by John Gardner
First thing the following morning, a boy left a thick buff envelope for the Professor.
The photographs were magnificent, Moriarty considered. Coax certainly knew what he was doing. He had positioned the lighting so exactly that the flesh of the women on display seemed to glow, breathe, and live in the likenesses.
The posing was also done with a certain tastefulness that stopped short of crudity, though few would doubt what they were viewing: the late Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, lickspittaling and poodle-faking with six different luscious, partly clad women, on chairs, draped on a chesterfield, and one—Dark Delilah Amphet—across a large bed.
Moriarty rubbed his hands gleefully, summoned Harkness and the hansom, and set off immediately, with Daniel Carbonardo as protection, to Gray’s Inn Road, to see what kind of an impression the photographs would make on his advisor, Perry Gwyther.
17
Holy Week
LONDON: LATE JANUARY–APRIL 15, 1900
PEREGRINE GWYTHER WAS well-heeled, rich, prosperous, tall, and immaculate of dress, confident, and gleamingly clean. He sported a bald head, one of those sleek heads of skin that glisten in any light, shining, bordered by neatly barbered snow-white hair: soft, lying smooth and silky at the back and sides. By the sight of Perry Gwyther’s head you knew of his cleanliness.
Perry was normally a person who would greet people with a smile and open-armed gestures, welcoming in a way that was completely un-threatening. He was not smiling now, as he looked up at the Professor from behind his desk. “And what are these?” he asked, passing his hand over the pile of photographs, his voice tilted to the brink of revulsion.
“What do you think they are?” Moriarty smiled, amused and jovial.
“I know what I am meant to think.” Gwyther’s face was sombre, no trace of pleasure. “Sir, what did you imagine you were doing?”
“I am set to put the Queen at a disadvantage.”
“Have you taken leave of your senses, Professor? How did you think you could use these unpleasant photographs?” he asked, his voice on a rising note.
“The idea was that she would do almost anything to stop them being distributed to the newspapers. She pined for long enough after his death—the Widow of Windsor—surely she would do anything to stop a scandal of this magnitude. I pay you to advise me, Perry. I know you can reach into the royal court. I hoped you would be in a position to—”
“The Queen, Professor, would not even look at these …” his voice barking, angry, cheeks flushed, and his hand again sweeping over the photographs, “… these…” a frustrated note from the back of his throat, “from… these… these… filthy fraudulent pictures.”
“Not even look?” Moriarty shuddered, taking a deep breath. Then again, “Not even look?”
Gwyther shook his head slowly, three times, not meeting Moriarty’s eye with his. “One glance and she would be near fainting. The late Prince Consort is sacrosanct. Even if she looked at these, she could never believe them. She would deny them utterly. She would see them as the stupid, irrelevant, dirty trick that they are.”
“But he is the spit and image of Albert …”
“Indeed, your model looks like Albert. Looks to a great degree like Albert, but nobody would possibly believe this, least of all Queen Victoria. It simply could not happen.”
“Why on earth not? Even in royalty there must be such a thing as jealousy. You yourself have said that she—”
“Much enjoyed the pleasures of the marriage bed? Yes, indeed, that is true, but that pleasure was tinged with a strange prudery, Professor, and a total trust in Prince Albert. What your photographs show just could not occur. The idea is ludicrous.” Gwyther could hardly credit Moriarty with plotting such idiocy. “My information is first class. Yes, I can, as you put it, reach into the court. If you had come to me with this absurd plan I would have advised you to bury it in the deepest well, sink it in the darkest ocean. How can you have expected this to give you any hold over Her Majesty?”
“I met the man, the man in the photographs, by accident. In Vienna.” Moriarty laid a hand, palm down, on the corner of Gwyther’s desk. “Schleifstein, the criminal overlord in Berlin, put me on to him, and the moment I saw him I imagined we could use him …And now…” He appeared to struggle for the right words. “And now … This is hopeless … You mean I have spent time and money—a lot of money—for nothing?”
“Nothing, Professor. Victoria is a sad old lady, in her eighty-first year, with declining health. She is like to die at any time. Her doctors say she has indicated that she would not fight hard against a mortal illness.”
“So she would in no way fight against these photographs being published?”
“I have told you. She would not even believe them. This is the woman who relied on Albert in all things. Who enjoyed, as you have said, the marital bed, yet could not even bring herself to explain human reproduction to her daughter—the Princess Alice—and left it to Albert; she is the woman who claimed to know of her son’s shenanigans with the girl Nellie Clifden,* but said she did not know ’the disgusting details.’ Do you not see what I am getting at?”
Moriarty, usually the most stoic of men, almost wrang his hands. “All that time!” he cried. “All that time; all that money. For nothing?” In his mind an even worse thought prowled—that he had been foolish to think this plan could have worked at all; that he had allowed himself to believe there was any merit in this threadbare scheme.
“Professor, you would be advised to bring your energies to bear on Idle Jack. You have such talent, and have made such a difference to the class we are both proud to share. You have so much more to give. I beg you, concentrate on that villain so we can see him put to rights.”
Moriarty gave an animal-like cry, a small howl that made Gwyther jump in his skin. “Na-ntaaacht!” The sound, part snarl, part cry of anguish, and part warning of attack, echoed through Perry Gwyther’s rooms in the Gray’s Inn Road so that two of his clerks in an adjoining office recoiled as though they had heard the call of some feral beast about to harass them, and were thrown into such terror that it drove them shivering into the street and, so, home at this early hour.
Moriarty left Gray’s Inn Road some twenty minutes later, refreshed by a cup of Indian tea made for him by Abott, Gwyther’s chief clerk, who was, as Perry himself remarked, a “dab hand when it came to infusing tea.”
Moriarty was refreshed, but still raging inside: furious and, worse, questioning his own self-confidence, as he sat shoulder to shoulder with Daniel Carbonardo in the hansom, silent, locked within himself for fifteen, nearly twenty, minutes, swaying against Carbonardo as the cab rolled back to Westminster.
Finally he leaned close and spoke quietly. “Tomorrow, Daniel. Tomorrow, take the Austrian home.”
“All the way to Vienna?”
Moriarty shook his head. “No, Daniel. No. You take him home.”
Indeed, on the following day Carbonardo accompanied von Hertzendorf onto the packet sailing from Dover to Calais. Nobody saw him with the Austrian when they reached France. Twenty-four hours later Daniel returned alone to London, where Moriarty had been particularly busy. Von Hertzendorf was not heard of again.
During the night—around three in the morning—Moriarty had personally wakened Joey Coax with the news that there was special work, dangerous work, to be done, after which the photographer would be paid in full. He then drove him, Moriarty himself at the whip, at great speed, to a remote house on the Ratcliffe Highway, where he handed over the terrified Coax to a pair of his most adept punishers. The house, between Wapping and Stepney, was destroyed by fire a year or so later, and the site has since been rebuilt upon. Joey Coax is possibly still there, sleeping through the years, fast in the reddish soil of the area that gave the name to Redcliff, and so Ratcliffe. This tale bears out the truth that it was not in your best interest to become professionally involved in any scheme put to you by Professor James Moriarty, particularly if you had some signal skill th
at he required to use. Rarely did the Professor leave witnesses in the present to speak of what had happened in the past.
Also, in the early morning of that same day, the barque Colleen of Cork was returning to Plymouth, coming in to The Sound, making way for Devonport, after calling in for a day at the French port of Le Havre, where two members of the crew—both Chinese—appeared to have deserted ship. A box of firecrackers, accidentally ignited, set fire to a powder keg kept under lock and key. In turn, the keg set off other inflammable and unstable materiel. The explosion was heard from as far away as Polperro, and several bodies were washed up along the coast, notably that of her captain, Michael Trewinard, and her first mate, Bernard Carpenter, both of whom were identified, in St. Austell, by family members.
So the wheels continued to turn, slowly, and the work began to take shape in the warehouse hard by the river in Poplar; also in the great house on the fringes of Westminster, which pleased the Professor so much that he even spoke to George Huckett about the possibility of his little firm doing some further restoration at Steventon Hall, on the road to Oxford. With this in mind they visited Steventon one day in mid-March accompanied by Sal Hodges, who brought a basket containing a loaf of Fanny Paget’s homemade bread and some cold sausage and pickle with mustard, and a flask of Fanny’s excellent cock-a-leekie soup made from a fine capon, her simmered chicken stock, and several parcels of leeks so that the soup was finally thick and most tasty. Sal said that even though this was a Scotch soup, she could remember the days in her childhood when people, coming to assist in gathering in the harvest, would each bring their own bunch of leeks to add to such a soup to be consumed as the first course at their harvest home banquet.
So, freezing January slipped quietly into a February that lived up to its old name of February fill-dyke, then to a March during which the days began to get a mite longer and the temperature started to rise a fraction, and they passed quietly into April with its soft refreshing rains. It was on All Fools Day, April first, that a thundering great robbery occurred in Hampstead, that place of groves once infested by wolves, and where during the reign of Henry VIII, London’s washerwomen soaked the clothes of the nobility. This particular event, the clearing out of an entire house of goods, jewels, precious stones, and furniture, was a robbery to order. The thieves were three men and a boy, all under Ember’s control, the object of interest being a single piece of furniture: a magnificent hand-carved Swiss sleigh bed, fashioned from pine, with outward-curving head and foot boards, complete with ridged foot blocks that Moriarty later called his “mounting blocks.”
Ember presented this large bed as a personal housewarming gift just as the carpets, curtains, and other furniture were being brought into the house. Eventually, the Westminster house was decorated and in perfect order, and it was almost time for Arthur to return home from Rugby for the Easter holidays.
The sleigh bed was wonderfully comfortable both for James Moriarty and his love, Sal Hodges, just as foxy little Ember knew it would be; and in the cozy darkness of the night, Moriarty would shrug off all traces of evil, and the dark phantoms that must have invaded his dreams; and he would whisper in Sal’s ear, “Oh, my dolly darling, my donah, my sweetmeat,” and running his hand between her stunning thighs, he would say, “Oh, my dilberry bush, my sweet garden ripe for planting, my honeycomb. My love.”
Stirring deep in the night, Sal Hodges would come awake and find great apprehension facing her in the gloom, for she kept one dark, terrible secret that she wished to hold on to until the end of her time. In her distress, she wondered if that would be possible, and dared not consider the consequences should the secret be revealed to her lord and master, to Professor James Moriarty.
Through the previous months, Moriarty had received regular messages from Sam Brock, his spy in place with Idle Jack, and the intelligence he was able to obtain, particularly concerning the passage of ideas between Jack Idell and the continental crime lords, he considered invaluable. But as they approached that Easter of 1900, the messages became more alarming.
I heard them again last night, Professor, Georgie Porgie wrote with a sense of urgency on Thursday, April fifth. They seem to be planning your downfall. I thing they are after you life. You are in great dangor.
And on that very evening, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, there was a great reunion at the house in Westminster. Young Arthur Moriarty—known in the world as Arthur James—returned for the Easter holidays, greeted lovingly by his mother, Sal Hodges, and his father, James Moriarty.
There was pride in the Professor’s heart as he faced his son, who had been met at Euston Station by Daniel Carbonardo and driven home by Harkness in the Professor’s hansom. The young man stood in the tiled hall of the great house, embraced his mother, and gave his father a firm handshake.
Moriarty thought he would burst with pride, for the young man had grown in stature, filled out, and was blessed with a new confidence after just over a year at Rugby. He spoke clearly in a firm classic voice with no trace of Moriarty’s former Irish accent, but with the clipped consonants and sharp, slightly elongated vowels of what was obviously the inflection of the upper classes; while the way in which he held himself was after the manner of a leader, a man born to be at the head of whatever profession he chose. The investment Moriarty had made in Rugby School was already paying off a hundredfold.
That night, after dinner, Sal left father and son alone over the port and, for the first time, Arthur spoke to his father about his place in the family, and what his father actually accomplished in life.
“Father of the chap I share a study with is something in the city and says you, Papa, are a bit of a dark horse.”
“Does he now?”
“That’s what he told, Peter—Peter Alexander, my friend. Said you had holdings and a lot of property. I’ve never thought about the kind of business you are in, Papa. Or what I shall do when I leave school.”
“I am what the French call an entrepreneur, Arthur. Know the word?”
Arthur looked his father full in the face. “Oh, indeed, sir, I do.” A smile and the merest shadow of a wink. “It can hide a multitude of sins, Papa. Yes?”
Moriarty smiled back, thinking his son was wise beyond his years, and leaning forward told the boy that he would, in due time, inherit a fortune, not simply in terms of money, but in human realities. “You will become heir to an army of workers, men, women, and children, people who are skilled in their various trades. You will be their rock and the one from whom they will derive their livelihoods. You will direct them, and be their master and their guide, both. You will be their reason for life.”
“And I shall be delighted to see to them, Papa.” Once more, the shade of a smile.
In that moment, the Professor’s heart sang, for he knew that he had bred a whelp after his own heart. “You should first study the Law, my son. That will make you ready to take on the great future I shall leave to you.”
So, a bond was forged between father and son. For the remainder of that week the two would sit and talk into the night, Arthur entertaining his father with both tales of life in the great public school and his own youthful ideas of how life should be lived, and how the great obstacles in life should be surmounted, and life’s difficulties overcome.
Arthur was, of course, as yet unlettered in the world, and required years of experience to grow and become familiar with the many pitfalls of that adventure from birth to knowledgeable rebirth. Yet in those days the Professor could clearly see how the son he had longed for at the time before his birth would be a beloved credit to him and to all with whom he had dealings. In the fact of Arthur, James Moriarty first began to sense what love may really be for a father.
Lucy Moriarty had been a devout Roman Catholic and had brought her children up in the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic faith. Moriarty naturally had followed his mother and in his own makeshift blood family insisted on an adherence to that faith. When in London, they would worship at the Pro-Cathedral in Kensington
High Street, going there quietly and with no fuss, as they did for the High Mass on Palm Sunday when, with the whole congregation, they remembered Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first day of the most momentous week in history for Christians. As in former years, they came away bearing palm leaves and crosses made out of palm leaves. They were there again on Good Friday, where they joined in the liturgy that seeks to focus hearts and minds on the agony and death of Jesus by the stripping and washing of the altar and the individual veneration of the instrument of death, the holy cross; the bells usually rung at the Sanctus and during the consecration now replaced by the harsh sound of a mallet on the sanctuary steps, reminiscent of the nails hammered into Christ on the cross. Then the prostration of the clergy before the large crucifix, followed by the veneration, the entire congregation coming one at a time to kiss the feet of Christ on the Cross, an act not of idolatry but of mental and spiritual obeisance. On Holy Saturday, with the end of the Lenten fast in sight, they attended, early in the morning, the kindling of the New Fire, bringing it into the church, a sign of the Holy Spirit regenerating each member of the Church as though coming down in tongues of flame, and so to the lighting of the Pascal candle. Then, Easter itself, with a great High Sung Mass, praising God and the miracle of the Resurrection.
“How much of all that do you believe, Papa?” Arthur asked when they assembled in the drawing room before the Easter lunch, their nostrils still lined with incense, which also seemed to cling to their clothes, at odds with the succulent new season’s lamb Fanny Paget had cooked for them.
“How much do I believe?” Moriarty seemed to look into the far distance. “A lot of it, I suppose. ‘Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.’ One cannot but believe in a God of vengeance …”
“And an afterlife?” Arthur prompted.
“Oh, there’s an afterlife.” Moriarty nodded. “I believe all that. There has to be Hell and Satan and retribution. Day of Wrath and Doom impending sort of thing. Fear all of it, son. Quake and fear all of it.”