Ill Tidings, page 1
Ill Tidings
AUGUSTUS DERLYTH: OCCULT DETECTIVE
BOOK ONE
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
Author’s Note
You will encounter occasional British spellings of things, as the main character is extremely English.
For Stone, the original Derlyth
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Read More
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Chapter
One
Augustus took another sip of his absinthe and looked across the table at his chess companion this evening, Captain Gordon Digby, formerly of the British Army, now retired. Digby, bless his soul, was drinking nothing more interesting than a good whiskey on the rocks as they studied the game board between them.
Nearby, the library’s fireplace snapped and hissed quietly as it provided an excellent light and a modicum of heat on this otherwise damp and somewhat dreary London evening. Dinner had been excellent, as always when Derlyth had the Captain over for their Thursday night game. Game hens tonight, but done up in the Cantonese style, which didn’t remind Augustus of home but did take him to one of the more pleasant places he’d lived in an interesting life.
For now, the chess game was moving slowly to endgame. Augustus rarely won games against his old friend, but partly that was how limiting he found it. There were rules about how things moved. Stark limitations about what you were and weren’t allowed to do at each and every step.
Piddle, but Augustus really just enjoyed the conversations. Digby had served in France during the Great War, bemedalled for heroism then as well as in the decade since. That level of regimentation truly helped the man with the stark limitations of the chessboard even as it had honed Digby’s killer instincts sharply.
Augustus sighed internally and moved a knight laterally and back. It was a concept he appreciated, to be able to escape linear thinking.
Outside, London carried on being damp and dreary. Augustus had shaped his library specifically as a respite from the world outside. A place he could retire to when he got tired of dealing with people. The faded mustard wallpaper had a design in it if you looked closely but tended to present a somewhat mesmerizing background. The ceiling was pressed tin in a different pattern, but Augustus rarely found himself looking up. Old hardwood floors underneath his feet were softened in places by rugs, a chair, and a settee under the window overlooking the rear yard.
Homey, even though London really wasn’t home. If anything, this abode was more of a private museum than anything; doubly so this room, by far the largest other than the dining room he rarely used. That would require him to entertain. Worse, for others to actually come.
As it was, he had far too many rooms for his Scots housekeeper, Mary, and him to use, but barely enough for the things that he had accumulated in his decades overseas engaging in…call them archaeological expeditions. Technically, nothing so prosaic, as rarely did any sort of educational institution provide funding ahead of time.
No, most of the folks he dealt with were the public—and private—collectors who sought after his findings and paid up-front in gold or other useful trinkets.
Augustus still kept the best parts here, safely ensconced inside the protective wards and esoteric barriers he maintained around the grounds. A collection such as his might otherwise be a target to any number of burglars, bandits, or summoned creatures.
Digby moved a bishop.
“Thoughts?” Digby asked, looking up from the board. “You seem even more reticent than usual, old friend.”
“Old?” Augustus snapped. “You are no spring chicken yourself, Captain.”
Digby just smiled. Augustus had known the man for several years, but he was right. At forty-eight, Augustus Dexter Derlyth might be mistaken for middle-aged by fools and scholars. Digby was a mere stripling at thirty-eight.
Gordon Digby. British Army, retired. Order of Merit (Military). Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division). Military Cross. Not a man to be trifled with. Even across a chessboard.
No one would mistake this veteran of the Great War for anything less than a terrible warrior. Six foot six inches tall and some two hundred and thirty pounds, even his age—a decade younger than Augustus—would only be obvious in the way the man’s brown hair was coming in a little gray on the temples these days, and in those great, woolly sideburns, plus the fact that he now wore glasses to read. His dark suit, wool tonight, was certainly a shade more conservative than Augustus habitually wore, but Digby tended to frequent local tailors, while Augustus liked a particular Italian chap near Camden who knew how to make cloth move with you.
Two men, so very little alike on the surface of things. Old friends perhaps growing into old men.
Old? Far from it, not that he would say such a thing.
Of course, Digby would age at the normal pace for a human, something Augustus had no intention of participating in. His esoteric studies would doubtless fail to keep him alive forever at some point, but he was certain that they had kept him younger and fitter than men half his age. As had his studies with blade and open hand under various masters around the world.
Augustus moved a bishop now against Digby’s aggressive maneuvers, but his heart wasn’t in the game. Too linear. Too predictable, to the point that Digby no doubt could offer a count of moves until checkmate, were Augustus to ask at this moment.
He took another sip and considered the board.
“Perhaps I should merely submit now, and we instead discuss something useful?” Augustus offered.
“Like politics?” Digby fired back with a grin.
“Racehorses or con artists would probably be a more fertile field of inquiry,” Augustus countered frostily. “At least there you have interesting characters. I find Ramsay MacDonald a bit tedious as a Prime Minister, though neither Baldwin nor Law were any better.”
Digby grinned but remained himself reticent.
The sound of the library’s door opening spared them the actual tedium of finishing the game, or of handicapping MacDonald’s chances, though Augustus rated them low anyway. The world had simply not settled again after the failure of civilization that the Great War, ended only five—no, six—years ago, now represented.
Augustus turned to the sound of the squeaking floorboards and noted the sour scowl upon the face of Mary, his Scots housekeeper, still wearing her apron from dinner over her dress in spite of the elapsed time since. The woman still kept a better kitchen than she did a library, but he had long-since forbade her from cleaning anything in here, for fear of what might happen if she did. Or who she might accidentally unleash and not be capable of recapturing, were he not present to prevent it.
At least she smiled with a bit of sarcastic glee as she announced a caller, however late in the evening it was and somewhat inappropriate. Doubly so considering the beastly state of the weather earlier. But they each had their little digs at one another, and she had been with the house for more than decade now.
“Lady Claudette,” Mary smiled, rounding off her vowels in frequently unnatural ways.
The damnable woman even had the sheer effrontery tonight to curtsy at him and withdraw before Augustus could reply with more than a put-upon nod.
Augustus was moved to say something especially sarcastic, perhaps call it loudly in Mary’s wake, but he noted from the man’s glittering eyes that Digby seemed to be taking Mary’s side on things, confound it. As well from the hint of a grin as the man leaned back in his chair now. Digby reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out his pipe and a bag of that cherry-flavored tobacco the Americans had hooked him on during the Great War.
Augustus sighed and rose. He turned his king down just to officially cede things.
By now, Augustus should know better than the challenge the gods, or whatever beings of power they might be, and offer them such a stupendous opening as his own ennui. Foolish move on his part.
“You’ll pardon me, of course.” Augustus nodded to his companion. “Duty calls.”
But Digby just continued to grin lightly without commentary and concentrated on his pipe, digging out the ash with a folding pocketknife and dumping everything into the nearby fireplace.
Augustus checked the library about them, but nothing had changed in the last few hours that he and Digby had spent playing chess and chatting about…let us stick with esoterica and leave it at that. Less chance of confusion or subsequent prosecutions on the matter.
Even if a man like Digby would never tell.
Shelves with tomes and trinkets, as it were, arranged in no particular order save the system Augustus carried in his head. Less chance that a burglar would be able to find a specific thing when looking.
He moved to the door and looked
She was dressed in that most modern style: a casual, sporty black chic that had replaced the Victorian and Edwardian silhouette with something more appropriate to the inner chambers, although Augustus supposed that he was merely feeling his age, almost exactly twenty-five years the senior of this youngest daughter of the Duke of Montmorcy. Tonight, that meant she had removed her overcoat to reveal stretchy black material in the form of a skirt just past her knees to show a daring amount of calf, with a jacket buttoned over top of a white shirt, and a rather pretty black cloche, protecting that reddish-blond hair occasionally called strawberry and cut rather pageboy short.
She was a petite woman. A smidgen over five feet in bare feet and perhaps one hundred pounds. Petite, but made of stern stuff, as she had shown many times before. Augustus generally approved of her as a young woman.
It was the trouble she frequently brought to his door that he could have done without, some nights.
Such as this one.
Still, he approached and bowed appropriately, as befit his lowly middle-class background and showing her the respect due her rank. But, as Mary had done to him, he did so as a political statement on this unmarried young woman calling on an older gentleman rather inappropriately late in the evening.
And because she detested her own rank and privilege as much as she took advantage of it.
“Lady Claudette.” He smiled as he rose. “How may I be of service this fine evening?”
He supposed that the rumors surrounding one Augustus Dexter Derlyth, Esotericist and Metaphysician, would be such that it would not damage her reputation were she to be seen here on such an evening, but he doubted that many of his neighbors would know the woman on sight.
Augustus had them well cowed, and they they stayed well away from his gate with the odd sounds and strange smells that occasionally emanated from his abode.
Lady Claudette sniffed.
“Is that Digby I smell?” she asked, suddenly striding right past him in the hallway and entering the library where the good Captain had already risen to greet her.
But Augustus supposed that Digby had read the situation correctly immediately upon Mary’s original entrance. And it was Thursday night, so Lady Claudette already knew that the man would be by.
Augustus trailed her rather dejectedly up the hallway and into his inner sanctum. He returned to his seat by the fire and the chessboard, even as Lady Claudette dragged around one of the unfortunately-coloured pink wingback chairs that a designer had once convinced him to buy. She then settled in, crossing her legs at the ankles of her black, T-strap-heeled shoes and studied the two of them.
Captain Digby had his pipe lit and puffed contemplatively as he watched the performance, standing to one side of the mantle and leaning against it as he watched. Augustus considered just breaking out the good sherry and saying to hell with it, but something in the woman’s eyes caught him short.
“It’s fortunate that I find you both here this evening,” she began, apropos of nothing and without bothering to start the conversation at the beginning. As was often normal with this young woman. “There is trouble afoot.”
“My dear, it is Thursday, I might remind you,” Augustus did. “The Captain and I have our usual dinner appointment and game of chess, so I can hardly expect you to be surprised by such circumstances. Perhaps it would be best if you were to explain your prospective assault on my digestion all at once, and we can be done with it?”
“There’s been a murder at the museum,” she said, turning brilliant, sapphirically-blue eyes his direction.
When she left it at that, Augustus drew the automatic conclusion. She would have otherwise said the Royal Museum, or even the British Museum. That Lady Claudette left it without further appellation generally meant The Hyde Park Hall of Antiquities.
Lady Claudette sat and waited now, watching him. Augustus let the silence stretch for longer than polite before replying, also leaning back to consider. He grabbed his absinthe again and finished the little bit remaining in the glass before sitting it down on the chess table, now truly forgotten.
Personally, Augustus was neither here nor there with those chaps at the museum. They tended to have a better budget for acquisitions than many of the other places Augustus was occasionally retained by. And a better reputation than most of the private collectors he had enhanced with his various and sundry expeditions.
“I might remind you that they are a private academic institution, Lady Claudette,” he attempted to dissuade her from whatever it was that she currently had in mind. “I am merely a mercenary contractor they occasionally retain for specific tasks in acquisitions. I have no authority with much of London’s society, high or low. Even less so with the police.”
Captain Digby emitted a sound in the corner that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed snort, so Augustus turned a withering eye on the man. That giant was immune, as always.
Still, Augustus might be exaggerating his connections with UnderLondon. Or whatever the opposite of exaggeration might be. The correct term eluded him at present.
As it was, Captain Digby just puffed innocently on his pipe, so Augustus returned to his most charming and lovely interruption.
“I suppose you will not be mollified until I am dragged kicking and screaming into the affair,” he announced. “Best you share with me then whatever idle chatter seems to have sent you racing to my doorstep.”
“Dr. Thomas rang me just now,” she replied with an innocent smile.
“Did he now?” Augustus could not help the sarcasm dripping like honey from his words, but these two knew him quite well by now.
“The evening watchman found a dead body roughly two hours ago, identity as yet unknown, while making his rounds,” she continued. “The man had been torn limb from limb, right there off the secondary hall, without anyone hearing or seeing anything. They summoned the police and surrounded the building, but nobody has yet done a thorough inspection of the grounds or interior.”
“Quite intelligent,” Augustus noted. “And I suppose that Dr. Thomas expects you to prevail upon me to investigate?”
“I was his first call after sending for the police,” she nodded.
“Only because your father, the Duke, is a significant backer of the enterprise on an annual basis,” Augustus retorted.
He turned to Digby now. Noted that the man was all eyes and ears but had refrained from speaking at all. Innocent bystander and all that, as if anyone might be fooled.
“That’s the problem with muck-raking,” Augustus observed to the man, with a nod towards Lady Claudette and her more-public journalistic proclivities. “Occasionally, you stumble onto things that might have preferred to sleep down in the mud. Your thoughts, good Captain?”
Captain Digby, OM (Mil), OBE (Mil), MC, British Army retired. A man of great and terrible capability, even with his recent addition of reading glasses.
Augustus removed his own glasses at the thought, breathing on them and drawing a handy handkerchief from a pocket to clean the lenses, the silver wire rims a bit smudged from the day.
It gave them both a moment of contemplation.
“You are a known quantity, Derlyth,” the Captain began with that baritone rumble of his, but Augustus interrupted with a sharp, harsh bark of a laugh that caused the man to blush a tad. “Your reputation precedes you, perhaps?”
“Granted,” Augustus acknowledged. “Better.”
Were he a known quantity, he would have already been imprisoned and possibly burned at the stake in any number of countries or colonies, so best not to have that discussion.
