It wasn’t just restlessness, a jaded need to expand an empire, which compelled Moriarty into border skirmishes with his continental rivals. In his mettle, he needed to be the best — which is to say, worst — in his field.
The Firm would go to war!
Not soon enough, said I. For I wasn’t content to be content, to grow plump and pampered in a London rut — no matter how many blushing twins were thrown into the pot — when there were savage lands to be conquered, and desperate campaigns to be waged. The hunter’s blood stirred and would not be quieted. View halloo, and into the fray…
Then, a railway messenger arrived. The lad was startled to be greeted on our doorstep by Tessie the Two-Ton Taff, in peignoir and straining stays. Mrs Halifax was off with one of her filles de joie, selling a healthy ‘inconvenience’ to thin-blooded, childless Americans, so the Great Lay of Llandudno was serving in Mrs H.’s stead for the day. The Welsh girl took the messenger by his ear and hauled him up to our reception room, where he presented a sealed envelope to the Professor. Having taken a shine to the railway lad, Tess then dragged him into the kitchens for what she referred to as ‘a nice dollop of dripping’. I doubt the boy ever reported back to his office, though I don’t credit the rumour spread by envious, bonier girls that Tess ate him.
This time, Stationmaster Moriarty enclosed a signed letter on the headed paper of the GS&W Railway Company. If presented to the conductor of the Fal Vale Special, which was to leave Paddington at two o’clock that afternoon, the document would entitle the bearer to accommodation gratis for himself and his party.
A wilful contrarian, Professor Moriarty was in a quandary. One brother had ordered him not to go to Cornwall. The other had summoned him to Cornwall. He could not disobey both equally. To defy one, he must satisfy the other. Besides weaving his head from side to side, he was grinding his teeth — a new habit, so far as I knew.
I tried to get him back to continental matters, asking his estimate of the Great Vampire’s intriguing new protégée — a female who styled herself ‘Irma Vep’ and was reputedly the greatest man manipulator in the business since that bitch herself.
But he would not be distracted from family business.
‘There’s nothing else for it, Moran. We shall have to seek out this worm. Pack guns.’
‘Your brother doesn’t mention a fee.’
‘He would not.’
‘Family discount, eh?’
Moriarty’s shoulders were rounder than usual. I saw my needling was getting through. Family can worry under the skin like a tick. The Professor was, in his way, a great man. Yet, despite what many who encountered him said, he was still a human man.
I’ll warrant Gladstone, Palliser and Attila were the same — in command of their destinies and fixed on their great goals, but red-faced and sputtering when joshed by some sibling who remembered when nursie smacked their bottoms for making sicky-sicky on their bibs. Attila, of course, could have irritating relations thrown into a wolf pit. However, in the so-called enlightened modern age, such methods of easing domestic stress were frowned upon.
So, we were hunting dragons. With no payday in sight.
I consoled myself with the thought that this expedition was but an appetiser: a quick kill to warm up for the long, delicious hunt to come.
We were at Paddington Station in good time for the Special, which was ready to board at its platform. We passed through scalding steam to reach the steps to the single carriage. Other passengers were already in their seats, which made me wonder who else was invited on the Fal Vale Worm Express. A conductor stood by the steps, with a whistle and a clipboard. Folds of skin hung loose under his eyes and chin.
Moriarty presented his brother’s letter to the official, who stated — in a tedious West Country drone — that no one had told him of extra passengers, opined that anyone could obtain a sample of the company’s stationery and declared he had never heard of the supposed signatory.
‘This b’ain’t no good yurr,’ he said. ‘Only money or murder’ll get yer ’board this train, or my name b’aint ’Ubert Berkins.’
Foolishly, we opted for money.
III
As the Fal Vale Special steamed out of London, the Professor sank into a deep quiet. He was thinking.
I’d known him not speak for a week, then arrange the removal of a human obstacle to one of his designs and become almost morbidly cheerful. I’d seen his crazes start up like a sudden summer storm, ending in ruination of one stripe or another for someone who had crossed him.
I need not mention again Nevil Airey Stent, the former Astronomer Royal. Even the Red Planet League business pales beside the fate of Fred Porlock, convicted in a court convened in our basement of a capital crime for selling information about the Firm’s dealings to outside interests. What was done to the traitor made the Lord of Strange Deaths seem lenient, and stood as a serious disincentive to anyone else who might consider following his unhappy path of collaboration with the law.
I’d even been in the room while the Moriarty brain ticked as he worked over purely abstract problems. As a devotee of games of chance and calculation, I’m a fair hand at practical maths, but Moriarty’s sums were well beyond my capabilities. He could have said ‘ah-ha!’ or ‘eureka!’ and chalked stickmen on the blackboard, claiming to have solved a puzzle which had baffled generations of clever clogs, and I’d be none the wiser.
But this was different. His head was not bobbing. His chin was clamped to his chest. He was still grinding his teeth. He would not be spoken to.
I’d never seen Moriarty like this. I concluded that only family could put him in such a black humour. His brothers set him equations for which there were no solutions, but which prompted endless, futile calculations. This was a new side to the Professor, and, I admit, I was uncomfortable with it. This forced me to a strange, giddying realisation that I had become comfortable with Moriarty’s other sides, the ones which were terrifying to the rest of the world. What did that say about me? Through association, had I become as much a freak of nature — as much a monster — as the old man?
Moriarty wasn’t in conversational mood and I’d not packed anything to read. Railway bookstalls tend not to stock Mistress Payne’s Rollicking Academy or R.G. Sanders’ Natives I Have Shot, my favoured perusing material. I was thrown back on eyeing up the other passengers.
Since this was a Special, the rest of the crowd must also have been invited.
I couldn’t immediately see how they fit together. A young lady, travelling alone — always promising, rarely delivering — trim enough figure, but affecting pince-nez and a severe look. A funny little Frenchman with waxed moustaches, deep in the Journal of the Society for Psychic Research. A middle-aged parson with white powder in his hair and dusting his cassock; an old scratch on his cheek, a scar you’d be more likely to pick up duelling with sabres at Heidelberg than reading up Acts of the Apostles at Lampeter. A man-about-town type, who had clocked the lone young lady and was buffing his nails in an attempt to draw her attention. And a gaunt, floppy-haired gent, who ogled me balefully. I tossed him a jovial smile, and got a more penetrating stare for my pains. He produced, filled and lit an ostentatious pipe, wreathing himself in rings of pungent smoke.