'There are invitations one does not refuse,' said my friend. He doffed his own hat to the footman, and I do believe that he was smiling as he climbed into the box-like space, and relaxed back into the soft leathery cushions.
When I attempted to speak with him during the journey to the Palace, he placed his finger over his lips. Then he closed his eyes and seemed sunk deep in thought. I, for my pan, tried to remember what I knew of German royalty, but, apart from the Queen's consort, Prince Albert, being German, I knew little enough.
I put a hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of coins—brown and silver, black and copper-green. I stared at the portrait stamped on each of them of our Queen, and felt both patriotic pride and stark dread. I told myself I had once been a military man, and a stranger to fear, and I could remember a time when this had been the plain truth. For a moment I remembered a time when I had been a crack-shot—even, I liked to think, something of a marksman—but my right hand shook as if it were palsied, and the coins jingled and chinked, and I felt only regret.
3. The Palace.
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The Queen's consort, Prince Albert, was a big man, with an impressive handlebar moustache and a receding hairline, and he was undeniably and entirely human. He met us in the corridor, nodded to my friend and to me, did not ask us for our names or offer to shake hands.
'The Queen is most upset,' he said. He had an accent. He pronounced his S's as Z's: Mozt. Upzet, 'Franz was one of her favourites. She has so many nephews. But he made her laugh so. You will find the ones who did this to him.'
'I will do my best,' said my friend.
'I have read your monographs,' said Prince Albert. 'It was I who told them that you should be consulted. I hope I did right.'
'As do I,' said my friend.
And then the great door was opened, and we were ushered into the darkness and the presence of the Queen.
She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.
Thizsz muzzst be zsolved. The words came from the shadows.
'Indeed, ma'am,' said my friend.
A limb squirmed and pointed at me, Zsttpp forward.
I wanted to walk. My legs would not move.
My friend came to my rescue then. He took me by the elbow and walked me toward her majesty.
Isz not to be afraid. Isz to be worthy. Isz to be a companion. That was what she said to me. Her voice was a very sweet contralto, with a distant buzz. Then the limb uncoiled and extended, and she touched my shoulder. There was a moment, hut only a moment, of a pain deeper and more profound than anything I have ever experienced, and then it was replaced by a pervasive sense of well-being. I could feel the muscles in my shoulder relax, and, for the first lime since Afghanistan, I was free from pain.
Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen's Counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.
'Certainly, ma'am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch. that night, the footprints were, although obscured, unmistakable.' And then, 'Yes. I understand…. I believe so. Yes.'
He was quiet when we left the palace, and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.
It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the Palace.
Fingers of sooty fog twined across the road and the sky.
Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking glass of my room, I observed that the frog-white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.
4. The Performance.
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That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door in Baker Street—an elderly Chinese man, a young roue, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend's room, and, with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall 'quick change artist', my friend would walk out.
He would not talk about what he had been doing on these occasions, preferring to relax, staring off into space, occasionally making notations on any scrap of paper to hand, notations I found, frankly, incomprehensible. He seemed entirely preoccupied, so much so that I found myself worrying about his well-being. And then, late one afternoon, he came home dressed in his own clothes, with an easy grin upon his face, and he asked if I was interested in ;he theatre.
'As much as the next man,' I told him.
'Then fetch your opera glasses,' he told me. 'We are off to Drury Lane.'
I had expected a light opera, or something of the kind, but instead I found myself in what must have been the worst theatre in Drury Lane, for all that it had named itself after the royal court—and to be honest, it was barely in Drury Lane at all, being situated at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of the road, where the avenue approaches the Rookery of St. Giles. On my friend's advice I concealed my wallet, and, following his example, I carried & stout stick.
Once we were seated in the stalls (I had bought a threepenny orange from one of the lovely young women who sold them to the members of the audience, and I sucked it as we waited), my friend said, quietly, 'You should only count yourself lucky that you did not need to accompany me to the gambling dens or the brothels. Or the madhouses—another place that Prince Franz delighted in visiting, as I have learned. But there was nowhere he went to more than once. Nowhere but—'
The orchestra struck up, and the curtain was raised. My friend was silent.
It was a fine enough show in its way: three one-act plays were performed. Comic songs were sung between
