J. Campbell - Gaslight Arcanum - Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

To scare each other, criminals told stories about Don Rafaele. You can imagine how they run. It is said that when a devoted lieutenant thoughtlessly spit out a cigar-end in church on a saint’s day, the pious Don had him strangled with his only son’s entrails. He took his culture seriously, too, and had a sense of humour. When a critic ridiculed the performance of Don Rafaele’s current inamorata as the Duchess Hélène in I Vespri Siciliani , the man wound up with his ears cut off and a donkey’s nailed onto his head in their place. I was surprised to learn this monster had a mama. If it were a matter of keeping his word, Don Rafaele would personally sink the old biddy in the Bay of Naples.

“What about Item Six?” chipped Carne.

“The Eye of Balor,” said Moriarty. “A gold coin, named for a giant of Irish mythology, reputed to have been taken from a leprechaun’s pot … lately the ‘lucky piece’ of ‘Dynamite’ Desmond Mountmain, General-in-Chief of the Irish Republican Invincibles. Which brought him only poor luck, since last week an infernal device of his own manufacture went off in his face when he thumped the table too hard at a meeting of his Inner Council of Immortals.”

I told you Ireland would come into it.

“The Eye of Balor is currently among Mountmain’s effects, in the possession of the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard. Half a dozen sons and cousins and brothers would like to obtain the coin. It’s said that, if ‘the Wee Folk’ approve, the owner will ascend to the office of Mage-King of Ireland. Whatever that means. The chief contestant for the position is Desmond’s son, Tyrone.”

That was foul news. Another ‘romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement’. Your paddy bomber is a mite more concerned with his own individual skin than your wog throttler or guido knifeman, though too hot-headed as a rule to preserve it. Dynamite Des wasn’t the first Fenian to blow himself up with his own blasting powder.

Tyrone Mountmain, the heir-apparent, figured high on my list of people I hoped never to meet again.

So, now we had to worry about brown priests and marauding Mi-Go, the Hoxton Creeper, Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, the Knights Templar, the Naples Mob, the little people and the bloody Fenians! It was a wonder Malvoisin’s Mirror, the Monkey’s Paw, Cap’n Flint’s treasure and Sir Michael Sinclair’s Door were off the ‘shopping list’.

How cursed did Professor Moriarty want to be by the end of the week?

VII

Recall my remarks, in re: nuisance value attendant on one little murder carried out in the service of a trade union?

Ask anyone who knows us (and is still in a position to talk) and you’ll be told we are a mercenary concern. We kill anyone, of whatever political stripe or social standing. For a price. It’s not true that money is all that interests us. The thrill of the chase is involved. If nothing else is on, I’d cheerfully pot someone or steal something just to keep my hand in. Moriarty claims pure intellectual interest in the problem at hand and can be inveigled into an enterprise if it strikes him as out of the ordinary. I believe he feels pepper in the blood too, in the planning, if not the execution. The moment of clear thrill which burns cold — as a perfect shot brings down a tiger or an Archduke — is the closest I can get to the fireworks which whoosh off in the Prof’s brain when his reptile head stops oscillating … and he suddenly knows how an impossible trick can be brought off.

We have no Cause but ourselves. We have no politics. We have no religion. I believe in Sensation. Moriarty believes in Sums. That’s about as deep as it needs run.

It was an irritant when the misconception set in that we were in sympathy with the working man. That inconvenience was as nothing beside the notion that fellows with names like Moriarty or Moran must support Irish Independence.

From time to time — usually when an American millionaire who’d never set foot on the isle of his ancestors for fear of being robbed by long-lost cousins decided to fund the Struggle — one or other of the many branches of Fenianism secured our temporary services. If Desmond Mountmain weren’t so all-fired certain he could handle his own bomb-making, he might have been buried in one piece. It takes a more precise touch to blow the door off a strong-room than the medals off a Chief Constable. Dynamiters on our books have names like ‘Steady Hands’ Crenshaw, not ‘Shaky’ Brannigan.

As a rule, Irish petitioners were much more trouble than they were worth.

Over the years, half-a-dozen proud rebels had tried to enlist us on the never-never in fantastic schemes of insurrection. You could separate the confidence men from the real patriots because simple crooks venture sensible-sounding endeavours like stealing cases of rifles from the Woolwich Arsenal. Genuine Irish revolutionaries run to crackpottery like deploying an especially-made submarine warship (the Fenian Ram ) to overthrow British rule in Canada. We decided against throwing in with that and you can look up how well it turned out. Canada is still in the Empire, last I paid attention, though I’ve no idea why. The place has nothing worth shooting (unless you count Inuit and sasquatch which, at that, I might) and boasts fifty thousand trees to every woman.

When a bold Fenian’s proposal of an alliance — with our end of it providing the funds — is rejected, he acts exactly like a music hall mick refused credit for drink. Hearty, exploitative friendliness curdles into wheedling desperation then turns into dark threats of dire vengeance. Always, there’s an appeal to us as ‘fellow Irishmen’. If the Prof or I have family connections in John Bull’s Other Island, we’d rather not hear from them. We’ve sufficient unpleasant English relatives to be getting on with. I thought pater and the unmarriageable sisters a shabby lot till I ran into Moriarty’s intolerable brothers, which is a story for another day.

It is possible the Professor is a distant cousin of Bishop Moriarty of Kerry, though rebels know better than to raise that connection. The Bishop — in one of the rare sensible utterances of a churchman I can recall — declared ‘when we look down into the fathomless depth of this infamy of the heads of the Fenian conspiracy, we must acknowledge that eternity is not long enough, nor hell hot enough to punish such miscreants’. Far be it from me to agree with anything said in a pulpit, but the Bish was not far wrong.

So: Tyrone Mountmain.

Here’s why he wasn’t at the meeting of the Inner Council of Immortals of the Irish Republican Invincibles which ended with a bang … he was the only man in living memory to devote himself with equal passion to the causes of Irish Home Rule and Temperance. A paddy intolerant of strong drink is as common as a politician averse to robbing the public purse or a goose looking forward to Christmas. An Irishman who goes around smashing up bottles and barrels has few comrades and fewer friends. If he weren’t a six-foot rugby forward and bare-knuckle boxer, I dare say Tyrone wouldn’t have lasted beyond his first crusade, but he was and he had. His dear old Da, whose favoured tipple was scarcely less potent than the dynamite which did for him, could not abide a tee-totaller in his home and exiled his own son from the Invincibles. They had a three-day donnybrook about it, cuffing each other’s hard heads up and down Aungier Street while onlookers placed bets on the outcome.

After the fight, Tyrone quit the Irish Republican Invincibles and founded the Irish Invincible Republicans. He attracted no followers except for his demented aunt Sophonisiba, who advocated the health-giving properties of drinking from her own chamber-pot, the tithing of two pennies in every shilling to establish an Irish Expedition to the Planet Mercury and (most ridiculous of all) votes for women. Tyrone promulgated a plan for bringing Britain to its knees by dynamiting public houses. The Fenian Brigades would never countenance such a sacrilegiously un-Irish notion. With Desmond dead, Tyrone rallied the unexploded remnants of the I. R. I. and folded them into the I. I. R. Claiming Aunt Soph was in touch with his Da on the ethereal plane, Tyrone relayed the story that if Dynamite Des hadn’t been so annoyed at a wave of recent arrests made by the Special Irish Branch he wouldn’t have hit the table so hard. That made Desmond a martyr to the Cause. Tyrone declared war on the S. I. B. As has been said about any number of conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War and the Gladstone-Disraeli feud, it’s a shame they can’t both lose.