Victorian Villainy Read online

  It crossed my mind that this might be a trap. There are people in London who would rather see me dead than steal a million pounds, and one of them might have been inside that door instead of the rotund Mr. Holmes. But I have an instinct for such things, and this was both too elaborate and too commonplace to be anything other than what it seemed. So I pulled up the collar of my borrowed coat against the chill wind, crossed the walk, and pulled the bell-pull at the indicated doorway.

  No more than three seconds later the door opened and a short woman of immense girth dressed as a maid gestured me in. Whether she was actually a maid, or some employee of the Foreign Service in masquerade I cannot say. “This way, Professor Moriarty sir,” she said. “You’re expected.”

  She showed me into a room that might have been the waiting room in some doctor’s surgery, or for that matter the outer office of the booking agent for a music hall. There was a wide, well-worn black leather couch, several large and sturdy chairs, a heavy table of some dark wood, ill-lit by three wall sconces with the gas turned low and a window with heavy light-green muslin curtains, which were drawn. A deep throbbing sound came faintly into the room; I could discern neither the location nor the function of its agent. Some sort of machinery? On the right-hand wall, leading to the back of the house, a pair of double doors were drawn closed. “Please wait,” she said. “He will be with you shortly.” The timbre of her voice changed when she said “He,” the added resonance giving the word importance, as though I were awaiting Aristotle or Charles Darwin himself. “Please don’t open the shades,” she added as she left the room.

  I turned the gas light up in one of the wall sconces and settled into a chair beneath it, taking from my pocket the journal I had brought with me, Das Astrophysische Journal der Universität Erlangen, and immersing myself in its pages. The Austrians Joffe and Shostak have advanced the theory that the nebulosities observed through the larger telescopes are not some sort of interstellar gas, but actually vast clouds of stars much like our own Milky Way galaxy, seen at tremendous distances. If so—but I digress.

  After a while I heard the door open and close, and I looked up to find Sherlock Holmes standing in the doorway. “So!” he growled, looking down his thin, crooked nose at me. “It was one of your tricks after all!” He thrust his walking stick in front of him like a child playing at dueling. “I warn you that I am prepared for any eventuality.”

  “How nice for you,” I said, folding my journal and putting it back into my pocket.

  “Mr. Holmes,” said the broad maid from behind him. “Please be seated. Your brother will be down directly.”

  Holmes stalked over to a chair in the far side of the room and dropped lightly into it. “We’ll see,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. He flexed his walking stick, describing a series of shapes in the air before him, and then laid it across his knees.

  The door opened again, and the large shape of Mycroft Holmes loomed into the room. “Sherlock,” he said, “Professor Moriarty. Good of you to come. Join me in the next room, where we can talk.”

  “You invited him?” asked Sherlock, pointing a wavering walking stick in my direction. “What were you thinking?”

  “All in good time,” said Mycroft. “Follow me.” He stomped through the waiting room and pulled open the double doors . The chamber thus revealed had once been the dining room of the house, but was now a conference room, with an oversized highly-polished mahogany table in the center, surrounded by heavy chairs of the same dark wood, upholstered in green leather. Around the periphery stood a row of filing cabinets, and a pair of small writing desks. A large chart cabinet stood against the far wall. The other walls were obscured by pinned-up maps, charts, graphs, diagrams and documents of all sorts and sizes, and one framed oil painting of a fox hunt which was covered with a dark patina of grime and neglect. The windows had heavy curtains over them, which were drawn closed. The room was brightly lit by three fixtures which depended from the ceiling. I observed them to be electrical lamps with great metallic filaments in evacuated bulbs. This explained the humming noise I had heard: this house had its own electrical generating plant.

  Three men were waiting in the room as we entered: two seated at the table looking stern, and the third pacing about the room with his hands linked behind his back. One of the seated men, a slender, impeccably-dressed, greying man with mutton-chop whiskers, I recognized instantly as Lord Easthope, who holds the post of Foreign Minister in Her Majesty’s present Tory government.

  “Come, sit down,” said Mycroft Holmes. “Here they are, gentlemen,” he added, addressing the three men in the room. “My brother, Sherlock, and Professor James Moriarty.”

  The pacing man paused. “Have they agreed?” he asked.

  “No, your lordship. I have not as yet explained the situation to them.”

  The third man peered at us over the top of his tortoise shell glasses. “So these are the miracle men,” he said.

  “Come now, sir,” Mycroft Holmes protested. “I never claimed that they were miracle men.”

  “They’d better be,” the man said.

  I took a seat on the right-hand side of the table. Holmes crossed over to the left side and sat where he could keep me in sight while speaking with our hosts.

  Mycroft laced his hands behind his back and leaned forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, addressing Holmes and me, “may I present their lordships, Lord Easthope and Lord Famm.” (That’s the way the name is pronounced. I later learned that His Lordship was Evan Fotheringham, Earl of Stomshire.) “And His Excellency, Baron van Durm.”

  Lord Fotheringham, the gentleman who was pacing the floor, was a tall man with an aristocratic nose and thinning hair. Baron van Durm was a great bear of a man, with heavy, black mutton chop whiskers and glowering dark eyes. He was impeccably dressed in a pearl-gray morning suit, with a diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg holding down his white silk cravat.

  “I see you have recognized Lord Easthope,” Mycroft said to Holmes and me, reading more from a slight widening of our eyes than most people could from the twenty eight pages of their evening newspaper. “Lord Fotheringham is Chairman of the Royal Committee for the Defense of the Realm, and Baron van Durm is General Manager of the Amsterdam branch of the House of van Durm.

  Although the name is not generally recognized outside of government or financial circles, the House of van Durm is one of the richest, most powerful, and most successful private banking houses in the world. With branches in every place you would imagine, and many that would not occur to you, the van Durms have supported governments in need, and brought about the ruin of governments whose policies offended them.

  Van Durm nodded his massive head slightly in our direction. Lord Fotheringham paused in his pacing long enough to glower at Sherlock Holmes, Lord Easthope growled a soft monosyllabic growl.

  “They know who you are,” Mycroft told us, “and we, collectively, have something to, ah, discuss with you of the utmost importance, delicacy, and secrecy. Before we continue, I must have your word that nothing we say here will be repeated outside this room.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Sherlock looked astonished. “You have my word,” I said.

  “You would trust that—” Holmes began, pointing a quavering finger at me. Then he paused as Mycroft glared at him, dropped the finger and sighed deeply. “Oh, very well,” he said. “You have my word also.”

  Mycroft sat down. Lord Fotheringham stopped pacing and stood facing us, arms behind his back. “Here is the situation, gentlemen,” said his lordship. “The enemies of Britain are hatching a devilish plot, and there is danger for the safety of this realm—perhaps of the entire world—lurking in every corner of Europe. Plainly put, there is a shadow growing over the British Empire.”

  “What is this devilish plot?” I asked.

  Lord Easthope focused his mild blue eyes on me. “There’s the heart of the problem,” he said, nodding approvingly, as though I’d said something clever. “We don’t know.”

/>   “A shadow?” Holmes’s eyes narrowed. The three noblemen might have thought that he was concentrating his attention on this growing shadow, but I—and probably his brother—knew that he was considering whether Lord Fotheringham should be forcibly restrained. I had some such motion myself.

  Holmes leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced over his waistcoat, his eyes almost closed. “You don’t know?”

  “Perhaps I should explain,” said Baron van Durm. “There are signs, subtle but distinct signs, all over Europe, that something of great import is going to happen soon, that it concerns Great Britain, and that it portends no good. Taken by themselves, each of these incidents—these signs—could be a random happening, meaning nothing, but when one looks at them all together a pattern emerges.”

  “We have a saying at the War Ministry, Lord Fotheringham interjected. “‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’”

  Sherlock Holmes leaned forward and laced his hands together beneath his chin, his elbows resting on the table. “What sort of incidents?” he asked.

  Lord Easthope began: “In various centers of Socialist and Anarchist thought throughout Europe; Paris, Vienna, Prague, speakers have begun warning against British imperialism and the ‘secret plans’ Britain has for world domination.”

  “I see,” I said. “‘The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Downing Street,’ eh? There is, I grant you, a school of thought that believes that the English are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.”

  “By itself it would be amusing, and hardly sinister,” Easthope said. “But if you consider these speakers to be part of a plan to pave the way for—something—then they deserve to be looked at more seriously.”

  “Even so,” Lord Fotheringham agreed. “Most of those who listen to this nonsense now, even among the émigré Socialist communities must realize it to be nonsense, considering that Britain is one of the few countries that allows these groups freedom of movement and association without having to worry about police spies in their midst.”

  “Unless, of course, they’re Irish,” Mycroft Holmes said bluntly, shifting his bulk forward in his chair. This was met with a complete silence, and he didn’t pursue the thought.

  “What else?” asked Holmes.

  “Newspapers,” said Lord Fotheringham.

  “The editorial pages of newspapers in various European countries; France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, are printing the occasional scurrilous editorial accusing Her Majesty’s government of a secret plan of aggression against the continental powers,” Mycroft explained.

  “How odd,” said Sherlock.

  “We know of three different men in the governments of three different countries who are preparing anti-British legislation of one sort or another,” said Lord Easthope. “Preparing, you will notice, but not submitting. They are waiting for the proper moment. We must assume that they believe that there soon will be a proper moment. If we know of three, presumably there are more.”

  “Do those three men know each other?” Holmes asked.

  “Apparently not,” his brother told him.

  “Then we must also assume there is, somewhere, a hand pulling the strings.”

  “We do so assume,” Mycroft said.

  “Is that all?” Holmes asked.

  “Is that not enough?” asked Easthope.

  “Actually,” said Baron van Durm, “there is one other thing. The House of van Durm, as you might surmise, has agents strategically placed all over Europe. Most of these conduct the bank’s business. Some merely collect information. The success of an international bank rises or falls on the quality of the information it gathers. One of these agents is highly placed in the government of, let us say, a foreign power that has not always been in the best of terms with Great Britain. In the course of his work for us he came across a document which might shed some light on these happenings. It was not addressed to him.”

  “Ah!” said Sherlock Holmes.

  “This is a copy of it, translated into English,” van Durm said, removing a sheet of paper from a folder on the table before him and passing it over to Holmes, who read it carefully twice before passing it on to me:

  Thirteen—

  Your concise and with information filled report was most welcome. We must continue and increase our efforts to discredit England and all things English. It is simpler to chop down a tree if you have poisoned the roots.

  Sixteen has failed us. Worse, he may have betrayed us. He was seen entering the embassy on Prinz Rupert Strasse. He stayed for an hour. He will not do so again.

  The day nears. The events unfold. Work and diligence carry great rewards. The Florida is now ours. Inform the brothers that the direction is up and the peak is in view. If we succeed, we will succeed together. Those who fail will fail alone. It is the time for cleverness and impudence. Stories must be told. Incidents must be arranged.

  The lion sleeps peacefully. Holmes and Moriarty are watched, as are Lamphier in Paris and Ettin in Berlin. They are not alert.

  Proceed to Lindau on the 16th. The company is assembling. The first place. Three white clothespins. Burn this.

  One

  “What do you make of that?” asked van Durm.

  “It was in German originally?” I asked.

  “That is so,” van Durm said.

  “The embassy on Prinz Rupert Strasse?”

  “The British Embassy in Vienna is on Prinz Rupert Strasse,” Lord Easthope said.

  Holmes leaned back in his chair. “Lindau is a German place-name?” He asked.

  “A town on the Bodensee, on the German side of the Austrian border.” Easthope told him.

  “Quite a distance from Florida,” Holmes remarked.

  “That is so,” Easthope agreed. “We have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation of that line. Not even, if it comes to that, a fanciful one.”

  “The whole missive has something of the fanciful about it,” I said. “Addressed to ‘Thirteen’ from ‘One.’ There’s something of the Lewis Carroll about it.”

  “Why was it not burned?” asked Holmes.

  “It was,” van Drum told him. “At least the attempt was made. The original was found in a fireplace grate, charred and singed. But it had been folded over several times, and so it was merely the edges that suffered the damage, and the whole message was retrieved intact.”

  I smiled, reflecting on the image of a high government official crawling about in a fireplace.

  Holmes glared at me. “I detect your hand in this,” he said.

  I was not amused, and I’m afraid that I allowed an ill-considered expletive to pass my lips.

  “Quite so,” said Lord easthope.

  “His name is on the document,” Holmes insisted. “Can’t you see—”

  “Enough!” cried Mycroft in a deceptively quiet bellow. “Your name is also on the document. Take my word for it, Sherlock, that whatever else Moriarty may be involved in, he has no hand in these events.”

  Sherlock Holmes gave his brother a long glare, and then assumed an attitude of sulky acquiescence from the depths of his chair.

  Baron van Durm looked from one to the other of us. “I thought you said they could work together,” he said to Mycroft.

  “They can,” Mycroft assured him. “They just need a little time to get over their mutual spitting match.”

  I resented that. I had done nothing to encourage Holmes in his asinine accusations. But I held my tongue.

  “When we saw the references to you, we naturally checked,” Lord Easthope said, “and ascertained that you were, indeed, being watched. Had you noticed?”

  “I assumed that it was at the behest of the younger Mr. Holmes,” I said.

  “I thought Moriarty was up to more of his usual deviltry,” snarled Holmes.

  “Well there, you see, you were both mistaken,” said Easthope. He turned to Mycroft. “Are you sure these are the men we want?”

  “Yes,” said Mycroft.

 
“What of Lamphier and Ettin?” Holmes asked.

  “Ah!” said van Durm.

  “Would that be Alphonse Lamphier the noted French criminologist?” I asked.

  “Yes, it would,” van Durm affirmed.

  “How can you be sure that he is the Lamphier referred to?” Holmes asked.

  “Because he was murdered yesterday.”

  “Coincidence,” said Holmes.

  “He was found in the ruins of a burned-out cottage outside the village of Lindau,” said Lord Easthope. “Pure accident that he was found. He—his body—could have stayed there for months. He was almost naked and had his hands tied together. He was already dead when the place was set on fire, but a section of interior wall collapsed and preserved his body from the fire.”

  Holmes opened his mouth to say something, but Lord Easthope continued, “He had scratched some words on his inner thigh with a pin before he died. Ils se réunissent. Means ‘they meet,’ or ‘they assemble,’ or ‘they gather,’ depending.”

  “I stand corrected,” said Holmes. “One can stretch coincidence too far. Does anyone know precisely what he was working on when he was killed?”

  “Our agents in Paris are attempting to ascertain that even now,” van Durm said.

  “What would you have us do?” I asked.

  “As they—whoever they are—are watching you,” said Lord Easthope, “we infer that they have reason to fear you. Perhaps because of your known abilities, each of you in his own sphere, or perhaps because you possess some information that you might not even know you have, that would be of value.”

  Holmes and I pondered this for a minute. Just as I was about to disagree with this diagnosis, Holmes anticipated me. “I think not,” he said.

  “Baron van Durm looked startled. “Why not?” he asked.

  “In Welsh coal mines the miners take a canary down into the pits with them,” Holmes said. “It is to give them early notice of bad air, as the canaries are more susceptible than the miners. We are these people’s canaries.”