Lyndsay Faye - Dust and Shadow

Holmes leapt to his feet and steepled his fingers before his lips, his countenance frozen but his entire posture vibrating with barely contained energy. “Mr. Dunlevy, the question I am about to pose is of paramount importance. Describe to me, as precisely as possible, Blackstone’s eyes.”

“They were blue, very pale in colour,” Dunlevy faltered, attempting to rearrange his features so that they did not imply my friend was out of his senses.

“Did he seem troubled at all by the light?”

“There was little enough light in the lairs we visited. One bright lamp in the White Swan, I believe. I remember he sat with his back to it, but they never lost their colour. Even in the darkest of the gin shops you could see his pale eyes shining out at you.”

Holmes let out an exclamation of unparalleled delight. Rushing forward, he began to wring Dunlevy’s hand. “I knew you could not have been thrown in our path merely to torment us!” He retrieved his hat and stick and made a theatrical bow. “Dr. Watson, our presence is required elsewhere. Good day to you, Mr. Dunlevy!”

I raced after my friend and caught him up at the corner.

“ Nihil obstat. * It is a great stroke of luck. Stephen Dunlevy has just told us everything we need.”

“I am heartily glad of it.”

Holmes laughed. “I’ll own I was in a bit of a fit this morning, but surely you’ll overlook it if I tell you where we shall find word of Johnny Blackstone.”

“I confess that I cannot imagine any link between a man’s eyesight and his Egyptian exploits.”

“You, like Dunlevy, think the reference to three cobras a relic of foreign wars, then?”

“What else could it possibly mean?”

“As a medical man, the constriction of his pupils even during levels of very low illumination ought to suggest something to you.”

“On the contrary—cobra venom is a neurotoxin working on the muscles of the diaphragm and could have nothing to do with photosensitivity, or indeed any ocular symptom.”

“As usual, my dear fellow, you are both correct and misled.” He whistled stridently for a fortuitous hansom which had just rolled into view. “It will all be clear to you in a few minutes’ time, when I have introduced you to the Three Cobras, possibly the least savoury opium den in the whole of Limehouse.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Narrow Escape

It was not a long journey down Commercial Road from Whitechapel to the tiny dockside realm of Limehouse, but the latter’s total dependence upon all things nautical made it a vastly different topography. Here the carmen were replaced by sailors, the market porters became dockside labourers, and the races as we approached the river grew ever more diverse. As the sun began to set over the lumbering Thames, I glimpsed from the window Welsh dockworkers, African stevedores, and Indian porters, all drifting in the general direction of hearth and home with a stop at the pub and two or three glasses of gin to sustain them on their way.

We turned abruptly onto a street, and all around us Chinese men and women, dressed immaculately in the British style, ducked in and out of shops marked only with the delicate slashes which served as writing in their native land. One young fellow, his pigtail tucked under a neat cloth cap and his fingerless gloves affording slight protection in the chill wind, pushed a child about in a tea leaf box which had been fitted with two front wheels, a back prop, and sanded handles.

Holmes rapped the ceiling of the cab with his stick, and the driver halted before a storefront identifying itself only by a crude picture of a steaming bowl. My friend leapt down with agile enthusiasm, tilting his head to our left toward the dampest, most soot-encrusted archway I’d ever laid eyes on. The businesses on either side, whose commerce I could not even hazard a guess at, boasted broken windowpanes patched with greasy brown paper.

“It’s just this way. Thank you, driver. And now, Watson, we would do best to keep our wits about us.”

Under the arch, we came upon a flight of mossy stone steps which led steeply down, under wooden slats and walls of grim brick, to a grotesque courtyard some three stories below the street at the level of the river. Seven houses sat in a semicircle, all constructed of rotting grey timber. My friend approached the sagging doorframe belonging to one of these and rapped three times.

When the door opened, a stoop-shouldered Chinese man with tufted silver brows and a peculiarly detached expression made a polite bow.

“I wonder, is this the establishment known as the Three Cobras?” Holmes ventured deferentially.

The proprietor, or so I assumed him to be, nodded his head. “There are several berths if you wish to smoke, sirs,” he said in near-perfect English.

“What a stroke of luck,” Holmes smiled.

“I am Mr. Li. Please step this way.”

The outer door opened into a hallway, which after a flight of three steep steps became a narrow passage with beds built into the walls like berths on a ship, six pallets arranged in a rectangular formation on each side of the corridor. One old woman, with eyes set deep as wells and a long braid of lead-grey hair, looked to have just enough life in her to continue smoking the vile substance.

“Holmes, how on earth did you come to know of this pit?” I murmured.

“I make it my business to acquaint myself with a great many particulars,” he whispered.

Mr. Li waved us onward, for the corridor ballooned at its far end into a larger common room with a bed pushed against the wall and grass mats lining the floors. Gauzy hanging strips of tattered cloth, which had no doubt once contributed to an air of mysticism, now hung slick with smoke like the mud-soaked sails of a shipwrecked vessel. I could see other Englishmen in this chamber—two soldiers, lounging with elongated pipes dangling from their limp fingers, and a slack-jawed naval officer, whose hand traced lazy patterns in the thick air above him.

Mr. Li waved us over to a pair of grass pallets cloaked by the decrepit drapery. Holmes indicated we had time only for a four-penny smoke, and Mr. Li retreated to the stove, where a great mound of shredded opium simmered in a sieve set over a pot of shallow water.

“My dear Holmes, assure me that we have no intention of actually smoking this dross,” I mouthed as softly as I could.

“Never fear, Watson,” he returned equally quietly but with a mischievous grin. “You know my taste in self-poisoning to run quite in another direction.”

When Mr. Li had toasted two tiny portions of resinlike amber material and loaded it into pipes, he handed them to us and vanished. Holmes, to my dismay, placed the pipe between his teeth, but I soon saw he merely sought to free his hands and unfasten his watch chain. A gold sovereign dangled from the end of it, a relic of an earlier adventure,* and in a trice he had scooped the smouldering lump out of his pipe, dropped it to the floor, returned the stem to his mouth, and held a hand out for my own. This process he repeated with my pipe, and then he pulled out his pocket handkerchief and methodically restored the Queen’s golden visage to her former spotlessness. Finally, he picked up the cooled pieces with his handkerchief and deposited them in his pocket.

“I fancy that will do the trick. Care for another pipe, Doctor, or shall we call an end to this reconnaissance?”

“The latter, if you have seen all you need.”

“Then let us be on our way. Ah, here is the man I want. May I have a brief word with you?” Holmes asked Mr. Li, heavy-lidded and reserved.

Our host nodded, and we followed him to a side room off the entrance chamber where books and ledgers scribbled with cryptic characters covered the single small table.