“The Master’s here in the house, is he?”
“Yes, sir,” said Ruskin with an exhausted sigh, a hint of moisture appearing at the corners of his eyes. “Not himself. Not himself at all. Won’t leave his rooms. Shouts at me through the door. Won’t take his breakfast.”
“Could you show us to him, Ruskin?” asked Sparks.
“I don’t think the Master wishes to be disturbed at the moment, sir, all due respect. He hasn’t been well lately. Not well at all.”
“I understand your concern, Ruskin. Perhaps it would set your mind at rest if Dr. Doyle here were to have a consultation with him.”
“Oh, are you a doctor, sir?” Ruskin said, looking up, his face brightening, an effect not unlike a full moon rising.
“I am,” said Doyle, holding up his bag by way of evidence.
“If you could direct us to the Master’s chambers, we’ll leave you to your work,” said Sparks, and then, in response to Ruskin’s second elaborate attempt to rise: “No need to announce us, Ruskin, I’m sure we can manage—are his rooms on this floor then?”
“Far end of the hall. Last door on your right. Knock first, if you would.”
“Thank you, Ruskin. The silver looks splendid.”
“Do you really think so, sir?” Ruskin said, eyes whelming with pathetic gratitude.
“I’m sure the dinner will be a great success,” said Sparks. He gestured for Doyle to follow and started back down the hallway. Doyle hung back.
“What’s the wall for, Ruskin?” Doyle asked.
Ruskin looked at him, screwing his face into a puzzle. “What wall, sir?”
“The wall outside.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Ruskin, with blank but attentive concern.
Sparks signaled Doyle to discourage pursuing the point. Doyle nodded, then stepped carefully forward through the field of silver. As he moved closer to Ruskin, Doyle could see the man’s lips were parched and blistered, his eyes as red as embers. He put a hand to Ruskin’s pale forehead; it was burning with fever. Ruskin stared up at him with the blind adoration of a beloved and dying dog.
“You’re not feeling very well, are you, Ruskin?” Doyle said softly.
“No, sir. Not very well, sir,” he said weakly.
Doyle took out his handkerchief, dipped it in the water basin, and tenderly wiped the grime off Ruskin’s forehead. Beads of moisture ran down his broad face; Ruskin dabbed at them hungrily with his tongue.
“I think it would be a very good idea,” said Doyle, “for you to go to your room now and rest for a while.”
“But the preparations, sir—”
“You needn’t worry, I’ll speak to the Master. And I’m sure he’d agree that the dinner will proceed much more smoothly if you’re properly refreshed.”
“I am so very tired, sir,” he said, pathetically grateful for the kindness, his mouth drooping, his chin trembling with the approach of more tears.
“Give me your hand now, Ruskin. Let’s help you up…here we go.”
With all his strength, Doyle was able to leverage the fevered wretch to his feet. Ruskin wobbled like a tenpin struck with a glancing blow. Doyle wondered just how long the man had been sitting there. He retrieved a vial from his vest pocket, asked Ruskin to hold out his hand, and tapped into his pillowy mitt four pills from the vial.
“Take these with water, Ruskin. They’ll help you to rest. Promise me you’ll do as I ask.”
“I promise,” Ruskin said, with the grave docility of a child.
“Off you go then,” said Doyle, handing him the candle and patting him on the shoulder; the fabric of his shirt was wet and clammy.
“Off I go,” Ruskin echoed with cheerless, empty mimicry.
Ruskin’s lumbering steps down the hall recalled to Doyle’s mind a shopworn elephant in leg irons he’d once seen in a circus parade. After Ruskin had shambled out of sight, Doyle and Sparks moved back along the corridor the way they’d come.
“We can be sure of one thing,” said Sparks. “Ruskin didn’t chop that hole in the wall. He couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding.”
“I don’t think he’s left the house in weeks. The Master’s most loyal servant.”
“At this late date, the Master’s only servant. This house employed a staff of thirty in its heyday. Not the most congenial atmosphere at present, wouldn’t you say?”
They reached the intersection just as Barry was coming up the stairs.
“House is empty. Boarded up,” Barry said—more to the point than his brother, thought Doyle—“Kitchen’s a mess. Been up to a fair amount of spud-bashin’ without botherin’ ‘bout washin’ up.”
“The work of the lamentable Ruskin, no doubt,” said Sparks.
“Two queer things,” Barry continued. “There’s salt been poured in all the hallways and across the thresholds—”
“Yes, and the other?”
“There’s a false wall in the larder off the kitchen. Behind it’s a door—”
“To where?”
“Couldn’t get it open without me tools. Below stairs by the smell—”
“To the cellar.”
“Already been to the cellar: This ain’t the cellar. And there’s an odd wind coming up under that door.”
Sparks showed keen interest. “Bring our bags in from the carriage if you would, Barry. And then open that door.”
Barry doffed his hat and headed back down the stairs.
“So if we agree Ruskin was on the inside and couldn’t have managed it, who cut the hole through the wall?” asked Doyle, as they continued down the hall.
“It was our late friend from the stables, the footman. Peter Farley’s his name; he’d been away on business, the transfer of four horses to Topping from family property in Scotland,” Sparks said, handing Doyle a paper.
“What’s this?” Doyle asked, unfolding the paper and reading.
“A bill of lading: a list of horses’ names, their descriptions, analysis of their health. Signed Peter Farley. I found that in the pocket of the footman’s coat, hanging on a peg in the groom’s bedroom. Sometime during the last few days—follow my thinking—Farley returns with the horses. The wall has gone up in his absence; clearly some madness has overwhelmed his home. He’s four prized horses to tend and feed after a hard ride and perhaps a wife or family working inside—he must find a way in.”
“That’s why he cut through instead of scaling the wall.”
“There’s broken glass set on its edges to discourage such access. And remember the dimensions of the hole.”
“Just high and wide enough for a horse to pass.”
“He worked fast for the better part of a day. He had to get those horses in quickly; there are a great number of deep hoofprints in the ground around the entrance.”
“Something was spooking them. Something approaching.”
“Unfortunately for our brave stablehand, the door he carved to save those horses proved his undoing.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Reason it out: The hole is finished, he leads the horses to stable, which he finds deserted but otherwise unaffected. He doesn’t venture into the main house, that’s not his place; he’s a simple man, his world is in that barn. If the Master’s gone off his kilt and built a big wall, it’s no concern of his. He puts the horses up, brushes them down, feeds them. He makes himself some tea and heats up a meat pie. He hears something outside, something disturbing the horses, leaves his supper on the table and goes to the barn to investigate, where he’s done in by something his doorway has allowed to follow him inside the compound.”
“Poor devil. What could have done such a thing to him?”
They had negotiated their way to the end of the hall, outside of what Ruskin had described as the Master’s doorway. The floor at this end of the corridor was completely covered with a layer of salt.
“What good is salt? What does it provide defense against?” pondered Sparks.
The
air was shattered by a loud crash of breaking crockery and an angry holler from inside the room.
“Foppery! Fops and frippery! Ha!”
Sparks put a finger to his lips, asking for silence, and knocked on the door. No response, but the sounds inside ceased. He knocked again.
“Everything all right, sir?” asked Sparks, but what issued from him was an uncannily accurate rendering of Ruskin.
“Go…away! Go away and play trains!”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” Sparks continued with the guise, “but some of the guests have arrived. They’re asking to see you.”
“Guests? The guests have arrived?” the voice trumpeted, with equal measures of incredulity and contempt.
“Yes, sir, and the dinner’s ready. We should be sitting down; you know how you disfavor a meal when the entrées go cold,” Sparks went on. Doyle could have closed his eyes and never suspected the obese unfortunate wasn’t nearby.
Footsteps moved to the door inside. A series of bolts were thrown.
“If there’s one thing I can’t bear, you gelatinous cur,” the voice said, rising in pitch and volume, “it’s the squalid perpetuation of lies!” More latches unlatched and locks released. “There is no party, there are no guests, there is no dinner, and if I hear another word from your wormy, liverish lips about any of this slumgullion, I shall with my own hands strangle the life from your swinish neck, boil your corpse in a pit, and render the fat for Christmas candles!”
The door was pulled open, and they were confronted by a man of average height and build whose blandly pleasant features were framed by a wild nimbus of matted blond beard and hair that had known no recent acquaintance of brush or comb. His eyebrows sprang up like untended hedges overrunning the ridges of his forehead. The eyes were bulbous, opalescent, and light as cornflowers, set wide apart on either side of a sharply beaked nose. He had attained at least forty years, but his face had an unlined schoolboy youthfulness that seemed less due to sound breeding than a petulant refusal to assimilate experience. He wore a black silk dressing gown over a loose blouse, peculiar cork-soled boots, and jodhpurs. And he was holding a double-barreled shotgun half a foot from their faces.
No one moved. “Lord Nicholson, I presume,” Sparks said, as pleasant and collected as a missionary on call.
“You’re not Ruskin,” Nicholson said with conviction, and then, unable to resist the opportunity for another disparagement: “That postulant oaf.”
“Baron Everett Gascoyne-Pouge,” Sparks said, affecting the diffident accents of a jaded dandy, as he produced the New Year’s Eve invitation with sardonic detachment. “I understand you’ve canceled the party, old boy; somehow my invite seems to have slipped through the net.”
“Really? How odd. Quite all right, come in! Delighted!” said Nicholson, lowering the gun, instantly the exuberant host.
“The bags. Gompertz,” Sparks snapped at Doyle, who realized with a jolt he was suddenly required to perform the functions of his assigned role.
“Right away, sir,” Doyle said.
Doyle brought his bag, the only bag they carried, through the door, which Nicholson quickly closed and bolted behind him. There were at least six locking devices, all of which he engaged.
“I’d given up hope, you see,” said Nicholson boyishly, pumping Sparks’s hand. “Wasn’t expecting a soul. Put it out of my mind, really. Truly an unexpected pleasure.”
If ever there is an individual more desperately in need of the company of his own class, thought Doyle, I never hope to meet him. The truculent ranting against his pitifully stalwart manservant had already disposed Doyle to an instant dislike of Lord Charles Stewart Nicholson.
Heavy curtains were drawn in the high-ceilinged room, broadening the somber mood set by ponderous medieval furnishings. Dust lay deep. A musk of urine and fear-sweat lathered the thick atmosphere. The floor was littered with broken cups and plates and the remains of old meals: bones, crusts of biscuit. Bladed weapons and a tarnished and dented coat of arms hung above the weak fire sputtering in the fireplace.
Nicholson crossed to the mantel, feverishly rubbing his hands together. “How about some brandy?” he asked, plucking the stopper from a cut-crystal decanter and sloppily filling two tumblers without waiting for a reply. “I’m having some.” He greedily gulped down half a ration and poured a refill before conveying the second glass to Sparks. “Cheers, then.”
“Thanks ever so,” said Sparks disinterestedly, making himself comfortable in front of the fire.
“Shall we have your man go below stairs?” said Nicholson, lurching into a seat across from Sparks and slurping his drink. “I’m sure Ruskin could use the help, the incompetent podge.”
“No,” Sparks replied, with just the right tinge of listless authority. “I may need him.”
“Very good,” said Nicholson, eagerly deferring to the superior rank suggested by Sparks’s indifference. “Tell me, how was the journey down?”
“Tiring.”
Nicholson nodded like a marionette. He sat on the edge of his chair, eyes wide with empty enthusiasm, took another sloppy drink, and wiped his moist lips with his sleeve. “So it’s New Year’s then, is it?”
“Hmm,” replied Sparks, gazing apathetically around the room.
“Do you see my boots?” He held up his dressing gown like a dance-hall coquette, raising a foot and wiggling it before them. “Cork-soled. They do not conduct electricity. Three pairs of socks. No, sir. No e-lec-tro-cu-tion for me. Even if it will make the trains run faster. Ha!”
Sparks demonstrated the wherewithal to recognize this as a remark to which there was no proper response. Nicholson collapsed back in his chair as if every other idea had been drained from his head. Then, furiously animated by an impulse of abject courtesy, Nicholson sprang from his seat, grabbed from the mantel a red Oriental lacquered box, ran to Sparks grinning like a deranged monkey, and with a flourish snapped it open. “Smoke, Baron?”
Sparks sniffed sourly, picked out a cigar as if it were a foul kipper, and held it poised in front of his face. Nicholson’s hands flew wildly through his gown until he found a match, casually struck it against the box, and held it for Sparks. Sparks puffed and rolled the cigar delicately around in his mouth, evening out its ignition.
“From Trinidad,” said Nicholson, lighting one for himself as he sat back down. “Father has a plantation down there. Wanted me to run the bleeding place for him. Can you imagine? Ha!”
“Bloody hot,” Sparks offered, with token empathy.
“Bloody hot,” he amplified. “Bloody hot, and the niggers steal you blind besides. Bloody backward sods with their native smells and their chanting at night and their black faces sweating. But may I tell you? Beautiful women. Bee-you-tee-ful women.”
“Really.”
“Whores, every one of them, even with little tar babies hanging round their necks like macaques in the bugging zoo. They’ll drop their knickers in the street for the change in your vest pocket,” said Nicholson, hoarse with illicit carnality. “You could have yourself a go down there, I’m here to say. Fancy a little dark meat on your dolly mops, you could have a bit of fair sport, let me tell you, that’s a bit of tropical splendor, that is. Ha!” He brushed his hand licentiously along his crotch and poured another brandy. “I could do with some sport about now; satisfy the inner man. Comes a point you don’t much care what sort of package it comes by way of, either.” He winked at Sparks suggestively.
The idea of Lady Nicholson as his spouse, that her handsome refinement had ever been subject to the vicissitudes of this baboon’s degeneracy, filled Doyle with moral outrage. If some unspeakable horror was hot on the heels of this besotted wastrel, he was suddenly of a mind to pick up an andiron and finish the job himself.
“How is your father, the Earl?” asked Sparks, his tone betraying no reaction or judgment.
“Still alive!” said Nicholson, as if it were the funniest thing imaginable. “Ha! Clinging to life, the mean bastard! No title for you
ng Charles here, living on a pittance, tied to the old man’s purse strings—and you don’t think that’s the way he likes it? You don’t think the thought of me scraping by, hardly able to sustain my house with the barest necessities, doesn’t treble his heart at night when the Angel of Death hovers? Ha! Spite in his veins. Gone scatty. Spite and ice water and horse piss and why isn’t he dead yet!” In a paroxysm of wrath, Nicholson flung his tumbler into the fireplace and jumped repeatedly up and down, knees reaching to his shoulders, spinning and screaming in the grip of an infantile frenzy.
Doyle and Sparks stole a look that wondered just how hazardous a lunatic the man was. Then, just as suddenly as he’d begun raving, Nicholson snapped out of his fit and strode to the mantel for another tumbler, which he calmly filled, all the while gaily singing a chorus from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan.
“And how’s your wife?” Sparks asked.
Nicholson stopped humming, his back to them.
“Lady Nicholson. How is she?”
“My wife,” Nicholson said, coldly.
“That’s right. I saw her recently in London.”
“You saw her.”
“Yes. She wasn’t looking very well.”
“Not well.”
“Not well at all. Her color was very poor.”
What is he on about? thought Doyle.
“Her color was poor,” said Nicholson, his back still turned to them. He put a hand in the pocket of his gown.
“Poor to positively unhealthy, if you ask me. Perhaps she was worried about your son. How is your son?” An unmistakable antagonism was creeping into Sparks’s tone.
“My son.”
“I say,” said Sparks, with a chuckle, “do you just parrot back the words when you’re asked a polite question, or didn’t your father ever teach you to answer them properly?”
Nicholson turned back to Sparks. He was holding a pistol. His lips curled in a malicious smile.
“Who are you?” Nicholson asked.
“So you won’t answer—”
“She sent you, didn’t she?”
“You’re confused.”
“My wife sent you—you’re her lover, aren’t you? The filthy whore—”