The List Of Seven (46 page)

Doyle felt slightly light-headed. He opened the door and stepped into the walled courtyard behind the public room. Snow covered the bricks that surrounded a gnarled, bare oak. The cold nipped through his shirt, but it felt clean and bracing. He breathed in the air deeply, greedily, trying to fill his lungs beyond their capacity.

"Fresh air is such a tonic," said a voice behind him. A voice he had heard quite recently.

Alexander Sparks stood in the shelter of the oak. Wrapped in his black cloak, motionless, hands out of sight, only his face visible in the wan light spilling from the windows. Long and narrow, facial structure similar to his brother's—the resemblance ended in the flesh. He looked nothing like the man Doyle had met outside 13 Cheshire, and yet he knew immediately they were one and the same. Skin lay taut over the bone, shiny and white as parchment, as if a relentless internal heat had seared away all excess, all comfort, everything but necessity. His eyes were pale and evenly set under dark slices of brow, with long black lashes of surprising delicacy. Lank brown hair hung straight to his shoulders, swept back off a high, smooth forehead that receded into the folds of the cloak. Only his mouth belied the geometric austerity of the arrangement; the lips were full, rosebud, red, and moist. As he spoke, a serpentine tongue flicked out from behind the small, neat lines of his teeth, the only visible concession to insatiable appetites that lit the man's interior as starkly as a candle in a jack-o'-lantern. His presence in the courtyard felt magnetic and riveting but somehow weightless; he didn't seem to occupy space so much as hover inside it. Doyle was reminded how much power was generated by absolute stillness.

"Do you favor this time of the night, Doctor?" Alexander's voice was conveyed by a deceptive frequency that split itself into twin modulations; a second tone attached to the surface of his round, rich baritone, riding under the belly of the words, a buzzing or ringing below the conscious threshold that unpleasantly slithered in the ear of the listener like a thief.

"Not especially."

Doyle lowered his hands and gently touched his pockets. "I believe you've left your gun in the room. With Miss Temple," said Alexander. He smiled in a way that might usually be described as kind.

Doyle flexed his hands. The adrenaline kicking into his bloodstream rapidly elevated his heart rate. He felt under a microscope and tried to suppress his alarm to undetectable levels. Wary the man might possess untold mesmeric abilities, he blinked often and avoided his gaze for any extended time. "I must confess that meeting you in this way is quite strange, Dr. Doyle. I do feel as if I know you already," said Alexander, with no small modicum of charm. "Do you share that impression?"

"We have met before."

"However unknowingly." Alexander nodded slightly, the first movement he had made.

Doyle glanced casually around the yard. His only avenue of escape lay through the open door behind him, but that would expose his back for the time it would take to climb the

stairs.

"What do you want?" asked Doyle.

"I felt it time for us to effect a more formal introduction. I fear, Doctor, that my young brother, John, may have imparted to you some severe and perfidious misperceptions regarding myself."

I don't want to hear this, thought Doyle instinctively, I mustn't listen. He did not respond with either word or gesture.

"I thought there would be decided value in our making an effort to know one another as, perhaps, a belated corrective to the more delusional of John's spurious inventions."

"Do I have a choice?"

"One always has a choice, Doctor," he said, smiling incandescently. The effect reminded Doyle of acid dripping slowly onto dark, polished wood.

Doyle paused as long as he felt able. "I should like to get my coat. I'm very cold."

"Of course."

Doyle waited. Alexander made no move.

"Now?" asked Doyle.

"We shan't get far if you freeze to death."

"It's in my room."

"How perfectly reasonable."

"So I'll go get it then."

"I will wait for you," said Alexander.

Doyle nodded and edged back into the building. Alexander watched without moving. Doyle turned, then walked through the public rooms and back up the stairs.

What is he about? wondered Doyle. How supremely confident, or heedlessly arrogant, the man was. Relentlessly pursuing me for days on end, then allowing me to walk away when I'm dead-bang within striking distance. He knew perfectly well that whatever sensibility the man evinced was nothing but a skillful and treacherous simulation. But what was his purpose?

Doyle silently slid in the key and opened the door. The curtains and windows were locked as before. Nothing appeared to have been touched. But Eileen was gone.

So that was it then; he kept me there long enough for them to take her. Doyle went for his coat. The pistol was not in the pocket where he'd left it, nor in any of the others. His bag was still on the floor. He opened it, rifling through the medical supplies for a handful of medicinal vials and two syringes. He inserted the needles into the tubes, filled both syringes with the liquid, ripped a small tear in the fabric of his coat alongside the inner breast pocket, and deposited the extra vials inside. The syringes he slipped one apiece into the sides of his boots.

Wary he had aroused suspicion by taking too long, Doyle hurried down the stairs. Alexander waited near the open front door, as composed and motionless as before.

"Where is she?" asked Doyle.

Alexander nodded to the outside.

"If you've harmed her—"

"Please. No threats." He sounded amused; a smile nearly congealed on his wet mouth. "She's quite safe." "Let me see her." "By all means."

Alexander raised a long, thin hand, gesturing out the door. A large black coach and four stood in the drive, if not the same menacing carriage Doyle had seen before, then an extremely reasonable facsimile. The horses snorted gutturally, stamping their feet. Doyle walked to the carriage. The driver. bundled on his perch, never turned to him. Curtains obscured the windows. "She's inside."

Doyle started. Alexander stood directly behind him: he had not seen or heard the man move from inside the inn. Doyle opened the door and stepped into the coach. Feeble light spilled in from lanterns mounted on the chassis. Eileen lay on the rear-facing seat against the wall, unconscious, wearing her borrowed hat and clothes. Doyle checked her pulse and breathing; both were steady but faint. He detected the scent of a disabling chemical around her mouth and nose: ether, perhaps, or some more potent compound.

The coach door closed. Doyle turned to find Alexander sitting across from them. With a loud thunk, the handles moved down, locking mechanically. The carriage lurched forward. Doyle held Eileen in his arms. Alexander smiled compassionately.

"If you aren't offended by the compliment, Doctor, you do make a most attractive couple," he said pleasantly.

Loathsome as the thought was that this man had knowledge of their recent intimacy, Doyle held his tongue. He cradled Eileen closer to him and felt the tender warmth of her neck against his hand. "Where are we going?" Alexander did not answer. "Ravenscar?"

Alexander displayed that raw bone of a smile. His face appeared skeletal in the dusky light, all trace of personality pared away, stripped to its naked essence.

"There's something you must know about my brother, Doctor. Our parents perished tragically in a fire when Jonathan was little more than a boy. Such a precocious and happy child, as you can imagine, he suffered dreadfully. I had already reached the age of emancipation, but Jonathan was made a ward of the court and regrettably placed in the care of a family friend, a physician of radically progressive ideas but indiscriminate methodology. After months with no noticeable improvement, this doctor undertook to treat Jonathan's hysterical disposition with a series of narcotic injections. These treatments initially succeeded in suppressing his disease; it was not too long before his spirits appeared to rise to, if not exceed, the levels he had enjoyed before the difficulties.

"Most unfortunately, the doctor declined to suspend the treatments; he continued these injections for many months. Consequently, he delivered to young Jonathan a lifelong craving for this drug from which he has not to this day been able to acquit himself. This has led him, often in times of emotional complexity, to periodic bouts of overindulgence, and these in turn to episodes of acute dementia that have required his being confined to hospitals specializing in the treatment of the mentally disturbed."

"Such as Bedlam," said Doyle.

"Sadly, yes," said Alexander, with a world-weary shake of the head. "I have attempted as best I could to care for my brother throughout his terrible ordeal. But as so often happens when one raises the hand of loving consolation to someone in this pitiably reduced state, so commanding is the drug's attraction that one tangled in its web comes to perceive the giver of aid as an enemy sworn to sever them from that substance which they believe provides them with their only succor. As a doctor, you would be well acquainted with this phenomenon."

Doyle had with his own eyes all too recently seen Sparks feeding that hunger, and he did know what pernicious effects these addictions wrought in the mind. Alexander recounted the story with such lubricious sincerity that Doyle was momentarily at a loss how much to credit. Nothing the man raised necessarily put paid to what Jack had said about him, and Doyle had not yet confronted him with any of Jack's accusations. It was nearly impossible not to consider, if only for a moment, Alexander's offered alternative as a disturbingly plausible scenario. On the other hand, if he owned only a fraction of the power Jack had attributed to him, this sort of routine dissembling would be as effortless to him as multiplication tables for a mathematical prodigy. If he's lying, thought Doyle, what is his purpose?

"Why was your brother confined to Bedlam?" asked Doyle

neutrally.

"Assault on a police officer. He was attempting a forced entry to Buckingham Palace. One of John's more persistent delusions involves an imagined relationship to Queen Victoria."

"What sort of relationship?"

"He often claims to be working under the direct and secret orders of Her Majesty, investigating an assortment of conspiracies involving threats to the continuity of accession to the throne, most of which he is convinced I am responsible for. Consequently, he follows after me wherever I go, trying to interfere with my day-to-day affairs. This has been going on for years. More often than not, it plays out harmlessly. On this occasion, that was regrettably not the case." "Why would he do these things?"

"As you know, with any mental aberration it is difficult to say with certainty. An acquaintance of mine, an alienist in Vienna whom I have consulted on the matter, speculates that Jonathan is driven by a compulsion to relive the devastating loss of our parents—wherein the Queen becomes a surrogate for his mother, you see—and that by 'saving' the Queen's life from imagined danger, he will somehow resurrect her."

"I see."

"What has he said to you about this matter, Doctor?" Alexander asked blandly.

He wants to know what I know, realized Doyle. That's what this charade is about. He wants to know how far the damage has spread.

"Jonathan was very close to your mother, wasn't he?"

asked Doyle.

"A very deep attachment, yes," said Alexander.

Doyle was careful to betray nothing with his eyes. "And were you close to her as well?"

Alexander smiled, showing the milky-white line of his perfect teeth. "Every boy is close to his mother."

The carriage slowed as it started up a long and gradual grade. Eileen shifted slightly in Doyle's arms.

"And your father, Mr. Sparks?"

"What of him?" Alexander was still smiling.

"What was your relationship to him?"

"I believe it is John's relationships we are scrutinizing here." The smile remained, but Doyle detected an almost imperceptible strain to keep it in place.

"I don't disagree," said Doyle, subtly maintaining the offensive. "And as familiar as you seem to be with the rudiments of psychology, you must know that one of its principal areas of investigation is relationships within the family." Alexander did not visibly react. "For instance, how would you characterize Jonathan's relationship to you?"

Alexander's smile seemed frozen in place now. "We were ... remote. I spent the better part of his childhood away at school."

"Did he have any contact with you during that time? Any visits? Correspondence?"

Alexander shifted ever so slightly in his seat.

"Nothing out of the ordinary."

"So you did write to him?"

"On occasion."

"And of course you saw him whenever you returned home."

Alexander hesitated. "Of course."

He's uncomfortable speaking about any of it, realized Doyle, but he doesn't want to evidence alarm that might raise my suspicion. He doesn't know what I know. The thought hit Doyle hard: He's underestimated me.

"Were there any difficulties in your relationship with Jonathan?"

"Difficulties of what sort?"

"Rivalries."

Alexander smiled. "Goodness no."

"Young boys ofttimes band together against figures of au-thority; were there any incidents of that sort your parents night have objected to?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I'm attempting to determine if Jonathan had formed any .nresolved hostilities to your parents," said Doyle, manufacturing as fast as he could speak. "In other words, are there any reasons to suspect that this fatal fire might have been something more than an accident?"

The suggestion seemed to pacify his resistance. "How interesting. To be honest with you, Doctor, I have often wondered the very same thing."

"Hmm. Yes. Can you recall if Jonathan had any totems or small items of particular importance to him?" said Doyle, now consciously adopting the inflated airs and labored deductions of a pompous academician. "These commonplace objects—sometimes called fetishes—often provide clues to the underlying causes of derangement—" "What sort of items?"