The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs Read Free Page A

voice. “Mum’s the word down south, don’t you see? Some sort of contagion , apparently.”
    He had St. Ives’s attention now. “Contagion?” the Professor asked. “What variety?”
    “I don’t know the particulars,” he said. “But I’ll tell you that in my way of business I talk to some…interesting people, so to say. And one of these people let on that the village was one great Bedlam, the entire population picking straws out of their hair and crawling about on their hands and knees. Madness by the bucketful. Mayhem in the streets. I wouldn’t have stopped in Heathfield for anything for fear of getting a dose of it. And mark my words, now that I know what I know, tomorrow morning I’m going back home to Hastings, and you can be certain it’ll be by way of Maidstone, and not Tunbridge Wells.”
    St. Ives seemed to reel at the news, and Hasbro put a supportive hand on his arm. We all gave each other a look, what with Tubby’s story of the recent horror at the Explorers Club still fresh in our minds.
    Wait!” the man said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a loved one in Heathfield, sir?”
    “His own wife,” Tubby said.
    “Good Lord, sir! You’d best get her out, and no delay.”
    “Anything more you could tell us, then?” Hasbro asked him, keen for information.
    “Well, sir,” the man said, dropping his voice again, “you didn’t hear it from me. But seeing as who you are, and that you’re worried for your poor wife, and rightly so, I’ll be straight with you. Like I said, the village is closed down tight—roads blocked, soldiers patrolling. If you go down that way by rail, as perhaps you must, you’d best get off at Uckfield and make your way to the village at Blackboys. This chap I know, my sister’s gentleman friend, I’m ashamed to say, who does some work in the sneak thief and housebreaking line when he ain’t poaching, reckons that a man could find his way into Heathfield through the forest—past the coal fire pits alongside of Blackboys there. It’s easy pickings in Heathfield with the village in an uproar, is what he told me. ‘In through the front door and out again with the swag’—them was his very words. You’ll say I should have him jailed, of course, given what I know, but that’s not my way. What a man tells me in confidence is just that, if you understand me. Now, do you know the open country around Blackboys?”
    “Tolerably well, yes,” Tubby put in. “I’ve got an uncle in the smelting way at the Buxted Foundry. Produces railway steel for the Cuckoo Line. He’s got a house there in Dicker. I’ve hunted my share of grouse in and about Blackboys.”
    “Then you know something of the place.” He nodded, as if relieved to hear it.
    “Why would this…acquaintance of yours chance going into the village at all?” I asked skeptically. “Never mind the authorities, it’s the contagion I’m thinking of.”
    “It’s a brain fever, you see. This fellow I’m talking about has fixed himself a cap out of those great heavy gloves they wear at the kilns. Lined with woven asbestos, they are— amianthus some call it. Split open and pulled down over the ears, it’ll keep out the lunacy molecules like leather keeps out the wind. If you’re in the mood to go into Heathfield, he’s the fellow you’ll be wanting to see down in Blackboys. People call him the Tipper. He’s a small man, not above so.” He held his hand waist high. The man was apparently a dwarf. “He’s not unacquainted with the Old Coach Inn, there on the High Street. If you look him up, tell him you’re a friend of Peddler Sam Burke. Give him this.” He dipped into a pocket in his coat then and pulled out a card with his name on it: “Sam ‘the Peddler’ Burke: Watches, Jewelry, and Pawn.”
    And with that he once again became the man “in the timepiece line.” He said loudly, “No one fancies a pocket watch, then? Very fine works. Austrian made.” But he was already folding up the