Free The Great Detective by Delia Sherman

 
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    November 1880
    On a foggy autumn morning, a horseless carriage chugged slowly along a fashionable London street. The carriage was of antique design, steam-driven instead of the more modern clockwork, with a tall chimney pipe that added its acrid mite to the smoky air. A burly footman sat on its box, peering through the gloom at the house numbers. As they passed a pleasant Georgian lodging-house, he hastily pulled the brake and the carriage came to a halt with a long hiss of escaping steam.
    The door burst open and a young gentleman sprang out onto the pavement. He was perhaps twenty-two, tall and knobby, with longish light hair and small, round spectacles. His low-crowned hat was crammed to his ears and his coat was buttoned askew. His careless appearance suggested Bohemian tendencies. The carriage’s obviously homemade shaded fog lights revealed a mechanical bent. Not an artisan, not with that coat. A gentleman mechanic, then—possibly an inventor.
    The young woman who alit after him was more difficult to parse. She was younger than the gentleman—between eighteen and twenty years of age—and clearly on comfortable terms with him. One would have thought them brother and sister, had there been the slightest resemblance. As it was, she was dark where he was fair, tiny and compact where he was tall and loose-limbed, and her severe mulberry walking costume spoke of a lady’s companion rather than a lady. She carried a practical-looking cane that she did not seem to need.
    A sulfurous swirl of fog briefly enveloped the pair. When it cleared, they were climbing the lodging-house steps with their footman a few steps behind, bearing in his arms what looked to be a large and elaborate doll clad in china blue.
    The young gentleman rang the bell. Above them, a curtain in the first-floor window twitched and a figure retreated into the room beyond.
    The game was afoot.
    *   *   *
    Miss Tacy Gof was in a state of tension so extreme that time slowed almost to a standstill. The ride through the fog from Curzon Street to Pall Mall had taken an age of the world, and another had passed as they waited for an answer to Sir Arthur’s ring. Tacy was on the point of reaching for the bell herself when the door snapped open to reveal a small, empty room sealed off from the house itself by a second door.
    Sir Arthur stepped in and peered about. “A fog-exhaust!” He exclaimed. “See the fan above the door? I have been longing to see one ever since I read about them in the London Inventor !” Then, impatiently: “Come in, come in. There’s room enough for all of us!”
    There was, though it felt very cramped when the street door swung to, trapping them in a cloud of stinging air. The fan whirred, the air cleared, and the inner door opened, letting them into a hall illuminated by a Smith clockwork lamp.
    A lady in black bombazine took one look at Sir Arthur’s hat and misbuttoned coat and said, “First floor front, end of the hall.”
    Sir Arthur sprang up the stairs like a dog on the scent, but Tacy turned, hesitating. “Angharad?”
    The doll answered her, its voice tinkling and tuneful as a music box. “Away with you! James and I will follow.”
    Gratefully, Tacy laid the cane she was holding in the doll’s white kid hands and ran up the stairs, reaching the top just as the door to the first floor front opened, revealing quite the largest man she had ever seen. He loomed over Sir Arthur—who was himself a tall man—and was easily twice his girth. Tacy judged him to be perhaps thirty, with a heavy, handsome countenance dominated by a hawklike nose and pale eyes that gave back the light of the Smith lamp like pearls.
    Sir Arthur straightened his spine and his spectacles. “Mr. Mycroft Holmes? I am Sir Arthur Cwmlech, of Cwmlech Manor, and I am come to consult your Reasoning Machine on a matter of some importance.”
    The pale gaze