Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  “Indeed?” said my friend. “What did you make of this, then? I do believe it is a word.”

  Lestrade walked to the place my friend was standing and looked up. There was a word, written in capitals, in green blood, on the faded yellow wallpaper, some little way above Lestrade’s head. “Rache . . . ?” he said, spelling it out. “Obviously he was going to write Rachel, but he was interrupted. So—we must look for a woman . . .”

  My friend said nothing. He walked back to the corpse, and picked up its hands, one after the other. The fingertips were clean of ichor. “I think we have established that the word was not written by His Royal Highness.”

  “What the devil makes you say—”

  “My dear Lestrade. Please give me some credit for having a brain. The corpse is obviously not that of a man—the color of his blood, the number of limbs, the eyes, the position of the face—all these things bespeak the blood royal. While I cannot say which royal line, I would hazard that he is an heir, perhaps—no, second to the throne—in one of the German principalities.”

  “That is amazing.” Lestrade hesitated, then he said, “This is Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia. He was here in Albion as a guest of Her Majesty Victoria. Here for a holiday and a change of air . . .”

  “For the theatres, the whores, and the gaming tables, you mean.”

  “If you say so.” Lestrade looked put out. “Anyway, you’ve given us a fine lead with this Rachel woman. Although I don’t doubt we would have found her on our own.”

  “Doubtless,” said my friend.

  He inspected the room further, commenting acidly several times that the police had obscured footprints with their boots and moved things that might have been of use to anyone attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night. Still, he seemed interested in a small patch of mud he found behind the door.

  Beside the fireplace he found what appeared to be some ash or dirt.

  “Did you see this?” he asked Lestrade.

  “Her Majesty’s police,” replied Lestrade, “tend not to be excited by ash in a fireplace. It’s where ash tends to be found.” And he chuckled at that.

  My friend took a pinch of the ash and rubbed it between his fingers, then sniffed the remains. Finally, he scooped up what was left of the material and tipped it into a glass vial, which he stoppered and placed in an inner pocket of his coat.

  He stood up. “And the body?”

  Lestrade said, “The palace will send their own people.”

  My friend nodded at me, and together we walked to the door. My friend sighed. “Inspector. Your quest for Miss Rachel may prove fruitless. Among other things, Rache is a German word. It means ‘revenge.’ Check your dictionary. There are other meanings.”

  We reached the bottom of the stair and walked out onto the street.

  “You have never seen royalty before this morning, have you?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well, the sight can be unnerving, if you’re unprepared. Why my good fellow—you are trembling!”

  “Forgive me. I shall be fine in moments.”

  “Would it do you good to walk?” he asked, and I assented, certain that if I did not walk I would begin to scream.

  “West, then,” said my friend, pointing to the dark tower of the palace. And we commenced to walk.

  “So,” said my friend, after some time. “You have never had any personal encounters with any of the crowned heads of Europe?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I believe I can confidently state that you shall,” he told me. “And not with a corpse this time. Very soon.”

  “My dear fellow, whatever makes you believe—?”

  In reply he pointed to a carriage, black-painted, that had pulled up fifty yards ahead of us. A man in a black top hat and a greatcoat stood by the door, holding it open, waiting silently. A coat of arms familiar to every child in Albion was painted in gold upon the carriage door.

  “There are invitations one does not refuse,” said my friend. He doffed his own hat to the footman, and I do believe that he was smiling as he climbed into the boxlike space and relaxed back into the soft leathery cushions.

  When I attempted to speak with him during the journey to the palace, he placed his finger over his lips. Then he closed his eyes and seemed sunk deep in thought. I, for my part, tried to remember what I knew of German royalty, but apart from the Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, being German, I knew little enough.

  I put a hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of coins—brown and silver, black and copper green. I stared at the portrait of our Queen stamped on each of them, and felt both patriotic pride and stark dread. I told myself I had once been a military man, and a stranger to fear, and I could remember a time when this had been the plain truth. For a moment I remembered a time when I had been a crack shot—even, I liked to think, something of a marksman—but now my right hand shook as if it were palsied, and the coins jingled and chinked, and I felt only regret.

  3. THE PALACE

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  The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, was a big man, with an impressive handlebar mustache and a receding hairline, and he was undeniably and entirely human. He met us in the corridor, nodded to my friend and to me, did not ask us for our names or offer to shake hands.

  “The Queen is most upset,” he said. He had an accent. He pronounced his Ss as Zs: Mozt. Upzet. “Franz was one of her favorites. She has many nephews. But he made her laugh so. You will find the ones who did this to him.”

  “I will do my best,” said my friend.

  “I have read your monographs,” said Prince Albert. “It was I who told them that you should be consulted. I hope I did right.”

  “As do I,” said my friend.

  And then the great door was opened, and we were ushered into the darkness and the presence of the Queen.

  She was called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge—huger than I had imagined possible—and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us without moving.

  Thizsz muzzst be zsolved. The words came from the shadows.

  “Indeed, ma’am,” said my friend.

  A limb squirmed and pointed at me. Zstepp forward.

  I wanted to walk. My legs would not move.

  My friend came to my rescue then. He took me by the elbow and walked me toward Her Majesty.

  Isz not to be afraid. Isz to be worthy. Isz to be a companion. That was what she said to me. Her voice was a very sweet contralto, with a distant buzz. Then the limb uncoiled and extended, and she touched my shoulder. There was a moment, but only a moment, of pain deeper and more profound than anything I have ever experienced, and then it was replaced by a pervasive sense of well-being. I could feel the muscles in my shoulder relax, and for the first time since Afghanistan, I was free from pain.

  Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen’s counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.

  “Certainly, ma’am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch, that night—the footprints, although obscured, were unmistakable.” And then, “Yes. I understand . . . I believe so . . . yes.”

  He was quiet when we left and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.

  It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the palace.

  Upon our return to
Baker Street, in the looking glass of my room, I observed that the frog white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.

  4. THE PERFORMANCE

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  That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door on Baker Street—an elderly Chinese man, a young roué, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick-change artist,” my friend would walk out.

  He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax and stare off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand—notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in the theatre.

  “As much as the next man,” I told him.

  “Then fetch your opera glasses,” he told me. “We are off to Drury Lane.”

  I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theatre in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court—and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the Rookery of St. Giles. On my friend’s advice I concealed my wallet, and following his example, I carried a stout stick.

  Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepenny orange from one of the lovely young women who sold them to the members of the audience, and I sucked it as we waited), my friend said quietly, “You should only count yourself lucky that you did not need to accompany me to the gambling dens or the brothels. Or the madhouses—another place that Prince Franz delighted in visiting, as I have learned. But there was nowhere he went to more than once. Nowhere but—”

  The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.

  It was a fine-enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between the acts. The leading man was tall, languid, and had a fine singing voice; the leading lady was elegant, and her voice carried through all the theatre; the comedian had a fine touch for patter songs.

  The first play was a broad comedy of mistaken identities: the leading man played a pair of identical twins who had never met, but had managed, by a set of comical misadventures, each to find himself engaged to be married to the same young lady—who, amusingly, thought herself engaged to only one man. Doors swung open and closed as the actor changed from identity to identity.

  The second play was a heartbreaking tale of an orphan girl who starved in the snow selling hothouse violets—her grandmother recognized her at the last, and swore that she was the babe stolen ten years back by bandits, but it was too late, and the frozen little angel breathed her last. I must confess I found myself wiping my eyes with my linen handkerchief more than once.

  The performance finished with a rousing historical narrative: the entire company played the men and women of a village on the shore of the ocean, seven hundred years before our modern times. They saw shapes rising from the sea, in the distance. The hero joyously proclaimed to the villagers that these were the Old Ones, whose coming was foretold, returning to us from R’lyeh, and from dim Carcosa, and from the plains of Leng, where they had slept, or waited, or passed out the time of their death. The comedian opined that the other villagers had all been eating too many pies and drinking too much ale, and they were imagining the shapes. A portly gentleman playing a priest of the Roman god tells the villagers that the shapes in the sea are monsters and demons, and must be destroyed.

  At the climax, the hero beat the priest to death with his own crucifix, and prepared to welcome Them as They come. The heroine sang a haunting aria, whilst in an astonishing display of magic-lantern trickery, it seemed as if we saw Their shadows cross the sky at the back of the stage: the Queen of Albion herself, and the Black One of Egypt (in shape almost like a man), followed by the Ancient Goat, Parent to a Thousand, Emperor of all China, and the Czar Unanswerable, and He Who Presides over the New World, and the White Lady of the Antarctic Fastness, and the others. And as each shadow crossed the stage, or appeared to, from out of every throat in the gallery came, unbidden, a mighty “Huzzah!” until the air itself seemed to vibrate. The moon rose in the painted sky, and then, at its height, in one final moment of theatrical magic, it turned from a pallid yellow, as it was in the old tales, to the comforting crimson of the moon that shines down upon us all today.

  The members of the cast took their bows and their curtain calls to cheers and laughter, and the curtain fell for the last time, and the show was done.

  “There,” said my friend. “What did you think?”

  “Jolly, jolly good,” I told him, my hands sore from applauding.

  “Stout fellow,” he said with a smile. “Let us go backstage.”

  We walked outside and into an alley beside the theatre, to the stage door, where a thin woman with a wen on her cheek knitted busily. My friend showed her a visiting card and she directed us into the building and up some steps to a small communal dressing room.

  Oil lamps and candles guttered in front of smeared looking glasses, and men and women were taking off their makeup and costumes with no regard to the proprieties of gender. I averted my eyes. My friend seemed unperturbed. “Might I talk to Mr. Vernet?” he asked loudly.

  A young woman who had played the heroine’s best friend in the first play, and the saucy innkeeper’s daughter in the last, pointed us to the end of the room. “Sherry! Sherry Vernet!” she called.

  The man who stood up in response was lean; less conventionally handsome than he had seemed from the other side of the footlights. He peered at us quizzically. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure . . . ?”

  “My name is Henry Camberley,” said my friend, drawling his speech somewhat. “You may have heard of me.”

  “I must confess that I have not had that privilege,” said Vernet.

  My friend presented the actor with an engraved card. The man looked at it with unfeigned interest. “A theatrical promoter? From the New World? My, my. And this is . . . ?” He looked at me.

  “This is a friend of mine, Mr. Sebastian. He is not of the profession.”

  I muttered something about having enjoyed the performance enormously, and shook hands with the actor.

  My friend said, “Have you ever visited the New World?”

  “I have not yet had that honor,” admitted Vernet, “although it has always been my dearest wish.”

  “Well, my good man,” said my friend, with the easy informality of a New Worlder, “maybe you’ll get your wish. That last play. I’ve never seen anything like it. Did you write it?”

  “Alas, no. The playwright is a good friend of mine. Although I devised the mechanism of the magic-lantern shadow show. You’ll not see finer on the stage today.”

  “Would you give me the playwright’s name? Perhaps I should speak to him directly, this friend of yours.”

  Vernet shook his head. “That will not be possible, I am afraid. He is a professional man, and does not wish his
connection with the stage publicly to be known.”

  “I see.” My friend pulled a pipe from his pocket and put it in his mouth. Then he patted his pockets. “I am sorry,” he began. “I have forgotten to bring my tobacco pouch.”

  “I smoke a strong black shag,” said the actor, “but if you have no objection—”

  “None!” said my friend heartily. “Why, I smoke a strong shag myself,” and he filled his pipe with the actor’s tobacco, and the two men puffed away while my friend described a vision he had for a play that could tour the cities of the New World, from Manhattan Island all the way to the farthest tip of the continent in the distant south. The first act would be the last play we had seen. The rest of the play might tell of the dominion of the Old Ones over humanity and its gods, perhaps imagining what might have happened if people had had no royal families to look up to—a world of barbarism and darkness. “But your mysterious professional man would be the play’s author, and what occurs would be his alone to decide. Our drama would be his. But I can guarantee you audiences beyond your imaginings, and a significant share of the takings at the door. Let us say fifty percent?”

  “This is most exciting,” said Vernet. “I hope it will not turn out to have been a pipe dream!”

  “No, sir, it shall not!” said my friend, puffing on his own pipe, chuckling at the man’s joke. “Come to my rooms in Baker Street tomorrow morning, after breakfast time, say at ten, in company with your author friend, and I shall have the contracts drawn up and waiting.”

  With that, the actor clambered up onto his chair and clapped his hands for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen of the company, I have an announcement to make,” he said, his resonant voice filling the room. “This gentleman is Henry Camberley, the theatrical promoter, and he is proposing to take us across the Atlantic Ocean, and on to fame and fortune.”

  There were several cheers, and the comedian said, “Well, it’ll make a change from herrings and pickled cabbage,” and the company laughed. It was to the smiles of all of them that we walked out of the theatre and onto the fog-wreathed streets.