Byron grinned. “You’ve read my Hours of Idleness!”
“Many times,” said Doyle truthfully.
“Well, I’ll be damned. In any case, we can pass the bottle back and forth.”
Byron glanced around the room, and noticed the stack of poetry on the desk. “Aha!” he cried, snatching it up. “Poesy! Confess, it’s your own.”
Doyle smiled and shrugged deprecatingly. “It’s no one else’s.”
“May I?”
Doyle waved awkwardly. “Help yourself.”
After reading the first several pages—and, Doyle noticed, leaving grease stains on them from having upwrapped the mutton—Byron put the manuscript down and looked at Doyle speculatively. “Is it your first effort?” He pulled the already loosened cork out of the bottle neck and took a liberal swig. “Uh, yes.” Doyle took the proffered bottle and drank some himself.
“Well, you’ve got a spark, sir, it seems to me—though a lot of it is damned obscure crinkum-crankum—and God knows in these times a poet is a worthless thing to be. I prefer the talents of action—in May I swam the Hellespont, from Sestos to Abydos, and I’m prouder of that feat than I could be of any literary achievement.”
Doyle grinned. “As a matter of fact, I agree. I’d be more pleased with myself if I’d made a decent chair, so all the legs touched the ground at the same time, than I am about having written that poem.” He folded the manuscript, wrapped the cover letter around it, addressed it, then dripped some hot candle wax on it for a seal.
Byron nodded sympathetically, started to speak, stopped, and then quickly asked, “Who are you, by the way? I no longer want to demand any answers, for I became your lifelong friend when you shot that murderous gypsy who’d otherwise have ended my story. But I’m damn curious.” He smiled shyly, and for the first time looked his actual age of only twenty-three years.
Doyle took another long sip of the wine and set the bottle down on the table. “Well, I’m an American, as you’ve probably guessed from my accent, and I came… here… to hear Samuel Coleridge give a speech, and I ran afoul of this Doctor Romany fellow—” He paused, for he thought he’d heard something, a sort of thump, outside the window. Then, remembering that they were on the third floor, he dismissed it and went on. “And I lost the party of tourists I was with, and—” He halted again, beginning to feel the alcohol. “Oh, hell, Byron, I’ll tell you the real story. Give me some more wine first.” Doyle took a long sip and set the bottle down with exaggerated care. “I was born in—”
With simultaneous crashing explosions of glass from one side and splinters from the other, the window and the door burst inward and two big, rough-looking men were rolling to their feet from the floor. The table went over, spilling the food and shattering the table and the lamp—and in the sudden dimness more men were pouring in through the doorway, stumbling or leaping over the split door, which was hanging at an angle from one twisted hinge. Blue flames began licking over the oil-splash.
Doyle grabbed one man by the scarf knot, took two steps across the room and then hurled him through the window; the man collided with the frame, and for a moment it seemed he might grab the rope the first man had swung in on, but then his hands and heels disappeared and there was a receding, gasping cry.
Byron had snatched up and drawn Romany’s sword, and as two men with raised coshes stepped toward the still off-balance Doyle—and from below, outside, came a multiple crack, and startled yells—Byron kicked forward in a lunge too long to recover from easily and drove three inches of the extended blade into the chest of the man closest to Doyle. “Look out, Ashbless!” he yelled as he wrenched the sword free and tried to straighten up.
The other man, alarmed by this sudden appearance of lethally naked steel, swung his cosh down with all his strength onto Byron’s head. There was an ugly hollow smack and Byron fell dead to the floor, the sword clattering away.
To regain his balance Doyle had crouched and grabbed a leg of the desk, and from there he saw Byron’s inert form; “You son of a—” he roared, straightening and lifting the desk over his head—everything spilled off it, and the envelope for the Courier fluttered out the open window—”bitch!” he finished, bringing the desk shattering down on the head and upraised arm of the man who’d hit Byron.
The man dropped, and since several of the intruders were busy smothering the fire, Doyle launched himself in a furious charge toward the doorway; two men leaped forward to block his way, but were felled by his massive fists; but as he lurched out into the hall a carefully swung sock full of sand thudded against his skull just behind his right ear, and his forward rush became a sloppy dive to the floor.
Doctor Romanelli eyed the motionless form for a few seconds, waving back the men who had followed Doyle out of the room, then he thrust the weighted sock away in a pocket. “Tie the chloroform rag around his face and get him out of here,” he grated, “you incompetent clowns.”
“Goddamn, yer Honor,” whined the man who picked up Doyle’s ankles, “they was ready for us! There’s three of us dead, unless Norman survived his fall.”
“Where’s the other man who was in there?”
“Dead, boss,” said the last man to emerge from the room, pulling on a scorched and smoking coat.
“Let’s go, then. Down the back stairs.” He pressed his hands to his eyes. “Try to stay together, will you do that at least?” he whispered. “You’ve caused such a pandemonium that I’ll have to set a radiating disorientation spell to confuse the pursuit you’ve certainly roused.” He began muttering in a language none of Horrabin’s men recognized, and after the first dozen syllables blood began running out from between his fingers. Clumping footsteps sounded from the direction of the front stairs, and the men shifted and glanced at each other uneasily, but a moment later they heard a confused babble of argument, and the footsteps receded. Romanelli ceased speaking and lowered his hands, breathing hoarsely, and a couple of the men with him actually paled to see blood running like tears out of his eyes.
“Move, you damned insects,” Romanelli croaked, shoving his way to the front of the group and leading them forward.
“What’s a pandemonium?” whispered one of the men in the rear.
“It’s like a calliope,” answered a companion. “I heard one played at the Harmony Fair last summer, when I went there to see my sister’s boy play his organ.”
“His what?”
“His organ.”
“Lord. People pay money to see things like that?”
“Silence!” Romanelli hissed. After that they were on the stairs, and gasping and straining too much with their unconscious burden even to want to speak.
It was a chorus of shrill, discordant whistling that finally led Doyle out of his drugged half-dreams. He sat up, shivering with the damp chill in his coffin-shaped box, the lid of which had been taken away, and after rubbing his eyes and taking several deep breaths he realized that the tiny bare room really was rocking, and that he must be aboard a ship. He hoisted a leg outside the box and let his sandalled heel clunk to the floor, and grabbing the sides he levered himself dizzily to his feet. His mouth was still full of the sharp reek of chloroform, and he grimaced and spat as he reeled to the door.
It was locked from the outside, as he’d expected. There was a small window in the door at the level of his neck, with stout iron bars instead of glass—which helped explain why the room was so cold—and, crouching a little to look out of it, he saw a damp deck that disappeared within a few yards into a wall of gray fog, and, from out of the close murk, a rope, belt-high and parallel to the deck, that was evidently moored to the outside of his cabin bulkhead.