The Isle of Blood

“I sincerely hope they haven’t followed Doyle,” Warthrop said. “I am uncertain why you recruited him to join your rescue party, but I would hate for him to pay the ultimate price for his altruism. And, of course, it would be a great loss to literature. I normally don’t care much for fiction, but there is something charming about his stories. A kind of grand naïveté—like the British Empire itself—the blindest of faiths that reason will triumph over ignorance, and human intellect over evil.”

Von Helrung looked incredulously at my master. Perhaps he was thinking he did not know Pellinore Warthrop half as well as he’d thought.

“We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?”

Warthrop nodded. He either entirely missed von Helrung’s point or he didn’t care. I did not think it was the former. “It is a pity; for all his faults, I rather liked Torrance. He would have been my choice too, had I been forced to make one, so do not hold yourself to blame, Meister Abram. If you want to assign fault, look no farther than the empty bottle of whiskey on the table in the sitting room. He was three sheets in the wind when his murderers came to call. There is no other explanation for how they overcame him so easily.” He looked at me. “There are only three real causes of death, Will Henry. The first is accidents—diseases, famines, wars, or like what befell your parents. The second is old age. And the third is ourselves—our slow suicides. Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.”

Von Helrung was shaking his head vehemently. “You are responsible, Pellinore—not for Torrance, God rest his soul, but for Conan Doyle. Should he perish for what he’s seen this day, it will be to pay the fine for your impulsiveness. Why did you invite him to our rooms? He was taking his leave of us at the station, and you—”

“Yes, he was,” snapped Warthrop. “And I may have saved his life—temporarily, perhaps, but at least I bought him an hour or two to spend with Touie and his newborn babe. You have no understanding of those men you saw on the platform, von Helrung. They are ruthless. They kill without compunction or remorse. I had to act quickly, and I believe I made the best of a very tenuous situation.”

“And what of this ridiculous and bizarre charade in the room? What is your excuse for that? You knew it was those men we saw in the station, and yet you pretended that you deduced everything, down to the color of the killer’s hair! For what reason, Pellinore? In mocking Doyle, you mocked the dead!”

The doctor’s countenance darkened. He leaned forward and poked von Helrung in the chest.

“Do not speak to me of mockery, von Helrung. Do you have any inkling of what it’s like to be sane and have your very sanity be the thing that binds you? Think about that before you judge me for a harmless bit of whimsy!”

They fell silent after this heated exchange, until we reached our destination, at which point the doctor knocked sharply on the hansom’s roof and directed the driver to now take us to Piccadilly Circus. The whip cracked, and we were off again.

“Where are we going?” von Helrung demanded.

“To Piccadilly Circus.”

Von Helrung closed his eyes and sighed wearily. “You know what I meant.”

The doctor glanced behind us, and then settled back into his seat. “I do.”

“They are ruthless, you said. Killers without compunction or remorse, you said. But you fail to say who they are or why they pursue us.”

“I would think the why is obvious. As to who… The big red-haired one is called Rurick. His bald partner goes by the name Plešec. They are Okhranka, Meister

Abram, members of the Russian secret police.”

Von Helrung absorbed the news with a crestfallen expression. He had not wanted Torrance to be correct. A part of him, I think, clung to the hope that Jack Kearns had but one coconspirator in the affair, the betrayer Thomas Arkwright, and all the rest of it had sprouted in Jacob Torrance’s fertile imaination. The truth sickened his heart. He was a scientist, and the essence of science is the quest for truth, a noble thing in and of itself, but no human endeavor—no matter how noble—remains unsullied for long. Monstrumology could be characterized as a contemplation of nature corrupted. The same could be said of us.

“We were duped,” my master stated bluntly. “I suppose we could take some small comfort in the fact that we were not the only ones played for fools. Arkwright played us, but the Russians played him, and Jack Kearns, I think, has had his fun with all of us.”

“It was Jacob’s theory that Kearns and the British—and the Russians, too—were using us to find for them the home of the magnificum. They had the golden egg—the nidus—but not the goose who lays it. That’s how Torrance put it.”