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...."