Free The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Vaughn Entwistle Page A

up. Abruptly, they turned sharp right into a large room with vaulted ceilings bedecked with plaster frieze works. Dazzled by the opulence of scarlet walls and glittering gilt, his eyes roved wildly, until his focus was drawn, by deliberate intent of the architect, to the far end of the room. Beneath a proscenium arch, a dais of three steps ascended to a throne. Seated upon the throne, still wearing her familiar dress of mourning black and white lace headdress, was a figure whose face was struck into every coin of the realm.
    Victoria Regina.
    Pike-wielding beefeaters hovered in every corner of the room, while red-tunicked soldiers of the queen’s life guard stood at attention on either side of the throne, cutlasses drawn and held ready. Cypher stopped fifteen feet shy of the throne, bowed his head, and uttered in a reverential voice, “Majesty.”
    Conan Doyle echoed the salutation and by pure reflex fell to one knee and bowed deeply.
    “Your zeal is noted, Doctor Doyle,” Victoria answered in a quavering, old ladie’s voice, “but men have not bowed from the knee since Elizabeth’s time.”
    Feeling foolish, Conan Doyle rose and bowed again, this time from the waist. When he finally summoned the courage to stand tall and raise his head, he was shocked by Victoria’s appearance. It had been ten years since the death of Prince Albert. In deep mourning, Victoria had withdrawn from public life and soon became a mystery to her own subjects. People whispered that she had secretly died and that the news was being suppressed to delay the succession of her dissolute son, Edward, Prince of Wales. Other scuttlebutt was far more vicious—the aging queen was stricken with disease: consumption, heart failure, even syphilis (contracted from Albert).
    As a trained physician, Conan Doyle could not fail to notice the ailing condition of the seventy-eight-year-old monarch. She had lost weight, he could tell from previously taken photographs, but she retained the pudding-in-a-sock physique. She slumped upon the throne. Her face was waxy and pallid. Her glassy brown eyes protruded like a spaniel’s. Her chest rose and fell unevenly—he could hear the leather-bellows wheeze of her respiration. And when she spoke, Victoria’s voice was faltering and distant, as though it had traveled a wearisome journey from her lips to his ears. In point of fact, she was barely audible.
    “Doctor Doyle, your Sherlock Holmes stories have been a great source of diversion to us during our retreat from the world.” She raised a hand in a series of palsied jerks and let it drop heavily in her lap. “Now it is our hope that a mind as ingenious as yours might be employed to save your queen, your country, and the great Empire we represent.”
    “Indeed, your highness, it is an honor to be asked,” Conan Doyle answered, and bowed again, quite unnecessarily.
    “The queen’s representative, Mister Cypher, will describe in detail the task you are asked to perform. But we wanted to meet you personally, so that you do not labor under any suspicion of this being the highest possible service you could render to the nation.”
    Throughout her speech, Conan Doyle leaned forward, straining to hear. He threw a worried frown at Cypher. “Her Majesty’s voice is very faint,” he whispered out the side of his mouth. “Might I approach the throne?”
    “You may, but at the risk of being skewered on a pike staff,” Cypher replied beneath his breath.
    “But I am not quite certain what is being asked of me,” Conan Doyle whispered to Cypher. “I don’t know what to say.”
    “Simply say ‘yes’ and bow,” Cypher replied. “Your acquiescence to a royal request is a foregone conclusion. Say ‘yes,’ bow to Her Majesty, and then we shall back away before we turn and leave the royal presence.”
    *   *   *
    “Do you know what the French term, coup d’ é tat means, Doctor Doyle?”
    They were back on the private underground train, the bowler-hatted