Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (28 page)

Had Delphine been in better physical condition, I might have turned round on the spot, re-entered the house, and dashed de Villegrand’s brains out while he slept. But Delphine needed a doctor. That was my first and foremost priority. Saving her took precedence over avenging the wrong done to her.

I got her back to her parents’ house, I don’t remember how. Monsieur Pelletier refused to listen to my explanations, my excuses, my entreaties. He called me every vile name under the sun. He beat me with his bare fists. He threw me out. I did not object or retaliate. I deserved every bit of his ill-treatment, and more.

The doctor came. I waited outside in the pouring rain, as dejected as it is humanly possible to be. He emerged an hour later, and his expression told me all I needed to know.

Delphine...

Delphine had died from internal injuries. Such was the brutality with which de Villegrand had used her. Abused her. That... that
monster
had taken the very best, the purest thing in all this world, and destroyed it.

In breaking her, he broke me.

I returned to the Marquis’s mansion, resolved to have it out with de Villegrand. I was a seething cauldron of rage and hatred, a veritable Fury. I found Delphine’s despoiler sitting with his cronies, enjoying a breakfast of cold cuts and leftover champagne. They were recounting the previous night’s exploits and laughing uproariously. I bearded de Villegrand. I rebuked him for his grotesque, savage behaviour. I called him a rapist and murderer.

“Rapist?” said he. “That’s a matter of opinion. From a woman’s perspective, what begins as rape does not always end up that way. But murderer?”

I told him that Delphine was dead. He had as good as killed her with his lusts.

He at least had the decency to look startled, albeit only for a moment.

“Well, if she wasn’t woman enough to handle me...” he said, and sniggered.

That snigger did it. I snatched up a table knife and lunged at him, fully intending to cut out his heart.

I had no idea that he was a martial artist of some proficiency. It seemed there was much I didn’t know about the Vicomte de Villegrand, much I had been blinkered to.

In a single swift action he wrenched the knife out of my hand and laid me low on the floor. His reflexes were astounding. I scarcely saw him move. I tried to rise but he kicked me back down with one foot. He stamped on my chest, pressing me in place. I squirmed but could not free myself.

“You did not deserve her,
rosbif,”
he sneered. “There are some girls who are made to know the touch only of a real man – a real French man. Anything else is a waste of their time, especially a limp, feeble
Anglais.”
He leaned closer. “Delphine loved it. You should have heard her cry out. She could not get enough. Once she had succumbed to me, once her resistance was broken, I repeatedly had to pleasure her, to meet her insatiable demands. If I am to be the only lover she ever had, then she has truly died content.”

I screamed at him then, until my lips were coated in a froth of spittle. What I said, I cannot exactly recall, but by the end of it I had exhausted my fund of French expletives and most of my English ones too. I had threatened to kill de Villegrand in a myriad inventive ways. I had vowed not to rest until he and all his coterie of insane nationalists were either behind bars or swinging from the gallows.

De Villegrand was unperturbed. He asked the others what should be done with me. The suggestions ranged from “lock him up in the cellar until he calms down” to “slit his throat and toss the body in the Seine”. The consensus tended towards getting rid of me permanently, so that I wouldn’t be a pest. In a surge of desperation, I burst forth with: “I challenge you to a duel!”

This elicited gales of laughter.

“I mean it,” I said. “If I am to die, at least let it be with honour. And if it also affords me an opportunity to gain reparation for the atrocious insult done to Delphine and her family, so much the better.”

The idea took de Villegrand’s fancy. “How terribly quaint you are, Fred. Yet, if it’s a duel you want, why not? Swords or pistols?”

I had never fired a shot in my life, nor for that matter wielded a sword. However, of the two options, the latter was the more appealing. There is little one can do about a bullet if it is aimed true. At least with a sword one stands a sporting chance.

When I informed de Villegrand of my decision, I realised I had chosen wrongly. He, it turned out, was an excellent shot but his swordsmanship was even more notable. “With a gun you might have got lucky,” he said. “With a sabre, not a chance.”

The date was set – a week hence.

“In the meantime,” de Villegrand said, “do not go to the police. I say this not as a warning but as a piece of practical advice. It will not be worth your while. My friend the Marquis here, do you know who his brother is? The Director-General of the Süreté, no less. Any claims you make against me and my friends will be ignored. You may even be incarcerated at La Santé for slander and defamation of character.”

I did not waste a minute of that week. I found myself the best fencing master I could, spending every last franc I had on him. I block-booked lessons for the entire day, every day, and I learned and I trained, and when I wasn’t learning or training I practised in my own time. I barely ate or slept. I was a man obsessed. I would beat de Villegrand, whatever it took. Failing that, I would not make it an easy fight for him. He would pay dearly for his victory.

The fateful day came round. Dawn saw us at the Jardin du Luxembourg. A low mist hung between the elms and shrouded the hard earth. The sun was a faint disk, struggling to rise above the rooftops. Paris was sombre and silent. It would be a good morning to die.

Several of the Hériteurs de Chauvin had turned out as spectators. I had no second, so the Marquis volunteered to fulfil that role. He pronounced himself unimpressed with the sword I had brought, but it was the best I could afford. I had sold my collection of Verne first editions in order to pay for it. He also advised me to offer no opposition, simply to surrender to the inevitable. It would be quicker that way, he said. Less painful.

De Villegrand and I faced off. He saluted me, sabre to nose.

“Let’s see how a
rosbif
fights,” he said. “
En garde!”

To his surprise, and mine, I acquitted myself well, at least to begin with. My fencing master had taught me some sneaky tricks which might give me an advantage, such as the
appel,
stamping one’s foot in order to distract one’s opponent, and the
flèche,
bringing the rear leg before the front leg and sprinting past one’s opponent to strike him from the side. These put de Villegrand temporarily off-kilter and allowed me to deliver attacks that almost – almost – penetrated his defences.

Yet always he managed to deflect and riposte, so that I was forced to fall back on the repertoire of parries. Only once did I land anything like a convincing blow, when I lunged towards him using a
disengage
feint. He answered with a
coup d’arrët,
but I anticipated this and switched to a second-intention
moulinet,
a circular cut. It caught him unawares, and the tip of my sabre slashed his cheek.

“Touché,” he said, dabbing off the blood with the back of his hand.

Up until that point he had not been taking me, or the duel, particularly seriously. He had danced around, playing to the crowd, showboating with flamboyant bits of footwork such as the
balestra
and the
patinando
. I had seemed more a nuisance to him than a serious threat.

That changed with the drawing of first blood. De Villegrand set about me in earnest. Flurries of thrusts and stabs came my way, his blade flashing like a dragonfly’s wing in the strengthening sunlight. My primary and secondary parries became less and less effectual, until in the end I was flapping my sword frenziedly around, blocking his attacks without elegance or precision, simply trying to survive. Delphine was still in my thoughts, but predominantly I was a man enduring a vicious, relentless onslaught, doing his level best not to get hurt.

He pressed me backwards, raining blows on me like a whirling dervish:
glissade, coupé, remise,
and some I had no names for. Eventually we ended up in an
engagement,
face to face, blade to blade, our bodies pushed together.

“You have no refinement,” he said to me, “no
élan
. What basic skills you have learned, you have mastered, I’ll give you that. But you lack a command of the higher techniques that make one exceptional. You will die here today,
mon ami
, defending the honour of a woman who is past caring. It is so sad. We could have done so much together, Fred. We could have gone so far. Your name would have echoed down through history, alongside mine. And you have thrown it away, all over some silly, simpering female.”

My blood boiled. How dare he talk about Delphine in that way! I brought my knee up sharply between his legs and heard with deep satisfaction his grunt of agony. He shoved me away with both hands, uttering a stream of profanity.

“A dirty trick,” he wheezed. “No Frenchman would ever stoop so low. For that, I will not kill you after all. I will instead leave you wishing you were dead.”

He fell upon me once more. I, by now exhausted, tried a simple extension attack, but de Villegrand dexterously flicked my sabre sideways, then disarmed me with a
prise de fer,
using his blade to twist mine out of my grasp.

Now utterly without means of defending myself, I was at his mercy.

What he did next...

You have seen my bare face, gentlemen, somewhat disguised. Those scars were stage makeup, for the most part. However, had you seen me without the fake burns, you would have beheld an ugly, permanent truth.

De Villegrand tripped me up, laid me out flat on my back, and proceeded to work on me all over with his sabre, paying particular attention to my face. There is almost no part of my body that does not still bear the marks of his blade. I am crisscrossed with cuts. Naked, I look as though I have been taken apart by a surgeon and put back together, reassembled much like one of the toys I dismantled as a child, or like Dr Frankenstein’s patchwork monster in the novel. One side of my face is so hideously marred that no one can look at it, even me in the mirror, without wincing. No woman, certainly, could ever deem me attractive again. De Villegrand has ensured that. Even if I could have found someone who could be a worthy successor to Delphine, someone who could come close to her in terms of beauty and luminosity, she would not give me a second glance. She would cross the street to avoid me.

De Villegrand left me there, lacerated, shredded, in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He and his Hériteur chums swanned off, and I might have bled to death had not a park keeper come by on his early rounds and hurried to fetch assistance. I was patched up at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, and a month later I was on my way back to England, still swathed in bandages like some ambulatory Egyptian mummy.

I stepped off the boat at Dover on a chilly, blustery autumn day. But I did not feel the bite of the wind. A fire was burning inside me, a fire that has kept me warm ever since, even on the coldest nights.

My mother’s brother – whom I had met but once, and that when I was a mere stripling – died shortly after I returned to England, and I became, unexpectedly, a man of independent means. My uncle bequeathed me, his only close male kin, his extensive plantations in the West Indies. My parents were all in favour of me going out to the Caribbean and running them. It might help me recuperate, they felt, from the terrible ordeals I had suffered in France, about which I refused to talk. I might even win myself a bride out there, where eligible white men were few and far between and therefore the standards for what constituted handsomeness were lower. But instead I sold off my uncle’s holdings and ploughed the money into a series of specialised engineering projects – into becoming Baron Cauchemar.

For I knew this: that de Villegrand would continue his scheme to build war machines, even without me. The Hériteurs de Chauvin would continue to bankroll him. They would not abandon their dream of a worldwide French hegemony. Someone would have to stop them. And that someone would be me.

In the wake of Cauchemar’s sorry tale, silence reigned in the gondola, the only sound the rumbling churn of the airship’s propellers. Outside, the sky was paling, the afternoon dissolving into evening.

Eventually Holmes said, “You have my sincerest condolences, Mr Tilling.”

“And mine,” I said.

“Thank you, but you should save your sympathies for de Villegrand.” Cauchemar’s voice was brittle. “When I am done with him, he will be fit for nothing but exhibition at a freak show, like Treves’s Elephant Man.”

“You will not kill him?”

“No, Mr Holmes. He spared my life – just – when it was his to take. I shall extend him the same courtesy, and let him spend the rest of his days as disfigured and loathsome as he left me.”

“I am still unclear why you have left it so late to confront him,” I said. “If you have known all along that it is de Villegrand who has been terrorising London, why not go after him sooner? His home address is no secret. Lives could have been saved.”

“But, Doctor, I did
not
know all along. Mr Holmes’s earlier surmises were not quite on the mark. The fact is, I didn’t begin to suspect de Villegrand might be behind the attacks until after the third bomb, the one at Waterloo. I was already closing in on Torrance at the time. I knew him to be an associate of de Villegrand’s, but I did not know how thick the two of them were with each other, to what extent they were in cahoots, if they were at all. Torrance could quite easily have been working independently of the vicomte where the bombings were concerned. At the back of my mind there lurked the strong possibility that de Villegrand himself
was
involved, but he is wily as a fox and left no clear trail, doing nothing to incriminate himself, not even sending any telegrams that might implicate him. Only after someone shot at me in the graveyard were my suspicions about him confirmed, the accuracy of the bullets compelling me to the conclusion that my old enemy was the one pulling the trigger and that the trail of information which led me to that church had been laid to lure me there. Thereafter, everything fell into place. In hindsight, there was one glaringly obvious clue that the bombings were the Hériteurs de Chauvin finally making their long-awaited move.”