Read Online Victorian Villainy by Michael Kurland - Free Book Online Page B

dueling. “I warn you that I am prepared for any eventuality.”
    “How nice for you,” I said, folding my journal and putting it back into my pocket.
    “Mr. Holmes,” said the broad maid from behind him. “Please be seated. Your brother will be down directly.”
    Holmes stalked over to a chair in the far side of the room and dropped lightly into it. “We’ll see,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. He flexed his walking stick, describing a series of shapes in the air before him, and then laid it across his knees.
    The door opened again, and the large shape of Mycroft Holmes loomed into the room. “Sherlock,” he said, “Professor Moriarty. Good of you to come. Join me in the next room, where we can talk.”
    “You invited him? ” asked Sherlock, pointing a wavering walking stick in my direction. “What were you thinking?”
    “All in good time,” said Mycroft. “Follow me.” He stomped through the waiting room and pulled open the double doors . The chamber thus revealed had once been the dining room of the house, but was now a conference room, with an oversized highly-polished mahogany table in the center, surrounded by heavy chairs of the same dark wood, upholstered in green leather. Around the periphery stood a row of filing cabinets, and a pair of small writing desks. A large chart cabinet stood against the far wall. The other walls were obscured by pinned-up maps, charts, graphs, diagrams and documents of all sorts and sizes, and one framed oil painting of a fox hunt which was covered with a dark patina of grime and neglect. The windows had heavy curtains over them, which were drawn closed. The room was brightly lit by three fixtures which depended from the ceiling. I observed them to be electrical lamps with great metallic filaments in evacuated bulbs. This explained the humming noise I had heard: this house had its own electrical generating plant.
    Three men were waiting in the room as we entered: two seated at the table looking stern, and the third pacing about the room with his hands linked behind his back. One of the seated men, a slender, impeccably-dressed, greying man with mutton-chop whiskers, I recognized instantly as Lord Easthope, who holds the post of Foreign Minister in Her Majesty’s present Tory government.
    “Come, sit down,” said Mycroft Holmes. “Here they are, gentlemen,” he added, addressing the three men in the room. “My brother, Sherlock, and Professor James Moriarty.”
    The pacing man paused. “Have they agreed?” he asked.
    “No, your lordship. I have not as yet explained the situation to them.”
    The third man peered at us over the top of his tortoise shell glasses. “So these are the miracle men,” he said.
    “Come now, sir,” Mycroft Holmes protested. “I never claimed that they were miracle men.”
    “They’d better be,” the man said.
    I took a seat on the right-hand side of the table. Holmes crossed over to the left side and sat where he could keep me in sight while speaking with our hosts.
    Mycroft laced his hands behind his back and leaned forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, addressing Holmes and me, “may I present their lordships, Lord Easthope and Lord Famm.” (That’s the way the name is pronounced. I later learned that His Lordship was Evan Fotheringham, Earl of Stomshire.) “And His Excellency, Baron van Durm.”
    Lord Fotheringham, the gentleman who was pacing the floor, was a tall man with an aristocratic nose and thinning hair. Baron van Durm was a great bear of a man, with heavy, black mutton chop whiskers and glowering dark eyes. He was impeccably dressed in a pearl-gray morning suit, with a diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg holding down his white silk cravat.
    “I see you have recognized Lord Easthope,” Mycroft said to Holmes and me, reading more from a slight widening of our eyes than most people could from the twenty eight pages of their evening newspaper. “Lord Fotheringham is Chairman of the Royal Committee