Moriarty (33 page)

So the wheels continued to turn, slowly, and the work began to take shape in the warehouse hard by the river in Poplar; also in the great house on the fringes of Westminster, which pleased the Professor so much that he even spoke to George Huckett about the possibility of his little firm doing some further restoration at Steventon Hall, on the road to Oxford. With this in mind they visited Steventon one day in mid-March accompanied by Sal Hodges, who brought a basket containing a loaf of Fanny Paget's homemade bread and some cold sausage and pickle with mustard, and a flask of Fanny's excellent cock-a-leekie soup made from a fine capon, her simmered chicken stock, and several parcels of leeks so that the soup was finally thick and most tasty. Sal said that even though this was a Scotch soup, she could remember the days in her childhood when people, coming to assist in gathering in the harvest, would each bring their own bunch of leeks to add to such a soup to be consumed as the first course at their harvest home banquet.

So, freezing January slipped quietly into a February that lived up to its old name of February fill-dyke, then to a March during which the days began to get a mite longer and the temperature started to rise a fraction, and they passed quietly into April with its soft refreshing rains. It was on All Fools Day, April first, that a thundering great robbery occurred in Hampstead, that place of groves once infested by wolves, and where during the reign of Henry VIII, London's washerwomen soaked the clothes of the nobility. This particular event, the clearing out of an entire house of goods, jewels, precious stones, and furniture, was a robbery to order. The thieves were three men and a boy, all under Ember's control, the object of interest being a single piece of furniture: a magnificent hand-carved Swiss sleigh bed, fashioned from pine, with outward-curving head and foot boards, complete with ridged foot blocks that Moriarty later called his “mounting blocks.”

Ember presented this large bed as a personal housewarming gift just as the carpets, curtains, and other furniture were being brought into the house. Eventually, the Westminster house was decorated and in perfect order, and it was almost time for Arthur to return home from Rugby for the Easter holidays.

The sleigh bed was wonderfully comfortable both for James Moriarty and his love, Sal Hodges, just as foxy little Ember knew it would be; and in the cozy darkness of the night, Moriarty would shrug off all traces of evil, and the dark phantoms that must have invaded his dreams; and he would whisper in Sal's ear, “Oh, my dolly darling, my donah, my sweetmeat,” and running his hand between her stunning thighs, he would say, “Oh, my dilberry bush, my sweet garden ripe for planting, my honeycomb. My love.”

Stirring deep in the night, Sal Hodges would come awake and find great apprehension facing her in the gloom, for she kept one dark, terrible secret that she wished to hold on to until the end of her time. In her distress, she wondered if that would be possible, and dared not consider the consequences should the secret be revealed to her lord and master, to Professor James Moriarty.

Through the previous months, Moriarty had received regular messages from Sam Brock, his spy in place with Idle Jack, and the intelligence he was able to obtain, particularly concerning the passage of ideas between Jack Idell and the continental crime lords, he considered invaluable. But as they approached that Easter of 1900, the messages became more alarming.

I heard them again last night, Professor
, Georgie Porgie wrote with a sense of urgency on Thursday, April fifth.
They seem to be planning your downfall. I thing they are after you life. You are in great dangor
.

And on that very evening, the Thursday before Palm Sunday, there was a great reunion at the house in Westminster. Young Arthur
Moriarty—known in the world as Arthur James—returned for the Easter holidays, greeted lovingly by his mother, Sal Hodges, and his father, James Moriarty.

There was pride in the Professor's heart as he faced his son, who had been met at Euston Station by Daniel Carbonardo and driven home by Harkness in the Professor's hansom. The young man stood in the tiled hall of the great house, embraced his mother, and gave his father a firm handshake.

Moriarty thought he would burst with pride, for the young man had grown in stature, filled out, and was blessed with a new confidence after just over a year at Rugby. He spoke clearly in a firm classic voice with no trace of Moriarty's former Irish accent, but with the clipped consonants and sharp, slightly elongated vowels of what was obviously the inflection of the upper classes; while the way in which he held himself was after the manner of a leader, a man born to be at the head of whatever profession he chose. The investment Moriarty had made in Rugby School was already paying off a hundredfold.

That night, after dinner, Sal left father and son alone over the port and, for the first time, Arthur spoke to his father about his place in the family, and what his father actually accomplished in life.

“Father of the chap I share a study with is something in the city and says you, Papa, are a bit of a dark horse.”

“Does he now?”

“That's what he told, Peter—Peter Alexander, my friend. Said you had holdings and a lot of property. I've never thought about the kind of business you are in, Papa. Or what I shall do when I leave school.”

“I am what the French call an entrepreneur, Arthur. Know the word?”

Arthur looked his father full in the face. “Oh, indeed, sir, I do.” A smile and the merest shadow of a wink. “It can hide a multitude of sins, Papa. Yes?”

Moriarty smiled back, thinking his son was wise beyond his years, and leaning forward told the boy that he would, in due time, inherit a fortune, not simply in terms of money, but in human realities. “You will become heir to an army of workers, men, women, and children, people who are skilled in their various trades. You will be their rock and the one from whom they will derive their livelihoods. You will direct them, and be their master and their guide, both. You will be their reason for life.”

“And I shall be delighted to see to them, Papa.” Once more, the shade of a smile.

In that moment, the Professor's heart sang, for he knew that he had bred a whelp after his own heart. “You should first study the Law, my son. That will make you ready to take on the great future I shall leave to you.”

So, a bond was forged between father and son. For the remainder of that week the two would sit and talk into the night, Arthur entertaining his father with both tales of life in the great public school and his own youthful ideas of how life should be lived, and how the great obstacles in life should be surmounted, and life's difficulties overcome.

Arthur was, of course, as yet unlettered in the world, and required years of experience to grow and become familiar with the many pitfalls of that adventure from birth to knowledgeable rebirth. Yet in those days the Professor could clearly see how the son he had longed for at the time before his birth would be a beloved credit to him and to all with whom he had dealings. In the fact of Arthur, James Moriarty first began to sense what love may really be for a father.

Lucy Moriarty had been a devout Roman Catholic and had brought her children up in the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic faith. Moriarty naturally had followed his mother and in his own makeshift blood family insisted on an adherence to that faith. When in London, they would worship at the Pro-Cathedral in Kensington
High Street, going there quietly and with no fuss, as they did for the High Mass on Palm Sunday when, with the whole congregation, they remembered Jesus Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on that first day of the most momentous week in history for Christians. As in former years, they came away bearing palm leaves and crosses made out of palm leaves. They were there again on Good Friday, where they joined in the liturgy that seeks to focus hearts and minds on the agony and death of Jesus by the stripping and washing of the altar and the individual veneration of the instrument of death, the holy cross; the bells usually rung at the Sanctus and during the consecration now replaced by the harsh sound of a mallet on the sanctuary steps, reminiscent of the nails hammered into Christ on the cross. Then the prostration of the clergy before the large crucifix, followed by the veneration, the entire congregation coming one at a time to kiss the feet of Christ on the Cross, an act not of idolatry but of mental and spiritual obeisance. On Holy Saturday, with the end of the Lenten fast in sight, they attended, early in the morning, the kindling of the New Fire, bringing it into the church, a sign of the Holy Spirit regenerating each member of the Church as though coming down in tongues of flame, and so to the lighting of the Pascal candle. Then, Easter itself, with a great High Sung Mass, praising God and the miracle of the Resurrection.

“How much of all that do you believe, Papa?” Arthur asked when they assembled in the drawing room before the Easter lunch, their nostrils still lined with incense, which also seemed to cling to their clothes, at odds with the succulent new season's lamb Fanny Paget had cooked for them.

“How much do I believe?” Moriarty seemed to look into the far distance. “A lot of it, I suppose. ‘Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.' One cannot but believe in a God of vengeance …”

“And an afterlife?” Arthur prompted.

“Oh, there's an afterlife.” Moriarty nodded. “I believe all that. There has to be Hell and Satan and retribution. Day of Wrath and Doom impending sort of thing. Fear all of it, son. Quake and fear all of it.”

Arthur could see that his father, James Moriarty, was moved following the surfeit of unrelenting prayer and ceremonial that told the story of Christ's promise to all men and women, from the glory, laud, and honour of His entrance into Jerusalem to the betrayal, death, and hope of the Resurrection.

In his head, Moriarty could hear the translated words of the Dies Irae, thudding in his brain like sombre, driving timpani beats:

LONDON: APRIL 17–30, 1900

B
ACK ON THE
evening of Palm Sunday, Moriarty had summoned Terremant to his room. In the old days, after Pip Paget had gone missing, and before his promotion, Terremant had been in charge of the punishers, that gang of hard and ruthless men used for inflicting violence, and even death, on enemies of the family.

“It's time we started to fight back, Tom,” the Professor began. “How many of the loyal punishers can you muster?”

“Around three-quarters of them, sir.” He went on to explain that he had, in the previous week, brought back six of their toughest men—including the legendary Arno Wilson, onetime fairground and booth prize fighter, like Terremant himself; and Corkie Smith, a man almost as big as Terremant, who would go into fights wielding a small holy
water sprinkler—a cudgel spiked with nails, set points to the fore—with which, it was said, he had already killed some four men in street fights. He had also won back Rickie Cohen, the tall master of the knife, who cut people with his long, razor-sharp blade—almost an equal to Lee Chow in flicking a cutter across his enemies' faces.

“They'll be true to you now, Professor,” Terremant told him, and on being further questioned, he said that he would trust the reunited punishers with his own life.

“Then let's put them to the test.” Moriarty said the time was now ripe, and perhaps on the Monday or Tuesday of Holy Week, when the trade for the girls would be slack, they should take back the house that Idle Jack had filched from them up at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street—the one Spear had gone to sniff out only a week or so ago, hidden deep among the warren of streets north of Oxford Street itself.

Terremant seemed pleased to get the chance of some real work, but later in the week he brought bad news. It had been as if Idle Jack's people had expected the assault. Instead of a sleepy and unprepared skeleton crew of minders and cash-carriers at the house, there had been a party of what the big punisher called fighting troops. “It was as if they had been tipped off and were prepared, waiting for us,” he told the Professor on the Thursday evening. “We was pushed back like a nest of ants being destroyed by boiling water. I've got three men who'll be on crutches for the next six months, and dear old Glittering George Gittins may not even pull through, he's so damaged.”

The tall, long-haired George Gittins had been shot in the head outside the house just as he was about to charge in with a group of six toughs as big as himself. (Eventually, he recovered.)

Moriarty had Bertram Jacobs keeping his eye on
The Standard
advertisements, but nothing had appeared summoning Cock Robin to
a meeting at the house in Delamare Terrace.
Maybe they are using the Royal Mail, like me
, the Professor wondered. Or, perhaps one of the reunited punishers had not been reunited enough. “Grill 'em,” he ordered Terremant. “If necessary get Danny Carbonardo in, with his extra-sharp and hot pincers. He'll make them talk.” Even Terremant appeared to wince. He had seen Carbonardo at work before.

On the Tuesday morning after Easter, another packet of letters arrived from Perry Gwyther's office.
I urg you to beware, Professor
, Georgie Porgie wrote.
I know they are plotting dredful things against you. And there are strange people here, in the house. A little man with a cocked head: sort of skew-wiff. A bad un if ever I saw one. He was with Idle Jack, alone and talking last night. Over an hour, and they talked about you. Jack said, “this must finish him.” The little one is cheeky. Jack called him bum-shus, but I dono what bum-shus meens. I do no they plan sumthing teribul
.