Simply surviving that night’s cascade of horrors was only useful insofar as it allowed us to continue our work. We had accomplished nothing besides losing three men killed, two who had run off and had not return, and one soldier severely disfigured by his own madness. Preparing an official explanation of the incident was difficult, but thankfully was also not my responsibility as His Majesty’s physician. Evidently, the official explanation provided by the sergeant among the men was that there was a party of bandits that had attempted to break into Kew Palace and that they had been heavily-armed insurrectionists, seeking the overthrow of the monarchy.

It was nothing short of staggering to me that Sir Lucas and Sir George had managed to sleep through the entire incident in their quarters in one of the adjoining buildings. When I discussed with them that following morning, they were entirely astonished at all they had heard. Sir Lucas had not difficulty believing me, but Sir George was incredulous. I want to thank Doctor Warren for not withholding his own experience. It proved useful in convincing Sir George of the veracity of our account.

Knowing that we had not yet put to rest the spirit of Octavius was my central concern. I believed that the banshee was in some way responsible for him never finding that rest, but I had a difficult time ascertaining precisely how. Banshees are heralds of doom far more often than they are the causes of it, or so I had been led to believe by all of the knowledge available to the clergy who attended to such matters.

Whatever the precise relationship, I knew that vanquishing the banshee would be of the utmost importance and I set about learning what its probable relationship was to Octavius. We summoned Her Majesty to the grounds of Kew, but kept her away from the King so that he might avoid having his spirits agitated by the topic at hand.

“Your Majesty, I want to discuss with you the circumstances under which Octavius perished here,” I said gently.

She whimpered at the suggestion but agreed to hear me out.

“Were there any peculiar sightings or noises the night he died?” I continued.

“Peculiar? Vat are you speaking of?”

“I do not wish to lead Your Majesty to give an answer,” I insisted. “Tell me to the best of your recollection.”

“I see,” she said. “There was this horrible vailing wind. So unusual. It vas May. The veather had been so nice. It sounded like, like someone screaming or a volf howling. Something like that.”

“And did anyone report to you any sightings of anything, something that they felt ashamed to bring to your attention?”

“Ein maid, excuse me, one maid said she thought she saw a ghost. I remember that. I assumed that she vas simply trying to help me believe that Octavius was on his vay to Heaven.”

I smiled at that innocent thought. Sadly, it is the case that pagan and primal forces in our world can lure Heaven-bound sounds back to the earth and keep them there as their servants. When I thought of it, while the banshee in question was likely not able to cause great harm by itself, it was possible that it had control over Octavius’ soul, particularly after Octavius might have felt aggrieved for the lack of mourning provided for him. Those who go unremembered or are badly remembered are at particular risk.

Once Her Majesty left, I met with the doctors and my sons in the palace while His Majesty had a blessedly long nap. Robert, via his copious acquired knowledge regarding Celtic pagan history and mythology, had surmised a strategy for luring out and destroying the banshee. It was elegant in its construction.

I cannot recall the precise way in which he described it as Robert’s insufferable arrogance makes for painful listening, but the essence is stated easily enough. He believed that the King’s random babble would periodically contain information that could be used to hypothesize a location for those who were doing this to him. He had, in his own time attending to His Majesty, heard descriptions of trees and other landmarks that might prove useful. He insisted that we needed to prod the King into a particularly agitated state to draw out such information.

“Ah!” Sir Lucas interrupted. “The King is very cross with us when we use cupping and blistering. Very cross, indeed.”

“Put hot cups on my skin and I’d be cross, too,” Thomas chuckled. The three doctors looked at him with great scorn. Thomas shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “I just think that we haven’t thought enough about how none of that works.”

“It’s been practiced for centuries!” Sir George protested. “Any radical modern notions have to answer for many years of successful practice!”

“Hear hear!” Warren bellowed.

“Indeed!” Sir Lucas added, adjusting his thick glasses.

“It obviously hasn’t been that successful,” Thomas mumbled.

“What was that?!” Sir George spat back.

“Irrelevancy,” I said to maintain our focus. “All of you, do whatsoever you are able to ensure the King enters a loquacious state. Then write down everything, and I do mean everything, he says.”

“Even the nonsense?” John asked.

“Especially the nonsense,” I retorted.

“And you, Willis. What will you be doing?” Warren asked.

I pointed my walking cane toward the northeast, right at London.

“A swift ride to London and back,” I said. “There is something very useful there that we must have. Mr. Greville, will you accompany me?”

Greville, who had been waiting just outside our conference, terribly distracted, joined in to agree that he would travel with me to and from London. I surmised that he was still staggered from the events of the prior evening and was trying to brace himself for the next calamity.

For the moment, however, there was a lull, as is typical for banshees. They particularly struggled to maintain their constant array of terrors and we decided it was possible to complete such a ride in a short amount of time before night would fall upon us.

What I looked for in London was in Westminster Abbey. After being led deep into the crypts below the abbey, we encountered a strange old woman, dressed in all white, and who looked as though she might have been a witch or some manner of supernatural entity herself. She prevented us from proceeding any further, even hissing at our colleague who had taken us that far.

“Who are you?” she asked, the light and dim candlelight in the area accentuating rather unpleasant features of her face.

“Captain Greville, His Majesty’s equerry,” Greville said, puffing himself up to make a larger impact.

“And your friend?” she asked

“Doctor Francis Willis. I am presently employed to provide care to His Majesty,” I explained with a slight smile.

“If you’re coming down this far, you’re very desperate indeed, oh….” The old woman groaned. “What’re you hoping to find down here?”

I hoped that she would not be the sort to ask a simple question but demand that the answer conform to a puzzle or riddle. I had encountered such types of guardian in my prior works. They were a queer and intriguing lot who belonged to an order within the Church specializing precisely in those efforts to purge the realm of the chaotic pagan influences that had once so dominated our kingdom.

“A banishing implement for haunting spirits. I believe that there is an ancient cudgel used by Saint Augustine of Canterbury,” I said.

“Oh, you need this for banshees, do you? Heh heh heh,” the old woman laughed. “Tell me, how do you fight that at which you cannot look?”

She was making reference to the fact that banshees were known to disappear into a puff of mist if looked upon, even though this particular one lurking about Kew Palace had not done so when we observed it. To apply rational rules to such creatures, however, is a fool’s errand. They exist outside the reason we in our era of Enlightenment like to believe so dominates that world.

“Every song has a singer. All words flow from a mouth. One needn’t have their eyes open to find their way,” I replied after thinking for some moments. Riddles never were a strong suit of mine. The old woman seemed pleased enough.

“Good. Then this,” she said, extracting from her sleeves the cudgel that I had sought out, “shall be yours. “Bring it back to us once you have done your duty.”

It was an impossibly old weapon, at least 1,180 years to be as exact as one could. The cudgel was hewn from a single piece of dark wood, inlaid with dark iron spikes and crude images of the crucifix. It had, miraculously, not fallen apart after all of this time. I wish it had been given a proper name like the great swords of legend, but alas it was a humble cudgel wielded by a lowly servant of the Almighty who sought for it no stories. Saint Augustine of Canterbury was everything that read of him in our histories and his cudgel proved that much.

We returned to Kew Palace just after nightfall to find the doctors applying a regimen of heated glass cups to His Majesty’s skin. As one would expect, the searing pain from having his skin blistered put the King in a most hideous temper. He shouted obscenities pertaining to desecration of the Virgin Mary that I dare not put to paper for fear that no amount of penance would render me clean before God’s eyes.

I noted, happily, that my son Robert was furiously taking down every word the King said. Given the King’s rapid pace of speech, this was a difficult task. I would estimate that the King spoke some two hundred words a minute, if not more. Robert, whatever his other shortcomings as a man, had a hand to match.

While the King remained laid out upon a sturdy red lacquered table, John and Thomas both held His Majesty down while Sir George and Sir Lucas observed the application of cups by Doctor Warren. Greville complained to me more than once that this entire enterprise was demeaning to His Majesty. I finally rejected all of his complaints utterly by saying, “Nothing will be more demeaning to His Majesty than if he lives out the rest of his life in lunacy.”

At one point that evening, Robert threw up his hands, drawing all of our attention.

“I think there’s something here!” he exclaimed.

“Oh? Something useful as opposed to just, well, something?” Thomas joked, still holding down His Majesty’s right arm.

Robert shot him the most frightful look and then returned to his pages.

“The King kept mentioning the King of Prussia and him being nearby. At first, I thought that was nonsense,” he said. “Then he kept talking about these trees. Something about six trees. Then he mentioned being underwater in a pond.”

“I’m afraid that sounds like quite a lot of nonsense again,” Sir George sighed.

“No damn it!” Robert shouted. “If any of you will recall, there is a botanical garden here on the Kew Palace grounds, or rather near them. Prussia gifted to the royal family some trees for that garden. I recall hearing that somewhere. Therefore, I believe that it is almost certainly the case that His Majesty continues making reference to those trees and they are around a pond in the garden.”

“And then the banshee is there,” I said, albeit with reserved confidence.

“The Welsh equivalent of a banshee, yes. I have no idea as to why it is this far east or why it is here at all, but that is my hypothesis,” Robert insisted.

It would not arise again in this conversation, but for the sake of accuracy I should note that the Welsh version of a banshee is a cyhyraeth. There are somewhat different characteristics and I have never been clear as to why those differences exist, but they do. Should any person find my records on this subject useful on the whole, perhaps that aside will be of specific value.

My son John made a spitting gesture in disgust.

“If we know where this beast is, why don’t we just go out there and kill it now?” he asked.

Sir Lucas mumbled and raised a finger to interject, but was drowned out for a moment by the King’s almost indecipherable screaming.

“Stop the blistering,” Sir George ordered. “It’s obviously been enough.”

Warren almost appeared sad that he would not be able to continue his exercise. He put down the heated cups he was about to apply to the King’s skin and instead sat down in an irritated posture.

“As I was about to say,” Sir Lucas began again, “I believe there is a problem with simply trying to hunt a banshee down, yes? They only appear when someone is about to die. Isn’t that correct?”

This was a point I had worried about as Robert had started explaining his theory. It was more complex because of the effects of Octavius’ ghost and whether that was truly under the banshee’s control or not. I had surmised that it was, but there was no firm way of knowing that.

Sir George clicked his cane on the ground and commanded the room’s attention as we all pondered Sir Lucas’ query.

“This seems a simple enough matter. We find some poor souls who are about to die in one of the nearby hospitals and bring them here,” he said without a single trace of remorse in his voice. He must have sensed how horrified I was by the thought as he offered an alternative. “Or, we find prisoners who are being held on capital crimes and execute them near where this creature is believed to be.”

“God help us, Sir George. I think that your first suggestion was better than the second,” I gasped.

“It is either that or you wait for that boy’s ghost to drive men to kill themselves again!” Warren immediately rejoined.

Simply waiting for that to occur had been a thought on my mind, as it had happened. Once a banshee started their wailing, it was believed that their intended target could not survive, regardless of the interjections of others. What we had observed raised another complication. If this foul abomination could indeed control the Prince Octavius’ spirit, we had an entirely different dilemma upon our hands. A banshee that could select its own quarry and bring about deaths on its own was a frightening thought.

“I suggest we move quickly on your suggestion, Sir George,” I said, conceding the point after a few seconds of additional thought. “Either it is successful and we can bring a swift end to this menace or it is a failure, in which case we will at least know what won’t work.”

We sent our summons that night to a hospital some six miles away for their most deathly ill patients to be transported to Kew by order of His Majesty’s physician, Sir George. It was a decision we all found distasteful, but grimly necessary.