Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ my imagination. A number of similar organizations that look after homeless children, such as the Orphan Working School, Princess Mary’s Village Homes, the Church of England Association for Befriending Waifs and Strays, or the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage, would have taken me in, but I managed to avoid them. An even worse fate would have been to fall into the hands of charities like the Marine Society, which prepared homeless boys for careers as sailors, or Miss Annie Macpherson’s Home of Industry, which would have trained me and then sent me to Canada for a new start in life.

      Fate guided my steps. I escaped all of the well-intentioned societies and sought refuge in the cattle-shed of an Irish dairyman. He and his wife were childless, kindly people of middle age—poor, of course, but I had never known anyone who wasn’t. They adopted me, jokingly calling me Colin Kine—Colin meaning child or young animal, and kine being their word for cattle. Colin Kine I remained until, long afterward, Lady Sara’s coachman adopted me. The dairyman and his wife had a surname of their own, but it never occurred to me that I had any claim to it.

      I already had my start in life. I was learning the shabby parts of London as few people ever know them.

      When I was eight or nine, my adoptive parents died of a fever, perhaps typhoid. Sickness and death were and are an ever-present reality to the London poor. I was sick myself but survived. Perhaps my foster parents fed and cared for me better than for themselves. The relative who took over their dairy business didn’t like my looks, and I didn’t care for his, so I left. My luck at avoiding well-intentioned charities continued. Simply by surviving in the London streets, I continued to educate myself as though I were deliberately preparing for the career I eventually followed.

      I must have been almost twelve when I met Lady Sara. I had happened onto a crowd of boys tormenting a dog that had been run over by a carriage. When they wouldn’t stop, I attacked the whole group in a fury, even though several were larger than I. In the end, with both eyes blackened and a bloody mouth, I routed all of them.

      Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Bring that boy here.” Her coachman grabbed me and took me to her carriage. She had watched the entire fracas, not intervening until it was over because she wanted to know what the outcome would be. She asked my name.

      “Colin Kine, Ma’am.”

      “Where did you get a name like that?”

      “I useter to look after cows, Ma’am.”

      “It’s the wrong name for you. You deserve something heroic. It takes character to fight a mob over an injured mongrel.”

      She continued to question me. When she found I had no parents and no home, she opened the carriage door. “That won’t do. Come along—I’ll find a place for you.” She was given to such kind impulses, and she always made up her mind quickly.

      She seemed as beautiful as a fairy princess, and the carriage and coachman marked her as fabulously wealthy, but none of that meant anything to me. My mind was still on the dog. I said, “Please, Ma’am, I wants to look after the dog.”

      She regarded me with interest. “Of course. That was the cause of it all, wasn’t it? We mustn’t forget the dog. I’m afraid it has a broken leg, but something might be done for it. Bring it along.”

      We drove directly to the Harley Street surgery of Thomas Tallmage, who was one of London’s most prominent young physicians. Once Lady Sara made up her mind to succour a mongrel dog, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to offer it anything but the best medical care available. As Dr. Tallmage himself said, laughing, when he learned what our errand was, “Lady Sara never does anything by halves!” He expertly reduced the dog’s fracture, and Lady Sara took it and me home with her. At that time she was still living in Connaught Place, so the street urchin and the mongrel joined the household of Earl of Ranisford, to the consternation of the Countess, her mother.

      But it was quickly evident that I could not be comfortable in such a fashionable residence. I was removed to Connaught Mews to the home of Lady Sara’s coachman, John Quick, who even then was known as Old John. He and his wife were wonderful people, and their own children were grown-up. Old John was almost as vain about his surname as he was about being Lady Sara’s coachman. He claimed to be descended from Robert le Quic, of Cornwall, a thirteenth century notable and the first of a long line of nimble ancestors. At Lady Sara’s suggestion, he formally adopted me, and I proudly became Colin Quick.

      Old John and his wife looked after me like a father and mother, but Lady Sara took the responsibility for my education and employment. She began by giving me menial chores to perform in her workrooms. When I demonstrated some potential, she began to trust me with more complicated tasks. The dog and I became known all over London. Much of my education developed out of the errands she gave me. She also took me with her when she travelled about the city, pointing out things and questioning my reactions.

      The errands were odder than I realized, and as I grew older, I gradually began to grasp the strangeness of this profession she had invented for herself. At the same time, there were large quantities of book learning for me to catch up with, and in this, as with everything else, she was a stern taskmaster. For one thing, I had to master different accents and dialects. My native cockney was invaluable but only when I was supposed to be one. Anywhere in the West End, or in fashionable society, or even in a middle-class suburb, it marked me disastrously. My struggles with English grammar, which I learned from a book by a Mr. Meiklejohn, will haunt me all my life. Pitman’s Shorthand Dictionary became my support in matters of pronunciation, a useful connection because as soon as I had the rudiments of reading and writing, Lady Sara set me to learning Pitman’s shorthand. As my skills improved, she began calling me her secretary when she needed one, and she kept drilling me intensely at shorthand until I had attained a speed somewhat better than a hundred and fifty words a minute. She was not about to lose valuable testimony because her secretary couldn’t keep pace with a witness.

      I was indebted to the Countess, Lady Sara’s mother, for another important aspect of my education. The Countess frequently asked me to accompany her on shopping expeditions, ostensibly to run errands but actually to receive instruction in matters she suspected Lady Sara was neglecting.

      She knew the city as few people knew it, but the attractions of London that interested her most were not listed in an ordinary visitors’ guide. They were places known and cherished only by connoisseurs such as herself: the dwelling celebrated for its strange assortment of ghosts; the public house outside which, ten years previously, the dead body of a man had been found in the gutter, his throat cut and a half-guinea piece clenched between his teeth; the place where the poisoner Neill Cream met one of his victims; the theatre where, concealed at the back of a closet, a skeleton had been found with a knife between its ribs; the square in Highgate haunted by the ghost of the chicken Sir Francis Bacon had beheaded and used for his famous experiment to prove that stuffing a carcass with snow would preserve it. The Countess had an amazing repertoire of such tales, and she knew where each had occurred.

      Lady Sara drove me to master an entire curriculum of skills and disciplines until I became a capable investigator myself though certainly not on her level. She had invented the profession; she invented me because she needed an assistant. She solved crime after crime—some highly public and some in the highest degree confidential; some of utmost importance and many trivial—and for most of these triumphs she received no credit or acknowledgement of any kind. Only a few of her closest friends and associates were aware of her achievements. Whether a mystery concerned missing jewellery or a fortune in stolen goods, it posed a question mark and a challenge. Lady Sara made a career of removing such question marks, and her success was the only reward she required.

      Now she had three unusually sinister problems to consider: the missing giant, who might be rusticating in a peaceful rural surrounding where his СКАЧАТЬ