"Monday," Moriarty said. "Come by and see me at Russell Square on Monday. I'll speak to the prince."
"I have a warrant," Holmes said. "I intend to search the house."
Lestrade looked from Holmes to Moriarty to Prince Tseng, who was glowering at them with unconcealed hostility. "Come along, Mr. Holmes," he said. "We'll go now."
ELEVEN — THE GENTLEMEN'S GENTLEMEN
Thus in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Upper Sedgewick Lane ran for two blocks south of Oxford Street, terminating abruptly at the high brick wall to the rear of Good Sisters' Hospital. Despite the best efforts of the residents and shopkeepers, the lane degenerated into shabby disrepute as one traveled the two-hundred-yard length of that final block.
The blame, if any, could be laid at the door of Good Sisters' Hospital. A massive rear door sheathed in heavy iron plate, studded with spikes and crusted with layers of muddy green paint, it was the only acknowledgment that Good Sisters gave to Upper Sedgwick Lane. And it was never used.
The front door of the hospital was on Beverton Street, a three-and-a-half-block semicircle from the lane. It was there that the carriages came and went, and there that the attentive doctors smiled and nodded at their respectable patients.
This sealed door was the subject of much speculation in Upper Sedgwick Lane. Rumor had it that in the darkest hours of the blackest nights, the green door opened.
In the dark of the moon, so the whisper went, mysterious carts, their wheels muffled with rags, would thump slowly over the ancient cobblestones and back up to the green door. Then the door would be opened by unseen hands and corpses, wrapped in white linen, would be whisked inside. Why the carts were said to be delivering bodies to the hospital instead of taking them away was never discussed. That is what happened, everyone knew it. They hadn't seen it themselves, but they could name two or three who had, if they hadn't promised to keep their mouths shut.
Then there was the matter of the epigraph circumscribed around the hospital wall, which was always referred to by the lane's residents as "them words." The full and proper name of Good Sisters' Hospital was "The Hospice and Sanitarium in Holy Charity of the Good Sisters of the Miraculous Scars of the Bloody Body of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." The architect and builder of the hospital, one Matthew Creighton, had wrapped a frieze around the upper story of the structure with this title deeply chiseled thereon, intended to last until the final trumpet should make hospices redundant. And the portion of this full and proper name that happened, by some malicious chance, to come around on the Upper Sedgewick Lane side, two feet high and five stories up, in deep relief, was: ARS OF THE BLOODY BODY.
Upper Sedgwick Lane had never recovered from this indignity.
"It is by such fortuitous happenings," Mr. Nathaniel Palmar told Barnett, "that the destinies of men and nations are determined. Were it not for Matthew Creighton's infantile sense of humor — for there can be little doubt that the placement of the lettering on that infamous frieze was deliberate — then Upper Sedgwick Lane might not have slowly degenerated over the past hundred years. Had that not happened, then this fine old mansion, once the home of Admiral Sir George Tallbouys, would never have been available at such a remarkably reasonable price. And had it not, then the Gentlemen's Gentlemen, through lack of a proper home, could never have come into being."
"That would have been a shame," Barnett said, running his hand over the dark mahogany woodwork of the entrance hall, with its patina of a hundred years' polishing and waxing.
"It would," Mr. Palmar agreed, "it would indeed." He led the way into the guests' parlor; a large room with a scattering of armchairs toward the front balanced by an ancient, well-used billiard table at the rear. "Yes, we owe a lot to Matthew Creighton. 'For his work continueth,' as the poet says, 'far beyond his knowing.' Were it not for the whimsical builder and the inadvertent benefactor, we would not be here."
"The inadvertent benefactor?"
Mr. Palmar indicated a large oil portrait on the wall behind them. Done in the whimsically realistic style of the '40s, it showed a portly gentleman with a choleric expression, wearing hunting tweeds and carrying a shotgun in the crook of his right arm and a brace of dead birds in his left hand.
Barnett peered at the brass plate under the portrait. " 'Sir Hector Billysgait,' " he read. "He was your benefactor?"
"It is a complex story involving an unexpected predeceasing, a residual legatee, and a gentleman whose taste for practical jokes extended even to the grave," Mr. Palmar said.
"Fascinating!" Barnett said sincerely. He took out the small notebook that was his reporter's disguise. "If you don't mind telling me about it…"
"In brief," Mr. Palmar said, "Sir Hector, though knighted for a service to the Crown, was merely the impoverished younger son of a baronet. Impoverished only in terms of his family and class, you understand. It was a constant struggle for him to maintain his flat in the city and his various shooting boxes and fishing rights and the like. He hardly ever killed as many creatures in a year as he would like to have done. And his income ceased upon his death, the principal reverting to the entailed estate which progressed from eldest son to eldest son."
"I see," Barnett said. "The man had no money."
"None to call his own," Mr. Palmar agreed, "beyond the value of those possessions which he had acquired over a lifetime — rifles, shotguns, fishing tackle, framed oils of men killing animals in a variety of ways, and a remarkable variety of clothing for tramping through the woods and shooting at things or wading in mountain streams with a fishing rod."
"So," Barnett said.
"Over the long years of their relationship," Mr. Palmar continued, "Sir Hector grew more and more in debt to his valet, Fellows. It was a gradual process — a couple of pounds borrowed here, a quarter's wages unpaid there — but eventually the total grew to in excess of two hundred pounds. Which, although a comparatively small sum to someone of Sir Hector's class, was a fortune to Fellows.
"Now Sir Hector was something of a practical joker. He promised Fellows, who was his junior by some twenty years, that he would leave him everything in his will. 'Every penny I have,' as he put it."
"But," Barnett interjected, "I thought he had no money of his own."
"True," Mr. Palmar agreed. "And when he died his income would cease. But his possessions remained part of his estate — those things he had bought over the years. And several of the firearms were of themselves worth well into the hundreds of pounds. Sir Hector did not stint himself."
"I see," Barnett said. "It still doesn't sound like enough to purchase a building and endow a private club."
"Ah," Mr. Palmar said, "but here is where the hand of fate takes over, and a strange chain of events turns a practical joke into a legacy. May I offer you a glass of sherry?"
Barnett accepted the sherry, which proved to be a particularly fine Garrett d'Austine '67. He sipped it, savored it, commented on its quality.
"Butlers and valets," Mr. Palmar said, "are particularly well-placed to develop a fine palate for wines, especially fortified wines." He sipped from his own glass and continued with the story he never tired of telling.
"Sir Hector died quite suddenly one morning in September, 1878. And he proved to be as good as his word. Exactly as good, and no better. Fellows was made residual legatee, meaning he was to have whatever was left over after all the specific bequests had been fulfilled. What quickly became apparent as the will was read was that the specific bequests would consume all of Sir Hector's real and personal property. The only thing left for Fellows was the bit of actual money that Sir Hector had on his person and in his flat at the moment of his decease. It amounted, if I remember aright, to a trifle over thirteen pounds. Fellows was rather disappointed."