The Holmes-Dracula File, Fred Saberhagen [pride and prejudice read .TXT] 📗

it was evident that only business of some terrible urgency could bring us visitors. Yet, as I saw when I moved closer to the window myself, an unmarked carriage had certainly just stopped before our door.

   Mindful of earlier days when assassins had watched us from below, I moved to draw Holmes farther from the window. He allowed himself to be turned away. But at the same time remarked in a tired voice: “I don’t think these visitors have come to shoot at me, old fellow. If my conjecture regarding their purpose is correct, they mean us no harm; but still I ask very earnestly that you do not retire just yet.”

   “Of course. But whatever they want, you had better send them away; we are both of us already exhausted.”

   “I shall, if such a course is possible. I fear it may not be.” With these words, Holmes seemed to shake off in a moment all his fatigue and dullness. With the air of a man plunging into cold water, he went out our door and down the stairs, so quickly and lightly that when he pulled open the street door he surprised a distinguished-looking old gentleman in the very act of reaching for the bell. Another man, younger and even more elegantly attired, stood beside the first visitor on the steps, and both gazed with some amazement at our two dressing-gowned figures that had so suddenly appeared.

   “Come in, gentlemen, come in,” Holmes invited, his tone completely business-like. New energies had been mobilized from somewhere in his great reserves, and he might just have risen from a refreshing sleep.

   One of the men who now ascended to our rooms was Sir Jasper Meek himself, the elderly and very eminent physician whose name had come up in our talk only minutes before. However striking this coincidence might have seemed ordinarily, at the time it was all but lost upon me, in the great wonder that I felt upon recognizing our second visitor. Although I am writing for posterity and not for immediate publication, I fear that prudence prohibits my naming him, or even describing his person in any detail. Nor shall I recount the first introductory remarks that passed among us.

   Suffice it to say, that when we were all of us settled round a replenished fire, this younger of our visitors wasted not a moment in getting down to business. “Mr. Holmes, I need not tell you that only a matter of an importance impossible to exaggerate has brought us to your door, without notice and at this late hour.”

   “No, you need not tell me that,” Holmes answered quietly. “Pray continue. You may speak as freely before Dr. Watson as before me.”

   “Very well. It is a crime of attempted blackmail with which we are concerned.”

   “I am not surprised.”

   “Not blackmail such as you must have dealt with in the past, Mr. Holmes. No affair of the heart. And this case is not confined to any single personage, however—eminent.” The speaker gestured with a practiced flourish. “This great city about us, the heart of empire, is itself being held for ransom.”

   I actually sprang to my feet with an exclamation, but the effect upon Holmes was nothing like so strong. His gray eyes had taken on a hard, penetrating stare, but he merely nodded, as if receiving confirmation of an idea already held in private.

   The two men on our settee exchanged glances. “You will understand, Mr. Holmes, and you, Dr. Watson,” the speaker continued, “why no public announcement of the peril has yet been made, and why in fact none is contemplated. Even the official police have not been notified, though our full appreciation of the danger is now some hours old. The city is bursting with visitors from every corner of the Empire, nay, of the world, come to do Her Majesty honor. Any mass panic under these conditions would...” Here our exalted visitor had to pause, to try to master his emotions.

   Sir Jasper Meek cleared his throat, and passed a hand over his high, pale forehead, so in contrast with the tanned parchment of his cheeks. “Gentlemen, the thing is this. There have already been several cases in the metropolis of London... of a most contagious and most terrible disease.” Now he, too, hesitated.

   “These cases you mention,” Holmes snapped, “are of course meant as proof of the blackmailers’ power to accomplish what they threaten, which is to loose an epidemic among us. And the disease is plague. Well, how much do the villains demand, and how and where is it to be delivered?”

   Had Holmes presented a revolver and ordered our visitors to hand over their purses, their astonishment could scarcely have been greater. Both of them, faces frozen, stared at him in silence for the space of several breaths. Then the man I have not named pulled from a pocket a small piece of paper, which he handed over to Holmes. My friend took it eagerly. Looking over his shoulder, I read part of the note, which had been composed by pasting onto a sheet of white paper printed letters and words evidently clipped from one or more newspapers. The closing words of the message were:

   UNLESS OUR DEMANDS ARE GRANTED, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN INDEED AND THE EMPIRE TOO. LET THERE BE NO TRICKERY OR A MILLION WILL DIE AS THIS MAN DIED.

   The speaker continued, in a voice that came near breaking: “No instructions have as yet been given us for the delivery of the ransom. But what is demanded—in an earlier note, that we at first dismissed as the work of a mere crank—is nothing less than a million pounds.”

   I burst out again with some exclamation, at which, I think, no one bothered to look up. Our eminent visitor went on: “The note you hold, Mr. Holmes, was found pinned to the garment of the third and latest victim, an elderly man still unidentified. His body