Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

I put a hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of coins-brown and silver, black and copper-green. I stared at the portrait stamped on each of them of our Queen, and felt both patriotic pride and stark dread. I told myself I had once been a military man and a stranger to fear, and I could remember when this had been the plain truth. For a moment I remembered a time when I had been a crack-shot-even, I liked to think, something of a marksman-but my right hand shook as if it were palsied, and the coins jingled and chinked, and I felt only regret.

3. The Palace

AT LONG LAST DOCTOR HENRY JEKYLL IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE GENERAL RELEASE OF THE WORLD-RENOWNED “JEKYLL’S POWDERS” FOR POPULAR CONSUMPTION. NO LONGER THE PROVINCE OF THE PRIVILEGED FEW. RELEASE THE INNER YOU! FOR INNER AND OUTER CLEANLINESS! TOO MANY PEOPLE, BOTH MEN AND WOMEN, SUFFER FROM CONSTIPATION OF THE SOUL! RELIEF IS IMMEDIATE AND CHEAP-WITH JEKYLL’S POWDERS! (AVAILABLE IN VANILLA AND ORIGINAL MENTHOLATUM FORMULATIONS.)

The Queen’s consort, Prince Albert, was a big man with an impressive handlebar mustache and a receding hairline, and he was undeniably and entirely human. He met us in the corridor, nodded to my friend and to me, did not ask us for our names or offer to shake hands.

“The Queen is most upset,” he said. He had an accent. He pronounced his Ss as Zs: Mozt. Upzet. “Franz was one of her favorites. She has so many nephews. But he made her laugh so. You will find the ones who did this to him.”

“I will do my best,” said my friend.

“I have read your monographs,” said Prince Albert. “It was I who told them that you should be consulted. I hope I did right.”

“As do I,” said my friend.

And then the great door was opened, and we were ushered into the darkness and the presence of the Queen.

She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.

Thizsz muzzst be zsolved. The words came from the shadows.

“Indeed, ma’am,” said my friend.

A limb squirmed and pointed at me. Zstepp forward.

I wanted to walk. My legs would not move.

My friend came to my rescue then. He took me by the elbow and walked me toward Her Majesty.

Isz not to be afraid. Isz to be worthy. Isz to be a companion. That was what she said to me. Her voice was a very sweet contralto, with a distant buzz. Then the limb uncoiled and extended, and she touched my shoulder. There was a moment, but only a moment, of a pain deeper and more profound than anything I have ever experienced, and then it was replaced by a pervasive sense of well-being. I could feel the muscles in my shoulder relax, and, for the first time since Afghanistan, I was free from pain.

Then my friend walked forward. Victoria spoke to him, yet I could not hear her words; I wondered if they went, somehow, directly from her mind to his, if this was the Queen’s Counsel I had read about in the histories. He replied aloud.

“Certainly, ma’am. I can tell you that there were two other men with your nephew in that room in Shoreditch, that night. The footprints were, although obscured, unmistakable.” And then, “Yes. I understand… I believe so… Yes.”

He was quiet when we left the palace, and said nothing to me as we rode back to Baker Street.

It was dark already. I wondered how long we had spent in the palace.

Fingers of sooty fog twined across the road and the sky.

Upon our return to Baker Street, in the looking-glass of my room, I observed that the frog-white skin across my shoulder had taken on a pinkish tinge. I hoped that I was not imagining it, that it was not merely the moonlight through the window.

4. The Performance

LIVER COMPLAINTS?! BILIOUS ATTACKS?! NEURASTHENIC DISTURBANCES?! QUINSY?! ARTHRITIS?! THESE ARE JUST A HANDFUL OF THE COMPLAINTS FOR WHICH A PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATION CAN BE THE REMEDY. IN OUR OFFICES WE HAVE SHEAVES OF TESTIMONIALS WHICH CAN BE INSPECTED BY THE PUBLIC AT ANY TIME. DO NOT PUT YOUR HEALTH IN THE HANDS OF AMATEURS!! WE HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A VERY LONG TIME: V. TEPES-PROFESSIONAL EXSANGUINATOR. (REMEMBER! IT IS PRONOUNCED TZSEPPESH!) ROMANIA, PARIS, LONDON, WHITBY. YOU’VE TRIED THE REST-NOW TRY THE BEST!!

That my friend was a master of disguise should have come as no surprise to me, yet surprise me it did. Over the next ten days a strange assortment of characters came in through our door in Baker Street-an elderly Chinese man, a young roue, a fat, red-haired woman of whose former profession there could be little doubt, and a venerable old buffer, his foot swollen and bandaged from gout. Each of them would walk into my friend’s room, and, with a speed that would have done justice to a music-hall “quick-change artist,” my friend would walk out.