The List Of Seven (28 page)

Was such a loss so catastrophic? Doyle turned the question over more thoroughly than a roasting game bird. He might be hungry now, but he knew full well starvation was not to be his fate; there would be another meal somewhere soon along the way, and hunger would only make it taste the sweeter. He had lost his home and possessions, but there was another home to be made, other possessions to replace what had been taken. He had his wits, his strength, his relative youth, good boots, the clothes on his back, and the courage of his convictions. He had adversity, and an imposing adversary, against which to measure his own worth, and in Jack Sparks a comrade-in-arms to stand beside and face this sea of troubles with together. What more did he require?

If one could only remain as aware as I am in this moment, thought Doyle; had he fortuitously stumbled onto the secret of peace of mind? Here it was then: The circumstances of a life must not dictate our terms of living it; that decision resides only in one's reaction to circumstance. And those reactions must be susceptible to our control. The mind, it all began in the mind! How blindingly simple! It bolstered him with a feeling of freedom as expansive as he could ever recall. His step quickened as his spirits soared. The open road ahead was an invitation to discovery, not disaster. He would embrace his hardships, forge ahead and brave the dangers in his path with equanimity and fortitude. Damn the Dark Brotherhood! Let this degenerate Alexander Sparks do his worst! He would consign them all to the same damnation they sought to visit on the earth!

A speeding wagon hit a deep puddle, and a heavy shower soaked Doyle through to the skin. Mud glopped from his forehead in clots. Water ran down his back and into his boots. A sudden gust of wind froze his bones to the marrow. It started to rain, sheets of the stuff, stinging like frozen bees. He sneezed. His newfound resolve fled before him like a flock of starlings.

"I'm in hell!" he shouted miserably.

A cab pulled up beside him. Larry sat in the driver's seat. Sparks threw open the passenger door.

"Come along, Doyle, you'll catch your death out here," he said.

Salvation!

Larry poured a kettle of steaming hot water into the basin where Doyle was soaking his feet. He sat wrapped in a blanket, shivering wildly, a hot plaster planted on his forehead. Larry replaced the kettle on top of the coal fire, on the screen of which Doyle's clothes lay drying in their dingy Holborn hotel room whose meager trappings rendered the memory of the Hotel Melwyn on par with the Savoy.

"Not a first-rate idea, Doyle, seeking out Inspector Leboux. For the second time," said Sparks, stretched out on the room's only sofa, idly forming a cat's cradle from a length of yarn.

"I was in prison. In possession of what I believed to be in-

formation vital to our cause. We had a noon appointment. I saw it as my foremost obligation to obtain the quickest possible release," said Doyle testily, fighting off the ague, in a completely foul humor.

"We would have gotten you out soon enough."

"Gotten me out how?—achoo!"

"Bless you. They know we're back in London now," said Sparks, weaving around the yarn, ignoring Doyle's question. "A considerable disadvantage. We'll be forced to move much more rapidly than I'd hoped we'd have to."

"And just how do they know we're back in London? I trust Leboux implicitly, and I daresay I know him a good sight better than I know you."

"Doyle, you hurt my feelings, you really do," said Sparks, holding out the cat's cradle to solicit the use of Doyle's hands.

Doyle reluctantly thrust his hands out, and Sparks loomed it expertly around his fingers. "How could they possibly know, Jack?"

"You spent two hours in a cell chockablock full with an honor roll of London lowlife and made a grand show of buying your way out. Alexander would have every dirty ear in town listening for the approach of our step. Do you imagine some word of your performance hasn't filtered back up the vine?"

Doyle sniffed and snorted, dearly wishing he had the use of his hands back to stem the flow of effluent from his nose.

"What about Barry?" asked Doyle, conceding the point.

"Don't you worry none 'bout Barry, guv," said Larry, sitting in the corner, happily dipping Scottish shortbread biscuits in his tea. "Many's the worse scrape he's shimmied out of before. The toffs ain't dreamed up the ark-e-tecture of a cell that can hold the likes of Brother B for long."

"Doesn't talk much, your brother," said Doyle, for the moment wishing Larry shared the trait.

"Barry's of a mind it's better to be silent and presumed a fool than to open your mouth and removed doubt altogether," said Larry cheerfully.

Sparks whistled "Rule Britannia" as he plaited another variation on the yarn between their fingers.

"At least we found Bodger Nuggins," said Doyle defensively. "And we got a fair amount out of him, too. At least give me credit for that."

"Hmm. Not a moment too soon, I'd say."

"You can't very well hold me responsible for his death."

"No, I reckon we have another party to thank for that. Pity. Just before Bodger might have revealed to us what purpose was behind the shipping of those convicts to Yorkshire—"

Doyle sneezed mightily, nearly kicking the yarn off his fingers.

"Bless you," said Larry and Sparks jointly.

"Thank you. Jack, when I last laid eyes on Nuggins, he was all but very firmly in the hands of the police. An hour later he's found facedown in the river. Are you suggesting the police had something to do with this?"

"Why do you suppose I persist in warning you against speaking to them?" said Sparks patiently.

"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 Lam' 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, mel-

ancholy 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, ·Jien 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 constant 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.