Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (25 page)

Worse was to come as Cauchemar then thrust the steering column sharply forwards, at the same time toggling a lever to increase the power output to the propellers. The airship lurched upwards, its nose rising steeply. It felt as though my stomach were still anchored to the ground even as the rest of me gained height. Dizziness drizzled down through my head as the blood rushed to my feet.

“Watson?” Holmes enquired. “You have gone a ghastly shade of pale. Are you all right?”

“I have been better,” I replied. “If this is flight, then it’s for the birds.”

“Ha!” laughed my friend. “You and your pawky sense of humour.”

“I assure you, I was not trying to be funny. If I cracked a joke, it was purely by accident.”

“You will soon get used to it,” Cauchemar said. “I was told by a balloonist I once met that one finds one’s ‘air legs’ far more readily than one does one’s sea legs. It might help if you were to look outside. It will acclimatise you, harmonising the input from your eyes with the messages your inner ear is sending you. As sailors are wont to say, ‘Keep your eyes on the horizon.’”

I peered out of a porthole set into the gondola’s curved hull. Below, rooftops and chimney pots were diminishing fast. I could make out almost the entire length of Baker Street, from Regent’s Park to Oxford Street. The grid arrangement of Marylebone became clear, thoroughfares broad and narrow intersecting neatly at right angles. The swarm of life in the roads down there seemed remote, something I was no longer entitled to be a part of. The higher the airship sailed, the more detached I became from the quotidian world. It was like entering a dream.

Having attained an altitude of, I would guess, six hundred feet, Cauchemar levelled the vessel out and poured on speed. We soared over the park, all green lawns, blue lake and autumn-gilded trees, like an illustration in a picture book. We crossed what I took to be Albany Street, and soon the huge glass dome that capped the Great Hall of Euston Station hove into view. Cauchemar pivoted the airship above the tracks which issued like multiple tongues from the terminus’s mouth. Singling out the main line, he matched our bearing to its.

Then we were gliding faster, ever faster, above the city. Over Primrose Hill we went, and the densely packed rookeries of Camden and Kentish Town, the imposing brow of Parliament Hill, and onward across the suburbs of Hampstead, Highgate and Finchley, which gleamed in their newness.

From up here London looked improbably tranquil, a sprawl of splendour and ambition, truly the capital of the world. If only, I thought, everybody could see it from this perspective. Too often one became mired in the hubbub and squalor of urban life. I, as the companion of Sherlock Holmes, had been exposed to the seamy underbelly of London, the cupidity and murderous passions of its inhabitants, more than most. I had seen the place, too often, at its worst. Yet now, aboard Cauchemar’s miraculous airborne conveyance, I was able to see it at its best.

I was able to see, too, that this city and all it represented were unquestionably worth saving.

Such was the aim of our urgent, desperate mission. We could not afford to fail.

The airship hurtled on, soon traversing open countryside. The railway track stretched ahead, a thin grey line like a thread connecting us to our destiny, winding through verdant livestock-dotted pastures and the furrowed brown rectangles of harvested fields. We were buffeted by winds that came sweeping in from the side, skewing the airship from true. Cauchemar, with deft counter-manoeuvres, kept us steady and on course. The railway might now and then veer beyond the limits of the viewing portals at the gondola’s bow, but always he brought it back into sight.

We had been aloft for over half an hour when Holmes said, “This truly is a splendid creation, Cauchemar. Does it have a name?”

“Thank you. It does, as a matter of fact. I call her
Delphine’s Revenge.”

“And would I be right in thinking that she has never flown before?”

“You would.”

“That would account for the absence of reported sightings. Something like this could not ply the skies above London, even after dark, without being noted and remarked upon.”

“Until today she has been berthed at a warehouse which I rent privately,” said Cauchemar. “I have been fine-tuning her, off and on, for seven months. I kept meaning to take her for a test flight and then procrastinating. Perhaps I feared the disaster that would ensue should some catastrophic mishap occur – a propeller working loose from its mounting or a leak in one or more of the helium cells. My concern was not for my own wellbeing, I hasten to add, but for that of innocent people below. I might conceivably have never taken her out for a spin, had the import of your telegraphic request not compelled me to, Mr Holmes. I am grateful to you for, as it were, pushing me out of the nest. Now I have proved that my ‘wings’ work.”

“I wish someone had told me this was a maiden voyage,” I said. “I might have thought twice before climbing aboard.”

“Do ignore Watson,” said Holmes to our pilot. “He is only to be taken seriously when he is
not
complaining. I suppose a logical question to ask is: who is Delphine?”

“I’m afraid that’s personal,” said Cauchemar.

“As is your relationship with the Vicomte de Villegrand?”

Cauchemar was momentarily lost for words. “That you say such a thing suggests you already know the answer.”

“I shall tell you how much I know,” said Holmes. “I know that all your vigilantism so far, all your crime-busting and altruistic acts of derring-do in the East End, these have all been in the way of a warm-up, a preamble, a dry run. You have been familiarising yourself with the use of your armour, practising, discovering its limitations and ironing out any snags. You have been field-testing it with a view to perfecting it, making it ready for some ultimate, all-or-nothing sortie.”

“Go on. I’m not saying you’re wide of the mark.”

“I know also that, all along, de Villegrand has been in your sights. A long-held, simmering enmity exists between the two of you. He has crossed you, wounded you grievously in some way, and you wish to get even.”

“Not get even. Utterly discredit and destroy him.”

“Yes. That would make sense. So things have progressed to the stage where you are all set to do battle with him openly. You have identified him as being behind the bombing campaign but have refrained from going after him until now. Why? Because previously he was operating covertly, in the shadows, using intermediaries such as Abednego Torrance. He has not directly entered the field of play until now, and it is there that you wish to snag him.”

“I should have guessed that you would burrow through to the truth in the end, Mr Holmes.” Cauchemar sounded rueful but also resigned. “It was inevitable. Once your and my paths crossed, it was only a matter of time before my secrets were brought to light.”

“They will be safe if you share them with us,” said Holmes. “You need not worry on that account. We are most avowedly on the same side, the three of us. Were that not so, I might find it hard to forgive you for gassing Dr Watson and myself.”

“Again, I apologise for that. It was discourteous and speaks more about my own lack of self-confidence than my confidence in you. In retrospect, I realise I should have shown greater faith in your discretion, Mr Holmes, and yours, Dr Watson.”

“It’s nothing,” said Holmes. “But now is the time, I think, to come clean. Tell me, how fast are we travelling?”

Cauchemar consulted the bank of instruments in front of him. “Our airspeed, according to the anemometer attached to the gondola’s keel, is in excess of a hundred and ten knots. Allowing for the wind factor, which introduces a variance of plus or minus ten per cent, we’re still travelling at a mean one hundred knots.”

“The Royal Train will be averaging eighty miles an hour. It has a three-hour head start on us. Allowing for refuelling stops, we should catch up with it in, what, two hours?”

“Give or take.”

“No quicker than that?” I said, despair and desperation vying within me for supremacy. “But what if de Villegrand launches his attack before we get there?”

“De Villegrand may be lying in wait for the Royal Train somewhere up the line. If that is so, then there is little we can do to stop him other than hope that we get there first. If, however, he too is pursuing the train just as we are, then there is a decent chance of us overtaking him. My money is on the latter.”

“You can be so damnably calm at times, Holmes.”

“I have learned, Watson, not to fret about matters over which I have little control. It is a waste of energy. In the meantime, since we have this opportunity, I can think of no more excellent or profitable way of passing the time than you telling us your history, Baron Cauchemar. Starting with your real name.”

I am (said Cauchemar, after some initial reluctance) from good solid Home Counties middle-class stock, just as you gauged from my accent, Mr Holmes – no baron at all. There is some trace of aristocratic lineage on my mother’s side, but it is so faint and etiolated as to be hardly worth the mention. My real name could not be more unassuming: Frederick Tilling. Just plain “Fred” to my friends. I am the son of a provincial barrister and a part-time milliner, born and raised in a small Sussex market town. My late father was moderately successful in his profession, enough to be able to afford a governess for his sole offspring and then later send that same child to boarding school, but my mother nonetheless was obliged to work at the hat shop in order to make ends meet and keep our heads firmly above water.

My boyhood was mostly happy. I was aware that our family financial situation, though comfortable by the standards of most, bore an underlying precariousness, and I was conscientious enough to try and not be an excessive burden on my parents. I pursued quiet, unobtrusive hobbies and pastimes. Foremost among these was a fondness for taking mechanical objects apart and fathoming how they worked. I did it with a clockwork train set of mine, and a wind-up tin soldier. I also did it, much to my parents’ initial dismay, with the cuckoo clock in the hallway and my father’s hunter-case pocket watch. The good news was that, having disassembled the items, I was able to put them back together, restoring them in such a way that they worked as well as, if not better than, before.

It became obvious that I possessed a natural facility for, I would even say affinity with, machinery. I was drawn to things such as railway engines while they waited at the platform at our local station, and the jiffy steamer and treadle-powered sewing machine at my mother’s place of work – intrigued and fascinated by them. I could divine, almost at a glance, how their component parts fitted together, the physical principles that drove them, what made them “go”. Where other children my age would be playing with conkers or aimlessly kicking a ball around, I would be tampering with a musical box so that it tinkled its tune in a minor rather than a major key, or crafting Japanese puzzle boxes out of wood that required fifty or more manipulations to open.

School was a wretched time for me. I had no leisure or opportunity to pursue my interest in matters mechanical. It was all rote learning of Latin verbs and long health-giving swims in a nearfreezing lake; not to mention endless Bible study, for it was a High Church establishment. If there is one thing guaranteed to foster an abiding aversion to religion, it is the reading aloud of the “begat” sections of the Old Testament. To stave off boredom I would scrawl pictures in the margins of my King James Version
ad infinitum –
designs for an electric mousetrap, a motorised lawnmower, a carbon-arc clothes iron – until I was caught in the act one day and soundly beaten for my pains. From then on, that avenue of selfexpression was closed to me for my remaining schooldays.

What saved me from a slow death by frustration and boredom was the discovery in the school library of several of the works of Jules Verne, in translation. I became lost in those books, engrossed in their depictions of science as a positive, transformative force in the world. My heroes became Captain Nemo, Professor Lidenbrock, Phileas Fogg, men for whom the application of knowledge and ingenuity is the solution to any and every problem. This type of novel has come to be known as the “scientific romance”, and I cannot think of a more apt name. Verne inculcated in me a true love of science, and it was, for me, the blossoming of a lifelong romance.

After school I floundered somewhat. While I continued to dream up various projects and devices, some more harebrained than others and none that got any further than the drawing board, I drudged through a series of uninspiring jobs – accounts clerk, draper’s assistant – finding scant satisfaction in any of them. In my spare time I hunted down and bought as many Verne novels as I could – and he is a prolific author! Often I could not wait for them to be published in English, so would purchase French editions by post from a dealer on the Left Bank in Paris. A ruinously expensive exercise, but such was my addiction to the great master’s writings. Incidentally, I could not have been more flattered when you, Dr Watson, described my
Subterrene
as “a thing from a Jules Verne novel”. To me there can be no higher accolade.

I had only the rudimentaries of the French language to begin with, so I struggled to read the books, but the effort was repaid in the pleasure they gave me. As a bonus, repeated exposure to Verne’s prose and the use of a French-English dictionary meant I rapidly became more fluent, until eventually I could read the tongue as well as any native Frenchman, though not speak it with nearly the same facility.

It struck me that France was the place where scientific innovation was at its boldest and most daring, where the greatest feats of engineering and the most radical technological breakthroughs were happening. This was the land of Eiffel and Pasteur, Poincaré and the Curies, Braille and the Montgolfier brothers. Not to denigrate our own fair nation and its pantheon of physicists, chemists, biologists, botanists, builders and explorers, pioneers all; but it seemed to me that at the level of sheer attainment and progress we simply could not compete. You can surely forgive my lack of patriotism. At the time I was a twenty-year-old in the grip of an infatuation, and there is nothing stronger nor more absolute in its convictions than youthful ardour.