* * *
Conan Doyle had been loitering outside Jedidiah’s Emporium of Mechanical Marvels for ten minutes before Wilde finally sauntered up. “What took you so long? I deliberately hurried all the way here.”
“Really? I deliberately dawdled. If they were pursuing me, it is likely they overshot.”
“Quickly, let’s go inside.”
The bell jangled as the two friends stepped inside the shop, and were greeted by its dazzling cornucopia of toys, dolls, and mechanical wonders, a place permeated with magic and the lingering odor of machine oil.
“I say,” Wilde exclaimed, looking around in amazement. “I must never bring the boys in here. I would leave bankrupt.”
The shop proprietor was not manning the counter when they entered, and failed to appear after a long wait.
“Hello?” Conan Doyle called aloud.
No response.
A train whistle moaned and the toy steam train whooshed from the alpine tunnel and circuited the shop on its elevated track before plunging into another tunnel at the far side of the room and vanishing.
The two friends drifted about the shop, poking at things, picking up the odd toy, which whirred or buzzed or jangled as it performed some kind of intricate mechanical motion. As he prowled the space, Conan Doyle’s scalp prickled and he had the feeling he was being watched. Then he saw the shadowy figure watching him from the back of the shop: the Automaton Turk.
“What the devil is it?” Wilde asked.
“A mechanical chess-playing device. You should try it.”
“You mean it actually works?”
“Very well. Too dashed well! You play chess, of course?”
“Naturellement. I was chess champion at Trinity.”
“Go on. Have a bash. Play a game.”
Wilde studied the elaborate device with a puzzled frown.
“How does it function? I see no switch.”
“Simply play your opening move. It somehow activates the mechanism.”
“Really?” Wilde tossed Conan Doyle an incredulous glance, but then squared his shoulders and pushed his knight’s pawn to knight 4.
Instantly, the Turk came alive in a whir of gears. The dusky head lifted, the eyes opened and glowed. It drew the long-stemmed pipe to its lips, paused, and exhaled a jet of steam. The arm jerked across the chessboard and pushed a black pawn to bishop 4, threatening Wilde’s pawn.
Wilde chuckled. “That’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen. It plays like my old chess master, Shaughnessy. It even pongs a bit like him.”
Conan Doyle left Wilde to his game and wandered deeper into the shop. The toy steam train sounded its mournful whistle and burst once more from the mountain tunnel, thundered around the walls in a blur of mechanical hurry, and vanished through the far wall. Beneath the alpine tunnel was a door, presumably leading to living premises behind the shop. He rapped his knuckles on the wood and called out, “Hello? You have customers! Hello?”
He waited a polite moment and, when no one answered, tried the doorknob. It was not locked and he stepped into a small sitting room decorated with horsehide settees bedecked with doilies and fripperies. Fresh cut flowers sat in glass vases. A coal fire throbbed in the grate.
“Are you quite certain we should be in here?” Wilde’s voice asked in his ear.
Conan Doyle gave a start. The large Irishman hovered at his shoulder.
“What happened to your chess game?”
A look of discomfort flashed across Wilde’s long face. “The machine cheats. Of that I am quite sure. Check and mate in under a dozen moves? Preposterous! Did I mention I was chess champion at Trinity?”
Conan Doyle noticed a framed black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall. Two figures posed on the foreshore of a large and placid lake: a young blond woman in a light crinoline; by her side a small boy, probably a few years younger than his son Kingsley, clutching a windup toy warship.
“Ah, there’s life,” Wilde said, and nodded out the window.
Like many English properties, the shop had a long, narrow garden. At the far end of the space, sitting in a kind of open pavilion, were two people: a woman in a rocking chair (Conan Doyle guessed it had to be the same woman as in the photograph, but could not be certain as her face was hidden beneath a rather old-fashioned pokey bonnet); at her side was a young boy seated in a bath chair, a cap upon his head and a blanket draped across his lap. His hands worked at the controls of a black box, which evidently threw the switches of the train track and determined the path of the toy steam locomotive. His face was set in a smile of childish delight, and his gaze followed the train’s progress as it sizzled along the shiny loops of track.
“Doctor Doyle, is it not?”
Both men jumped. The shopkeeper stood behind them, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Terribly sorry,” Conan Doyle apologized. “I knocked but no one answered. We had been waiting some time.”
Jedidiah beamed with his usual good humor. “Yes, I was down in the workshop, just putting the finishing touches on … a project. Your little boy’s soldier has been fixed. I have it under the counter, all boxed up and ready to take home.”
“Wonderful.”
Wilde nodded at the figures in the garden. “If I may say so, you have a beautiful boy. A quite radiant child.”
“Thank you, sir.” Jedidiah gazed out the window at the two figures and his eyes misted. “My wife and child are the reason I draw breath. Without them, I would be nothing.”
A silence crowded into the room with them and overstayed its welcome. The toy maker drew himself together. “Shall I ring you up, sir?”
They returned to the shop counter. As Conan Doyle settled the bill, Wilde continued to browse.
“There you go, sir,” Jedidiah said brightly, tightening the twine fastening the box securely. “And as I promised, a lifetime guarantee.”
Conan Doyle thanked him and, seeing an opening, said, “You’re a man conversant in all matters mechanical. As a matter of interest, have you ever seen anything like this?” He fished in his pocket, took out the shiny brass cogwheel, and laid it on the counter.
The shopkeeper glanced down at the object and froze. After a long pause he picked it up and studied it, turning it over and over. His head shook from an involuntary tremor. “No … no, I have never seen its like. Quite remarkable. The machining is exquisite.” He laughed. “I am a mere toy maker. This is the work of a great engineer. A master.” He fondled the shiny gear. “Might I inquire where you obtained it?”
Conan Doyle did not want to reveal too much, and offhandedly muttered, “I found it. In the street somewhere.”
“In the street?” Jedidiah repeated in a tone brittle with skepticism. “Do you recall which street?”
Conan Doyle shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Just happened upon it in my travels.” He held out his hand. “Well, there you are. Thank you for trying.”
Jedidiah hesitated. “I’d be very interested in finding the maker of these gears, sir. Their use would contribute greatly to my business.”
“Afraid I can’t help.” Conan Doyle kept his hand held out. With obvious reluctance, the toy maker handed the gearwheel back.
Wilde arrived at the counter. “Might I inquire, sir, which are the noisiest toys in your shop?”
“The noisiest?” the shopkeeper repeated, puzzled by the question. He squinted around. “I suppose the tin trumpet and the drum. Between them they make a fair old racket.”
“Splendid,” Wilde said, laying his calling card on the counter. “Please box them up and have them delivered to my home address.”
The bell chimed as Conan Doyle and Wilde left the shop. As soon as the door closed on their backs, Jedidiah rushed from the counter. He flipped the sign from OPEN to CLOSED and turned his key in the lock, watching through the glass as the two friends stood conversing on the pavement.
From behind, the Ottoman Turk stirred to life in a purr of greased gears. The head lifted, the eyes sprang open
and glowed eerily. A jet of steam shot from the automaton’s caved lips. The wooden arm lifted, swung across the chessboard, and tapped the tip of its pipe one … two … three … four … five times upon the chessboard.
“Yes, Otto, you are right,” the toy maker said without turning to look around. “This is a most worrisome development.” His eyes momentarily dropped from the men outside to the calling cards clutched in his trembling hands. “Fortunately, the two gentlemen”—he squinted to read the finely calligraphied names—“Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, Author, and Mr. Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, Playwright, have been kind enough to provide me with their calling cards. Now I know who they are … and precisely where they live.”
Out in the street, Wilde and Conan Doyle were still arguing over their respective chess prowess, or lack thereof.
“I haven’t played chess in ages,” Wilde rationalized.
“No, of course not.”
“And playing against oneself hardly counts.”
“I had precisely the same excuse.”
The Irishman was incensed. “Beaten by a, a, a—”
“Glorified cuckoo clock?”
“Precisely! Did I mention I was chess champion at Trinity?”
“This would make the third time.”
Wilde fixed his friend with a look of concern. “Are we growing old, Arthur? Losing our faculties?”
“No. Nowadays we play different games. With greater outcomes.”
Something up the street caught Conan Doyle’s eye. He grabbed Wilde by the lapel of his coat, propelled him into a nearby shop doorway, and pressed him up against the door.
“What? Must we really fight about this? Or are we about to dance?”
“Look.” Conan Doyle nodded at two bowler-hatted men standing on a street corner, looking about, studying the faces of passersby.
“Dandelion and Burdock! Not again! Did they see us?”
“I think not.”
“What now?”
Conan Doyle reached into a pocket, removed the cogwheel and tossed it in his hand. “The shopkeeper is possessed of a keen mechanical bent, and yet he said he’d never seen the like of this gear. He concluded it was clearly the work of a master engineer. It just so happened that a master engineer visited Tarquin Hogg shortly before he was murdered. I think we need to pay a visit to Ozymandius Arkwright.”
At that precise moment a hansom veered around a stationary omnibus and clopped in their direction. “Here comes a cab now, Oscar. Quickly.”
They stepped from the shop doorway and flagged the cab. The two friends clambered aboard and Conan Doyle shouted for the cabbie to drive on.
“Did they see us?” Wilde asked.
Conan Doyle turned and peered out the back window.
“If they did, they show no signs. I think we made a clean escape.” He instructed the driver to take them to an address Wilde had never heard of, a place on the very outskirts of London.
“Where are we going?”
“Arkadia.”
“What’s that?”
“Arkwright’s factory. This may take a while. I’m afraid it’s a bit out of the way.”
“Ah,” said Wilde, and then took out his silver cigarette case and counted how many cigarettes he had left. “So long as it’s no farther than seven cigarettes there should no problem.”
The two fell into reverie as the cab clopped through the busy streets. Finally Conan Doyle turned to Wilde and said, “Why did you ask for the noisiest toys in the shop?”
Wilde paused in lighting up his second cigarette of the journey. “My wife, Constance, suffers from the most excruciating migraines.”
“What? You can’t. You couldn’t do that!” Conan Doyle said, utterly scandalized. “Oh, that’s terribly cruel, Oscar!”
“As I have told you, Arthur. These days, Robert Sheridan is there to keep her company. He lingers in the parlor like the aroma of bacon long after the breakfast things have been cleared. I feel quite forgot. However, my little gift to our boys will be sure to keep me uppermost in her thoughts.”
CHAPTER 16
LOOK UPON MY WORKS AND TREMBLE
“What is this drab and dreary place, Arthur?”
“Arkadia. Spelled with a k, not a c. Note the sign.”
The hackney had traveled north for close to an hour, taking them to the ragged edge of the metropolis, a place where rows of brick houses abruptly transitioned into green fields. Up ahead, like a smudge of soot upon the landscape, stood a huge factory with rows of tall chimneys vomiting smoke.
They stepped down from the hackney and walked through an archway of wrought iron. The top of the arch spelled out a name in black iron letters: ARKADIA.
“Arkadia,” Wilde read aloud, and sniffed. “Obviously meant to be ironic. That name conjures a land of rustic simplicity and beauty. Yet all I see is a dark satanic mill with chimneys billowing brimstone and huddled before it a ghastly monotony of identical brick terraces.”
“It is a planned village. A model of sanitary and modern living. Arkwright has built a place for his workers to live, complete with a church and town hall.”
“Planned dreariness more like it. Why can the English not build villages modeled after those in Tuscany? Are Italian bricks somehow more expensive to make?”
Like the strands of a web, all streets led to the factory and were long and wide. The two friends set off walking at a good clip and it did not take long for Conan Doyle to concede Wilde’s point: the houses were indeed drab and anonymous. But compared to the filthy, dilapidated hovels many Londoners lived in, they were palaces.
The two friends had almost reached the factory gates when they heard a familiar sound from behind: wisshhhhthump … wishhhhhhhthump.… wishhhhhhhthump …
They turned to find a steam car bearing down on them. The top-hatted driver did not slow down, but instead squeezed the rubber bulb of a horn and honked impatiently. The two friends had barely time to throw themselves clear as the steam car whistled past and disappeared through the factory gates.
“That’s him now!” Conan Doyle grumbled. “Bounder near ran us over!”
Although the steam car was nowhere in sight when they passed through the gates, a figure in a stovepipe hat was. Standing upon a plinth was a bronze statue of a tall thin man with muttonchop whiskers, a cigar clamped in his jaws, and his trademark tall headgear. A brass plaque beneath it bore the inscription: OZYMANDIUS ARKWRIGHT, BENEFACTOR.
“Ozymandius, indeed?” Wilde snickered and began to recite in a chest-thumping voice the sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
“Yes, very amusing, Oscar. I know the poem, too.”
“One moment,” Wilde said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t you think there’s something a little odd about this statue?”
“Odd in what way?”
“The left arm looks a bit off. And the statue is not properly centered.”
A moment’s closer inspection revealed two cutoff brass stubs in the concrete plinth.
“This statue originally had a companion,” Wilde surmised. “A second figure that has since been removed. I would speculate that the pose has been amended. The arm was once draped about the shoulder of its neighbor, but has been cut off and the pose rather crudely changed.”
“Yes, you’re right, Oscar,” Conan Doyle agreed. “How odd. How very odd.”
* * *
After being left in a small waiting room for the best part of an hour, the two colleagues were then conducted into an even smaller waiting room. After an additional wait of twenty minutes, a balding secretary entered.
“Lord forbid,” Wilde muttered. “No doubt he’s come to shift us to a closet and from there into a biscuit tin.”
Instead, the secretary, muttering apologies for the wait, conducted them into a long, low-ceilinged room, brightly lit by strings of electric bulbs. Men in shirts and waistcoats wearing accountants’ visors with elastic garters holding up
their sleeves stood at rows of drafting tables, working with pencils, protractors, compasses. Ozymandius Arkwright stood gazing over the shoulder of one of the draftsmen, and Conan Doyle noticed that the man’s hand trembled visibly as he drew.
When Arkwright finally noticed the two friends, he fixed them with a suspicious glare, his muttonchop whiskers bristling as he clenched a jaw so square it could have been machined from a billet of steel.
“What the bloody hell do you two want?” he bellowed in a broad, Yorkshire accent.
Conan Doyle removed his hat and spoke in a firm, but diplomatic tone. “Mister Arkwright, I am Arthur Conan Doyle and this is my friend, Oscar Wilde.”
There were few names in British society of equal fame, but it was obvious the master engineer was completely clueless. “Who? Never bloody heard of you. State your business and then kindly bugger off!”
“It’s about the fog, sir,” Wilde put in—rashly, it turned out.
At the mention of the word fog the large Yorkshire engineer grew apoplectic.
“Oh, I’ve seen you bloody London types before! Are you come here to dun me about the smoke my factories release? Ignorance, gentlemen. Mindless piffle! London sits on marshland through which a great river runs. There have been London fogs since Roman times. The puny efforts of man have no effect whatsoever upon the climate.”
Rather inadvisably, Wilde chose to argue the point. “But surely it must have some effect. When I smoke in my carriage it fogs the air dreadfully and my wife upbraids me. Of course, I simply must smoke as it is vital to the creative process, and yet still she complains.”
“Your analogy is baseless,” Arkwright sneered. “The interior of a carriage is a tiny space. By comparison the atmosphere is as vast and limitless as the oceans. Besides, do you know what that smoke represents?”
“Black lung?” Conan Doyle ventured; the man’s rudeness had got his dander up. “Respiratory distress, inflammation of the bronchioles, emphysema—”
“Work, sir! Work. Employment. Commerce. The creation of wealth for all. Food on the table for my workers. Employment for colliers. For coal merchants. Warmth for the hearths of millions. Baked bread to feed hungry bellies. A bloody small price to pay for an occasional smudge of soot on a fine gentleman’s starched collar.”
The Dead Assassin Page 15