Supping With Panthers

by Tom Holland

  ‘You just keep coming back, Doctor. How flattering. But you must excuse them’ – he gestured at the shuddering bodies by his feet – ‘if they get the wrong idea as a consequence.’

  Slowly, I picked myself up. I breathed in deeply again.

  Polidori studied me with mock concern. ‘So what have you come for?’ he asked at length.

  ‘The same as before, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah.’ Polidori rubbed his hands. ‘Then perhaps you have the makings of an addict after all.’ He gestured with his arm. ‘This way, please.’

  He opened the door behind the brazier and I followed him out across the bridge. ‘What a devoted and attentive friend you must be,’ he said, opening the warehouse door to me. ‘Hurtling after Sir George like this all the time, rescuing him.’ He leered at me. ‘A guardian angel.’

  I paused before following him through the doorway. ‘George is well, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Never better. Adultery is so improving for the health, don’t you think?’

  ‘You haven’t harmed him?’

  Polidori drew himself up as though cruelly wronged. ‘Me?’ he exclaimed. ‘Harm Sir George? Why on earth would I do that?’ He watched me as I followed him in. ‘Besides,’ he murmured in my ear, ‘I wouldn’t dare. Not harm the lover of her Ladyship.’ He drew his face close to mine, his pale eyes wide; then he spluttered with laughter and kicked the door shut. ‘This way,’ he said abruptly, not looking round. I followed him across the hall and through a second door.

  A corridor stretched ahead of us, just as I remembered it. Mem., a curious effect on that previous visit – for several minutes, no matter how fast Stoker and I moved, we never seemed to draw closer to the door at the end. Talking to Stoker later, it was apparent that the illusion had affected us both. At the time I had suggested opium fumes as a possible cause; now, though, walking down the corridor a second time, I imagined myself inured to the effect of the smoke, for I reached the far door without difficulty. Indeed, I began to congratulate myself on the improvement to my constitution, for I had breathed in far more fumes this second time round, to no apparent ill-effect. But it was then that Polidori opened the door; I followed him through it; I looked around at the room beyond. And at once I knew I was affected after all.

  For there was no nursery. Clearly, my powers of observation had deserted me – far from retracing my steps, as I had assumed, I had been brought down a quite different corridor. I was now standing on a staircase of spiralling iron, black and wonderfully ornamented. Beyond me lay a room in which even the air seemed rich with textures and different shades of light, and yet, no – to say ‘room’ is to misdescribe it, for it seemed something far beyond an architect’s skills – almost, though I hesitate to say it, like a fantasy conjured from some decadent’s dreams. I am aware, of course, of how unobjective I am sounding now; yet I can think of no other way to describe the room’s effect on me, which was very powerful and somehow, at the same time, inescapably real In part, I suppose, it must have been my own dream I was glimpsing, summoned from beyond my conscious mind by the opiates; and yet not entirely, I think. For the room was not all hallucination; something strange was out there before my gaze. I tried to study it but I found the effort hard. The dimensions appeared to be seeping from my stare, and even the colours of the walls seemed to change. I do not mean that they shimmered in the fashion of a mirage; rather that they seemed so deep, so intense, so beautiful, that I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect, yet I only had to look away for a second to realise – when I glanced back at them again – that I had been blind before, for the beauty now had grown even more intense. The crimson of the curtains, the gold of the lacquer, the details of the tapestries and artwork, all seemed to deepen before my stare, as though promising some dark meaning, some tantalising secret just beyond my grasp…

  Of course, I am sounding ridiculous now. Indeed, I am embarrassed to play back the phonogram – my clarity of thought must have been remarkably affected at the time. And yet I owe it to myself, I suppose, from the clinical point of view, to describe exactly what I felt and saw, so that I may judge the extent to which my perceptions had been drugged, or merely seduced by the beauty of the room. Certainly, from the very start, I found my senses betraying me into an emotional response of a kind that I am not accustomed to experiencing, for it is my reason which is usually predominant, yet standing there by Polidori I found it suddenly under siege. Staring around me, I felt my alertness and sense of danger flooding away; in its place there was left a strange, excited euphoria and the ache, deep within my bones, of still greater pleasures and revelations to come. It was the most wonderful pain I had ever known. I began to realise, what I had never before understood, how a man might surrender his reason and self-control. And at once I knew I had to fight – against the pleasure and against die beauty of the room, for they both seemed indistinguishable to me, equally seductive and dangerous, and when I steeled myself, I could remember this, and remain myself. But still I was drawn. Slowly, I began to walk down the stairs.

  I wondered what power the room had, to disturb and enrapture me in such a way. Certainly, it displayed a wealth that seemed almost magical. Silk-fringed rugs were piled on the floor; the designs on the walls were of the most remarkable skill; the furniture was crafted from rich, fragrant woods. Lilac blossom filled the air, and from golden tripods rose the subtle perfume of ambergris, dizzying and lulling my thoughts even more. I paused and, as I had done before, sought to dear my mind; aware of how susceptible the human brain can be to the influences of sight and sense, I knew that my reason – in such a place, and endangered by unknown threats – had to be preserved, for in truth it was the only weapon I possessed. And so I braced myself, and then stepped towards a curtain which was drawn across the room. I reached to part it; and as I did so I shuddered, as though approaching some great mystery. ‘Pass through it,’ whispered Polidori in my ear. I glanced round at him; I had forgotten his presence entirely – somehow I no longer found it threatening; instead, my emotions were absorbed by some greater source of fear which seemed, like the presence of a god in an ancient sanctuary, to be waiting for me beyond the veil. I reached for the curtain again; I took it in my hand; I passed through it.

  If the room had been beautiful before, now, past the curtain, it seemed a hundred times more so, I clenched my fists, determined that I would not be seduced by its delights – determined to cling to my reason, my analytic powers. I looked around and saw a child before me, seated by a table; she was frowning with concentration, staring at a chess-board. I recognised her from my previous visit with Stoker. She looked up at me suddenly. ‘Hello,’ she said. Not a trace of surprise was evident on her face. Before I could reply to her greeting, she had returned to her game. She moved a queen and took the remaining king from the board. With great care she placed it next to a line of other pieces; then, smoothing back her plaits, she smiled calmly and turned in her chair.

  I followed her gaze and recognised George seated on a divan. He was poring over a map. I took a step forward and, as I did so, he started and looked round at me. ‘Great Scott!’ he exclaimed. ‘Jack! So you came here after all,’ He rose to greet me, but then checked himself, and just as the young girl had done, he turned away from me again.

  They were both staring at something I couldn’t quite make out; whether it was the shadows cast by the crimson gas flames or the heaviness of the incense in the air of the room, I hesitate to say, but certainly, for a second, I found myself the victim of an optical trick. I seemed to be observing a haze of gold and red, the deep red of blood, shimmering as water does when glimpsed through great heat. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, and the illusion was gone. Instead, there was a woman. She wore gold around her neck; her long dress was red, and I realised that these were what I must have just glimpsed. But now, even in the shadows where the woman still stood, I could make her out quite clearly. Despite myself, I gasped. Her appearance was radiant and extraordinary, I had never seen such physi
cal beauty before. The woman walked forward into the light and stared into my eyes. I stayed frozen where I was.

  I knew at once that this was Lilah. I remembered what George had written to me: ‘even you might tum your head’. He had made this claim expecting I would not believe him – yet there I was, staring virtually transfixed. I fought against this attraction: I knew I could not surrender to it. Instead, I struggled to observe Lilah clinically. There was much to observe. She was dressed in the very height of the latest Paris fashion, her arms and shoulders bare, her scarlet dress tight around her waist and hips, and she moved with the grace of one born to such a style. Yet clearly she could not have been; and indeed, the very ease with which she wore European haute couture only emphasised how foreign – almost how unearthly – she seemed. ‘Exotic,’ George had called her, and so she was – so she would have been anywhere – but especially so now in London’s darkest quarter, amongst the squalor of the docks, amongst the warehouses that stood by the filthy Thames. Her hair was raven-black and thick, and braided with gold; her skin a rich brown; her features delicate and yet remarkably strong; in her nose winked a stud of amethyst. She reminded me forcibly of the bandit that Moorfield had captured on the Pass above the road to Kalikshutra; yet striking though that girl had been, the woman before me seemed a thousand times more beautiful, and more dangerous. I felt this at once, this mistrust of her, for reasons I find it hard now to justify, it being my method to resist an instinctive response, lest the process of deduction should be prejudiced. And yet in truth, I found that instinct was all I had left to me – my powers of analysis seemed blinded and defied. Perhaps it was Lilah’s very beauty which unsettled me, for its radiance was like the sun’s, beyond all my attempts to survey it as a whole. Or perhaps it was the legacy of other, older fears: dark memories of Kalikshutra, and a statue I had seen there daubed with blood; legends of Kali the terrible…

  I was being ridiculous, of course – my imagination had run away with me. Yet that Lilah can have such an effect, even on a mind as cold and resistant to the sex as mine, is tribute enough to her powers of fascination, and I could see now why George should have fallen so helplessly for her. Nor were my initial thoughts of Kalikshutra entirely the prompting of superstitious fear; for it was apparent to me, seeing George surrounded by his maps, that my suspicions of Lilah had been very close to the truth. George himself, of course – before I could even open my mouth – at once began to assure me that this was not the case at all; he had put it to Lilah, he told me, asking whether she had an interest in the frontier, and she had said it wasn’t true, and there it was, everything was fine, he was just getting on with his Bill because, as he had said, this was where he found he could work at his best, and really I shouldn’t worry, everything was fine. He would appeal to Lilah occasionally and she would murmur a supportive response, her voice as enchanting and seductive as her face, with that same quality that Lord Ruthven’s possessed – soft, and silver, and musical. So naturally, I found my darkest suspicions flooding back, as I wondered what nature of thing she might be, for she inspired in me, I cannot deny it, doubts greater even than Lord Ruthven had done. I began to rehearse in my mind all I had heard of her before, from Lucy, and Rosamund and George himself. And as I did so, I saw Lilah smiling softly at me.

  It was almost as though she had been reading my thoughts. She stopped George with the faintest elevation of her hand, then began to ask me about the steps by which I had first tracked him to her lair. I was reluctant to say much, but it was soon apparent that George had told her the story anyway, and as I spoke I had the sense that she was toying with me. She would glance occasionally at the little girl who was still seated by her chessboard; as George praised my deductive powers and skills, Lilah would smile at the girl and the girl, solemn-faced, would peruse George and myself in turn. Her stare, I realised, was making George fidget. I finished speaking abruptly.

  Lilah rested her fingers on the little girl’s head. ‘You see, Suzette,’ she said, ‘the Doctor is a real-life detective. He solves mysteries.’

  Suzette considered this, studying me attentively. ‘But when you have a mystery,’ she asked me, ‘how do you know when it finishes?’

  I glanced at Lilah and Polidori. Polidori flashed me a grin, then bared his teeth. ‘It’s very hard,’ I said, turning back to Suzette. ‘Sometimes, mysteries never end at all.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem fair, then,’ she replied, swinging her legs as though on a swing. ‘If you don’t know when a mystery ends, you might have got the beginning quite wrong as well. You might even have been in a different mystery altogether, and never realised it, and then where would you be?’

  ‘In difficulty,’ I replied – ‘or worse.’ I glanced round at Lilah again. Her expression was one of perfect serenity.

  ‘Here,’ I heard Suzette say. She was tugging on my sleeve and I looked down at her. She was holding a magazine in her hand. ‘This is my favourite,’ she said as she handed it to me. I looked at the tide: Beeton’s Christmas Annual. The child smiled at me and took it back, opening it at a well-thumbed page. ‘In stories,’ she said, ‘detectives always know when the mystery ends,’ She began to read out a title carefully. ‘A Study in Scarlet: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery.’ She looked up at me. ‘Do you know it?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t have much time for stories, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You should read this one,’ said the little girl. ‘The detective is very good. He might help you understand some of the rules.’

  ‘Rules?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said patiently, ‘for when someone gets murdered.’ She looked down at her magazine again, and repeated the title slowly and with relish. ‘A Study in Scarlet. That means a study in blood.’ She looked up at me suddenly. ‘And when blood is shed, there must be rules. Everyone knows that How will you manage if you don’t know what they are?’

  ‘But blood hasn’t been shed.’

  ‘Not yet,’ she replied.

  ‘Will it be?’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ muttered George, looking away. But Suzette ignored his protest and continued to stare at me, her eyes as wide and solemn as before.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you must hope so,’ she said at last, ‘otherwise, what is the point of being a detective at all? You wouldn’t have anything exciting to do,’ She reached for her magazine, then climbed down from her chair and smoothed out her dress. ‘So let us just hope that it’s a matter of time.’ She looked up at me; her eyes seemed exceedingly bright and cold. She reached for my hand and pressed it tightly. ‘Just a matter of time.’

  There was silence, then suddenly Polidori began to laugh. George stared at him with unconcealed distaste, then peered at Suzette with an even more visible shudder. ‘Really,’ he muttered, ‘this is all pretty poor.’

  ‘Poor?’ Lilah asked. She had settled herself upon a velvet-lined chaise and was smoking a cigarette. It was delicate and long; its smoke curled as languidly as Lilah herself.

  ‘Well, yes, confound it,’ George spluttered with sudden fury, ‘it is poor, damned poor! Just look at her! She shouldn’t be reading murder stories! Dolls, ponies, that’s what little girls are meant to enjoy, magical fairies, things like that. Not all this blood nonsense. I mean, dash it all, Lilah, you can’t say it’s normal!’ Suzette continued to stare at him, quite unperturbed. George plunged his hands in his pockets and looked away. ‘Gets at my nerves,’ he muttered to me, ‘sitting there all the time, with her baleful gaze and her ghoulish chat Worse than the Lord Chancellor. Puts me off my drink.’

  Lilah raised a languorous hand. ‘Please,’ she murmured, ‘you will upset the child.’

  ‘Upset her?’ snorted George. ‘You need someone to do a damn sight more than upset her. You spoil that girl, you know, Lilah. I mean, look at her!’ Suzette was watching him as impassively as before. ‘Where the hell’s her respect?’

  ‘For you?’

  ‘Yes, of course, for me!’

  ‘Perhaps yo
u should earn it, then,’ said Lilah with a sudden iciness, extinguishing her cigarette and rising to her feet.

  George ignored her. Indeed, he seemed not to have heard her at all. ‘I mean, dash it all, I know she’s an orphan,’ he said, still staring at Suzette, ‘and it’s bloody good of you to have her as your ward, and God knows I’m as keen on charity as the next man, so well done, Lilah, yes, I mean that, well done, but’ – he paused to draw in breath – ‘the fact remains’ – he narrowed his eyes, and breathed in again – ‘the fact remains … she is a little brat.’

  Lilah shrugged faintly. ‘So what do you propose?’

  ‘Simple,’ said George. ‘Have her taken in hand.’

  Lilah laughed, a strange, enchanting, inhuman sound. ‘And you are volunteering yourself, I suppose?’

  ‘Me?’ George frowned. ‘Goodness, no, what a comical idea! I meant a nanny! This is woman’s work we’re talking about now. That’s what you’ve been lacking, my dear, a damned good nanny, one who can get Miss Suzette into a nursery and teach her the sorts of things that little girls should be made to understand.’ He glanced at the child. ‘A few of the feminine virtues, don’t you know? Mildness, sweetness – obedience.’