The curious case of the Clockwork Man bas-2

by Mark Hodder

  Midway through May, there arrived at 14 Montagu Place a communique from Herbert Spencer, who was still below stairs at Tichborne House. It was delivered by a small blue and yellow parakeet, which landed on the study windowsill and tapped at the glass.

  Burton had pulled up the sash and exclaimed: “By James! Surely it's Pox?”

  “Shut your trap!” came the squawked response, then: “Message from the beautiful and magnificent Herbert Spencer. The Claimant, Kenealy, Jankyn, Bogle, and moronic Lord Lushington are holdin’ weekly seances in the bloody billiard room. They've been summonin’ the ghost of Lady Mabella. I haven't been able to overhear their conversations with her. Message bleeding well ends.”

  “Well now, I wonder what they're up to?” Burton muttered. “And why is Lushington playing along with them?”

  “Stinky twisted bum-face!” POX JR5 responded.

  “Message for Herbert Spencer,” Burton said. “Get out of there. Take the swans home. Message ends.”

  Pox gave a whistle and flew away.

  By early summer, the Tichborne case was such a cause celebre that legal processes were hastened to bring it to trial as soon as possible. The Claimant was the plaintiff, of course, but, in truth, few people regarded him as such-he was going to have to prove that he was the man he represented himself to be.

  The trial had opened in May.

  Kenealy began by reviewing Sir Roger Tichborne's youth, which, he claimed, was a thoroughly unhappy affair. James Tichborne, he alleged, was an alcoholic and violent father, while the boy's domineering mother was smothering in the extreme.

  Roger had been driven into the company of gamblers and reprobates, and this had eroded his aristocratic nature. It was then further weakened by the terrible ordeal he'd suffered during the many days adrift in a longboat after the sinking of La Bella.

  “Undoubtedly,” said Kenealy, “long exposure to the unremitting sun affected the young man's brain.”

  Rescued, Roger Tichborne was landed at Melbourne and wandered aimlessly through New South Wales until he eventually settled in the little town of Wagga Wagga. He lived there as Tomas Castro, a name borrowed from a man he'd known in South America, and worked as a humble butcher until the day he opened a newspaper and saw Lady Henriette-Felicite’s plea for information.

  After the reading of the affidavits, witnesses for the Claimant had been paraded before the court. They included Anthony Wright Biddulph, one of Sir Roger's distant cousins, who'd mumbled his way through an incoherent statement of support; Lord Rivers, a Rakish aristocrat who'd refused to reveal why he was providing money to the Claimant; and Guildford Onslow, a Liberal member of parliament who was very obviously working his own agenda. A great commotion had then erupted when Colonel Lushington declared himself a firm supporter of “Sir Roger,” even though it was he himself against whom the legal case had been brought.

  Next, a number of Carabineers, who'd served with Tichborne, had come forward, as had residents from the estate, servants, a tailor, Sir Edward Doughty's former coachman, and, unsurprisingly-at least to Burton-Doctor Jankyn.

  When the latter took the stand, he made a point of mentioning that while in the army Roger Tichborne had been tattooed on his left arm by a fellow soldier. The Claimant was asked to remove his jacket and roll up his shirtsleeve. He did so. His left forearm, quite unlike its opposite, was white and slender. On its inner surface, there was tattooed a heart overlaid with an anchor. About four inches above it, a line of rough stitches encircled the arm. The flesh on the other side of it was dark, coarse, and bulged corpulently.

  In mid-June, Edward Kenealy sat down, Henry Hawkins stood up, and the cross-examination commenced.

  Swinburne, in the gallery with Burton, made the observation that Sir Roger seemed to have grown even fatter.

  “Sir Roger?” Burton asked.

  Swinburne massaged his temples, winced, and mumbled: “Why do I keep saying that? I meant the Claimant, of course.”

  The court clerk said: “State your name, please.”

  “Sir Roger-Charles-Doughty Tichborne,” came the drawling reply. Hawkins tested the Claimant's education, his knowledge of the Tichborne family, and his familiarity with Roger Tichborne's history. To anyone with a modicum of intelligence, the replies were wholly unsatisfactory, yet somehow, opinions of the Claimant's performance differed in the extreme.

  One journalist wrote: In all the fifteen years I have spent reporting court dramas, I have never witnessed such a shambolic performance as that offered by the Tichborne Claimant. That anyone can doubt he is anything other than an audacious confidence trickster fair boggles this writer's mind.

  Another countered with: For shame! For shame! That a man should return home and be subjected to this pitiful circus! What foul plot has Sir Roger Tichborne in its clutches? For none who see him can possibly believe he is anyone other than the person he says he is.

  The questioning continued through into July. During those hot, clammy weeks, the Claimant visibly swelled, growing so obese that the witness stand had to be rebuilt to accommodate him. His gums bled constantly, and when three of his back teeth dropped out, his speech became so difficult to follow that an amplifying screen was erected beside him.

  Hawkins, by contrast, had been loud, erudite, and devastatingly effective.

  “This person who presents himself to you as a lost aristocrat,” he'd proclaimed to the jury, “is nothing but a conspirator, a perjurer, a forger, an impostor, a dastard-a villain!”

  He'd then brought forth the first of his witnesses and had begun, piece by piece, to tear apart the Claimant's story.

  By the third week of July, the jury had heard enough. They stopped the trial and asked the judge to allow them to come to a verdict. He agreed to their request.

  The Claimant was found guilty of perjury. He was immediately arrested and incarcerated in Newgate Prison.

  It was now a criminal matter.

  Scotland Yard began to investigate his background.

  So did Sir Richard Francis Burton.

  The king's agent had travelled to New Orleans on the troop-carrying rotorship Pegasus. There he'd boarded a steamer, which transported him down to Buenos Aires, where he'd fallen in with an Englishman named William Maxwell, who was searching for his missing brother. Burton had helped, and the subsequent adventure-which he intended to log under the title The Case of the Wayward Wendigo -had, coincidentally, led to the completion of his mission.

  He now reported the result to Lord Palmerston: “I know where Tomas Castro is.”

  “The man whose name the Claimant borrowed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Burton told him.

  Lord Palmerston's eyebrows did not shoot upward, but that was only because they were no longer capable of such a movement.

  “You need to speak to him,” he said.

  The king's agent grunted his agreement.

  They spoke for a further forty minutes, then the prime minister turned his attention to a pile of parliamentary papers.

  “I have to deal with matters of economy and foreign policy now, Captain. You are dismissed.”

  Burton rose to leave.

  “One more thing-”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “In your report-these Eyes of Naga stones-”

  “Yes?”

  “They're not the only black diamonds in existence. Am I correct?”

  “You are, sir. There are others. However, the Eyes seem to be the only ones possessed of the peculiar properties that Sir Charles Babbage noted.”

  “Hmm.”

  Burton made to move to the door.

  “Wait!” Palmerston snapped. “I have-I have a confession to make.”

  “A confession, sir?”

  “I have not been entirely truthful with you. At the end of the Spring Heeled Jack case, I informed you that Edward Oxford's time-jumping suit had been destroyed.”

  “It hasn't?” asked Burton, with mock surprise. He'd never believ
ed that particular assertion.

  “No, it hasn't. I wanted it examined. If you recollect, Oxford wore a circular device attached to the front of it.”

  “I remember.”

  “The machinery inside it is baffling. There are no moving parts, for a start. My people have yet to identify a single component of the thing they can understand.”

  “So?”

  “So they found six small black diamonds fitted into the device.”

  “Do they emit a low, almost inaudible hum, Prime Minister?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, they do.”

  “Then in all probability, sometime in the future, they will be cut from one of the Eyes of Naga.”

  The rapid clicks and scrapes of a fencing match filled Burton's study. It was combat a la Florentine -he and Admiral Lord Nelson were holding long knives in their off-hands, using them as a secondary defence.

  Burton was being forced backward around one of his three desks by his valet. As he came abreast a bookcase, the clockwork man “broke time,” suddenly changing the tempo of his attack, which caused Burton to miscalculate his parry. It was a classic move, but exercised with such speed and precision that it completely fooled the king's agent, whose foil flew wide. The brass man followed up with a balestra -a forward hop-and an attaque composee, which skipped lightly past Burton's instinctively raised knife to penetrate his defence before he could regain control.

  The famous explorer grunted as the tip of his opponent's foil prodded into his right shoulder.

  “Superb!” he cried enthusiastically. “Now do it again. I want to examine your change of balance when you break time. En garde!”

  The competition continued.

  Burton puffed and panted with exertion as his foil met and parried the clockwork man's thrusts. He backed across the hearthrug, avoided a prise de fer, and tried to press his opponent's foil aside. His valet responded by sliding his weapon from a high line to a low line, then twisted and lunged. Burton countered but Admiral Lord Nelson's move had been a feint; the brass man broke time again, skipped sideways then forward, and his attaque composee flashed past the opposing blade, his point stabbing hard against Burton's sternum.

  “Bismillah, but you're good! Again! Again! En garde!”

  Their foils clicked together.

  There came a knock at the door.

  “Not now!”

  “You have a visitor, Sir Richard.”

  “I don't want to be disturbed, Mrs. Angell!”

  “It's Detective Inspector Honesty!”

  Burton sighed. “Disengage,” he ordered.

  Admiral Lord Nelson lowered his weapon. Burton did the same and pulled off his mask.

  “Oh, very well,” he called in exasperation. “Send him up!”

  He took his valet's foil and placed it, and his own, in a case that lay on one of the desks.

  “We'll continue later, Nelson.”

  The clockwork man saluted, walked across the room, and stood at attention next to the bureau between the two windows.

  Moments later, there was a short sharp rap at the door.

  “Come!”

  It opened and Detective Inspector Honesty stepped in. There were beads of sweat on his brow.

  “Hallo! Too hot. Hellish weather.”

  “Come in, old chap. Take that confounded jacket off if you don't want to cook!”

  The Scotland Yard man divested himself of his outer garment, hung it on a coat hook behind the door, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and settled into a chair. He looked around the study with interest, running his eyes over the swords hanging on the walls, the heavily loaded bookcases, the teakwood chests, the pistols displayed in the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast, the huge African spear leaning in a corner, the three big desks, and the many souvenirs of Burton's travels.

  Detective Inspector Honesty was a slightly built man and rather fussily dressed, but he had a wiry strength about him and Burton knew that he was a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat. His brown mustache was extravagantly wide, waxed, and curled upward at the ends. His hair was parted in the middle and lacquered flat. His eyes were grey. There was a monocle clenched in the right.

  “Back yesterday?” he asked, in his characteristically clipped manner.

  “The day before,” Burton answered. “I spent most of yesterday reporting to the prime minister.”

  “Any luck in South America?”

  “Yes, I know where Tomas Castro is.”

  “Do you, by crikey!” Honesty exclaimed, sitting upright. “Where?”

  “In the Bethlem Royal Hospital.”

  “Bedlam? Lunatic asylum? Here in London?”

  “Yes.”

  Burton took a cheroot from a box on the mantelpiece, applied a lucifer to it, and sat opposite the detective. He gave a quick nod of permission when Honesty half pulled a pipe from his waistcoat pocket. As the policeman went through the ritual of scraping its bowl and pressing in a plug of tobacco, the king's agent explained.

  “I've had rather a high old time of it these weeks past. I shan't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that I got caught up in an adventure that took me from Buenos Aires across Argentina and into Chile. There, I was able to trace the Castro family to Melipilla, a town on the main road between Valparaiso and Santiago. I met Pedro Castro, the son of Tomas, who revealed that his father went missing almost a decade ago while prospecting in the mountains with a Frenchman. This individual had been staying with the family for some weeks. I showed Pedro a daguerreotype of the Claimant. He recognised the face as the lodger's but was astonished at the size of his body. The Frenchman, apparently, had been very slim.”

  Honesty put a match to his pipe and muttered, “Impossible to get that fat. Even in ten years.”

  Burton nodded, and continued, “So Tomas and this Frenchman spent weeks prospecting until one day they never came back. Nothing further was heard until earlier this year, when rumours reached Pedro that a person named Tomas Castro was in an asylum in Santiago. He rode there to make enquiries and was told that, around the time of his father's disappearance, a man had been delivered to the establishment in a state of near insanity. He'd later, during a moment of lucidity, given his name as Castro. Naturally, Pedro wanted to see him, but was informed that the patient had recently been transported to London to be incarcerated in the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Apparently, he'd turned out to be from a rich English family. Pedro therefore concluded that the lunatic in question was neither his father nor the Frenchman.”

  “English!”

  “Yes. So now we have to find out exactly who that man is.”

  “Roger Tichborne?”

  “It seems likely. You'll remember that he was raised by a French mother and had a French accent.”

  “Which the Claimant doesn't.”

  “Notably.”

  Honesty asked, “Who took him from the Santiago asylum?”

  “Ah, that's an interesting point.”

  “It is?”

  “He was removed by a rather well-known individual.”

  “Who?”

  “Nurse Florence Nightingale.”

  “The Lady of the Lamp!”

  “The very same. Which, considering I was told she's missing, intrigues me a great deal!”

  “Told by whom?”

  “Isambard Kingdom Brunel, at the time of the Brundleweed robbery.”

  “By gum! What's she up to? We must see that man in Bedlam! A police raid, perhaps?”

  “Good heavens, no! That would be far too heavy-handed! No, no, softly, softly, catchee monkey. Palmerston's men, Burke and Hare, are preparing false papers. In a couple of days, they and I will enter the asylum in the guise of government inspectors.”

  Honesty grunted and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.

  Burton pulled a cord at the side of the fireplace. He and his guest sat in contemplative silence until Mrs. Angell answered the summons. Burton requested a pot of coffee. As the old lady left, he turned back to the
Yard man and said: “So Commissioner Mayne sent you to Australia to find out more about our faux aristocrat? How went it?”

  “Went well. I took Commander Krishnamurthy. Remember him? Fine fellow. Head of Flying Squad now!”

  “Yes, so I've heard. What did you two find down there?”

  Honesty bent and placed his pipe on the hearth. He licked his lips, interlaced his fingers, and rested his hands in his lap. He eschewed long sentences, but he was now in a position where they might be necessary, and he needed to prepare himself.

  The study door creaked open and footsteps padded across the room.

  “Hello, Fidget,” Burton muttered. He reached down to fondle his basset hound's ears. “I'm afraid you'll have to wait for your walk.”

  The dog sat at his feet and regarded the man opposite.

  “In Wagga Wagga,” Honesty began, “no one has heard of Tomas Castro. No one recognised the face in the daguerreotype. They did speak, however, of a man named Arthur Orton, a local butcher. Tremendously fat. Had an insatiable appetite for raw meat. Mysteriously disappeared.”

  “When?”

  “Four weeks before the Claimant arrived in Paris.”

  “Ah!”

  “Orton learned his skill as a butcher in London. He originally hailed from Wapping. Upon my return, I found the family. Interviewed his sisters. They say he moved to Australia some fifteen years ago. Never heard of again. I showed them the daguerreotype. They say it's not him.”

  The study door swung open and Mrs. Angell entered with the coffee. She poured them each a cup.

  “Thank you, my dear,” said Detective Inspector Honesty. The housekeeper smiled. There came an impatient hammering at the front door.

  “I'll get it,” she said, and departed.

  “I have the distinct impression, Inspector,” said Burton, “that a very tangled web has been woven.”

  “I should say so. Who's assaulting your door?”

  “I'd recognise that knock anywhere. It's our mutual friend William Trounce.”