Рон Гуларт - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

“Did you enjoy your service in South Africa?” asked Ganelon.

“Indeed so,” came the reply. “All this talk of war is foolishness. The Boers are farmers, not soldiers.” Here he stopped and gave Ganelon a quizzical look. When the detective nodded at the pipe, the kind preferred by the Boer settlers, Childers’s face brightened with understanding.

Ganelon smiled to himself, amused by the connection between war and tobacco. The Napoleonic wars had knocked out the snuff box and replaced it with the short cigar. The British had learned about the cigarette from the Russians during the Crimean War. And now the British were taking up the Boers’ bulldog pipe. Ganelon was not as sanguine about the South African situation as Childers.

“Do you miss active duty?” asked the detective.

The Englishman thought for a moment. “I’m not quite sure,” he said. “My father served as equerry before me. He was a personal friend of Prince Albert, the queen’s late consort. But he came to the post with many accomplishments behind him while I still dream of new worlds to conquer.” For a moment Childers’s face took on a faraway look.

Then the train passed a small station and Childers gave the platform his careful attention. And the next station. And the next. At last Ganelon had to ask the man what he was looking at. “The signboards which advertise various products,” said Childers. “I think they have great potential. In a business sense. One day I would like to form a company which would offer its clients signboards presented with more dash and imagination than Keen and Colman.”

When Childers spoke of worlds to conquer, Ganelon had thought he meant Samarkand or deepest Africa. But he had to admit that the mustard rivals’ ubiquitous signs were pedestrian, the first with its name in yellow letters on a black background, the second black on yellow. “Well, if you do,” said Ganelon, “I hope you don’t have both these companies as your clients.”

When Childers asked why not, Ganelon gave his long smile and replied, “Scripture forbids it. No man can serve two mustards.”

Childers led Ganelon deep into Buckingham Palace until they reached a gilded room with an elaborately coffered ceiling and a pleasant bay of windows. His guide told him that it had once been the queen’s sitting room. As a boy he’d come there with his father and had been fascinated by a birdcage topped by a fishbowl that stood on a piano there. But now the room was used for receiving guests privately.

In a moment Queen Victoria entered the room looking as sturdy as a small turnip in spite of her age. Her widow’s black stood in contrast to her gilded surroundings. In Ganelon’s talks with Vitelli over dinner, the Italian had mentioned John Varley’s book Zodiacal Physiognomy, where it was maintained that people resemble in some fashion the sign under which they are born. Ganelon was far from sure what that meant. Cancer the crab would be easy enough. And he could imagine a Libra being a person with eyebrows that went up and down like a balance. But Ganelon had looked up Victoria’s sign. She was a Gemini, the Twins. And how could one person be two? Unless her widow’s weeds and the quiet sadness in her face represented her other half, her lost Prince Albert.

Childers presented Ganelon to the queen and left the room. Victoria said, “You were kind to come on such short notice, Mr. Ganelon.” Then she held out her hand. “Before we begin, the item I sent you, I wish to have it back. It is a memento of a very happy incident of my youth long before I met my beloved husband Albert.”

Ganelon set the love token in her palm. Her hand closed over it and disappeared into her small black reticule.

“Mr. Ganelon,” she repeated, leaving him with the distinct impression she liked to say the name, “did your father ever explain the circumstances which led to our exchange of — items?”

“He did not, ma’am,” said the detective.

“Then let me say that in the second month of my reign, some sixty years ago, your father’s archrival, Dr. Ludwig Fong, in one of his schemes to rule the world, had me kidnapped and replaced me with a look-alike, his niece Abigail Fong-Smythe of the English branch of his family. Do you know of them?”

Ganelon indicated he did. The Ganelons kept close watch on all the Fongs. From offices in Paris the Fong-Smythes operated a chain of low newspapers throughout England and Dragon House, a publisher of sensational books.

“I’m told her resemblance to me was extraordinary,” continued the queen. “All I remember is entering a room in the palace to have a burlap bag thrown over my head and a hand clasp my mouth. Then my outer garments were taken and, bound and gagged, I was lowered from a window to a waiting carriage. It was Abigail who walked from that room in my place.

“The crime might have gone undetected. But Lord Melbourne remarked on a certain earthiness in his young queen’s sense of humor and an unfamiliar bray in her laughter. He called in your dear father to investigate. Ambrose discovered what had happened and at great personal risk he rescued me from the slave-pens of Timbuktu where Fong had sent me.” The memory of the place caused the queen to lay the back of her hand across her brow. “Oh, the noise and the heat!” she said. “And how people poked at one through the bars of the cage! But your father saved me and brought me back to England. Abigail and the Fong-Smythes fled to the Continent and I resumed my proper place.”

“A happy conclusion, ma’am.”

Victoria inclined her head in agreement. “But that is not why I asked you here,” she said. After a pause the queen asked, “You remember Jack the Ripper, of course.”

Ganelon started. Who could forget the madman who killed and mutilated eight women in London’s Whitechapel ten years before and escaped the law? “Don’t tell me the killer has resumed his bloody career.”

“Thank heaven, no,” replied the queen. “But did you know that the Ripper’s reign of terror ended just about the time my eldest son Bertie, Albert Edward the Prince of Wales, left on a trip to Paris?”

“I did not, ma’am,” said Ganelon. “A coincidence, I am sure.”

Victoria’s voice turned sharp. “Of course it was a coincidence,” she said. After a moment she continued in a gentler voice, “Even so, it was remarked upon. The gutter press even dared to wonder if Bertie’s return would mean a resumption of the Ripper killings.

“But I’ve only myself to blame for much of what followed. You see, on the eve of his trip I chastised Bertie for his stiff and haughty manner in his dealing with our subjects. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I told him, ‘loosen up a bit. Bend a little. Smile. Try not to be such a prig.’

“Well, during his stay in Paris my son took his mother’s words to heart. His first day back in London Bertie even took a ride in an open carriage sporting this foolish grin. When the people saw him and began to cheer he stood up, doffed his hat, and blew kisses to them. Several times he ordered the carriage to stop and descended, shaking hands with the crowd and chucking the children under the chin. Was it any surprise that some began to doubt this man was the aloof prince they knew?

“From there it was an easy step to the story that Bertie had committed Jack the Ripper’s heinous murders, been apprehended by the police, and, wearing a black mask to conceal his identity, had been tried by a secret court. Convicted, the story went, he had been confined to an asylum for the criminally insane and some grinning look-alike put in his place.”

The queen’s story left Ganelon speechless.

“Help me, Mr. Ganelon,” continued Victoria. “And quickly. I am an old woman. These rumors could destroy any chance of Bertie succeeding to the throne.”