The List Of Seven (13 page)

"So while the one's publicly and visibly engaged, the other brother goes about the fieldwork."

"That being the targeted burgle, in and out wit' the grab bag clean as a nun's wimple," added Larry.

"Both of them as quick as mice and able to work their way into places you wouldn't believe humanly possible," Sparks

went on—enjoying himself just a little too much with this story, thought Doyle.

"Barry, see, 'e can dislocate 'is shoulders in a tight spot and collapse 'imself down like an umbrella—"

"They're never seen together in public, so even if the brother on the job is pinched red-handed, forty eyewitnesses in the pub are ready to swear they spent the evening in the accused's flamboyant company. Absolutely foolproof."

"And Bob's your uncle it was, too, sir," Larry continued. "That is, till one dark day Barry buys hisself a bit of a hard cheese. Always after the ladies, Barry was: a tragic flaw. On this one particular night, he's flouncing a fishmonger's daughter. He's laid a mighty siege to the citadel of this dolly's virtue: The more defense she musters, the more engines of war Barry marshals onto the field of honor. Four in the morning, right there in the shop among the sardines. He's broken through her battlements, overrun the palace guard, and is about to breach her sanctum sanctorum when her old dad barrels in, unexpected like wit' a catch a' North Sea haddock, and before Barry can half pull his knickers on, the man whacks a cleaver 'cross his chops, cuts him right to the bone—"

"We can safely leave out the medical details, Larry," said Sparks.

"Right. Sorry, sir," Larry said earnestly, searching Doyle's face for any wounded sensibility.

"There's a place for the likes of you and your brother," replied Doyle. "It's called prison."

"No question about it, sir. And no doubt that's where we'd both be languishin' to this day, deservedly so, if it weren't for the good graces of Mr. Sparks 'ere."

"A long story we shan't belabor the good doctor with at the moment," Sparks said authoritatively. "Did you spy anyone else on the road?"

"I can say wit' some confidence that your avenue of escape remains undetected, sir."

"Welcome news. Now, my friend, what have you brought for us?"

"Beggin' your pardon, gents, 'ere I am gabbin', and you must be as parched as a medieval monk's manuscript."

It turned out Larry had brought in his saddlebags a great

many things that, if he hadn't been in such poor humor to start, would have gone a long way toward substantially revising Doyle's judgment of the wayward brothers. Sandwiches to start, numbers of them, in abundant variety: deviled ham, rare roast beef and sharp cheddar, turkey and mayonnaise, mutton slathered in horseradish sauce. And with them packages of nuts and sweets and water and cool beer. And perhaps most welcome of all, a change of dry clothes for them both.

They supped off the road, the horse grazing nearby in the tall alfalfa. Larry brought them up to date on his recent movements. Stationed for the last day and a half at the Cambridge railway office, upon receiving a coded wire from Barry in London—he'd led the pursuers a merry chase halfway back to town before eluding them entirely—Larry had taken to his horse and tracked down Sparks and Doyle off the beaten path. Although Doyle assumed it fell along the lines of employment, he found the exact nature of Barry and Larry's relationship to Sparks difficult to pin down and felt more than a little uneasy in asking. The proximity of such a clearly criminal personality, however putatively reformed, aroused in Doyle an Old Testament stoniness that the sandwiches and beer did little to dissolve, despite Larry's sunny attempts to ingratiate himself.

Freshly fortified, and wearing dry shoes again, Doyle and Sparks set off once more down the old Roman road. Larry mounted and rode off ahead of them to perform some undisclosed advance-guard action. The sight of his flapping cloak disappearing over the next hill brought back the memory of a recent and more sinister visitation.

"Who's after me, Jack? Who's that man in black I saw last night?"

A seriousness of aspect clouded his disposition. "I'm not certain."

"But you have some idea."

"He's a man I've been looking for. Last night was the closest I've come to him in many years. He's the reason I was at the seance the other night."

"Is he some part of this evil confederacy you've alluded to?"

"I believe this man you saw is their field general."

"It's someone you know, isn't it?" asked Doyle, with a flash of intuitive certainty.

Sparks looked at him sharply. To Doyle's amazement, there was in Sparks's cool eyes a flicker of fear. Shocking and unexpected.

"Perhaps." Then Sparks raised a roguish eyebrow with customary confidence, his more familiar self again. This unearthing of genuine fright, its mere presence, humanized the man, bringing him closer to the common ground of Doyle's understanding.

"Does it occur to you how little reason there is for me to believe anything of what you've told me?" said Doyle ungrudgingly.

"Certainly."

"I have the experience of my senses to rely on, but these tales you spin ... why couldn't there just as easily be a thousand other equally, if not considerably more, plausible explanations?"

Sparks nodded in rueful consensus. "What else are our lives finally but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain of living?"

"We have to believe life has meaning."

"Perhaps it can only be as meaningful as our own ability to make it so."

What a variety of feeling his friend had exhibited in so short a span of time. Doyle found himself amazed again at the violent elasticity of emotion, more mutable than summer weather. And he saw his opening.

"I completely agree," said Doyle. "For instance, I know next to nothing about you, Jack, factually speaking, and yet I'm still able to construct an idea of you—a story of you, if you will—that may or may not bear any relation to who you actually are."

"Such as?" said Sparks, suddenly keen.

"You're a man of about thirty-five, born on your family's estate in Yorkshire. You are an only child. You suffered a severe illness as a boy. You have a lifelong love of reading. Your family traveled extensively in Europe during your youth, spending a considerable amount of time in Germany. Upon your return, you were enrolled in public school and upon graduation attended college at Cambridge. More than

one college, I think. You studied, among other things, medicine and science. You play some sort of stringed musical instrument, probably the violin, and you do so with no little virtuosity—"

"This is astounding!"

"You briefly entertained the idea of a career as an actor and may in fact have spent some time on the stage. Military service was an option you also considered, and it's possible you journeyed to India in 1878 during the Afghan Campaign. While in the East, you spent time studying religions, among them Buddhism and Confucianism. I believe you have also traveled in the United States."

"Bravo, Doyle. You do amaze me."

"That was my intention. Shall I tell you how I came to these things?"

"My accent, what trace of it remains, gave away Yorkshire. By my manner and apparent means, you correctly assume I spring from family holdings sufficient to support myself in some comfort, without pursuing a life in commerce."

"Correct. Your vivid imagination leads me to believe you were invalided in childhood—perhaps the cholera epidemic of the early sixties—during which you entertained yourself by reading voraciously, a habit you maintain to this day."

"True. And my family did travel regularly through Europe, particularly Germany, but I can't for the life of me surmise how you arrived at that."

"An educated guess: Germany is the preferred destination for upper-class families of your parents' generation attempting to instill in their children some systematic appreciation of literature and culture. I suspect the Germanic lineage of our last few sets of royals has had much if not everything to do with that tendency among the landed gentry."

"Well reasoned," Sparks conceded. "One misstep: I do have an older brother."

"Frankly, I'm surprised. You bear the natural confidence and ambition of an eldest and only child."

"My brother is considerably older. He never traveled with us and spent the better part of my early life away at school. I hardly knew him."

"That explains it then."

"I did attend Cambridge—Caius and Magdalene—studying

medicine and the natural sciences, which you arrived at through my familiarity with the town itself and the apparent ease with which I retrieved the information regarding young Nicholson."

"Right again."

"I also briefly attended Christ Church at Oxford."

"Theology?"

"Yes. And, I'm embarrassed to say, amateur theatricals."

"Your knowledge of makeup and disguise led me to it. The effectiveness of your Indian ruse led me to believe you'd been to the Orient."

"I never entered the military, sorry, but I have traveled to the Far East and did indeed spend many hours in the comparative study of religions."

"And the United States?"

"You did not fail to notice my occasional use of the American vernacular."

Doyle nodded.

"I spent eight months tramping the Eastern Seaboard as an actor on tour with the Sasanoff Shakespearean Company," said Sparks with the tone of a penitent in the confessional.

"I knew it!"

"I thought Mercutio my finest hour on the stage, although in Boston they seemed to favor my Hotspur," he said, mocking his own vanity. "Now I follow your line of thinking on every one of these deductions save one: How on earth did you know I play the violin?"

"I once treated a violinist of the London orchestra for a badly sprained wrist sustained in a bicycling accident. He had a distinctive pattern of small calluses, from fingering the strings, on the pads of the fingertips of his left hand. You possess that same pattern; I assume you play the instrument as devotedly, if not as expertly, as my patient."

"Marvelous. I do congratulate you on your powers of observation."

"Thank you. I pride myself on them."

"Most people drift through life in a perpetual haze of self-conscious introspection that entirely prevents their seeing the world as it is. Your diagnostic training has granted you the priceless habit of paying attention to detail, and you have clearly labored to develop that skill to a profound level. It

suggests that you have also worked with equal diligence to develop an advanced philosophy of living."

"I guess I've always felt the less said about such things, the better," said Doyle modestly.

" 'Let actions define the man for the world, while the music of his soul plays for an audience of one.' "

"Shakespeare?"

"No, Sparks," Sparks said with a grin. "Shall I have a go at you then?"

"What? You mean, what have appearances told you about me?"

"The prospect that I've met my match in the exercise of observational deduction brings my competitive tendencies racing to the fore."

"How will I know these are legitimate inferences and not facts you've gathered by some covert means?"

"You won't," said Sparks, flashing his grin again. "You were born in Edinburgh, Catholic parents of Irish descent and modest means. You fished and hunted extensively in youth. You were educated in Jesuit parochial schools. Your lifelong passions have been literature and medicine. You attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh, where you studied under an inspirational professor who encouraged you to develop your powers of observation and deduction beyond the scope of their diagnostic application. Despite your medical training, you have never relinquished your dream of one day making your living exclusively as a man of letters. Despite your indoctrination in the Church of Rome, you renounced your family's faith after attending seances and encountering experiences too difficult to reconcile with an adherence to any religious dogma. You now consider yourself a confirmed, albeit open-minded, agnostic. You are very handy with a revolver...."

And so they passed the remainder of the afternoon, this meeting of the minds a great refresher for men so accustomed to the solitary exercise of their more acute faculties. Although occasional farms and one or two more developed settlements appeared in the distance, they stayed to their primeval path, quieting hunger and thirst as they arose from the stores that Larry had left them. They passed through meadows and birch woods and blasted, fallow flatlands, until sundown found

them at path's end on the banks of the River Colne, a wide and lazy waterway meandering through the fields and retiring farming villages of the Essex countryside. After a quiet evening meal under a sheltering oak, as darkness fell, Larry appeared again, putting in to shore near their camp at the helm of a twenty-foot sloop, seaworthy and strong, a lantern hanging off the bow. They boarded her while Larry held the gunnels. A worn canvas lean-to and a pallet of blankets offered shelter amidships. Under a clear night sky and the light of a three-quarter moon, they pushed off and drifted silently downstream with the current, passing unnoticed through a sleepy riverside town. At Sparks's insistence, Doyle took the first turn in the bunk, and before the boat had traveled another half-mile downriver, the gentle rolling of the water carried the weary doctor down into the dreamless arms of grateful sleep.

The river conveyed them uneventfully through the night, past Halstead and Rose Green, Wakes Colne and Eight Ash, wending through the knotty sprawl of ancient Colchester near dawn and then down past Wivenhoe, where the river widened out, preparing to meet the sea. Although they passed a number of barges and other small ships at anchor during the night, here they began to encounter for the first time larger vessels under steam. Larry hoisted the mainsail to aid their progress against the incoming tide and a following southeasterly bellowed the canvas, skating them around the cumbersome, cargo-laden traffic that snarled the channel.

Two brief, vertical catnaps were all Sparks had allowed himself during the journey and seemed to be all he required. Doyle slept through the night, waking refreshed and more than a little startled to find them passing landfall and approaching the open sea. With the wind full at their backs, they came about and made for the south. Sparks took the rudder as they rolled into the heavier swells, Larry took his turn on the blankets, and Doyle joined Sparks aft. Although conditions were favorable, Doyle could see by his touch on the helm and his feel for the wind that Sparks was an expert sailor. They soon left all sight of the river behind, keeping the barren reaches between Sales and Holliwell Point visible to starboard.