The Revolutions Read Online Free PDF

Sedgley’s lap. “Yes, hello, boy; hello.”
    “Does it seem hasty? Not to me. It seems that the storm was six months of ordinary life in one night. I think that I love him, Esther.”
    “Yes, Gautama, yes; there’s a handsome boy. Josephine, I think I should like to meet this young man.”
    *   *   *
     
    London in general was in something of an excitable mood. The flood of fashionable mourning for the late Duke carried an undercurrent of morbid—frankly paranoid—speculation. Though rivers of ink had been spilled on the subject of the Duke’s death, the cause remained somewhat unclear. He left no heirs or family. Influenza, the doctors said, but this was widely considered an unsatisfactory explanation. A well-known East End medium declared that the spirits had revealed to her that he’d been murdered—she couldn’t say how. She wasn’t the first or the last. Fortune-tellers (who were ten a penny in London) unanimously held the Duke’s death to be a bad omen. The stars were very bad in general for the coming year.
    The police denied foul play. The Duke had been elderly, after all, and frail. Yet rumours persisted. Bombs, a shooting, a poisoning. The body was not displayed. Political motives for the crime—if it was a crime—were hinted at in Parliament, whispered in pubs. The news got out that the police were seeking persons in connection with an investigation; of what, they wouldn’t say. The newspapers recalled the deceased’s various lifelong occult interests, his fraternization with spiritualists and fortune-tellers and practitioners of Eastern religions and—well, you never knew with those sort of people, did you? No doubt the great man had been taken advantage of. A man of his breeding had no defences against the low cunning of common frauds. Was there perhaps blackmail involved, or something worse, something the criminal law didn’t precisely have a word for? High time to shine a light on that netherworld (said the Bishop of Manchester, in a letter to the Times ).
    The Prime Minister spoke in Parliament, calling for calm. The Times criticised the failure of officials to make arrests, and hinted at conspiracy so vaguely and with such discretion that no one was quite sure what they were saying. Some American and Parisian newspapers, less circumspect, called it murder , though they couldn’t get their story straight as to method or suspects or motive.
    A New York newspaper reported that Dr Arthur Conan Doyle had been invited by the police to lend his expertise to their investigation of whatever it was they were investigating, or weren’t investigating. Arthur read it in Mr Borel’s shop one afternoon when he went to call on Josephine.
    “Can you believe that?” His own detective story had fallen by the wayside, rather. Between the Storm and Josephine, he’d spared few thoughts for Dr Syme in recent weeks. Still, he couldn’t deny feeling a certain small pang of jealousy.
    Borel glanced at the headline. “I can believe anything, Mr Shaw.”
    “Well now! Dr Doyle! If that isn’t desperation, I hardly know what is.”
    Borel said nothing.
    Arthur returned the paper to the window. “What do you think, Mr Borel?”
    Borel removed his spectacles and studied them, sighing, as if examining their lenses for imperfections. “Mr Shaw, I have suffered considerable expenses in the storm.”
    “I dare say.”
    “I have borrowed money to make repairs. I did not like to do that. The sum of money that you owe me is now considerable. I do not like to have to remind you.”
    “I know, Mr Borel. I know. But the fact of the matter is I find myself hard up at the moment. The Mammoth owes me money—and the rent must be paid before all else.”
    “We must all pay rent to someone, Mr Shaw. I am sorry.”
    Borel put his spectacles back on and blinked at Arthur as if he were surprised to see him still in the shop. Arthur took this to mean that their conversation about money was over. Borel was a decent