Fragile Things Read online

  Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen’s Counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.

  “Certainly, ma’am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch, that night. The footprints were, although obscured, unmistakable.” And then, “Yes. I understand…. I believe so…. Yes.”

  He was quiet when we left the palace, and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.

  It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the palace.

  Fingers of sooty fog twined across the road and the sky.

  Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking-glass of my room, I observed that the frog-white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.

  4. The Performance

  LIVER COMPLAINTS?! BILIOUS ATTACKS?! NEURASTHENIC DISTURBANCES?! QUINSY?! ARTHRITIS?! THESE ARE JUST A HANDFUL OF THE COMPLAINTS FOR WHICH A PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATION CAN BE THE REMEDY. IN OUR OFFICES WE HAVE SHEAVES OF TESTIMONIALS WHICH CAN BE INSPECTED BY THE PUBLIC AT ANY TIME. DO NOT PUT YOUR HEALTH IN THE HANDS OF AMATEURS!! WE HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A VERY LONG TIME: V. TEPES—PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATOR. (REMEMBER! IT IS PRONOUNCED TZSEPPESH!) ROMANIA, PARIS, LONDON, WHITBY. YOU’VE TRIED THE REST—NOW TRY THE BEST!!

  That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door in Baker Street—an elderly Chinese man, a young roué, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and, with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick-change artist,” my friend would walk out.

  He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax, staring off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand, notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in the theater.

  “As much as the next man,” I told him.

  “Then fetch your opera glasses,” he told me. “We are off to Drury Lane.”

  I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theater in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court—and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the rookery of St. Giles. On my friend’s advice I concealed my wallet, and, following his example, I carried a stout stick.

  Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepenny orange from one of the lovely young women who sold them to the members of the audience, and I sucked it as we waited), my friend said, quietly, “You should only count yourself lucky that you did not need to accompany me to the gambling dens or the brothels. Or the madhouses—another place that Prince Franz delighted in visiting, as I have learned. But there was nowhere he went to more than once. Nowhere but—”

  The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.

  It was a fine enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between the acts. The leading man was tall, languid, and had a fine singing voice; the leading lady was elegant, and her voice carried through all the theater; the comedian had a fine touch for patter songs.

  The first play was a broad comedy of mistaken identities: the leading man played a pair of identical twins who had never met, but had managed, by a set of comical misadventures, each to find himself engaged to be married to the same young lady—who, amusingly, thought herself engaged to only one man. Doors swung open and closed as the actor changed from identity to identity.

  The second play was a heartbreaking tale of an orphan girl who starved in the snow selling hothouse violets—her grandmother recognized her at the last, and swore that she was the babe stolen ten years back by bandits, but it was too late, and the frozen little angel breathed her last. I must confess I found myself wiping my eyes with my linen handkerchief more than once.

  The performance finished with a rousing historical narrative: the entire company played the men and women of a village on the shore of the ocean, seven hundred years before our modern times. They saw shapes rising from the sea, in the distance. The hero joyously proclaimed to the villagers that these were the Old Ones whose coming was foretold, returning to us from R’lyeh, and from dim Carcosa, and from the plains of Leng, where they had slept, or waited, or passed out the time of their death. The comedian opined that the other villagers had all been eating too many pies and drinking too much ale, and they were imagining the shapes. A portly gentleman playing a priest of the Roman God told the villagers that the shapes in the sea were monsters and demons, and must be destroyed.

  At the climax, the hero beat the priest to death with his own crucifer, and prepared to welcome Them as They came. The heroine sang a haunting aria, whilst, in an astonishing display of magic-lantern trickery, it seemed as if we saw Their shadows cross the sky at the back of the stage: the Queen of Albion herself, and the Black One of Egypt (in shape almost like a man), followed by the Ancient Goat, Parent to a Thousand, Emperor of all China, and the Czar Unanswerable, and He Who Presides over the New World, and the White Lady of the Antarctic Fastness, and the others. And as each shadow crossed the stage, or appeared to, from out of every throat in the gallery came, unbidden, a mighty “Huzzah!” until the air itself seemed to vibrate. The moon rose in the painted sky, and then, at its height, in one final moment of theatrical magic, it turned from a pallid yellow, as it was in the old tales, to the comforting crimson of the moon that shines down upon us all today.

  The members of the cast took their bows and their curtain calls to cheers and laughter, and the curtain fell for the last time, and the show was done.

  “There,” said my friend. “What did you think?”

  “Jolly, jolly good,” I told him, my hands sore from applauding.

  “Stout fellow,” he said, with a smile. “Let us go backstage.”

  We walked outside and into an alley beside the theater, to the stage door, where a thin woman with a wen on her cheek knitted busily. My friend showed her a visiting card, and she directed us into the building and up some steps to a small communal dressing room.

  Oil lamps and candles guttered in front of smeared looking glasses, and men and women were taking off their makeup and costumes with no regard to the proprieties of gender. I averted my eyes. My friend seemed unperturbed. “Might I talk to Mr. Vernet?” he asked, loudly.

  A young woman who had played the heroine’s best friend in the first play, and the saucy innkeeper’s daughter in the last, pointed us to the end of the room. “Sherry! Sherry Vernet!” she called.

  The young man who stood up in response was lean; less conventionally handsome than he had seemed from the other side of the footlights. He peered at us quizzically. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure…?”

  “My name is Henry Camberley,” said my friend, drawling his speech somewhat. “You may have heard of me.”

  “I must confess that I have not had that privilege,” said Vernet.

  My friend presented the actor with an engraved card.

  The man looked at the card with unfeigned interest. “A theatrical promoter? From the New World? My, my. And this is…?” He smiled at me.

  “This is a friend of mine, Mister Sebastian. He is not of the profession.”

  I muttered something about having enjoyed the performance enormously, and shook hands with the acto
r.

  My friend said, “Have you ever visited the New World?”

  “I have not yet had that honor,” admitted Vernet, “although it has always been my dearest wish.”

  “Well, my good man,” said my friend, with the easy informality of a New Worlder. “Maybe you’ll get your wish. That last play. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you write it?”

  “Alas, no. The playwright is a good friend of mine. Although I devised the mechanism of the magic-lantern shadow show. You’ll not see finer on the stage today.”

  “Would you give me the playwright’s name? Perhaps I should speak to him directly, this friend of yours.”

  Vernet shook his head. “That will not be possible, I am afraid. He is a professional man, and does not wish his connection with the stage publicly to be known.”

  “I see.” My friend pulled a pipe from his pocket and put it in his mouth. Then he patted his pockets. “I am sorry,” he began. “I have forgotten to bring my tobacco pouch.”

  “I smoke a strong black shag,” said the actor, “but if you have no objection—”

  “None!” said my friend, heartily. “Why, I smoke a strong shag myself,” and he filled his pipe with the actor’s tobacco, and the two men puffed away, while my friend described a vision he had for a play that could tour the cities of the New World, from Manhattan Island all the way to the furthest tip of the continent in the distant south. The first act would be the last play we had seen. The rest of the play might perhaps tell of the dominion of the Old Ones over humanity and its gods, perhaps telling what might have happened if people had had no Royal Families to look up to—a world of barbarism and darkness—“But your mysterious professional man would be the play’s author, and what occurs would be his alone to decide,” interjected my friend. “Our drama would be his. But I can guarantee you audiences beyond your imaginings, and a significant share of the takings at the door. Let us say fifty percent!”

  “This is most exciting,” said Vernet. “I hope it will not turn out to have been a pipe-dream!”

  “No sir, it shall not!” said my friend, puffing on his own pipe, chuckling at the man’s joke. “Come to my rooms in Baker Street tomorrow morning, after breakfast-time, say at ten, in company with your author friend, and I shall have the contracts drawn up and waiting.”

  With that the actor clambered up onto his chair and clapped his hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen of the company, I have an announcement to make,” he said, his resonant voice filling the room. “This gentleman is Henry Camberley, the theatrical promoter, and he is proposing to take us across the Atlantic Ocean, and on to fame and fortune.”

  There were several cheers, and the comedian said, “Well, it’ll make a change from herrings and pickled-cabbage,” and the company laughed.

  And it was to the smiles of all of them that we walked out of the theater and onto the fog-wreathed streets.

  “My dear fellow,” I said. “Whatever was—”

  “Not another word,” said my friend. “There are many ears in the city.”

  And not another word was spoken until we had hailed a cab, and clambered inside, and were rattling up the Charing Cross Road.

  And even then, before he said anything, my friend took his pipe from his mouth, and emptied the half-smoked contents of the bowl into a small tin. He pressed the lid onto the tin, and placed it in his pocket.

  “There,” he said. “That’s the Tall Man found, or I’m a Dutchman. Now, we just have to hope that the cupidity and the curiosity of the Limping Doctor proves enough to bring him to us tomorrow morning.”

  “The Limping Doctor?”

  My friend snorted. “That is what I have been calling him. It was obvious, from footprints and much else besides, when we saw the prince’s body, that two men had been in that room that night: a tall man, who, unless I miss my guess, we have just encountered, and a smaller man with a limp, who eviscerated the prince with a professional skill that betrays the medical man.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Indeed. I hate to say this, but it is my experience that when a doctor goes to the bad, he is a fouler and darker creature than the worst cut-throat. There was Huston, the acid-bath man, and Campbell, who brought the procrustean bed to Ealing…” and he carried on in a similar vein for the rest of our journey.

  The cab pulled up beside the curb. “That’ll be one and tenpence,” said the cabbie. My friend tossed him a florin, which he caught and tipped to his ragged tall hat. “Much obliged to you both,” he called out, as the horse clopped into the fog.

  We walked to our front door. As I unlocked it, my friend said, “Odd. Our cabbie just ignored that fellow on the corner.”

  “They do that at the end of a shift,” I pointed out.

  “Indeed they do,” said my friend.

  I dreamed of shadows that night, vast shadows that blotted out the sun, and I called out to them in my desperation, but they did not listen.

  5. The Skin and the Pit

  THIS YEAR, STEP INTO THE SPRING—WITH A SPRING IN YOUR STEP! JACK’S. BOOTS, SHOES AND BROGUES. SAVE YOUR SOLES! HEELS OUR SPECIALITY. JACK’S. AND DO NOT FORGET TO VISIT OUR NEW CLOTHES AND FITTINGS EMPORIUM IN THE EAST END—FEATURING EVENING WEAR OF ALL KINDS, HATS, NOVELTIES, CANES, SWORDSTICKS &C. JACK’S OF PICCADILLY. IT’S ALL IN THE SPRING!

  Inspector Lestrade was the first to arrive.

  “You have posted your men in the street?” asked my friend.

  “I have,” said Lestrade. “With strict orders to let anyone in who comes, but to arrest anyone trying to leave.”

  “And you have handcuffs with you?”

  In reply, Lestrade put his hand in his pocket, and jangled two pairs of cuffs, grimly.

  “Now sir,” he said. “While we wait, why do you not tell me what we are waiting for?”

  My friend pulled his pipe out of his pocket. He did not put it in his mouth, but placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took the tin from the night before, and a glass vial I recognized as the one he had had in the room in Shoreditch.

  “There,” he said. “The coffin-nail, as I trust it shall prove, for our Master Vernet.” He paused. Then he took out his pocket watch, laid it carefully on the table. “We have several minutes before they arrive.” He turned to me. “What do you know of the Restorationists?”

  “Not a blessed thing,” I told him.

  Lestrade coughed. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” he said, “perhaps we should leave it there. Enough’s enough.”

  “Too late for that,” said my friend. “For there are those who do not believe that the coming of the Old Ones was the fine thing we all know it to be. Anarchists to a man, they would see the old ways restored—mankind in control of its own destiny, if you will.”

  “I will not hear this sedition spoken,” said Lestrade. “I must warn you—”

  “I must warn you not to be such a fathead,” said my friend. “Because it was the Restorationists that killed Prince Franz Drago. They murder, they kill, in a vain effort to force our masters to leave us alone in the darkness. The Prince was killed by a rache—it’s an old term for a hunting dog, Inspector, as you would know if you had looked in a dictionary. It also means “revenge.” And the hunter left his signature on the wallpaper in the murder room, just as an artist might sign a canvas. But he was not the one who killed the Prince.”

  “The Limping Doctor!” I exclaimed.

  “Very good. There was a tall man there that night—I could tell his height, for the word was written at eye level. He smoked a pipe—the ash and dottle sat unburnt in the fireplace, and he had tapped out his pipe with ease on the mantel, something a smaller man would not have done. The tobacco was an unusual blend of shag. The footprints in the room had, for the most part, been almost obliterated by your men, but there were several clear prints behind the door and by the window. Someone had waited there: a smaller man from his stride, who put his weight on his right leg. On the path outside I had s
everal clear prints, and the different colors of clay on the bootscraper gave me more information: a tall man, who had accompanied the Prince into those rooms, and had, later, walked out. Waiting for them to arrive was the man who had sliced up the Prince so impressively….”

  Lestrade made an uncomfortable noise that did not quite become a word.

  “I have spent many days retracing the movements of His Highness. I went from gambling hell to brothel to dining den to madhouse looking for our pipe-smoking man and his friend. I made no progress until I thought to check the newspapers of Bohemia, searching for a clue to the Prince’s recent activities there, and in them I learned that an English Theatrical Troupe had been in Prague last month, and had performed before Prince Franz Drago….”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “So that Sherry Vernet fellow—”

  “Is a Restorationist. Exactly.”

  I was shaking my head in wonder at my friend’s intelligence and skills of observation, when there was a knock on the door.

  “This will be our quarry!” said my friend. “Careful now!”

  Lestrade put his hand deep into his pocket, where I had no doubt he kept a pistol. He swallowed, nervously.

  My friend called out, “Please, come in!”

  The door opened.

  It was not Vernet, nor was it a Limping Doctor. It was one of the young street Arabs who earn a crust running errands—“in the employ of Messrs. Street and Walker,” as we used to say when I was young. “Please sirs,” he said. “Is there a Mister Henry Camberley here? I was asked by a gentleman to deliver a note.”

  “I’m he,” said my friend. “And for a sixpence, what can you tell me about the gentleman who gave you the note?”