Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  “Go on. I’m not saying you’re wide of the mark.”

  “I know also that, all along, de Villegrand has been in your sights. A long-held, simmering enmity exists between the two of you. He has crossed you, wounded you grievously in some way, and you wish to get even.”

  “Not get even. Utterly discredit and destroy him.”

  “Yes. That would make sense. So things have progressed to the stage where you are all set to do battle with him openly. You have identified him as being behind the bombing campaign but have refrained from going after him until now. Why? Because previously he was operating covertly, in the shadows, using intermediaries such as Abednego Torrance. He has not directly entered the field of play until now, and it is there that you wish to snag him.”

  “I should have guessed that you would burrow through to the truth in the end, Mr Holmes.” Cauchemar sounded rueful but also resigned. “It was inevitable. Once your and my paths crossed, it was only a matter of time before my secrets were brought to light.”

  “They will be safe if you share them with us,” said Holmes. “You need not worry on that account. We are most avowedly on the same side, the three of us. Were that not so, I might find it hard to forgive you for gassing Dr Watson and myself.”

  “Again, I apologise for that. It was discourteous and speaks more about my own lack of self-confidence than my confidence in you. In retrospect, I realise I should have shown greater faith in your discretion, Mr Holmes, and yours, Dr Watson.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Holmes. “But now is the time, I think, to come clean. Tell me, how fast are we travelling?”

  Cauchemar consulted the bank of instruments in front of him. “Our airspeed, according to the anemometer attached to the gondola’s keel, is in excess of a hundred and ten knots. Allowing for the wind factor, which introduces a variance of plus or minus ten per cent, we’re still travelling at a mean one hundred knots.”

  “The Royal Train will be averaging eighty miles an hour. It has a three-hour head start on us. Allowing for refuelling stops, we should catch up with it in, what, two hours?”

  “Give or take.”

  “No quicker than that?” I said, despair and desperation vying within me for supremacy. “But what if de Villegrand launches his attack before we get there?”

  “De Villegrand may be lying in wait for the Royal Train somewhere up the line. If that is so, then there is little we can do to stop him other than hope that we get there first. If, however, he too is pursuing the train just as we are, then there is a decent chance of us overtaking him. My money is on the latter.”

  “You can be so damnably calm at times, Holmes.”

  “I have learned, Watson, not to fret about matters over which I have little control. It is a waste of energy. In the meantime, since we have this opportunity, I can think of no more excellent or profitable way of passing the time than you telling us your history, Baron Cauchemar. Starting with your real name.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  BARON CAUCHEMAR COMMENCES HIS STORY

  I am (said Cauchemar, after some initial reluctance) from good solid Home Counties middle-class stock, just as you gauged from my accent, Mr Holmes – no baron at all. There is some trace of aristocratic lineage on my mother’s side, but it is so faint and etiolated as to be hardly worth the mention. My real name could not be more unassuming: Frederick Tilling. Just plain “Fred” to my friends. I am the son of a provincial barrister and a part-time milliner, born and raised in a small Sussex market town. My late father was moderately successful in his profession, enough to be able to afford a governess for his sole offspring and then later send that same child to boarding school, but my mother nonetheless was obliged to work at the hat shop in order to make ends meet and keep our heads firmly above water.

  My boyhood was mostly happy. I was aware that our family financial situation, though comfortable by the standards of most, bore an underlying precariousness, and I was conscientious enough to try and not be an excessive burden on my parents. I pursued quiet, unobtrusive hobbies and pastimes. Foremost among these was a fondness for taking mechanical objects apart and fathoming how they worked. I did it with a clockwork train set of mine, and a wind-up tin soldier. I also did it, much to my parents’ initial dismay, with the cuckoo clock in the hallway and my father’s hunter-case pocket watch. The good news was that, having disassembled the items, I was able to put them back together, restoring them in such a way that they worked as well as, if not better than, before.

  It became obvious that I possessed a natural facility for, I would even say affinity with, machinery. I was drawn to things such as railway engines while they waited at the platform at our local station, and the jiffy steamer and treadle-powered sewing machine at my mother’s place of work – intrigued and fascinated by them. I could divine, almost at a glance, how their component parts fitted together, the physical principles that drove them, what made them “go”. Where other children my age would be playing with conkers or aimlessly kicking a ball around, I would be tampering with a musical box so that it tinkled its tune in a minor rather than a major key, or crafting Japanese puzzle boxes out of wood that required fifty or more manipulations to open.

  School was a wretched time for me. I had no leisure or opportunity to pursue my interest in matters mechanical. It was all rote learning of Latin verbs and long health-giving swims in a nearfreezing lake; not to mention endless Bible study, for it was a High Church establishment. If there is one thing guaranteed to foster an abiding aversion to religion, it is the reading aloud of the “begat” sections of the Old Testament. To stave off boredom I would scrawl pictures in the margins of my King James Version ad infinitum – designs for an electric mousetrap, a motorised lawnmower, a carbon-arc clothes iron – until I was caught in the act one day and soundly beaten for my pains. From then on, that avenue of selfexpression was closed to me for my remaining schooldays.

  What saved me from a slow death by frustration and boredom was the discovery in the school library of several of the works of Jules Verne, in translation. I became lost in those books, engrossed in their depictions of science as a positive, transformative force in the world. My heroes became Captain Nemo, Professor Lidenbrock, Phileas Fogg, men for whom the application of knowledge and ingenuity is the solution to any and every problem. This type of novel has come to be known as the “scientific romance”, and I cannot think of a more apt name. Verne inculcated in me a true love of science, and it was, for me, the blossoming of a lifelong romance.

  After school I floundered somewhat. While I continued to dream up various projects and devices, some more harebrained than others and none that got any further than the drawing board, I drudged through a series of uninspiring jobs – accounts clerk, draper’s assistant – finding scant satisfaction in any of them. In my spare time I hunted down and bought as many Verne novels as I could – and he is a prolific author! Often I could not wait for them to be published in English, so would purchase French editions by post from a dealer on the Left Bank in Paris. A ruinously expensive exercise, but such was my addiction to the great master’s writings. Incidentally, I could not have been more flattered when you, Dr Watson, described my Subterrene as “a thing from a Jules Verne novel”. To me there can be no higher accolade.

  I had only the rudimentaries of the French language to begin with, so I struggled to read the books, but the effort was repaid in the pleasure they gave me. As a bonus, repeated exposure to Verne’s prose and the use of a French-English dictionary meant I rapidly became more fluent, until eventually I could read the tongue as well as any native Frenchman, though not speak it with nearly the same facility.

  It struck me that France was the place where scientific innovation was at its boldest and most daring, where the greatest feats of engineering and the most radical technological breakthroughs were happening. This was the land of Eiffel and Pasteur, Poincaré and the Curies, Braille and the Montgolfier brothers. Not to denigrate our own fair nation and its pant
heon of physicists, chemists, biologists, botanists, builders and explorers, pioneers all; but it seemed to me that at the level of sheer attainment and progress we simply could not compete. You can surely forgive my lack of patriotism. At the time I was a twenty-year-old in the grip of an infatuation, and there is nothing stronger nor more absolute in its convictions than youthful ardour.

  I resolved that France was where my future lay, and not only that but the future of the world. I must go there and live and partake of its culture and its thrusting ambition. There my genius would be recognised and celebrated. My talent for invention and my mechanical expertise would bloom more fruitfully in French soil than in English.

  I had little to leave behind. Two parents who had begun to despair of me ever making anything of myself. A string of jobs that were beneath me and provided nothing but an income, and a paltry one at that. I sold all I owned, apart from my precious collection of Vernes, and crossed the Channel by packet steamer to start anew in what I firmly believed was the country I had been born to belong to.

  It is a decision I regret to this day, deeply.

  Do I have to go on?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  BARON CAUCHEMAR CONTINUES HIS STORY

  Holmes insisted that Cauchemar, or rather Fred Tilling, must continue his narrative.

  “You cannot,” he said, “leave us in the lurch. You arrived in France, and then what?”

  Then (said Cauchemar) I travelled straight to Paris, the city where most of the French intelligentsia were gathered, the hub of that nation’s cerebral industry. I set myself up in a cheap atelier apartment in Montmartre – that arrondissement which is the haunt of artists, musicians, writers and other Bohemian types, an impoverished, absinthe-soaked demimonde – and I cast about, looking for suitable gainful employment, something to tide me over while I built up a list of useful contacts and made my way in the world.

  Soon I found work with a manufacturer of clockwork automata. This is a field the French have long excelled in, its best-known exponent being the stage conjuror Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, famous for his Marvellous Orange Tree illusion, in which a replica orange tree grew before the audience’s eyes and sprouted real fruit, and his Mystery Clock, which ran perfectly and told the right time but had no apparent mechanism.

  I was engaged in constructing altogether less dramatic devices: singing canaries in cages, monkeys that ride bicycles, and dolls – androids, as they are known in the trade – that can seemingly draw pictures, write poems or play chess or cards. We produced these as fairground attractions, props for illusionists, or toys for the rich. It was not terribly demanding work, at least not for someone with my aptitude, but I enjoyed it because of the miniaturist precision it required, the necessity for millimetre-perfect accuracy at all times. A single misaligned ratchet, a single faulty cog, a single eccentrically turning cam, and nothing would happen. One’s creation would refuse to spring into action or grind to a screeching halt.

  But oh, when it did work, when a machine functioned as though the very breath of life infused it – that thrill never palled.

  I began to offer my employer, Monsieur Pelletier, suggestions for improvements. I told him how we could make our automata yet more complex, more uncannily realistic still. At his encouragement, I devised a system whereby an android could be given the power of mimicking speech. A rubber voicebox, with puffs of air pushed through it pneumatically and piston rods to manipulate it, could replicate vowel sounds. Combine that with a malleable rubber “tongue” which could modulate those sounds and introduce plosives, fricatives and glottal stops, and you had a fairly authentic reproduction of human vocal patterns. Individual phonemes could be triggered by keystrokes. Put them in sequence and you had actual words, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, close enough to the actuality to deceive the human ear.

  The trouble with this was that it was a step too far. An automaton which could point to letters on a blackboard or tell someone’s “fortune” by dealing out tarot cards, that was one thing; that was acceptable. One which seemed actually to be conversing with you? The reactions to that were almost invariably shock, disgust, horripilation, cringing dread. I saw people recoil from the doll much as though it were a farmyard pig that had suddenly opened its mouth and started talking. One woman to whom I demonstrated my androïde qui parle swooned away in a dead faint. Another person, a highly respected actor who was later appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, made the sign of the cross and ran shrieking from the workshop.

  There was, I realised, such a thing as a too-lifelike machine. Mine offended people’s sense of themselves as divinely favoured beings. If a doll could talk – and most who saw my creation were firmly convinced it could, in spite of my protestations to the contrary – then what did that mean for those of us on whom God had bestowed the supposedly exclusive gift of a soul?

  There was one man who did not regard my talking android as an affront against religion and nature. Rather, he was impressed and captivated by it and insisted I reveal to him its mysteries. He was a charismatic fellow, high-born and urbane, ever ready with a quip and a neat turn of phrase. He seemed to me, naive and inexperienced as I was, to be the epitome of class and sophistication.

  I am talking, of course, about the Vicomte de Villegrand.

  I did not know him then for what he is. At the time, I could not have been more delighted that this nobleman, of seemingly impeccable credentials, who had apparently dropped by the workshop on an idle whim, was taking such a keen interest in my work. He professed himself an engineer too, although not, he said, of my calibre – not in the same league. An amateur, he called himself modestly, a tinkerer. Not a genius, like me. That was the word he used: genius.

  Naturally, all this flattery turned my head. Thereafter, de Villegrand became a regular visitor at Pelletier’s, always keen to admire my handiwork, though never to buy anything, much to my employer’s chagrin. We discussed engineering-related topics for hours on end, he and I, and soon we were meeting up in the evenings. He would take me to glamorous night spots, Paris’s finest watering holes, the best cafés and brasseries, even the notorious Moulin Rouge, and there introduce me to various of his friends. All of them appeared as high-ranking as himself, and those of them who weren’t affected airs and graces as though they were.

  He was a roué and a reprobate, that much was obvious. He enjoyed a drink and had an eye for the ladies. Indeed, I lost count of the number of times he and I parted company at the end of an evening’s carousing and I would watch him stagger homeward in the company of some lively mademoiselle, about whom, when we next met, he would have many a racy, lascivious tale to tell. He was ten years my senior, he was a handsome rake, he appeared not to have a care in the world – he was everything that I wished to be, and better still, he was my friend.

  I recall this one occasion when we were both in our cups and wandering along the banks of the Seine. It was a gorgeously warm, clear spring night, the city alive and buzzing all around us, and de Villegrand began describing his ambitions for the promotion and advancement of la belle France across the entire world. He bemoaned the current administration’s desire for rapprochement with England in the face of the aggressive rhetoric coming France’s way from von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. He was firmly of the view that France could stand on its own two legs against any enemy and that no alliance with “les rosbifs” was necessary.

  I jokingly said that, as a rosbif myself, I ought to take offence, but could not bring myself to, being such a devoted Francophile.

  De Villegrand’s response was to wrap an arm around my shoulders and call me, not merely a Francophile, but an honorary Frenchman. I all but melted at the compliment.

  “I must confess, mon ami,” he said, “it was no accident that we met. I came to Pelletier’s not by chance, as I claimed, but because I had heard rumours of this marvellous doll with the power of speech and I wished to make the acquaintance of the Englishman who had built it. He sounded to me as though he m
ust be a man of brilliance. And he is! And that is why I am asking you now to come and work with me. Leave Pelletier and his trinket factory. Together, you and I could achieve such things, Fred, such wonderful, incredible things. Join me in building a better, stronger France and a brighter future for all.”

  There were two reasons why I didn’t accede to his request on the spot, why I asked for time to consider. The first was that I liked my job. Pelletier was a decent man and, although my talking android had proved something of a fiasco, he remained open to new ideas from me. He claimed he was proud to have me as an employee, and I was proud to call him my boss.

  The other reason was Pelletier’s daughter. I haven’t mentioned her until now because... Well, it is difficult. It is difficult for me even to think about her, let alone talk about her.

  Her name was Delphine. She was seventeen. She was the loveliest creature in all of Paris, and that is saying something in a city whose women are generally held to be the most beautiful anywhere. She was sublimely pretty, with perfect lips, tip-tilted nose, and auburn hair that tumbled about her face in glossy ringlets. She moved with the utmost gracefulness, and her conversation was by turns witty and intelligent. She was a very paragon of femininity. All who met her fell instantly in love with her, and I’m not ashamed to say I was one of the smitten.

  We were introduced for the first time when Pelletier invited me to dinner at his townhouse on the Rue des Rosiers in the Marais. I have to say I was dumbstruck throughout the entire meal. My grasp of French appeared to have deserted me, along with my senses. All I could do was gaze across the table at this vision, this angel dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, while Monsieur and Madame Pelletier tried in vain to extract some sort of meaningful conversation from their English guest. It was “le coup de foudre”, in the French parlance. The thunderbolt. Love at first sight.