Beneath London by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

that I am.”
    “I’ll just take myself in hand,” Alice said. “I’ll fetch your coat from upstairs, Langdon. The weather is changing. Give me two minutes, and I’m with you.” She rose and hurried away up the stairs.
    St. Ives took up his pen and wrote a note to Hasbro, asking him to bring the chaise around to Hereafter Farm and to wait for them there, and then he took Alice’s double-barreled fowling piece from the wall and slipped four shells into his trouser pocket, before compelling himself to sit back down at the table. He was anxious to see this through in order to be back about his business.
    “Sarah Wright granted me a particular service once, Professor, for which I owe her a great deal, although it’s nothing I can speak of here, and nothing that I would willingly make public. I was mortally certain that our secret was safe, but if it is not, if someone has…” She struggled to her feet when she saw Alice descending the stairs, and the three of them went out beneath the afternoon sky, her sentence left unfinished.
    * * *
    M other Laswell drove the wagon, the three of them sitting together tightly on the seat. St. Ives’s shillelagh, which served him as a weapon and walking stick both, lay on the bed of the wagon along with Alice’s fowling piece. He had no idea of taking the women along to Sarah Wright’s cottage until he had seen it for himself, or of leaving them defenseless in the chaise. He had raised the issue as soon as they had started out, and neither woman had protested, Alice agreeing immediately to remain with Mother Laswell.
    His mind turned on Boxley Woods now, which he had regarded through the window not an hour past. He had tramped through it on two previous occasions, searching out mushrooms for Mrs. Langley, but he had never traveled deeply enough into it to see the cottage where Sarah Wright lived. Now the wood lay a hundred yards in front of them, the copper beeches at the outer edge, and the upper branches of the old forest towering one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. Had it been the purple color in the beeches that had attracted his attention earlier today, or had his attention been attracted by something else? By a presentiment, say. It was a novel idea – one that he would have laughed into oblivion fourteen months ago, before he had met Mother Laswell and got caught up in her desperate affairs, which had turned out to be his own.
    The wagon entered the wood and fell into shadow. The vast trunks of the beeches were green with moss along the woodland floor, although gray above, the sparse leaves a hodgepodge of browns, reds, and yellows. There was almost no undergrowth – far too much shade – and the beech saplings were puny and starved for sunlight. Mosses and lichens covered the rocks that lay along the roadway, with here and there a patch of grass when a break in the foliage above let in a ray of sun. Mushrooms grew up through the litter of leaves and rotted wood on the ground – blewits were particularly plentiful, and oyster mushrooms on fallen limbs. St. Ives promised himself that he would return in the next week or so with a basket. The family would make a day of it.
    But the pleasant idea disappeared from his mind as quickly as it had entered, replaced by a sense of indefinite dread, which increased as they drove deeper into the trees. He wondered whether his mind had been infected by Mother Laswell’s sense of foreboding, or whether the foreboding had some authentic existence. The wind gusted, and leaves fell from overhead and skittered along the dirt track, which had narrowed.
    A fork appeared in the road ahead, the track on the right being hidden by leaf-covered grass, as if no one had passed that way since summer had ended. Mother Laswell turned down along the path less traveled, and soon the trees closed in on either side, and she reined in the horses on a clear, grassy patch of ground.
    St. Ives climbed down, handed Alice the fowling piece, and set