The Arcanum (2 page)

2

THE PAPER BEFORE him was blank. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could not concentrate, distracted by the metronomic tick of his grandfather clock. He tapped his shoe on the snout of a Bengal tiger-skin rug splayed out at his feet and surveyed his surroundings, scanning the evidence of a life fully lived.

The billiards room of his Windlesham estate ran the length of the manor and substituted as a ballroom and Doyle’s writing office. His wife, Lady Jean, kept a piano and a harpsichord in the corner by the redbrick fireplace. The lion-toed billiards table counterbalanced the room at the opposite end. The walls were ornamented with an eclectic array of Napoleonic weapons and a stag’s head with an impressive six-foot rack. Doyle’s gaze drifted past the bust of Sherlock Holmes in his deerstalker cap, and settled wistfully on a Sidney Paget portrait of young Kingsley Doyle in his Royal Air Force uniform. The boy’s rounded face could have been a mirror of his own at that age. Doyle looked at his hands and counted the blotching age spots. He glanced back again at the portrait until he felt a chamber of welled-up sorrow creak open in his chest. Then he turned once more to the empty pad of paper.

The phone rang: a dull jangling that never failed to distract. He found Bell’s contraption grossly intrusive. Not answering seemed boorish, but Doyle could never predict when a visitor might arrive unannounced into his office, demanding his attention even if he was writing. It was technological rudeness; a harbinger of things to come. Doyle glared at the phone from across the room, rapping his fountain pen on the arm of the chair.

Then the floorboards creaked as he crossed to the mantel and plucked the receiver from its post, holding the body of the phone in his other hand.

“Yes? Hello?” Doyle tended to shout into the telephone.

“Arthur?” The voice was deep, rich, and unmistakable even across the crackling phone lines: the Minister of Munitions, Winston Churchill—a friend of Doyle’s since the Parliamentary elections of 1900.

“Winston?”

“There’s news, I’m afraid. Bloody awful news.” The phone lines were quiet save for static. “Konstantin Duvall is dead.”

A single droplet of ink struck the floor. Doyle ran a hand over his walrus moustache and closed his eyes. His shoulders sagged. He placed the dripping pen back on the table. “When?”

“Last night, they say. Clipped by a motorcar. In the fog.”

“My God.” Conan Doyle felt his emotions hiss away into the recesses of his heart, leaving only nausea. But after sixty-plus years, this, he knew, was only a precursor of the tidal rush of grief to come.

“Did he have any family, Arthur? Of all of us, you knew him best.”

“Honestly, I . . . I don’t know.”

“I’ll have the Yard look into it, but I suspect they’ll have no better luck than I will. We may have to put something together. Small, of course.”

Doyle was reeling. Bits and shards, pictures, words, a rush of thoughts had broken free. He grasped for useful information. “He spoke once . . . of wanting to be cremated. From his days in the Orient.”

“Eh? That’s something, then. We can accomplish that. It seems unbelievable. Unbelievable . . .” Churchill allowed the silence to loom. He was clearly waiting for information he knew Doyle possessed. The good doctor, however, was lost, for the moment, to the past. Finally, Churchill pressed on. “What on earth was he doing at the British Museum? And at that absurd hour?”

Doyle hesitated, then lied, “I have no idea.”

“Bollocks,” Churchill answered. “There’s much you’ve left unsaid of your business together, Arthur. Reams left unsaid. Now, I’ve been straight with you about Duvall, and I would appreciate a portion of the same courtesy in return. Someday quite soon, old boy, I want to know what you chaps were up to.”

Doyle sighed. “Honestly, Winston, we’ve been over this—”

But Churchill cut him off. “Duvall was an important man, but only you seem to know how important. At some point, you’ve an obligation to your country, your king, and to me to tell us what you know. In the meantime,” Churchill’s voice softened, “I’m very sorry. I know he was important to you. He lived well. That’s all we can ask in the end. To live well. I’ll ring you later.”

“Yes, Winston. Thank you for calling.”

The line went dead. Doyle recradled the receiver, finding it difficult to swallow. It was the secrets, held for thirty years now, surging forth to overtake the present. But he held on to the mantel and fought them off, locking them back where they belonged.

LADY JEAN DOYLE was trimming the roses, in a white dress with long sleeves and a yellow hat. Her fair skin was susceptible to the sun but she enjoyed gardening—especially when she could watch their young daughter ride her horse along the green bluffs of Sussex Downs. The Doyles’ estate at Windlesham was the picture of tasteful grandeur: a redbrick mansion of thirty-two rooms guarded by a ring of 300-year-old maple trees.

But moments of beauty like this had grown rarer of late, making Lady Jean doubly thankful for each one. The recent past had tested the Doyles’ mettle with a harrowing string of deaths. Aside from the loss of their adored Kingsley, Doyle’s brother Innes had died of influenza. And Jean’s brother, Malcolm, perished at the Battle of Mons. Recovery—if it was to happen at all—would be painfully slow.

Worse still, the Doyles’ recent crusade on behalf of the Spiritualist Movement had sent unintended shock waves through the British press, and set off a firestorm of ridicule. Enemies and admirers alike had declared Doyle a rube, as gullible as Sherlock Holmes was skeptical. There seemed no reprieve from the insults and jibes, but Doyle soldiered on, watching his reputation crumble, like a man burdened with secret knowledge.

As indeed he was.

Yet, even knowing this, it had still shaken Lady Jean to see her dear Arthur—her robust champion—age before her eyes. Now even the natural escape of writing was lost to him. He would sit in his normal spot in the billiards room, in his creaking swivel chair—the birthplace of scores of novels—frozen like a statue, staring at the page. Grief had wrung him dry and Lady Jean feared the strain of it was killing him.

Now, as Doyle stumbled out onto the patio, he looked frail and drawn. Lady Jean dropped the clippers, and ran to him. “Arthur, what’s wrong?”

“Duvall was killed by a motorcar last night. At the museum, of all places.”

Lady Jean took him into her arms, his forehead resting on her shoulder like a child’s. She stroked his hair and kissed his brow, not only out of love, but also so as not to betray her relief. It was not one of their children or immediate loved ones. And, to her, it meant that one of the worst and most frightening chapters of their lives had finally ended.

Or so she believed . . .

3

THE FUNERAL CAME and went, a puzzling and pathetic anticlimax to Duvall’s life. The weather was typically English, a cold, steady drizzle leaking from the sky. Doyle knew how Duvall would rage at such a paltry display. The occasion called for hurricanes, tempests to flatten trees. After all, Duvall was the last of the great mystics, a remnant of the Middle Ages. He bore the likeness and courage of a Templar Knight, yet embraced the perversions of an Inquisitor priest. He was as burnt-fingered and secretive as an alchemist, yet spoke dozens of languages, wrote manuscripts in cipher, and traveled the world with different identities, in the tradition of a court spy.

And now his end was all too depressingly human. It seemed, in the end, that Duvall was just a man.

Doyle gazed at the other seven mourners lined up along an ivy-covered bridge—luminaries all, though scarcely a fraction of Duvall’s vast network.

Even now, Doyle shook his head at the breadth of the man’s influence. Duvall was among the most pivotal voices of his time. His friends and confidants had been the elite, not only of Europe, but of the Americas as well. Prime ministers, kings, archbishops, presidents, philosophers, and writers—all considered it necessary proof of their standing to know Konstantin Duvall, and to call him friend.

And he was still a paradox to Doyle, even throughout the many years of their acquaintance. No newspaper journalist had ever printed his name, he mused. Few publishers—Hearst being the exception—even knew he existed. Yet Duvall reigned supreme in the pantheon of Occult masters, straddling cultures and worlds: ever-present, enigmatic, ageless.

Doyle took note of a woman wrapped in black standing apart from the others. Her lashes beat like butterfly wings as tears dripped from the curve of her elegant nose. Doyle recognized her as a Spanish princess, and also the wife of one of the richest shipping magnates in Europe. It reminded him of the way women lost their senses in Duvall’s presence. In his lifetime, Duvall had been challenged to eight pistol duels by cuckolded husbands and won them all.

But beyond the society gossip, the rumors were impossible to confirm, for Duvall was a man who made embellishment too tempting. Indeed, embellished stories of Duvall were the currency of social advancement amongst the European aristocracy. The stories of his international diplomacy were too widespread and inconceivable to be believed, but Doyle knew full well that Duvall was involved in the more crucial decisions of the last half of the nineteenth century, despite showing no allegiance to any one country or king.

Many feared him. There was a dark side to the stories, not so kind or easily dismissed; tales of political treachery, of spy-craft and assassination. There were even whispers of sorcery and Devil worship.

Supposedly, Pope Pius IX had placed a secret bounty on Duvall’s head, though some found that to be more an act of self-preservation than of holy writ.

He never paid for a meal, Doyle remembered with a smile, and could be an oppressive braggart. But no one had any concept of the scope of his knowledge, or the depths of his experience.

And then there was that memorable accent, impossible to decipher. Russian? French? And that crisp laugh, like a rifle report.

The memories clogged Doyle’s throat and fogged his sight. How distant it all felt. And yet . . . where grief had once barricaded the doors to the past, now the past wanted out.

For Montalvo Konstantin Duvall had chosen Doyle, and that one simple fact had been Doyle’s seminal secret for the last thirty years. Duvall had brought them all together. It was his vision from the start. The Arcanum was the one thing Duvall called his own. But who took charge now?

Doyle watched the dust puff and scatter from the urn. Most of it hit the stream beneath their feet, but some swung back, peppering overcoats and bowler hats. Doyle released Lady Jean’s hand and swept a bit of ash from his sleeve before realizing what Duvall had become. Just a smudge. Dismissed.

It was wrong. All of it was wrong. The act of brushing Konstantin Duvall off his sleeve confirmed it.

A rusted lever turned over in Doyle’s mind. For a moment, he was more awake than he had been in four years. And he knew something was wrong about this. Very wrong.

To Doyle’s left stood Churchill, his bulbous red nose protuberant beneath his bowler. Doyle took his elbow and spoke softly. “The Yard looked into this?”

Churchill whispered back, “Young actors drove the car. Actors in a play. They told the authorities that Duvall rushed at them out of the fog.”

Doyle stared at Churchill, who tilted his head up, annoyed. “What?”

“You are not answering the obvious question, Winston.
Why
did Duvall rush at them out of the fog?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Churchill’s voice rose, and he was shushed by someone down the line of black-clad mourners. “There’s plenty about that man I never understood,” he added in a whisper.

Doyle released Churchill’s elbow and gazed over the bridge at the last of the dust melting into the streambed.

Churchill shot him a wary look, and lowered his voice even further. “What are you thinking, old boy?”

“Nothing of consequence.”

“Call off the dogs, Arthur; it was an accident. That’s all. No point mucking round in it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Let the boys at the Yard do their job. Splendid to see you still have the old fire, though.” Churchill patted him on the back.

Doyle softly repeated the words. “ ‘The old fire,’ yes.” He smiled at Churchill. He knew better than anyone that nothing in Duvall’s life had ever been an “accident.” And now Doyle sensed the same would hold true in death.

LADY JEAN TURNED to her husband in the back of the Bentley limousine. She was not a psychic, but she could read her husband’s mind better than most wives. She knew the meaning of every line, blanch, and color of his sturdy, handsome face. He ignored her gaze by studying a fly buzzing against the car window. She would have none of it. “What were you and Winston discussing?” she asked.

Doyle pretended to be lost in thought. “Yes, dear?”

But Lady Jean was not fooled. “There’s a saying, isn’t there, Arthur?” she said. “About sleeping dogs and where they lie?”

Her husband did not respond.

“It was a terrible accident.”

Doyle turned, his eyes containing a certain steeliness that made her flinch. “Then there’s no reason for concern, is there?” he answered.

4

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Doyle took a carriage into the heart of Whitechapel on the east end of London. There was heavy foot traffic on the narrow streets, for motorcars were still rare in this part of town, and Doyle was jostled as vendors hawked cold cups of jellied eels and children played cricket using lampposts as wickets. A tribe of barefoot orphans latched on to his pant legs until he sprinkled them with small coins, and when the dust cleared he found himself deep in the labyrinth of tenement alleyways.

The gold knob of his walking stick tapped on the door of a row house.

A woman answered the door. “Yes?”

“Good day. Is Daniel Bisbee on the premises?”

The woman scowled, wiping wet hands on her apron. “You with Scotland Yard, then?”

A mother protecting her cub, he thought. “Most certainly not. My name is Arthur Conan Doyle, and I—”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” She pulled the door wide and ushered him through as he tipped his hat. “What an honor, sir. What an honor! Such a fine man, and ye’ve come fer me Danny! It’s a bloody mess—please, can I make you some tea, then, sir?”

“That would be lovely, yes.”

Daniel’s mother pounded hard on the wall of the tenement. “Danny! It’s Arthur Conan Doyle, for God’s sake. Get up, now!”

“Bugger off,” came a muffled voice from behind the wall.

Daniel’s mother flashed her guest an embarrassed grin, then turned and kicked the wall. As mother and son bellowed at each other between the walls, Doyle took a long look around the room and determined—in three days, fifteen hours, and forty-two minutes less than Scotland Yard—that Daniel Bisbee was innocent of murder. It was a level of observational acuity as basic to him as that of a master pianist playing scales. His mind allowed information to flow through a meticulous mental machinery that sorted, prescribed, rendered, annotated, and filed with photographic precision: yearbooks, family heirlooms, trinkets atop counters, the scent of fresh-baked scones, the quality of the carpets and furniture, the placement of keys on the coffee table, the brand of cigarettes smoked . . .

Doyle was the measure of his greatest literary invention, and more.

“ ’Ave ye come to save ’im, then, my Danny?” Mrs. Bisbee was suddenly at Doyle’s side, tugging at his sleeve. “I know what ye’ve done with that poor Indian fellow.”

She spoke of George Edalji, an East Indian immigrant wrongfully accused of bizarre cattle mutilations across the moors of southern England some years previously. Many had seen Doyle’s intervention as simple humanitarianism. But had the public—or the legal establishment—known what had truly mutilated the cattle of Cheltenham that year, the world would never have been the same. There would have been riots in the streets, capitals burned. For publicity purposes, it had been convenient to use Doyle both for disinforming the public and to preserve Edalji’s innocence.

Doyle took Mrs. Bisbee’s hand from his sleeve. “Madam, I trust Danny never meant for this to happen. The victim was a friend. I would like to ask your son some questions, that’s all.”

Daniel Bisbee appeared in the hallway. His brow was furrowed as he tucked a dirty T-shirt into his trousers.

Doyle offered his hand. “Daniel?”

“Are you really him, then?” Daniel asked, as they shook hands.

“Yes. And you are Daniel Bisbee?”

“The Yard sent you after me? To fox me out?”

Doyle squeezed Daniel’s hand, then released it. “I know you did nothing wrong.”

Daniel relaxed. “How’d you know that, then?”

Doyle smiled. “It is my business to know things. Perhaps I’ve trained myself to see what others overlook.”

Mrs. Bisbee brought a tray of tea to the table and picked lint off her son’s shoulder. Daniel shook her off. Doyle turned. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Bisbee, I’d prefer to speak with Daniel alone.”

“I don’t mind in the slightest, sir.”

Daniel glared at his mother, who was gazing adoringly at Doyle. The doctor patted her hand and she backed away.

When she was gone, Daniel settled into his chair and eyed Doyle. “So you wrote them stories, then? Them Sherlock Holmes stories?”

“Have you read any?”

Daniel took a cigarette from his case and lit it. “A couple, yeah. Smart bugger, that Holmes. You as smart as him, then?”

“I’m only the humble creator,” Doyle said, looking hard into Daniel’s eyes and causing the actor to shift nervously.

“You knew the feller, then? I heard ye tell Ma . . .”

“He was an old friend.”

Daniel spit a bit of tobacco off his tongue, and sucked on his cigarette. “I still see him, Mr. Doyle. Every night, I see him. In the fog.”

“Go on, son.”

Daniel told his story. And being an actor, he told it well, and Doyle found himself drawn into the tale. And when caught up in the memories, Daniel took Doyle’s arm the way Duvall had grabbed his, and Doyle flinched. Then Doyle shut out everything but Daniel’s voice, repeating Duvall’s dying words, until . . .

“The Arcanum,” Doyle finished.

Daniel blinked. “That’s it exactly. ‘The Arcanum,’ just like you just said, sir. That’s bloody unreal. You know what it is, then?”

Doyle stood, offered his hand. “You’ve been very brave, Mr. Bisbee. And very helpful.”

Daniel shook Doyle’s hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, sir. You’re the most famous person I ever met. A real honor, sir.”

Doyle liked the boy. “Give Lizzie time, son. Nothing worth having ever comes easily.”

Daniel frowned, confusion painting his face, “How did you—?”

“Of the two schools you’re considering, I would always favor Oxford over an American college. The Queen’s English is far preferable for stage work. American playwrights are just getting their footing, wouldn’t you say?”

Daniel spluttered. “Did—”

“Ah yes. Your mother’s arthritis, untreated, could become debilitating. Yet she’s too proud to go to the doctor. There’s a physician in Wellington I want you to telephone.” Doyle scribbled a name and number on a sheet from his tiny notebook, then handed it to Daniel. “He’s one of the best, and most certainly will take some of the pain away. And for you, my boy, it’s less midnight tea if you want to have a decent night’s sleep again. You’re too young to be an insomniac.”

“You’ve got bloody magic, sir.”

“Eyes and ears, son. Eyes and ears. Wish your mother good day.” Then he squeezed the boy’s shoulder and departed.