The Curious Case Of The Clockwork Man (43 page)

His arms were held out, the forearms poised vertically, the palm of his right hand directed at the ceiling, the palm of his left at the floor. His head was thrown back and his mouth and eyes were shut, as if in peaceful contemplation. There were droplets of sweat on his face—and he whirled and whirled!

Around and around, gyrating at considerable speed, in time with the drumbeat, he appeared entirely oblivious to their presence.

“Do you mean to tell me that His Majesty’s agent has been spinning in circles for two days?” Palmerston huffed.

“Yes, Prime Minister, he has. It’s the dance of the Dervish, of the Sufi mystic. I believe he’s attempting to repair the damage our enemies did to him.”

Palmerston, his face as expressionless as ever, watched Burton for a few moments.

“Well,” he muttered. “He’d better pull himself together soon. He might be the only person in the country who can tell me exactly why our normally industrious labouring classes have decided to go the way of the damned French. In the meantime—”

Footsteps sounded as Burke and Hare pounded up the stairs.

“Prime Minister, please excuse the interruption,” Burke said, speaking rapidly and with his voice raised above the music. He turned to the poet: “Mr. Swinburne, when you recovered Sir Richard, did he have an odd-looking pistol in his possession?”

“The green thing?” the poet asked. “Yes, I found it in his jacket pocket. Is it a pistol? It doesn’t look like one!”

“Where is it now?”

“In the top drawer of his main desk, by the windows.”

Burke turned to Hare. “If you would, Mr. Hare?”

With a nod, his colleague turned and headed back to the study.

“What’s happening?” Palmerston snapped.

“A minute, if you please, sir,” Burke responded briskly. He leaned across and pulled the library door shut, muffling the melodic noise. He then indicated another door, just along the hall, and addressed Swinburne again: “What’s in there?”

“It’s Richard’s storeroom.”

With a swift nod, Burke pushed past them, opened the door, and looked inside. He saw a room piled high with wooden boxes.

“Excellent. In you go, please, Prime Minister.”

“What the devil—!” Palmerston began.

Gregory Hare reappeared, with Burton’s spine-shooter in his hand. He passed it to his colleague.

“Sir!” Burke’s voice was filled with urgency. “If you recall, I advised you in the strongest possible terms that coming here was a grievous miscalculation. Sir Richard and his colleagues have made themselves known to the enemy forces. They are targets. You have knowingly placed yourself in the line of fire for no good reason except to satisfy your curiosity—”

“How dare you speak to me like th—”

Burke continued, raising his voice and speaking over the prime minister’s objection. “What I feared most is now occurring. The street outside has just filled with wraiths. They caused your guards to shoot your outriders dead then turn their rifles upon themselves. We can only assume that this house is about to be attacked, isn’t that so, Mr. Hare?”

“Quite right, Mr. Burke,” Gregory Hare answered.

“We must barricade ourselves inside,” Burke continued. “If it becomes necessary, Mr. Hare and I will act as your last line of defence.”

“I—” Palmerston said, but a thick arm was suddenly wrapped around his waist and Hare hoisted him off his feet, carried him past Burke and Swinburne, and plonked him into the storeroom.

“Unhand me, sir!” came his receding protest.

Burke turned to the poet: “I’m sorry, Mr. Swinburne, but Lord Palmerston’s safety is my and Mr. Hare’s primary duty. I have no choice but to leave you and your companions to defend this house as best you can. Besides which, we are somewhat hampered by our injuries. If our attackers make it past you, hopefully you will have weakened them enough for us to be able to deal with them.”

“You mean to make of us a forlorn hope?” Swinburne asked. “Ruthless bugger, aren’t you?”

“You object?”

Swinburne grinned. “Not at all! This is just my cup of tea! Go! Barricade yourselves in. I’ll rally the troops.”

“Thank you, sir. Um—” Burke looked at the cactus pistol in his hand “—I should keep hold of this but Mr. Hare and I are armed with revolvers and, under the circumstances—”

He passed the strange weapon to the poet, quickly explained its use, then turned away, entered the storeroom, and closed the door.

Swinburne let loose a breath and whispered: “Tally-ho!” He descended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he saw Mrs. Angell in the hallway below, carrying a coffee pot and cups on a tray.

There was a knock at the front door.

The housekeeper immediately put the tray down on the hall table and reached for the door handle.

“Don’t!” Swinburne yelled.

It was too late. Even as she turned to look up at him, Mrs. Angell’s fingers had twisted the doorknob.

The portal swung inward, pushed by a big bloated hand.

The old woman staggered backward and screamed.

A bulging mass of clothing blocked the threshold. Swinburne recognised it at once: the Tichborne Claimant!

The hideous head came ducking under the lintel and, as the hulking mass of blubbery flesh pushed through after it, Mrs. Angell dropped in a dead faint.

Swinburne raised the cactus pistol and pressed the trigger nodule. He missed. Spines thudded into the doorframe. The Claimant raised his repulsive face, looked at the poet, and smiled sweetly.

“You must be Algy.”

His voice was female, with a Russian accent.

“Forgive me for not visiting you in person,
kotyonok
, but I am a little stretched at the moment.” The Claimant glanced down at his corpulent belly. He looked back up at the poet and chuckled. “He he he! Horribly stretched! But as a matter of fact, I was referring to the uprising. It goes well, does it not? Your capital burns! Ha ha! How your poor King Albert must tremble!”

“Who the hell are you?” Swinburne snarled.

The door beside him opened and Detective Inspector Trounce stepped out.

“What’s going—
Bloody hell!”

“Ah, is that William Trounce? How gratifying. I do hope you have Herbert Spencer with you, too. It would be so convenient if my emissary can kill you all at once before he retrieves Sir Richard. Really, it was very rude of you to take him from me before I’d finished ruining that extraordinary mind of his. I would have come for him sooner but I have so much to do. I am quite dreadfully busy. Ah well, let us proceed. Time for you to die! As we say in Russia:
Bare derutsya—u kholopov chuby treschat!
Farewell!”

The Claimant’s eyes suddenly dulled. He emitted a loud bellow, in his own voice, and started up the stairs. His girth was such that the banister and its balusters cracked, splintered, and fell away from the staircase as he heaved himself up.

Trounce went to draw his police revolver. It snagged in his pocket.

“Confound it!” he cursed.

Swinburne raised the spine-shooter and fired again, hitting the advancing monstrosity in the chest. The spines had no effect other than to elicit another roar.

The poet and policeman retreated into the study.

“What’s happenin’?” Herbert Spencer asked.

“Big trouble,” Trounce grunted. “Very big indeed!”

The Claimant blocked the doorway, wedged his vast body into it, and began to shove himself through. The door frame split.

“Cover your ears,” Trounce muttered. Swinburne and Spencer did so. The Scotland Yard man had finally freed his revolver. He fired a shot into one of the unwelcome visitor’s beefy thighs.

The Claimant yelled incoherently, grabbed the side and top of the door, and ripped it from its hinges. He threw it at Trounce.

The slab of wood smashed into the detective inspector and sent him stumbling backward. He fell to his knees, dazed.

“Repulsive toad!” Pox squawked, and sought refuge on top of a bookcase.

Herbert Spencer grabbed a brass poker from the hearth and brandished it like a sword.

“What’ll we do, lad?” he mumbled, gaping at the slowly advancing mountain of flesh.

Swinburne, standing beside the vagrant philosopher, became conscious that the mantelpiece was at his back. No retreat. He glanced to the left. Both the study windows were closed. No escape there, not that anyone could survive the jump. He grimaced. His head had started aching and his thoughts were becoming turgid and confused. He was feeling the baleful influence of the Choir Stones, which were still embedded in the Claimant’s scalp. He felt an urge to welcome Sir Roger Tichborne to the house and to help him fight his enemies.

He gritted his teeth.

He looked to the right and saw Admiral Lord Nelson standing immobile by the door to the dressing room.

The faux aristocrat lumbered closer.

A fat hand reached out.

Swinburne, without thinking, screeched: “Nelson! Throw this obese bastard out of the house the fastest way possible! At once!”

The clockwork man bent his upper torso forward and accelerated away from the wall, a blur of gleaming metal.

The Claimant turned toward the movement.

Nelson collided with the giant’s belly, snapped his mechanical arms out straight, and pushed with all his spring-loaded might.

Neither Swinburne nor Herbert Spencer had any inkling that the clockwork man possessed the power that, in a shocking instant, now became evident.

The whalelike mass of the Tichborne Claimant was thrown into the air and right across the study. He hit the window and went out through it, taking the glass, the frame, and a considerable chunk of the wall on either side of it with him.

The shattering crash was tremendous, and was followed by the clatter and bangs of falling masonry as the front part of 14 Montagu Place suffered his unexpected exit.

Detective Inspector Trounce, shaking his head to clear it, staggered to his feet and peered around at the room. It looked as if a bomb had exploded in it. The Claimant’s passage had wrecked furniture, brick dust swirled around, and Burton’s papers were raining down like autumn leaves.

“Bloody hell!” he gasped.

Admiral Lord Nelson turned to the poet and saluted.

“Yes, thank you, old chap,” Swinburne responded meekly. “Very effective, though not quite as neat as the trick they worked on Sir Alfred. My hat! Mrs. Angell is going to kill me.”

Herbert Spencer gingerly approached the gaping hole in the wall and squinted out at the street below. It was enshrouded by steam, billowing about in a slight breeze. He saw movement in the cloud.

“Gents,” he said quietly. “Do you happen to have a spare pistol I could borrow? That thing ain’t dead.”

“You’re not serious?” Trounce exclaimed.

“It’s layin’ on the pavement but it looks to me like it’s just winded.”

The Scotland Yard man retrieved his revolver from the floor.

Swinburne stepped up to one of Burton’s desks and pulled a pistol from its drawer. He handed it to Spencer.

Trounce growled: “Let’s get out there and finish that abomination off!”

He set his jaw and marched out of the study. Spencer and Swinburne followed. The poet looked back over his shoulder at Nelson.

“Come on, Admiral.”

The three men and the clockwork device descended to the hallway. Trounce quickly checked Mrs. Angell, who was sitting dazed against the wall.

“Go down to your rooms, dear. We’ll come and tell you when it’s safe.”

Swinburne picked Burton’s silver-handled swordstick from the elephant-foot umbrella stand by the front door. He handed it to Nelson.

“Here, unsheathe it and don’t hesitate to use it. If you can manage it, slice the lumps off the fat man’s head.”

The mechanical valet saluted.

“What’s that?” Trounce exclaimed. “Why play silly beggars? Wouldn’t it be better to run the damned beast through the heart?”

“The François Garnier diamonds are sewn into those lumps, Detective Inspector.”

“Brundleweed’s stones!” Trounce cried. “And you’ve only just thought to tell me?”

“Richard had his reasons for keeping it quiet. All you need to know for now is that if we can free the fiend from their influence, we might be able to get some information out of him.”

Trounce grunted and shook his head. “Perhaps, but I’ll tell you, lad: if that brute looks to be getting the upper hand, I’ll not hesitate to put a bullet through his brain!”

They went outside. Palmerston’s guards were slumped in the mobile castle’s bartizans, their heads shattered by their own bullets. The four cavalrymen lay dead in the road.

Wraiths moved through the haze.

As Swinburne led his companions out onto the pavement, the mist parted, and the Claimant came charging out of it like an enraged hippopotamus. Before any of them could raise a weapon, they were sent flying. Swinburne and Spencer both ended up on their backs in the gutter, while Nelson clanged noisily against one of Palmerston’s steam-horses. Trounce was grabbed by the collar, yanked off his feet, and thrown high into the air and clear across the road. He thumped down headfirst onto the opposite pavement, rolled, and lay still.

Nelson ducked under the Claimant’s swinging fist and scuttled away to retrieve the rapier, which had been knocked out of his hand. Swinburne rolled under the steam-horse and out the other side. He jumped up then backpedalled rapidly when he found himself looking a wraith full in the face.

“Argh!” he cried, and clutched the sides of his head. He felt a terrible pressure on his brain. “No!” he gasped. “I’ll not let you inside! Not ever again!”

A gunshot echoed as Herbert Spencer put a bullet into the Claimant’s side. The philosopher scrambled to his feet, turned, and ran to the back of the prime minister’s carriage. A ghostly hand clutched at his arm. He struggled in the grip of a wraith.

The Claimant flew into a berserk rage. Stamping his feet and waving his arms, he hollered and howled, screamed and hissed, and threw himself into the side of the foremost of the two steam-horses. It must have weighed well over a ton, but under his onslaught, the machine keeled over, narrowly missed crushing Swinburne, and skidded across the cobbles on its side, showering sparks and emitting a plume of white vapour as one of its pipes tore open.