Moriarty

‘You are very welcome, Mr Lavelle.’ The monarch herself could not have said it with less enthusiasm.

Her husband, standing next to her, was more genial, a large, square-shouldered man with deep black hair which swept across his head in two contradictory waves. The smile on his face was fighting a losing battle with the seriousness in his eyes and his every movement seemed formal to the point of being stilted. His cheeks and indeed his mouth were obliterated by a huge beard and moustache which stretched all the way to his ears and which I might almost have described as lopsided and even unkempt. I had seen him addressing the people at the front of the line and it occurred to me that both he and his wife were concealing something, with greater or lesser success. They had been touched quite recently by some sort of sadness and it was still with them, here in the room.

I found myself standing in front of him and once again repeated my false name. By now I was getting used to it. He seized my hand in a powerful grip. ‘I am Robert Lincoln,’ he said.

‘Mr Lincoln …’ The name was of course well known to me.

‘It is a great pleasure to welcome you to my London home, Mr Lavelle. May I present to you my councillor, Mr White?’ This was the third man in the line, also bearded, about ten years younger than the envoy. That gentleman bowed. ‘I hope the evening is both enjoyable and useful to you.’

I waited until Athelney Jones had made his introductions and together the two of us climbed the stairs.

‘Lincoln …?’ he asked.

‘The son of Abraham Lincoln,’ I replied. How could I have forgotten that this descendant of one of America’s most famous families had been sent to the court of King James? A seat had actually been reserved for Robert Lincoln at the Ford Theatre on the night his father had been assassinated and the sympathy that many people felt for him had been translated into enthusiastic support. It was said that Lincoln might himself run for president at the time of the next election.

‘This imposture will be the undoing of me,’ Jones muttered, half seriously.

‘We are in,’ I replied. ‘And, so far, without any difficulty.’

‘I cannot find it in my heart to believe that a criminal organisation could be hiding itself in the sanctuary of an international legation. Such an idea does not bear thinking about.’

‘They invited Scotchy,’ I reminded him. ‘Let’s see if we can find the fat boy and the man from the brougham.’

We passed through an archway and into a room that stretched the entire length of the building with floor-to-ceiling windows that might have provided views over the gardens at the back had they not been heavily curtained. There was a crowd of some hundred people already gathered together with a young man at the piano playing the syncopated rhythms which, I imagined, would have been unfamiliar to Athelney Jones but which I recognised as originating from the streets of New Orleans. A long table stood with glasses and what looked like bowls of fruit punch, and waiters were already circulating with plates of food … raw oysters with cucumbers and radishes, fishballs, vol-au-vents and so on. It amused me to see that many of the dishes carried labels advertising the ingredients; among them were E. C. Hazard’s tomato ketchup, Baltimore vinegar and Colburn’s Philadelphia Mustard. Later on, one of the tables would be displaying Chase and Sanborn’s finest coffee. But then this was a business gathering and so perhaps the legation staff considered these notices to be part of the etiquette.

There was not a great deal we could do. This was the room in which the reception was to take place and there was no question of our creeping around the legation in search of Clarence Devereux. If he was here, there was a chance we might stumble across him — or at least across somebody who knew him. If not, we had wasted our time.

We drank some mint julep (Bourbon from Four Roses, Kentucky, the label read) and mingled with the other guests. There were soon a couple of hundred people present, all of them in their finest evening dress, and I noticed the little man from the door among them. He was angrily dismissing a waiter who had approached him with a plate of curried sausages. ‘I do not eat meat!’ The words, expressed in a high-pitched voice, seemed somehow ungracious and out of keeping with the affair. Then, finally, the envoy, his wife and his councillor came up from the entrance hall, signalling that the assembly was complete. From that moment on, wherever Robert Lincoln placed himself, a small crowd gathered round him, and such was his command of the room that Jones and I were unable to escape being drawn into one such circle.

‘What is to be done with this business of seal hunting?’ someone asked him. With his whiskers and beady eyes, it struck me that there was something seal-like about the interlocutor himself. ‘Will we go to war over the Bering Sea?’