The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (56 page)

             
"You have strong opinions, sir," Lord Arundale said.

             
"So I have been informed," said Holmes, "on more than one occasion."

             
Lord Arundale carefully laid his cigar on the lip of the large brass ashtray on the table before him. "I did not come here for your approbation, Mr. Holmes," he said. "Neither did I come here for your censure. I came for your assistance in apprehending a murderer."

             
"You telegraphed to Forchheim?
"

             
"
I did."

             
"Lord Crecy, I presume, had not escaped?
"

             
"
Indeed he had not. How did you know that?
"

             
"
Never mind that at the moment, my lord. So the deaths of Lord John and the others are again a mystery.
"

             
"
Even so."

             
"And you suspect a possible political motivation. Were any of the other victims connected with the Continental Policies Committee, or otherwise involved in government activities?"

             
"Isadore Stanhope, the barrister, was an agent for the Austrian government," Lord Arundale said. "George Venn had no known connections to any government, but he is said to have taken frequent trips to Paris. The purpose of these trips is, as yet, unknown. It is being looked into."

             
"And what of Lord Walbine?"

             
"A quiet man of independent means. Seldom left London except to return to his ancestral estate near Stoke on Trent, and that but twice a year. The only thing of interest we've been able to find out about the baron is that he had a rather large collection of, let us say, exotic literature in a concealed set of bookcases in the library."

             
"What fascinating things one finds out about one's fellow man when one is compelled to search through his belongings," Holmes commented.

             
"Will you take the case?" Lord Arundale asked.

             
"I will," Holmes said. "As a problem, it is not altogether without interest. I was sure when I saw you arrive, my lord, that you would have something stimulating to offer. And so you do."

             
"Have you any ideas?"

             
"My dear Lord Arundale," Holmes said, chuckling, "I'm afraid that you have been given an exaggerated notion of my abilities. Even I cannot solve a crime before I have assimilated its details."

             
"Well, I wish you luck," Lord Arundale said. "Any assistance you require will be immediately forthcoming from Scotland Yard."

             
"That should prove to be a novel experience," Holmes said. "I will have to tell Inspector Lestrade and his people of the circumstances surrounding the death of Lord John Darby, you realize."

             
Lord Arundale rose to his feet. "I leave that to you," he said. "If you feel you must, then do so. As to your fee—"

             
"My fees are on a standard schedule," Holmes told him. "I shall send my bill to the Foreign Office."

             
"That will be satisfactory," Lord Arundale said. "There is one last thing you should know.
"

             
"
And that is?"

             
"I have just received a second telegram from Forchheim. After being informed of his brother's death, Lord Crecy killed a guard and escaped from the asylum. That was yesterday. Presumably he is headed back to England, possibly to avenge his brother's death. Unless he is apprehended on the Continent, he should be here within the week."

             
"That," said Holmes, "should make things very interesting indeed!"

Small is the worth

Of
beauty from the light retir'd ...

— Edmund Waller

             
In just under two years the offices of the American News Service had grown from one small room on the top floor of 27 Whitefriars Street to a set of chambers that encompassed the whole of the top floor and several rooms on the ground floor. The floor between was the ancestral home of McTeague, Burke, Samsone & Sons, who concocted and purveyed a variety of printing inks to the newspapers around the corner on Fleet Street. Benjamin Barnett had cast an occasional covetous eye on the frosted-glass door of McTeague
et al.
as he climbed the stairs to his overcrowded domain; but he knew that the inky firm would neither change locations nor cease to exist at any time in the foreseeable future. For, as the younger Samsone, a gentleman well into his seventh decade, had told Barnett in a characteristically loquacious moment: "It were a McTeague mixture which inked the pages of the first number of the
Daily Courant
in 1702. Thick, tarry stuff they used in them days. If you was to use it in one of them fine modrun-type rotaries now, it'd smear all abaht the paper. And it were McTeague inks what printed six of the eleven dailies what come out within three miles of this spot this very morning. Yes, young man; I tell you that as long as newsprint must be spread with ink, pressmen will trot up to the door to have it formulated."

             
And so, for as long as the Fleet Street presses continued to rumble, the copy desk and the dispatch desk of the American News Service would remain separated by untold demijohns of printers' ink. And whenever the little bell on the dispatch-room wall tingled, an
errand boy would race up the two flights of narrow wooden stairs to pick up the precious sheets of copy and return them to the dispatch desk to be logged and turned over to the telegraphers.

             
Barnett noticed, as he climbed the stairs on this Tuesday afternoon, that no light was diffusing through the frosted glass on the ink merchants' door. They were closed for the day. McTeague
et al.
was a model of a modern Socialist employer, giving the whole day Saturday off and closing the shop for all sorts of obscure midweek holidays. The employees' delight in the abbreviated work week was perhaps mitigated by the McTeague custom of inviting Socialist speakers in to lecture during the lunch half hour.

             
At the top of the stairs, the door to his own offices was, as usual, wide open. Barnett dodged a descending errand boy and threaded his way toward the inner offices past the small, cluttered desks of those dedicated to creative journalism. The four secretaries—three gentlemen of varying ages and a young lady of severe demeanor— looked up and issued a variety of polite greetings as he passed. The reporters—two young, intense-looking gentlemen and an elderly lady named Burnside who was an authority on the Royal Family—all affected an air of being much too busy or too deeply sunken into the creative process to notice his passing.

             
Miss Cecily Perrine was at her desk in the inner office, staring intently at the half-page of copy in her Remington Standard typewriter. Miss Perrine had come to work for him the very day the American News Service had opened for business almost two years before. Her burning desire
since early adolescence, for one of those inexplicable reasons that shape our lives beyond our control, was to become a journalist. Now, in the Merrie Land of England when Victoria was queen, and things were just about the best that things had ever been, a lady did not work for a newspaper. Oh, perhaps the society page would have a lady correspondent, but she would certainly never set foot in the actual offices of the paper. Even the secretaries and typists were traditionally male, and against tradition there is no argument.

             
So the American News Service, as far as it was from being a real newspaper, was as close to journalism as Miss Cecily Perrine could approach. At the beginning they wrote almost none of their own material; instead they bought stories that had already appeared in the London dailies, doing some minor rewriting to make them understandable to American readers. Then, once a day, one of them would walk over to the Main Post Office on Newgate Street to have the stories telegraphed to New York.

             
Cecily Perrine proved to be innately brilliant at handling all the organizational details in running a business, a fact that surprised her as much as it pleased Barnett. She was calm and even-tempered, and much better at handling people than Barnett. And she was also lovely to look at.

             
Barnett observed her silently for a moment as she studied the page of copy in her typewriter, noting how the single shaft of sunlight, twisted by some prismatic effect of the ancient glass panes in the small window, highlighted the light-brown curls piled in artful disarray atop Cecily's attractive oval face. She was beauty in repose, a model of graceful elegance, even with her face screwed up in the awful concentration of creativity. Or so Barnett thought as he looked at her.

             
"Good morning, Miss Perrine," he said as she became aware of his presence behind her. "Busy little beehive we have out there."

             
"Good afternoon, Mr. Barnett," Cecily Perrine said pointedly, her clear blue eyes meeting his. "As you are the owner of this establishment, I shall not attempt to regulate your comings and goings, but I am bound to point out that when the employer arrives at the office at one-thirty in the afternoon, it is not conducive to creating a good work attitude among the employees."

             
"Ah, Miss Perrine," Barnett said, "let the staff believe that you are a hard-hearted harridan, capable of vilifying even your employer for an imagined tardiness. But to me, in private with the door closed"—he closed the door—"admit that you're tired of supervising others while they write the stories and get the acclaim and the bylines. Tell me that you desire to get out into the great city yourself and have doors slammed in your face, and suffer insults that a lady should never hear and epithets that a lady should not even understand."

             
"Why, Mr. Barnett," Cecily said, "you make it sound so attractive that I blush to admit that such might indeed be the case, for fear that people will think me nothing more than a dilettante!"

             
"Never, Cecily. You are too fine a woman for that!" Barnett said, going over to his desk and settling into his chair. "I may call you Cecily, may I not?"

             
"You may," Cecily said. "And I shall call you Benjamin, for that is your given name, is it not?"

             
"It is, and I should be proud to hear it from your lips," Barnett told her with a grandiloquent gesture that swept half of his morning mail from the desk to the floor.

             
Benjamin Barnett had an inordinate fondness for the theater. In his youth, in New York City, he had acted in many an amateur theatrical production of
The Drunkard,
or
His American Cousin.
Cecily Perrine had grown up in the theater. Her mother, Laura Croft, had been one of the great leading ladies of the melodramatic '60s. Her father had been a noted villain until, some ten years before, her mother had died and her father had quit the stage, devoting himself to his linguistic studies.

             
Barnett and Cecily frequently went to the theater together, usually chaperoned by Elton Perrine, Cecily's father. For their own amusement, they occasionally assumed the attitudes of the melodramatic stage in private conversation.

             
Barnett found the pastime satisfying for another reason. For roughly the past year he had been deeply in love with his office manager, the intelligent, perceptive, beautiful, talented, altogether wonderful Cecily Perrine. Not that love was a new emotion for him; indeed, he had been in love many times before. But his past loves had been light-hearted and evanescent, never deep, or serious, or meaningful, full of pleasant emotion and devoid of either thought or pain.