Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  Had Delphine been in better physical condition, I might have turned round on the spot, re-entered the house, and dashed de Villegrand’s brains out while he slept. But Delphine needed a doctor. That was my first and foremost priority. Saving her took precedence over avenging the wrong done to her.

  I got her back to her parents’ house, I don’t remember how. Monsieur Pelletier refused to listen to my explanations, my excuses, my entreaties. He called me every vile name under the sun. He beat me with his bare fists. He threw me out. I did not object or retaliate. I deserved every bit of his ill-treatment, and more.

  The doctor came. I waited outside in the pouring rain, as dejected as it is humanly possible to be. He emerged an hour later, and his expression told me all I needed to know.

  Delphine...

  Delphine had died from internal injuries. Such was the brutality with which de Villegrand had used her. Abused her. That... that monster had taken the very best, the purest thing in all this world, and destroyed it.

  In breaking her, he broke me.

  I returned to the Marquis’s mansion, resolved to have it out with de Villegrand. I was a seething cauldron of rage and hatred, a veritable Fury. I found Delphine’s despoiler sitting with his cronies, enjoying a breakfast of cold cuts and leftover champagne. They were recounting the previous night’s exploits and laughing uproariously. I bearded de Villegrand. I rebuked him for his grotesque, savage behaviour. I called him a rapist and murderer.

  “Rapist?” said he. “That’s a matter of opinion. From a woman’s perspective, what begins as rape does not always end up that way. But murderer?”

  I told him that Delphine was dead. He had as good as killed her with his lusts.

  He at least had the decency to look startled, albeit only for a moment.

  “Well, if she wasn’t woman enough to handle me...” he said, and sniggered.

  That snigger did it. I snatched up a table knife and lunged at him, fully intending to cut out his heart.

  I had no idea that he was a martial artist of some proficiency. It seemed there was much I didn’t know about the Vicomte de Villegrand, much I had been blinkered to.

  In a single swift action he wrenched the knife out of my hand and laid me low on the floor. His reflexes were astounding. I scarcely saw him move. I tried to rise but he kicked me back down with one foot. He stamped on my chest, pressing me in place. I squirmed but could not free myself.

  “You did not deserve her, rosbif,” he sneered. “There are some girls who are made to know the touch only of a real man – a real French man. Anything else is a waste of their time, especially a limp, feeble Anglais.” He leaned closer. “Delphine loved it. You should have heard her cry out. She could not get enough. Once she had succumbed to me, once her resistance was broken, I repeatedly had to pleasure her, to meet her insatiable demands. If I am to be the only lover she ever had, then she has truly died content.”

  I screamed at him then, until my lips were coated in a froth of spittle. What I said, I cannot exactly recall, but by the end of it I had exhausted my fund of French expletives and most of my English ones too. I had threatened to kill de Villegrand in a myriad inventive ways. I had vowed not to rest until he and all his coterie of insane nationalists were either behind bars or swinging from the gallows.

  De Villegrand was unperturbed. He asked the others what should be done with me. The suggestions ranged from “lock him up in the cellar until he calms down” to “slit his throat and toss the body in the Seine”. The consensus tended towards getting rid of me permanently, so that I wouldn’t be a pest. In a surge of desperation, I burst forth with: “I challenge you to a duel!”

  This elicited gales of laughter.

  “I mean it,” I said. “If I am to die, at least let it be with honour. And if it also affords me an opportunity to gain reparation for the atrocious insult done to Delphine and her family, so much the better.”

  The idea took de Villegrand’s fancy. “How terribly quaint you are, Fred. Yet, if it’s a duel you want, why not? Swords or pistols?”

  I had never fired a shot in my life, nor for that matter wielded a sword. However, of the two options, the latter was the more appealing. There is little one can do about a bullet if it is aimed true. At least with a sword one stands a sporting chance.

  When I informed de Villegrand of my decision, I realised I had chosen wrongly. He, it turned out, was an excellent shot but his swordsmanship was even more notable. “With a gun you might have got lucky,” he said. “With a sabre, not a chance.”

  The date was set – a week hence.

  “In the meantime,” de Villegrand said, “do not go to the police. I say this not as a warning but as a piece of practical advice. It will not be worth your while. My friend the Marquis here, do you know who his brother is? The Director-General of the Süreté, no less. Any claims you make against me and my friends will be ignored. You may even be incarcerated at La Santé for slander and defamation of character.”

  I did not waste a minute of that week. I found myself the best fencing master I could, spending every last franc I had on him. I block-booked lessons for the entire day, every day, and I learned and I trained, and when I wasn’t learning or training I practised in my own time. I barely ate or slept. I was a man obsessed. I would beat de Villegrand, whatever it took. Failing that, I would not make it an easy fight for him. He would pay dearly for his victory.

  The fateful day came round. Dawn saw us at the Jardin du Luxembourg. A low mist hung between the elms and shrouded the hard earth. The sun was a faint disk, struggling to rise above the rooftops. Paris was sombre and silent. It would be a good morning to die.

  Several of the Hériteurs de Chauvin had turned out as spectators. I had no second, so the Marquis volunteered to fulfil that role. He pronounced himself unimpressed with the sword I had brought, but it was the best I could afford. I had sold my collection of Verne first editions in order to pay for it. He also advised me to offer no opposition, simply to surrender to the inevitable. It would be quicker that way, he said. Less painful.

  De Villegrand and I faced off. He saluted me, sabre to nose.

  “Let’s see how a rosbif fights,” he said. “En garde!”

  To his surprise, and mine, I acquitted myself well, at least to begin with. My fencing master had taught me some sneaky tricks which might give me an advantage, such as the appel, stamping one’s foot in order to distract one’s opponent, and the flèche, bringing the rear leg before the front leg and sprinting past one’s opponent to strike him from the side. These put de Villegrand temporarily off-kilter and allowed me to deliver attacks that almost – almost – penetrated his defences.

  Yet always he managed to deflect and riposte, so that I was forced to fall back on the repertoire of parries. Only once did I land anything like a convincing blow, when I lunged towards him using a disengage feint. He answered with a coup d’arrët, but I anticipated this and switched to a second-intention moulinet, a circular cut. It caught him unawares, and the tip of my sabre slashed his cheek.

  “Touché,” he said, dabbing off the blood with the back of his hand.

  Up until that point he had not been taking me, or the duel, particularly seriously. He had danced around, playing to the crowd, showboating with flamboyant bits of footwork such as the balestra and the patinando. I had seemed more a nuisance to him than a serious threat.

  That changed with the drawing of first blood. De Villegrand set about me in earnest. Flurries of thrusts and stabs came my way, his blade flashing like a dragonfly’s wing in the strengthening sunlight. My primary and secondary parries became less and less effectual, until in the end I was flapping my sword frenziedly around, blocking his attacks without elegance or precision, simply trying to survive. Delphine was still in my thoughts, but predominantly I was a man enduring a vicious, relentless onslaught, doing his level best not to get hurt.

  He pressed me backwards, raining blows on me like a whirling dervish: glissade, coupé, remise, and
some I had no names for. Eventually we ended up in an engagement, face to face, blade to blade, our bodies pushed together.

  “You have no refinement,” he said to me, “no élan. What basic skills you have learned, you have mastered, I’ll give you that. But you lack a command of the higher techniques that make one exceptional. You will die here today, mon ami, defending the honour of a woman who is past caring. It is so sad. We could have done so much together, Fred. We could have gone so far. Your name would have echoed down through history, alongside mine. And you have thrown it away, all over some silly, simpering female.”

  My blood boiled. How dare he talk about Delphine in that way! I brought my knee up sharply between his legs and heard with deep satisfaction his grunt of agony. He shoved me away with both hands, uttering a stream of profanity.

  “A dirty trick,” he wheezed. “No Frenchman would ever stoop so low. For that, I will not kill you after all. I will instead leave you wishing you were dead.”

  He fell upon me once more. I, by now exhausted, tried a simple extension attack, but de Villegrand dexterously flicked my sabre sideways, then disarmed me with a prise de fer, using his blade to twist mine out of my grasp.

  Now utterly without means of defending myself, I was at his mercy.

  What he did next...

  You have seen my bare face, gentlemen, somewhat disguised. Those scars were stage makeup, for the most part. However, had you seen me without the fake burns, you would have beheld an ugly, permanent truth.

  De Villegrand tripped me up, laid me out flat on my back, and proceeded to work on me all over with his sabre, paying particular attention to my face. There is almost no part of my body that does not still bear the marks of his blade. I am crisscrossed with cuts. Naked, I look as though I have been taken apart by a surgeon and put back together, reassembled much like one of the toys I dismantled as a child, or like Dr Frankenstein’s patchwork monster in the novel. One side of my face is so hideously marred that no one can look at it, even me in the mirror, without wincing. No woman, certainly, could ever deem me attractive again. De Villegrand has ensured that. Even if I could have found someone who could be a worthy successor to Delphine, someone who could come close to her in terms of beauty and luminosity, she would not give me a second glance. She would cross the street to avoid me.

  De Villegrand left me there, lacerated, shredded, in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He and his Hériteur chums swanned off, and I might have bled to death had not a park keeper come by on his early rounds and hurried to fetch assistance. I was patched up at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, and a month later I was on my way back to England, still swathed in bandages like some ambulatory Egyptian mummy.

  I stepped off the boat at Dover on a chilly, blustery autumn day. But I did not feel the bite of the wind. A fire was burning inside me, a fire that has kept me warm ever since, even on the coldest nights.

  My mother’s brother – whom I had met but once, and that when I was a mere stripling – died shortly after I returned to England, and I became, unexpectedly, a man of independent means. My uncle bequeathed me, his only close male kin, his extensive plantations in the West Indies. My parents were all in favour of me going out to the Caribbean and running them. It might help me recuperate, they felt, from the terrible ordeals I had suffered in France, about which I refused to talk. I might even win myself a bride out there, where eligible white men were few and far between and therefore the standards for what constituted handsomeness were lower. But instead I sold off my uncle’s holdings and ploughed the money into a series of specialised engineering projects – into becoming Baron Cauchemar.

  For I knew this: that de Villegrand would continue his scheme to build war machines, even without me. The Hériteurs de Chauvin would continue to bankroll him. They would not abandon their dream of a worldwide French hegemony. Someone would have to stop them. And that someone would be me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  TWO IRON DUKES

  In the wake of Cauchemar’s sorry tale, silence reigned in the gondola, the only sound the rumbling churn of the airship’s propellers. Outside, the sky was paling, the afternoon dissolving into evening.

  Eventually Holmes said, “You have my sincerest condolences, Mr Tilling.”

  “And mine,” I said.

  “Thank you, but you should save your sympathies for de Villegrand.” Cauchemar’s voice was brittle. “When I am done with him, he will be fit for nothing but exhibition at a freak show, like Treves’s Elephant Man.”

  “You will not kill him?”

  “No, Mr Holmes. He spared my life – just – when it was his to take. I shall extend him the same courtesy, and let him spend the rest of his days as disfigured and loathsome as he left me.”

  “I am still unclear why you have left it so late to confront him,” I said. “If you have known all along that it is de Villegrand who has been terrorising London, why not go after him sooner? His home address is no secret. Lives could have been saved.”

  “But, Doctor, I did not know all along. Mr Holmes’s earlier surmises were not quite on the mark. The fact is, I didn’t begin to suspect de Villegrand might be behind the attacks until after the third bomb, the one at Waterloo. I was already closing in on Torrance at the time. I knew him to be an associate of de Villegrand’s, but I did not know how thick the two of them were with each other, to what extent they were in cahoots, if they were at all. Torrance could quite easily have been working independently of the vicomte where the bombings were concerned. At the back of my mind there lurked the strong possibility that de Villegrand himself was involved, but he is wily as a fox and left no clear trail, doing nothing to incriminate himself, not even sending any telegrams that might implicate him. Only after someone shot at me in the graveyard were my suspicions about him confirmed, the accuracy of the bullets compelling me to the conclusion that my old enemy was the one pulling the trigger and that the trail of information which led me to that church had been laid to lure me there. Thereafter, everything fell into place. In hindsight, there was one glaringly obvious clue that the bombings were the Hériteurs de Chauvin finally making their long-awaited move.”

  “And that clue was...?”

  “The choice of location for the third bomb. Waterloo Station. A deliberate provocation. The venue has significance for the Hériteurs, deriving its name as it does from Nicolas Chauvin’s final battle and England’s last great victory over the French. That was when I realised that the bombers might have a different agenda, that this might after all be the handiwork of Frenchmen not Irishmen.”

  “De Villegrand has been in the country some while, though,” said Holmes. “You have had ample opportunity to exact your vengeance on him before now, bombings or not.”

  “I was not ready. My armour was not ready. And his downfall must be public, his every offence laid bare, so that the world will see right through his smiling façade to his rotten core. He must be brought down in such a way that his crimes will be known to all and sundry, the spotlight of infamy will be shone upon him, the man’s reputation will be shattered along with the man himself. His humiliation must be total, and he must live to see it. It is not enough that he faces justice. He must lose everything he holds dear, everything that makes him a man: his reputation, his dignity, his standing. The name de Villegrand must forever after be associated with ignobility and depravity.”

  “Yet confronting him earlier would have spared a lot of people a great deal of suffering and hardship, Watson and myself included. Prevented deaths, what’s more.”

  “What can I tell you? I am not perfect. I have put my own interests before those of others. I can only hope that the good deeds I have done in the East End outweigh my shortcomings elsewhere. If there is such a thing as a set of cosmic scales for each man’s soul, then I trust that mine are balanced in my favour.”

  “Besides, you are hardly in a position to criticise,” I said to Holmes. “There have been times when you have turned down clients whose cases you should, all thi
ngs being equal, have accepted. You have left the police to deal with affairs which you could have cleared up in no time, but which you chose to disregard because they didn’t sufficiently pique your interest. ‘Let he who is without sin...’ et cetera.”

  “Watson,” said Holmes, “as ever you prick the bubble of my self-absorption and keep me grounded. I thank you for doing so. What would I be without you?”

  It may have sounded like a fulsome tribute and apology, but my friend was quiet for some time afterwards and I could tell he was disgruntled. He did not like having his deficiencies pointed out to him. Who does?

  We raced on. Dusk laced long mauve shadows across the countryside. We were, to the best of my judgement, well into the Midlands by now. The landscape had flattened out into a series of plains, with ribbons of low-lying hills running between, and here and there, like a splotch of manmade lichen, the grey expanse of a mining town or industrial city. We had yet to see a sign of the Royal Train, but we knew we were on the right track, as it were, since we had discerned no other trains travelling the rails below us. Mycroft’s edict banning all scheduled journeys along the Royal Train’s route was still in force.

  The more time that passed, the better adjusted I became to being in the Delphines Revenge. What had started out as stomach-churning and miraculous had become, within a couple of hours, tolerable and even in a way monotonous. We were aboard an airborne vehicle. So what? Mankind’s great dream, to be able to fly like a bird, was here made real. But in becoming real it had become, perforce, mundane. I am writing this in an era when the great silver cloud of a Zeppelin is a common enough sight and people think nothing of boarding a passenger plane to travel abroad. Men have fought a world war partly in the skies and crossed entire oceans using aircraft. Any novelty, even one as remarkable as aviation, soon wears off. We are such a restless, never-satisfied species. It is our tragedy and our saving grace.