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

“Mere rumors, ma’am?” protested Ganelon.

Victoria shook her head. “There is nothing ‘mere’ about them,” she replied. “You will see. Tonight I invite you and Captain Childers to a very special social event where you will learn how very deeply these stories pervade the minds of our common people.”

Ganelon dined with Childers in his quarters. Over preliminary whiskeys and soda the equerry pointed out the signed photograph of Albert the Prince Consort on the mantel, a gift to Childers’ father. It showed the prince in a frock coat with a corsage in his buttonhole, holding a cane in his left hand. “This was my father’s most valued possession,” he said. “When confronted by a social situation where he was unsure how to proceed, my father always asked himself what Prince Albert would have done and he never came out wrong.”

Childers also told Ganelon that the evening’s social event was a costume ball and that they should both consider themselves honored to be invited. “The guests are restricted to members of a certain secret society within the palace,” he explained.

After dinner Ganelon was taken to his own rooms where he found his costume laid out for him. Childers had said it was the queen’s idea that he go dressed as a popular fictional detective of the moment in a tweed suit with Knickerbocker trousers, a deerstalker hat, and an Inverness cape. There was also a calabash pipe whose tobacco so reeked of old Persian slipper that Ganelon chose to carry it unlit, cradled between a thumb and forefinger. Examining himself in the cheval glass, Ganelon had to admit that Childers had taken his measurements well when he sized him up on the train.

When Childers arrived to take him to the ball the equerry’s own costume quite filled the doorframe. The queen had decreed Childers go as a guardsman sentry in a tall bearskin hat. The outfit included a striped sentry box, a thing of wire and canvas supported by a yoke over his shoulders.

The affair took place in the high-ceilinged Green Drawing Room. At one end stood a broad refreshment table decorated with flowers. From behind the curtain at the other the orchestra was tuning its instruments.

In between, a most extraordinary collection of guests awaited the queen’s arrival. Among them were several pearly king costermongers and their wives, two ragged little boys with bootblack boxes on their shoulders, and several women in flower sellers’ shawls with baskets of violet nosegays.

A man Ganelon first took to be a headhunter wearing his terrible shrunken trophies on a chain around his neck turned out to be a Punch and Judy showman decked out with his cast of hand puppets. Another man wore a thick overcoat and a curious stovepipe hat pierced about with as many round holes as a Swiss cheese. The placard on his back announced him to be King of the Black Bug Exterminators Without Harmful Poisons. When he saw Ganelon reading his sign he opened his vast coat and whistled to demonstrate. Immediately young hedgehogs peeped from the holes in the man’s hat and the many pockets in his coat lining. Then his wife used sugar tongs to reward each creature with a black bug from a fine-meshed metal cage she carried over her arm.

On the edge of the crowd an old crossing-sweeper in a broken-brimmed hat was demonstrating his tip-earning broom work by pretending to sweep the flickering light from the chandeliers into the darker corners of the room.

A musical flourish from the orchestra silenced everyone. In a moment Queen Victoria entered. Amidst all the bows and courtesies she motioned Ganelon to her side. “In days of old,” she told him, “rulers like Haroun al-Raschid used to visit Baghdad’s lower town in disguise to discover if the ordinary people considered themselves governed well or ill. But with my face on every coin and postage stamp I can go nowhere anonymously. Instead I send out through the city select members of my household — I call them the Buckingham Palace Irregulars — lords- and ladies-in-waiting and pageboys, all masters of disguise and mimicry, to read the hearts of the ordinary people. Tonight you may ask them what those hearts say.”

Now the queen led Ganelon down the line of guests, introducing him to the costermongers as Lord and Lady This and Lord and Lady That, who greeted the detective with a cheery “Guv” or “Ducky.” The Punch and Judy man, who was the Earl of Something, shot him a wink. The young bootblacks, who were the Honorable Chalk and the Honorable Cheese, tugged their forelocks and looked critically at the shine on Ganelon’s shoes.

Afterwards the queen left Ganelon and took her place in an armchair on a low dais. “I declare this, the Eighteenth Annual Buckingham Palace Irregulars’ Costume Ball, well and truly open,” she said.

The first dance was the traditional quadrille. As Ganelon and his partner, the bug exterminator’s lady, waited for their turn she assured him that, indeed, the people she met as an Irregular believed that Bertie had committed Jack the Ripper’s crimes and was now confined to an insane asylum. She even named the institution of confinement. It was the Criminal Asylum at Norwich, where a whole ward of patients believed themselves to be the Prince of Wales.

When the waltzes began, Ganelon returned the lady to her exterminator husband and spent the next hour talking to any guest who was not at the moment dancing. The woman’s story was confirmed on every side. The crossing-sweeper further informed him that the common people believed another inmate of that ward had been chosen to act as the prince’s double. This impostor was always followed by a carriage of the Black-Maria sort filled with asylum warders with strait-waistcoats over their arms ready to act should the impostor deviate from his instructions or alter the speeches written for him.

The Punch and Judy man, who followed the theatrical news, said that journals like Backstage or Playland were now regularly covering the double’s public appearances with criticisms of his acting and use of makeup.

When Ganelon visited the refreshment table where the two Honorable shoeshine boys were demolishing a chocolate cake, young Chalk even showed Ganelon a Dragon House penny-dreadful entitled The Ripper Prince, whose lurid cover depicted a man wearing the regalia of the Order of the Garter, knife in hand, stalking a woman down a dark street.

Ganelon drew off by himself to a corner to make something of all this. Clearly the Fong-Smythes, operating their gutter-press empire from abroad, had been waiting to revenge themselves on the British royal family. Had Jack the Ripper given them that opportunity? Or had they played a more direct hand? There was talk of the Ripper’s skill with the knife. And wasn’t Rupert Fong-Smythe professor of surgery at the École de Médecine in Paris? Ganelon made a mental note to look into the man’s whereabouts during the Ripper’s heyday.

And here was the paradox. Having failed to palm off their Abigail as a counterfeit Queen Victoria, the Fong-Smythes had set about to convince the English underclass that the real Prince of Wales was an impostor. Over the last ten years they had entangled the popular imagination in their web of lies and insinuations. What could Ganelon do in a mere few days to foil a plot so long in the making?

Then he saw moon-faced Childers standing across the dance floor in his sentry box looking for all the world like the grand-father clock in the third-floor hallway at 18 bis rue Blondin. And suddenly this gave the detective an idea. He went over to Childers and explained what he had learned from the Irregulars.

The man did not seem surprised. “We’ve all heard a few of those stories,” he said with a smile directed, Ganelon was sure, at the credulity of the masses.

Then Ganelon described what the Fong-Smythes had really been up to and the violent social unrest it could provoke when the queen died and a Prince of Wales so many believed to be bogus tried to ascend the throne.