Obviously, this was my day for fancy-dress.
I got into the ridiculous outfit and took the card.
Wilcox protested into his gag. Another kick quieted him.
I climbed back into the cab and Craigin made great show of delivering me to the front door of Trelawny House.
The knocker was in the shape of a green-eyed serpent. At a single rap, the door was opened by a gigantic negro prize-fighter wearing harem pantaloons. His face and chest were painted gold. I handed over the ram card, which he dropped into a brazier. He stood aside.
I followed the noise and the — slightly intoxicating — smell. Through the reception hall, which boasted the usual clutter of elephant’s foot umbrella stands and potted aspidistras gone to seed. Down a set of stone steps into a cellar, where scented oil-lamps cast odd shadows. People dressed like silly buggers gyrated to the plinkings of musical instruments I couldn’t put names to. A proper knees-up.
The large cellar was decorated like an Egyptian tomb. I should say, it was decorated with an Egyptian tomb. All around were artefacts looted from the burial place of Queen Tera in the Valley of the Sorcerers. Each item was cursed seven ways to sunset.
The guests were all of a type with Wilcox. Robes and masks didn’t conceal thick middles, bald pates and liver-spotted, well-manicured hands. Well-to-do and well-connected, I judged. Members of Parliament and the Stock Exchange, commanders of manufacturing empires and shipping lines, high officers of the law and the armed forces, princes of the church and our ancient institutions of learning. More money than sense, more power than they knew what to do with. So, the hostess was working a high-class racket. With marks like these on her lists, Miss Trelawny was very well set-up.
Mixed among the robed, masked guests were professional houris of both sexes, immodestly clad in gold paint and little else. They sported Egyptian fripperies: hawk head-dresses, golden snake circlets, ankhs and scarabs, that eye-in-the-squiggle design. Some might have been imported from Eastern climes, but I recognized a body or two from the city’s less exotic vice establishments. Mrs. Halifax had mentioned a few of her younger, prettier earners had gone missing lately; that mystery was now solved.
At the far end of the cellar was an altar, where two little black boys waved golden palm fronds at the high priestess of this congregation.
Margaret Trelawny dressed to show off her person, though she would frankly have stopped traffic in a nun’s habit. Already a tall girl, she towered well over six and a half feet with the famous crown of Queen Tera set on her masses of jet black hair. The head-dress consisted of seven intertwined, jewel-eyed serpents with onyx-inlaid cheek-guards. As a connoisseur, I would venture her frontage — judged by size, firmness and ‘wobble factor’ — finer than Lily Langtry’s … and, after a couple of gins, Lily could crack walnuts between her knockers. To display the goods, Miss Trelawny wore an intricate yet minimal bustier composed of interlinked gold beetles. A transparent skirt gathered in a knot under her bare belly. If tautness of tummy were your prime requirement in womanly form, she’d pass the bounce-a-sixpence-off-it test with flying colors. A big sparkling ruby was set in a ring on her forefinger. The Jewel of Seven Stars looked like a congealed gobbet of blood. Her eyes had a mad, green-and-red lustre. Her face had a commanding — indeed demanding — beauty uncommon among the milk-and-water ladies of Kensington.
Miss Trelawny danced, which is to say undulated, in a shimmy which drew further attention — as if attention were required — to her broad hips, serpentine stomach and generous bosom. Beneath an exotic arrangement, I recognized the tune her three-piece slave band was playing. ‘The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid’. You probably don’t know the title — I had to ask a cocaine-injecting trumpet-player from the Alhambra to tell me — but it’s sung the world over by dirty-minded little boys of all ages. You can hear many, many variations on the rhyme ‘oh, the girls in France/do the hoochy-koochy dance … and the men play druu-u-ums/on the naked ladies’ buu-u-ums’, et cetera, et cetera.
For the moment, I was willing to entertain the possibility that Margaret Trelawny was — as she claimed — wicked Queen Tera reborn. She possessed at least one demonstrable supernatural power. Thanks to her presence, I suffered a prominent inconvenience in the trousers. I believe this condition was shared by not a few of the other gentlemen present.
I was drawn through the crowd, as if by magnetic attraction … or an invisible thread knotted about my gentlemen’s parts. I was gripped by tantalizing, almost painful desire. I had to concentrate on the real object of my visit — the ruby. Its redness grew large, tinting my whole view. I suspected there was something funny in the incense.
All about, houris were groped by guests and responded with a fair simulation of wild abandon. Divans were set aside for continuance of these activities, several already in use by knots of two or three — or, in one rather dangerous-looking conjunction, five — dedicated, conscience-free revellers. Some masks had slipped. A prominent social reformer and a tiresomely staunch advocate of female emancipation were sandwiching a slave-boy; the maiden ladies who signed their petitions and wore their banners would probably disapprove. A magistrate known for harsh sentences was bent over a wooden horse, taking a spirited whipping from two Cleopatra-wigged girls. Jamjars of sweet, sticky cordial were passed around, suitable for drinking or smearing. I forgot myself and took a swallow of the stuff, which seemed laced with gunpowder.
I had a notion that Margaret Trelawny wouldn’t give up her prize as easily as Bianca Castafiore.
The music rose in a frenzied crescendo. The dancing — and other activity — in the room became faster and faster. Someone indeed played drums on the posteriors of unclad maidservants, slapping with more enthusiasm than skill. I was near the altar-dais now, and the crowd was thicker. A girl with bared teeth and wide eyes tore at my robe, but I discreetly kneed her in the middle and threw her aside to be pounced on by the Mayor of a provincial city who had kept on his chain of office but nothing else.
Miss Trelawny’s exertions were extraordinary.
My inconvenience throbbed like a hammered thumb.
Then, a gong was struck — resounding throughout the cellar — and everything stopped.
Masks came off, en masse. I made no move to doff mine, but it was gone anyway.
Margaret Trelawny took a scimitar from her alter and lashed, precisely, at my head. I was unharmed, but unmasked. No, not quite unharmed. A line across my forehead dribbled blood. I clamped a hand to the wound.
My imperious hostess held a blade to my throat.
“Balls,” I said, with feeling.
XII
I woke in darkness, wearing clothes not my own. Not even clothes, I realized as my senses crawled back. Tight wrappings which smelled of moth-balls. I wriggled and found my legs tethered together and my arms bound to my chest. I was bandaged all over! I shifted my shoulders and banged against confining walls.
With a grinding sound, darkness went away. Something heavy shifted and I found myself looking up at Margaret Trelawny. A fork-bearded lesser cove I didn’t immediately recognise stood next to her, wearing a steel balaclava. I was lying in an Egyptian sarcophagus, trussed like a mummy.
“Apologies for the ‘rush job’, Colonel Moran,” said my hostess. “Before wrapping, you should have had your heart, lights and liver removed to be placed in canoptic jars and your brains pulled out through your nostrils. Revival of the arts of Egypt proceeds slower than I would like.”
Why had they wrapped and entombed me, then taken the trouble to re-open the sarcophagus? Miss Trelawny must want something from me before I was buried for the archaeologists of three thousand years’ hence to exhume and put on display. I swear, the maledictions upon Moriarty’s Crown Jewels are a Sunday stroll compared to the curses I’ll lay on those fellows. Beware the wrath of Basher Moran, you unborn tomb-looters!