Free Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares by James Lovegrove Page B

it is,” he said, “was, of course, the reason we put ourselves through that. I was looking for the French nobleman whom you overheard Torrance mention in such an oblique and casual fashion.”
    “Ah yes, the ‘Froggy toff.’”
    “There were a number of Frenchmen named. However, the Abbess’s code identified this particular one as being fond of barely pubescent girls, and did you not tell me that Torrance said something about the nobleman liking girls who were ‘fresh, with the dew still on them’? Putting the two things together yielded only one possible candidate.”
    “And the Frenchman and Baron Cauchemar are connected somehow?”
    “What makes you say that, old chap?”
    “You seem mad-keen on pursuing Cauchemar, almost to the point where nothing else matters, not even the bombings. I can only assume this is another manifestation of that monomania.”
    “Monomania? I would not put it so strongly myself.”
    “That is how it might appear to a dispassionate observer.”
    Holmes chuckled wryly. “What would I do without you, Watson? You remind me constantly that the workings of a mind like mine must seem incomprehensible to a mind like yours. It is like a tortoise trying to fathom the speed of a cheetah.”
    “Oh,” I said, not flattered.
    “But you’re right all the same. About this being about Cauchemar. It is, to some extent. There is the Torrance link, of course. Hearsay but no less valuable for that. There is also the superficial-seeming fact that cauchemar is a French word.”
    “Meaning...?”
    “‘Nightmare’. Apt, n’est-ce pas? We must bear in mind, too, that the Abbess’s French client has a title, and our ironclad vigilante has bestowed the rank of baron upon himself. Each, individually, a slender association, but together, cumulatively, I find them persuasive. At the very least, they are enough to make me think that you and I should pay a house call on a certain French peer who currently resides in London: the Vicomte de Villegrand.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
A T THE V ILLA DE V ILLEGRAND
    We journeyed by cab from Moorgate to a grand Gothic villa up in Hampstead, a stone’s throw from the Heath. The house was well-kept, the front garden tidy and orderly, the wisteria that overhung the porch trimmed.
    Even now, in the broad light of day, outside this fine and desirable residence, I could not wholly dismiss the events of the previous night from my thoughts. I was oppressed by the memory of our encounter with Baron Cauchemar and found it hard to shake the feeling that, in spite of Holmes’s insistence to the contrary, we had been in the presence of something not wholly of this earth.
    I had learned, with Sherlock Holmes, to be wary of expressing notions that were not entirely in keeping with his ultra-rational world view. Only the year before, during our hair-raising escapade at Baskerville Hall and on the surrounding moors, it had been amply demonstrated to me that something which seemed supernatural, even hellish, could be explained away as a product of human ingenuity combined with human suggestibility.
    And so now, while a part of me continued to maintain that Cauchemar was nightmarish in more than name alone, that he was at least in part paranormal, that he even carried a whiff of infernal brimstone about him, I knew better than to raise this possibility again with Holmes. He would have none of it. He would pooh-pooh the very idea and ridicule me, and I feared his scorn almost as much as I feared another meeting with the Bloody Black Baron.
    Holmes’s voice summoned me out of my brooding.
    “Watson,” he said as we strode up the front path, “whatever happens in the next few minutes, do not intervene and do not protest. Just follow my lead and trust my judgement. Is that understood?”
    I nodded assent.
    In answer to our knock, the door was opened by a manservant whose lugubrious demeanour belied his relative youthfulness. He enquired, in a thick French accent, who we were and what our