Free The Isle of Devils by Craig Janacek Page A

earliest hints of grey, and I judged that his age may have been nearer forty than thirty, though his tremendous vitality made that number irrelevant. He had a splendid masterful forehead over magnetic amber eyes, and his sunbaked skin was so craggy it might have been chiseled in granite. He had massive broad-shoulders, with the limbs and chest of a Hercules. I figured that he must have been sixteen stone of solid bone and muscle. His huge hands looked as if they could bend steel. All in all, he was an imposing, commanding figure, with a natural expression of authority, and my first thought was that he would have looked splendid in an Army uniform, though he was dressed plainly in an simple black-frock coat with a circular malachite pin.
     
    His companion was much smaller, likely below average height, though well-built and freshly complexioned. His age was not more than three or four and thirty, and he possessed a frank, honest face with the brow of a philosopher. His sandy hair was cut short and continued around along his cheeks and chin in a trimmed beard with a slight moustache. He used an eye glass, and I noted that his alert eyes were a piercing shade of blue. He wore a very shiny top hat and a neat suit of dark-grey, with an emerald and black silk cravat.
     
    As I studied them, I noted raised voices coming from the back room where the woman had retreated. One voice was surely hers, while the other had the deep tones of a large man. Shortly thereafter, the owner of that voice appeared. In age he may have been about fifty, I should judge, with a strong-jawed, rugged face, and a grizzled moustache and shock of brown hair, which failed to fully cover a bald shining scalp which shot out from among it. He was a thick-set, burley man, with broad shoulders that were unencumbered by a coat, and he was stripped down to his rolled-up shirtsleeves, clearly having recently been engaged in some physical activity. His grey eyes appeared slightly flustered, but he smiled broadly at me, exposing a line of crooked teeth. “You must be Captain Henry’s brother, the doctor! It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I am Graham Boyle. Your brother secured your room with me, and I am afraid that I forgot to mention it to Mrs. Foster. Don’t you worry yourself, sir! If you could just sign the ledger here, please? ” He pushed a worn leather book towards me. “ Of course we have a room for you. It’s our last one, but one of our finest. It is the corner room, upstairs, the Walker Room.”
     
    “The Walker Room?” I inquired.
     
    “Ah, named after the previous tenant of the building. Before this was the Globe Hotel, it was the headquarters of Major Norman Walker. He was the agent for the Confederate States of America. From here he oversaw the shipment of war materials from Europe to the Southern States.”
     
    I frowned. “I was but a lad back then, but was there not a blockade by the North?”
     
    “Hah!” the man laughed loudly. “Of course there was. But where do you think the best blockade-runners came from?”
     
    “That’s enough history, I think, Mr. Boyle.” Mrs. Foster had reappeared from the back room and was busying herself with setting up the tables for the dinner service. “Have you even fixed our guest a drink?” She fixed me with a piercing state, and I thought I detected a hint of sulky defiance in her eyes, though what I had done to agitate her was beyond my power of comprehension.
     
    “Oh, I am sorry, sir.” Boyle moved over to a sideboard, where he pulled a bottle of whisky from a spirit case and expertly sprayed a bit of soda water into it from a nearby gasogene. He set the glass down in front of me, and I sipped at it contentedly.
     
    “When you are ready, sir, I can show you to your room,” continued Boyle.
     
    I nodded. “If you don’t mind me taking your glass up with me, then I am prepared to go now.”
     
    “Of course, sir!” he grinned at me. “I can bring you another in twenty minutes,