The same face also bore an expression of grave disapproval and distaste, which I would soon learn was a fixture rather than a reaction.
Holmes had already been standing during his righteous tirade, and had not yet resumed his seat. He bowed, and said calmly, ‘Lady Bracknell, I believe your nephew was about to tell me some information of significance.’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ Lady Bracknell replied. Her tones called to mind the trumpeting of a haughty elephant. ‘Information of significance is invariably vulgar. The safest particulars are those pertaining to nothing of importance whatsoever.’
‘I beg leave to differ, my lady,’ Holmes replied quietly.
Lady Bracknell retrieved a lorgnette which hung from a gold chain pinned to her breast, and examined my friend through it for a lengthy interval. He lowered his eyes and politely submitted to her stare.
Finally, she asked, ‘Ernest, who is this controversial gentleman?’
Ernest stammered a little in his hurry to explain. ‘This is Sherlock Holmes, Aunt Augusta. He’s a consulting detective working with Scotland Yard. He’s here about the… occurrence last night. Oh, and this is Dr John Watson.’
‘We have been helping Mr Holmes with his inquiries, Aunt Augusta,’ Algernon supplied smoothly.
‘That shows very poor judgement,’ Lady Bracknell decreed. ‘A perfectly successful inquiry would be one which elicited no information at all. It would do nothing to imperil the established order, yet satisfy all concerned that nothing more could have been done.’
‘I assure you, Lady Bracknell,’ Holmes sighed, ‘that that is precisely the kind of success towards which your young relatives have been endeavouring to assist me.’
‘I feel bound to tell you that you are not a person I should have chosen to find in their company, Mr Holmes.’ Lady Bracknell’s tone was like a frozen waterfall. ‘Your influence upon them is unlikely to be admirable, and may prove alarmingly instructive.’
Holmes said, ‘This is not a social call. As Mr Moncrieff says, I am here on behalf of the police.’
‘That in itself,’ Her Ladyship decreed, ‘is hardly a sign of respectability. No doubt the excesses of the constabulary classes must be tolerated until such time as they can be eliminated or reformed, but for a gentleman to interest himself in their activities is to risk overturning a status quo decreed by providence and statistics. And that, Mr Holmes, smacks of a revolutionary tendency that I cannot condone.’
Holmes smiled. ‘I am pleased to say that the only revolutions which interest me are in the sphere of knowledge.’
‘Indeed,’ tolled Lady Bracknell sceptically. She crossed to a divan and settled herself upon it. Gratefully, the rest of us sat. ‘Mr Holmes, my nephews have been wayward at times.’ Algernon and Ernest looked embarrassed. ‘Their smoking and drinking, their gambling, their frequenting low forms of the theatre, reputable pursuits though they are for a young gentleman, cannot hide that fact from me. But it is quite impossible that they should be so vulgar as to turn to crime, just as you should have had better taste than to turn to its suppression.’
Holmes reiterated, ‘Nobody in this house is under suspicion at present, Lady Bracknell. I am here merely in search of information – though I am afraid it may turn out to be of significance,’ he added with a small smile.
‘Last night’s events are much to be regretted,’ Her Ladyship stated sternly. ‘Poor Lady Harbury was so overcome by shock that she fainted into the arms of three separate footmen, and it is the purest good fortune that she had absented herself before the policemen arrived. The decent course now is to put the deplorable affair behind us and do our utmost to ensure that it is forgotten. To indulge any further curiosity on the topic seems to me incorrigibly morbid.’
‘That surely cannot be the course of action you would recommend to the police?’
‘Even the police may hardly be allowed to satisfy their inquisitiveness on every trifling matter. It will only give them an exaggerated sense of their own importance. If there is any particular fact that it would be instructive for them to know, they may be sure that we shall tell them. Their judgement can hardly be allowed to hold sway in the matter.’
Holmes’s smile became a little steely. ‘Perhaps not. But they have me acting on their behalf.’
‘Indeed,’ Lady Bracknell intoned, her disapproval palpably intensifying. ‘I am told that your name is in the newspapers this morning, Mr Holmes. I read only the society columns myself, but I allow Lord Bracknell to indulge himself, strictly during the hour of breakfast, in more sensational fare. He tells me that you and this Dr James, or John, Watson, arrested Lord Arthur Savile yesterday on a charge of murder. Tell me, sir, is this lamentable aspersion correct?’
‘That I arrested him is true enough,’ Holmes replied. ‘The murder charge will be decided in court.’
‘And what evidence have you for his culpability?’
‘His handprint,’ said my friend.
‘A handprint?’ Lady Bracknell’s voice elevated itself several octaves in disbelief.
Holmes did not flinch, but his voice sounded a little tighter as he said, ‘The case is a complicated one and I would not wish to pre-empt its presentation in court. Suffice it to say that I am quite satisfied of Lord Arthur’s guilt.’
‘If the only safeguard against young gentlemen being carried away from their homes and turned over to the police is to be their innocence,’ Lady Bracknell intoned, ‘then we live in an era the depredations of which may only be compared to the iniquities of the French Revolution.’
‘I can assure you, it is not a general principle. The facts of the case took some effort to uncover, but I am quite convinced of them. Lord Arthur is a murderer. So far I have found no indication that this is true of any of your relatives.’ Holmes was pre-empting the truth here, at least as I understood it, but it was clear that Lady Bracknell would need to be placated if we were to make any headway here today.
Undeterred, she replied, ‘Then I advise you to desist from your investigations at once, while such a happy state of affairs still pertains, and take up some inoffensive pastime such as stamp-collecting or a career in the church.’
‘Lady Bracknell, are you suggesting that if I continue, I will find some evidence against your family?’
‘I never suggest, Mr Holmes. When I wish to make something known, be it information or instruction, there is no element of suggestion whatsoever. Unlike yours, my principle is a general one. I do not approve of this modern obsession with discovering the facts when a multitude of pleasing illusions is available. Misconceptions are both simple and reassuring. Facts are neither.’
‘Mama believes that ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit,’ Gwendolen put in. ‘If you touch it, it loses its bloom.’
‘Whereas I regard ignorance as the most stubborn of weeds,’ replied Holmes stiffly, ‘and any garden the worse for its growing there. But there, again, I am afraid we must agree to differ.’
‘I shall agree to no such thing,’ said Lady Bracknell decidedly. ‘My view is that which I have stated. If you choose to differ from it, that is entirely your own affair.’
Holmes bowed again. ‘As you say, Lady Bracknell. In that case, Dr Watson and I will bid you good day.’
Confused, I stumbled to my feet and followed Holmes as he strode towards the door. A footman held it open for us, but at the last moment, my friend turned.
‘Incidentally, Lady Bracknell,’ he asked, ‘the dead man gave his name as Bunbury. Does that have any meaning for you?’
Lady Bracknell’s eyes widened, and she deployed the lorgnette once again. ‘I am quite positive,’ she told us with ringing conviction, ‘that none of my family has ever had dealings with any person of that name. Good day, Mr Holmes.’
Behind her I saw Algernon steel himself in anticipation as she turned, but at that point the footman closed the door behind us. Merriman appeared, in readiness to show us out, but Holmes held up a hand.
‘A moment, Merriman
,’ he said. ‘I think the family will be distracted for a few minutes at least. I shall need admittance to the library balcony once again, if you please.’
The butler paled. ‘Mr Holmes, sir, I do not believe that Lady Bracknell would be best pleased if I—’
Holmes fixed him with a stern eye. ‘You know I represent the police in this matter, Merriman. Besides, who has authority in this house, your employer or his aunt?’
‘On the second question,’ said Merriman stiffly, ‘to offer an opinion would hardly be within the purview of my position, nor advisable should I wish to keep it. As it happens, however,’ he added hesitantly, ‘I find that I am unavoidably called away at present, and must ask you to wait upstairs in the library for a short time, while a footman is found to escort you from the premises. I believe that Mr Moncrieff has spent some time smoking on the balcony this morning.’
The butler showed us up to the landing, nodded curtly, and left us outside the library, which Holmes immediately bustled me into.
I said, ‘Holmes, this is extraordinarily rude even for you. We are guests in Mr Moncrieff’s house, and we’ve been left in no doubt that we are no longer welcome. Nobody is in danger, nor are we expecting to effect an arrest. Politeness surely dictates that we should withdraw, rather than placing the servants in such an impossible position.’
Holmes gazed quizzically at me. ‘Watson, in the name of justice you have committed more burglaries and impersonations at my side than I can immediately recall. Outstaying one’s welcome in order to ascertain a fact or two is a mild solecism by comparison.’
Saying this, he opened the French windows and steered me out once more onto the balcony. In the daylight the garden below us looked a much cheerier place, with spring flowers bursting forth in bunches across its well-kept borders, although the grisly stain on the sundial’s former plinth remained. The drawing room where Lady Bracknell was presumably even now haranguing her younger relatives overlooked the square at the front of the house, so we stood unobserved for the moment.
‘Attend carefully, Watson,’ said Holmes, withdrawing Mabel Goring’s tattered and dirty shawl from an inner pocket of his jacket. ‘It is likely that we will have but one opportunity.’
He spent a long moment sizing up the distance to Mrs Winterbourne’s tree and hefting the crumpled ball of the shawl, then hurled the grubby bundle in an arc up and across the garden with all his might. At first it hurtled as swiftly as a cricket ball towards a batsman’s willow, but as it did so it unfurled rapidly, slowing itself down as more of it was presented to the resisting air, until after a few seconds it was more fluttering than flying. It sank gently, alighting at last on the bottommost branches of the tree, a good six feet beneath where it had hung the night before.
‘A different initial angle and speed would make a difference, of course,’ said Holmes, ‘but not, I think, a very significant one. A demon bowler might perhaps reach the position where we saw the garment last night, or it might be done with some kind of catapult, but neither of those would have been easily obtainable by Lady Goring last night. No, if she threw it, it was not done from here.’
He hurried out onto the landing, where a footman with a pinched and worried look was waiting to usher us from the house with indecent haste.
‘I think you were right when you suggested that I was being unnecessarily cautious, Holmes,’ I conceded, though not before we were standing safely outside on the pavement. ‘Frankly, though, Lady Bracknell is a rather intimidating person.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Watson,’ Holmes replied, and his voice was suspiciously firm. For a moment I thought that Her Ladyship had oppressed him as much as she had me, but looking at him I saw that he was concealing a smile. I realised with surprise that during his conversation with the Moncrieff family’s matriarch, my friend, mercurial as ever, had gone from his incandescent anger to a wary amusement. Perverse though her views were, he had actually enjoyed exchanging conversational sallies with that formidable woman.
I suddenly had a sense of what it might be like to be Holmes: always the most dynamic and forceful person in a room, always the centre of everybody’s attention. He revelled in it, of course – his inclinations were nothing if not dramatic – but it must be refreshing nevertheless on the rare occasions when he encountered a rival for that status.
‘But what we suspected is true,’ he said decidedly. ‘It is quite clear that Bunbury’s name is known to them all, and is of some especial significance to Algernon Moncrieff.’
‘But who was he?’ I asked. ‘Was the dead man the same Bunbury that they knew, or some relative? From their first reaction to the name, I would have supposed they thought him dead already.’
‘Perhaps a stranger merely gave a name they knew in order to gain their attention. At present we simply do not have sufficient knowledge to guess. We must ask Gregson whether he has made any headway in identifying the dead man.’
By now we were strolling back along Grosvenor Crescent. I glanced back nervously towards Belgrave Square and said, ‘They were all there last night, even Lady Bracknell. If they thought the man knew some shameful family secret, might they not have tried to silence him?’
‘It is a rather extreme hypothesis, Watson. But you’re right, it is not one we may altogether discount. The family’s conspicuous refusal to acknowledge any moral dimension to the situation, and Lady Bracknell’s attempts to discourage my investigation, might point in its favour. The Moncrieffs have already had some embarrassing family history revealed in the popular newspapers, but whether that will have inured them to the experience or made them more averse to having it repeated, I cannot tell. Nor is it obvious what further secrets the family might hold.’
‘Well, that is the nature of secrets,’ I said. ‘Would they really be so malicious as to cast the blame onto Lady Goring, though?’ I could perhaps imagine the Moncrieffs acting individually or collectively to eliminate a threat, but none of them seemed actively spiteful.
‘Not everyone is as chivalrous as you, Watson,’ Holmes said chidingly, but he looked thoughtful, nonetheless.
A hundred yards later, I said, ‘The problem is that we know so little about these people.’
Holmes sighed. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘If they belonged to the criminal classes we could draw on my Index or the police records, but at their level of society one must rely on Burke’s or Debrett’s, and they carry little information that is useful for purposes such as ours. For that we must either listen to gossip or suborn the servants. We may yet need to fall back on the latter.’
We were entering Green Park now, passing beneath another monument to the Duke of Wellington, the gigantic equestrian statue that surmounts the arch bearing his name. It was not the most direct route back to Baker Street, and I realised what Holmes had in mind.
‘You intend to try gossip first?’ I guessed.
‘Indeed, Watson. Our current path will take us to the Albany, where I suggest we avail ourselves of luncheon. After that, I propose we repair to Bradley’s Club on St James’s Street, and speak to our friend Langdale Pike. Of all the men in London, he is best situated to tell us all that is known about the Moncrieffs and their guests.’
I ate well, though Holmes was restless and picked irritably at his food, refusing wine and drinking only water. After lunch, on our way from Piccadilly to St James’s Street, I espied a figure crossing the road some distance ahead of us.
‘Isn’t that Lord Illingworth?’ I asked Holmes, noting the man’s height, broad build and steel-grey whiskers. He appeared not to see a speeding hansom, and the cabbie yelled imprecations while hurriedly changing course to avoid him, nearly running into a grocer’s dray.
‘None other, Watson,’ Holmes agreed. ‘He seems somewhat distracted.’ The diplomat was carrying an envelope, and as we watched he disappeared into a post office, emerging shortly afterwards without it. ‘I am surprised, also, that he is running his own errands.’
‘Should we follow him?’ I asked.
&n
bsp; Holmes said, ‘No. He knows us, and I have no disguise to hand.’ He glanced around for any sign of his Irregulars, the motley force of street urchins whose offices and loyalty he was able to rely upon in return for regular cash payments, but none of them was in evidence. By now Illingworth had almost disappeared in the direction of Trafalgar Square and the Embankment.
Holmes shrugged. ‘I admit his demeanour is intriguing, but pursuing a peer of the realm whom we have no special reason to suspect is unlikely to be the best use of our time. Let us follow our plan and pay our visit to Langdale Pike.’
We found Holmes’s confederate, as always, sitting in the bow window at Bradley’s, where he received visitors of all kinds and, as I understood it, rewarded them lavishly for the information they brought him. He greeted us with the listless, slightly acerbic humour that was the nearest he came to warmth, and bade us sit across from him. Holmes stretched himself out at perfect ease but again refused the offer of wine. I called for tea, settled myself uncomfortably, and tried not to pay attention to the passers-by gawking at us from the pavement of St James’s Street.
I have not often written of Pike, Holmes’s longest-serving and most reliable source of hearsay, chitchat and particularly scandal relating to the upper echelons of London life. A languid, dandified figure, he made a profligate living writing columns of society tittle-tattle for all the worst papers, and had a memory almost as formidable as Holmes’s own, despite the trivial use to which he put it.
‘So, Bunbury’s reared his head again?’ was his first comment when Holmes asked him whether he had heard the name in connection with the Moncrieff family. ‘How amusing. We all thought we’d heard the last of Bunbury when young Algy became engaged to Cecily. Not least Algy himself, I imagine.’
‘Well, he’s dead now,’ I said, a little harshly.
I regret to say that, when Holmes called Pike ‘our friend’, he exaggerated. I confess that I did not care greatly for the man. I considered his profession a parasitical one, and felt that their association did Holmes little credit. Still, it could not be denied that he was the prime conduit for all the gossip worth knowing in London; its one-man intelligence headquarters or, if one were feeling less charitable, its primary effluent pipe.
Sherlock Holmes--The Spider's Web Page 8
