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

by Kurland, Michael

  The construction was a bit, but only a bit, behind schedule. In a month the moat would be finished and Cathcaril Rill would be diverted to fill it, and that bunch of laborers could go home. A herd of skilled artisans and artists were still working inside the great house, setting the tile, carving the wood beams, and completing the frescoes. But skilled artisans seemed to have no sense of the passage of time. The tapestries from the mill in Flanders were to begin arriving within the month, but he’d believe it when he saw them unrolled.

  In a month. In a month, if nothing went wrong and the Great Plan stayed on course, the whole world might change, shift sharply sideways and set off in a new direction, like a ship with a new steersman. In a month, those who had forgotten him and his line would have cause to remember. Commons, and perhaps even peers, would be banging at his doors—the massive oak doors that had just been installed to replace the original castle doors, absent since the seventeenth century when the castle had been plundered and abandoned by the Roundheads or the Squareheads or a band of passing jugglers. Accounts varied.

  Or, more probably, they would bang at the doors of Westerleigh House, his manse in London, which had sixteen bedrooms, two kitchens, and a ballroom big enough to hold a full orchestra in one corner while a few hundred people danced.

  Maisgot, his lordship’s seneschal, approached and bowed. “My lord,” he said, “Prospero is here with news from London.”

  “Good news or bad?”

  “I did not presume to ask,” Maisgot told him. “If I may, I’ll send him in.” Albreth nodded his permission, and Maisgot bowed again and glided from the room, closing the door behind him.

  It was at moments like these that Albreth felt taller than his scant five feet three inches, older than his thirty-two years, imbued with the wisdom and strength of the ancestors whose blood flowed through his veins. He sat on the oversized oak stool that, although by no stretch of even his imagination a throne, was itself three hundred years old and had supported the bottoms of many a prince and king, and waited to hear the next stanza in the saga of his destiny.

  Maisgot opened the door. “Prospero, Your Lordship,” he announced.

  The hefty, ratlike man who came through the door bowed and scurried and bowed and scurried until he reached the oak chair. “Your worship,” he intoned in a scratchy voice.

  We have to be more selective when we choose our noms de guerre, Albreth thought. Names from Shakespeare, yes. Names plucked from a helm at random, no. Bottom the Weaver for this one, perhaps, or Andrew Aguecheek. This man is no Prospero. He leaned back in his chair and fixed his gaze somewhere to the right of the man. “What news have you?” he asked.

  “The night at the opera went well, Your Excellency. There was an unexpected interruption, but Macbeth thinks it may have actually heightened the desired effect.”

  Albreth’s gaze shifted to fix on the man’s nose. “Unexpected how?” he inquired gently.

  “A copper interrupted Henry just before he achieved, um, climax, as it were. Henry fled successfully.”

  “What was a policeman doing there?”

  Prospero managed to look aggrieved. “Well, I don’t know, do I?” he asked. Adding, “Your Lordship,” after a slight pause.

  “But Henry removed himself in a timely manner?”

  Prospero thought that over for a second before venturing a “Yes.”

  “And maintained the illusion?”

  “He did that. They was calling him ‘Your Highness’ and such. That was before the altercation. On his way out they was yelling, ‘Stop!’ and ‘Oy!’ and suchlike.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “He took a slice at her throat, but he didn’t have time to do any other cutting about here and there, if you see what I mean—and she lived.”

  “She survived?”

  “Right enough, but she won’t be singing for a while.”

  The Earl of Mersy mused. He slouched on his stool and put his thumb under his nose and stared off into the middle distance. He didn’t like this part of it. Not at all. Macbeth said it was necessary, though, and Macbeth took the responsibility. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. He didn’t, he realized, much like omelets.

  He straightened up on the stool and squared his shoulders. “What must be done must be done. It might,” he decided, “be to the good. When she is questioned, assuming she can speak, she will have a tale of horror to tell.”

  “She can write notes, if it comes to that,” Prospero observed.

  “And Henry? How is he?”

  “A bit disappointed, I’d say. He was going on about how he didn’t complete the design.”

  “What design?”

  “He didn’t say. You talk to him if you want to know just what he’s talking about. I’d rather not, if it comes to that.” The earl glared at him until he added, “Your Lordship,” and relapsed into a sullen silence.

  “He’s under control? Macbeth is having no trouble handling him?”

  “Macbeth won’t nohow have trouble with nobody, never,” said Prospero the Rat. “I don’t know where you found him, Your Lordship, but there’s a gent what knows how to take care of himself. And everybody else, if it comes to that.”

  He found me, the quondam Albreth Decanare found himself thinking. Were it not for Auguste Lefavre, henceforth known as “Macbeth,” there would be no earldom, no castle, no grand scheme. Macbeth had set all this in motion. Macbeth pulled the strings. Macbeth had found the madman known as Henry whose appearance and whose proclivities were at the heart of the grand scheme. Albreth, by himself, had grown up knowing who he was—his mother had drilled it into him from the cradle—but neither he nor his mother, nor any of his male or female relatives out to second or third cousins once or twice removed, had any idea of what to do about it aside from shaking their fists at blind providence and cursing the fates. All the wealth his great-grandfather had accumulated selling tinned smoked beef to Napoleon’s armies and smuggled cognac to the British couldn’t buy him a throne.

  But Macbeth had connections, and had an implacable desire to take down the British monarchy. The present British monarchy. So when he found Albreth and discovered that he was a direct descendant of Edward Plantagenet, the seventeenth Earl of Warwick and rightful heir to the English throne, if four hundred years of inconvenient history could be overlooked, he decided to support the claim—a claim that Albreth had no idea that he could actually pursue until Macbeth had shown him how.

  “Macbeth says as how he thinks it’s time what you should come down to London,” Prospero said. “The Residence on Totting Square is staffed and ready for you and the Word is being spread.”

  “What?” Albreth squinted at the man. “Westerleigh House is ready? Good God, man, why didn’t you say that before?”

  “Well, I just did, didn’t I?” asked an aggrieved rat. “I was getting to it, and then I did get to it, and there you are … Your Lordship.”

  Albreth leapt from his stool and began pacing back and forth across the width of the room. “So the time has come,” he muttered, “but am I prepared—truly prepared?”

  “Pardon?” asked Prospero.

  Albreth ignored the interruption. “Can any man say he is truly prepared?” he asked the oak doors in front of him. “You must seize the moment when it offers itself.” He made a seizing gesture with his right hand that caused Prospero to take two sharp steps backward and out of his way. Then he raised the arm and declaimed, “That which cries ‘Thus thou must do, if thou have it’—and that which rather thou dost fear to do than wishest should be undone.” He punctuated the words by slamming his fist down on an oaken sideboard en passant.

  “Whot’s that?” asked Prospero.

  Albreth paused for breath. “Macbeth,” he explained.

  “Whot about ’im?”

  “Not our friend. The play. Macbeth. The Scottish play. By the bard. Those are his words.”

  “Oh. Is it then?… Your Lordship.”

  Albreth waved a
finger at him. “You must to London with all due haste,” he said, “and tell Macbeth that I shall follow anon!”

  “Whatever you say, Your Lordship,” Prospero agreed, backing toward the door. “Whatever you say.”

  [CHAPTER EIGHTEEN]

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

  —ANATOLE FRANCE

  “GO, THEN,” PRONOUNCED CECILY, prodding with an oversized hairpin to subdue a few strands that had somehow worked themselves loose from the coil of long auburn hair that was her workday coiffure. With one last twist and push of the hairpin, she raised her head and continued, “I shall not stand in your way.”

  Barnett paused, a pair of socks in each hand, and considered. “If you want me to stay—” he began.

  “No, no,” Cecily insisted. “You’ve already decided. If the professor needs you in Paris, then to Paris you must go.”

  “We’ve decided,” he reminded her.

  “True,” she conceded.

  “You know I wouldn’t—”

  “No, no, really,” Cecily interrupted. She sighed. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Professor Moriarty is right. You must go. And since this latest outrage … There should be a better, stronger word. That poor woman—will she recover?”

  “They think so, but she may never be able to speak again, much less sing.”

  Cecily shuddered. “You must go. This must end, and if your going to Paris brings that one day closer—you must go. For queen and country, and all that. But I don’t have to be pleased about it.”

  “You could come with me,” Barnett suggested for the third or fourth time.

  “Au contraire, I must stay,” Cecily said. “After all, I have my own tasks here. The girl Pamela Dilwaddy must learn how to appear in public and not look like … what she is. What she was. And it must be achieved quickly, if it’s to be any use. So says Professor Moriarty, and, given the situation, he’s clearly right. For queen and country.” She looked critically at the way Barnett was stuffing clothing into the leather traveling bag. “Here, let me do that.”

  “Ah, Pamela,” Barnett said, stepping aside to let his wife continue the packing job. “How are you doing with her? I haven’t seen her but once in the, what, ten days you’ve been, ah, tutoring her.”

  “Nor shall you,” Cecily told him, “until she’s ready.”

  “How long is it going to take you to turn her into a lady?” Barnett asked.

  Cecily laughed. “A lady, no. Although give me a year … but I can teach her to be a passable lady’s maid in a few weeks.” She picked a starched, folded white shirt from the bureau drawer and compared it critically with a second starched, folded white shirt.

  “Really?”

  “I think so. Provided she doesn’t have to open her mouth, past saying ‘ma’am’ and ‘pardon.’ The girl is a surprisingly quick study, but ridding her of that dreadful accent…”

  “Just stand and curtsey in an apron and mob cap? Is that it?”

  “Just so,” Cecily agreed. “Turning her into a truly useful lady’s maid would require a bit longer—perhaps even a bit longer than turning her into a lady. Being a ‘lady’ is, after all, largely a question of picking the right parents.” She put one of the shirts into the traveling bag and returned the other to the drawer.

  “Society then pummels one into shape, whatever one’s own inclinations,” she continued on her theme. “One does not really learn to become a lady, one is molded into the shape of a lady by constant external pressure.”

  “‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends,’” Barnett suggested.

  “Indeed so,” Cecily agreed, “and our manners and our carriage and our speech and the clothes we wear and our friendships, and even the books we read, the places we visit, and the food we eat. And eventually, as we are young ladies, our beaux and our husbands.”

  “You don’t seem to have been strongly affected by any of this,” Barnett observed.

  “I was not raised to be a lady,” she told him, “nor to ape them. I was raised to be the daughter of an eclectic professor of philology who believed that my mind was more important than my gender or my social class.”

  Barnett smiled. “What a dangerous idea.”

  “Indeed,” Cecily replied seriously.

  “So one becomes a lady by a process of osmosis, is that it?”

  “I would say so. Also if one, or one’s parents, are insecure as to how much of the knowledge has seeped in, there are always the Swiss ‘finishing schools.’ After a year or two at one of those it could be said that a young lady is well and truly finished.”

  “And a lady’s maid?”

  “Usually starts her career as a lowly domestic and, after some years in service, may achieve the rank of upstairs maid. If she is quick and fortunate and suits the needs of the mistress of the house or one of the daughters, and a position opens up, she may attain the exalted status of lady’s maid. But, as I say, I can teach Pamela how to stand and curtsey and such in a week, if she’s a quick study. She does seem to be quite bright once she allows herself to be.”

  Barnett watched as Cecily held two more identical white shirts up to the light, selected one for his suitcase, and put the other back in the bureau drawer. “Will that suffice?”

  “It will have to, won’t it? The idea is to be able to take her into places and situations where the miscreants—if that’s a sufficiently harsh word for these evil men—might be found, and see if she can recognize anyone. All we’ll have to do is find a lady whom she can seem to be tending, and I assume that the professor’s new friends should be able to accomplish that.”

  “Ah!” said Barnett. “And did the professor say in what sort of places or situations he expects the villain to be found?”

  “I assume that’s what you’re going to Paris to find out,” his wife told him.

  He nodded. “I suppose it is,” he said.

  She selected two cravats from the rack, rejecting a third, and folded them over the bar in the bag placed there especially to fold cravats over.

  “I like the red one,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” she said. “Not with either of the suits you’re taking.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No.” Firmly.

  “Ah! Clearly I was mistaken. Good of you to point these things out to me.”

  “What,” she asked, smiling sweetly, “is a wife for?”

  When he was completely packed to Cecily’s satisfaction, he kissed her firmly and completely and stood back. “I have to leave,” he said. “Catch the train.”

  She suddenly clutched at his sleeve and pulled him to her. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “Please. Be careful.”

  “I shall be very careful,” he assured her. “Besides, I’ll have the mummer to look after me. He spent a few years in Paris and Marseilles before he came to work for the professor. His French is better than mine.”

  “My French is better than yours,” she told him, “and I’ve never lived there.”

  “There is that,” he admitted.

  “Do your best to stay out of trouble, my dear,” she said.

  “I shall, you have my word. Besides, you know I’m a confirmed coward.”

  “I know what you are,” she said. “Please take care.”

  He hugged her close. “How could any man,” he murmured into her hair, “with you to return to, risk losing one moment of the future?”

  She said something muffled into his shirt front.

  “I shall,” he replied, hoping that was the proper response. “I’ll be back as soon as—as soon as I can.”

  * * *

  Only a few decades earlier it would have taken a traveler ten days or more to make the journey from London to Paris, Barnett mused as he and the mummer settled themselves into their first-class seats on the Continental Express in Victoria Station, and the coach ride would have been fraught with the possibility of peril or at least minor adventure. T
oday, with a bit of luck, one could leave London in the morning and eat dinner in Paris. Three hours from Victoria to Dover, an hour and a half on the ferry to Calais, and another three hours to the Gare du Nord. If the train isn’t delayed. If you make all your connections. If the Channel isn’t too rough. If the French customs man doesn’t spend too much time poking about in your luggage.

  Barnett pulled out his pocket notebook and jotted down these notions as they came to him, pausing as the prefatory jolt of the train getting under way rocked the compartment, and then continuing as useful images came to him: difference between British coach and American stagecoach; the cry of “Stand and deliver!” and the perils of the highwayman and bands of outlaws on one side of the Atlantic and the other compared; the hazards of crossing the Channel under sail; the idea of digging a tunnel from Dover to Calais—and then the fear that Napoleon was actually having one dug, causing the British Army to post men in Dover to listen for the sound of tunnel digging and Punch magazine to get several useful cartoons from the image.

  Barnett wrote an occasional column, “Mutterings from the Continent,” for the New York World, and this topic looked as if it could be mined for a cluster of them. “Only Fifty Years Ago: London to Paris in Two Weeks.” Two weeks sounded about right. He would have to do some research to pin down facts. There was always some pedantic curmudgeon who knew the exact times and distances, and essayed an erudite letter of shocked indignation if you got it wrong. Usually with the phrase “everybody knows” somewhere in the missive. “Everybody knows that the carosse de diligence from Calais to Paris took an average time of three days and four hours, except for that time in May ’64…”

  * * *

  The crossing was, indeed, uneventful, and Barnett and the mummer checked into the hotel Pépin le Bref in Montmartre in time for dinner. It wasn’t a fashionable area of the city, being infested with artists, writers, poets, playwrights, actors, models, Bohemians, and other untouchables. But it was close by the flat Barnett had for two years as a correspondent for the World, before the trip to Constantinople to witness the sea trials of the Garrett-Harris submersible had put him in prison, introduced him to Professor James Moriarty, and forever changed his life.