A Soul of Steel (25 page)

“Hopefully, he has left France and will not. And hopefully the sinister Captain Morgan has left France also. I didn’t fancy leaving Irene behind with that man circulating. Please don’t attribute my concern there to jealousy also, Nell. A husband may worry, that is all.”

“That is most becoming, Godfrey. I can imagine no greater good fortune than that someone would worry about me one day.”

“There are other emotional apexes than worry, my dear Nell.”

“Such as—?”

Godfrey looked about to say something, then shook his head. “Some things one must discover for oneself. Look at the lines! We have arrived at the temple of La Tussaud.”

How amazing that so many people should queue up to see some dressmaker’s dummies, I thought as Godfrey helped me out of the cab and paused to pay our driver.

Once we were ushered into the dim-lit building, my tune changed. Perhaps it was the cleverly manipulated lamplight and settings, but many of the waxen figures seemed eerily real, especially those in the horrific tableaux displayed in “The Chamber of Horrors.”

Godfrey and I emerged into the daylight blinking, and London came into clean, bright clarity for the first time since my return.

“How wonderful to view a street crowded with carriages and horses, and omnibuses topped with signs and people, and peddlers and pedestrians,” I said. “I had no idea that so many dreadful historical events required memorializing in wax. Those guillotine scenes—”

Godfrey nodded. “That is the real reason I wanted to view this exhibit. Lives are at stake in this matter we meddle in. Who can say what really happened in Afghanistan so many years ago? Yet I believe Stanhope when he says that Maclaine was brutally killed and as brutally slandered after his death, that Stanhope’s own life has never been the same, and that at least one other, innocent life stands in danger today from the repercussions of whatever conspiracy unwound then.”

“When you put it that way, I feel quite foolish for presuming to play a part in this drama.”

“You are foolish.” Godfrey looked as serious as I had ever seen him. “So is Irene, and so am I. Danger comes to a boil in the world around us. Your chance acquaintance with Quentin Stanhope—not to mention your unexpected reunion—has immersed us in the nastiest cauldron we have stirred up yet. Remember that in the days to come. Our guard must be up constantly. Nothing is more dangerous than old secrets that span many borders.”

“You think our world is as ugly as the one depicted in the wax museum’s Chamber of Horrors?”

He nodded. “Sometimes, Nell, it is. For the most part it presents a fairer face, but we must not allow that benign visage to lull us.”

“What now, then?”

“Now that we are suitably impressed with the seriousness of our task,” said he, hailing a cab with his lifted cane, “on to Baker Street and the trail of the mysterious Dr. Watson.”

Chapter Sixteen

WATSON'S FEVERED FRIEND

“What is
it, John, dear?”

“A matter for Holmes, I am afraid.”

“Afraid? When something turns up that could benefit from Mr. Holmes’s talents you are more often intrigued than regretful.”

I handed the letter across the toast rack. My wife accepted it with her usual grace, preventing the lace-trimmed sleeve of her combing gown from trailing in the clotted cream, while never taking her eyes from the letter in her hand.

“Oh, how sad!” she exclaimed after reading it.

Holmes’s evaluation would be far more forthcoming about the nature of the paper and penmanship, but Mary’s sympathetic response echoed my own immediate reaction. Well I remembered the writer from our school days: Percy Phelps, known rather more familiarly as “Tadpole.” A bright if somewhat fragile boy, he had gone on to a glittering Cambridge career, followed by a Foreign Office appointment, while I was still wallowing in enteric fever in India.

“Brain fever for nine weeks!” Mary shook her head. “The poor man.”

A woman’s compassion is a wondrous thing. There is no man, even one hardened by life and its disappointments, who will not stir some woman to pity when he is truly down and out.

“I can well sympathize myself,” I added, grimly recalling my own months of fever and forgetfulness nearly nine years before.

“What disaster can he refer to in his letter?” Mary wondered, her large blue eyes all concern.

“That is for Phelps to say, or, rather, for Holmes to discern.”

“Yes, you must present the matter to Mr. Holmes at once! No one can dissect the unthinkable as he can.”

“You are certain that you won’t mind my running off for the day, Mary? Phelps gives his address as Briarbrae, Woking, and Woking is far from the city smokestacks.”

“Nonsense! The poor man has asked you for help. I have never known you to refuse it. Besides, a jaunt to the country will do you good.”

Blessed the man who is joined to a compassionate woman! I kissed Mary good-bye and within twenty minutes was bound for Baker Street. If Mary’s company was a balm, Holmes's was sure to be an astringent. Of that I was soon reminded when I arrived to find my friend hunched over one of his chemical experiments.

“Ah, Watson, the married man!” he greeted me without surprise. He went on to warn me that should the chemical solution turn the litmus paper-red, it would cost a man’s life. I watched the paper suffuse into a telltale maroon the moment Holmes thrust it into a test tube.

Holmes spent the next moments scrawling telegrams for the pageboy.

“A very commonplace little murder,” he commented before settling into his favorite velvet-lined armchair and giving me his utter attention, his gray eyes keen with anticipation.

I produced my mysterious letter with a tinge of hesitancy. Phelps’s dilemma seemed mild in comparison with murder, no matter how commonplace. Indeed, Holmes found nothing of interest in the missive besides the fact that it had been written for my friend by a woman—a woman of extraordinary character, Holmes claimed airily without further explanation.

Yet this poor, vague spoor was enough for the hound always lurking within him. Despite declarations to the contrary, he harbored a drop or two of the milk of human kindness; in minutes we were off for Waterloo and within an hour approaching the large house and lavish grounds at Woking where my former schoolmate lived.

We found my friend Phelps, looking pale despite the summer sunlight pouring in from the garden window, with his fiancée, Annie Harrison, a handsome, tiny woman with a Madonna’s eyes and a diva’s glossy black hair.

Phelps’s tale was sobering. He had been asked by his uncle, the Foreign Minister, to transcribe the original of a secret treaty between England and Italy, whose contents “the French or the Russians would pay an immense sum to learn.”

Percy had retired to his office and stayed late in order to accomplish the task in privacy. When he went to inquire after a cup of coffee he had ordered from the commissionaire’s lodge he found the old soldier asleep at his post.

At that moment, a bell rang from the very room poor Phelps had left unattended.

He dashed back to the chamber, seeing no one in the hall or its intersecting passage while coming or going. Yet Phelps found the original treaty gone. Only his copy of eleven of the twenty-six articles remained.

Although in the nigh ten weeks since the tragedy not a whisper indicated that the treaty had reached the wrong hands, be they French or Russian, this fact was small comfort to my friend. He had collapsed completely at the discovery of the theft, and only now had emerged weak and anxious from lost weeks of delirium, spent in the ground-floor bed-sitting room at Briarbrae, from which his sudden illness had evicted Miss Harrison’s brother Joseph.

Miss Harrison had come to Briarbrae to meet her fiancé’s parents, with her brother as escort, when the tragedy occurred. Despite a sickroom bedecked with dainty bouquets from the tending hand of Miss Harrison in every corner, despite her brother Joseph’s cheery optimism, I could see that the only thing that heartened Percy’s spirits was the intervention of my friend Holmes.

Yet Holmes offered no false hopes during the interview with Percy and Miss Harrison, pronouncing the case very grim indeed.

We returned to London. A call on Inspector Forbes at Scotland Yard produced no obvious direction to the mystery. At least Percy’s eminent uncle, Lord Holdhurst, the Foreign Minister, at Downing Street confirmed that France or Russia should have acted by now had either nation obtained the treaty.

Imagine Holmes’s chagrin, after we traveled again to Woking the next day, to learn that Phelps had surprised an intruder at his window the previous night. Truly, the mystery had deepened. Holmes responded by ordering the recovering Percy to come to town with us. Holmes’s actions took a further odd turn at the train station in Woking, when he left Phelps and me to proceed to London while he remained behind on errands of a peculiarly vague nature.

I’d rarely been so annoyed with Holmes during our acquaintance. I would be forced to spend the entire day with Percy, a fine enough fellow but one in a strained and nervous condition.

“If your Mr. Holmes remains at Woking to trap last night’s burglar, his efforts are vain,” Phelps confided as we rattled along toward London.

“Why do you think so?”

“Because I am no longer at Briarbrae. Oh, you may eye me askance, Watson; you never were a decent mummer even at school, but I am not still off my head. I tell you that no common burglar broke in with that long knife last night. And if I am the target of this mania, now that I have left Briarbrae there will be no further incidents.”

“Holmes does not usually act against the grain of the situation.”

“He underestimates the political depth of this conspiracy.”

“Perhaps so,” I said mildly, “but why are you the focus of such a grandiose scheme? Who would have cause to destroy you?”

“I don’t know,” Phelps said despondently, lapsing into a silence all the more unnerving because his hands and feet were never still.

By late afternoon we returned to Baker Street, where I sent a message to Mary that I would be staying the night with a sick friend. As a doctor’s wife, she was accustomed to my extended absences. We shared one of Mrs. Hudson’s substantial dinners—roast beef—then settled in for a worrisome evening. I attempted to distract my charge from matters that upset him.

“I must say, Phelps, we’ve come again to a common path by unfortunate events, but I have faced more dire circumstances than this and come through.”

“You, Watson?” His hand patted nervously at his face in the pallid gas light. “How could anything be more dreadful than this pall over my life and reputation? Nine weeks of my life unremembered; my career in limbo, awaiting only an awful disclosure to complete my ruin; my fiancée, the sweetest woman who ever stood by a man, facing only shame and revilement for her loyalty—”

“You are not dead yet, man! And Holmes is helping you. I would that I had acquired such assistance at Maiwand.”

“Maiwand?” Phelps looked totally mystified and bit at his lips. I could as well have spoken of Katmandu.

“Yes, the battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan in ’Eighty. I joined as an assistant surgeon with the Northumberland Fusiliers, but when I arrived in India the Afghan war had broken out, so I was assigned to the Sixty-sixth Berkshires at Kandahar under Brigadier General Burrows. At Maiwand I took a jezail bullet in the shoulder.”

“You were wounded, Watson?”

“I seldom speak of it, but I was very nearly killed, Phelps, and suffered enteric fever for weeks afterward, during the entire month-long siege of Kandahar, before Roberts’s troops came marching to our rescue. Then we turned and drove the Ayub Khan’s men back into the Afghanistan mountains. So, you see, I know more of brain fever than even my medical degree would attest.”

“You, too, forgot everything while you were ill?”

“My dear fellow, you must keep this to yourself, but I never even remembered taking a second bullet in my leg, yet that is the inexplicable scar that reminds me of itself every rainy day, though it has been less bothersome of late.”

“I was never military material, Watson,” Percy said with a wan smile. “It is hard to imagine you in such a shabby fray. One does not hear much about the Afghanistan adventure these days. I had forgotten all about it.”

“So have most people. I do not fancy many military reputations were polished in that rough arena. Of course, I was just doing my duty and seeing something of the world, a lad in my twenties. And there is much to see in that quarter of the globe, exotic bits, Phelps: snake charmers and belly dancers and some astounding mating rituals—”

Phelps suddenly clasped a hand to his mouth. “What do you suppose Holmes is doing all day at Woking?”

“Walking,” I suggested shortly.

“I am sure that he underestimates the influences at work here.” He rose to pace the chamber anxiously, his fingers twitching. “It could be foreign spies; the interests of strong nations are at stake.”

“Holmes is aware of such influences. He has often represented the reigning houses of Europe in matters of such sensitivity that they are far too dangerous to speak of even now.”