The Adventure of the Ring of Stones: A Langdon St. Ives Novella

By James P. Blaylock

A strange message summons Langdon St. Ives and his companions to the Half Toad Inn in Smithfield, London, and along with the eccentric but fabulously wealthy Gilbert Frobisher, they set out for an uncharted island in the Caribbean, carrying a map that promises a treasure that beggars description. What they find – a terrible, pagan god from the depths of the ocean – leads them back to London, carrying within the hold of Frobisher’s steam yacht a fearsome, tentacled menace that threatens to devastate London.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781625672391

James P. Blaylock

James P. Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded ­– along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and Philip K. Dick Award, he currently directs the creative writing programs at Chapman University. Blaylock lives in Orange CA with his wife. They have two sons.­

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Ambush at the Half Toad

A week following the Snow Hill Massacre, which  had rocked Smithfield and all of London, I found myself once again at William Billson’s Half Toad Inn, Lambert Court, along with the brilliant Professor Langdon St. Ives and his man Hasbro, who had traveled with St. Ives these many years and was more friend than factotum. We were waiting on Tubby Frobisher and his eccentric and fabulously rich Uncle Gilbert, the two of them a worrisome quarter of an hour overdue. Tubby was coming down from Chingford, and Gilbert up from his mansion in Dicker, the old man anxious to communicate with us face-to-face. It was he who had summoned us. The mails weren’t to be trusted, Gilbert had told us, and we were to destroy the missive that called us to the Half Toad.

We were well used to Gilbert’s fancies and had done as he’d asked, ascertaining from the summons that he had in mind a sea voyage of some four weeks duration, the destination a well-kept secret: somewhere in the Atlantic, given the brevity of the voyage, but whether to the high northern latitudes or to the tropics we knew not. His privately-owned, ocean-going steam yacht was moored at the West India Docks. Our curiosity piqued, we had come along to the Half Toad, dunnage in hand, St. Ives evidently relieved to be active once again after a long period of hibernation.

Nearly a year had transpired since the terrible business of the Aylesford Skull, during which time St. Ives had gone to ground in Kent, playing the role of the gentleman farmer. He had seen to the building of an oast house on his and Alice’s considerable property during that mild fall and winter, and in the spring to the planting of a cherry orchard. The breezes of early summer, however, generated a certain nervous energy in the man, the old wanderlust rising in him like a tide. He had been denying nature, of course—something that Alice understood all too well—and it was she who insisted that he agree to Gilbert’s voyage. Meanwhile, she and the children and my own betrothed Dorothy toddled off to Scarborough for their annual summer visit to Alice’s aged grandmother, leaving the running of their acreage in Kent in the hands of the admirable Mrs. Langley, old Binger, the groundskeeper, and young Finn Conrad.

Foot traffic in Smithfield was uncommonly sparse this evening, and there were few customers, the bloody murders having cast a shadow over the neighborhood that hadn’t lifted yet. But it was all the better for our clandestine meeting with Tubby and Gilbert. Billson, who had the physical properties of a blacksmith and the mind of a natural philosopher, was cooking with a keen eye and a generous hand, turning a multi-armed spit that skewered two dozen of Henrietta Billson’s fat sausages, the drippings basting three plump pheasants on another spit directly below, the fire sizzling happily. Billson had just served out delicate mounds of lobscouse as a kickshaw, molded in tiny pie dishes and swirling beneath a cloud of steam redolent of nutmeg, juniper berries, and corned beef. Billson subscribes to the odd habit of serving lobscouse with a brown onion sauce, by the way, which I heartily recommend, the entire business, lobscouse and sauce both, thickened with pounded ship’s biscuit that had borne the government stamp—an inverted arrow—before Billson pulverized it with a belaying pin.

Billson had been a sailor, you see, in the years before he married Henrietta and purchased the Half Toad. Indeed, he had brought an immense, carved, wooden toad home with him from the West Indies—a fanciful ship’s figurehead, the ship itself having been blown to flinders, turning the toad into a missile that had very nearly done for Billson when it splashed down like a meteor not three feet from his head. But the toad had meant his salvation, for he had clung to it through the long night, the rest of the crew dead, the ship sunk. The heroic amphibian now looks out from its perch above the door on Fingal Street, its broad mouth set in a mysterious smile that brings to the well-tempered mind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and never more evidently than after one has consumed two quarts of Billson’s best ale, Old Man Newt.

I had just put a share of it away, the three of us having decided to whet our appetites and whistles while we waited for Tubby and Gilbert. I was admiring in a happy reverie the old oak wainscot, the etchings by Hogarth that adorned the wall, and the pheasants on the spit, my mind idle but well satisfied. Lars Hopeful, the halfwit tapboy, had renewed our jug of ale, and the window behind us stood open, letting in a grateful evening breeze. The bell of St. Bartholomew the Great began to toll just as Mrs. Billson was putting a bread pudding into the oven, which would come out again, hot and with buttered rum set aflame, when we had need of it later in the evening. I recall having turned to the window at the sound of the bell, looking for the crenellated tower of St. Bartholomew over the rooftops, when there came the sound of a wild curse, a pistol shot, and running