"A camera. How ingenious," said Doyle, anxious to examine it although his fingers were thoroughly enmeshed with yarn.
"Yes," said Sparks, making a last maneuver with the string. "Extremely useful. Seeing as how we happened to be concealed outside the rear of the Russell Street publishing house owned by Lady Nicholson's family at the time."
"But who is this woman?"
'That remains to be seen."
The teakettle started to boil. Sparks extracted himself from the string to retrieve it, leaving Doyle with a rigid net of webbing snarled around both hands. The only thing in the room more twisted was the tangle of his unmitigated perplexity.
"But what does this mean?" Doyle asked.
"It means you must lead us to the most accomplished medium in London, Doyle, and you must do it straightaway. How are you feeling?"
"Wretched."
:"Physician, heal thyself!" said Sparks, adding the boiling water to Doyle's basin.
Wrapped in blankets, sweating out the grippe that had seized hold of him, Doyle slept hard as the afternoon waned. Feverish and disoriented, he awoke to find Sparks gone off and Larry sitting attentively bedside with a sketchpad and a piece of charcoal. He was under instruction from Sparks to obtain from Doyle a description of the female psychic who had presided over Cheshire Street's murderous congregation and to reproduce her likeness. They toiled for an hour—Larry sketching, Doyle adding and subtracting—and in the end arrived at a satisfying facsimile of the poxy, pug-ugly clairvoyant.
"Now there's a face could scare the life right out of a dead man," pronounced Larry, as they inspected the finished portrait.
"I don't think I could ever forget it," said Doyle.
"Come on then, Doc, up and at 'em," said Larry, pocketing the picture. "Let's see if we can find this handsome filly somewhere among the living."
Doyle roused himself from his sickbed, dressed in fresh, dry clothes and an enveloping greatcoat Lam' had secured for him—God knows how or where. As the sun paid its final respects, they set out from the hotel in search of the mysterious medium.
"I'll follow your feather, guv," said Larry, taking the driver's seat atop their hansom. "You're the one's acquainted with the local fish and fowl."
"How do you propose we go about this?"
"Travel about, flash the crystal-gazers wot are familiar to yourself our pretty picture and sniff out what leads as may present themselves to us."
"There are a great number of mediums in London, Larry. This could take a considerable amount of time," grumbled Doyle, bundling up in the back, muscles aching, dearly wishing he were back beneath the covers.
"Detective work ain't all oysters and beer. The expenditure of shoe leather while keepin' an alert mind, that's the truth of it."
"What a business."
"Better 'an a kick in the head with a frozen boot. Your desired address please, sir?" asked Larry, in a parody of hack etiquette.
Doyle gave him the number of a knowledgeable psychic who would provide as adequate a starting place as any. Larry tipped his hat, snapped the whip, and they drove off into the misty evening.
Mediums tended to be night-dwellers, eschewing the restorative warmth of the sun for candles and moonlight, mel-
ancholy creatures more possessed by their uncommon talents than in possession of them. Although Doyle had on occasion encountered the odd solid citizen, no more troubled by the unaccountable presence of his or her eerie abilities than by a double-jointed knee, mediums were for the most part vague and insubstantial souls, one foot planted uneasily on either side of the Great Divide. Their gift, such as it was, seemed to deprive them of an even more precious ability: feeling at home in the world of the living. Most subsisted in relative poverty, unable in even the most rudimentary ways to engage with society's cogs and wheels. Although their aberrant sensitivity to other realms rendered them frightening, even leprous to many, actual practitioners were no more to be feared than the sails of a windmill, at the mercy of a capricious wind they neither comprehended nor controlled. In his experience of the type Doyle had consistently found them merely pitiable and sad.
Until meeting the duenna of Cheshire Street, that is. There had been something queasy and complicit in the woman's elicitation of that basso profundo spirit. Even if much of the proceedings that followed were sophisticated variations on tried-and-true theatrical mechanics, the stone-cold presence of evil in that room when the guide revealed itself had been undeniable. She had not simply allowed this baleful spirit to move through her; the thing had been invited. The woman was obviously equipped with some force majeure extraordinaire, the antithesis of the divine.
The first few objects of inquiry they visited during their rounds did not fail to disappoint. No, didn't recognize the woman, hadn't seen that face before, hadn't heard of any such new rival practitioner—despite its ethereal trappings, mediumship was nothing if not a fiercely competitive business—bringing her services onto the local marketplace. Keep an eye out, though. Do what they could. Upon closer questioning, they did, each of them, however, report a recent, disturbing increase in nightmares and waking visions— indistinct, flashing glimpses that inspired a blinding terror, ·Jien vanished before memory could capture a lasting impression. Each of the first five mediums described remarkably similar experiences they were deeply reluctant to discuss, leaving Doyle to suspect they remembered more than they were willing to divulge.
The apartment of Mr. Spivey Quince was their sixth stop of the evening. Doyle had never quite made up his mind as to whether Spivey was more con man or clairvoyant. A recluse and masterful hypochondriac—his seeking out of Doyle's medical acumen had served as their introduction—he nevertheless maintained a razor-keen awareness of the world at large by voracious digestion of a dozen daily newspapers. Contrary to most of his brethren, who required the mediation of a spouse or dependent to tend to the daily servicing of life's barest necessities, Spivey was aggrandizingly self-sufficient. He resided in a splendid Mayfair building, a constant stream of errand boys delivering the finest food, clothing, and goods—Spivey kept accounts with every smart tailor in town and had worked his way through the menus of all the best restaurants without ever setting foot in a single one of them—and although he never left his house. Quince had nonetheless managed to make himself a veritable font of information on every aspect of the London social scene.
Since he never advertised his skills, and by all appearances had no regular clientele clamoring for his services, Spivey's method of maintaining himself in such high style had remained for many years a much-conjectured-about mystery, until one day Doyle spotted one of Spivey's boys leaving a well-known tout's office the day after the Epsom Derby with a knapsack full of hard cash. On his next consultative visit to Spivey's flat—tending to the latest series of ever-more-imaginative phantom disorders—Doyle noticed that among the floor-to-ceiling stacks of newspapers that Quince kept neatly rimmed around his living room stood two piles exclusively devoted to back issues of the Racing Form, The source of Spivey's secret fortune came clear. Whether a quotidian genius for handicapping was responsible or the ponies were the principal direction in which he had chosen to exercise a genuine psychic gift was the fulcrum upon which Doyle's uncertainty about Spivey's native character continued to perpetually seesaw.
Doyle asked Larry to stay with the cab, knowing Spivey would be thrown sufficiently off stride by Doyle's surprise appearance that he was unlikely to admit to his house any stranger unequipped with a written and sealed bill of health. Quince answered the bell himself—he kept no household staff; penuriousness was another cornerstone of his wealth—in his customary monogrammed red silk pajamas, matching robe, and amber-tasseled brothel creepers. Although his closets were bursting with a plenitude of fashionable styles, Doyle had never known Spivey to appear in any ensemble other than this boudoir outfit he was currently sporting.