by Bill Peschel
He set the paper carefully on the desk. I wished with my whole soul that it would burst into flames, and take him and his damnable house with it.
To distract myself, I pulled out a cigar. “How much?”
“It is not money that I want.”
I treated the answer with the contempt it deserved. I pulled a match from my vest pocket and scratched it on the sole of my shoe. It failed to catch, and I had to steady my foot and try again.
“You are writing a book. I am a publisher. We can reach an agreement.”
A Tramp Abroad?
“Is that the name? Much like The Innocents Abroad is it? That would do well, then. Yes, very well. That would suit the MacNaughton House very much.”
I paused to blow smoke at the coffered ceiling and to appear to give the matter some thought. “I’d like some time to consider the matter. This will take some ciphering.”
“So long as I get an answer soon. In fact—” he was interrupted by a knock at the door. A housemaid held a brief confab with the butler, who approached the throne with a folded slip of paper. MacNaughton read it, smiled, and asked:—
“Is she here?”
“Her boy is at the door, my lord,” said the maid.
“Inform him that she should come tonight when she has the package.”
“Very good, my lord.”
The butler left, but MacNaughton did not pick up his share of the conversation. He looked at the note again, chuckled as if at some private joke, and slowly hummed a tune as he refolded it and slid it under the blotter.
“I’m giving a dinner party tonight. Just a few authors and company backers. Come and dine. You will greatly add to my credit. You can give me your answer and sign the contract.”
“Damn you! That’s not enough time.”
“What is there to consider?” he waved my speech as if he was fanning himself. “Eight o’clock. White tie.”
* * * *
I returned to Montague Street in a foul mood, which wasn’t helped when his landlady said Holmes had gone out. He had left instructions to set out a cold lunch, and that I was to amuse myself as I saw fit until he returned.
Seeing the cold mutton and round of bread next to the domed dish swept away my appetite. I poured off a glass of warm cider, added a dash of whiskey to it, shoveled a double handful of coals onto the fire, lit a cigar and settled in for a long brood.
I was in a fix and I knew it. I would rather burn the Tramp manuscript than hand it over to that blatherskite. Would . . . but couldn’t. I could see clearly my future with that speech attached to my name. It wasn’t pretty. I had given my enemies a weapon. They’d say I hadn’t changed. That I was still the crude Westerner carpetbagging my way into the literary East. They would sneer as fools the friends who championed me, like Rev. Joe Twichell. He’d back me to the hilt, but he’d be pitying me as well, and that’s a heavy burden for any man to bear. That brought up a fresh head of steam, I relieved myself with fresh damnations of MacNaughton until I felt better.
The door opened. A thin man bundled in a coat and scarf entered and crossed toward the warm fire, his face hidden by his tall hat and coat that marked the undertaker’s profession.
“If you came for a body, he’s over there,” I pointed to the covered hand. “You won’t need a coffin to carry him out. A towel would do.”
The hat and scarf came off, revealing Holmes’ ascetic face.
“Not quite yet, Clemens.” He unshucked himself and rubbed his hands briskly. “While you’ve been comforting yourself by my fire, I have been busy with your problem.” He stopped at the table to cut a slice of mutton and a heel of bread before settling opposite me. “While I’m eating, why don’t you tell me what happened.”
I described MacNaughton’s office and repeated as much as I could of our conversation. Between bites, he fired questions to spark my memory. He was an exacting prosecutor, ransacking my brain for the tiniest detail. I’ve no doubt he would have made an excellent inquisitor, and would have invented a few torture devices as well.
I had no clue what he was gaining from my interrogation, except to test the limits of my tolerance for nonsense. He finally reached it when he asked me to sing the tune that MacNaughton had hummed.
He repeated the phrase. Perfectly, of course. “Is that it?”
“That’s right.”
He dusted the crumbs from his hands, picked up his violin and plucked the sequence of notes and looked to me for confirmation.
“Right.”
“That slow?”
“Yes. Shall I tap it in Morse code?”
“Do you recognize it?”
“Do I? It’s ‘Camptown Races,’ you ninny! Haven’t you heard of it?”
“No. Does it come with words?”
“Words? Why—of course it does!” And rather than throttle him, I leaned back and roared:
“De Camptown ladies sing this song, do-dah, do-dah!”
He waved his hand at me to stop. “No, no, just the part he sang! How does it go?”
So I boomed out—
“Somebody bet on the bobtail nag
“Somebody bet on the bay.”
That stilled him. He got this look in his eyes like the windows in an abandoned house. I had seen it on the face of an idiot back in Hannibal. With that fellow, it signaled the onset of a fit.
Only Holmes did not flop to the floor and froth at the mouth. He laid his violin on the table, folded his hands under his chin and thought deeply.
I ventured a sally: “I assume this has some meaning to you.”
“Of course it does!” Life returned to his eyes, and he waved away his anger. “Never mind. I was concentrating and you interrupted, but, yes, that fits with what I learned at his house. I’m surprised he didn’t quote Rabbie Burns, a far more appropriate nationality than your American Stephen Foster.”
“I’m grateful he didn’t. Associating that wretch with Burns would put me off his poetry permanently. So you visited the house?”
“Yes, in the guise of an undertaker as you guessed. I called at the back door to measure a customer for a coffin. The cook informed me that death had not visited the house, and my charming apologies resulted in an invitation for tea.”
“Really?” I said. “I would have thought the undertaker would be the least welcome visitor when not needed.”
“To a lonely cook in a small household, any visitor is a fine excuse for a chat over a cuppa,” Holmes dipped again into his store of accents. “She took me into the basement kitchen, and soon we were by the fireside, and she was telling me about her life and that, of course, included the master of the house, his little peccadilloes, and his visitors. If I had a few days to spare, and a few nights walking out, I am sure we would have become engaged. Servants are a vastly underused resource, Clemens. They go everywhere, see everything, and will tell everything to the right ear with the right inducement. Remember that when dealing with your staff, Clemens.”
The significance he put into that last sentence unnerved me. An uncomfortable memory surfaced of the times I had used profanity to describe my disappointments in the servants. One incident over the missing buttons in my freshly laundered shirts escalated from words into a shower of shirts and profanity from an upstairs window. To cover my shame, I asked:—
“What did you learn?”
“That Mr. MacNaughton uses the house as his place of business, preferring to keep his wife and children in Hampstead. He spends so much of his time there that he keeps only a cook, housemaid and butler, who, as you suspected, had a brief career as a bare-knuckle fighter. This, combined with your information, gives us our plan. If all goes well, we could stop Mr. MacNaughton and protect your reputation.”
“And if we fail?”
Holmes opened his hands, palms up, like a Frenchman and said, “We go to prison.”
* * * *
When I returned to the house at eight, I was led to where the dinner guests were gathered, in the billiard room on the second fl
oor, what the English call the first. This allows you to see who else had been invited and, according to your opinion of them, to fortify yourself accordingly.
Seeing that lovely billiard table nearly broke my heart. There is nothing I like better than spending my afternoons with a cue in my hand, and the thought I shared that interest with my blackmailer saddened me. I turned my attention instead to my co-conspirators at the dinner table. The only consolation I found there was that I would dine among strangers. Over the course of many visits to England, I had been introduced to the cream of the peerage, writers held in high esteem, and people whose company I valued. I would have been mortified if any of them had showed up tonight at that blackmailing scoundrel’s behest. And if they had seen me.
The only person I wanted to see there but didn’t was Holmes. He had no invitation, of course, but he assured me he would figure out a way inside. His casual reference to prison shocked me into arguing against the scheme. But then he challenged me to come up with a better plan and that took the trick. He even refused my demand for details, except to suggest that I do nothing and leave everything to him.
I was not nearly so confident. This sounds strange now, with Holmes nearly as well-known as myself. But this was when the man had no reputation. He was barely out of the university and believing he was brilliant enough to pioneer a science nobody had ever heard of. He was like many young men I knew. They were building devices to find gold and silver using sound waves, treat diseases with electricity, build airships that can travel the world and machines to reach the bottom of the seas. They were dreamers who believed the rules of science did not apply to them, and many of them found out too late that they were wrong.
If Holmes was as flighty as them, I was sunk. If he didn’t show, I would lose my only chance of recovering the speech and be forced to give up a book it had taken two years to write.
While waiting for the call to commence the festivities, I drank my champagne and made small talk. I did not know the other guests, but they made great efforts to know me. A dozen heads had turned upon my entrance. A dozen hands were extended to be shaken. A dozen pairs of ears turned eagerly to catch my sallies. The laughter in response to my remarks was too loud by half, and my heart sank. I was being courted, and I knew what would happen next.
I was drawn like a magnet to the sideboard where MacNaughton had kneeled only hours before. The doors were closed, holding tight their secrets. Some young idiot who claimed to be a humorist was bending my ear. His name was not familiar, of the publications he claimed to have appeared in I was ignorant, and his wit was sad. As expected, he tried to arrange an audience with me after the dinner, to read his work to me and solicit a favorable comment for publicity. I suggested sending it to my hotel, and gave him the wrong name so that his package would not follow me.
When he was fended off, another supplicant took his place. This one was a poetess, thinned and paled no doubt by her devotion to Art, who encouraged me to read some patriotic twaddle on relations between Britain and the United States. She was followed by a printer with a new idea for an automatic typesetter, then an inventor seeking backing for a new coal-mining process.
It was driving me insane. I was standing only feet away from recovering my reputation. If I could, I would rip away the concealing panel, rifle through his papers, make off with my property, and damn everyone to purgatory.
Then I was asked for a story. I looked at their faces, shining in the gas light, and I must confess that the devil took a hold of me. I took a deep breath and caught the scent of roast pork from the kitchen in the basement. They want something from me, then I’ll give to them but good, with vinegar and mustard on top!
This is what I told them:
“Once in Washington, during the winter, Riley a fellow-correspondent, who stayed in the same house with me, rushed into my room—it was past midnight—and said, ‘Great God, what can the matter be! What makes that awful smell?’
“I said, ‘Calm yourself, Mr. Riley. There is no occasion for alarm. You smell about as usual.’
“But he said there was no joke about this matter—the house was full of smoke—he had heard dreadful screams—he recognized the odor of burning human flesh. We soon found out that he was right. A poor old woman, a servant in the next house, had fallen on the stove and burned herself so badly that she soon died. It was a sad case, and at breakfast all spoke gloomily of the disaster, and felt low-spirited. The landlady even cried, and that depressed us still more. She said:
“‘Oh, to think of such a fate! She was so good, and so kind and so faithful. She had worked hard and honestly in that family for twenty-eight long years, and now she is roasted to death—yes, roasted to crisp, like so much beef. Poor faithful creature, how she was cooked! I am but a poor woman, but even if I have to scrimp to do it, I will put up a tombstone over that lone sufferer’s grave! Mr. Riley, if you would have the goodness to think up a little epitaph to put on it which would sort of describe the awful way which she met her—’
“And Riley said, without a smile, ‘Put it ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’
There were a few chuckles that were drowned by the ringing of a small gong in the hall.
“Is that the dinner bell?” I told the assembled. “Mighty fine. I hope that’s pork I smell! I would even eat a publisher!”
* * * *
By the time the third course was being wheeled in, I was as jumpy as a cat on coals. There were footmen behind the chairs, servants bringing in wine and the platters, and still no sign of Holmes. The bruiser of a butler came in. He whispered into MacNaughton’s ear. He dropped his napkin onto his plate and stood.
“I apologize, but I must leave ye for a moment.”
I saw my opportunity. Holmes or no Holmes, I must see for myself to that blasted paper! I counted to a hundred, and then stood. The table fell silent. I excused myself and took care to look abashed, and they took my meaning. I must visit the water-closet immediately.
With the dining room door closed behind me, I rabbited across the hall to his office. The gas had been turned off, but I felt my way around by memory until I reached his desk. I struck a match and yanked opened the drawer. The key lay glittering in the feeble light. I pocketed it, tiptoed across the carpet, then peeped through the door. The staircase was free of servants. I vaulted the steps to the billiard room. With typical Scotch thriftiness, MacNaughton had the gas jets turned low to the point of gloominess in anticipation of our return. In a moment I was on my knees before the sideboard, my ears flapping for any noise. But all I could hear was the faint murmur of conversation from downstairs.
I opened the cabinet and pawed for the keyhole. The light did not penetrate, and I could not find it. Cursing, I struck a match. The brass keyhole gleamed in the flaring light. I jammed in the key, turned and the door popped, pushed by a hidden spring.
Then my blood froze. The hallway door opened. There was the sound of a woman’s laughter, and MacNaughton shushing her.
I closed the secret door. The voices were growing nearer. I closed the outer door and sought a bolt-hole. Nothing suited. The room looked like a gentleman’s club. Heavy couches against the wall; club chairs against the far wall. The voices were coming closer. I could hear her throaty chuckle.
I was in a desperate fix. I was a rabbit in the hunter’s sights. The billiard table was nearest, so I spider-crawled across the carpet and dove underneath it, where I came face to face with Holmes.
“What—?”
He prevented further conversation with the palm of his hand, just in time for the hall door opened.
“We must hurry, my love,” MacNaughton was purring. “I’ve left my guests at table and must return soon. Was it difficult getting the letters?”
“Naw,” her Cockney voice cut through the gloom. “The old dear had ’em in plain sight, like he was waiting to hand them over. It was all I could do to not bust out laughing.”
The crinkle of papers could be heard as MacNaughton shoved them in
his jacket pocket.
“Aren’t you going to keep them in the safe, love?”
“Not yet, not yet.” MacNaughton sounded almost giddy over his newest acquisition. “The key’s in my desk, and I don’t have time.”
“So when are we going to have time, dearie?” From under the gloom of the billiard table, I stifled a sneeze. The house servants did not do their master’s duty by cleaning the cobwebs from here.
All we could see was the tail of her skirt as she was backed across the floor toward our hiding place. There were giggles. The silence was broken by moist smacks of the most disgusting kind. Surely they weren’t going to . . . not above us!
“Oi!”
A pair of men’s legs appeared at the door. The scene had spun on a point from lurid romance to a domestic drama. A man had entered the scene, stage center.
“Oi thought so!” he roared. “Ye said y’were going out for a drink, so I follows you and I find this!”
“No!” she screamed.
There was a bang. MacNaughton’s legs jerked and he slid into view as he hit the floor with a moan, staring at the ceiling and clutching his chest.
“Clemens,” Holmes hissed. “The gas! Turn up the gas!”
I crawled out from under the table, found a jet and turned the key, throwing light onto that scene of confusion. The man was gone, leaving behind a haze of gunpowder smoke. The woman was bent over and cradling MacNaughton’s head. His shirtfront sprouted the red rose of blood in the center of his chest. Holmes bent over him and opened his jacket and shirt. MacNaughton was moaning, his face pale, his breathing rapid, but he was still moving, and even to an untutored eye that indicated that the fellow is still living.
“You better leave,” Holmes said. Even then, I noticed he omitted my name.
“What about my paper?”
“There’ll be a bigger scandal if you’re seen at the home of a blackmailer who has been shot.” He wiped his bloody fingers on MacNaughton’s coat and stood. He led me out to the hall. I could hear the murmur of natives gathering at the foot of the stairs. They had heard gunfire, their host was absent, and soon someone would build up the nerve to climb up and see. The butler appeared at the top of the steps from the basement and was holding a confab with the other servants.
