'Because they are real,' said Vamberg. 'I've seen them. Spoken to them. Danced with them.'
Not recently you haven't, thought Doyle. 'Really.'
'Shy creatures, extremely reticent, but once contact is made—and I was able to do so initially with the help of Caribbean tribal priests—one quickly learns how extremely eager they are to cooperate with us.'
'How terribly interesting,' said Doyle, finishing off his partridge.
'Isn't it just?' piped in the Bishop, trickles of grease shining like tinsel around his mouth and chin.
'Cooperate how, exactly?' asked Doyle.
'Why in doing what they do best,' said Vamberg. 'Growing things.'
'Growing things.'
Vamberg picked the immense cabbage leaf off his plate. 'What if I were to tell you the cabbage seed that produced this leaf was planted in dry sand three weeks ago, deprived of all water or nutrients, and harvested this very morning?'
'I would say, Professor Vamberg, that you've spent too much time dancing around toadstools,' said Doyle.
Vamberg smiled dryly and lifted the wing from his plate. 'And if I were to tell you that when it was freshly dressed this afternoon, this bird was only two weeks old?'
Servants were clearing and laying in the next course, two of them rolling in a silver-hooded steam table.
'So these elementals, as you call them, presumably have nothing better to do than help you raise partridges the size of eagles?' asked Doyle.
'Trout with lemon!' said the Bishop.
The hood of the table was rolled back, revealing a single, intact fish on a garnish of lemon and parsley. Its coloring and markings identified it as brown trout, but the thing was the size of a sturgeon. The servants carved and served. Doyle caught Eileen's eyes, hers filled more with wonder than the profound unease stirring inside him.
Vamberg smiled like Carroll's Cheshire cat. 'Oh ye of little faith.'
A plate of the trout landed in front of Doyle. As savory as it looked and smelled, he was rapidly losing his appetite; the idea of this mysteriously denatured meat made him queasy. Glancing around the table, he noticed Alexander Sparks also refrained from eating, instead staring intently across at Eileen. At the other end, a napkin tucked in his collar like a child's bib, His Highness the Duke of Clarence aggressively sucked up his fish in greedy, gluttonous mouthfuls, sloshing it down with sloppy gouts of wine, all the while making noisy drones of infantile contentment, completely oblivious to the company and his surroundings.
'Delicious!' pronounced the Bishop. A beautiful fair-haired altar boy stood at his side. The Bishop whispered in his ear and ran his stubby fingers possessively through the boy's locks.
'Another benefit unlooked for came from that encounter— this was on the island of Haiti, by the way—when the priests introduced me to an elixir of various herbs, roots, and organic extracts they said the elementals had revealed to them,' said Vamberg. 'The priests of Haiti have been using this compound judiciously for centuries: They discovered that when administered in the right amount, in conjunction with certain medical practices, this compound virtually strips a man or woman-—any man or woman—of their conscious will.'
'I'm sorry?' asked Doyle.
'Their will is no longer their own. It renders them docile, pliant, completely under the command of the priests, who
men employ these people however they see fit, as field or household help. Even the most intractable subjects become obedient. Trustworthy. Well behaved.'
Slaves. Mute and unreasoning as marionettes, servers were laying in a meat course: Doyle tried not to think what manner of hideously altered beast might have yielded these ripe morsels of flesh.
'That's how Haiti solved the servant problem,' chimed in the Bishop with a broad wink. 'How nice to speak freely in front of the help.'
Vamberg sent the Bishop another venomous look before continuing. 'The priests are a closed fraternity; this knowledge is guarded with their lives. I was one of few outsiders— the only European—who has ever been given access to this treasure. I've even improved the effect with a simple, surgical procedure, used in conjunction with the compound.'
No wonder Bodger Nuggins ran, thought Doyle. Better dead facedown in the Thames than an ambulatory corpse like Lansdown Dilks, stored away in some root cellar like a sack of nightsoil—
'Marvelous!' said the Bishop.
'It was years later, during my travels in the high country of Tibet, that I met a man with the vision to see how this procedure might one day be utilized in a broader, more socially useful fashion.' Vamberg gave a nod to Alexander Sparks.
So that's how it began, with Sparks and Vamberg. The meeting of two dark minds, a seed brought back to English ground to reach its full flower of corruption—
A crash of crockery startled him. A servant on the far side of the table had dropped a plate. The man bent down, his movements addled and sluggish, and attempted to scrape up the fragments of china and the scattered food around it with his hands.
'Clumsy fool,' muttered General Drummond.
A jolt ran through Doyle; the back of the man's neck had been recently and roughly shaved, and a vivid, suppurating triangular scar ran across its length. Crude blue thread stitched the flaps of the wound loosely together. Another servant went to the damaged man, straightening the poor wretch to his feet.
Doyle's heart sank.
It was Barry.
His eyes were dead, light and life entirely gone from them.
'Here, here,' said Alexander. 'What's your name, clumsy boy?'
Barry shuffled slowly around and stared at him uncompre-hendingly, a thin line of drool forming in the corner of his mouth.
Alexander sprang to his feet and cuffed Barry harshly across the ear. He accepted the blow as passively as an exhausted pack animal. Doyle gripped the arms of his chair to keep from leaping up at Sparks.
'Speak when you're spoken to, boy.'
Some dim whisper of cognition surfaced in the well of his broken mind. Barry nodded. The weak noise that emerged from his mouth could hardly be understood for a word.
'Since you've demonstrated you're no use doing your job, perhaps you can entertain us, you stupid cow,' said Alexander. 'Dance for us now, give us a jig, come on then.'
Alexander clapped his hands, encouraging the others at the table to join in, establishing a steady rhythm. The quartet at Alexander's prompting began to fiddle an Irish jig. Alexander slapped Barry again, spinning him around, then prodded him with the end of a cane.
'Dance, boy. Do as you're told.'
Doyle could see the music seeping through to what was left of Barry. He tried to shuffle his feet, but the result was pathetic, the slightest movement costly and excruciatingly painful. His arms swung limply at his sides. A spreading stain appeared in the crotch of his pants.
The company of seven and their royal guest found the exhibition endlessly entertaining. Prince Eddy seemed on the verge of jumping to his feet and joining in. The Bishop laughed so hard he held his sides and doubled over in his chair, face red with exertion.
Doyle looked to his left. Eileen was pale, fighting her emotions; there were tears in her eyes. He gestured to her: Show them nothing.
Unable to sustain the effort, Barry slumped to his knees against a chair, gasping for breath, a dry rattle in his chest. A thin line of milky red fluid ran from his wound and around his neck. Alexander threw his head back and laughed, then
waved dismissively. The music stopped. Two servants lifted Barry by the arms and guided him gently but firmly out of the room, as one would a doddering, incontinent pensioner.
'Delightful!' said the Bishop.
They put him here so we'd see, thought Doyle furiously. We'd see how they've decimated his mind and robbed him of his soul. This wasn't only Vamberg's drug at work; they had cut Barry, cut crudely into the back of his head and obliterated something essential to his humanity.
