CHAPTER ONE
“Mac!” Cyrus Barker bawled from his bedchamber at the top of the house that morning, the tenth of January 1892.
My wife was already down in the kitchen helping Etienne Dummolard, our chef, but I was shaving, so I turned to hear what the disturbance was all about. One rarely heard a word of criticism about Jacob Maccabee, and certainly not from our employer. I heard our factotum’s soft footfalls on the stair overhead.
“Sir?” he said, a trifle coldly.
“Mac, what are these?” Barker rumbled.
“I believe they are hose, sir.”
“To be more precise, they are silk hose,” Barker replied. “What are silk hose doing in my drawer? Where did they come from?”
“From Paris, sir. I ordered them for you. They are very fine and in fashion. All the butlers in London are suggesting them to their gentlemen this year.”
“Mac, I am a humble man and I prefer humble hose. Plain woolen socks are good enough for me. I am no fashion plate, and have no need of silk hosiery.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Mac said. “I was only trying to keep you looking modern and professional, like contemporary enquiry agents.”
“Who, pray tell, wears such frippery?”
“Mr. Llewelyn does, sir. His wife chose them for him specially, I understand.”
“Well, that is more than enough silk for one household, then. The silkworms may toil for Mr. Llewelyn, but they need not do so on my account. Take this box and post it back to Paris, before it taints the rest of London with French decadence.”
“Yes, sir.”
I heard Mac sigh as he came down the stair a defeated man. I donned my jacket and followed him to the ground floor. Going into the kitchen, I kissed Rebecca on the cheek and she handed me a hot cup of coffee. Etienne was teaching my wife the proper way to bake a French tart, which I found ironic. I wondered if our chef had heard the Guv’s remark about French decadence. His voice does tend to carry.
Etienne waved me to a chair and slid a warm pastry my way so that I wouldn’t interrupt his lesson. I looked out at the cold, austere garden, enjoying the peace while Barker still grumbled in his bedchamber. Things were topsy-turvy. Everything had been subtly derailed, like a train engine that had jumped the track but was still rolling forward parallel to the rails. One knew something bad was coming, but did not know when or how.
I heard Barker’s heavy tread on the stairs, pecked my wife on the cheek, and took a large bite from the tart before sprinting to the front hall. Mac opened the door to his butler’s pantry and gave me a forlorn look, holding a flat white box in his hand. Poor Mac. The man was very nearly perfect and unused to being scolded by the headmaster. Unlike me, for instance. I opened the door and Barker sailed through it into another day. In black woolen socks, of course.
I went in search of a cab. Perhaps my employer’s fit of pique was due to his injury, I thought, as I directed the vehicle to our home to pick him up.
Barker had been badly injured six months earlier, a compound fracture of the tibia, which left him with a leather brace and a cane. It meant that he was confined to his desk more often than either of us preferred. It must have ached, but the man was a stoic of the first order. In true Scottish form, he would not complain. It was up to me to note when his limp became more pronounced and suggest we take a hansom. The cold of a London January, which seeps into one’s bones, did nothing to aid in his recovery.
This meant, of course, that most errands, from delivering messages to bringing lunch from a local public house, fell to me. It also meant should either of us be attacked, it was my duty to defend us both. It hadn’t happened yet, and I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t, not for my sake, but for his. The Guv’s pride would be damaged, being defended by his subordinate, and the man does tend to brood.
“Lad, what are you ruminating over?” he asked as our hansom reached Westminster Bridge.
“Nothing important, sir. This and that.”
Recently, Barker had remarked that I was less talkative than I had been as a bachelor, which was for the better. Things were more complicated now that I was married. I had two completely different people to please, sometimes with contradictory expectations. There was less time to read, or to soak in the bathhouse in our garden. These were prices I gladly paid, since I’d never been so happy in my life. Rebecca was perfect for me, and as I learned more about her every day, I appreciated her all the more.
“Here we are,” he rumbled.
I would not help him out of the cab, but I hovered nearby in case I was needed.
“Morning, Mr. B., Mr. L.,” our clerk, Jeremy Jenkins, said as we entered.
“Good morning, Jeremy,” I replied.
Cyrus Barker grunted in greeting, crossed our chamber to his desk and sat in his green leather swivel chair. Jenkins and I had a sort of signal as to how the Guv was faring on any particular day. I shook my head. Storm clouds approaching.
Lifting our ledger book, I began going over our accounts, or pretended to. I’d gone over them the day before. In reality, I fell back to thinking about my wife.
During our honeymoon, Barker had renovated the first floor for our private use. The guest bedroom had become ours, a lumber room beside it had become a sitting room, and my old bachelor quarters were now a study-cum-library. We could not fault his generosity, but I was aware that he did so partially to have me on hand should he need me. If Rebecca had her wishes, we would have moved into her house in the City, which she still kept. We had reached a temporary compromise: each morning after breakfast, she would go to Camomile Street in order to receive callers and friends, and then the two of us would return, separately, to Barker’s house to have dinner together and retire for the evening. It was not a perfect arrangement, and as much as I enjoyed the routine, I knew it was only a matter of time before we moved permanently. A woman needs a house, to choose cushions and drapes and add countless small details. A husband is there on sufferance, to pay for everything and to keep his opinions to himself.
Cyrus Barker and I were installed in our offices in Craig’s Court. Unfortunately, there was no current case under our scrutiny. Between his aching limb and the lack of mental stimulation, I feared he would take to growling at me much in the way he had growled at Mac that morning.
There was much more in me with which to find fault and I was an easy target to hand.
“Please, Lord,” I prayed to myself. “Something to keep him occupied. Anything. He needs it. I need it. We all need it.”
I assumed, in my sins, that God hears a lowly Methodist who had married a Jewess and was now attending a Christian-Jewish church. I was still working out if we were satisfied in Reverend Mordecai’s church-synagogue, but whatever we were, we were more satisfied than the Guv.
Cyrus Barker had lost his faith. Well, perhaps not his faith as such; according to Baptist doctrine, no man is able to pluck the believer out of his Father’s hand. Still, he drew little comfort from the Scriptures as he once did, and I knew him well enough to see that it pained him. Fewer verses came from his lips. The old ship’s captain was at sea.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, that prince among evangelists, whose sermons were published worldwide and who preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle but a few streets from the Guv’s house, had had a dispute with his congregational and denominational leaders. He withdrew from the Baptist Union over what he saw as a growing apostasy and they censured him. He retired to the South of France. As a deacon, Barker was called to an immediate meeting, which lasted long into the night. Two days later, he resigned. That was in 1887. Spiritually speaking, he was never the same again.
Barker glanced my way and I became industrious, typing notes from our last case. There was a flutter in the waiting room outside and I caught a glimpse of military braid, one of the old soldiers who delivers telegrams and packages in London. Jenkins signed for whatever was delivered, then stood. I knew what would come next: he would enter with the missive on a silver salver with as much dignity as could be mustered by a clerk who’d spent the previous evening pouring neck oil down his gullet.
In he came, of course, stopping with the salver at Barker’s desk. We live but to serve.
Cyrus Barker stared at the salver as if it were an adder that might bite him. He seized the edge of the package with his hand and raised it, testing its weight. By the way he hefted it, the package contained something heavier than mere paper. He set it down again and ran his fingers over the irregular object, trying to deduce by touch alone what it was. He nodded decisively. His hand went to his desk drawer where he kept an Italian dagger for use as a letter opener, then he slit the top and dropped the contents of the envelope into his hand. It was a key.
I rose from my desk and leaned over his, examining it as my employer turned it over in his hand. It was an old brass key, thick and long, the kind of door key that existed before locks became such fine and complicated mechanical marvels. I saw a letter stamped into the ferrule on one side, the letter Q. It was not in an elaborate script, just a simple oval with a tail. There was no way to tell if it was originally stamped thereon or if it had been a later addition.
Barker sat back between the high wings of his green leather chair, deep in thought. He spread his arms wide and placed his hands prone on the desk. Then he began to drum on the spotless glass sheet that lay upon it. He looked at his hand. He looked toward our bow window. He looked down again and then up. Then he stood.
“Let us take a walk, Mr. Llewelyn,” he said, coming out from behind his desk. Though officially we were partners in the agency, my opinion was not requested.
We passed through the outer office and I informed our clerk that we would be out. We donned our coats and stepped outside into the bitter wind. I fixed my hand to the brim of my hat, walked into Whitehall Street, and regarded the vehicles passing by. Cabmen perched atop their cabs, huddled in their thick coats, looking miserable. Their fares hunched over inside the open vehicles, no less despondent. I turned to make some commonplace remark to Barker and found that he wasn’t beside me.
I turned and saw him striding deeper into Craig’s Court, heading east toward the Telephone Exchange. I hurried until I was beside him again. His breath came in white plumes, as if he were smoking one of his innumerable meerschaum pipes. We came to the cul-de-sac, which veers right, and faced Harrington House, a wide circle of tall gambrel-roofed buildings. They had been built a few centuries earlier to provide the Earl of Harrington access to a Palace of Westminster that was never built. One felt sorry for the earl in his powdered wig, dejected that his grand scheme was thwarted by Henry VIII, that old spoilsport. But I digress.
There was a tall, thin building of indeterminate age on the right hand just as one reached the court. It had an old, yellowed TO LET sign in the cobwebbed window. Barker walked up to the door and put the key in the keyhole. It fit. It took a little jiggling, but the door came open with a protest of both the wood of the door and the aged hinges. Barker inclined his head toward the side of the entrance. In the wood there a crude letter had been carved, Q, as if by a jackknife. It did not look recent, and may even have been a hundred years old.
“I’ve never noticed this building before,” I said as we stepped inside.
“No, you haven’t,” he replied.
It was cold in the vestibule, so cold one wondered if what was floating in the air were dust motes or ice crystals. A set of steps led up toward the first floor and we found a door at the top. The Guv tried the key, but it didn’t work. We turned to the stairway leading to the rooms above, but it had been roped off: a dusty, aged piece of rope was hanging between the two bannisters. Immediately, Barker plunged down the stair to the ground floor again and I followed after.
We descended another pair of steps to the bottom of the stairs, barred by yet another door. The key unlocked it. We went through and found practically the last thing I expected to find: a long brick tunnel.
“Down the rabbit hole,” I said, quoting Carroll.
More pragmatic, Cyrus Barker lit a match and found an old-fashioned candlestick with a brass ring on a shelf. He lit the candle, and without hesitation headed forward into the tunnel. I was glad to see that it was both dry and warmer than the house we had exited. I hazarded that it might be some kind of sewer tunnel that had been abandoned. It was too narrow for even the oldest carriages of the Underground.
“Built by the earl, I’ll warrant,” the Guv said, his voice echoing in the tunnel. “A private entrance to the palace.”
“The one that was never finished.”
“Precisely.”
We plunged deeper. I don’t do well in tunnels. They are too enclosed for my liking. It was what kept me from following my father and brothers into the coal mines of Gwent. Ten minutes there and I would be in a blind panic, convinced the ceiling would fall in and crush us or a wind would come through and snuff out all the candles attached to our helmets. I tried everything, but nothing could be done. The miners considered it a curse. I half believed it myself.
Though the tunnel was perfectly dry, my face became clammy and my lungs felt waterlogged. I tried not to reveal it to my senior partner, but he misses nothing.
“Forward, Thomas. One step in front of the other. This tunnel has to end somewhere soon.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
During the first week after formally becoming partners in the agency, we had both attempted to have me call him by his Christian name, but it was a resounding failure. He would always be “Sir” and I would always be “Thomas.” I was lucky to get him to stop calling me “lad” now that I was six-and-twenty and sometimes he still forgot.
We had walked perhaps five minutes before we came to a fork in the tunnel. By this point it had widened and the ceiling became higher overhead. What was the purpose of this tunnel? I wondered. I guessed that we had been going south, but the second tunnel headed west and there was a gate blocking it.
“The key?” I asked.
It had been a rhetorical question, but Barker put the key in my hand. I tried it in the keyhole of the barred gate and it opened easily. That meant it had been oiled in recent memory. We stepped inside.
“South,” I continued, pointing down the first tunnel. “That’s roughly where the Houses of Parliament are. Perhaps this is some sort of escape tunnel for them, in case of emergency. Dangers such as Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up the House of Lords, or Old Boney making a landing here from France.”
“You read at Oxford, lad, not I,” Barker said.
“So, where will this tunnel end? Westminster Abbey?”
“Not so far south,” he said. “Look at the brick.”
I studied it by the flickering of the candle. I ran a hand along it and found it smooth. The brick was made more recently. Possibly much more recently.
I ducked a cobweb unsuccessfully and brushed a spider from my shoulder.
Copyright © 2019 by Will Thomas
