Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(22)

“And a disgraced one. Which is why I work for the Major, because nobody else will have me. Next question.”

“At ease. If I may continue? A highly educated man, and one who has worked in strange and ancient places. Do you think there’s anything in Major Peabody’s theories?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s a serious question.” Glyde’s voice remained light, a slight smile on those thin lips. “Do you think there’s more to the world than meets the eye?”

“I think there’s plenty I don’t understand,” Saul said, feeling his way. “And that the human mind has remarkable and insufficiently explored capacities. For example, mesmerism. What did you do to me?”

“I?”

Saul gave him a look. “You did something I don’t understand on Camlet Moat, and something on Cock Lane, too. I’d like to know what you’re playing at.”

Glyde’s brows rose. “I dare say, but you haven’t answered my question. No, no, Mr. Lazenby: you go first.”

“Whether there’s more to the world than meets the eye? Of course there is, one way or another. People create poetry and mustard gas. We invent gods and monsters and gods that might as well be monsters. We act with extraordinary grace and unfathomable cruelty. We’re so terribly intelligent, and dreadfully easy to fool. I’m ready to believe you mesmerised me on Camlet Moat; I’ve seen odder things done. I don’t need to believe in mystical hexagrams to explain a tree bursting into flame—”

“How do you explain it?”

“I don’t,” Saul said. “It may have been a natural phenomenon, a new undetectable secret weapon, or divine intervention. I couldn’t say which.”

“You aren’t curious?”

“Do you have an answer? Because if so, then yes, I am damned curious, but I’ve heard enough meaningless speculation for a lifetime.”

“You don’t think there is method in Major Peabody’s madness?”

“Not to speak of, or any meaning either.”

“Mmm. And yet you keep turning up.”

“What do you mean, I keep turning up?” Saul demanded with justifiable outrage. “You keep turning up. I’ve been there before you every time, on Cock Lane, and Camlet Moat, and even at the tree. You came to find me on that train, and you were waiting for me today. And I’m acting at the dictates of a luna—uh, an eccentric, so what is it that brings you to the same destinations as me? What mystical patterns are you following, Mr. Glyde?”

“That’s an extremely good question,” Glyde said. “Which I don’t intend to answer.”

Saul sighed. “You astonish me.”

Glyde’s lips curved. One couldn’t call it a grin, but it was certainly a smile, and a real one at that, crinkling his eyes and parting his lips for the first time that Saul could recall. He didn’t have much to smile about himself; it struck him now that Glyde seemed not to find much joy in the world either.

He looked better smiling. It cut through the cool superiority of his manner, turning his bony aristocratic features into something warmer, more human. It made him touchable, or it made Saul want to touch him.

“I think you owe me some sort of answer, though,” he said, more or less at random. Anything to keep this going, not to have Glyde walk off and to be alone again. “Don’t tell me: you’re searching for Geoffrey de Mandeville’s lost treasure. Following clues through London from Temple Church to Camlet Moat.”

“Damnation,” Glyde said. “I should have thought of that, shouldn’t I? Yes, this is a case of rival treasure hunters across London. Peabody will sweep you off to the Pyramids next, for inscrutable reasons, and I shall step out from behind the Sphinx—”

“Looking much like its shorter cousin.”

Glyde gave a crack of laughter. “Ha! Yes, indeed. I shall make gnomic utterances swathed in a headscarf and vanish into a sandstorm.”

Saul was smiling too now. “It’s clearly your metier. Wines, spirits, and cryptic disappearances.”

“Wines and spirits take up much of my life,” Glyde assured him. “Is Major Peabody looking for treasure?”

“Not to my knowledge. He seems to me nothing more than a harmless crank with a mind open to every passing wind of belief. You would—you would tell me if he was not? If you knew any ill of him?”

“What ill do you fear?”

“Oh, you know.” Saul strove for his previous tone. “If you’re actually a spy for some top secret government department. If Major Peabody is using the cover of a harmless eccentric to work for the Germans, and I’m unwittingly helping him—” He broke off, raising his pint to his lips, but his hand shook, the beer splashing his face. He put the glass down too hard, and felt beer run down its sides, over his fingers.

Glyde’s eyes were on him, intent. “I can’t tell you Major Peabody is harmless, or if he intends ill, or if he is doing ill without intending it. I don’t know what he’s doing, or if it’s for anyone but himself. I will not lie to you: I am concerned. On the other hand, I do not work for the Government.” He said that with extreme distaste, as though denying being a common prostitute. “I have no reason to believe Major Peabody is a traitor to his country, in the way you fear. Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on.”