'Everything all right, sir?' asked Sparks, but what issued from him was an uncannily accurate rendering of Ruskin.
'Go ... away! Go away and play trains!'
'Begging your pardon, sir,' Sparks continued with the guise, 'but some of the guests have arrived. They're asking to see you.'
'Guests? The guests have arrived?' the voice trumpeted, with equal measures of incredulity and contempt.
'Yes, sir, and the dinner's ready. We should be sitting down; you know how you disfavor a meal when the entrees go cold,' Sparks went on. Doyle could have closed his eyes and never suspected the obese unfortunate wasn't nearby.
Footsteps moved to the door inside. A series of bolts were thrown.
'If there's one thing I can't bear, you gelatinous cur,' the voice said, rising in pitch and volume, 'it's the squalid per-Petuation of lies!' More latches unlatched and locks released. 'There is no party, there are no guests, there is no dinner, and if I hear another word from your wormy, liverish lips about any of this slumgullion, I shall with my own hands strangle the life from your swinish neck, boil your corpse in a pit, and render the fat for Christmas candles!'
The door was pulled open, and they were confronted by a man of average height and build whose blandly pleasant fea-rares were framed by a wild nimbus of matted blond beard and hair that had known no recent acquaintance of brush or comb. His eyebrows sprang up like untended hedges overrunning the ridges of his forehead. The eyes were bulbous, opalescent, and light as cornflowers, set wide apart on either side of a sharply beaked nose. He had attained at least forty years,
but his face had an unlined schoolboy youthfulness that seemed less due to sound breeding than a petulant refusal to assimilate experience. He wore a black silk dressing gown over a loose blouse, peculiar cork-soled boots, and jodhpurs. And he was holding a double-barreled shotgun half a foot from their faces.
No one moved. 'Lord Nicholson, I presume,' Sparks said, as pleasant and collected as a missionary on call.
'You're not Ruskin,' Nicholson said with conviction, and then, unable to resist the opportunity for another disparagement: 'That postulant oaf.'
'Baron Everett Gascoyne-Pouge,' Sparks said, affecting the diffident accents of a jaded dandy, as he produced the New Year's Eve invitation with sardonic detachment. 'I understand you've canceled the party, old boy; somehow my invite seems to have slipped through the net.'
'Really? How odd. Quite all right, come in, come in! Delighted!' said Nicholson, lowering the gun, instantly the exuberant host.
'The bags, Gompertz,' Sparks snapped at Doyle, who realized with a jolt he was suddenly required to perform the functions of his assigned role.
'Right away, sir,' Doyle said.
Doyle brought his bag, the only bag they carried, through the door, which Nicholson quickly closed and bolted behind him. There were at least six locking devices, all of which he engaged.
'I'd given up hope, you see,' said Nicholson boyishly, pumping Sparks's hand. 'Wasn't expecting a soul. Put it out of my mind, really. Truly an unexpected pleasure.'
If ever there is an individual more desperately in need of the company of his own class, thought Doyle, I never hope to meet him. The truculent ranting against his pitifully stalwart manservant had already disposed Doyle to an instant dislike of Lord Charles Stewart Nicholson.
Heavy curtains were drawn in the high-ceilinged room, broadening the somber mood set by ponderous medieval furnishings. Dust lay deep. A musk of urine and fear-sweat lathered the thick atmosphere. The floor was littered with broken cups and plates and the remains of old meals: bones, crusts of
biscuit. Bladed weapons and a tarnished and dented coat of arms hung above the weak fire sputtering in the fireplace.
Nicholson crossed to the mantel, feverishly rubbing His hands together. 'How about some brandy?' he asked, plucking the stopper from a cut-crystal decanter and sloppily filling two tumblers without waiting for a reply. 'I'm having some.' He greedily gulped down half a ration and poured a refill before conveying the second glass to Sparks. 'Cheers, then.'
'Thanks ever so,' said Sparks disinterestedly, making himself comfortable in front of the fire.
'Shall we have your man go below stairs?' said Nicholson, lurching into a seat across from Sparks and slurping his drink. 'I'm sure Ruskin could use the help, the incompetent podge.'
'No,' Sparks replied, with just the right tinge of listless authority. 'I may need him.'
'Very good,' said Nicholson, eagerly deferring to the superior rank suggested by Sparks's indifference. 'Tell me, how was the journey down?'
'Tiring.'
Nicholson nodded like a marionette. He sat on the edge of his chair, eyes wide with empty enthusiasm, took another floppy drink, and wiped his moist lips with his sleeve. 'So it's New Year's then, is it?'
'Hmm,' replied Sparks, gazing apathetically around the room.
'Do you see my boots?' He held up his dressing gown like a dance-hall coquette, raising a foot and wiggling it before them. 'Cork-soled. They do not conduct electricity. Three pairs of socks. No, sir. No e-lec-tro-cu-tion for me. Even if it will make the trains run faster. Ha!'
Sparks demonstrated the wherewithal to recognize this as a remark to which there was no proper response. Nicholson collapsed back in his chair as if every other idea had been drained from his head. Then, furiously animated by an impulse of abject courtesy, Nicholson sprang from his seat, grabbed from the mantel a red Oriental lacquered box, ran to Sparks grinning like a deranged monkey, and with a flourish snapped it open. 'Smoke, Baron?'
Sparks sniffed sourly, picked out a cigar as if it were a foul kipper, and held it poised in front of his face. Nicholson's hands flew wildly through his gown until he found a match, casually struck it against the box, and held it for Sparks. Sparks puffed and rolled the cigar delicately around in his mouth, evening out its ignition.
'From Trinidad,' said Nicholson, lighting one for himself as he sat back down. 'Father has a plantation down there. Wanted me to run the bleeding place for him. Can you imagine? Ha!'
'Bloody hot,' Sparks offered, with token empathy.
'Bloody hot,' he amplified. 'Bloody hot, and the niggers steal you blind besides. Bloody backward sods with their native smells and their chanting at night and their black faces sweating. But may I tell you? Beautiful women. Bee-you-tce-ful women.'
'Really.'
'Whores, every one of them, even with little tar babies hanging round their necks like macaques in the bugging zoo. They'll drop their knickers in the street for the change in your vest pocket,' said Nicholson, hoarse with illicit carnality. 'You could have yourself a go down there, I'm here to say. Fancy a little dark meat on your dolly mops, you could have a bit of fair sport, let me tell you, that's a bit of tropical splendor, that is. Ha!' He brushed his hand licentiously along his crotch and poured another brandy. 'I could do with some sport about now; satisfy the inner man. Comes a point you don't much care what sort of package it comes by way of, either.' He winked at Sparks suggestively.
The idea of Lady Nicholson as his spouse, that her handsome refinement had ever been subject to the vicissitudes of this baboon's degeneracy, filled Doyle with moral outrage. If some unspeakable horror was hot on the heels of this besotted wastrel, he was suddenly of a mind to pick up an andiron and finish the job himself.
'How is your father, the Earl?' asked Sparks, his tone betraying no reaction or judgment.
'Still alive!' said Nicholson, as if it were the funniest thing imaginable. 'Ha! Clinging to life, the mean bastard! No title for young Charles here, living on a pittance, tied to the old man's purse strings—and you don't think that's the way he likes it? You don't think the thought of me scraping by, hardly able to sustain my house with the barest necessities, doesn't treble his heart at night when the Angel of Death
hovers? Ha! Spite in his veins. Gone scatty. Spite and ice water and horse piss and why isn't he dead yet' In a paroxysm of wrath, Nicholson flung his tumbler into the fireplace and jumped repeatedly up and down, knees reaching to his shoulders, spinning and screaming in the grip of an infantile frenzy.
Doyle and Sparks stole a look that wondered just how hazardous a lunatic the man was. Then, just as suddenly as he'd begun raving, Nicholson snapped out of his fit and strode to the mantel for another tumbler, which
