Death by Gaslight

by Michael Kurland

  The cart with the third chest on it was being pushed up onto the loading platform. “Easy enough to check,” Barnett said. “Any takers? Ten quid; easy money.”

  “How would you establish the contents of the chests?” von Hertzog asked.

  “Open one,” Barnett said.

  “You’re on!” Inglestone said, coming to a decision. “Ten pounds says that you’re mistaken; that those chests are, indeed, full of the pieces in the Lord East Collection. But understand that this wager has nothing to do with the fourteen bob you owe me.”

  “Fair enough,” Barnett said. “You can deduct it from my winnings. Well, shall we go find out? His lordship can’t object to a reasonable request to open one of the chests. We’ll all promise not to touch; won’t we, boys?”

  Now that the suggestion had been advanced, the reporters were unable to leave it alone. It became imperative to them to discover whether a possibility that none of them had even considered five minutes ago, that was unlikely in the extreme, that was actually none of their business, was true. In a body they left the grandstand and advanced toward the loading dock, the treasure chest, the goods wagon, and Lord East.

  The four plainclothes policemen who were guarding the grandstand moved to stop the cluster of them as they advanced. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!” one of them cried, opening his arms wide, as if to encircle the group himself.

  “’Ere now, what’s this?” a second barked, running around to the front of the group. The other two also raced around to the front to place themselves uncertainly between the reporters and the platform.

  Lord East heard the disturbance and turned to see the cluster of correspondents advancing on him. For a second he looked nonplussed, but then he gathered himself and guided his horse over to the group, placing himself and his horse between the reporters and the platform. “You gentlemen were requested to remain on the grandstand,” he said sternly. “You must realize that we cannot compromise our security arrangements, even to oblige the press. Please return immediately whence you came.”

  The third chest was now inside the goods wagon, placed carefully on its supporting frame, and the Indian carters were emerging from the wagon as the fourth chest was pulled up in its cart. “If you don’t mind, my lord,” Barnett called up to him, “we’d like to see inside that box.”

  “Box?” Lord East looked uncertain for a moment. “You mean the treasure chest, sir?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Higgins, of the Pall Mall Gazette, called. “There seems to be some doubt as to whether the treasure is actually in the chests, or whether this is merely a ruse.”

  “A ruse, gentlemen?” Lord East looked shocked. He had just been accused of doing something un-British.

  “The suggestion is, my lord,” Inglestone said, “ridiculous as it sounds, that you have spirited the treasure away by some alternate means, while encouraging us to believe that it is still in those chests. Thus supposedly foiling possible criminal attempts upon the collection.”

  Lord East considered for a second. “And just why should I do that?” he asked. “The treasure is quite safe where it is. Certainly safer than any other place I could put it. I do not like these devious methods you speak of, nor do I resort to them. They are unnecessary.”

  “Then, my lord, the treasure is, indeed, in the chests?” Inglestone asked, looking inordinately pleased. “You affirm that?”

  “There is my seal,” Lord East said, pointing with his riding crop to the lid of the fourth chest, now being inserted into the goods wagon. He indicated the strip of ribbon that went across the lid’s opening, sealed above and below. “It has not been broken.”

  “You will permit us to check?” von Hertzog asked.

  “I most certainly will not!” Lord East said sharply. He waved the chest on into the wagon. “Gentlemen, this is outrageous! How dare you question me! The chest will be opened at the Royal Albert Museum, in the presence of a representative of her imperial majesty, and not a jot before. Please return to your seats.”

  The reporters, muttering uncertainly, returned to the grandstand. Barnett watched as Lord East checked the inside of the goods wagon and then ordered it closed and sealed from the outside.

  Barnett’s part of the job, whatever it had accomplished, was done. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the train that would take Moriarty to Hampermire Station and himself through to London. How the little act he had just put on would further the cause, he didn’t know, and at the moment he didn’t care. Somewhere in London, Cecily Perrine had disappeared; somewhere in London she was at this very moment. In what state she was, Barnett did not care to speculate. How he would find her, he had no idea. But if she was still alive, find her he would.

  The sun was coming up, and the area outside the limelight was just beginning to be visible. Moriarty and Barnett left the grandstand and returned to the hotel. There was a telegram waiting for Moriarty when they arrived. He opened it and read it in a second. “Nothing,” he said. “Sorry, Barnett. No trace of the lady yet.”

  “I’ll find her,” Barnett said.

  “Of course you will,” Moriarty told him.

  TWENTY

  ALWAYS DARKEST

  I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

  The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

  Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

  Rayless, and pathless, and the icy Earth

  Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

  Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day…

  GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

  Cecily Perrine awoke. Slowly, dimly, her awareness returned, and she was amazed to realize that she had been asleep. She had no idea how long she had slept; there was no way to mark the passage of time in her pitch-black surroundings. She rose from the ticking full of dank straw that was her mattress on the cold stone floor, and felt her way around the smooth stone walls. She did not know what she hoped to find, and in any case her groping fingers encountered nothing but damp stone. The cell she was in was approximately six feet square, and higher than her fingers could reach with her arms fully extended. It contained the straw-filled ticking, a chamber pot, and Cecily. The door in the corner of one wall was no more than a foot wide and four feet high, and held neither a peephole nor a doorknob.

  She was not sure how, or why, she had arrived where she was. She remembered leaving the Hope mansion and walking toward her carriage. She had passed an alley where the Count d’Hiver was engaged in earnest conversation with some tall man. She remembered wondering who the man was, and where he had sprung from at such an hour. Then, on an idle whim, she had turned to hurry back to the mansion; she had thought of an unimportant question she wanted to put to Mr. Holmes. It would wait, but after all, she was there now. Rapid footsteps had sounded behind her, and a large, powerful man had grabbed her from behind. She had instinctively started to cry out, but her assailant had instantly clamped one great hand over her mouth, cutting her scream to no more than a loud gasp. He had then carried her a short distance, where some other person draped a sweet-smelling rag across her face. It must have been dosed with chloroform or some similar substance, for the next thing Cecily knew she was in this chamber.

  It must have been Count d’Hiver and the man he was talking to who had done this thing to her; so she decided once again, as she had a dozen times before. But it made no sense. Why would the count, the representative of the Privy Seal and thus of the Queen, abduct Cecily Perrine? Why would he abduct anyone, for that matter? What did he want with her? Why had no one come to her cell—except the man in black—since she had been there?

  The man in black! Four times since she had awakened from her drugged sleep to find herself in this featureless stone cell, the man in black had entered. He had given no warning; suddenly she had heard the bolts being thrown back and the door had opened. The cell had been bathed in a bright light—how bright she could not tell, since in her darkness a candle would have seemed the sun—and a man dressed
all in tight-fitting black garments, even to a black hood and black mask, had stepped in.

  She had, at first, tried speaking to him, reasoning with him, pleading with him, screaming at him; but to no avail. Four times he had put down bowls of rancid-smelling gruel and cups of water. Three times he had turned and left, wordlessly, gesturelessly. The fourth time he had reached out a hand and touched her on the arm; briefly, probingly, experimentally. And this had been the most horrible thing of all. He had not touched her as a man touches a woman, not even the gloating, possessive touch of a captor for his captive. This was immeasurably worse. There had not been even the humanity of lust in that touch. He had touched her as a farmer might probe a prize pig, to test the firmness of its skin, to feel its muscles, and how well fatted it was.

  She could not tell how long she had been held a prisoner. She had been fed four times, but at what intervals? She had eaten but little of the gruel, and was still not hungry; but this was no indication. She felt wretched and afraid and alone, and such feelings would keep her from hunger for weeks, not merely days.

  Cecily shrank back into the corner; there was that sound now, the snick-snick-snick of three bolts being thrown. The narrow wooden door was pulled open, and light flooded into the tiny cell. The tall man in black had once again come to visit. This time he brought no gruel. This time he took her by the arm and propelled her, as though she were a rag doll, out into the narrow stone corridor beyond the door. She resisted an impulse to cry out, feeling obscurely that it would give him satisfaction, and maintained a passive silence as he pushed her ahead of him down the corridor. He did not appear to notice her silence, any more than he had heeded her crying and pleading on his previous visits.

  Cecily tried to prepare herself for whatever might happen. Her mind was in turmoil, and she realized that she had no idea what to prepare herself for. This was so far outside her experience as to be a succession of unbelievable happenings, one long nightmare from which she was unable to wake.

  The light, which had seemed so blinding from within the black cell, proved to come from a row of gas-mantle fixtures set high in the corridor wall. From the way that the pipe ran along the outside of the wall, right below the ceiling, it was evident that the stone corridor and its row of cells had been constructed long before the coming of gaslight. She was captive in the ancient cellar of some great house, the house of a man important enough to plan on keeping captives in his own basement, back in the days when influential noblemen might expect to have a few captives of their own. And now the present owner of the house was using his inherited cellar for purposes that nineteenth-century authorities would frown on, if only they knew. That was a fact to be filed away. Probably useless, but a fact nonetheless. Collecting and sorting facts kept her mind busy and active, and that in itself was helpful.

  The man in black paused at the end of the corridor to unlock a thick wooden door, and then to lock it behind him. Just habit? Or were there other prisoners in that hellish black dungeon?

  After three more locked doors and a twisting iron staircase, they came at last to a room, a well-appointed study, the floor deeply carpeted and the walls lined with bookcases filled with leather-bound books. For all its fine appointments, there was something strange about the room, and it took Cecily a minute to figure out what it was: there were no windows.

  Behind an ancient, ornately carved oak table in the middle of the room, perched on a chair that would have served as a throne in many lesser kingdoms, was a small man clad in a black velvet lounging suit, his face concealed behind a great harlequin mask. Cecily thought it looked suspiciously like the Count d’Hiver—the size and build were about right—but she couldn’t be sure.

  The man in black brought Cecily to the front of the table, facing the harlequin, and released her. The harlequin stared intently at her, his blue eyes peering through the mask’s eye slits, and said nothing.

  Cecily felt a mixture of strong emotions all trying to surface at once; fear, astonishment, hatred, and rage boiled inside of her, causing her heart to thump loudly in her chest, her face to flush, her hands to feel alternately hot and cold. She wanted to cry, to scream, to beg, to hit out with all of her might at the man in black, to throw herself across the desk and throttle the smug harlequin. And so she did nothing. She felt that the harlequin was waiting for her to speak, perhaps to beg, to entreat, to demand; and so, mustering all the self-control she had available in her weary, frightened body, she remained mute.

  “Welcome!” the harlequin said at last, in a deep voice. (Artificially deep? The voice of d’Hiver, lowered for effect or disguise? She couldn’t be sure.) “Do you know why you are here?”

  “What?” The single syllable was drawn out of Cecily involuntarily, so shocked was she by the question. “Listen, you,” she said, putting her hands flat on the table in front of her and leaning aggressively forward toward the masked man. “I’ve been kidnapped, drugged, locked up in a black, dank cell, fed some kind of repulsive gruel, ministered to by this ape behind me, and you want to know if I know why I’m here! I’m here against my will, obviously at your behest, and you shall suffer for this. You can’t expect to get away with a thing like this in the middle of London in 1887, as though you were some sort of feudal lord. My friends are looking for me, and you will live to regret this. Don’t think they won’t find me!”

  The man in black grabbed her by the hair and lifted her straight up and back away from the table, actually raising her off the floor with one hand. The suddenness of the act, the shock and surprise, and the almost unbearable pain made her scream and brought tears to her eyes. She grabbed for his hand just as he released her hair, causing her to fall heavily to the floor. “Stand!” he commanded—the first word he had spoken in her presence.

  Cecily struggled to her feet, tears stinging her eyes. “You bastards!” she screamed across the desk. “If Benjamin were here—”

  “You are here as an acolyte, a supplicant, a slave,” the harlequin said, precisely as though nothing had just happened, as though she had remained respectfully silent. “There was some discussion at first about what you might know, or not know; but it was realized that it does not matter. What will grow in you, what will become of paramount importance, is your own knowledge of your condition. And that will change from day to day, from moment to moment.”

  She gaped at him. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Do you know what you’re doing—what you’ve done? You must be insane!”

  “I am the Master Incarnate,” the harlequin continued, ignoring her outburst. “In the course of time, you will come to know other masters. You are to be removed from here, and taken to the place of your service. You will learn what it means to be a slave.”

  “Listen!” Cecily yelled, anger at this man, so smug behind his silly mask, outweighing her fear. “You—”

  The harlequin turned to the man in black. “Is it time, Plantagenet?” he asked.

  The man in black nodded.

  The harlequin smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. “Take her!” he commanded.

  “Now, look—” Cecily said.

  The man called Plantagenet wrapped his right arm around her body, pinning her arms to her side. She tried to fight, but was unable to move in his iron grip. His left hand came up to her face, and there was a sweet-smelling rag in it.

  “No!” she cried…

  TWENTY-ONE

  INSIDE OUT

  In the still air the music lies unheard;

  In the rough marble beauty lies unseen;

  To wake the music and the beauty needs

  The master’s touch, the sculptor’s chisel keen.

  HORATIUS BONAR

  After an uneventful journey through some of England’s most beautiful countryside, Lord East’s treasure train arrived in London shortly after four o’clock, Saturday afternoon, and came to rest at a specially designated siding in Hampton Court. It remained there, sealed and surrounded with its military escort, until two o’clock next aft
ernoon, Sunday, when her imperial majesty’s personal representative, the stern and splendidly choleric Duke of Denver, eighty years old and ramrod-stiff in the saddle, trotted officially over to accept delivery of the Lord East Collection, as an indefinite loan, in her majesty’s name.

  The seals on each of the special goods wagons were now broken, and the great doors rolled aside, one at a time. The contents of the first three wagons—statuary, pillars, walls, friezes, and great stone urns—had passed the trip in fine condition. The fourth wagon, holding the five great treasure chests, appeared to be as it was when it was sealed. With a flourish, Lord East himself opened the first chest—

  —which was empty.

  In a haste approaching frenzy, the lids of the other four chests were pried off, revealing the impossible: each chest contained nothing but air, and dust, and one small seed pearl which was found wedged in a crack on the bottom of the third chest.

  All the color drained out of Lord East’s face, and, were it not for the instant aid of his two faithful Indian companions, he would have fainted dead away on the wagon floor. “It’s impossible!” he screamed to the Duke of Denver, as his aides helped him over the side of the wagon and down to the ground. “I tell you, the thing’s manifestly impossible! They can’t be gone!”

  The Duke of Denver wheeled in his saddle and turned to his escort, the Captain Commander of the Household Guard. “Get me Sherlock Holmes!” he ordered.

  * * *

  Benjamin Barnett did not return to the Russell Square house until late Sunday night, having spent every moment since he arrived back in London on Saturday afternoon doing his best to find out what had happened to Cecily Perrine. As far as he could discover, she had left the Hope mansion slightly after two o’clock the morning of Thursday, the thirty-first of March, and then disappeared off the face of the earth. He could seem to get no further.