Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (24 page)

Holmes nodded. This was not news to him, even if it was to me. “But if it is known amongst the authorities here that he belongs to these ‘Chauvin’s Heirs’, how come he is allowed in Britain at all? Surely someone with links to such an organisation would be precluded from holding any kind of official position over here, or even any kind of residency permit.”

“I said ‘rumoured,’” said Mycroft. “It’s one of those things which you hear talk of but which can’t be proven one way or the other. There are some in the Foreign Office who claim the Hériteurs de Chauvin are as apocryphal as Nicolas Chauvin himself, a fictional ideal, a figment of the collective French imagination, nothing more. Equally, it has been reported by our spies across the Channel that not only is this group real, it recruits only the brightest and best from among its countrymen. Its exclusivity is such that one must be a master of several disciplines simply in order to be
considered
for membership. Its tentacles reach into the topmost strata of French society, and it receives funding in the form of donations from the wealthiest individuals that nation has to offer.”

“De Villegrand would certainly appear to be the perfect candidate for its ranks,” Holmes said. “Moreover, my own recent enquiries indicate that not only does this secret society exist, but that the vicomte is a pre-eminent member of it.”

I recalled the certainty with which, a short while earlier, Holmes had spoken of de Villegrand’s yearning for “French Rule”. “He continues to fall in my estimation – and he wasn’t that high in the first place.”

“You’re quite sure about this, Sherlock?” said Mycroft.

“I delved into his background,” my friend said. “The details are sketchy, conclusive evidence hard to come by, but I found enough to confirm to my satisfaction that the Hériteurs de Chauvin are no fiction and that de Villegrand plays a prominent role in their activities. He is over here posing as a cultural attaché when really he is an
agent provocateur.”

“A viper in our midst,” I said, feeling that
“agent provocateur
” was altogether too grand and refined-sounding an appellation for de Villegrand.

“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.”

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, not 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?”

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.