Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  “And,” continued Holmes, “should he succeed in assassinating our Queen and the rest of the royals, it would decapitate this country, as surely as France’s revolutionaries decapitated their aristocrats. It would leave us foundering, lost, our empire a shambles. All at once there would be a power vacuum in the world, which France would be more than happy to rush in and fill.”

  “You are quite positive, then, that the Royal Train is their ultimate target?” said Mycroft.

  “Yes. Your very own words, but two minutes ago, triggered a somewhat belated ‘eureka’ moment for me, dispelling every last shred of doubt.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You referred to the locomotive which pulls the train as belonging to a certain class of such engines.”

  “What of it?”

  “Benoît, de Villegrand’s servant, mentioned with his dying breath the ‘Duc Enfer’. I misheard him. I thought he said ‘Duc d’Enfer’, meaning ‘Duke of Hell’, whereas actually he was saying ‘Duc En Fer’, three separate words.”

  “Duke In Iron,” I said. “Iron Duke. My God...”

  “That settles it.” Mycroft rose ponderously to his feet, using the chair arms to assist him in craning up his great bulk. “I must go at once to Whitehall and send missives. The Royal Train must be intercepted and made to turn back.”

  “It may be too late for that to do any good,” cautioned his brother.

  “Nevertheless I must try.”

  Mycroft lumbered off down the stairs, which creaked piteously with every step he took. He passed Mrs Hudson on the landing as she brought up a tray with our lunch on it. The front door slammed as he departed.

  Mrs Hudson set the food down before us and was about to withdraw, when Holmes sprang up and whispered in her ear for some while. When he was done, his landlady frowned at him, perplexed, but nodded assent. She left the room in haste, and moments later I heard the front door slam a second time.

  The meal looked delicious: eel soup, lamb chops with onion custard, browned tomatoes and baked beets, and cocoa flummery for dessert. Holmes tucked in with gusto. I, on the other hand, found it hard to muster an appetite.

  “How can you eat at a time like this?” I upbraided Holmes.

  “Because I am famished. You should join me. There is no point in starving yourself just because you are anxious and upset. The more sensible course of action is to replenish one’s depleted reserves while one can. We will soon be needing all the energy we can get.”

  “What for?” I was close to despair. “What’s the use? De Villegrand has the Queen at his mercy. There’s nothing we can do other than pray that Mycroft is successful and the Royal Train is halted before he strikes.”

  “Nothing we can do?” There was a glint in my friend’s eye. “Hardly. I have, in fact, already done something very constructive.” “Oh yes? What?”

  “Instructed Mrs Hudson to send a telegram,” said Holmes.

  “That’s it? Send a telegram? Whom to? The man in the moon? Or perhaps our Maker, begging for divine intercession?”

  “Neither. God will not save our Queen, old friend. But, with aid from a particular quarter, we yet might.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  AN EARTHQUAKE ON BAKER STREET

  I ate, in accordance with Holmes’s recommendation, and we both cleaned ourselves up and donned a change of clothes.

  I felt somewhat better for that, but remained in a state of ungovernable agitation. Unable to settle, I paced the floor. Holmes, meanwhile, sat puffing away at his pipe, Sphinx-like in his imperturbability. It drove me to near distraction.

  “All right!” I exclaimed, when I had had my fill of his taciturnity and his seemingly unwarranted composure. “Tell me, since I cannot fathom it for myself. The telegram – who is the recipient?”

  “His name,” said Sherlock Holmes, “is Sherlock Holmes.”

  I halted mid-stride. “What? You sent it to yourself?”

  “Yes,” said my friend.

  “What on earth is the use of that? Are you so conceited as to think that only you can be Her Majesty’s rescuer?”

  “Watson, you do me a disservice. Think, man, think. My purpose in sending myself a telegram cannot be to inform myself of anything. That would be ridiculous. However...”

  “...it would get the telegram into the system,” I finished. Light was dawning. “And if it’s in the system...”

  “... then it will be perused by a certain masked man of our acquaintance.”

  “Cauchemar. Good grief, Holmes.” I slapped my forehead. “I have been a dunce.”

  “That’s perhaps putting it a little strongly.”

  “What better way to summon his help in our hour of need?”

  “Quite,” said Holmes. “I cobbled together a message containing several of those ‘key words’ he spoke of – words that would catch his teleprinter’s automated attention and cause it to flag the telegram up as urgent. ‘Royal’ was one, ‘danger’ another. My own name, of course. And two other names which are of special relevance to the baron. One is Torrance. The other: de Villegrand.”

  “The former needs no explanation, but why the latter?”

  “You’ll recall my saying that I intuited a connection between them – the genuine French nobleman and the vigilante with the assumed French aristocratic name.”

  “I do.”

  “Cauchemar knows de Villegrand. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the two of them are, or once were, intimately acquainted.”

  “How?”

  “That remains to be discovered, although Benoît provided what might be a clue. For now, we must sit tight and hope that the Bloody Black Baron intercepts the telegram and responds to it with alacrity.”

  “And if he does, are we to travel in that damnable Subterrene fandango again?”

  “It would not get us far, definitely not as far as we need to go. However, my study of the blueprints in his workshop leads me to think that Cauchemar has developed another, altogether more impressive mode of transport, one which will much better suit our purposes.”

  I racked my brains trying to recall what had been on those blueprints, which I had viewed glancingly over Holmes’s shoulder. Perhaps it was a consequence of Cauchemar’s oneirogenic gas, but my memory of the night’s events was hazy, a series of impressions glimpsed as though through fog. Now, these many years later, I have been able to piece them together for the benefit of this narrative and make them coherent, but that is with the luxury of considerable hindsight and, also, the application of a modicum of creative licence (many of my accounts of Holmes’s adventures are the product of reminiscence bolstered by imagination). At the time everything was vague and nebulous in my exhausted mind, the blueprints in particular a blur.

  “You will have to enlighten me,” I said.

  “I would not wish to raise your expectations unduly, in case I am mistaken. It’s possible that Cauchemar hasn’t yet constructed the vessel. However, there were bales of sailcloth in his workshop.”

  “There were?”

  “You were too busy toying with his glue-firing gun to notice them. Likewise the offcuts of said sailcloth.”

  “A ship?”

  “Be patient and we shall see.” So saying, Holmes steepled his fingers and lapsed into a meditative trance.

  I, in turn, resumed my floor pacing, wearing out both carpet and shoe leather as I circled the room. Every so often I paused to glance out of the window. Baker Street seemed more or less its usual self. I saw familiar sights: the newsvendor on the corner, the itinerant hawkers, the crossing sweeper, the errand boys, the chimney sweep doing his rounds, the pedestrians, the clattersome toing and froing of traffic. There was a perceptible sense that London was getting back to normal, or at least trying to, after the alarums and excursions of recent days. With an alleged terrorist in police custody, people were allowing themselves to believe that the crisis was past. Little did they suspect that worse lay in store. This period of tranquillity was merely a lull, no
t an ending; a comma rather than a full stop. The nation had been softened up for a killing blow it didn’t even realise was coming.

  As midday shaded into afternoon, all I could think about was the Royal Train puffing energetically northward. Where would it be by now? Peterborough? Grantham? As far as Doncaster? With every minute that passed, it became more and more likely that de Villegrand would have already committed his shocking, demoralising act of regicide. I could scarcely contain my inner torment. It felt as though the world was trembling around me, starting to fall apart.

  Then I realised that the world was trembling around me. At least, the room was. Ornaments were shaking and dancing on their shelves. The windows were rattling in their frames. The floorboards were shivering underfoot. An immense vibration permeated the building’s fabric, as though 221B were a bass pipe in a cathedral organ.

  “Holmes! What is this? An earthquake? It’s not possible.”

  “This,” said my friend, “unless I am very much mistaken, is our transportation arriving.”

  I ran to the window. Out in the street, people were peering upwards, eyes wide and mouths agape. Twisting round, I followed their gazes but could not descry what they were looking at. The angle was wrong, too steep. Whatever was the source of their astonishment, it lay directly above the house, out of my line of sight.

  Holmes took to the stairs, with me in hot pursuit. We ascended past his bedroom and my former bedroom, past the bathroom and the water closet, all the way up to the attic. Picking our way around linen hampers, packing cases, steamer trunks and odds and ends of discarded furniture, we reached the skylight. Holmes opened it and slithered nimbly out. He extended down a helping hand and I wriggled out after him.

  Perched on the roof slates, we both looked up.

  Hovering overhead was what appeared to be a cross between a blue whale and a hot air balloon.

  “An airship,” I said.

  Yet it was unlike any airship whose photogravure picture I had seen in magazine or newspaper. It made the efforts of Tissandier, Renard, Krebs, Campbell and Wölfert seem clumsy and ungainly by comparison. Where their dirigibles were elaborate confections of rope, wood and canvas, this was sleek-contoured and to a large extent metallic. Where theirs looked awkward and fragile, this looked agile and tough. It had something of the Portuguese man o’ war about it, or else the great white shark; some deadly sea creature at any rate.

  Gigantic gimbal-mounted propellers churned, keeping the aircraft stationary and stable above the house, yet I had no doubt they could also impel it along at tremendous speed. Beneath the aerodynamic gas-filled envelope clung a torpedo-shaped gondola, and from a hatch in the base of this there now issued a rope ladder, along with an exhortation in the familiar booming tones of Baron Cauchemar.

  “All aboard, gentlemen, quick as you can. Your carriage awaits. Where to?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE DELPHINE’S REVENGE

  Our pilot was in his armour, helmet-less but with his padded under-mask on. He bade us make ourselves at home. There was at least somewhat more floor space available in the gondola’s cabin than there had been in the Subterrene’s, so Holmes and I did not have to stand hugger-mugger, squashed shoulder to shoulder, as last time.

  “Mr Holmes,” Cauchemar said, “the contents of your telegram, which I can safely assume you intended me to read, alarmed me greatly. I am at your disposal. We are to go north?”

  “North,” my friend confirmed. “It would be simplest if you were to head for Euston Station, then follow the main line north towards the Scottish border. Don’t you agree?”

  “No sooner said than done.” Cauchemar pushed sideways on the large brass steering column that was situated between his knees. The airship began to rotate around its vertical axis and its longitudinal axis simultaneously, a most unnerving sensation which had me reaching out to grab the nearest handhold for support. I had endured long ocean voyages and was well versed in the pitch and yaw of a ship on a sea swell. This, though, was different, a quality of motion I had not experienced hitherto, an uncanny rolling through space, with a sort of sickening greasiness about it.

  Worse was to come as Cauchemar then thrust the steering column sharply forwards, at the same time toggling a lever to increase the power output to the propellers. The airship lurched upwards, its nose rising steeply. It felt as though my stomach were still anchored to the ground even as the rest of me gained height. Dizziness drizzled down through my head as the blood rushed to my feet.

  “Watson?” Holmes enquired. “You have gone a ghastly shade of pale. Are you all right?”

  “I have been better,” I replied. “If this is flight, then it’s for the birds.”

  “Ha!” laughed my friend. “You and your pawky sense of humour.”

  “I assure you, I was not trying to be funny. If I cracked a joke, it was purely by accident.”

  “You will soon get used to it,” Cauchemar said. “I was told by a balloonist I once met that one finds one’s ‘air legs’ far more readily than one does one’s sea legs. It might help if you were to look outside. It will acclimatise you, harmonising the input from your eyes with the messages your inner ear is sending you. As sailors are wont to say, ‘Keep your eyes on the horizon.’”

  I peered out of a porthole set into the gondola’s curved hull. Below, rooftops and chimney pots were diminishing fast. I could make out almost the entire length of Baker Street, from Regent’s Park to Oxford Street. The grid arrangement of Marylebone became clear, thoroughfares broad and narrow intersecting neatly at right angles. The swarm of life in the roads down there seemed remote, something I was no longer entitled to be a part of. The higher the airship sailed, the more detached I became from the quotidian world. It was like entering a dream.

  Having attained an altitude of, I would guess, six hundred feet, Cauchemar levelled the vessel out and poured on speed. We soared over the park, all green lawns, blue lake and autumn-gilded trees, like an illustration in a picture book. We crossed what I took to be Albany Street, and soon the huge glass dome that capped the Great Hall of Euston Station hove into view. Cauchemar pivoted the airship above the tracks which issued like multiple tongues from the terminus’s mouth. Singling out the main line, he matched our bearing to its.

  Then we were gliding faster, ever faster, above the city. Over Primrose Hill we went, and the densely packed rookeries of Camden and Kentish Town, the imposing brow of Parliament Hill, and onward across the suburbs of Hampstead, Highgate and Finchley, which gleamed in their newness.

  From up here London looked improbably tranquil, a sprawl of splendour and ambition, truly the capital of the world. If only, I thought, everybody could see it from this perspective. Too often one became mired in the hubbub and squalor of urban life. I, as the companion of Sherlock Holmes, had been exposed to the seamy underbelly of London, the cupidity and murderous passions of its inhabitants, more than most. I had seen the place, too often, at its worst. Yet now, aboard Cauchemar’s miraculous airborne conveyance, I was able to see it at its best.

  I was able to see, too, that this city and all it represented were unquestionably worth saving.

  Such was the aim of our urgent, desperate mission. We could not afford to fail.

  The airship hurtled on, soon traversing open countryside. The railway track stretched ahead, a thin grey line like a thread connecting us to our destiny, winding through verdant livestock-dotted pastures and the furrowed brown rectangles of harvested fields. We were buffeted by winds that came sweeping in from the side, skewing the airship from true. Cauchemar, with deft counter-manoeuvres, kept us steady and on course. The railway might now and then veer beyond the limits of the viewing portals at the gondola’s bow, but always he brought it back into sight.

  We had been aloft for over half an hour when Holmes said, “This truly is a splendid creation, Cauchemar. Does it have a name?”

  “Thank you. It does, as a matter of fact. I call her Delphine’s Revenge.�
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  “And would I be right in thinking that she has never flown before?”

  “You would.”

  “That would account for the absence of reported sightings. Something like this could not ply the skies above London, even after dark, without being noted and remarked upon.”

  “Until today she has been berthed at a warehouse which I rent privately,” said Cauchemar. “I have been fine-tuning her, off and on, for seven months. I kept meaning to take her for a test flight and then procrastinating. Perhaps I feared the disaster that would ensue should some catastrophic mishap occur – a propeller working loose from its mounting or a leak in one or more of the helium cells. My concern was not for my own wellbeing, I hasten to add, but for that of innocent people below. I might conceivably have never taken her out for a spin, had the import of your telegraphic request not compelled me to, Mr Holmes. I am grateful to you for, as it were, pushing me out of the nest. Now I have proved that my ‘wings’ work.”

  “I wish someone had told me this was a maiden voyage,” I said. “I might have thought twice before climbing aboard.”

  “Do ignore Watson,” said Holmes to our pilot. “He is only to be taken seriously when he is not complaining. I suppose a logical question to ask is: who is Delphine?”

  “I’m afraid that’s personal,” said Cauchemar.

  “As is your relationship with the Vicomte de Villegrand?”

  Cauchemar was momentarily lost for words. “That you say such a thing suggests you already know the answer.”

  “I shall tell you how much I know,” said Holmes. “I know that all your vigilantism so far, all your crime-busting and altruistic acts of derring-do in the East End, these have all been in the way of a warm-up, a preamble, a dry run. You have been familiarising yourself with the use of your armour, practising, discovering its limitations and ironing out any snags. You have been field-testing it with a view to perfecting it, making it ready for some ultimate, all-or-nothing sortie.”