once, and that briefly. Certainly they were fanatical over ‘the cause,’ as they called it, the most dangerous kind of fanatics too: fanatics with fabulous sums at their disposal.”
“My father introduced you,” said the doctor. It was not a question.
The old man nodded, and even that small gesture propelled him into a coughing jag that lasted at least two minutes, at the end of which he produced the same disgusting scrap of cloth and spat into it. Beside me Kearns chuckled, as if something about the ritual delighted him.
“And who did my father say they were?”
“Philanthropists.”
Kearns stifled a guffaw. The doctor shot him a look and turned back to Starr. “Philanthropists?”
“Interested-keenly interested, in their words-in the advancement of the science of eugenics.”
“Fanatical philanthropists,” ventured Kearns, still chuckling.
“My father,” said Warthrop. “He enlisted their aid in an experiment.”
Starr nodded. “As I understood it, it involved the merger of the two species.”
“Oh, dear God!” Kearns ejaculated with mock horror.
Warthrop’s revulsion was not feigned, however. “Anthropophagi with Homo sapiens? To what possible purpose?”
“The obvious one, Pellinore,” said Kearns. “A killing machine with an intellect on par with its bloodthirstiness. The ultimate predator. The bestial equivalent to Nietzsche’s Übermensch.”
“I don’t think he looked at it that way, Dr. Schmidt,” said Starr. “ They might have, Mason and Slidell, but not Warthrop. ‘It may be in our power to give a soul to the soulless,’ he told me in private. ‘Mercy to the merciless. Humanity to the inhuman.”’
“And you agreed,” said Warthrop.
“Not at first. I rebuffed the offer outright. I had no desire to play God.”
“But you changed your mind. Why?”
Starr stayed silent. His chest rattled in counterpoint to his tortured breath. Warthrop added two more coins to the stack.
“How do you know I changed it?” the geezer croaked.
“You shut up Varner for them. Convinced the court he was insane and locked him away lest anyone ever believe his tale.”
“Varner was mad as a hatter.”
“And you agreed to the second part of the bargain.”
Starr wet his purplish lips. “There was no other part,” he insisted. “What is this about, Warthrop? What do you want from me? I am an old man, a dying old man, I might add. Why have you come here to badger me about the past?”
Warthrop whirled and, seizing my wounded arm, shoved it under the agitated alienist’s nose.
“Because it isn’t the past,” he growled. He released me and leaned into the old man’s face. “You ask what I want. I will answer with the same question: What is it that you want, Jeremiah Starr? You have my word as a gentleman I will tell no one what transpires between us this day. You shall not spend the remainder of your miserable little life in prison or end it upon the gallows, though the blood of your countless victims calls to heaven for it! I know most and suspect I know the rest, but I wish to hear it, and there is no one left alive to confess to it but you. You have my word; what else?”
Starr refused to answer, but his greed betrayed him: His rheumy gaze flickered for an instant to the stack of coins at his elbow. Warthrop opened his purse and dumped the entire contents onto the table. The coins clattered, cascaded to the worn carpet. One landed heads-up on top of the old man’s throw.
“There!” Warthrop cried. “All I have with me. Tomorrow I’ll give you ten times that, only answer the question so the matter can be put to rest once and for all… The creatures in my father’s care needed two things to survive during the course of this ‘experiment’ in eugenics, whatever its true purpose: a safe haven, which no doubt Mason and Slidell funded, and food. Yes? They built the subterranean enclosure and you supplied the meals. Yes? Say ‘yes,’ you damnable monster.”