Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,82
him that morning without good reason. Within an hour, a reply came to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes tore open the flimsy blue envelope, read the single line of the message, and looked up.
“Lunch at the Diogenes. One-fifteen precisely. In that case, Watson, it will be a private room. Under the second rule of the club, all conversation is forbidden in the public rooms. No one, not even a member, is permitted to address another except by invitation. You had better remember that.”
It was a curious prospect. As our cab carried us and the leather hatbox towards Westminster, I wondered why men who preferred to avoid contact with the rest of the human race should ever have formed a club. Its inspiration had been the late Sir Cloudsley Clutterbuck, wealthy master of Cloudsley Hall, set in rolling fields between Oxford and Blenheim. He so arranged his life that he rarely saw, let alone spoke to, his footmen or the workers on his estate. Food was delivered to him from the kitchens by a revolving compartment in his dining-room wall. An ingenious system of bells indicated to the servants his precise wants, reducing the need for spoken commands.
The grounds of his park had been surrounded by a wall, six feet high. Village rumours spoke of secret orgies or the rituals of the black mass. But Sir Cloudesley merely wanted walls high enough to keep out huntsmen and riders, for fear that they might kill the wild animals on his estate. These were the only creatures to whom he talked freely and affectionately. In his will, he stipulated that he was to be buried in the grandeur of the family vault, not in a gold-handled coffin but in a plain “Diogenes tub.”
Sir Cloudesley’s Pall Mall club-house was a Grecian-style creation of the 1830s with half a dozen broad steps leading up to plain glass doors. In the high marble-tiled vestibule, Sherlock Holmes carried on a whispered exchange with the attendant porter, to whom he now entrusted the ancient brown leather hatbox, which had accompanied us on our cab ride from Baker Street.
We were led quietly up a further flight beneath a fine glass dome. To one side at the top I glimpsed the dining-room, its dark-red walls lined by oil portraits, no doubt commemorating famous men of silence. The seating consisted of individual tables each with a single chair whose back was to the wall. To avoid so much as an uninvited glance from other diners, every one of these chairs was sheltered within a hood, as though two porters might lift the occupant on poles and carry him off. Every table was also equipped with a reading-stand at its edge, so that throughout the meal the occupant might look across his plate and enjoy in peace the volume or newspaper of his choice. I noticed that the dining-room steward and his assistants glided soundlessly across the marble floor in ornamental felt slippers.
At the end of a first-floor corridor Mycroft Holmes sat alone in a traditional private room. Lunch was laid for three and sunlit windows opened on to the expanse of Horse Guards Parade. Mycroft’s bulk was a challenge no tailor had come to terms with. The crumpled grey flannel of his suit encased him like a bag. Yet the massive head spoke of what Sherlock Holmes described as “Mathematics at Trinity, Cambridge; Classics at Balliol, Oxford; a laudatory first-class degree in both. Dining rights at All Souls. There’s no knowledge but he knows it.”
To all this was added the power of a supreme mandarin with a key to every government secret worth knowing. It was something of an anti-climax when he greeted us with his fork already in the air.
“I trust you will excuse me, dear Brother. Time presses for an afternoon conference with the Attorney-General on the Government of India Bill. I have chosen the stuffed vine-leaves and ordered them on your behalf. Dig in as soon as they come. In what way, gentlemen, did you suppose that I might be of some service to you?”
What an extraordinary pair the two of them were! Had I a brother—alas, I no longer had—surely I would have passed the time of day with him when meeting after several years apart? There was no family greeting whatever here. Mycroft paused just long enough to slide one hand under the table and press a discreet electric bell. In answer to his brother’s inquiry, Sherlock Holmes leant forward and spoke confidentially.