“Why did you pick the Renaissance playwrights?” Barnett asked.
“They was on top of the stack.”
“Good thinking,” Barnett agreed.
The mummer reappeared with another bottle of the port and carefully decanted it into the wine jug. “We’re running low on bottles,” he said. “Best hurry and drink it up before it’s gone.”
The logic appealed to Esterman, who happily refilled his glass. “A superior tipple, i’ faith,” he said. He held the glass to the side of his nose for a moment and then drained it. “Pardon,” he said, getting up and weaving toward the back. “I think I’d best go see about a dog.”
“He can put it away, can’t he?” the mummer commented as Esterman disappeared out the back door.
“He’d better get more talkative pretty soon,” Barnett said, “or we’ll run out of port.”
“Oh,” the mummer said, “we ran out two bottles ago. I’ve been refilling the bottles from our landlord’s own stock.”
“Ah!” said Barnett. “I thought I detected a difference.”
“Blimey if you did!” Mummer Tolliver grinned a toothy grin. “After finishing the first two bottles I could have mixed gin with horse piss and colored it red, and you both would have drunk it happily and praised it fulsomely.”
Barnett smiled. “You may be right,” he said. “I won’t ask what you would have colored it red with.”
Esterman weaved back to his seat. “As oft as wine has played the peppermill,” he intoned, “and robbed me of my coat and jacket, well … I often ponder what the vintners buy … Could be as thirsty as this stuff so swell!” He sat down with a thump.
“Indeed,” Barnett agreed.
“If not in word,” the mummer suggested, “but close enough—close enough.”
“I merely state,” Esterman said ponderously, “that this is good plonk. Good plonk indeed.”
“Lord Thornton-Hoxbary doesn’t think so, I guess,” Barnett said. “Couldn’t interest his man in as much as half a case.”
“I could of told you visiting Widdersign-on-Rip … er … Ribble would be a waste of you gentlemen’s time,” Esterman smugged. “His Lordship don’t lay out a farthing till he’s squeezed it bone dry, but you wouldn’t have listened to me nohow, now would you?”
“Probably not,” Barnett admitted, “but we’re listening to you now.”
“Parsimonious, is His Lordship?” the mummer asked.
“If that means miserly, mean, tight-fisted, then you might say so. Ain’t no one around here what would argue with you.”
“He seems to have been pretty generous with you,” Barnett said, looking around.
“You mean this place?” Esterman asked. “The Fox and Hare? Well, it ain’t as if he gave me the deed outright, is it? I mean, he has an interest in the place. Only he don’t consider it seemly, or some such, for a peer to be a publican, so we don’t talk it about.”
“That explains it, then,” Barnett said.
“Besides,” Esterman added, “he had to, didn’t he? It was only right.”
Barnett leaned across the bar. “Did he, then? Why was that?”
Esterman drained his glass, blinked twice, smiled across the bar at his guests, and slowly leaned forward until he was resting on his nose. His eyes closed.
Barnett rapped on the bar. “Mr. Esterman!” he said sharply. “Landlord!”
Esterman turned his face until it was resting on his right ear. His eyes remained closed.
“P’raps we should let the man sleep,” the mummer suggested. “P’raps he’s told us enough if we parse it properly.”
“Perhaps,” Barnett agreed. “Perhaps I’ll go upstairs.”
“I’ll do a bit of scouting whilst our landlord slumbers,” the mummer said. “No telling what I might turn up.”
[CHAPTER SIX]
THE SPANISH HOUSE
Who has known all the evil before us,
Or the tyrannous secrets of time?
Though we match not the dead men that bore us
At a song, at a kiss, at a crime—
Though the heathen outface and outlive us,
And our lives and our longings are twain—
Ah, forgive us our virtues, forgive us,
Our Lady of Pain.
—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
THE WALLED ESTATE ON THE SOUTHWEST CORNER of Regency Square extended for forty feet along the square and twice that when it turned down Regency Street on one side and Little Horneby Mews on the other. A twelve-foot-high redbrick wall surrounded it, fronted by a thick blackthorn hedge first planted the year Nelson and his ships visited Egypt. If one stood far enough back from the wall, one could glimpse the top floor of the Georgian mansion within. Once the residence of the now-defunct Barons Wysland, it was set well inside the wall and surrounded by an impeccably groomed lawn with a gardener’s cottage, gazebos, and a small frog pond. At the moment there were no frogs in residence. The wide doors of a carriage house opened onto the mews.
The property was presently tenanted by a secretive society known by those permitted such knowledge as Le Château d’Espagne, although it had no particular connection with either France or Spain. Its membership, which comprised L’Ordre du Château, was carefully self-chosen, each member free to suggest candidates, who would then be accepted or not according to the whim of the chatelain, master of the order, who was seldom seen and never spoken to directly. The name he was known by, Giles Paternoster, was certainly not the one he was born with. The stories told of him were grotesque and spoke of unnatural vices, but perhaps they were exaggerations, clever fictions crafted to be good for business. Or perhaps not.
Natyana, the dark-haired mistress of the house, her long fingernails bright scarlet but for the one ebon nail on the ring finger of her right hand, was part German, part Levantine, and part someone her mother never talked about. Most of the staff looked to be Egyptian or Moroccan, and the boys and girls who serviced the guests had been recruited from Paris, Rome, Belgrade, Vienna, and half a dozen other European cities. They were little different from the slum children of London except for their native tongue, but they quickly picked up enough English to serve, and their accents made them seem exotic. They were sent back whence they had come on or about their fifteenth birthday, when their services were no longer desired.
The members and their guests arrived in carriages or chaises with the family crests or other devices on the doors discreetly covered over. Some of the more cautious were picked up at a place of their choosing by an unmarked black four-wheeler driven by a small, thin man with a long, twisted nose and piercing black eyes set well back in his skull-like face. His top hat, cape, trousers, gloves, and boots were black, and his face was as white as though it had been dusted with the finest flour.
Both members and guests were expected—required—to have their faces masked before passing through the gate and arriving at the front door. A domino would suffice, but many of the masks were quite elaborate, and some showed more of their wearer’s soul than would his naked face.
Entrance to the Château was obtained by showing the doorman a talisman and whispering a word. The word was changed monthly, the talisman yearly. This year’s talisman was a gilded cock, about two inches across, pierced through the tail feathers for a small gold ring so that it could be hung around the neck on a slender gold chain and worn between shirt and chest. The word for the month was “Cybele,” the name of the mother of the gods of Olympus. It is said that the ancient cult of Cybele honored her by performing orgiastic dances and unspeakable acts.
The brougham that stopped before the gate to Le Château d’Espagne just after dusk this Friday, the nineteenth day of September, was a deep maroon color trimmed in the blackest of blacks. A thin gilt stripe outlined each of the maroon panels. The driver and footman wore powdered wigs and red and gold tailcoats with oversized gold buttons over puffy black breeches terminating in a pair of white stockings just below the knee. It was a style of livery aping the
court dress of the eighteenth century that the servants of the nobility seemed loath to give up.
Two men wearing black half-capes over their evening clothes emerged from the brougham, one tall and slim and elegant, the other a bit shorter and stocky, with hunched shoulders and small eyes that shifted constantly about as though looking for hidden dangers behind every lamppost. They paused to don masks: the slim man a half-mask of pressed gold with black eyebrows and a pencil-thin black mustache champlevé that covered eyes and nose but left the mouth visible, and the stocky man a black puffy-faced half-mask that covered the nose but left off at the mouth and the brown beard below it.
A third man, enfolded in a great dark blue cape with a blue muffler wrapped around his face and a squat top hat pulled low over his eyes, dropped off the brougham and settled for a long wait outside the château walls. The brougham pulled away.
Passing through the wrought-iron gate, the two masked men crossed to the heavy oaken door of the château and knocked. A small square opening appeared in the door and an eye peered out, and the tall man dangled his talisman by its gold chain in front of the eye and giggled. “Cybele,” he whispered in a high, piercing whisper, and giggled again.
The door swung open, and a large man, dark hued and imposing of girth, dressed in breeches and tunic of red and gold brocade and wearing a gold turban, bowed and bade them welcome. Not quite suppressing a final giggle, the tall man tucked his talisman back under his shirt and advanced into the marble-tiled entrance way, followed closely by his companion. A cloakroom was just inside the door on the right, and behind its counter a comely young girl, unclothed except for a man’s bow tie and a cummerbund, stood ready to receive their capes. The tall man passed his over with an elegant sweeping gesture and then handed the girl a white pasteboard on which had been hand-printed the word PECCAVI. The card was promptly put through a slot in a locked cherrywood box. Each member picked his own private word, which identified him for mundane financial purposes, and only Master Paternoster possessed the book that coupled the member with his chosen word.
Beyond the entrance was an ebon, gold, and ivory hallway, the ebony polished to a gleaming shine, lighted by a row of small gold gas lamps set along the left-hand wall, inches from the ivory ceiling. A gaily colored fresco along the ceiling depicted scenes of the sort found on Greek vases of the classical period. The vases on which these sorts of scenes were found were kept in the private rooms of museums, for viewing by serious scholars only.
There were eight rooms along the hallway, each decorated in a different style. The first on the right was a re-creation of chambers in the seraglio of an Eastern potentate, or at least what a well-read European might imagine such chambers to look like. It had red and green silk drapes descending from the ceiling at seemingly random intervals; the floor was covered with an oversized Isfahan carpet, on which round leather-covered ottomans were scattered with a casual hand. A smattering of habitués were lounging about talking softly and accepting an occasional glass of champagne, hock, madeira, or absinthe from one of the girls in their frilly white chemises, or one of several young lads clad in the uniforms of some of Britain’s better public schools.
On the left was the library: easy chairs with conveniently placed lamps, desks at which to write or read, racks with current newspapers and magazines, and dark cherrywood bookshelves, ceiling high, filled with books bound in buckram, leather, linen, and silk. Books on history, religion, and natural philosophy filled the shelves, along with classical authors and a smattering of fiction, but the great majority of the works fell into that class known variously as erotica, exotica, and French. There were the works of Ovid, Catullus, Sappho, Boccaccio, Petronius, Mlle. de Sapay, Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the Marquis de Sade. An unbound copy of the rare first edition of Burton’s Kama Shastra, or the Hindoo Art of Love was in a closed case, but a dozen leather-bound copies of the later, expanded Kama Sutra sat on the shelves. There were multiple copies of The Misfortunes of Virtue, Venus in Furs, and The Secret Manual of the House of Jade. There were books on rough paper with flimsy covers and titles like Six Months of Sodom, A Man and a Maid, The Naughty Schoolgirl, What Miss Flaybum Remembers, and The Book of Bad Boys. On the shelves holding artwork there were erotic paintings, etchings, and prints covering a span of many centuries, and a fine assortment of penny postcards that could not conceivably have been sent through the mails.
One of the housemen, dressed all in black and wearing a domino mask, stood in the hall, and the tall man beckoned to him and murmured a few words in his ear. The houseman nodded and turned. “Follow me, please,” he said.
The houseman led the tall man and his companion past the delights of these two rooms and the next two, whose doors were closed, and turned in at the third room on the left. It resembled a boys’ locker room, with several rows of lockers and between them wooden benches at which the boys could change. Around the walls of the faux locker room were red and black leather couches, where the adults could sit and watch the boys at play. There were a dozen or so barely pubescent boys in the room, sporting about with towels or wrestling in a friendly manner, as boys will. Particularly if the boys have received instruction in just what sort of sporting about will please such older men as are pleased at the sight of young lads sporting about. The houseman saw his two charges in and bowed briefly to them, and then left the room, closing the door behind him.
Five men rested on various of the encircling couches, watching the young lads as they flicked each other’s bottoms with towels and scampered about. Several of the men were smiling, savoring their memories and expectations. Several were staring intently, as though there were mystical secrets to be discerned in the flashing limbs and heaving torsos of the wrestling youths.
The tall man sprawled his angular body on a couch and regarded the youths with interest. His companion sat primly next to him, hands laced together, face—what could be seen of it below the mask—devoid of expression. His posture suggested a blending of vigilance and detachment.
After a time the tall man rose and beckoned to one of the lads, seemingly at random. “You,” he said. “Come!” He turned around and pulled open the door, leaving the room without a backward glance, and the boy followed. The second man pushed himself slightly back on the couch, but otherwise remained where he was, motionless and unsmiling.
The tall man climbed the wide staircase to the floor above and nodded at Natyana, who sat in a heavily brocaded chair at the head of the stairs. She looked at him and his boy companion and returned the nod. “Room six is empty and freshly made up,” she said. “To the left.”
He nodded again and winked and giggled a brief giggle, then, taking the lad by the hand, crossed to the room and entered, closing the door gently behind him.
The hall porter, a skinny, wiry old man with a wandering eye, a twisted lip, and a freshly starched white jacket, emerged from a closet behind Natyana and stared with his good eye at the closing door. “Peccavi, that gent calls hisself.” he observed. “I wonder which of our high-and-mighty clientele he would be when he’s at home. Quite a toff, but there’s sommat strange about him.”
Natyana shrugged. “There’s something strange about all our clients,” she said. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“I do my noticing elsewhere,” the porter told her.
After a short while sounds of squealing, laughing, giggling, thumping, whipping, and high-pitched screaming could be heard faintly through the well-insulated walls of the room. No more than could be expected, given the nature of the establishment. Sometime later all sounds ceased.
Some forty minutes or so after he had entered the room, the tall man opened the door and exited, closing it behind him. Nodding to Natyana and giggling a final giggle, he went down the stairs, bouncing slightly from step to step as though unable to contain whatever emotion it was that he felt. His companion joined him almost immediately and, retrieving their cloaks with wide smiles and a more than appropriate pourboire, they left the premis
es.
It was some time before it occurred to Natyana that the lad had not emerged from the room. She crossed the hall and knocked sharply on the door to rouse him. “No shillying or shallying,” she called. “The night isn’t over. Come on out, Istefan.” Hearing no response, she opened the door.
A sharp intake of breath, and then her hand flew to her mouth. “Lyi tann!”
“Pardon?” The hall porter looked up from the pastry that he had produced from one of the many pockets of his white jacket.
Natyana used the door to hold herself up. “It’s … There’s been … Don’t look, there’s no reason for you to look. I think you’d better gather the staff, and see if you can locate Master Paternoster.”
The porter put the tartlet aside, pushed himself to his feet, and joined Natyana at the door. He glanced into the room and then, with a sharp intake of breath, took two steps farther in and peered at the object on the floor. Then he turned away and put his hand to his mouth. “Cor blimey!”
“I told you not to look,” Natyana said.
“I wish I hadn’t,” he agreed. “Is he—no, never mind the question—’course he is. What are we going to do?”
Down the hall a door opened and a fat man with puffy gray side whiskers and a red nose trotted out with his arms around the shoulders of a short, very blond young girl in a red camisole. She had her arms as far as they would go around his middle, clutching on to his tattersall waistcoat front and back, and was staring up at his face. “Oh my!” he said, perhaps to the girl, perhaps to himself. “Oh, but certainly that was invigorating. Give and take, I always say. Yes indeed, give and take.” He trotted toward Natyana, the girl shuffling along with him, and before Natyana thought of closing the door to conceal the horror inside, the fat man was nodding cheerfully to her and pausing to look into the room.
Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) Page 6
