“Your … rescuer … came out of that,” Keats said. “If the old scavenger in the clergyman suit hadn’t drained off some of the potency first, the thing probably would have killed that woman, in addition to stopping her shot.”
CHAPTER 4
The stones …
Began to lose their hardness, to soften, slowly,
To take on form, to grow in size, a little,
Become less rough, to look like human beings,
Or anyway as much like human beings
As statues do, when the sculptor is only starting,
Images half blocked out….
–Ovid, Metamorphoses
Taking Keats’s advice, Crawford thickened his voice a little and let his mouth tend to hang open when they were questioned by the senior surgeon; total bewilderment he didn’t have to feign, nor a tendency to jump at any sudden motions around him. The senior surgeon told them that the nurse who had fired the gun had fled the hospital, so Crawford was able to say that he’d never seen her before and had no idea what she had hoped to accomplish. The condition of the corpse in the hospital bed was blamed on the ricocheted pistol ball, and it required an acting ability Crawford hadn’t known he possessed to nod and agree that that sounded likely.
Keats was through for the day, and Crawford knew that his own days as a medical student were over now that Josephine had somehow found him, and so the two of them walked homeward together up Dean Street. Men were unloading bales of old clothes from several wagons by the south corner of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and the yells from the vehicles of the merchants and cabbies blocked behind them were almost drowned out by the clamor of the dozen boys and dogs playing around the halted wheels, and for several minutes as Keats and Crawford shouldered their way through the crowd neither of them spoke.
Finally they were past the worst of the noise, and Crawford said, “John, what was that thing? That flying snake?”
Keats seemed bitterly amused. “Are you really trying to tell me you don’t know?”
Crawford thought about it. “Yes,” he said.
Keats stopped and stared at him, obviously angry. “How is that possible? How the hell much do you expect me to believe? Am I supposed to think, for instance, that your finger was really amputated because of gangrene?”
In spite of the fact that Keats was shorter than he and fourteen years his junior, Crawford stepped back and raised his hands placatingly. “That was a lie, I admit it.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to share any of his recent personal history with Keats, so he tried to change the subject. “You know, that fake priest was staring at my … at where my finger used to be.” He shook his head in puzzlement. “It seemed to make him … angry.”
“I daresay. Can you really not know about all this? He thought you were there for the same reason he was, and he was angry because you pretty clearly didn’t need to be anymore.”
“He was—what the devil are you saying, that he was there to get a finger amputated? And jealous because I’m missing one? John, I’m sorry, but this doesn’t even—”
“Let’s not talk about it in the street.” Keats thought for a moment, then looked hard at Crawford. “Have you ever been to the Galatea, under the bridge?”
“Galatea? No. Is that a tavern? It sounds as if …” He let the sentence go, for he’d been about to say as if the barmaids are living statues. Instead he said, “Why is it under the bridge?”
Keats had already started walking forward. “For the same reason that trolls hang about under bridges,” he called back over his shoulder.
The Galatea was indeed a tavern under London Bridge. After shuffling down a set of stone steps to the narrow river shore—into the shadows of the beached coal barges, where the two of them picked their way over unconscious drunkards and piles of rotting river weed—they stepped into the dank darkness under the bridge, and at one point even had to shuffle single file along a foot-wide ledge over the water, and Crawford wondered if there was another entrance for deliveries or if all the food and drink was delivered to the front door by boat.
They passed the place’s warped windows before they got to the door; lamplight made luminous amber blobs in the crude glass, and it occurred to Crawford that sunlight must never get this far in under the wide stone belly of the bridge overhead. Nine tiny lamps burned over the door, and Crawford wondered if they might be just the remainders of a pattern of now mostly missing lights, for
their positions—four in a cluster, then two, then three—seemed intentional.
Keats was in front, and pushed open the door and disappeared inside. When Crawford followed him in, he saw that there was no consistent floor to the place—every table was on its own shoulder or slab or projection of primordial masonry, connected by stairs and ladders to its neighbors, and each of the half-dozen oil lamps hung from the ceiling on a chain of unique length. Considering the place’s location, Crawford wasn’t surprised that it smelled of wet clay.
There were only a few customers huddled down there on this summer morning, and Keats led Crawford past them, in a winding, climbing course, to a table on an ancient pedestal in what Crawford assumed must have been the back of the place. One of the lamps swung in a subterranean breeze a couple of yards above the scarred black tabletop, but the shadows were impenetrable around them as they sat down.
“Wine?” suggested Keats with incongruous cheer. “Here you can get it served in an amethyst goblet—the ancient Greeks believed that wine lost its power to intoxicate if it were served that way. Lord Byron used to drink wine out of an amethyst skull.”
“I read about that—but it was just a skull, I think, a plain old bone one,” said Crawford, refusing to be intimidated by Keats’s manner. “A monk’s, I believe. He dug it up in his garden. And yes, wine would be just the thing on a day like this—sherry, if they’ve got a thick, strengthening one here.”
A big, moustached man in an apron climbed up beside Keats and smiled at the two of them; Crawford guessed that he had grown the moustache to partially conceal the no doubt cancerous bump that disfigured his jaw. “Well now, look who we have here!” the man exclaimed. “After some company, are you, my men? Neffy on this fine day? I’m not sure who’s around right now, but there’ll certainly be several who’ll pay for—”
“Have you met my friend?” interrupted Keats. “Mike Frankish, Pete Barker.”
Barker bowed slightly. “Anyone who can persuade Mr. Keats to grace my estab—”
“Just drinks,” interrupted Keats. “An oloroso sherry for my friend, and I’ll have a glass of the house claret.”
The man’s smile remained mockingly knowing, but he repeated their orders and went away.
“He didn’t know you.” Keats sounded thoughtful. “And Barker knows all the neff-hosts in London.”
“What is that, and why did you think I was one?”
The drinks arrived then, and Keats waited until Barker had climbed away into the darkness again. “Oh, you are one, Mike, or you’d be gripping the sides of the operating table right now while some doctor probed your abdomen for that pistol ball. But I knew it when I first saw you. There’s no mistaking the mark—kind of an ill look about you that’s all in the eyes. At first. Clearly you only became one recently—you couldn’t live with the mark on you in any city for very long without noticing the kind of attention you’d be drawing—and anyway your finger still hasn’t healed, and their bites heal quickly.”