Out in the street, Wilde and Conan Doyle were still arguing over their respective chess prowess, or lack thereof.
“I haven’t played chess in ages,” Wilde rationalized.
“No, of course not.”
“And playing against oneself hardly counts.”
“I had precisely the same excuse.”
The Irishman was incensed. “Beaten by a, a, a—”
“Glorified cuckoo clock?”
“Precisely! Did I mention I was chess champion at Trinity?”
“This would make the third time.”
Wilde fixed his friend with a look of concern. “Are we growing old, Arthur? Losing our faculties?”
“No. Nowadays we play different games. With greater outcomes.”
Something up the street caught Conan Doyle’s eye. He grabbed Wilde by the lapel of his coat, propelled him into a nearby shop doorway, and pressed him up against the door.
“What? Must we really fight about this? Or are we about to dance?”
“Look.” Conan Doyle nodded at two bowler-hatted men standing on a street corner, looking about, studying the faces of passersby.
“Dandelion and Burdock! Not again! Did they see us?”
“I think not.”
“What now?”
Conan Doyle reached into a pocket, removed the cogwheel and tossed it in his hand. “The shopkeeper is possessed of a keen mechanical bent, and yet he said he’d never seen the like of this gear. He concluded it was clearly the work of a master engineer. It just so happened that a master engineer visited Tarquin Hogg shortly before he was murdered. I think we need to pay a visit to Ozymandius Arkwright.”
At that precise moment a hansom veered around a stationary omnibus and clopped in their direction. “Here comes a cab now, Oscar. Quickly.”
They stepped from the shop doorway and flagged the cab. The two friends clambered aboard and Conan Doyle shouted for the cabbie to drive on.
“Did they see us?” Wilde asked.
Conan Doyle turned and peered out the back window.
“If they did, they show no signs. I think we made a clean escape.” He instructed the driver to take them to an address Wilde had never heard of, a place on the very outskirts of London.
“Where are we going?”
“Arkadia.”
“What’s that?”
“Arkwright’s factory. This may take a while. I’m afraid it’s a bit out of the way.”
“Ah,” said Wilde, and then took out his silver cigarette case and counted how many cigarettes he had left. “So long as it’s no farther than seven cigarettes there should no problem.”
The two fell into reverie as the cab clopped through the busy streets. Finally Conan Doyle turned to Wilde and said, “Why did you ask for the noisiest toys in the shop?”
Wilde paused in lighting up his second cigarette of the journey. “My wife, Constance, suffers from the most excruciating migraines.”
“What? You can’t. You couldn’t do that!” Conan Doyle said, utterly scandalized. “Oh, that’s terribly cruel, Oscar!”
“As I have told you, Arthur. These days, Robert Sheridan is there to keep her company. He lingers in the parlor like the aroma of bacon long after the breakfast things have been cleared. I feel quite forgot. However, my little gift to our boys will be sure to keep me uppermost in her thoughts.”
CHAPTER 16
LOOK UPON MY WORKS AND TREMBLE
“What is this drab and dreary place, Arthur?”
“Arkadia. Spelled with a k, not a c. Note the sign.”
The hackney had traveled north for close to an hour, taking them to the ragged edge of the metropolis, a place where rows of brick houses abruptly transitioned into green fields. Up ahead, like a smudge of soot upon the landscape, stood a huge factory with rows of tall chimneys vomiting smoke.
They stepped down from the hackney and walked through an archway of wrought iron. The top of the arch spelled out a name in black iron letters: ARKADIA.
“Arkadia,” Wilde read aloud, and sniffed. “Obviously meant to be ironic. That name conjures a land of rustic simplicity and beauty. Yet all I see is a dark satanic mill with chimneys billowing brimstone and huddled before it a ghastly monotony of identical brick terraces.”
“It is a planned village. A model of sanitary and modern living. Arkwright has built a place for his workers to live, complete with a church and town hall.”
“Planned dreariness more like it. Why can the English not build villages modeled after those in Tuscany? Are Italian bricks somehow more expensive to make?”
Like the strands of a web, all streets led to the factory and were long and wide. The two friends set off walking at a good clip and it did not take long for Conan Doyle to concede Wilde’s point: the houses were indeed drab and anonymous. But compared to the filthy, dilapidated hovels many Londoners lived in, they were palaces.
The two friends had almost reached the factory gates when they heard a familiar sound from behind: wisshhhhthump… wishhhhhhhthump.… wishhhhhhhthump…
They turned to find a steam car bearing down on them. The top-hatted driver did not slow down, but instead squeezed the rubber bulb of a horn and honked impatiently. The two friends had barely time to throw themselves clear as the steam car whistled past and disappeared through the factory gates.
“That’s him now!” Conan Doyle grumbled. “Bounder near ran us over!”
Although the steam car was nowhere in sight when they passed through the gates, a figure in a stovepipe hat was. Standing upon a plinth was a bronze statue of a tall thin man with muttonchop whiskers, a cigar clamped in his jaws, and his trademark tall headgear. A brass plaque beneath it bore the inscription: OZYMANDIUS ARKWRIGHT, BENEFACTOR.
“Ozymandius, indeed?” Wilde snickered and began to recite in a chest-thumping voice the sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
“Yes, very amusing, Oscar. I know the poem, too.”
“One moment,” Wilde said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t you think there’s something a little odd about this statue?”
“Odd in what way?”
“The left arm looks a bit off. And the statue is not properly centered.”
A moment’s closer inspection revealed two cutoff brass stubs in the concrete plinth.
“This statue originally had a companion,” Wilde surmised. “A second figure that has since been removed. I would speculate that the pose has been amended. The arm was once draped about the shoulder of its neighbor, but has been cut off and the pose rather crudely changed.”
“Yes, you’re right, Oscar,” Conan Doyle agreed. “How odd. How very odd.”
After being left in a small waiting room for the best part of an hour, the two colleagues were then conducted into an even smaller waiting room. After an additional wait of twenty minutes, a balding secretary entered.
“Lord forbid,” Wilde muttered. “No doubt he’s come to shift us to a closet and from there into a biscuit tin.”
Instead, the secretary, muttering apologies for the wait, conducted them into a long, low-ceilinged room, brightly lit by strings of electric bulbs. Men in shirts and waistcoats wearing accountants’ visors with elastic garters holding up their sleeves stood at rows of drafting tables, working with pencils, protractors, compasses. Ozymandius Arkwright stood gazing over the shoulder of one of the draftsmen, and Conan Doyle noticed that the man’s hand trembled visibly as he drew.
When Arkwright finally noticed the two friends, he fixed them with a suspicious glare, his muttonchop whiskers bristling as he clenched a jaw so square it could have been machined from a billet of steel.
“What the bloody hell do you two want?” he bellowed in a broad, Yorkshire accent.