The List of Seven

  “Which implies, fantastically, that in addition to his alleged criminal empire, your brother holds some sway over Scotland Yard.”

  “Policemen are no more immune to the influence of his magnetism than the moon is to the earth.”

  “So what would you have me believe? Lansdown Dilks, the police, escaped convicts. General Drummond, Lady Nicholson and her brother, her husband’s land, your brother, the gray hoods, the Dark Brotherhood: It all points toward a great indefinable hooking-up somewhere, does it?”

  “I daresay that’s never been very much in question,” said Sparks, deep in contemplation of his increasingly complicated string work.

  “And the pig’s blood from Cheshire Street—may I ask what that suggests to you?”

  “Something very odd indeed. Show Dr. Doyle the picture, Larry.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  Larry produced a photograph from the pocket of his coat that he held up for Doyle to peruse. It depicted a woman leaving the rear of a building down a flight of stairs toward a black coach in the lower left-hand corner of the frame. A tall, strong-featured woman with raven hair, near thirty, Doyle estimated, not attractive in a conventional way, but handsome, commanding. Although her face was slightly blurred by movement, her attitude was unmistakably surreptitious and covert.

  “Do you recognize this woman, Doyle?”

  Doyle studied the photo closely. “She looks somewhat like Lady Nicholson, a good deal like her, actually, but this woman is…stronger somehow, physically larger as well. This is not the same woman.”

  “Very discerning,” said Sparks.

  “Where did you obtain this?”

  “Why, we took it ourselves, this morning.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “All you need’s one good eye and one flexible digit,” said Larry, holding up the box Doyle had seen Sparks pocket at the hotel that morning.

  “A camera. How ingenious,” said Doyle, anxious to examine it although his fingers were thoroughly enmeshed with yarn.

  “Yes,” said Sparks, making a last maneuver with the string. “Extremely useful. Seeing as how we happened to be concealed outside the rear of the Russell Street publishing house owned by Lady Nicholson’s family at the time.”

  “But who is this woman?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  The teakettle started to boil. Sparks extracted himself from the string to retrieve it, leaving Doyle with a rigid net of webbing snarled around both hands. The only thing in the room more twisted was the tangle of his unmitigated perplexity.

  “But what does this mean?” Doyle asked.

  “It means you must lead us to the most accomplished medium in London, Doyle, and you must do it straightaway. How are you feeling?”

  “Wretched.”

  “Physician, heal thyself!” said Sparks, adding the boiling water to Doyle’s basin.

  Wrapped in blankets, sweating out the grippe that had seized hold of him, Doyle slept hard as the afternoon waned. Feverish and disoriented, he awoke to find Sparks gone off and Larry sitting attentively bedside with a sketchpad and a piece of charcoal. He was under instruction from Sparks to obtain from Doyle a description of the female psychic who had presided over Cheshire Street’s murderous congregation and to reproduce her likeness. They toiled for an hour—Larry sketching, Doyle adding and subtracting—and in the end arrived at a satisfying facsimile of the poxy, pug-ugly clairvoyant.

  “Now there’s a face could scare the life right out of a dead man,” pronounced Larry, as they inspected the finished portrait.

  “’I don’t think I could ever forget it,” said Doyle.

  “Come on then, Doc, up and at ’em,” said Larry, pocketing the picture. “Let’s see if we can find this handsome filly somewhere among the living.”

  Doyle roused himself from his sickbed, dressed in fresh, dry clothes and an enveloping greatcoat Larry had secured for him—God knows how or where. As the sun paid its final respects, they set out from the hotel in search of the mysterious medium.

  “I’ll follow your feather, guv,” said Larry, taking the driver’s seat atop their hansom. “You’re the one’s acquainted with the local fish and fowl.”

  “How do you propose we go about this?”

  “Travel about, flash the crystal-gazers wot are familiar to yourself our pretty picture and sniff out what leads as may present themselves to us.”

  “There are a great number of mediums in London, Larry. This could take a considerable amount of time,” grumbled Doyle, bundling up in the back, muscles aching, dearly wishing he were back beneath the covers.

  “Detective work ain’t all oysters and beer. The expenditure of shoe leather while keepin’ an alert mind, that’s the truth of it.”

  “What a business.”

  “Better ’an a kick in the head with a frozen boot. Your desired address please, sir?” asked Larry, in a parody of hack etiquette.

  Doyle gave him the number of a knowledgeable psychic who would provide as adequate a starting place as any. Larry tipped his hat, snapped the whip, and they drove off into the misty evening.

  Mediums tended to be night-dwellers, eschewing the restorative warmth of the sun for candles and moonlight, melancholy creatures more possessed by their uncommon talents than in possession of them. Although Doyle had on occasion encountered the odd solid citizen, no more troubled by the unaccountable presence of his or her eerie abilities than by a double-jointed knee, mediums were for the most part vague and insubstantial souls, one foot planted uneasily on either side of the Great Divide. Their gift, such as it was, seemed to deprive them of an even more precious ability: feeling at home in the world of the living. Most subsisted in relative poverty, unable in even the most rudimentary ways to engage with society’s cogs and wheels. Although their aberrant sensitivity to other realms rendered them frightening, even leprous to many, actual practitioners were no more to be feared than the sails of a windmill, at the mercy of a capricious wind they neither comprehended nor controlled. In his experience of the type Doyle had consistently found them merely pitiable and sad.

  Until meeting the duenna of Cheshire Street, that is. There had been something queasy and complicit in the woman’s elicitation of that basso profundo spirit. Even if much of the proceedings that followed were sophisticated variations on tried-and-true theatrical mechanics, the stone-cold presence of evil in that room when the guide revealed itself had been undeniable. She had not simply allowed this baleful spirit to move through her; the thing had been invited. The woman was obviously equipped with some force majeure extraordinaire, the antithesis of the divine.

  The first few objects of inquiry they visited during their rounds did not fail to disappoint. No, didn’t recognize the woman, hadn’t seen that face before, hadn’t heard of any such new rival practitioner—despite its ethereal trappings, mediumship was nothing if not a fiercely competitive business—bringing her services onto the local marketplace. Keep an eye out, though. Do what they could. Upon closer questioning, they did, each of them, however, report a recent, disturbing increase in nightmares and waking visions—indistinct, flashing glimpses that inspired a blinding terror, then vanished before memory could capture a lasting impression. Each of the first five mediums described remarkably similar experiences they were deeply reluctant to discuss, leaving Doyle to suspect they remembered more than they were willing to divulge.

  The apartment of Mr. Spivey Quince was their sixth stop of the evening. Doyle had never quite made up his mind as to whether Spivey was more con man or clairvoyant. A recluse and masterful hypochondriac—his seeking out of Doyle’s medical acumen had served as their introduction—he nevertheless maintained a razor-keen awareness of the world at large by voracious digestion of a dozen daily newspapers. Contrary to most of his brethren, who required the mediation of a spouse or dependent to tend to the daily servicing of life’s barest necessities, Spivey was aggrandizingly self-sufficient. He resided in a splendid Mayfair building, a c
onstant stream of errand boys delivering the finest food, clothing, and goods—Spivey kept accounts with every smart tailor in town and had worked his way through the menus of all the best restaurants without ever setting foot in a single one of them—and although he never left his house. Quince had nonetheless managed to make himself a veritable font of information on every aspect of the London social scene.

  Since he never advertised his skills, and by all appearances had no regular clientele clamoring for his services, Spivey’s method of maintaining himself in such high style had remained for many years a much-conjectured-about mystery, until one day Doyle spotted one of Spivey’s boys leaving a well-known tout’s office the day after the Epsom Derby with a knapsack full of hard cash. On his next consultative visit to Spivey’s flat—tending to the latest series of ever-more-imaginative phantom disorders—Doyle noticed that among the floor-to-ceiling stacks of newspapers that Quince kept neatly rimmed around his living room stood two piles exclusively devoted to back issues of the Racing Form. The source of Spivey’s secret fortune came clear. Whether a quotidian genius for handicapping was responsible or the ponies were the principal direction in which he had chosen to exercise a genuine psychic gift was the fulcrum upon which Doyle’s uncertainty about Spivey’s native character continued to perpetually seesaw.

  Doyle asked Larry to stay with the cab, knowing Spivey would be thrown sufficiently off stride by Doyle’s surprise appearance that he was unlikely to admit to his house any stranger unequipped with a written and sealed bill of health. Quince answered the bell himself—he kept no household staff; penuriousness was another cornerstone of his wealth—in his customary monogrammed red silk pajamas, matching robe, and amber-tasseled brothel creepers. Although his closets were bursting with a plenitude of fashionable styles, Doyle had never known Spivey to appear in any ensemble other than this boudoir outfit he was currently sporting.

  “Hallo, what’s this—why, Dr. Doyle,” said the slight Quince as he opened the door a crack. “Heavens, I don’t remember sending for you—”

  “You didn’t, Spivey,” said Doyle.

  “Thank God. I thought perhaps for a moment I was suffering the effects of a dread delusional fever, you know, something tropical, Amazonian, treatable with massive doses of quinine. Is something wrong? Am I ill?”

  “No. you appear to be fine, Spivey—”

  A rebuttal of tubercular proportion burst from the depths of Quince’s chest. “There, you see? I could feel it coming on all day. You have arrived not a moment too soon,” Quince said upon recovering. He took a cautionary look outside at the spreading fog. “It’s the change in weather; I’m simply not myself. A London Particular like this so soon after such an unseasonable warming trend could spell the death of me—come in, come in—I hope you’ve brought your complete pharmacopoeia, God knows what you’ll eventually diagnose me with.”

  Doyle entered, and knowing Spivey’s reluctance for making contact with anything foreign, took off his hat and coat and hung them on the rack.

  “I don’t have my bag at the moment, Spivey. This is more social than a medical call,” explained Doyle, trying to harness every symptom of his own nagging affliction down to undetectable proportions; one whiff of contagion in the air would send Spivey racing for quarantine.

  “You see, I haven’t been sleeping well recently, and I always feel more susceptible when I’m not getting my rest,” Quince said, ignoring Doyle’s opener as they moved down the hall.

  “Any disturbing dreams?”

  “Terrible. Giving me fits. Can’t seem to remember them, though. I’m just about to drift off when something jolts me awake. No doubt my general lassitude contributes to this feeling of imminent dis-ease.”

  Quince led Doyle into the living room/newspaper morgue. Although the room was grand and spacious, the furnishings were handed down, threadbare, antimacassars serving yeoman duty on every shiny arm and back. Except for the towering newsprint monoliths obscuring the walls, the room was fastidiously clean. Neat rows of patent medicines lined the surface of the table beside which Quince took a seat. He racked out another spasmodic cough and patted down the rebellious thatch of ginger hair on his head that threatened to sprout in every direction. His color was good, his posture strong and correct. In every observable way, Spivey Quince seemed the very picture of robust and hearty health.

  “Haven’t you even brought your stethoscope?” said Quince anxiously. “I feel something loose rattling around in my chest with every cough. Perhaps I’ve dislodged a rib, or God forbid a blood clot might be forming. One can’t be too careful about these things. Not in January.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it—”

  Quince elaborately hawked up something unsavory into a handkerchief, which he then examined like a parson poring over Scripture. “What do you make of this, then?” he said, offering the handkerchief to Doyle.

  “Eat more oranges,” said Doyle after a moment of feigned sagacity. Afraid that any further hesitation would plunge him into prognostic purgatory, he unveiled the medium’s portrait from his coat. “What do you make of this?”

  Quince would not touch the picture—he seldom touched anything if he could avoid it, not without gloves on, and at the moment he was absent them—but he studied it alertly. Doyle chose not to reveal who the woman was or why he was seeking her; if Spivey had the second sight, let him use this opportunity to authenticate it.

  “You wish me to read it for you,” said Spivey.

  “If at all possible, yes.”

  Spivey continued to stare at the picture. His eyes grew drowsy. “Not right,” said Spivey after a while, almost a whisper. “Not right.”

  “What’s not right, Spivey?”

  A caul of nervous energy had settled over Spivey’s countenance; skin taut, he trembled with pulsing energy. His eyes went as wide as an owl’s, and they midged about as if his sight had been inverted. Doyle recognized the signs of entrance to a waking trance; he was seeing internally now.

  Slipped into it as quick as a pair of his pajamas, thought Doyle. Perhaps Spivey was the real item after all.

  “Can you still hear me?” asked Doyle after an appropriate interval.

  Spivey nodded slowly.

  “What do you see, Spivey?”

  “Daylight…a clearing…there’s a boy.”

  Better than I could’ve hoped for, thought Doyle. “Can you describe him?”

  Spivey’s eyes squinted blindly. “No hair.”

  No hair? Doesn’t sound right. “Sure he’s not blond?”

  “No hair. Bright clothes. Blue. Near horses.”

  The ponies. Apparently, Spivey wasn’t inclined to clairvoy anything other than the track when he went under. Maybe the “boy” was a jockey in his multicolored silks. “Is he…at the races?”

  “No. Curved road outside. Men in red.”

  Doyle thought for a moment. “Buckingham Palace?”

  “Tall building. Grass. Iron gate.”

  He’s describing the Royal Mews, thought Doyle. “What is the boy doing there, Spivey?”

  No answer.

  “What is the significance of this boy?”

  “The sight. He sees.”

  Fine. That and thruppence will buy me a biscuit. “That’s very helpful about the boy, Spivey. Can you by any chance divine something about the woman herself?”

  Spivey frowned. “A biscuit?”

  “A biscuit?” He plucked that right out of my head fair enough, didn’t he? thought Doyle with a start.

  “Biscuit tin.”

  Something nagging about a biscuit tin. Yes, it came back to him: the séance, in the corner of that vision of the boy—a cylinder with the letters CUI. Of course, that’s what it was, a biscuit tin. But where was Spivey reading this, wondered Doyle, out of thin air or from my imperfect memory?

  “You don’t happen to know what brand of biscuit that was, do you, Spivey?”

  “Mother’s Own.”

  Here was help uncounted on. Mother’s
Own Biscuits. He could hardly wait to tell Sparks how he’d single-handedly cracked the case open like a soft-shelled peanut.

  “Anything there besides the biscuit tin, Spivey?”

  Spivey shook his head. “Can’t see. Something in the way.”

  “What’s in the way?”

  Quince was having difficulty “seeing.” “Shadow. Great shadow.”

  Curious. Not the first person to use that same phrase—Spivey suddenly reached forward and grabbed the drawing from Doyle’s hand. As he took hold of it, his body jerked and shuddered as if the paper were electrified. Doyle half expected to see smoke pouring from Spivey’s ears: He was loath to touch the man for fear this dangerous energy would be conducted back to him.

  “The passage! Close the passage!” Spivey shrieked alarmingly. “Block his way! The throne! The throne!”

  That’s enough, thought Doyle, and he seized hold of the drawing—odd, he did feel something like an insistent buzz pulsing through the page—but Spivey’s grip on it was fierce; as Doyle tried to pull it away, the paper ripped to pieces. That seemed to break the current; Spivey relaxed his grip, the shards of the drawing fell between them, and Quince slumped back in his chair. His eyes cleared slowly. His entire body shivered, and his forehead beaded with sweat.

  “What’s happened?” asked Spivey.

  “You don’t remember?”

  Spivey shook his head. Doyle told him.

  “Something came at me off that woman’s image,” said Spivey, staring down at his quivering hands. “Something that’s made me feel quite ill.”

  “You don’t look particularly well at the moment,” said Doyle. For once.

  “I’m all at twos and eights. Good heavens. Good heavens. Can you provide me with something? My nerves are in a frightful jangle.”

  Feeling liable for inciting Spivey to this hysteria, Doyle surveyed the array of medicines on the table and concocted a compound that might soothe his discomfort. Spivey accepted the recommended dosage docilely.

  “Why I prefer to stay indoors, you see,” said Spivey gently, trying to catch his breath and control the shaking that beset him. “Never know what I’ll encounter in the street. Like a wild river. Dangerous currents. Rocks and eddies. I couldn’t survive unprotected in those waters. My mind couldn’t take the strain, I’m afraid.”