Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [133]
The madman’s face contorted in a silent scream.
There was something peculiarly hideous about the constable’s voice, as if he were a music hall dummy manipulated by a wicked ventriloquist.
“Mind … ‘ow … you … go … sirs!”
The policeman lifted the madman — not a small individual, by the way — one-handed. He marched off stiff-legged, bearing his whimpering prisoner down the Strand. As he walked, his hump seemed to shift under blue serge, as if it were a separate entity. I had a sense of evil eyes cast at me.
J. asked me if I had any idea who the maniac was.
He had something of a military mien, I thought — though come down in the world, perhaps having frazzled his brains out in some sunstruck corner of Empire. It came to me that I had seen him before — perhaps in the audience at one of my many popular lectures, perhaps skulking on the street waiting for the chance to accost me. J. pointed out that he had known who I was, but — of course — everyone in England knows the Astronomer Royal.
“It should definitely be ‘Marsian’,” I insisted. “The precedents are many and I can recall them in order…”
J. remembered he had forgotten another appointment — with a lesser author — and left, before I could fully convince him. Must send him my monograph on planetary possessives. Some still rail against ‘Mercurial’ and ‘Jupiteric’, though a consensus is nearly reached on ‘Moonian’ and ‘Venutian’. By the end of this century, we shall have definitively colonized the sunnar system for proper naming!
September 7, later.
I had thought to dispel completely the unpleasant memory of this afternoon’s strange encounter … but the words of the madman resounded.
By some happenstance, this was literally true.
The long-necked cabbie who conveyed me back to Greenwich bade me a jovial farewell with “keep watching the skies, sir.” An unusual turn of phrase to hear twice in one day, perhaps — but a sentiment naturally addressed to a famous astronomer in the vicinity of the biggest telescope in the land.
Galvani, the Italian foreman of the gang who have completed — at last! — the electrification of Flamsteed House, handed me a sheaf of wiring diagrams marked ‘for the attention of the householder’ and clearly said “look to the Red Plan, et … es essential for to understan’ the current en the house”. There was, indeed, a red plan in the sheaf, but it seemed to me he had stressed the first part of his sentence, which echoed the words of the madman, and thrown away the second, which conveyed his particular meaning.
Then, before supper, I was passing the kitchens and happened to overhear Mrs. Huddersfield, the new house-keeper, tell the butler to “look into the crystal”, referring to our fresh stock of Waterford glassware, a scant instant before Polly, the new under-maid, exclaimed “egg!” in answer to a question about the secret ingredient of the face-paste which keeps her complexion clear. To my ears, these separate voices melded to produce a single sentence, the madman’s “look into the Crystal Egg”.
Lady Caroline is at her sister’s, and I dined alone, unable to concentrate on supper. Every detail of the business on the Strand resurfaced in my mind.
I was shocked out of my reverie only by the sweetness of dessert — and looked down into a crystal bowl to see a quivering scarlet blancmange, with a curiously eye-like glacé cherry at its summit. In its color, the dish reminded me of the planet Mars, and, in its movement, the somehow-unnatural hump of the strangely-spoken police constable.
Only then did I remember the paperweight snatched out from the grasp of the odious Ogilvy yesterday.
A mass of crystal, in the shape of an egg!
A Crystal Egg! Could the madman of the Strand have been referring to this item of bric-a-brac?
Unable to finish my dessert for thinking.
September 7 — still later: a great discovery!
After supper, I repaired to my study, where I keep my collection of antique and exotic optical and astronomical equipment: