Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (7 page)

“Very good, was ’is Lordship? Gave you the jolly to buy this pub, did ’e?” the mummer suggested.

“That’s as may be,” Esterman said sharply, “and what business would that be of yours?”

“Now-now-now-now,” Barnett said sharply, raising his hand between the two. “We’re all friends here, we are. We wish to see His Lordship to interest him—or his steward—in some of our fine wines and spirits. He’s on our list, which was drawn up by the accounts manager himself. And Mummer, Mr. Esterman’s business is just that—his business. Keep your sharp little nose out of it!”

“So that’s the way the apple bounces, is it?” the mummer said peevishly, jumping off his chair. “Well, I’ll just out myself into the street and await your worshipful presence,
Mr.
Barnett.” The mummer put an edge on the “Mr.” sharp enough to cut paper, and with that he packed up the two wine cases and stomped out of the taproom with one under each arm.

Esterman glared after the departing little man until the door had closed behind him, then turned to Barnett and smiled a jagged-tooth smile. “Interesting creature, that,” he said. “P’raps you should keep him on a lead.”

“I’d better go after him,” said Barnett. “Sorry if he said anything untoward; he doesn’t mean anything by it. He gets a bit testy when his morning dance is cut short.”

“His … dance?”

“After he gets up and before breakfast,” said Barnett, improvising furiously. “He spends about twenty minutes in his room dancing. The hornpipe, the jig, the kazatsky, whatever strikes his mood. If he doesn’t get his morning dance, he tends to be disputatious all day.”

Esterman nodded. “Interesting. I had an aunt who was like that. Only with her it wasn’t dancing, it was—well, never mind about that now.”

“So don’t take Mr. Tolliver seriously. He means well.”

“No problem,” Esterman said, spreading his arms magnanimously.

“Hold on to our luggage, will you?” asked Barnett. “We’ll be back—and there’s that bit of a taste I promised you.”

“I’ll have the bags taken up to your rooms,” Esterman said.

*   *   *

“We’re not actually going to visit ’is bloomin’ lordship, is we?” the mummer asked when Barnett caught up with him some hundred yards down the road.

“We’d best not,” Barnett replied. “Supposing his lordship wishes to acquire some of our plonk? We’d have to find it somewhere.”

“The professor wouldn’t like it if we further denuded his wine cellar,” the mummer observed. “But if we is to call ourselves traveling men, we’d best do some traveling.”

“We’ll knock about for a few hours,” Barnett said, “and reappear at the Fox and Hare sometime late afternoon. Then, after we dine, we’ll share a few drinks with the publican.” Barnett turned to stare at his little companion. “What gave you the idea for that bit about Esterman and his lordship?”

“It just came to me,” the mummer said, “the way Esterman reacted when you read off his lordship’s name.”

“I wonder if it means anything?”

“I’ll be much surprised if it don’t,” the mummer observed.

“Well, we’ll find out this evening, if our landlord is as susceptible to drink as the professor supposes. In the meantime…”

“I could do with a bit o’ skof,” the mummer suggested.

“A late lunch?” Barnett asked.

“The very same. Never too late, I says.”

“There’s a tearoom some ways down,” Barnett suggested. “Here, let me take one of those cases.”

“I won’t say no,” the mummer agreed, letting one black case slide slowly out from under his arm until Barnett caught the handle.

*   *   *

Esterman raised his glass and leered at the liquid within. “There is a divinity what shapes my ends,” he declaimed, “however so much I hew them with my little ruff.” He plumped down into his chair and tilted his head back so the last few drops of ruby liquor could more easily pass between his welcoming lips.

“A noble sentiment,” Barnett opined. “You have a sensitive soul, Mr. Esterman, a sensitive soul.” He lifted his glass and made a show of drinking deep without actually imbibing more than a few drops. There was little doubt that the landlord could drink him under the table, and probably under the whole house, if he’d a mind to. Once the drinking began, he had little mind for anything else. It was late evening of the second day of Barnett and the mummer’s sojourn at the Fox and Hare. The gas lamps burned low, the other patrons were long gone, and the bottles of aged port were being sampled to extinction.

“It is unusual—I might say unique,” Barnett said, “to find an innkeeper quoting the bard.”

“You might say that,” Esterman agreed, looking up from under his eyebrows, which seemed to have grown strangely heavy. He raised his voice.

“There is a history in all men’s lives,

Figuring the nature of the times deceas’d,

The which observ’d a man may prop … prof … prophesy,

With a near aim, of the main chance of things

As yet not come to life.”

He turned and squinted at Barnett. “That’s Hank the Quart,” he said.

Barnett mentally turned the phrase over. “Henry the Fourth?”

“The very one.”

“How came you to have such an appreciation of Shakespeare?” Barnett asked.

“’Ere,” the mummer interjected, “let me fetch another bottle of the ’38. This one seems to have depleted itself.” Bottle in hand, he trotted off.

Esterman watched the mummer’s retreat with interest until the little man turned the corner. Then he ponderously moved his head and adjusted his vision to look at Barnett. “When I was with His Lordship,” Esterman said, “His Lordship had the library redone. All the bookshelves, what were oak, were ripped out and replaced with other bookshelves what were cut from the Widdersign Ash, a great squat tree which were over two hundred years old when it was removed to make way for the tennis courts. He had two Italian artisans come in to do the work. On the bookshelves, not the tennis courts.”

“A great improvement, no doubt,” said Barnett.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Esterman said, “but what His Lordship wants is what His Lordship does. At any rate, I was responsible for these big stacks of books while they was out of the shelves. And so I started reading. Shakespeare and Kidd and Marlowe and Bacon and like that. They used the most mellyfloo … mellifluous words, and I grew into the habit of speaking them aloud when they wasn’t anybody who could hear me.”

“Why did you pick the Renaissance playwrights?” Barnett asked.

“They was on top of the stack.”

“Good thinking,” Barnett agreed.

The mummer reappeared with another bottle of the port and carefully decanted it into the wine jug. “We’re running low on bottles,” he said. “Best hurry and drink it up before it’s gone.”

The logic appealed to Esterman, who happily refilled his glass. “A superior tipple, i’ faith,” he said. He held the glass to the side of his nose for a moment and then drained it. “Pardon,” he said, getting up and weaving toward the back. “I think I’d best go see about a dog.”

“He can put it away, can’t he?” the mummer commented as Esterman disappeared out the back door.

“He’d better get more talkative pretty soon,” Barnett said, “or we’ll run out of port.”

“Oh,” the mummer said, “we ran out two bottles ago. I’ve been refilling the bottles from our landlord’s own stock.”

“Ah!” said Barnett. “I thought I detected a difference.”

“Blimey if you did!” Mummer Tolliver grinned a toothy grin. “After finishing the first two bottles I could have mixed gin with horse piss and colored it red, and you both would have drunk it happily and praised it fulsomely.”

Barnett smiled. “You may be right,” he said. “I won’t ask what you would have colored it red with.”

Esterman weaved back to his seat. “As oft as wine has played the peppermill,” he intoned, “and robbed me of my coat and jacket, well … I often ponder what the vintners buy … Could be as thirsty as this stuff so swell!” He sat down with a thump.

“Indeed,” Barnett agreed.

“If not in word,” the mummer suggested, “but close enough—close enough.”

“I merely state,” Esterman said ponderously, “that this is good plonk. Good plonk indeed.”

“Lord Thornton-Hoxbary doesn’t think so, I guess,” Barnett said. “Couldn’t interest his man in as much as half a case.”

“I could of told you visiting Widdersign-on-Rip … er … Ribble would be a waste of you gentlemen’s time,” Esterman smugged. “His Lordship don’t lay out a farthing till he’s squeezed it bone dry, but you wouldn’t have listened to me nohow, now would you?”

“Probably not,” Barnett admitted, “but we’re listening to you now.”

“Parsimonious, is His Lordship?” the mummer asked.

“If that means miserly, mean, tight-fisted, then you might say so. Ain’t no one around here what would argue with you.”

“He seems to have been pretty generous with you,” Barnett said, looking around.

“You mean this place?” Esterman asked. “The Fox and Hare? Well, it ain’t as if he gave me the deed outright, is it? I mean, he has an interest in the place. Only he don’t consider it seemly, or some such, for a peer to be a publican, so we don’t talk it about.”

“That explains it, then,” Barnett said.

“Besides,” Esterman added, “he had to, didn’t he? It was only right.”

Barnett leaned across the bar. “Did he, then? Why was that?”

Esterman drained his glass, blinked twice, smiled across the bar at his guests, and slowly leaned forward until he was resting on his nose. His eyes closed.

Barnett rapped on the bar. “Mr. Esterman!” he said sharply. “Landlord!”

Esterman turned his face until it was resting on his right ear. His eyes remained closed.

“P’raps we should let the man sleep,” the mummer suggested. “P’raps he’s told us enough if we parse it properly.”

“Perhaps,” Barnett agreed. “Perhaps I’ll go upstairs.”

“I’ll do a bit of scouting whilst our landlord slumbers,” the mummer said. “No telling what I might turn up.”

[CHAPTER SIX]

THE SPANISH HOUSE

Who has known all the evil before us,

Or the tyrannous secrets of time?

Though we match not the dead men that bore us

At a song, at a kiss, at a crime—

Though the heathen outface and outlive us,

And our lives and our longings are twain—

Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,

Our Lady of Pain.

—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

THE WALLED ESTATE ON THE SOUTHWEST CORNER
of Regency Square extended for forty feet along the square and twice that when it turned down Regency Street on one side and Little Horneby Mews on the other. A twelve-foot-high redbrick wall surrounded it, fronted by a thick blackthorn hedge first planted the year Nelson and his ships visited Egypt. If one stood far enough back from the wall, one could glimpse the top floor of the Georgian mansion within. Once the residence of the now-defunct Barons Wysland, it was set well inside the wall and surrounded by an impeccably groomed lawn with a gardener’s cottage, gazebos, and a small frog pond. At the moment there were no frogs in residence. The wide doors of a carriage house opened onto the mews.

The property was presently tenanted by a secretive society known by those permitted such knowledge as Le Château d’Espagne, although it had no particular connection with either France or Spain. Its membership, which comprised
L’Ordre du Château,
was carefully self-chosen, each member free to suggest candidates, who would then be accepted or not according to the whim of the
chatelain,
master of the order, who was seldom seen and never spoken to directly. The name he was known by, Giles Paternoster, was certainly not the one he was born with. The stories told of him were grotesque and spoke of unnatural vices, but perhaps they were exaggerations, clever fictions crafted to be good for business. Or perhaps not.

Natyana, the dark-haired mistress of the house, her long fingernails bright scarlet but for the one ebon nail on the ring finger of her right hand, was part German, part Levantine, and part someone her mother never talked about. Most of the staff looked to be Egyptian or Moroccan, and the boys and girls who serviced the guests had been recruited from Paris, Rome, Belgrade, Vienna, and half a dozen other European cities. They were little different from the slum children of London except for their native tongue, but they quickly picked up enough English to serve, and their accents made them seem exotic. They were sent back whence they had come on or about their fifteenth birthday, when their services were no longer desired.

The members and their guests arrived in carriages or chaises with the family crests or other devices on the doors discreetly covered over. Some of the more cautious were picked up at a place of their choosing by an unmarked black four-wheeler driven by a small, thin man with a long, twisted nose and piercing black eyes set well back in his skull-like face. His top hat, cape, trousers, gloves, and boots were black, and his face was as white as though it had been dusted with the finest flour.

Both members and guests were expected—required—to have their faces masked before passing through the gate and arriving at the front door. A domino would suffice, but many of the masks were quite elaborate, and some showed more of their wearer’s soul than would his naked face.

Entrance to the Château was obtained by showing the doorman a talisman and whispering a word. The word was changed monthly, the talisman yearly. This year’s talisman was a gilded cock, about two inches across, pierced through the tail feathers for a small gold ring so that it could be hung around the neck on a slender gold chain and worn between shirt and chest. The word for the month was “Cybele,” the name of the mother of the gods of Olympus. It is said that the ancient cult of Cybele honored her by performing orgiastic dances and unspeakable acts.

The brougham that stopped before the gate to Le Château d’Espagne just after dusk this Friday, the nineteenth day of September, was a deep maroon color trimmed in the blackest of blacks. A thin gilt stripe outlined each of the maroon panels. The driver and footman wore powdered wigs and red and gold tailcoats with oversized gold buttons over puffy black breeches terminating in a pair of white stockings just below the knee. It was a style of livery aping the court dress of the eighteenth century that the servants of the nobility seemed loath to give up.