The List Of Seven (56 page)

"No."

"We're looking for a couple, a man and woman wot boarded in Whitby and disembarked from this schooner. Seems they brung a coffin in the cargo hold. Body of a relative, the captain's told, brought back to be laid to rest in native soil. This couple left Bremen by train, to the south. Here the trail goes cold. Every station, every bleedin' whistle-stop 'tween Bremen and Munich. Saw more of Prussia than the Prussians. No soap. By this time, I'm right keen to get back to a native soil of my own, but the guv'nor, he's got one more notion—"

"Salzburg."

"That's right, sir, where the brothers as you know went to school. Austria: That's where we're off to now, and we goes over that old town wit' a louse comb. Comes across a driver remembers pickin' up a couple wot answers to our description. Took 'em to a town two hours north. Called Braunau. Braunau am Inn.

"Seems this couple took a house there on the spot, paid cash money for it. Lucky for us there's a nosy parker livin' next door, an old woman's got nothing better to do than peep out her lace curtains all hours of the day and night.

"Yes, she seen 'em arrive, all right. And they did unload a large wooden crate from the wagon. The only baggage they brought wit' 'em, too, save wot she seen 'em carryin' by hand, and that impressed her mind. Kept strange hours, this couple, lights burnin' all hours of the night. Stayed two months and never spoke a whisper to her—not very neighborly, was they?"

"Were they there when you arrived?"

Larry shook his head. "Gone a week, she says. We goes into this house ourselves. To say it's a right shambles doesn't quite cover it: It was as if somebody held a furnace to the place, melted it halfway down, then let it cool. Everything soft, the walls like aspic ... I can't imagine how they was still standin'."

Doyle knew these effects only too well: Blavatsky had described it as something breaking through from the other side. "Did they leave anything behind?"

"That coffin. What was left of it. Scorched, split to toothpicks. Empty. Sitting on a pile of dirt, like wot we seen at Whitby Abbey."

"No remains inside?"

"No sir."

Doyle didn't like the look on Larry's face: Something worse was coming.

"What happened then, Larry?"

"We endeavored to pick up their trail again, fresh as it was, only a week past. Led us southwest to a little town in Switzerland, 'tween Zurich and Basel. A resort area, this is, people goes to take the waters, and there's a waterfall folks like to see. Reichenbach Falls. Five cascades. Over two hundred feet high."

Larry asked for more brandy. Zeus watched attentively as Doyle poured and waited while Larry drank it down.

"We arrive. Check the hotel hard by the falls. Yes, the couple in question's been there two days now. We look to their room. Signs of life but no one about. Jack asks me to wait by the door while he goes round the other side. Little time goes by. I get a bad feelin' up the back a' me neck, so I runs out of there. There's a path leadin' up the mountain where one goes to look down at the falls, and there I can see Jack runnin' up that path. Fast as I can move, I'm on that path myself.

"I hasn't caught sight of him again when ahead of me I hear pistol shots, and I runs and I turns a corner and up there on the next switchback cutting 'cross the face of the mountain, not fifty feet from me, there's Jack and he's wrestling with a man in black and I know right off it's Alexander. Not sure who's fired those shots, but neither looks hit. I never seen two men go at each other so fierce and bad. Matched strength for strength, blow for blow, both battered and bleeding, neither one askin' or givin' quarter. I'm shamed to say I was paralyzed by the sight, I couldn't budge from that spot.

"And as I watched, I saw Jack begin to take a slight advantage, a margin so slim you couldn't measure but the tide turnin' ever so slightly in his favor. Alexander takes a step

back, trying to pivot on his rear foot near the rim, and the ground gives out beneath him, a shower of rocks and dirt go down and he loses his balance and for an eternal moment he hangs on the edge of that cliff. And then he goes.

"Just as he's about to disappear into that black gorge, he reaches out and he grabs our Jack by the boot, and Jack staggers, digs in, and holds back, but the sheer weight of the man pulls Jack over the edge with him, and I watches them fall, sir, down, down that long way. Down till the mist of the falls swallows them up entire."

Tears were flowing down his face. Doyle couldn't move.

"Did they ... did they find the bodies?"

"I don't know, sir, because in that next moment a shot hits the ground at my feet, and I looks up and see that hellcat on the path above me drawing another bead—"

"Lady Nicholson?"

"Yes, sir. And so I ran, and I don't think I stopped running till I got to the station and boarded the next train. So you see, I don't know, sir, if they found the bodies. But it was a terrible long fall, sir, and I seen those rocks two hundred feet below, and I'm very much afraid that Mr. Jack Sparks has been taken from us long before his time, long before the good a man such as he could do 'as been done by half."

Larry buried his face in his hands and wept bitterly. Doyle inhaled, his chest catching and his eyes blind, and he put a hand on the poor man's shoulders, and tears sprang to his eyes because Jack was gone and because now in so short a time they had both lost their only brother. And there the two men remained, before the fire, deep into the longest of London nights.

In the weeks that passed after hearing of the events at Reichenbach Falls, Doyle began again to crave the numbing comfort of prosaic daily routine. He sought employment and accepted an obscure medical post in the provincial harbor town of Southsea, Portsmouth, there beginning life anew, burying his grief and confusion in the welter of details and routine surrounding the maintenance of the health of this untroubled seaside community. The striking ordinariness of his patients' complaints proved a tonic for him. Gradually, in increments so small they passed unnoticed by his conscious mind, the overwhelming sense of terror and wonder that had swept him so nearly to the edge of madness fell slowly and quietly away.

Standing outside a small thatched cottage one morning, where he had just treated a child for colic, looking out at the lush green fields and crystalline ocean below as the sun broke through a spectacular thunderhead, he realized with a jolt he had not thought of Jack or Eileen or that unspeakable night on the moors in over a day.

You're on the mend, Doyle, he diagnosed.

Late that summer Tom Hawkins, a young farmhand from the village, strong and vital, enormously well liked, contracted cerebral meningitis. Responding to the most serious challenge of his medical career, Doyle moved the young man into his own house to care for him more thoroughly. The man's sister, Louise, a soft-spoken, comely woman in her early twenties, resolutely devoted to her brother, moved in with him as well. Their mutual dedication to Tom and his enormous dignity in confronting the end they soon realized was inevitable quickly brought Doyle and Louise closer than either had ever been to another. When Tom died in their arms three weeks later, his last act was to gently take Louise's hand and join it with Doyle's. Later that summer, Doyle and Louise were married. The following spring their first child was born, a daughter, Mary Louise.

With an unsurpassed sense of contentment and security informing his personal life, Doyle found himself able for the first time to consider with some perspective the time he had spent in Jack's company. He knew that none of the royals or government officers whom Jack had served could ever publicly acknowledge his contributions, but then he had never looked for or expected personal reward.

After puzzling it through, and after many long discussions with his beloved Louise, Doyle realized at last that what disturbed him most deeply, what haunted his waking hours, was the ^thought that this vivid, valiant, and extraordinary man, who had selflessly given his life for Queen and country, could vanish from the earth without so much as a moment's acknowledgment. This was a profound injustice. Although he had personally sworn his service and secrecy in this matter to the Queen—and she was to call on him again, repeatedly, in years to come—Doyle in the end devised a way to honor his sworn oath to her, while paying tribute to the memory of the late Jonathan Sparks.

That night, with his wife and child lying safely in their beds, he reached for the pen that the Queen had given him and sat down to write a story about their mysterious friend.

EPILOGUE

HERE, THE RIVER GOES DEEP THERE, AT THE BASE OF THE

rocks. Current below is deep. Fast. The bodies, they are not always found."

Doyle stands on the boardwalk at the rim overlooking Reichenbach Falls, as his hired Swiss guide, a broad-faced genial young man, points down at the cataract below.

"People jump, from there, you see," the guide explains. "Women most frequent. Broken hearts. So many, over the years." The man shook his head in an earnest simulation of despond.

"I understand," says Doyle.

"Very sad place."

"Yes. Very sad."

A bright April morning in 1890. Publishing success about to transform his life forever, Dr. Doyle, Louise, and three-year-old daughter Mary Louise are enjoying their first excursion abroad.

"Has anyone ever survived?" asks Doyle.

The guide's brow knits tightly. "One woman. Yes. She comes out, seven kilometers south down the river. Does not remember her name."

Doyle nods, letting his gaze drift across the turbid water.

Farther down the boardwalk, strolling with her mother, little Mary Louise is captivated by the sight of an infant in its passing perambulator.

"Mummy, look at the baby," she says, leaning over the edge to peer down at the child.

The parents, an unremarkable lower-middle-class couple, are taking a first vacation since the birth of their son the year before. The father, Alois, is a customs official, the mother, Klara, a simple country girl from Bavaria.

"Look at the eyes, Mummy," says Mary. "Doesn't it have the most beautiful eyes?"

The baby's eyes are indeed beautiful. Inviting. Transfixing.

"Yes, he does, dear. Die Augen ist ... sehr schon," says Louise to the young parents, in her schoolgirl German.

"Thank you," says Klara politely.

"Wo kommen Sie heraus?" asks Louise.

"We come from Austria," answers Alois, uncomfortable with any foreigner, let alone an English gentlewoman.

Doyle, with the guard at the rail forty feet away, fails to notice their conversation.

"Braunau," adds Klara. "Braunau am Inn."

"We must go," says Alois, and with a brusque nod to Louise he takes Klara by the arm, turning her back the other way.

"Auf wiedersehen," says Louise.

"Auf wiedersehen," says Klara, with a sweet smile for Mary.

"Say good-bye now, Mary," says Louise.

"Bye-bye."

Mary spies her father and runs to tell him all about the baby with the extraordinary eyes, but by the time she reaches him, the thought has fled from her mind, like the mist rising from the falls below.

As Klara turns the pram around she leans down to straighten her son's bedding. She smiles at him, and says softly:

"Komm mit, Adolf."

THE END

(Tale Continues in Book Two: The Six Messiah)