masking complaisance to incite a merging with the mystic, a death in life leading to greater life. This longing prowled his mind like a wraith. He had never spoken of it, not once, to anyone.
To appease that desire for surrender, he read Blavatsky and Emanuel Swedenborg and a host of other long- winded mystics, scouring obscure bookshops in search of rational proof he could quantify, confirmation he could hold in his hands. He attended meetings of the London Spiritualist Alliance. He sought out mediums and seers and psychics, conducted his own parlor seances, visited houses where the dead reportedly did not rest. In every instance, Doyle brought to bear his three cardinal principles—observation, precision, and deduction; these were the cornerstones upon which he had constructed his sense of self—and he recorded his findings clinically, privately, without conclusions, preamble to some larger work whose shape would reveal itself to him only in time.
As his studies deepened, the wrestling within him between science and spirit, these two irreconcilable polarities, grew increasingly clangorous and divisive. He pressed on nonetheless. He knew too well what could happen to men who surrendered that fight: To one side stood the self-appointed pillars of morality, manning the ramparts of Church and State, sworn enemies of change, dead inside but lacking the good sense to lie down; at the other extreme lay a host of wretches chained to asylum walls, wearing their own filth, eyes bum-ing with ecstasy as they communed with an illusory perfection. He drew no judgmental distinction between these extremes: He knew that the path of human perfectibility—the path he aspired to walk—lay exactly on the midpoint between them. It remained his hope that if science was unable to lead
him down that middle path, perhaps he could help science find its footing there.
This determination generated two unexpected results: First, when in this spirit of investigation he chanced upon some fraud or advantage taken of the weak of mind or heart by scoundrels for deceitful gain, he would without hesitation unmask the perpetrators. Low and foul characters, these swindlers generally sprang from the criminal class and understood only the idiom of violence: hard words, tables overturned, physical threats promised and delivered. At the urging of a Scotland Yard confidant, Doyle had recently begun to carry the revolver after the exposure of a counterfeit Gypsy provoked a dagger attack that nearly provided him with firsthand experience of the Great Beyond.
The second: Living with these contradictory impulses—the desire for faith; the need to prove faith genuine before embracing it—left Doyle with the simple human need to compose his unresolved reactions. He found the ideal forum in writing works of fiction, reducing his shapeless experience of this murky netherworld into straightforward narrative lines: stories of mythic planes, dread and eldritch deeds committed by plotters of evil intent, contested by men from the world of light and knowledge—not unlike himself—who ventured knowingly and for the most part recklessly into the darkness.
In service to that vision, during the previous years Doyle produced four manuscripts. His first three efforts had been dutifully submitted to a succession of publishers, where they were uniformly rejected and returned, then consigned to the depths of a wicker footlocker he'd brought back from the South Seas. He was still awaiting responses to his most recent composition—a rousing adventure story entitled 'The Dark Brotherhood'—which he considered his most accomplished work for a number of reasons, not the least of which being his fervent desire to lift himself out of shabby-genteel poverty.
As to his physical appearance, suffice it to say that Doyle was man enough for the tasks he set himself, sturdy, athletic, without vanity but not above a conditioned twinge of shame if he encountered social betters while wearing cuff or collar frayed by his financial limits.
He had seen enough of vice to be sympathetic to the cap-
tives of its hooks and snares without ever having been entangled there himself. He was not boastful and by inclination held greater stock in listening than speaking. Of human nature, he hoped for basic decencies, and met its inevitable disappointments without rancor or surprise.
The fairer sex aroused in him a natural and healthy interest but also on occasion tapped a vein of vulnerability, a pocket of frailty and indecision in an otherwise solid granite facing. This tendency had never offered more of a predicament than the standard vexations and anxieties posed to any younger man in the pursuit of love. As he was about to discover, it would soon present far graver consequences.
A hirteen Cheshire Street stood packed in the center of a residential shanty row as flimsy as playing cards. Four steps led to a doorway with a pronounced starboard lean. The building could not yet be fairly considered a hovel, but that day was not far off. It appeared to possess no inherently sinister qualities. It appeared to possess no quality whatsoever.
Doyle looked on from across the street. He had arrived an hour earlier than requested by the letter. Light was in scarce supply, foot and street traffic scant. He kept to the shadows and waited, certain his presence had not been detected, watching the house through a small optic magnifier.
A pale aurora of gaslight limned the curtains of the forward parlor. Twice during his first quarter-hour, shadows pressed between the light and lace. Once the lace moved, a hand appeared, a dark male face dimly seen studied the street below, then withdrew.
At 7:20 a squat figure covered in an accretion of dark, tattered shawls ambled down the street, climbed the stairs, and methodically knocked three times, paused, then rapped a fourth. Five feet tall, well over fourteen stone, head and face obscured against the cold. High-button shoes. A woman. Doyle raised the magnifier to his eye; the shoes were new. The door opened, and the figure entered. Doyle saw neither the interior hall nor the figure's admitter.
Five minutes later, a young boy sprinted into view, straight to the door, where he repeated the same knock. Shabbily dressed, an urchin, carrying a bulky, irregular bundle wrapped in newspaper, bound by twine. Before Doyle could focus the glass clearly on the bundle, the boy entered.
Between 7:40 and 7:50, two couples arrived, the first on foot, working class, the woman sallow, heavily with child, the man thick, built for manual labor, uncomfortable in what Doyle reasoned was his best set of clothes. They also employed the signal knock. Through the glass, he watched the man hectoring the woman as they waited, her eyes downcast, defeated, a habitual state. He couldn't quite make out what the man was saying; an attempt to read his lips yielded the words Dennis and blagglord. Blagglord? They entered; the door closed.
The second couple came by carriage. Not a hansom, a private vehicle, dark leathers, steel-span wheels, the horse a handsome chestnut. Judging from the gelding's heavy lather, they had traveled at high speed from somewhere forty-five minutes to an hour away. Heading west, that placed them in Kensington, with Regent's Park the northern extreme.
The coachman dismounted and opened the door. His dress and deferential manner did not contradict what he appeared to be, a career servant, fifty, muscled, and dour. A young man alighted first, slender and pallid, bearing the tremulous conceit of a privileged university student—as broad cultural types went, not an inordinate favorite of Doyle's. Wearing an elaborate cravat, dickey, and beaver hat, he'd either come straight from a social function or considerably overestimated the formality of his destination. Curtly brushing the coachman aside, he lent a hand to the coach's second passenger as she descended.
She was in black, as tall as the young man, willowy and supple, swaying in emotional currents that seemed considerable. Bonnet and shawl framed a pale oval face; a familial resemblance to the younger man—his sister, Doyle chanced, two or three years his senior—but the glimpse of her features was brief as the young man took her arm and ushered her quickly to the door. He knocked straightforwardly, the signal apparently unknown to them. As they waited, the young man attempted to press her on some persistent point—perhaps imprecations against their rough surroundings; it appeared he had accompanied her under protest—but despite her apparent frailty, a steadiness in the set of her eyes indicated her will was the stronger.
The woman glanced anxiously about the street. This is the author of the note, and she is looking for me, Doyle realized.
He was on the verge of starting across to them when the door opened, and the house swallowed them up.
Shadows played against the parlor curtains. Employing the glass, Doyle saw the woman greeted by the man whose dark face he had spied earlier at the window, accompanied by the pregnant woman; she took the brother's hat, the woman's shawl. The dark man gestured modestly, indicating they should adjourn to an inner room, and with the woman leading the way, they moved from sight.
She is not acting out of bereavement, concluded Doyle. Grief collapses inwardly. What's propelling this woman forward is fear. And if 13 Cheshire was a. snare, she had walked eagerly into its jaws.
