Read Online Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles by Kim Newman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kim Newman
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Moriarty, she is always that bitch.
Irene Adler arrived in our Conduit Street rooms shortly after I undertook to assist my fellow tenant in enterprises of which he was the pre-eminent London specialist. In short, sirrah, crime.
The old bread and honey came into it, of course [1] . The Professor had me on an honorarium of six thousand pounds per annum. Scarcely enough to make anyone put up with Moriarty, actually, but it serviced my predilection for pursuits the naïve refer to as ‘games of chance’. However, I own that the thrill of do-baddery attracted me, that blood-running whoosh of fright and delight which comes from cocking repeated snooks at every plod, beak and turnkey in the land. When a hunting man has grown bored with bagging tigers, crime can still jangle the nerves and keep up the pecker. The bloodless Moriarty got his jollies in the abstract, plotting felony the way you might play a hand of patience. I’ve heard him say the business of committing the crime itself is but a tiresome necessity, the practical proof of a theorem already solved to his satisfaction.
That morning, the Professor was thinking through two problems. A portion of his brain was calculating the timings of solar eclipses observable in far-flung regions. Superstitious natives can sometimes be persuaded that a white man has power over the sun and needs to be given handy tribal treasures if bwana sahib promises to turn the light on again. Bloody good trick, if you can get away with it [2] . The greater part of his attention, however, was devoted to the breeding of wasps.
‘Your bee is a law-abiding soul,’ he said, in his reedy lecturing voice, ‘as reverent to their queen as the clods of England, dedicated to the production of honey for the betterment of all, buzzing about promiscuously pollinating to please addle-minded poets. They only defend themselves at the cost of their lives, for they sting but once. Volumes are devoted to the care of bees, and apiculture exists to exploit their good nature. Wasps do nothing but sting. Persistently venomous, they fly from one assault to the next. Unwelcome everywhere. Thoroughly nasty sorts. We are not bees, Moran.’
He smiled, a creepy thing for a man with lips as thin as his. His near-fleshless head moved from side to side. I couldn’t follow Moriarty’s drift, but that was usual. I nodded and hoped he would come, eventually, to a point. A schoolmaster before taking to villainy, his rambles tended to wind towards some inverted moral.
‘Summer will be upon us soon,’ he mused, ‘the season for picnicking in the park, for tiny fat arms to go bare, for governesses to sit and gossip unveiled, for shop girls and their beaux to spoon in public. This will be a bumper year for our yellow-and-black-striped friends. My first generation of polistes pestilentialis is hatching. The world is divided, Moran, between those who sting and those who are the stingees.’
‘And you would be the sting- ers ,’ shrilled that voice.
The American Nightingale had been admitted by Mrs Halifax.
‘Miss Irene Adler,’ acknowledged Moriarty. ‘Your Lucia di Lammermoor was acceptable, your Maria Stuarda indifferent and you were perhaps the worst Emilia di Liverpool the stage has ever seen.’ [3]
‘What a horrible man you are, James Moriarty!’
His lips split and sharp teeth showed.
‘My business is being horrible, Miss Adler. I make no effort at sham or hypocrisy.’
‘That, I must say, is a tonic.’
She smiled full-bore and arranged herself on a divan, prettily hiking her hemline up over well-turned ankles, shifting her décolletage in a manner calculated to set her swanny mams a-wobble. Even Moriarty was impressed, and he could keep up a lecture on the grades of paper used in the forgery of high-denomination Venezuelan banknotes while walking down the secret corridor with the row of one-way mirror windows into the private rooms where Mrs H.’s girls conducted spectacularly indecent business day
Irene Adler arrived in our Conduit Street rooms shortly after I undertook to assist my fellow tenant in enterprises of which he was the pre-eminent London specialist. In short, sirrah, crime.
The old bread and honey came into it, of course [1] . The Professor had me on an honorarium of six thousand pounds per annum. Scarcely enough to make anyone put up with Moriarty, actually, but it serviced my predilection for pursuits the naïve refer to as ‘games of chance’. However, I own that the thrill of do-baddery attracted me, that blood-running whoosh of fright and delight which comes from cocking repeated snooks at every plod, beak and turnkey in the land. When a hunting man has grown bored with bagging tigers, crime can still jangle the nerves and keep up the pecker. The bloodless Moriarty got his jollies in the abstract, plotting felony the way you might play a hand of patience. I’ve heard him say the business of committing the crime itself is but a tiresome necessity, the practical proof of a theorem already solved to his satisfaction.
That morning, the Professor was thinking through two problems. A portion of his brain was calculating the timings of solar eclipses observable in far-flung regions. Superstitious natives can sometimes be persuaded that a white man has power over the sun and needs to be given handy tribal treasures if bwana sahib promises to turn the light on again. Bloody good trick, if you can get away with it [2] . The greater part of his attention, however, was devoted to the breeding of wasps.
‘Your bee is a law-abiding soul,’ he said, in his reedy lecturing voice, ‘as reverent to their queen as the clods of England, dedicated to the production of honey for the betterment of all, buzzing about promiscuously pollinating to please addle-minded poets. They only defend themselves at the cost of their lives, for they sting but once. Volumes are devoted to the care of bees, and apiculture exists to exploit their good nature. Wasps do nothing but sting. Persistently venomous, they fly from one assault to the next. Unwelcome everywhere. Thoroughly nasty sorts. We are not bees, Moran.’
He smiled, a creepy thing for a man with lips as thin as his. His near-fleshless head moved from side to side. I couldn’t follow Moriarty’s drift, but that was usual. I nodded and hoped he would come, eventually, to a point. A schoolmaster before taking to villainy, his rambles tended to wind towards some inverted moral.
‘Summer will be upon us soon,’ he mused, ‘the season for picnicking in the park, for tiny fat arms to go bare, for governesses to sit and gossip unveiled, for shop girls and their beaux to spoon in public. This will be a bumper year for our yellow-and-black-striped friends. My first generation of polistes pestilentialis is hatching. The world is divided, Moran, between those who sting and those who are the stingees.’
‘And you would be the sting- ers ,’ shrilled that voice.
The American Nightingale had been admitted by Mrs Halifax.
‘Miss Irene Adler,’ acknowledged Moriarty. ‘Your Lucia di Lammermoor was acceptable, your Maria Stuarda indifferent and you were perhaps the worst Emilia di Liverpool the stage has ever seen.’ [3]
‘What a horrible man you are, James Moriarty!’
His lips split and sharp teeth showed.
‘My business is being horrible, Miss Adler. I make no effort at sham or hypocrisy.’
‘That, I must say, is a tonic.’
She smiled full-bore and arranged herself on a divan, prettily hiking her hemline up over well-turned ankles, shifting her décolletage in a manner calculated to set her swanny mams a-wobble. Even Moriarty was impressed, and he could keep up a lecture on the grades of paper used in the forgery of high-denomination Venezuelan banknotes while walking down the secret corridor with the row of one-way mirror windows into the private rooms where Mrs H.’s girls conducted spectacularly indecent business day
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