The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (66 page)

             
"Look at that!" Lestrade exclaimed. "It must be some sort of signal."

             
"Quickly!" Holmes cried. "There's no time to lose!" Leaping up, he led his little force scurrying and sliding down the hill to the lawn below. As they reached the edge of the lawn two of the tethering cables fell away and the balloon flew skyward, trailing a third cable below it like an umbilical cord.

             
"There he goes!" Holmes yelled, running forward like a demented man to reach the gondola before it was too high. "We must stop him!" He leaped for the bottom of the gondola and managed to grab it with his fingers, but there was nothing to cling to and he fell away.

             
"Stop! Stop!" the constabulary yelled, racing across the lawn. One of them drew his pistol and fired at the ascending balloon.

             
"Come back down here!" another one yelled, stopping to take aim at the rapidly rising gondola, "Come back in the name of the law!"

             
Once the shooting had started it was contagious, and within seconds a fusillade of small-arms fire was directed at the great black object, which was rapidly disappearing into the great star-filled bowl of the night sky. Two of the policemen reached the one cable which, rising from layers of coils on the ground, was still attached to the ascending gondola. One of them leaped for it and was fifteen feet in the air before, realizing the folly of what he was doing, he let go and fell to the ground.

             
Moriarty's men dived for cover under whatever was available as this strange armed band appeared in their midst and began shooting at their precious aerostat. The locals, who were mostly sitting together on the side of the lawn nearest the road, began shrieking and howling. Most of them ran off into the night, but a few sat stolidly watching, perhaps suspecting that this was all part of the entertainment.

             
Gradually the shooting and yelling died away, until, within two minutes, the small group of Scotland Yard men were clustered silently in the middle of the lawn together, staring at the sky.

-

             
"What is the meaning of all this?" a firm, didactic voice suddenly asked from close behind them. "Inspector Lestrade, have you taken leave of your senses?"

             
Lestrade jerked around like a man on a string and gaped at the tall, dark-clad figure. "Professor Moriarty!" he gasped.

             
"I refuse to believe that you didn't expect to find me here," Moriarty said. "Now, what exactly is the meaning of this charade?"

             
"I—we—thought you were in that balloon."

             
"I see," Moriarty said. "Anytime you see an aerostat ascending into the sky, you naturally assume that I am aboard. And this, of course, explains why you were shooting at it.
"

             
"
Ah, well, not precisely—"

             
Sherlock Holmes came striding toward them across the lawn. "Moriarty!" he yelled.

             
"Holmes!" Moriarty said, turning and shaking his fist at him. "Now I understand. This moronic escapade was your doing."

             
"I have a warrant, Moriarty," Holmes shouted, brandishing the document over his head, "to search this property, house and grounds."

             
"And fire upon any aerostat that you happen to find ascending when you arrive?" Moriarty demanded. "Really, Holmes—"

             
"There was a murder in London last night." Holmes said, "and I have reason to believe that you were involved."

             
"There are about three murders in London every week, if the statistical abstracts are to be believed," Moriarty said. "And you believe that I am involved in each and every one of them. Is that any reason to go about shooting revolvers at perfectly innocent teen-age boys?"

             
"What boys?"

             
"There are two teen-age boys in the aerostat to work the equipment," Moriarty told him. "And if either of them is hurt, you will answer for it!"

             
"We thought you were on the balloon, Professor," Lestrade said in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. "Mr. Holmes said you were escaping."

             
"Escaping? From what? The aerostat is tethered, as you can see for yourselves if you'd bother to look." Moriarty indicated the one cable which was still uncoiling from the ground and following the balloon into the heavens.

             
A Chinese gentleman in dark robes and a close-fitting cap came scurrying across the lawn from the house. "They are unhurt," he called to Moriarty. "My son wishes to be informed as to what is going on down here, but neither of them was injured by the cannonade. What is going on down here?"

             
"Gentlemen," Moriarty said, "May I introduce my friend and colleague, Prince Tseng Li-Chang, fourteenth in line for the throne of Imperial China. His son, Low, at whom you were shooting in the aerostat, is fifteenth in line. They are here in exile, under the personal protection of her majesty, Queen Victoria. Prince Tseng, let me pres-ent Inspector Giles Lestrade of Scotland Yard, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes."

             
"You were shooting at my son?" Tseng demanded, glaring alternately at Lestrade and then at Holmes. "Why were you doing this? Are you agents of the Empress Dowager?"

             
Lestrade sighed. "I am afraid we have made a mistake," he said. "Please accept my apologies, and the apologies of the Yard."

             
"Mistake!" Moriarty snorted. "You'll be back in uniform tomorrow, Lestrade, if Prince Tseng complains to her majesty. You'll be lucky not to lose your pension."

             
"In my country," Prince Tseng interjected, "they would suffer the death of a thousand knives for shooting at a royal heir."

             
"Let me try to explain, Professor," Lestrade said.

             
"I can't imagine any possible explanation for what just went on here," Moriarty said, "but it will be fascinating to hear you try. Unfortunately I have no time now. We have a lot of work ahead of us, Prince Tseng and I and the two lads, and we cannot take the time right now. We are commencing a night of astronomical observations by a specially constructed aerostat-carried telescope."

             
"So you say," Holmes said, "but then what are you doing down here?"

             
Moriarty turned to glare at him. "The lads are up there to expose photographic plates. They send them down on small parachutes attached to the tethering cable, which also contains a telegraphic wire. We stay down here to develop the plates. Now please leave us alone for the remainder of the night. You have a warrant—go and search the house. Try to refrain from shooting up the furniture."

             
"Assassins!" Prince Tseng exclaimed.

             
"I think we'd better go," Lestrade said. "We don't have to search the house. We'll just go back to the city now. Can we talk about this sometime, Professor? I mean, without bringing her majesty into the discussion?"

             
"Monday," Moriarty said. "Come by and see me at Russell Square on Monday. I'll speak to the prince."

             
"I have a warrant," Holmes said. "I intend to search the house."

             
Lestrade looked from Holmes to Moriarty to Prince Tseng, who was glowering at them with unconcealed hostility. "Come along, Mr. Holmes," he said. "We'll go now."

Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

             
Upper Sedgewick Lane ran for two blocks south of Oxford Street, terminating abruptly at the high brick wall to the rear of Good Sisters' Hospital. Despite the best efforts of the residents and shopkeepers, the lane degenerated into shabby disrepute as one traveled the two-hundred-yard length of that final block.

             
The blame, if any, could be laid at the door of Good Sisters' Hospital. A massive rear door sheathed in heavy iron plate, studded with spikes and crusted with layers of muddy green paint, it was the only acknowledgment that Good Sisters gave to Upper Sedgwick Lane. And it was never used.

             
The front door of the hospital was on Beverton Street, a three-and-a-half-block semicircle from the lane. It was there that the carriages came and went, and there that the attentive doctors smiled and nodded at their respectable patients.

             
This sealed door was the subject of much speculation in Upper Sedgwick Lane. Rumor had it that in the darkest hours of the blackest nights, the green door opened.

             
In the dark of the moon, so the whisper went, mysterious carts, their wheels muffled with rags, would thump slowly over the ancient cobblestones and back up to the green door. Then the door would be opened by unseen hands and corpses, wrapped in white linen, would be whisked inside. Why the carts were said to be delivering bodies to the hospital instead of taking them away was never discussed. That is what happened, everyone knew it. They hadn't seen
it themselves, but they could name two or three who had, if they hadn't promised to keep their mouths shut.

             
Then there was the matter of the epigraph circumscribed around the hospital wall, which was always referred to by the lane's residents as "them words." The full and proper name of Good Sisters' Hospital was "The Hospice and Sanitarium in Holy Charity of the Good Sisters of the Miraculous Scars of the Bloody Body of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." The architect and builder of the hospital, one Matthew Creighton, had wrapped a frieze around the upper story of the structure with this title deeply chiseled thereon, intended to last until the final trumpet should make hospices redundant. And the portion of this full and proper name that happened, by some malicious chance, to come around on the Upper Sedgewick Lane side, two feet high and five stories up, in deep relief, was:
ARS OF THE
BLOODY BODY.

             
Upper Sedgwick Lane had never recovered from this indignity.

             
"It is by such fortuitous happenings," Mr. Nathaniel Palmar told Barnett, "that the destinies of men and nations are determined. Were it not for Matthew Creighton's infantile sense of humor—for there can be little doubt that the placement of the lettering on that infamous frieze
was deliberate—then Upper Sedgwick Lane might not have slowly degenerated over the past hundred years. Had that not happened, then this fine old mansion, once the home of Admiral Sir George Tallbouys, would never have been available at such a remarkably reasonable price. And had it not, then the Gentlemen's Gentlemen, through lack of a proper home, could never have come into being."

             
"That would have been a shame," Barnett said, running his hand over the dark mahogany woodwork of the entrance hall, with its patina of a hundred years' polishing and waxing.

             
"It would," Mr. Palmar agreed, "it would indeed." He led the way into the guests' parlor; a large room with a scattering of armchairs toward the front balanced by an ancient, well-used billiard table at the rear. "Yes, we owe a lot to Matthew Creighton. 'For his work continueth,' as the poet says, 'far beyond his knowing.' Were it not for the whimsical builder and the inadvertent benefactor, we would not be here."

             
"The inadvertent benefactor?"