anywhere about, they’ll flush him out.”
I said, “They’re not cops, Lord Purleigh.”
“My point exactly.”
Someone knocked at the door.
“Yes?” Lord Bob called out.
The door opened and the butler stood there, looking as magnificent and as blank and expressionless as he had looked last night. “Forgive me for disturbing you, milord.”
“Yes, Higgens?”
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has arrived. With Madame Sosostris and her husband.”
“Ah,” said Lord Bob. “And what have you done with them?” “The lady and her husband are being shown to their room. Sir Arthur is waiting in the library.”
Lord Bob nodded. “Very good, Higgens. Please tell Sir Arthur that we’ll be joining him shortly.”
Higgens inclined his head. “Very good, milord.” He pulled the door shut.
Lord Bob turned back to the Great Man. “Doyle’s something of an expert on all this, eh? Guns, disguises, mystification. Let’s put this before him, shall we, and see what he has to say?”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood tall and massive at the library window, blocking the light like the trunk of an oak tree. As we entered the room, he was gazing out at the grounds with his lips thoughtfully pursed and his hands thoughtfully clasped behind his back. He turned toward us and raised his eyebrows and opened wide his brown eyes and he smiled at us from beneath a plump prosperous white mustache. The smile was more boyish and open than you would expect to see on the face of someone so famous, or someone so large.
“Houdini!” he called out in a rumbling bass voice. “And Lord Purleigh!” He strode briskly across the room and held out a ruddy hand that looked as big as a flounder.
In his sixties, he was at least six feet four inches tall. His shoulders seemed almost as wide. He must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds but he carried it with a relentless vigor, like a retired athlete who still took his strength for granted, or still wanted to. He was so charged with physical energy that he appeared even larger and more imposing than he was. He made the Maplewhite library feel frail and flimsy and cramped.
The Great Man smiled his own charming smile but he remembered his manners long enough to let his host take Doyle’s hand first.
“Looking splendid, Doyle,” said Lord Bob. Doyle pumped at his arm as though he were trying to raise water from thirty feet below ground.
“ Feeling splendid, Lord Purleigh!” said Doyle. His large white irregular teeth were sparkling. His thinning hair was ginger and gray where it ran back along his wide pink crown, but at his temples it was white as his mustache. He was wearing a doublebreasted suit of dark gray wool, a white shirt, a blue and red silk tie, and a pair of the biggest brogues I’d ever seen, black and bulbous and shiny. You could have carried mail in those shoes. Across the Mississippi River. “Absolutely tiptop!” he said to Lord Bob. “How goes it with you? And Lady Purleigh?”
“Fine, thank you, fine, both of us. But it’s ‘Bob, old man. Told you a hundred times. You know Houdini, of course.”
“My good friend,” said Doyle. He grabbed the Great Man’s hand and buried it within the lumpy mass of his own and he pumped the Great Man’s arm. He reached out and his left hand slammed down, affectionately, onto the Great Man s shoulder. Grand to see you again,” said Doyle. “How are you?
“Excellent, Sir Arthur,” said the Great Man, nodding and grinning up at him. The top of his head was below the level of Doyle’s square red jaw. “Please let me introduce my… ah… friend, Mr.
Phil Beaumont.”
“Delighted!” said Doyle, and he smiled down at me, crinkling up the corners of his eyes. He captured my hand and he imprinted some creases in my palm that felt like they would be there until the day I died. “American, are you?” he asked as he pumped at my arm.
“Yes,” I said.
“ Topping! Welcome to England!” He released my hand.
My fingers were still attached to my body but it was a good thing that nobody would be asking me to play the piano any time soon.
Lord Bob was glowering at me as if I had slithered out of a hole in the wainscoting. He turned away. “Listen, Doyle,” he said. “Something’s come up, I’m afraid.”
Chapter Twelve
'What an extraordinary tale!” said Doyle. He sat on one of the padded leather library chairs, his great red head thrust forward, his heavy forearms planted on knees the size of pineapples. He shook the head a few times in amazement and then turned it toward the Great Man. “And you’re quite all right, are you?”
“Oh yes,” said the Great Man, tapping his palm lightly against his thigh. He sat opposite Doyle in another leather chair, beside my own. “I am in perfect health, as always.”
Seated, Doyle was more subdued. It was as though his age somehow caught up with him when he stopped moving, and then settled over his heavy shoulders like a shawl. “And the young woman? Miss Turner?”
“She’s fine, considering,” said Lord Bob, who sat to my right. “Resting in her room. Poor girl’s had rather a thin time of it. Disturbances last night, and then her horse ran away with her. And now this. Some filthy sod firing a bloody rifle. Can’t blame her for feeling a bit under the weather, eh?”
Beneath his white mustache, Doyle’s lips tightened. “Disturbances, you say? Last night? What sort of disturbances?”
Lord Bob waved his hand lightly. “A nightmare.”
“She believed,” said the Great Man, “that she had seen the ghost of Lord Purleigh’s ancestor.”
Doyle nodded his big head at the Great Man and said to Lord Bob, “That would be Lord Reginald?”
“Yes. My fault, I expect. Shouldn’t have told her the story. Cousin of my wife’s pried it out of me. Persistent woman.”
“But perhaps Miss Turner did see Lord Reginald.”
Lord Bob frowned, as though he didn’t want to discuss this possibility. “Irrelevant, isn’t it?” He held up a placating hand. “Sorry, Doyle, know you’re fond of all that-ghosts, spirits, et cetera. Fair enough. One man’s meat, eh? Agree to disagree, eh? But just now, seems to me, we’ve got to deal with this Chin Soo fellow.”
“I concur,” said Doyle. He sat back in his chair and I noticed a small brief wince of annoyance flicker across his mouth. Rheumatism, or arthritis, or maybe just ligament and bone that had grown wary of sudden movements. Whatever it was, he wasn’t as limber as he would’ve liked to be. Probably no one was, except the Great Man.
Doyle reached into the right-hand pocket of his coat, looked over at Lord Bob. “May I smoke?”
Lord Bob waved his hand. “Course you may.” He smiled. “A two-pipe problem, eh?”
Doyle smiled back, but wanly, as though he had heard this before, often. He pulled from the pocket a meerschaum pipe and a leather tobacco pouch. He opened the pouch and dipped the pipe into it and he glanced over at the Great Man. “When did all this begin?”
The Great Man put his arms on the arms of the chair. “One month ago,” he said. “In the city of Buffalo, in New York State. Both Chin Soo and I were performing there. I was at the Orpheum, he was at the Palace. You know, perhaps, that the vaudeville houses in America are extremely competitive these days, due to the increasing popularity of the cinemas.”
Doyle had pulled out a small box of Swan Vespa matches. He struck one alight. Nodding at the Great Man, he held the flame to the bowl of his pipe.
“Naturally,” said the Great Man, “I myself have no trouble filling a house, even in these difficult days. But for a performer of lesser magnitude, such as Chin Soo, the situation can be truly formidable. And when Houdini is playing the same town, at the same time, well, of course, the situation becomes in fact hopeless.” With a lot of puffing at the stem of his pipe, Doyle had finally gotten the thing lit. He slipped the matches back into his coat pocket and blew out a streamer of smoke. The smoke drifted across the room, smelling like smoldering burlap.
“Not surprisingly,” said the Great Man, “Chin Soo’s ticket sales were very poor. He grew desperate. He
