End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  Sincerely,

  W.B. Taylor

  “League?” Blank raised an eyebrow. He glanced at the cheque, and then at the framed print on the wall. “LRT?”

  Miss Bonaventure caught his meaning, and gave a slight smile. “League of the Round Table, perhaps?”

  “The same which counted the late Xenophon Brade among its members?”

  “Could he be the letter's ‘Mr. B,’ perhaps?” Miss Bonaventure asked.

  “I think,” Blank said, putting his bowler hat back on his head, “a visit to this ‘W.B. Taylor’ might be in order.”

  Blank and Miss Bonaventure found themselves a short while later standing before the return address listed on the envelope for W.B. Taylor, which was revealed to be a modest residence in Paddington. Ringing the bell, they were greeted at the door by Taylor himself.

  If Blank had formed an impression of the man based on hearing a few lines of correspondence read aloud, his impression had struck far of the mark. The man who stood before them, towering some inches above himself and Miss Bonaventure, looked like he'd just stepped from the pages of a penny dreadful about the wild American west. Broad-shouldered, with large, long-fingered hands, he had a long drooping mustache and a small pointed beard on his chin, his hair worn brushing the collar of his starched white shirt. Judging by the gray which shot through his hair, and the wrinkles which ran from the corners of his eyes, which made him look as if he were perpetually squinting in the sun's glare, he looked to be about fifty years of age, though in evident excellent health. He wore a brocade waistcoat over his shirtsleeves, a string tie was knotted at his neck, and on his feet were western-style boots.

  “Mr. Taylor?” Blank began.

  “Look,” barked the man in the doorway in a brusque American accent, “if you've come on Cody's say-so, you can go hang, and to thunder with Cody!”

  Blank smiled. “You're American.”

  “Hell, no!” Taylor snapped. “I'm from Texas.”

  Blank took his hat from his head and held it over his chest with both hands. “I believe there may be some misunderstanding, Mr. Taylor. I'm afraid we don't know any Cody.”

  “We're here to question you in connection with the deaths of Mr. Xenophon Brade and Miss Cecilia Villers,” Miss Bonaventure put in, with less tact than Blank might have liked.

  “Cecila?” Taylor said, blinking. “Dead? I…I didn't know.”

  “Killed by the same hand,” Miss Bonaventure explained, “or so it would appear.”

  Either the man was a better actor than any Blank had previously seen, or he legitimately had not known about the death of Miss Villers. It was hardly surprising if he didn't, since the murder had only been discovered a few short hours before.

  Taylor stood in the door, blinking in the bright June afternoon sun, seemingly adrift.

  “May we come in?” Blank asked, gently.

  Taylor nodded absently, and stepped aside to usher them in. “Sure, sure,” he said, his eyes unfocused.

  The rooms beyond the door were small but crowded with memories. If Miss Villers's flat had betrayed little about the woman who had lived there, Taylor's rooms spoke volumes. On the floor was a Mexican blanket spread out as a rug, and on the wall a pair of crossed cavalry sabers and a long-barreled rifle. On a hat rack near the door hung a ten-gallon hat and a gun belt, weighed down by a LeMat revolver. Tacked up on the wall, unframed, was a poster advertising Buffalo Bill's Wild West Exhibition, with the name “LITTLE BILL TAYLOR” emblazoned on the top and the legend “THE KNIGHT OF THE TEXAS PLAINS” at the bottom, and at its center a photo of a slightly younger W.B. Taylor surrounded by engraved scenes depicting him trick riding, shooting glass balls out of the air with a Spencer repeating rifle, demonstrating quick draws with a revolver, and so on.

  Blank scanned the spines of the books on the crowded shelves while Miss Bonaventure sat down on the settee, her legs crossed. Spread on the table was a copy of an American paper, which on closer examination proved to be the April 19th edition of the Dallas Morning News. The front page carried a banner headline about a skirmish between a Turkish battery and a Grecian steamer, but it was a headline on page 5 that caught Miss Bonaventure's eye.

  “‘The Great Aerial Wanderer,’” she read aloud.

  Blank stepped behind her and read over her shoulder.

  The story concerned an airship which had apparently been reported in recent editions of the paper, which had landed at the Texan towns of Greenville and Stephenville and subsequently been seen to explode in midair. The article in question consisted primarily of the testimony of a Mr. C.L. McIlhany, who claimed to have seen an airship himself. Mr. McIlhany concluded his statement with the following observation. “And say, what you reckon is going to happen when dynamiters get to riding in airships and dropping bombs down on folks and cities? Is the world ready for airships?”

  A shiver ran down Blank's spine as he remembered what he'd learned concerning aerial bombing in the School of Thought, however jumbled and garbled the intelligence had been. He straightened, saw a peculiar glint in Miss Bonaventure's eye, and wondered for the thousandth time just what she knew of what lay in store for their beloved London in the decades to come.

  Whatever her foreknowledge of events to come, Miss Bonaventure played the article off as the hoax it doubtless was. “It must be longer than I'd realized since last I visited the United States,” she said lightly, an eyebrow raised, “if they've already begun to travel by airship.”

  “Hmm?” Taylor looked over, distracted. He saw the paper spread across table. “Oh, that. My brother Jack lives in Recondito, California, and sends me a stack of American newspapers from time to time. I think he intends to make me all homesick, reminding me of what I've left behind, but it tends to have the opposite effect, most times, when I read bunkum like that.”

  “How long has it been, Mr. Taylor?” Miss Bonaventure asked, casually. “Since you came to England?”

  “I came across the big water with Cody's Wild West show in 1887, ma'am, but when he pulled up stakes and went back to the States, I stayed up.”

  “It's ‘miss,’ actually,” Miss Bonaventure corrected discreetly.

  Taylor nodded and picked up a glass ball from atop a dressing table. The ball was the twin of those Taylor was depicted shooting out of midair in the poster. Was it one that he'd missed, all those years before? He tossed it up in the air and caught it neatly, and then again, over and over. It seemed to Blank to be some sort of nervous habit which the tall American did unconsciously, as another would tap a foot or drum fingers on a table.

  “So Cecilia's dead, is she?” Taylor shook his head, disbelievingly. “Hell, Brade's body's barely cold, and now there's Cecilia to be laid out right beside him.” He paused, thoughtfully, snatching the glass ball out of midair and holding it for a moment, frozen. “I gotta wonder if someone ain't come gunning for us.”

  “I wonder, Mr. Taylor, about this Cody you mentioned,” Blank said, casually looking up from his examination of the titles on the bookshelf. “Did you mean Colonel Cody, he of the Wild West show?”

  “Hell, no,” Taylor spat. “I meant Samuel Cody. The polecat claims to be from Texas, but I've got it on good authority he's really from Iowa, of all places. And his name's just as phony. It isn't even Cody, but Cowdrey or some such thing. Hell, Buffalo Bill had to sue the bastard twice, to keep him from using the name ‘Wild West’ in his act, and to keep the bastard from claiming to be Buffalo Bill's own son on his playbills, and his wife Bill Cody's daughter.”

  “And he's been troubling you, this Samuel Cody?” Miss Bonaventure asked, looking up from the papers before her.

  “He tried to talk me into investing in the development of some new rapid-fire pistol he couldn't get the British government to buy, and now he's trying to put on a new Wild West revue at Alexandra Palace and wants me to perform in it.”

  “The return of the ‘Knight of the Plains,’ Mr. Taylor?” Blank indicated the poster with a nod.

  A blush
rose in Taylor's cheek, and an incongruously boyish expression of embarrassment flitted across his rugged features. “Ah, that's just huckstering,” Taylor said, glancing at the poster. “They needed to put something to balance out my name, I guess.” He looked back to Miss Bonaventure and Blank. “But no, I'm retired from all that now, no matter what that bastard Sam Cody might ask.”

  A momentary silence stretched between them, as Taylor's attention drifted away, his expression growing once more careworn.

  “If you don't mind our asking,” Miss Bonaventure asked, at length, “how were you connected with Mr. Brade and Miss Villers? Were you friends?”

  Taylor snapped back into focus and shook his head. “I don't know as I'd call us friends, miss. Professional acquaintances, maybe. I met Brade in the league, and then I met Cecilia when Lady P hired her to take the pictures for our big project, ‘The Raid on the Unworld.’”

  “Lady P?” Blank prompted, from the bookshelves.

  “Lady Priscilla Cavendish,” Taylor clarified.

  “And they, along with yourself, belonged to this League of the Round Table?” Blank asked.

  Taylor cocked an eyebrow, perhaps curious how Blank had come by the organization's name, but didn't voice a question about it, if he had one. Instead, he nodded, and said, “Yep. The group started up a few years back, as I understand it, when Baron Carmody got back to London after his trip to Africa went south. They roped me into it after reading some poems I'd written about King Arthur.”

  Now it was Blank's turn to raise an eyebrow. “Really? I wouldn't have taken you for a poet.”

  Taylor smiled, a bit sheepishly. “Well, see, I'd read Tennyson and just couldn't see what the fuss was about. Near as I could see, the fellow knew damned little to nothing about horses or warfare, which made him pretty ill-suited to write about a warrior king and horseman. I was practically born in the saddle, having ridden the Pony Express with Bill Cody and my twin brother, Jack, so I knew about horses. And I knew men who'd fought in the Mormon Wars and the Kansas border ruffians wars, and saw a bit of action myself fighting for the North in the War between the States, so I knew something of fighting, as well. So I figured I was better suited than most to write about Arthur, even if I wasn't exactly a dab hand at the writing itself.”

  “You were in the American Civil War, then?” Miss Bonaventure asked.

  “Sure was, miss,” Taylor said proudly. “I was one of the Red Legged Scouts under the command of Captain Tuff.”

  Blank paused in his perusal of the shelves and pulled down a slim volume. It was bound in green cloth and had the title Horseman King on the spine and the name William Blake Taylor stamped beneath. “This is your own work, I take it?” Blank flipped to the indicia, and saw that it had been self-published in an edition of five hundred copies.

  Taylor was suddenly bashful, like a boy who'd suddenly found himself pantless in company, and hurried to take the book from Blank's hands. “Well, I know that I'm just a cowboy poet with aspirations that outreach my talent,” he said, apologetically, “but I've got visions in my head that I just can't shake, and writing them down is the only way to get shut of them. Still, I'm a damned sight better at writing than Captain Jack Crawford, self-styled ‘Poet Scout of the Black Hills,’ so at least I can carry on knowing I'm not the worst damned scribbler to come out of the West.”

  Blank offered a gentle smile as Taylor slipped the slim volume into his pocket.

  “When did you last see Mr. Brade or Miss Villers, if you don't mind me asking,” Miss Bonaventure put in.

  Taylor scratched his chin beneath his beard, thoughtfully. “I hadn't seen Cecilia in a fortnight, I suppose, but I saw Brade last week, at the regular League meeting.”

  “And when is the next league meeting, Mr. Taylor?” Blank asked.

  Taylor looked up at the ceiling for a moment, as if consulting some mental calendar, and then said, with some surprise, “Tonight, I reckon.”

  Blank smiled. “You know, I would very much like to accompany you and meet the other members. Do you think that could be arranged?”

  Taylor had provided an address in Mayfair, near Grosvenor Square, and told Blank and Miss Bonaventure to meet him there at seven o'clock in the evening. He would arrange matters with Baron Carmody, whose residence it was, and then they would be able to question the league members regarding the late Mr. Brade and Miss Villers.

  The American cowboy poet was clearly shaken by news of Miss Villers's killing, perhaps not as much because of her death in and of itself, but for what it suggested about his own prospects. The only connection between any of the Jubilee Killer's victims was between Brade and Villers, and was the League of the Round Table. If the league were the uniting factor, then Taylor was right to suppose that he or one of the other members might be the killer's next target.

  Saying their farewells to Taylor, Blank and Miss Bonaventure returned to York Place. She lounged on the divan reading a novel while he consulted his Whitaker's, his social registers, his Burke's Peerage, and his Who's Who, sketching out portraits of the Baron Carmody and Lady Priscilla, the two as-yet unknown members of the league. Then, when he had done, Miss Bonaventure set aside her novel, and he recited aloud the facts as he knew them.

  “Priscilla Anna Cavendish née Griffith,” Blank said, his notes spread before him on the desk. “From her first husband, fourth Baronet of Sherring, Lady Priscilla was bequeathed an honorific; her second husband, however, Thomas Aston Cavendish, a former officer in the Tenth Hussars and himself a widower of the daughter of the third Baron Balinrobe, left her only a large sum of money, which doubtless proved more useful. Widowed a second time, Lady Priscilla opted not to remarry, announcing publically that she prefers instead the company of women and is now an avowed tribadist.” He paused and looked up from his papers. “If anyone thought Lady Priscilla's claims to be anything but a bald attempt at scandal, she'd likely be prosecuted for indecency, but as it is, she remains unmolested. So to speak. In any event, Lady Priscilla has pledged to spend her remaining years pursuing her ‘grand work.’”

  “Which is?” Miss Bonaventure prompted.

  “It would seem,” Blank answered, “that Lady Priscilla is something of a self-taught scholar, following in the footsteps of Lady Charlotte Guest, she of Mabinogion fame.”

  Miss Bonaventure nodded, and Blank continued with his recital.

  “Arthur Carmody, the tenth Baron Carmody. Lord Arthur had been a member of the Hythloday Club but let his dues lapse after the tragic events of his expedition to Africa, during which he lost his wife and infant son. He splits his time between the ancestral residence of Belhorm in Somerset, a summer home in Brighton, and a large house in Mayfair off Grosvenor Square, the address for which Mr. Taylor was kind enough to provide.”

  Blank could not help but be reminded of the first Baron Carmody, who'd been a member of the School of Night during the days of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Robert Carmody had been possessed of a keen intellect and a lunge few swordsmen would turn aside. He'd done proud service as a Stranger of the School of Night, serving the crown with distinction. That the present-day claimants to the School's long tradition, Absalom Quince and his band of lunatics, had fallen so far from the body's former glory was no smirch against the work Carmody and his fellows had done in olden days.

  THE DOOR ON THE FAR WALL OF THE LIBRARY opened onto the bottom steps of a wrought-iron spiral staircase that climbed up and up into the gloom, disappearing from view.

  Stillman had dressed in a gray business suit and white Oxford shirt open at the neck and without a tie. On their way through the library, he'd strapped on a shoulder holster under his suit jacket, with his Hotspur fletcher snugged into it, and clipped a small box the size of a cigarette pack onto his belt, which he explained held additional rounds. Then he slid clunky sunglasses that he might have stolen from Buddy Holly over his eyes and started climbing the stairs. Alice, wearing her Doc Martens and leather jacket, followed him up. He'd told her to leave her backpack
behind, but she refused.

  “You never know when you may have to jam,” Alice said.

  “Suit yourself,” Stillman said.

  Figured that he'd never seen The Breakfast Club.

  It was dark at the top of the stairs, though the echoes of their own footsteps coming back from the walls suggested a fairly large space. Alice barked her shin against some sort of ledge and then backed into a rough wall.

  “Just where are we going, anyway?”

  “We're already there, my dear.”

  Alice heard a car door open, and then the space flooded with illumination as the interior lights came up.

  The damned thing looked like Speed Racer's Mach Five, but painted fire engine red. A convertible with curving lines, a pointed back end, and a point-backwards-bullet-shaped headrest for the driver.

  “What is this?!”

  Stillman grinned and slid into the driver's seat, which was of course on the wrong side of the car. “It's a 1957 Chevy Corvette SS, of course,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Considerably customized, you understand.”

  By the light from the car's interior, Alice saw that they were at one side of a largish garage, with the concrete underfoot stained by oil spills back at the dawn of time.

  “Used to have a whole fleet of cars up here in the motor pool, but this was the one I drove for preference. When I was promoted from Rook One to D, I used it as my personal car. When I demobbed, as it were, and MI8 moved across the river to Lambeth, I did a bit of jiggery-pokery with the files and ended up with the deed to the decommissioned Tower of London base and the keys to the Corvette SS. Seeing as I wouldn't be getting a pension, I figured it was only my due.”

  Stillman turned the key in the ignition, and the engine started to rumble. Then he punched a button on the dash, and overhead Alice heard the sound of gears grinding and chains clanking.

  “Hop in, now.” A band of bright sunlight appeared in front of the car as a garage door scrolled up into the ceiling. “Early bird, and all of that.”