“How much?”
“How much can you manage?”
Barry sighed heavily. “Stand over here, please, guv.”
Doyle stood and shielded Barry from the rest of the room as he turned to the wall, unbuttoned a hidden flap on the inside of his waistcoat, and pulled out a bulging roll of five-pound notes. “Will this do?”
“Just one, I think, will be more than sufficient.” said Doyle, trying to conceal his amazement.
Barry peeled one note off and replaced the rest. Doyle took the note from him and tore it neatly in half.
“Cor…wot’zat then?” gasped Barry.
“Do you know an officer here you can trust?”
“There’s a contradiction in terms—”
“Let me rephrase that: Do you know one who can be relied upon to do a job for money?”
Barry looked out at the guards patrolling the corridor. “Could do.”
Doyle folded the written note around half the bill and handed it to him. “Half now, the rest when we get word the message’s been received.”
“Give it a go,” said Barry, sneaking a look at the note as he moved toward the bars. He couldn’t help but notice the note was addressed to Inspector Claude Leboux.
Two hours later, Doyle was summarily escorted without explanation to a small room at Pentonville set aside for questioning of suspects. Minutes afterward, Leboux appeared alone, his mustache fairly bristling with anger. He closed the door and stared at Doyle.
“Hello, Claude.”
“Corralled at a dice game, Arthur? I don’t recall gambling as a vice you were given to indulge.”
“I wasn’t there to gamble, Claude. This is a clear case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Leboux sat opposite to Doyle, folded his arms, splayed out his feet, and toyed with one waxed end of his mustache while he waited for the next line of questions to coalesce in his mind. Trying to heed Sparks’s repeated advice about mistrusting the police, Doyle weighed how much he needed to divulge in order to secure his release, without drawing down the unwelcome attention of Leboux’s superiors.
“You look like a valet,” Leboux finally said.
“There have been repeated attempts on my life by the identical parties who tried the other day. This is by way of avoiding detection.”
“Why haven’t you come to me?”
“I’ve been out of the city since you last saw me,” said Doyle, thankful to employ some small grain of truth. “Leaving London seemed the safest course.”
“Was it?”
“No, as it happens. These assailants have pursued me relentlessly.”
“When did you return, Arthur?”
“Last night.”
“Have you been to your flat?”
Petrovitch, thought Doyle; he knows about Petrovitch. “I haven’t, Claude. I wasn’t at all sure it would be safe.” Doyle waited, summoning the bland countenance he employed in the presence of patients who had ventured beyond hope of recovery but weren’t up to receiving the news.
“Your building was burned down,” Leboux finally said.
“My flat?”
“A total loss, I’m afraid.”
Doyle shook his head. Fire again. Not hard to reason who’s responsible for that, thought Doyle. My flat gone. It wasn’t the thought of losing his possessions that troubled him so—he’d considered those lost already. Now not only all evidence of Petrovitch’s murder but the outrage they had visited to his rooms as well was gone forever. A hot coil of anger went red inside him.
“Claude, I want to ask you something,” said Doyle. “In your capacity as inspector.”
“All right.”
“Are you at all familiar with the name… Alexander Sparks?”
Leboux looked up at the ceiling and squinted. After a moment, he shook his head slightly and took out a notepad and pencil. “Let’s have it again.” Doyle spelled it for him.
“That’s the man who’s after me. The one you’re looking for. The man responsible for these crimes and perhaps a great many others as well.”
“And what leads you to believe this is the man?”
“I’ve spied him pursuing me now on three different occasions.”
“What’s his appearance?”
“I’ve never seen his face. He’s given to wearing black. And a cape, a black cape.”
“Black cape…what places is he known to frequent?”
“No one seems to know.”
“Acquaintances?”
Doyle shrugged.
“Other recent offenses?”
“Sorry.”
Leboux’s cheeks filled with color. “Do you happen to know his hat size?”
Doyle leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You’ll have to forgive my vagueness, Claude. He’s an elusive figure, but there’s a better than even chance this man is nothing less than criminal mastermind of the entire London underworld.”
Leboux shut his notebook and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Arthur,” Leboux said, measuring his words like a printer. “You’re a doctor. Well on your way to becoming a pillar of our community. I say this to you as a friend: You are not on the straight and narrow to reaching that post by running around England dressed like a butler going on about plots to murder you in the night by mysterious kingpins of crime.”
“You don’t believe me. You don’t believe I’ve been under attack at all.”
“I believe that you believe that you have been—”
“What about what I found on the floorboards at Thirteen Cheshire Street?”
“Yes. I had that substance analyzed by our chemist—”
“You can’t tell me that wasn’t blood, Claude.”
“That it is. It does appear that you did in fact witness a murder.”
“Just as I told you—”
“The murder of a large hog.”
There was silence. Leboux leaned forward. “It was pig’s blood, Arthur.”
“Pig’s blood? That’s not possible.”
“Perhaps someone got carried away carving the Sunday roast,” said Leboux. “A bit on the rare side for pork, if you ask me.”
What did this mean? Doyle raised a hand to his throbbing head.
“You could do with a nice slab of rare meat about now for that knot on your bean,” said Leboux.
“Forgive me, Claude, I’m a trifle confused. It’s been a very trying few days.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
Leboux folded his arms and gave him a look that was more pans police inspector than trusted friend. Feeling the leverage of Leboux’s scrutiny, Doyle was prompted out onto an even less sturdy part of the limb to which he was so precariously clinging.
“John Sparks,” he said, almost a whisper.
“Excuse me?”
“John Sparks.”
“Any relation to the other gentleman?”
“Brother.”
“What about John Sparks, Arthur?”
“Does the name ring a bell?”
Leboux paused. “Perhaps.”
“He tells me he’s in the service of the Queen,” whispered Doyle.
That brought Leboux to a momentary halt. “What am I to do with this piece of information?”
“Perhaps you could verify it.”
“What else can you tell me about John Sparks, Arthur?” Leboux asked quietly, as close as he had come to an open appeal for Doyle’s cooperation.
Doyle hesitated. “That’s all I know.”
They looked at each other. Doyle could feel his bond with Leboux stretch to its breaking point; for a long moment there was no telling whether it would hold. Finally, Leboux flipped open his notebook, wrote down Sparks’s name, closed the book, and rose.
“My strong advice to you is stay in London,” said Leboux.
“Am I free to go then?”
“Yes. I need to know how to reach you.”
“Leave word at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I’ll make a point of checking there on a d
aily basis.”
“See that you do.” Leboux stopped to offer a more considered opinion. “I don’t think gambling is at the heart of your difficulty, Arthur; I don’t think you’re particularly well. If I were you, I would seek out the opinion of a doctor. Perhaps even the services of an alienist.”
Fine, thought Doyle, he doesn’t think I’m a criminal, he just thinks I’m mad.
“Your concern is not unappreciated,” said Doyle humbly, trying not to offend.
Leboux opened the door and hesitated, without looking back. “Do you need a place to stay?”
“I’ll manage. Thank you for asking.”
Leboux nodded and started out.
“One more name, Claude,” said Doyle. “A Mr. Bodger Nuggins.”
“Bodger Nuggins?”
“He’s a prizefighter. He was at the dice game but apparently wasn’t apprehended along with—”
“What about Bodger Nuggins?”
“I have it on good authority the man’s an escaped convict from Newgate.”
“Not anymore he isn’t,” said Leboux.
“Sorry? I don’t follow.”
“We pulled Mr. Bodger Nuggins from the Thames about an hour ago.”
“Drowned?”
“His throat was slashed. Like he’d been attacked by an animal.”
chapter thirteen
ANCIENT ARTIFACTS
IT WAS A LONG WALK FROM PENTONVILLE PRISON TO THE CENter of London for a man with no coins in his pocket or food in his belly. He hadn’t judged it prudent to press Leboux for Barry’s release; he was still inside Pentonville and might be for some time. Prison held no surprises for Barry, and fewer now for Doyle. He had already missed his noon rendezvous with Sparks at Hatchard’s Bookshop, and he dared not hire a hansom without the surety he could pay for its services at journey’s end. Now that hope was gone. The road was muddy and slow going, passing wheels routinely baptizing him with spume. From their sheltered perches, the carriage trade stared down at him with suspicion, disdain, or, worse yet, looked through him as if he were a pane of glass. Doyle experienced a surge of kinship for the tramp’s disenfranchisement from the propriety and narrow-mindedness of genteel city life. Riding high in their private coaches from one privileged location to the next, an endless roundelay of social engagements and leisurely luncheons and shopping and smug preoccupation with their beastly children, these upright citizens seemed a species of life as foreign to him as the electric eel. Doyle was stunned to discover he had more innate sympathy for Barry the East End burglar than for these bourgeoisie parading past him on the street. But weren’t these prosperous gentlefolk the highest purpose of a civilized society, a permanent, expanding middle class able to enjoy the products of society’s labors in safety and freedom? Weren’t they the audience he himself aspired so strenuously to entertain, deepening their appreciation of the human condition by exposure to his craft? How close-minded they were! How effortlessly led to accept the values of school, church, or institution. The thought of exerting himself to touch the hearts of these unfeeling brutes in their hermetic carriages suddenly felt empty and profitless as their supercilious pursuit of a happy, carefree life.
Industrialized society demands a terrible tribute from its parishioners, thought Doyle. Did any of us realize how few of our ideas or feelings were truly, originally, our own? No, or how could we go on day after day, enacting the same lifeless rituals, repeating the same deadening actions, if we acknowledged their lack of meaning? So much of our ability to survive is predicated on the conscious limiting of our mind and senses. We’re wearing blinders like the swaybacked dray pulling the beer wagon, peering out at the world through a spyglass, peripheral vision denied, excluded, and our choice in the matter removed because we’ve been taught from birth that such narrowing is compulsory. Because to remove the lens from our eye is to be confronted with the pain and anguish and sorrow we’ve shunted so diligently away from view. But the misery around us remains regardless, constant, immutable, a legless beggar by the side of the road. Suffering must be the inevitable tariff exacted from spirit for residing in human form. No wonder tragedy wields the only hammer stout enough to crack the resilient bubble of complacency we construct around our petty lives, shrouding our gaze from the furies that patrol the darker corridors of the night. War, famine, mass disaster. That’s what it takes to wake us from this sleep. Terror and the sudden severing from everything familiar turns the trick quite neatly, too, I can attest to that, thought Doyle. The scales have surely been ripped from my eyes.
Was such a loss so catastrophic? Doyle turned the question over more thoroughly than a roasting game bird. He might be hungry now, but he knew full well starvation was not to be his fate; there would be another meal somewhere soon along the way, and hunger would only make it taste the sweeter. He had lost his home and possessions, but there was another home to be made, other possessions to replace what had been taken. He had his wits, his strength, his relative youth, good boots, the clothes on his back, and the courage of his convictions. He had adversity, and an imposing adversary, against which to measure his own worth, and in Jack Sparks a comrade-in-arms to stand beside and face this sea of troubles with together. What more did he require?
If one could only remain as aware as I am in this moment, thought Doyle; had he fortuitously stumbled onto the secret of peace of mind? Here it was then: The circumstances of a life must not dictate our terms of living it; that decision resides only in one’s reaction to circumstance. And those reactions must be susceptible to our control. The mind, it all began in the mind! How blindingly simple! It bolstered him with a feeling of freedom as expansive as he could ever recall. His step quickened as his spirits soared. The open road ahead was an invitation to discovery, not disaster. He would embrace his hardships, forge ahead and brave the dangers in his path with equanimity and fortitude. Damn the Dark Brotherhood! Let this degenerate Alexander Sparks do his worst! He would consign them all to the same damnation they sought to visit on the earth!
A speeding wagon hit a deep puddle, and a heavy shower soaked Doyle through to the skin. Mud glopped from his forehead in clots. Water ran down his back and into his boots. A sudden gust of wind froze his bones to the marrow. It started to rain, sheets of the stuff, stinging like frozen bees. He sneezed. His newfound resolve fled before him like a flock of starlings.
“I’m in hell!” he shouted miserably.
A cab pulled up beside him. Larry sat in the driver’s seat. Sparks threw open the passenger door.
“Come along, Doyle, you’ll catch your death out here,” he said.
Salvation!
Larry poured a kettle of steaming hot water into the basin where Doyle was soaking his feet. He sat wrapped in a blanket, shivering wildly, a hot plaster planted on his forehead. Larry replaced the kettle on top of the coal fire, on the screen of which Doyle’s clothes lay drying in their dingy Holborn hotel room whose meager trappings rendered the memory of the Hotel Melwyn on par with the Savoy.
“Not a first-rate idea, Doyle, seeking out Inspector Leboux. For the second time,” said Sparks, stretched out on the room’s only sofa, idly forming a cat’s cradle from a length of yarn.
“I was in prison. In possession of what I believed to be information vital to our cause. We had a noon appointment. I saw it as my foremost obligation to obtain the quickest possible release,” said Doyle testily, fighting off the ague, in a completely foul humor.
“We would have gotten you out soon enough.”
“Gotten me out how?—achoo!”
“Bless you. They know we’re back in London now,” said Sparks, weaving around the yarn, ignoring Doyle’s question. “A considerable disadvantage. We’ll be forced to move much more rapidly than I’d hoped we’d have to.”
“And just how do they know we’re back in London? I trust Leboux implicitly, and I daresay I know him a good sight better than I know you.”
“Doyle, you hurt my feelings, you really do,” said Sparks, holding out the
cat’s cradle to solicit the use of Doyle’s hands.
Doyle reluctantly thrust his hands out, and Sparks loomed it expertly around his fingers. “How could they possibly know. Jack?”
“You spent two hours in a cell chockablock full with an honor roll of London lowlife and made a grand show of buying your way out. Alexander would have every dirty car in town listening for the approach of our step. Do you imagine some word of your performance hasn’t filtered back up the vine?”
Doyle sniffed and snorted, dearly wishing he had the use of his hands back to stem the flow of effluent from his nose.
“What about Barry?” asked Doyle, conceding the point.
“Don’t you worry none ’bout Barry, guv,” said Larry, sitting in the corner, happily dipping Scottish shortbread biscuits in his tea. “Many’s the worse scrape he’s shimmied out of before. The toffs ain’t dreamed up the ark-e-tecture of a cell that can hold the likes of Brother B for long.”
“Doesn’t talk much, your brother,” said Doyle, for the moment wishing Larry shared the trait.
“Barry’s of a mind it’s better to be silent and presumed a fool than to open your mouth and removed doubt altogether,” said Larry cheerfully.
Sparks whistled “Rule Britannia” as he plaited another variation on the yarn between their fingers.
“At least we found Bodger Nuggins,” said Doyle defensively. “And we got a fair amount out of him, too. At least give me credit for that.”
“Hmm. Not a moment too soon, I’d say.”
“You can’t very well hold me responsible for his death.”
“No, I reckon we have another party to thank for that. Pity. Just before Bodger might have revealed to us what purpose was behind the shipping of those convicts to Yorkshire—”
Doyle sneezed mightily, nearly kicking the yarn off his fingers.
“Bless you,” said Larry and Sparks jointly.
“Thank you. Jack, when I last laid eyes on Nuggins, he was all but very firmly in the hands of the police. An hour later he’s found facedown in the river. Are you suggesting the police had something to do with this?”
“Why do you suppose I persist in warning you against speaking to them?” said Sparks patiently.