I must have come across to Delphine as a complete nincompoop. I certainly was behaving like one. Yet she had the politeness not to laugh out loud at me, nor to be offended by my helpless staring. I imagine she was accustomed to it. There can’t have been a man alive who didn’t become her adoring, tongue-tied thrall the moment he laid eyes on her.
Thereafter Delphine started coming down to the workshop, which by all accounts she had never done beforehand. She would even try to talk to me, lobbing questions to which I would offer fumbling replies. She would listen patiently as I launched into long, technical explanations about whatever piece I was working on, and she never showed signs of boredom, however much I rambled.
Ignoramus that I was, I had no idea that Delphine Pelletier had taken a shine to humble Fred Tilling. I could never have believed such a thing possible. She was Aphrodite, I was lowly Hephaestus, but unlike in the myths, no divine edict could surely bring two opposites such as us into union. As far as I was concerned, I was barely worthy to be in the same room as her.
Monsieur Pelletier, however, knew his daughter’s mind and perceived what was going on. He took me aside one day and dropped hints so broad, so unsubtle, that even I could not misconstrue them. The penny dropped. I was beside myself with joy. Could it be true? Delphine was showing a romantic interest in me?
Being a father, Pelletier was at pains to warn me not to take advantage of his girl or abuse her feelings in any way. I vowed to him that I would not. I would behave as honourably towards her as it was in my capacity to do. He need have no fears on that front, I told him.
Consequently, I was permitted to squire Delphine on walks in the park, with her mother or one of the family maidservants acting as chaperone. I understood Pelletier’s caution. His daughter was such a rare pearl, so great a prize, he could not afford to let her go out with any man unescorted. I did not mind. An hour spent with Delphine all to myself, even though we were never truly alone, was an hour in heaven.
What we spoke of during those walks, I scarcely remember. Nor does it matter. It was everything and nothing, the sweet nonsense of young lovers. Amid all the billing and cooing, however, there was a clear sense that she and I were coming to an understanding. I could foresee the direction my life was taking, and Delphine was a part of it. No. She was it.
You can see, therefore, why I was so reluctant to jeopardise my situation with Pelletier. If I quit my job, might I also not ruin my chances with Delphine?
In the end, I told de Villegrand I would be available to him at evenings and weekends. It was my best offer, and he, though he obviously would have preferred more, consented.
So I found myself, a few days later, calling round at de Villegrand’s apartment in the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Occupying the whole of the second floor of the building, it was a nice set-up, perhaps not as grand as I might have expected for a man of his background and breeding, but relatively opulent and spacious. He kept two servants, a brother and sister, both young: Benoît, who was my age and acted as general factotum, and Aurélie, who was barely a girl and acted as scullery maid. I had little interaction with either of them. Aurélie was clearly a simpleton, while Benoît seemed to me unusually surly and resentful of his master. This inclined me to look down on him, for who on earth could dislike the magnificent Vicomte de Villegrand? Of course, I know now that Benoît was fully justified in his antipathy, and I regret how contemptuously and dismissively I treated him.
The apartment had a studio, where de Villegrand had been busy drawing up plans. He showed me portfolios full of sketches and diagrams of inventions he wished to build, and scale models of some of the same. He invited me to offer my input on his ideas and suggest ways of refining them.
What did he propose to create?
I’ll tell you.
War machines.
Astounding, frightful war machines.
Things to make the ordinary infantryman redundant and render rifle and cannon as primitively ineffectual as a Stone Age man’s club.
I can barely convey the bizarreness and awesome ingenuity of what he was dreaming up. You think my armour and weaponry remarkable? My Subterrene and this airship extraordinary? They are nothing next to de Villegrand’s designs. They are mere toys compared with the massive, artful engines of destruction he hoped to assemble.
Some of his creations I could tell at a glance would never make it beyond the draft stage. They were too big, too unwieldy, too impossible. Gigantic crab-like troop transporters, for instance, that would stride across the landscape on eight articulated legs, each leg the size of a column in a Roman temple. A huge mobile platform suspended aloft by helical rotor blades, much like those of da Vinci’s ornithopter, from which airborne shock troops might descend on enemy lines from on high, swooping down with silk-and-balsa glider wings attached to their backs. Seagoing vessels shaped like manta rays which could both skim the wavetops and submerge and travel underwater in the manner of Nemo’s Nautilus.
One cannot fault de Villegrand’s imaginative powers or ambition, but there are limits to what can be accomplished even with the latest materials and engineering techniques. Some of his designs were on such a colossal scale they were simply unfeasible. Their own weight and dimensions would prevent them getting off the ground, both figuratively and literally.
On the other hand, some of his less hubristic ideas were, I could see, readily achievable. Complex, to be sure, fantastically intricate, and they might take years to complete – but they could be made nonetheless. I told him so. He was pleased.
Would I assist him, he asked, in ushering them from the page to reality? Midwiving his brainchildren?
I, to my eternal shame, said I would.
It would be for the greater glory of France, he said, in order to give his homeland an unassailable military edge over its rivals.
I, the “honorary Frenchman”, had few qualms about that.
We sealed the deal over a fine bottle of Margaux, and I returned to my rooms in Montmartre feeling heady, not only from the wine, but from excitement. I had agreed to co-operate on a project that was truly exceptional and that had the potential to alter the course of history. If all went as planned, France would ascend to become the sole, dominant global power. Once de Villegrand’s designs were realised and put into mass production, the might of the French military would be unstoppable. And then...
Worldwide peace.
That could be the only possible outcome. So de Villegrand claimed, and so I, in all my juvenile idealism, believed. No more would there be empire versus empire, vying to gain the upper hand. No more would the larger powers gobble up the smaller ones like sweetmeats on a salver. No more would there be rapacious exploitation of one country’s resources by another. France would rule over every continent, from east to west, from pole to pole, a benevolent, world-spanning dictatorship.
In de Villegrand’s words: “What Bonaparte failed to achieve, our brave new France will. Its sovereignty will know no bounds. Today, Fred, you and I have laid the foundations for a new reign of concord and prosperity for all, a Third Republic that will endure a thousand years.”
I can feel a pair of stern gazes boring into the back of my neck. You reckon me a fool at best, gentlemen, and at worst a traitor. You might be right on both counts.
My only defence is that I was under de Villegrand’s spell. He wove fine words, couching his vision in such a way that I was swept up in it, taken in fully. With hindsight, these several years on, I can see that what he was proposing was nothing short of worldwide conquest, the subjugation of all. And I realise that no dictatorship rules peaceably. It crushes opposition with cruelty and brutal suppression. It buys its continued existence with the blood of rebels and insurgents. But I knew no better back then. I wanted only to please my newfound friend, and if that meant helping him develop a new and terrible generation of war machines, so be it.
As the work began, I discovered that many in de Villegrand’s social circle were more than they seemed. They
started showing an increased interest in me, not as a person but as his collaborator. They quizzed me almost daily about how the work was proceeding. It was as though I had been inducted, without my knowing, into some secret brotherhood.
Which, in a way, I had been. One evening, de Villegrand and I went for dinner at the mansion of a friend of his on the outskirts of Paris. It started out like some salon occasion, full of lively and good-tempered debate. Then the mealtime conversation turned to politics. Our host, the Marquis of somewhere or other, recalled with disgust the débâcle of the Franco-Prussian War, the shortlived German occupation of Paris in 1871, and the subsequent two months during which the Commune held sway over the city, until the army wrested back control, bloodily. The Marquis lamented how Parisian had been pitted against Parisian, which could be blamed, he said, on a weak government that could not marshal its own people and had forfeited their trust through incompetence and a series of disastrous policies. The French had lost their selfrespect. France as a nation had lost its way. It should remember the example of Nicolas Chauvin – enlisted soldier, wounded seventeen times under Napoleon, maimed, mutilated, yet even at Waterloo, while serving in the Old Guard, this seasoned campaigner fought on long after the other troops had surrendered, defiant in the face of defeat. “If only more of our countrymen,” the Marquis said, “could be like Chauvin, tirelessly devoted to their homeland, always putting France before themselves.”
The Marquis then proposed a toast: “To Chauvin, who has shown us the way! And to us, his heirs!”
I joined in the toast, raising my glass high and shouting the oath as loudly and joyously as anyone in that room. I did not want to be left out. On the contrary, I wanted to demonstrate how “in” I was.
And so, half without realising it, but willingly nonetheless, I joined Les Hériteurs de Chauvin, a society of nationalist zealots dedicated to the exaltation of France as a country above all others.
That was one of the greatest mistakes I made.
But a greater was to come, a mistake that would prove, in every sense, fatal.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
BARON CAUCHEMAR CONCLUDES HIS STORY
Again, Cauchemar had to be coaxed into carrying on.
My error (he said) lay in inviting de Villegrand round to the Pelletiers’. I admit I wanted to show him off to Delphine. I wanted her to meet him, so that she could see that her Frédérique – how I adored the way she pronounced my name in the French manner, “Frédérique”, like a phrase of song – was getting ahead. I wanted her to be impressed by de Villegrand’s title and noblesse. I hoped the glow of his glory would reflect onto me and make me shine brighter still in her esteem.
As soon as de Villegrand walked into the house and laid eyes on her, he was bewitched. How could he not have been? His bow to her was low. His kiss on her hand lingered. His gaze, throughout the visit, seldom strayed from her. Delphine gave him no encouragement. She was her usual demure self. She remained a model of womanly self-restraint even when, in her presence, he delivered an encomium to her beauty which lasted several minutes. He professed himself infinitely jealous of me for having laid claim to her. Were it not for that, he said, he would even now be making love to her for all he was worth.
In the days that followed, all de Villegrand could talk about was Delphine. He interrogated me on her habits, her likes, her dislikes, what books she read, what foodstuffs she preferred, which shops she favoured. We seldom had a conversation that did not at some point touch on the subject of Delphine. I found nothing troubling in his fascination with her. Rather, I was delighted that my friend was so enamoured of the girl whom I intended to be my betrothed. I regarded it as a positive reflection on my achievement in securing such a rare, radiant creature for my own. If de Villegrand so admired her, it meant I had chosen well. What he liked, I liked. That was how badly I wanted to please him and earn his approval.
Our work continued, sporadically. What we were designing between us... Well, I’m afraid you’re likely to see for yourselves soon, gentlemen, the nature of the war machine that we devised. It is a source of gut-wrenching misery to me that de Villegrand is even now pursuing our Queen in something I helped to create. Her death will be in no small part on my hands, should we not succeed in stopping him. I do not bear that guilt lightly.
But now we come to the nub of my tale.
I received a note from de Villegrand one day, enjoining me to attend a soirée at the Marquis’s residence. He specified that I was to bring Delphine along. It sounded like it would be a grand occasion. I begged Pelletier to allow his daughter out with me, just this once, unchaperoned. It would only be for a few hours. De Villegrand would be there, along with other representatives of polite society. Delphine and I would be in company at all times. Nothing could go awry, surely.
Pelletier was persuaded, against his better judgement. He harboured a few reservations about de Villegrand, he told me. He had heard a few unsettling rumours about the man. But he was aware of the high regard in which I held my friend and he had no wish to impinge on the happiness or prospects of his future son-in-law. He instructed me to bring Delphine home by eleven o’clock at the very latest, a stipulation I could live with.
It promised to be a wonderful, magical, unforgettable evening.
It certainly proved unforgettable, and how I wish that that were not so.
No sooner had Delphine and I walked through the front door of the Marquis’s mansion, than I sensed something was amiss. The only other guests were select members of the Hériteurs de Chauvin. Most had brought along female company, but the married ones had eschewed their wives in favour of their mistresses while the rest were with women such as actresses, dance hall performers, and exponents of an even lower profession.
Champagne was served. Delphine and I took a few sips, I more trepidatiously than she. The atmosphere felt wrong in a way that I could not quite define. For all the smiles and banter around us, I could not help feeling that we were out of place here. We were too much the centre of attention. Everyone else seemed over-keen to chat with us.
The phrase “sacrificial lambs” springs to mind.
Then we guests were ushered through to the dining room. Even as my nerves were becoming increasingly skittish, my thoughts were becoming increasingly clouded. I could not seem to string a meaningful sentence together any more. I sought out de Villegrand, my one true ally here. He, out of all the male partygoers, was the only one to have come solo. The great womaniser for once had no woman. I wished to ask him about this strange state of affairs. I desired to know, too, what sort of champagne we were drinking that was leaving me so light-headed, making my legs feel so leaden, my speech so slurred.
De Villegrand merely laughed and shook his head in a pitying way. “Can’t take your drink, eh, Fred?” he jeered, and helped me to a chaise longue in the corner. “You lie down there. Have a nap if you need to. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Delphine. She won’t want for masculine attention while I’m around.”
My champagne had been drugged, of course. A soporific of some sort. I could barely keep my eyes open. I fought to stay awake. I must not abandon Delphine! I must not let her out of my sight! But sleep bore down on me with the force of a tidal wave.
I came to at brief intervals during the evening. Now and then I would be conscious enough to catch a glimpse of what was going on.
The horror of it.
The soirée, if that was what it had ever been, swiftly degenerated into an orgy. That is the only description for it: orgy. The Hériteurs de Chauvin stripped off their clothes, their political posturing, and their decency and decorum, and became a herd of grunting, rutting animals. It was debauchery on a scale that would make the Hellfire Club blush. I cannot begin to tell you the sights I saw during those intermittent snatches of lucidity – the couplings, the unnatural conjoinings, the troilism. The room had become a jungle of limbs akimbo and leering faces. The women, sad to relate, were no better than the men. Some even committed unmentionable act
s of tribadism. If it shocks you to hear such things, Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, imagine how much more shocking it was to witness them at first hand. Every time my eyelids parted I was confronted with some fresh spectacle yet more obscene than the last. And I was powerless to move. I had been so strongly sedated that I could not raise my body from the chaise longue any more than I could lift a five-ton elephant.
And what of Delphine? Doubtless that’s the question you’re asking yourselves. It was the one I was asking myself, that’s for sure. I could not see her anywhere in the room. Nor, for that matter, could I see de Villegrand. Their absence both heartened and disturbed me. I hoped – how I hoped – that de Villegrand had whisked her off to safety the moment the bacchanalian revels broke out. I feared, however, that he had not. I continued to nurture a belief in my friend’s fidelity and goodness, yet this faint flame was waning fast.
Around midnight I awoke and was finally able to stir my limbs to motion. The candles in the chandelier had burned down to stubs. The dining room was filled with sleeping bodies in various states of undress. The smells of spilled liquids – alcohol, vomit, bodily fluids – were nauseating. I picked my way stumblingly over the snoring figures, careful not to tread on them or slip in a puddle of something awful. I searched through the house, calling Delphine’s name softly. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in that she wasn’t here, that she was even now back at home, unharmed, intact, that de Villegrand had behaved with chivalrous integrity. I doubted she would ever consent to see me again, given what I had inadvertently exposed her to, but I could live with that, as long as she was not ruined.
Upstairs, a voice responded to my enquiries, quavering out “Frédérique?” from behind a bedroom door. I opened the door, trembling with anguish. I found Delphine curled in a sobbing heap on the four-poster bed, with de Villegrand beside her, the latter deep in slumber. I helped her up. Poor Delphine, my dearest darling Delphine, was bleeding profusely and so weak she could scarcely walk. We staggered together out of that hellish mansion. My heart had shrivelled to a black coal of anger and despair. Rain was falling. I cursed the night sky. I cursed God. I cursed the day I had ever set foot in Paris. Above all I cursed the betrayer of my trust and the agent of Delphine’s downfall, the Vicomte de Villegrand.
Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares Page 21