Chapter 6

QUEEN LUDD

1

By the time the two men walked over the flintstone bridge into Ladbroke it was time for luncheon, of which they partook at an inn named The Bell. Service was not prompt, and the landlady confessed that she rarely saw custom from the stagecoach passage. “Usual, sirs, the coach but rattles through,” she announced, as she set two tankards down on the table with such delicacy it seemed she thought the pewter were filigree. “They generally stop at Banbury, as I understand it.”

“The coach broke down, upon the road,” Holmes told her. “We have had to walk here. But tell me, good woman: where might we hire a gig, or failing that two horses, to continue our journey?”

“It might be Farmer Simpson’ll hire you a hoss,” said the woman. “But how would he get it back again?”

“I fear one horse would not suffice. We are two men of substantial stature. Is there no carriage?”

“The coach don’t stop here,” said the woman. “Carts come through.”

“Carts?”

“Taking coke stone to the pottery, most.”

“If we are to ride on a commercial cart, Aster,” said Holmes, “we might as well walk. How long would it take to walk to Oxford, my good lady?”

“Strong step, long legs,” said the lady, eyeing the two of them. “You could be there be nightfall, if you strike out.”

“I propose we take refreshment here, and then set out again. If our progress is slow, we can stop at Banbury – there will surely be a greater chance of conveyance there. But if we manage a better lick we could sleep tonight in Oxford and take the gig from there to Reading, where the railway will transport us the rest of the way.”

“Railway!” said the landlady, dismissively. “They say they’re building a railway-road from Middlemarch, down which those great fire-machines will roll, day and night.”

“They say,” Aster observed, “correctly.”

“It’s not coming down this way,” the woman said, with some emphasis. “I’m glad to say. We don’t need it. The line is running full many miles east of here, methinks.”

“Youthinks right,” said Aster. “Might we have our luncheon?”

“I am fetching it, fetching it,” insisted the woman, settling herself into a chair by the door and wiping her face all over with a handkerchief. “They wouldn’t dare, you see.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Holmes asked.

“Dare what?” asked Aster.

“Dare bring that steel turnpike down these parts. We still have Queen Ludd in this shire– though other portions of the land have given her up. But she scares away the railwaymen, at very least, though she couldn’t stop them making the pottery, and that has scarred the land somewhat. But at least there’s work –work for honest men – in those manufactories.”

“Is there, perhaps, work for an honest tap-woman, here, and now?” Holmes suggested. “As it might be, serving us luncheon?”

“Madam,” said Aster, his temper aroused. “I must inform you that I work for the railway company that is driving its line from Middlemarch down to London, and consider your comments insulting.”

The pot-woman’s eyes grew very wide. “You don’t say!” she exclaimed. “Art come here to run your steel rails through the heart of Ladbroke?”

“No, my dear woman, I am not. The railway runs to London, and London does not lie due south of Middlemarch. The path, as you correctly said, goes east. Your village is quite safe from our depredations. Nonetheless – “

Visibly trembling, the woman rose to her feet. “There’s no vittles,” she declared, in a low and thrumming voice, “for such as the likes of you. I’ll thank you to leave my establishment.”

“My dear woman,” said Holmes, exasperated by this. “Come now: we have walked a long way, and have a long way yet to go. Surely you will not cast us out, upon the highway, with empty bellies?”

“In the name of Ludd,” she said. “Go!”

“Is there, at least, another tavern in town? Might another citizen provide us with sustenance, for honest money?”

“I think, Holmes,” said Aster, “we had best go.”

The two men rose and left the inn, with the landlady following close behind them, informing them that it was Queen Ludd who chased them out, and Queen Ludd who kept the devil train from her door.

“Well,” said Holmes as they set off together. “I suppose we had best put on our liveliest speed, and look to refresh our strength at Banbury.” Aster, his face gloomy, said nothing.

Clearing the town, they began to feel that they were fairly on their way. For a while the road ran through fields and scrubby patches of heathland. Walking on, they found the ground becoming increasingly parched. The chimneys of the pottery rose over the horizon with their stride, like the lady of the lake lifting Excalibur – though a dirty red-black brick Excalibur, and a lake browned and ill-smelling. The two men passed a long suburb of brick houses: workman’s homes, some with patches of garden-ground, where coal dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace. The main body of the pottery manufactory lay heavy on the land to their right as they walked, a great slab of brick, its chimneys supplying rainclouds-worth of black smoke.

They passed now through the very heart of a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass grew, where nothing green lived save only the verdant scum on the surface of the pools which here and there lay idly chilly by the black roadside. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men moved slowly, bringing in baskets of chips, or drawing after themselves barrows of coke. A horse, its head down in dejection, inched a cart heaped with slag and ashes out towards a dumping ground. Holmes first, and then Aster, tied their kerchiefs around their mouths, to filter the choking dust.

The two men walked on, passing another mile or so, until they were again in the open countryside. Downwind of the manufactory the shrubs and trees were sugared with ash and smuts, and grew in stunted and unhappy contortions.

During this passage through the wasteland they had picked up a follower, out of the vicinity of the pottery. Holmes noticed her first, walking half a mile behind them along the same road. But though Holmes and Aster stretched their legs to their full stride, this woman seemed to have no trouble in keeping pace with them.

When the road passed over a stream, the two men took the opportunity to wash their faces and hands, and to drink a little water. They sat on the stonework of the bridge for a little while. “There are many such sites,” Aster observed. “Scars upon the earth.”

Holmes said nothing, but only wrung out his kerchief, which he had rinsed of its dust in the stream.

“You will be surprised, perhaps,” said Aster, “to hear me say so.”

“Why would you think so?”

“Because I work for the railway company, and the construction of railways involves scarring the land. But there is this difference, Mr Holmes: for we seal up the work after we are done, leaving only a rapid and convenient new path for the transportation of people and goods. We are the future, and in the future technology will make the land more efficient and more streamlined.”

“As the landlady at The Bell said,” Holmes pointed out, “not everybody in the world sees it so.”

“I had thought the Luddites all gone and departed, relicts of the days of our fathers,” said Aster. “Tell me, Holmes: what is your background? Where are you from?”

“Hampshire,” said Holmes. “My people have lived there for many generations. Country squires and gentleman farmers. You?”

“I am from no such rooted background. My father, I have reason to believe, was of a good family, but although my mother was provided with an income, after my nameless birth – enough to send me to a good school, and provide me with the educative wherewithal to make my own way in the world – there was never such a sense of rootedness in my childhood.”

Holmes touched his arm. “You have made a place for yourself in the world, Mr Aster, with determination, assiduity and honour. That is all that matters.”

“Not everybody takes so liberal a view of such matters as family, connection, legitimacy,” said Aster. “But, you see, Sir Martin did not care about any of that. He employed me, and took me into his confidence. He treated me, always, as a fellow human being. My loyalty to him is predicated upon this commonality – for he too came from no very distinguished or established bloodline.”

“He was a Jew, I think?” Holmes said. “Of Polish stock?”

“He believed,” said Aster, “that a man should be defined by what he does, and what he makes – the extent to which he makes the world a better place – and not by his family history. What good is a crest won in the wars of the roses nowadays? What does it matter what your great-grandfather achieved, if you yourself do nothing? Sir Martin looked to the future, Mr Holmes, and not to the past. He anticipated a world in which all might have the opportunity to achieve according to their talents.”

“You make him sound,” said Holmes, “almost like a revolutionary.”

“There are many tribes of revolutionary,” said Aster, looking away. “Many want to tear down progress, and prevent change – to revolve, in other words, back into the past. Were we not just talking about those Luddites, who set out to smash machinery and trap humankind in medieval primitivism? They worked towards their own revolution, I suppose. Sir Martin always wanted the wheel of history of turn, to revolve, but forward – forward.”

As if summoned by his words, a tune, and some words roughly-sung, drifted over the land to where the two men were sitting.

Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood

His feats I but little admire

I will sing the Achievements of Honest Queen Ludd

Heroine of all Middleshire

Kind Ludd was to measures of violence unused

Til her suff’rings became so severe

That at last to defend her own Interest she rous’d

And of the great work did prepare.

It was the woman who had been following them along the road, now approaching them, and singing lustily as she did.

She was a person of the lower rank, whose russet kirtle was overlaid with a flowing cotton dress of Middlemarch blue which itself bore a pattern of brown dots, like coffee beans. A red shawl, somewhat ragged, was looped under both arms and tied behind her neck, and upon her head was a black loaf-hat of coarse fabric, itself fastened under her chin with a black ribbon. Instead of stockings she wore breeches, and her shoes were suited to tramping through the countryside rather than the more delicate business of housework. Her clothes, indeed, had been made out of good materials, but this was a long time since and they were but indifferently adjusted and put on. Her size, too, was unusually large; her features swarthy and singularly harsh, and her voice carried a rasp and volume in it. That her chin was supplied with some prominent hairs brought – at least to Holmes’s mind – the line in Macbeth, where Banquo declares of the witches:

You should be women,

And yet your beards forbid me to interpret

That you are so.

“Good afternoon, gentleman both,” said this Amazonian woman. “I have, as you see, caught you up – though you went off at a brisk enough ramble. Almost one might think ye fleeing from some terror behind.”

“Not so, good woman,” said Holmes. “We are only in a hurry to find an inn, hungry for a little refreshment on our travels. Why did you hurry to catch us up? Do you have business with us?”

“Gentlemen,” said the lady, grinning. “Do you not know me?”

“I do not,” said Holmes.

“But you do,” said the lady, turning to the other: “you recognise me, do you not, Charles Aster?”

Aster growled: “I see you are togged-out in the garb of Queen Ludd – like some mummer in a play, for the Luddites are all grown old and have given-up on their frame-breaking and ruination. But I do not see how you know my name.”

“I know both your names, gentlemen,” said the Queen, turning again to Holmes. “And I know much more besides. I know, Mr Vavasour Holmes, that you are making painful slow progress in undoing your trip to Middlemarch. I would urge you to more haste. What will happen in London will not wait for you.”

Aster leapt to his feet. “What is this? Explain yourself! Why have you followed us.”

Queen Ludd seemed unconcerned. “Mr Holmes knows.”

“Madam,” said Holmes, also standing. “I do not.”

“Have you forgotten? It is not twenty-four hours since that you dined with Mr Griffin.”

“What do you know of him?” Holmes demanded. “Griffin – how do you know him? And how do you know I dined with him in Middlemarch?”

“Queen Ludd has her agents everywhere,” said the woman, in a low, chuckling voice. “Come now – have you forgotten our prior meeting?”

Holmes pressed his memory, but nothing emerged. “We have met before?”

Queen Ludd laughed.

“I suggest you do not attempt to threaten us,” said Aster. “For there are two of us, and only one of you. Madam Ludd, or whatever you are calling yourself. Should you assault us you will find yourself overpowered.”

“I think not,” said Queen Ludd. “I am stronger than you may think.”

Holmes stepped forward. “Wait,” he said. “Please, madam. You are alone, and we are two. I will be perfectly frank with you, my memory of the meeting with Griffin is – partial. In truth I hardly remember it at all. I do not know what he was doing there, and, though it sounds a strange note to say so, I do not know what I was doing there either.”

“Do not treat with her, Holmes,” said Aster, urgently. “Can you not see, she is an agent of anarchy?”

“If by anarchy,” laughed Queen Ludd, “you mean revolution, then I gladly accept the title. For revolution is coming, gentlemen. You think the Chartists, and Reformists, the old Luddites and the new Marx-men, can’t cooperate in so important a matter? It will happen here, as it is happening across the whole continent of Europe. The barricades are laid in the streets of Paris. The common folk gather in Italy and Spain. Berlin is filled with the new power of the people. This decade has been a hungry one for the ordinary folk, and ordinary folk will endure it no longer.”

“You come to smash the machines,” said Aster, “as if that will help the poor! It will only immiserate them further.”

“You mistake me for my father, General Ludd,” said the woman. “He thought small – to organise the working people of the countryside to break a frame here, smash a spinning jenny there, intimidate this squire or that landowner. I am not he. Our movement is more ambitious. There is such a thing as a refiner’s fire, gentleman. Not all blazes are mere destruction. We must remake the world. Your old employer, Mr Aster, knew something of that – to tear down the old in order to build the new, and so make the world better.”

“Your words have nothing to do with rebirth,” said Aster, angrily. “You will conjure the mob – inflame the poor and the simple, prompt them all to desperate actions: preach at them in stern language of their wrongs, urge them on to frightful cries and threats – maddened men, armed with sword and firebrand, spurning the tears and prayers of women who would restrain them, rushing forth on errands of terror and destruction, to work no ruin half so surely as their own – for where will they end, except in the field of fire of companies of troopers? How will they end except shot down and cut with sabres, and filling rude coffins to be carried away in rude carts, as orphans cry, and distracted women shriek and follow in their wake?”

“The world is changing, Mr Aster,” said Queen Ludd. “You are right to fear the mob, but wrong to believe they can be dispersed with a little musket fire and a charge of fat troopers on straw-fed nags. Come only to know the mob, sirs, and you’ll find it comprised of regular inkle weavers, as thick as.”

“They say,” said Holmes, “that a mob charged Sir Martin, and beat him to death. Do you believe it?”

Queen Ludd put her head on one side and gave Holmes a shrewd look. “That’s the first cute thing either of you have said.”

“The old man’s death is a mystery,” said Holmes, “which has occupied the attention of many of us. Was Sir Martin’s killing a step on this path – the path to revolution?”

“If Martin Malprelate was slain by a mob,” said Queen Ludd, “it was none of mine. Perhaps a mob came from the future to hold him to accompt. Perhaps the ghosts of the dead came revenant from the past, to take revenge upon him. Why do you think he was killed?”

“I think he was a notable captain of industry, a man of great wealth, director of a prominent railway company,” said Aster. “Such a figure as the mob, in their blind fury, are wont to drag down.”

“And I think he was unlike the other plutocrats of London town,” said Queen Ludd, “in his charitable donations and help to the poor. But you know that, Charles Aster, for you knew him well.”

Aster scowled. But Holmes took another step forward, sensing that answers to the mystery were near at hand. “You have followed us, and addressed us, for a reason Madam. What is it?”

“The revolution is coming, dear sirs,” said Queen Ludd. “You have had some dealings with the King of Carts. He knows it. You dined with Mr Griffin – and he knows it.”

“Griffin is no revolutionary,” exclaimed Holmes.

“Indeed he is not. You know that much, yet you do not know what he is.”

“What is he?” Holmes asked.

“You call me, without politeness Mr Aster, an anarch, a purveyor of chaos. This title better belongs to Griffin. If you do not know what he is, then you must find out, and soon. He deserves to be stopped, and we will stop him.” She hoisted her kirtle and made as if to leave.

“Madam,” said Holmes, taking yet another step forward. “Wait a moment. I was drugged – rendered unconscious, or at any rate left in a mental condition where consecutive rational thought was impossible. I was ported to Middlemarch and there, you say, you – or one of your followers – saw me dine with Griffin. Believe me when I say I do not remember the encounter, or what he said. Believe me when I say I do not know why he might have wanted me transported to that place. Why was Griffin in that town?”

“It is the town of his birth,” said Queen Ludd, simply. “I believe he went to observe the child.”

“The child? His child?”

“Himself,” Queen Ludd said. “And yourself, Mr Holmes.” And with no further leave-talking she was away, walking with great unwomanly strides across the fields, calling back, without turning her huge head: “We are everywhere, Holmes! The uprising is upon us!”

2

Aster was for chasing after the figure, apprehending and if necessary dragging her by main force to Banbury and the police cells. But Holmes prevailed upon his companion to let her go, and to continue their walk.

Aster was not in a mood to talk, and Holmes was content to wrestle with his thoughts, or, rather, with his memory. Presumption number one: Griffin had been behind his abduction (though why? To what end?) Presumption number two: that he had been removed to Middlemarch, from London, spoke to some connection between the two locations – and Sir Martin Malprelate’s railway line was the physical manifestation of precisely such a connection. But how did the elements cohere?

Passing through the village of Watergall, Holmes became aware as he had not been before of the looks the working-man cast at the two walkers: not idly curious, but focused and purposive. There were insolent grins, sarcastic nods. A man in a moleskin jacket and patched trousers was mending a flintstone wall; he lolled out his tongue at them as they went, like an overheated dog. Down Watergall high street they passed a Dame School, its mother-hen clucking her charges out of her cabbage-patch front yard and clipping them with expert gestures as they danced around her. The Dame stopped her herding to stare at Holmes and Aster as they walked by, resuming the business of hurrying the youngsters inside her cottage only when they had gone.

In the countryside again Holmes began to notice that they were, again, being followed, although this time by working men in country clothes and flop-brimmed leather hats. None of these men came close enough for Holmes to hail them, or question their intent, but neither did they lose sight of the two men.

Eventually the road brought them down the long slope towards Banbury. The river Cherwell sputtered over stones and flowed through its deeper channels to their left, cottages and hovels on the far side of the water, and more substantial houses on their right. In amongst fields of winter wheat, the locale was well supplied with rhubarb patches: rose-pink stems and green leaves like elephant ears. The more he looked, the more rhubarb Holmes could see being grown.

The sun was low in the sky by the time their feet hit the metalled road of Banbury High Street, and Holmes proposed they take refreshment before doing anything else. He pointed to a milestone, underneath Banbury Cross: “Oxford is yet away thirty miles – even if we hired the fastest horses we would hardly be in the city before midnight. Perhaps we should break our journey here.”

Aster went to speak in reply, but his voice broke into coughs. He cleared his throat. “You saw those ruffians following us,” he said. “I have no desire to stay longer than I absolutely must – yes, we must eat something, for I am weak with hunger. But let us not loiter.”

They called at the Black Horse, drank from tankards and shared a large pork pie. But rather than invigorating him, Holmes found the fulness of his stomach to be soporific. “It is possible,” he told Aster, tugging on his moustache hairs to keep himself awake, “that my body still suffers the after-effects of the drug – whatever it was – that collapsed my consciousness before.”

“I am disinclined to stay here,” said Aster. “Can you ride?”

“I fear I would fall from the saddle. We could hire a gig, and take turns driving it,” suggested Holmes. “And perhaps, instead of aiming straight at Oxford, we could detour to Bicester? If we are pursued, as you suspect – and if our pursuers have malicious intent – such a destination might throw them off the scent. And we would arrive in Bicester early evening, in time to find lodgings for the night.”

“You heard the Luddite Queen,” said Aster, grimly. “She has people everywhere. I will not feel comfortable until we are back in London, and can recruit the police to our protection.”

“We could approach a magistrate of this town, Aster, if it is protection by the authorities you desire?”

“I would no more trust some tuppence magistrate in a provincial backwater like this than I would trust Queen Ludd herself.”

“Are you certain her followers mean us direct harm? She could have summoned them whilst she and we were in conversation, but did not.”

“Look through the window, Holmes,” Aster instructed. On the far side of the street, lounging against the stone water-trough, were two country-men, dust upon their shoes and breeches. They were chatting and chuckling amongst themselves, showing large mouths with incomplete sets of teeth to the world.

“Perhaps – as with Griffin – they are merely sent to observe us,” said Holmes. “Surveillance rather than assault.”

“You are too trusting, Holmes,” said Aster.

“Perhaps we should split up,” said Holmes, struggling to suppress a yawn. He wanted nothing more than to sleep, and yet he knew he could not. “You continue on to Oxford, and thence to Reading and the railway – or perhaps by stagecoach from Oxford to London. I could stay here and make my way tomorrow.”

Aster looked at him. “No,” he said. “Mr Holmes: it may be that chance has thrown us together – although, recent events have made me doubt my belief in happenstance as mere accident – but thrown together we have been, and I propose we stick together. I do not mind telling you, I feel a bond – a connection. I am used to being shunned, regarded with suspicion and even disdain, known to the world only as Sir Martin’s secretary, and he a man libelled by the whole world, presumed to be a very devil. I do not befriend easily, and am not used to being trusted, or to trust. Yet I feel such things with you.”

“Your confidence does me honour,” replied Holmes. “I, too, feel the mutuality of which you speak. More, I feel that together we have a chance of dissolving away the clouds of unknowing that surround this mystery. Very well: let us not part. I will rouse myself with as much coffee as this establishment may provide, and we shall ride all night if we must, to arrive at Reading by dawn, to catch the earliest railway service into London.”

“Yes,” exclaimed Aster, grasping the other’s hand. “Let us at least try.”

“Tired as I am,” said Holmes, gesturing to the serving boy to bring them coffee, “I do not fear that you and I would have much difficulty in besting those two rural clowns, presently loitering outside the inn.”

“They are but the advance guard, the pickets posted. Once we make our move, I believe an army of Queen Ludd’s will seek to hunt us down.”

“But – seriously? To what end?”

“To prevent us reaching London,” said Aster. “To stop us – perhaps by stopping our mouths forever – from interfering with whatever they have planned.”

“You think they might kill us?”

“I do not know. But I feel sure they will capture us, detain us, perhaps beat us.”

The coffee arrived: manifestly the morning’s brew reheated in a skillet, but welcome for all that. Holmes thanked the serving girl and took a sip. “But this makes no sense, Aster. We don’t know what they do have planned – or indeed whether they have anything planned at all. And if they do: why, how could we stop it?”

“Holmes,” said Aster. “You have observed that we are followed – and spied-upon. Why?”

Holmes stirred sugar into his cup. The teaspoon clinked against the fat porcelain like a tiny clapper striking a muffled bell. “Let us lay out the facts as we know them,” he said. “And more: let us augment such hard facts as may be ineluctable with such supposition or hypothesis as does not stray too far from rationality. Sir Martin Malprelate is dead.”

“Indubitably so.”

“So is my friend Bryde, who was investigating Sir Martin’s murder. There may, or there may not be, a connection between the two things. The story goes that Bryde was trampled by an ox, but I, who witnessed it first hand, cannot reconcile what I saw with such explaining-away. I do not know, exactly, what I saw: but if Bryde’s death was no accident, and was rather the result of a targeted assassination, it is surely possible that the people responsible for Sir Martin’s death intervened to prevent Bryde from reaching the conclusion of his investigation and so unmasking them.”

“Possible, certainly,” said Aster. “Although the hypothesis lacks proof.”

“Yes. Still: the torch, as the phrase goes, having been handed to me – unworthy though I am – events follow which, again, baffle the ratiocinative mind. I am drugged, and my memory and mental capacity is disarranged. In that state I am transported to Middlemarch. Why?”

“We do not know. But it appears to have something to do with Griffin. Or perhaps with the renewed Luddites, the anarchists and revolutionaries Queen Ludd claimed for her cause. Or perhaps both.”

“It is hard to see what Griffin gains by allying himself with revolutionary agitators. From the little I know of him it is clear he has no sympathy with anarchy or Chartism or socialism: on the contrary, he would prefer a world in which he is King of All.”

“King of All is entirely Griffin’s ambition.”

“Well then,” said Holmes. “Here is one hypothesis. Let us say that Sir Martin was killed by a revolutionary mob – in a preliminary to a more concerted uprising. Call it a proof of concept. A test. A group of men rush Sir Martin and beat him to death.”

“That is not what the witnesses reported,” noted Aster.

“Indeed not. So add-in this: the organisers have access to an airborne powder that causes a derangement of sensory perception, visions of something that does not exist – a type, perhaps, of mental delirium tremens. A powder, such as I inhaled.”

“A delusion,” said Aster.

“Hallucination, is Thomas Browne’s word, and it strikes me as apropos. Imagine it: you puff out this dusty drug, and the various folk present at the assassination – the late-working workmen, the passers-by – see a strange phantasy rather than the reality. Not a group attacking and killing a man, but a demonic locomotive steered by the Devil himself.”

“And do they all,” said Aster, “see the same thing? The same demonic locomotive? Even granting the hallucinatory nature of the drug – something to which you yourself can attest, I concede – how could it act the same way upon so many disparate folk?”

“This is indeed a key question.”

“Could it,” Aster pressed, “be in some sense orchestrated by the malefactors? Could they, as stage designers do in the theatre, determine in advance what it is that the witnesses see?”

“I do not see how,” Holmes admitted. “But I have been speculating, since the powder was first cast into my face, or more precisely since my shattered consciousness was able to piece itself back together again – speculating whether there might be a simpler explanation. You know Ockham’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle?”

“I do.”

“So, say this. Posit a group – a dozen people, perhaps: agitators, anarchists, socialists, physical-force Chartists, followers of Queen Ludd, or perhaps of the King of Carts – “

“The two figures perhaps working in concert,” Aster put in.

“Perhaps! But stay with our positing: a dozen fellows, muffled up and masked, so as to avoid inhaling the operative chemicals of the drug they are also dispensing. They rush at Sir Martin as he walks away from the meeting, through the fog and the dark, and beat him to death. As they do so they are observed by another dozen folk, witnesses, who then report to the police, genuinely, what they have seen, as they understand it. But these witnesses have all inhaled the drug. Not as intense a dose as I myself ingested, perhaps: for the man who threw the dust into my face was close and I breathed it full, where we must suppose that the powder was more diffusely dispensed on that night. But each of the twelve got some of the drug, and it was enough to derange their capacity for clear sensation and apprehension.”

“And so?”

“So they report what they saw. But what did they see? Absent the drug, they saw a group of men, masked, carrying torches or lanterns, perhaps pushing a cart of some kind – yelling and hooting. An unexpected sight even for a sober mind to comprehend! Might a mind whose abilities were compromised by the drug not see this knot of mankind, features deformed by the masks they were working, as devils? Might not all of the witnesses interpret this input similarly? Think of Sir Martin’s diabolical reputation…”

At this Aster coloured. “Undeserved reputation,” he insisted. “Say rather, the libels that pursued him. The caricature and distortion.”

“Quite so, quite so,” said Holmes, putting his hand on his fellow’s arm. “But recall we are not talking of truth but only of reputation – of the ill-regard in which the common man held him. These associations, unfairly but undeniably, were widely shared. Consider: an ordinary person, out late, sees something extraordinary: devilish faces, lights, noise, a lone man struck down. Consider the location: for everybody there knew the land had been cleared so that a railway could be laid. Consider the rumours that affixed themselves to Sir Martin himself – undeserved, I hear you, but still. Put these things together. Is it not possible that the various witnesses might not, independently, and without need for a centralising coordinator, reach the same, supernatural conclusion?”

Aster considered this. “Possibly, possibly. But why would these revolutionaries bother with the hallucinatory powder at all? We have seen what has happened in the Continent – in Paris, and Hamburg, in Madrid and Rome. Agitators there simply band together and fight: assassinate and intimidate, throw up barricades in the street.”

“And so I suppose our revolutionaries plan to do here. I am, as I say, assuming that the attack on Sir Martin was by way of being a test. A mob marching up the Mall, looting the Houses of Parliament or breaking into Newgate to free the prisoners within – that would be terrifying enough. But how much more terrifying if those observing these revolutionary agitations saw them not as disaffected labourers and apprentices, not frame-breakers and carters, but as demons and monsters.

“Once on a time,” Holmes went on, “popular unrest had been the disorganised milling of a crowd of disaffected individuals. But with the French Revolution of 1789 it became something much more alarming, something collective, something genuinely terrifying because premised upon Terror. Robespierre’s Terror is the idiom of revolution, my friend. What I am hypothecating here is the augmentation of terror, using the pharmaceutical resources of modernity. Our present-day Robespierre is, I suggest, aiming not just at collective action and violence, but at instilling a more than mortal terror in the hearts of all who observe it. Honest citizens, police, troopers, anyone who could stand against a mob of their fellow men – infect their minds, overwhelm them with phantasms. For who could stand against a swarm of devils come straight from Hell’s mouth?”

“Extraordinary,” murmured Aster.

“As it stands, a mere hypothesis,” Holmes said. “As you noted earlier, I have no proof of this. But revolutionary fires are sweeping across the Continent. We know the tinderbox that our own land has become. It would be irresponsible to do nothing.”

“We must get to London, and alert the authorities,” agreed Aster. “We must contact Bucket, and go further – use such influence as we have to speak to the great men of the land. I will see about hiring, or if necessary buying, horses to carry us.”

“Accordingly we must decide,” Holmes pointed out: “do we ride to Oxford and so on to Reading, to catch the train? Or would it be quicker to ride straight for London from here?”

“The latter is perhaps to be preferred,” said Aster.

“We will ride as quick as ever Dick Turpin rode on Black Bess. He came all the way from York, we are only traversing the Chilterns from Banbury to London.”

“It’s fifty mile and more,” Aster cautioned. “But the sooner we depart the sooner we shall arrive. Holmes – “

“Yes?”

“One more thing, before we rouse ourselves. What about Bryde’s death?”

“I have of course been revolving precisely that matter.”

“Does this hallucinogen perhaps explain the strangeness you reported in your own testimony?”

“I was not conscious of any such effect, at the time,” said Holmes. “Yet the experience when Griffin’s men – if they were Griffin’s men – tossed the powder in my face was unmistakeable. Still, as you suggest: what I saw certainly did approach the vividness and irrationality of a hallucination!”

“It could be that you inadvertently inhaled a smaller dose, and experienced a smaller but still palpable effect?”

“I had just that minute walked out of the Zoological Gardens,” Holmes mused. “A place that contains wild beasts. Then I saw my friend knocked down in front of my eyes, but instead of seeing a man attacking him, or perhaps a carriage running him down, I saw a wild beast.”

“As did others,” Aster noted. “The maddened ox!”

“But those others had not just exited the zoological space,” Holmes said. “What of those others? And who distributed the drug, if drug was indeed dispersed at that scene?”

“Did you not say you saw the King of Carts, on the other side of the road?”

“Bryde said so,” Holmes replied. “Never having met the gentleman, I cannot confirm.”

“Your mind is a machine of great precision and logic,” Aster said, “and you are using it to pry into all the problematic aspects of this hypothesis. But do not ignore the large similarities! Consider the presence of the King of Carts – consider the followers of Queen Ludd now dogging our footsteps – consider the likelihood of a coordinating revolutionary rising, happening soon! And consider, since you invoke Okham’s razor, the respective likelihoods. The witnesses at Sir Martin’s death saw a demonic locomotive. You actually saw a devilish bull stampeding from Hell’s gate.”

“Phantasms,” said Holmes. “Still, I wonder if…”

“Come,” said Aster, getting up. “Hold your wondering-if until we are safely back in London. The Dutch Clock says that it is three hours after noon. Let us go and obtain our transportation.”

3

But obtaining horses proved much harder than either man had anticipated. As they settled their bill and left the inn, the two men who had followed them – on Queen Ludd’s orders, as Aster supposed – peeled away from the wall of the building opposite and followed. Holmes wanted to confront them, but Aster suggested they were poorly placed should matters develop into actual conflict.

They made their way round to the back of the inn, and asked the ostler of that place where might they hire a couple of horses. The ostler was a hirsute-faced man with a spine of hair running down the middle of his head, the way some of the more exotic birds have plumes of elaborate feathers crowing their heads – a feature he augmented by rubbing both hands up the vane of hair to primp it up.

“Amos Kirby runs a stable, over on Wroxton Street,” he said.

They thanked him and made their way thither. They found Amos Kirby himself asleep, on a bench, lying in the thin sunlight of the winter afternoon.

“Mr Kirby? I apologise for waking you,” said Aster. “But we have a pressing need for two horses. We would prefer to hire them, and return them to you within the week, but if necessary we can purchase them outright.”

It took Kirby several moments to gather himself. “Bound to?”

“To London.”

“That’s a moderate distance,” said Kirby. “Too late to start today: come back tomorrow morning, early.” He lay down on his bench and again closed his eyes.

“I’m afraid that won’t serve,” said Holmes, who could see the two Luddite spies loitering by the entrance to the stableyard. “We must leave immediately.”

Kirby sat up and regarded each of them. “A hurry is it? Why so?”

“That is our business,” said Aster, with asperity. “Yours is to take our money, honestly offered, and supply our need. Is that not the business of a stableyard such as this?”

“Tackle too?” said Kirby. “Saddles?”

“We hardly propose to ride bareback into the city!”

“Can’t be done,” said Kirby, lying down again, and closing his eyes.

“My good man,” snapped Aster. “Perhaps you don’t understand the urgency of our need.”

“I understand,” said Kirby, recumbent, and without opening his eyes, “that those two gentleman hanging about by my entrance are attached to you, as a gendarme is to a prisoners. I understand fro whence they come, and have no desire to anger her who sent em. Find your oss elsewhere, sirs.”

Aster’s temper boiled up at this, but Holmes took him aside and endeavoured to calm him.

They made their way back into the centre of town and located the Town Hall. There was no dedicated police station, but they found a mayoral officer and he in turn was able to turn-out the local constable from his home. But though both constable and council officer were sympathetic to Holmes’ and Aster’s story, and both quite believed the reality of Queen Ludd, neither could help. The former suggested Thomas Gulliver, the latter a man called Holdenby, and gave directions; but the same circumstances obtained in both searches. No horses were to be had for any sum, and neither Gulliver nor Holdenby would be drawn into an action they feared would antagonise Queen Ludd.

“This is absurd,” said Aster. “It is now four in the afternoon, and we are no closer to being mounted and away.”

“We are going about this wrong,” said Holmes. “Come.”

Holmes approached a duo of men sitting on the ground with their backs to the wall of a public house. “Gentleman,” he opened. “Would you do me the inestimable honour of permitting me to buy you a drink?”

The duo were suspicious, but for some men thirst will always be a greater force than caution, and Holmes’ insistence moved them from outside to the saloon where they removed the dust from their gullets, as they styled it, with two sixpennorth’s of gin. As the second round of drink was being poured, Holmes confided his requirements to them.

“Do I look,” said the first ruffian, “as though I keep a oss?”

“I will be perfectly frank with you, gentleman,” said Holmes. “Two men, working for Queen Ludd – whom of course you know – are following us, and her name is enough to prevent reputable horse dealers from meeting our needs.”

At this the two ruffians laughed, and the second said, “I should imagine that is so.” His laughter was a long, drawn-out syllable of hoar, each being distinctly repeated as if he were saying the word rather than just guffawing. “Did you akse Kirby? I should think he’d prefer not to get on her highnesses wrong side, hoar, hoar, hoar.”

“My question to you is: imagine yourself in our shoes. What would you do? From where might you obtain two horses, with immediate effect? If you can supply us with such information you will find us grateful.”

The two men looked, each at the other. “Stroud’ll do it,” said the first. “Though he won’t go cheap.”

“And where might we find Mr Stroud?”

“He’s Egyptian,” the second said. “Strikes a sharp deal.”

“But his horses are good?”

“He knows horseflesh like an Egyptian,” said the first. “If you know what you’re buying, he won’t con you.”

“You’ll find him on the Chipping road, away out of town.”

“He fancies hisself a scholar,” said the first. “But you are gentlemen, and know Latin, so that should endear you to him. Only his horses are small.”

“So long as they are large enough to carry us,” said Holmes. “But will he do business? Is he not afeared of the wrath of Queen Ludd?”

“He?” scoffed the second man. “Her jurisdiction don’t extend to Egypt, I think.”

Holmes deposited a sum with the landlord of the inn, and left the two men to the business of consuming it in liquid form. And so he and Aster left, and walked as quickly as they could along the Chipping road. They looked behind themselves often, but did not see the two men following them.

The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached the smallholding of Mr Stroud, and it took them a while to convince him that their money was good. “This banknote, see,” Stroud told Holmes, turning the paper over and over, “is drawn on a Middlemarch bank. And must I travel all that way so as to redeem it? Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest, you know, gentlemen.”

“Here,” said Holmes, writing upon the back of the note, “is my London address. If there is any difficulty in redeeming these notes at Banbury, or Oxford, or any other place at which you might do business, you are you contact me and I will reimburse you, plus twenty percent.”

Stroud considered this, then folded the notes and tucked them away. He took Aster and Holmes round to the back of his establishment and had a boy bring out two horses.

“You are to give me your word as gentlemen,” he said, “that you’ll not use these beasts for hunting.”

“We do not propose to go chasing any foxes,” said Aster, exasperated. “Our business is travel.”

“Your words, mind.”

Holmes swore, and after an ill-tempered pause, so did Aster.

“It’s barbarism and heresy,” Stroud declared. “The fox is nature’s gipsy, and should be left to his own business. Now, will you be riding these beasts far?”

“Where we ride is our business,” Aster declared hotly. But Holmes said: “London.”

Stroud nodded. “My cousin is in Southwark, on Coin Street. If you don’t propose to keep the beasts, go to him and he’ll take them off your hands. They are hardy mounts, though but little to look at. They are what you university gentlemen call multum in parvo.”

The deal having been finalised, Stroud then went through a secondary pantomime of beginning to remove the saddles and tackle, acting surprised when Aster angrily demanded they be left in place. A second deal had to be struck for this equipment, which Holmes purchased at what even he – no horse-trader – understood to be an excessive price. But finally the whole was completed, and a toast drunk (Stroud insisted upon this).

“Is this the London road?” Holmes asked, as the two men mounted-up.

“Bicester – Aylesbury – London town,” said Stroud, unfolding and refolding the banknotes. “And good riding, my sirs.”

Aster and Holmes trotted away. “Were ever such nags purchased for so high a price?” Aster called. “Still, at least we are away.”

“It will be a long night,” said Holmes.

4

They rode briskly south-east, with the sun sinking behind them, drawing the shadows of their horses longer on the road before them, as a glassblower pulls and extends a stretch of hot glass. The air was brisk. The cold blue sky was filled with prim, white clouds whose edges darkened and purpled as the light began to thicken. Down a shallow valley and up the other side, the horses were already starting to pant.

“This does not bode well,” Aster called across, as the two paused at the low summit for their mounts to get their breath back. “We have barely started!”

“I fear we must accelerate,” said Holmes, gesturing behind them.

“Oh no!” said Aster, looking back.

Coming across the lower ground, an unofficial posse comitatus of five riders was making their way towards them. Even at this distance, it was clear to see that two of the riders were the same men who had dogged the steps of Aster and Holmes down the streets of Banbury. Their three companions were not recognisable, but Holmes had no doubt that all five were pursuing them at the behest of Queen Ludd herself.

“Come,” cried Aster, and they spurred their horses.

They rode hard over the brow of the hill, and through the wide woodland that cloaked the downslope on the far side. By the time they emerged into open country again it was dusk. They passed few people: workmen and workwomen making their way home from fields and quarries from foundries – as well as poorer folk returning from the forest clutching their paltry stacks of twigs, with which they planned to heat their hovels as the night closed in. One workman, carrying a great basket on his back filled to the brim with flints, looking like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, doffed his cap as Aster and Holmes rode past. There was something sarcastic, even menacing, in the gesture. Holmes spurred his wheezing horse harder.

“We are surrounded by enemies,” he exclaimed.

“They mean to prevent us from reaching London in time,” called Aster.

As the sky darkened further the few scattered lights of Bicester rose into view. By the time Holmes and Aster reached that town the sky was fully dark. They watered their horses at the town trough, standing in the only street in town to be gaslit.

“We have to get to London,” said Aster. “As soon as possible.”

“Why?” asked Holmes, although he shared Aster’s urgency.

“If only,” said Aster, “because Queen Ludd and her anarchist followers are so eager to prevent us from getting there.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “Yes.”

A few locals opened shutters to look down upon them, but they did not stay long. As the two men remounted, the five pursuing horses came into view at the end of the High Street. “Come on,” urged Aster.

They rode on, as fast as they could encourage their mounts to pass and were soon clear of Bicester and travelling the long road, metalled with loose stones under the hooves, towards Aylesbury. Holmes was no habituated rider, and found the constant motion grating and unpleasant. His thighs, unused to the exercise, chafed and raged. But he pressed on. Aster, evidently a more experienced horseman, rode ahead.

But the five chasing riders were relentless, persistent, to the saddle born. It was only by bullying and repeatedly spurring their own horses that they kept ahead of the pursuit. Holmes, looking back, could see that their pursuers were husbanding their energies. “They do not need to force their mounts,” he muttered to himself. “For their horses are bigger and stronger than ours. All they need do is keep us in view and follow us until we flag – and then take us, in some remote spot far from any human assistance.”

It was not a comfortable thought.

Aster and he galloped through the darkening night. The incessant rhythm of the hooves on the road and the accompanying woodwind of equine puffing and wheezing became the horizon of Holmes’s experiences, altogether. There was nothing but that, and his own exhaustion. The temporary elevation of the coffee he had drunk drained away. He became possessed by utter exhaustion, the debt to be paid of days of extraordinary stress. He was rocked by his ride as a baby is rocked into absolute soporism. He clung to the leather reins and grasped a fat bunch of mane-hair in his right hand, and tried to avoid simply sliding, dead-weight, out of the saddle, in a stupor. But it was very hard, very hard. The stars bumped and jolted above him, the road pounded like a drum beneath him, the clear reality of the world around him receded. It was all a dream.

“Ugh!” he called, for his weight had shifted in the saddle and he had almost fallen. He scrabbled to readjust his seat. “Aster!” he yelled. “Aster, wait!”

But Aster was far ahead of him, and out of earshot.

Holmes struggled on, biting the inside of his cheek to try and keep himself awake. After the cold hour of midnight was past, in spite alike of love and of sorrow, the extreme fatigue which Holmes underwent in the preceding days began to have a deeper effect on him. Every now and then, strong consciousness of the risk of falling from or with his horse roused him to exertion and animation, but ere long his eyes again were dimmed by confused shades of all sorts of mingled colours, the moonlight landscape swam before them, and he was so much overcome with fatigue. They were on the outskirts of Aylesbury, and the elevations and obstacle presented by the Chilterns – standing like a colossal defensive dyke between them and their destination – rose up before them, black against the starry sky.

“Do you need rest?” Aster barked, as the two horses stood gasping and frothing at the bit. The beasts were so sweaty that drips fell like a rainfall from their bodies. “Refreshment? Our pursuers are but a quarter hour behind us. If we stop here, for any length, they will be upon us.”

“I am struggling, my friend,” Holmes returned, slapping his own cheeks with an open hand in an attempt to smarten his wits, to wake himself up. “I drift into sleepfulness, and fear I may simply drop from the saddle.”

“We have miles to go, and our pursuers are at our heels!”

“I know, my friend, I know.”

“We must strike on – up the hill.”

“If our horses survive,” gasped Holmes. “Though I may not.”

But on they went. When at length they reached the town of Tring, at the top of the mount, Holmes’s horse – evidently the weaker of the two – was staggering left and right, and close to collapsing altogether. Aster dismounted briskly and led the two horses, with Holmes atop the other, into the black spaces between the trees. It was a prickly, uncomfortable progress, through a perfect blackness which the moonlight above could not penetrate. They stopped when the horses chanced upon a ditch of water, and drank noisily. Aster hissed angrily at this, since he feared it would give away their location; but soon enough the horses were satiated and simply stood, leaning their rumps against the tree trunks around, and dozing in that upright way in which horses sleep.

Holmes was so exhausted that he was able to curl up amongst the rough brambles at the foot of an oak and sink instantly into deep sleep. He woke, because Aster was kicking him with the toe of his right boot. He had no idea how long had transpired.

“Hsh!” Aster whispered. “They are among the trees, looking for us.”

That woke Holmes. He sat up, and rubbed his face. In the middle distance, the bouncing beams of carried torchlight lit one tree, then another. The murmur of voices, pitched too low and too far off for the specific words to be audible.

Behind Holmes and Aster their horses stood, breathing loudly through their nostrils and occasionally shaking their heads. “The steeds will give us away!” Holmes hissed.

“It is my worry,” agreed Aster.

“Shall we mount and ride away?”

“We cannot ride them through the trees – we would be captured in moments,” whispered Aster. “And if we try to lead them out on foot I fear we would only be signalling our presence.”

“Then what?” The lights, moving through the trees, were coming closer. “Shall we leave the horses and simply slip away?”

“We must, I calculate, be near to Watford. Perhaps we can find sanctuary there.”

“In a church perhaps?” hissed Holmes. “Come now; let us be sensible.” He was, although he did not like to admit it, scared.

“There is a railway,” said Aster. “Of course it is my business to know it… “

One of the two horses coughed, explosively, behind them. It was as loud as a shotgun being discharged. The lantern lights stopped, and then grew in brightness, as their bearers turned them in the direction of Holmes and Aster.

“We must go,” Holmes hissed. “Right now.”

“Let us at least lead the horses with us,” said Aster, going over to his mount and starting to untie the reins, where they were looped around a branch. This was harder to do in the dark.

“Leave the horses,” urged Holmes.

The lights were more prominent now, and the voices of the men carrying them was growing into audibility. They were not attempting to disguise their speech, so confident were they that they had cornered their prey. “Over here,” one said. “See th’steam from their oss’s nostrils glinting in thmoonlight.”

“Come,” hissed Holmes.

“Wait,” returned Aster.

“You there,” a voice came, loud and imperious through the darkness. “Stop where you are.”

“Game’s up,” called another. “You led us a merry chase, genlmen, but now you must stand, and permit us to take you into our custody.”

Aster was making a meal of untying his horse, and his levels of frustration had become elevated. Holmes felt a flush of panic, palpable in his chest, that his friend’s temper would betray him – as it had done before. “Come,” he hissed, reaching out for his arm. But Aster had stepped away from the horse, and was advancing towards the approaching lights.

“You have no authority to detain us,” he boomed. “Cease, desist, retire, or you will face consequences for your illegal pursuit of us.”

This defiance was greeted with coarse laughter. “Aster!” Holmes called, abandoning his attempt at muffling his voice. “Come!”

Then the horse coughed again, only much louder, and – Holmes was momently disoriented – before rather than behind him. But the sound couldn’t have come from that direction, for Holmes’s and Aster’s horses were behind them. The cough was accompanied by a starburst, a firework squib that flared and scattered crumbs of light in an oval. Holmes heard the ball sing past his ear, and felt the splinters fly from the tree behind, where the shot struck, before he quite grasped that one of his pursuers had fired a pistol at them.

“Run!” he called.

And ran.

It was a nightmare progress, sprinting, terrified, through the dark, veering away from the black trunks of trees as they loomed up, in the black night, at the last minute, zigging and zagging until, with a hefty collision, he ran straight into a tree, bounced back, staggered and fell. At once, and despite the pain occasioned by the blow, despite the whining in his ears and the sense that blood was coming from his agonised nose, Holmes scrambled quickly to his feet again. As he did so he was aware – he couldn’t exactly see in the dark, but felt the brush of air as his companion passed – that Aster had passed him and was running ahead.

He started again, this time in a more moderate jog and with his arms in front of him, passing himself hand by hand around the fatter tree trunks as he encountered them. The pursuers, their way lit by lanterns, came on faster and surer. They were gaining ground.

Holmes didn’t know where he was going. The plan – could he still think of a plan? – was to get into Watford and take the train from there. But he was not sure he was going in the right direction. “Aster,” he gasped. “Aster – we must stay together.”

A tree swiped at him, like a giant out of a fairy tale. This was a more glancing blow than the other, and Holmes staggered, span about like a ballerina, and did not quite fall. In his spin, in which he appeared to rotate with bizarre, dreamlike slowness, Holmes saw how close behind him his pursuers were. In a moment, as if illuminated by a flash of lightning, he saw their faces – scarfs around their mouths, hats pulled low, but glinting, wicked eyes. Then, as his rotation continued, he understood the nature of the lightning flash, for one of the men had again fired his pistol. A ruff of light surrounded the circle at the barrel’s end, and the flicker of gunpowder brightness fixed the faces of his assailant upon Holmes’s retina like a daguerreotype.

Holmes was away again. They are trying to kill me, he thought to himself. Those words formed themselves in his mind with perfect distinctness.

Suddenly Holmes was out of the trees. The spaciousness was startling. He was running across an empty frost-filigreed field, beneath a broadcast of stars overhead, the thin moonlight from a sideways arch of crescent moon pasting a meagre light. He looked to his right, and saw Aster. Then to his left and the pursuers burst from the trees, lanterns swinging, tossing shadows like cabers.

The pursuers had emerged some twenty yards further along the open space – it was, Holmes saw, despite the paucity of light, a road.

“Come,” yelled Aster, grabbing Holmes as he ran past.

The two rushed along the road, their feet pounding a tattoo upon the surface below them. Holmes, unused to such exertion, felt the air burn in his lungs as he panted, and his legs cramp and seize. He glanced behind. Their pursuers were closing.

“Aster,” he gasped. “I can’t – we must part – you must get to London with our warning. Revolution! I will detain them as long as possible.”

“Vavasour, no,” gasped Aster.

“There is no time to discuss!” Holmes gasped. He stopped, and leant his hands on his thighs, his body cantilevered forward, as he breathed deep. Aster stopped too, but Holmes barked at him to fly, to fly, and with that he turned to face their pursuers.

He had scarcely recovered his breath but he found he had breath enough to yell. And so he did, as Aster hurried away: a Holmesian battle cry as he launched himself back along the road and directly at the men pursuing them.

His charge, as bold as any brigade’s rushing down an enemy’s redoubt, was short lived. Not a man trained in any of the pugilistic or martial arts, Holmes closed the distance between himself and the men very rapidly and then found himself unsure what to do next. On instinct he grasped at one of the men, hooking his arm round the fellow’s chest and using his momentum to drag him down, as if playing the “rugby” style of football. But the fellow was quite a bit bigger than Holmes, and quite unalarmed at his assault. All that happened was that the man steadied his foothold and Holmes merely jarred himself against the heftier fellow, collapsing to the left and finding himself, winded, gasping for air, on all fours on the road.

“Jonas,” somebody shouted, away to the right and above him, “you attend to that sprat, and we shall chase down tother.”

The next thing that Holmes knew, he was hoisted back to his feet, and his arms were pinioned behind him. He was still struggling with his breathing, and the click of the handcuffs locking resonated through his head.

“Now,” said Jonas, in rough tones. “Will you be a nice and conformable gentleman? Or will I be obliged to knock your loaf with the stock of my pistol.”

“You have,” Holmes gasped, “done me enough violence already, my man.”

From further down the road there came another terrifying detonation: a flash of gunpowder and the crack of a pistol being fired that dinned through the night air. A second shot followed.

Jonas, whose features were underlit and ghastly from the lantern he carried in his left hand, grinned at this. “We’ll take you alive, if we can,” he said. “But will shoot you down like hares if we must, if you insist upon running like hares.”

“Murder!” exclaimed Holmes.

“Tis execution,” retorted Jonas, “as, come the revolution, many of your sort will face. But our mistress will have words with you, before your neck is stretched – and with tother gentleman too, if George hasn’t shot him dead.” Jonas laughed. “And George is a deadeye shot!”

“Your mistress – Queen Ludd – “said Holmes, testing the strength of the restraints that pinned his wrists by stretching and wriggling his arms. It was no good: they were fixed and immobile. “I have already had the pleasure of a conversation with her, my good fellow. I am not in need of a second.”

“The King and Queen of our folk,” growled Jonas, “will determine who they speak to, and when they speak, and you should count yourselves lucky to have their time. Great deeds are afoot, Mr Gentleman. Great deeds that will reform society and take away the parasites and leeches.”

“If Queen Ludd thinks I have anything to do with such affairs, either to assist or impede, she is mistaken. I know nothing! I am nobody. This entire business is – for what else could it be? – mistaken identity.”

Jonas thrust Holmes back a step, and then another. He found himself pressed against the trunk of one of the trees lining the road. Overhead, away to his right, the sky was beginning, very gently, to pale. That at any rate (he told himself) must be the east, and therefore the direction along which he should make his way – if he could only escape this imprisonment – so as to reach Watford.

Not that there was any hope of that.

“You know nothing?” scoffed Jonas. “Walker? You weren’t dining with him, in a Middlemarch hostelry, not twenty-four hours since?”

“Him?”

“Griffin,” Jonas barked. “Insult me with your pretended ignorance, must you? You tell me you don’t know Griffin and I’ll knock your pate. Tell her you don’t know him, and she’ll do much worse.”

“What’s Griffin to her?” Holmes rasped.

“What’s Griffin to her? Same as he is to all who follow our cause, I should think.”

“I do not know the man,” Holmes insisted. “It is true I dined with him – or so it seems, for I do not remember. I have met him, I have spoken with him, but I know nothing about him.”

“The nothing you know will be extracted, as a tooth doctor pulls out a rotten ivory with pliers. Griffin will not thwart us, you can be most assured of that.”

“But,” said Holmes, and stopped.

Something bizarre was happening. As the thin, chill dawn light began to suffuse the sky to the west, whilst the sun was as yet below the horizon, and with the breath exhaled by the two men glinting white with the cold, Holmes saw something. But what he saw was unclear, and made no sense. For a bar – a spar – a club – perhaps a branch fallen from, or wrenched out of, one of the trees, was floating in the middle of the road.

There was just enough light now for Jonas to see Holmes’s face, which is to say to see the direction in which his eyes were pointed. It caused him to look behind himself, and he too saw the floating beam.

“The devil?” he demanded.

Jonas stepped away from Holmes, advancing upon the floating stick. And then the stick flashed, and the end of it connected with Jonas’s forehead. The big man sagged and fell, collapsing onto his side.

Holmes, startled, stepped forward. But the stick that had felled Jonas was lying on the road beside his body, and there was nobody else around.

He looked along the road, but there was no sign of the other men, or of Aster either. Perhaps – he could at least hope – his friend had been fleeter of foot than his pursuers.

Then another bizarre moment: the metal cuffs restraining his arms clicked open and fell to the ground.

Holmes span about, looking in all directions. There was nobody there. A faint chittering sound, that so closely resembled teeth clacking together, diminished and died away.

He was alone in the dim predawn. Rubbing his wrists to restore circulation, Holmes crouched down beside the prone figure of Jonas. The man was breathing still, although his forehead was swollen and cut open and a small quantity of blood had pooled onto the frosty surface of the road.

Holmes stood again. He considered the events that had just passed, and tried to construe them in a way that made rational, scientific sense. Then he considered whether he had suffered another hallucinogenic episode, either as a throwback to his earlier debility, or because of a renewed ingestion of the powdered drug.

At any rate, he could not stay where he was. Holmes set off, at as brisk a walk as his tired legs could manage, down the road in the direction of the south-east. He kept to the edge of the road, thinking to duck in amongst the trees if he encountered trouble. But the road was quite deserted. He could not see what had become of Aster.

As the horizon swelled with cool yellow light, and the ruby winter sun began to haul itself over the edge of the world, Holmes emerged from the woodland. Roads branched off to the left and right, and the main thoroughfare passed down a gentle slope through fields and farmhouses. Smoke flowed thin and slow from chimneys as the households roused themselves for the day. Cows stood, still as statues, crowded together and staring at him.

It was not until the outskirts of Watford that he saw another human being: a woman, swaddled up against the cold, carrying two empty milk pails on a beam across her shoulder, hurrying up the road away from town.

The day itself had fairly started as Holmes entered the northward end of the long High Street that almost entirely defines Watford village. The railway station, a tidy little building made of fresh bricks, and supplied with a letter-box and a telegraph office was just opening its doors. Holmes waited, chafing his hands against the cold, as the station master readied his property for the day. When he was satisfied with his preparations, the man stepped behind the ticket counter and sold Holmes a two shilling single to Euston. The man stared pointedly at Holmes’s scratched-up face, at the scuffs and derangements of his dress, but he took the money and passed across the ticket.

Holmes took a seat in the waiting room, exhausted, baffled, unsure whether ruffians would appear suddenly to prevent him joining the train. No matter how much he tried to make sense of recent events, a coherent and rational account of them refused to come together in his mind.

The noise of the train woke him from what was – he only realised as he woke – a sleep into which he had inadvertently slipped. He leapt to his feet, hurried onto the platform and pulled open the door to the carriage before him. As he clambered up, and hauled the door shut behind him, and settled into the upholstered seat, he saw that he was not alone. It was with the sort of pseudo-logic that occurs in our dreams, and not through any process that made rational, waking sense to Holmes, that he registered the identity of his travelling companion. It was Griffin.