without much interest, since it wasn’t Romany’s twanging step, and his eyes widened in surprise when the newcomer stepped into the hall, for it was Romany after all, but he was wearing high platform boots instead of his spring-shoes.
The clown cast a triumphant glance around the company, then bowed grotesquely to the newcomer. “Ah, your Worship,” he piped, “we’ve been awaiting your arrival with, in a couple of cases,” he waved at the two corpses, “terminal suspense.” Then Horrabin’s smile faltered and he looked more closely, for the visitor was pale and reeling, and blood was running sluggishly from his nose and ears. “You’re… Horrabin?” the man croaked. “Take me … to Doctor Romany’s camp… now.” As the clown blinked uncomprehendingly, a voice screeched from the derelict’s corner. “No use going there, Pierre! That whole plan’s as dead as Ramses! But I can lead you to the man that wrecked it—and if you can take him and wring him dry, you’ll have a better thing than just England dead, Fred!” A few of the penny toss crowd had sufficiently recovered their aplomb to cheer and whistle at this pronouncement.
“Carrington,” whispered Horrabin, furious and embarrassed, “get that creature out of here. In fact, kill it.” He smiled nervously at Romanelli. “I do apologize, uh, sir. Our… democratic policies are sometimes too—”
But Romanelli was staring with almost horrified astonishment at the weightless derelict. “Silence!” he rasped.
“Yes, do shut him up, Carrington,” said Horrabin.
“I mean you, clown,” said Romanelli. “Get out of here if you can’t shut up. You,” he added to Carrington, “stay where you are.” Then almost reluctantly he turned to the ruin-faced derelict again. “Come here,” he said.
The thing flapped and jiggled across the floor and tapdanced to a stop in front of him.
“You’re him,” Romanelli said wonderingly, “the ka the Master drew eight years ago. But… that face wound was taken … decades ago, by the look of it. And your weight—you’re nearly at the disintegration point. How can this have happened in just eight years? Or no, since I last spoke with you?”
“It’s them gates Fikee opened,” the thing chittered. “I went through one, and was a long time making my way back. But let’s discuss it on the ride, Clyde—the man that knows it all is staying at The Swan With Two Necks in Lad Lane, and if you can take him to Cairo for a thorough sifting, then nothing since 1802 will have been a waste of time.” The thing turned its eye on Horrabin. “We’ll need six—no, ten—of your biggest and coolest boys, ones smart enough to grab and bind a big man without killing him or denting his precious brain. Oh, and a couple of carriages, and fresh horses.”
There was some snickering from the crowd, and Horrabin said, with a not very confident attempt at bravado, “I do not take orders from a damned… walking cast-off snakeskin.”
Romanelli opened his mouth to contradict him, but the ragged creature in the middle of the floor waved him to silence.
“That’s nearly exactly what you’ll take orders from, clown,” it said. “You’ve done my bidding before, though I can scarcely now remember those evenings of scheming, hanging side by side in the buried bell tower. What I remember more clearly is waiting for your birth. I knew your father when he stood no higher than the table there, and I knew him when he was the tall leader of this thieves’ guild, and then I used to chat with him over a snitched bottle of wine sometimes in the days after you’d shortened him down again so as to have a court jester.” A couple of the creature’s teeth were blown out of its mouth by the vehemence of its speech, and they spun away upward like bubbles rising through oil. “It’s a terrible thing to have to sit through one’s own foolish speeches again, knowing they’re all wrong while you wait for the clock to come around again, but I’ve done it now. I’m the only one in the world that knows the whole story. I’m the only one worth taking orders from.”
“Do as he says,” growled Doctor Romanelli.
“Aye,” said the bobbing creature. “And when you’ve got him, I’ll come along to Cairo with you, and after the Master’s finished with him I’ll kill whatever’s left of him.”
* * *
Having copied out the cover letter to The Courier from memory, Doyle tossed it onto the stack of manuscript pages that lay beside Doctor Romany’s sheathed sword on the desk. It hadn’t even come as too much of a surprise to him when he’d realized, after writing down the first few lines of “The Twelve Hours of the Night,” that while his casual scrawl had remained recognizably his own, his new left-handedness made his formal handwriting different— though by no means unfamiliar: for it was identical W. William Ashbless’. And now that he’d written the poem out completely he was certain that if a photographic slide of this copy was laid over a slide of the copy that in 1983 would reside in the British Museum, they would line up perfectly, with every comma and i-dot of his version precisely covering those of the original manuscript.
Suddenly a thought struck him.
He pushed the vertiginous concept away, stood up and went to the window. Lifting the curtain aside, he looked down at the wide yard of the Swan With Two Necks, crowded with post and passenger coaches.
Even as he let the curtain fall there was a knock at the door. He crossed to it. “Who’s there?” he asked cautiously.
“Byron, with refreshments,” came the cheery reply. “Who did you suppose?”
Doyle undid the chain and let him in. “You must have gone far afield for them.”
“I did go over to Cheapside,” Byron admitted, limping over to the table and setting a waxed paper bundle down on it, “but with good result.” He tore the paper away. “Voila! Hot mutton, lobster salad and a bottle of what is unlikely to be, as the vendor swore it was, a Bordeaux.” His face went blank. “Glasses.” He looked up at Doyle. “We haven’t any.”
“Not even a skull to drink it out of,” Doyle agreed.
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
