3. THE PALACE
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The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, was a big man, with an impressive handlebar mustache and a receding hairline, and he was undeniably and entirely human. He met us in the corridor, nodded to my friend and to me, did not ask us for our names or offer to shake hands.
“The Queen is most upset,” he said. He had an accent. He pronounced his Ss as Zs: Mozt. Upzet. “Franz was one of her favorites. She has many nephews. But he made her laugh so. You will find the ones who did this to him.”
“I will do my best,” said my friend.
“I have read your monographs,” said Prince Albert. “It was I who told them that you should be consulted. I hope I did right.”
“As do I,” said my friend.
And then the great door was opened, and we were ushered into the darkness and the presence of the Queen.
She was called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge—huger than I had imagined possible—and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us without moving.
Thizsz muzzst be zsolved. The words came from the shadows.
“Indeed, ma’am,” said my friend.
A limb squirmed and pointed at me. Zstepp forward.
I wanted to walk. My legs would not move.
My friend came to my rescue then. He took me by the elbow and walked me toward Her Majesty.
Isz not to be afraid. Isz to be worthy. Isz to be a companion. That was what she said to me. Her voice was a very sweet contralto, with a distant buzz. Then the limb uncoiled and extended, and she touched my shoulder. There was a moment, but only a moment, of pain deeper and more profound than anything I have ever experienced, and then it was replaced by a pervasive sense of well-being. I could feel the muscles in my shoulder relax, and for the first time since Afghanistan, I was free from pain.
Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen’s counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.
“Certainly, ma’am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch, that night—the footprints, although obscured, were unmistakable.” And then, “Yes. I understand . . . I believe so . . . yes.”
He was quiet when we left and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.
It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the palace.
Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking glass of my room, I observed that the frog white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.
4. THE PERFORMANCE
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That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door on Baker Street—an elderly Chinese man, a young roué, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick-change artist,” my friend would walk out.
He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax and stare off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand—notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in the theatre.
“As much as the next man,” I told him.
“Then fetch your opera glasses,” he told me. “We are off to Drury Lane.”
I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theatre in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court—and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the Rookery of St. Giles. On my friend’s advice I concealed my wallet, and following his example, I carried a stout stick.
Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepenny orange from one of the lovely young women who sold them to the members of the audience, and I sucked it as we waited), my friend said quietly, “You should only count yourself lucky that you did not need to accompany me to the gambling dens or the brothels. Or the madhouses—another place that Prince Franz delighted in visiting, as I have learned. But there was nowhere he went to more than once. Nowhere but—”
The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.
It was a fine-enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between the acts. The leading man was tall, languid, and had a fine singing voice; the leading lady was elegant, and her voice carried through all the theatre; the comedian had a fine touch for patter songs.
The first play was a broad comedy of mistaken identities: the leading man played a pair of identical twins who had never met, but had managed, by a set of comical misadventures, each to find himself engaged to be married to the same young lady—who, amusingly, thought herself engaged to only one man. Doors swung open and closed as the actor changed from identity to identity.
The second play was a heartbreaking tale of an orphan girl who starved in the snow selling hothouse violets—her grandmother recognized her at the last, and swore that she was the babe stolen ten years back by bandits, but it was too late, and the frozen little angel breathed her last. I must confess I found myself wiping my eyes with my linen handkerchief more than once.
The performance finished with a rousing historical narrative: the entire company played the men and women of a village on the shore of the ocean, seven hundred years before our modern times. They saw shapes rising from the sea, in the distance. The hero joyously proclaimed to the villagers that these were the Old Ones, whose coming was foretold, returning to us from R’lyeh, and from dim Carcosa, and from the plains of Leng, where they had slept, or waited, or passed out the time of their death. The comedian opined that the other villagers had all been eating too many pies and drinking too much ale, and they were imagining the shapes. A portly gentleman playing a priest of the Roman god tells the villagers that the shapes in the sea are monsters and demons, and must be destroyed.