Fiendish Schemes Read Online Free PDF Page A

lost on me, as were those of the interlinked constellation of escapements and ratchet-mounted balances extending through and above the central rotating cylinder. Even the cartridges inside the cylinder were of intricate design; though unable to find a method of removing them for closer inspection, I was still able to peer through a circular lens mounted before the hinge of the cocking hammer and marvel at the exquisite details just as would an entomologist dissecting a scarab beetle beneath a microscope.
    Technically, by letter of the law, the device did not properly belong to me. Years before, at the conclusion of those travails that had once made my name a popular synonym for disaster and iniquity, I had turned over all the creations of my father still in my possession to the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, that august scientific body having pledged to make a complete examination of them, with the hope of benefiting society by a revelation of those secrets that had been my father’s stock-in- trade. In exchange, I had received a not inconsiderable sum of money. It had only been some time later, after the last of the carts laden with the boxes and hammered crates of these treasures had rumbled off to the Society’s Collection of Curiosities, lately relocated from Crane Court, that I discovered the pistol. In gathering up the few sentimental items I wished to take with me in my flight from London, I had accidentally put my elbow through what I had always assumed to be a solid wall in the storeroom of what had been my Clerkenwell watch shop, and before that my father’s shuttered laboratory. After examining the revealed hole more closely, I had soon extracted the pistol, my breath blowing the dust from its surfaces and my sleeve burnishing the metal to its original gleaming.
    While I possessed no more of the virtue of honesty than the average man, thievery was still not a vice that could be attributed to me, likely due to cowardice more than stern morality. Yet even while initiating a communication to the Society’s officers, requesting them to return to the now abandoned shop and claim this last bit of the properties they had purchased, I found myself instead laying down my pen and picking up the heavy, hand-filling device from the desk before me.
    Some magic in its silent gears had lured me, and thus had made the decision, separate from the ratiocinating centers of my brain. It wasn’t thieving, I had reasoned, in that the Royal Society had received more than ample value for their money, carting away a collection that generations of their Newtons and Babbages might analyze and tinker with, before answering all its riddles. What was one more piece to that grand, inexhaustible puzzle? Surely a loving son—or as close to one as I could simulate being—was entitled to one memento of the man whose name I bore.
    Thus I thought, and thus I sealed my fate. . . .
    Which I had unlocked now and weighed in my hands.
    Granted, I had had no notion of suicide at that time, when I had removed myself and my few belongings to that remote rural village, where I had hoped to live unnoticed while enduring the slow ebb of my infamy. My affairs had been in order then, or at least their financial aspect. A stuporous future had been laid out for me, much desired in that regard after all I had endured. But Man—or at least George Dower, it seems—cannot evade his destiny. However innocent of cause I had been in my first ruination, the second one was all the result of my own folly. The thought provided scant satisfaction.
    Now, in this bleak Cornish inn, I raised my father’s pistol and examined it with care greater than that which I had undertaken upon previous occasions. I had made attempts before to fire the thing, aiming it at some bottle placed upon a countryside boulder. Some subtlety in its operation eluded me, though. I had discovered a tiny key that could be withdrawn from a repository in the