The Arcanum Read Free Page A

Arthur—her robust champion—age before her eyes. Now even the natural escape of writing was lost to him. He would sit in his normal spot in the billiards room, in his creaking swivel chair—the birthplace of scores of novels—frozen like a statue, staring at the page. Grief had wrung him dry and Lady Jean feared the strain of it was killing him.
    Now, as Doyle stumbled out onto the patio, he looked frail and drawn. Lady Jean dropped the clippers, and ran to him. “Arthur, what’s wrong?”
    “Duvall was killed by a motorcar last night. At the museum, of all places.”
    Lady Jean took him into her arms, his forehead resting on her shoulder like a child’s. She stroked his hair and kissed his brow, not only out of love, but also so as not to betray her relief. It was not one of their children or immediate loved ones. And, to her, it meant that one of the worst and most frightening chapters of their lives had finally ended.
    Or so she believed . . .

3
    THE FUNERAL CAME and went, a puzzling and pathetic anticlimax to Duvall’s life. The weather was typically English, a cold, steady drizzle leaking from the sky. Doyle knew how Duvall would rage at such a paltry display. The occasion called for hurricanes, tempests to flatten trees. After all, Duvall was the last of the great mystics, a remnant of the Middle Ages. He bore the likeness and courage of a Templar Knight, yet embraced the perversions of an Inquisitor priest. He was as burnt-fingered and secretive as an alchemist, yet spoke dozens of languages, wrote manuscripts in cipher, and traveled the world with different identities, in the tradition of a court spy.
    And now his end was all too depressingly human. It seemed, in the end, that Duvall was just a man.
    Doyle gazed at the other seven mourners lined up along an ivy-covered bridge—luminaries all, though scarcely a fraction of Duvall’s vast network.
    Even now, Doyle shook his head at the breadth of the man’s influence. Duvall was among the most pivotal voices of his time. His friends and confidants had been the elite, not only of Europe, but of the Americas as well. Prime ministers, kings, archbishops, presidents, philosophers, and writers—all considered it necessary proof of their standing to know Konstantin Duvall, and to call him friend.
    And he was still a paradox to Doyle, even throughout the many years of their acquaintance. No newspaper journalist had ever printed his name, he mused. Few publishers—Hearst being the exception—even knew he existed. Yet Duvall reigned supreme in the pantheon of Occult masters, straddling cultures and worlds: ever-present, enigmatic, ageless.
    Doyle took note of a woman wrapped in black standing apart from the others. Her lashes beat like butterfly wings as tears dripped from the curve of her elegant nose. Doyle recognized her as a Spanish princess, and also the wife of one of the richest shipping magnates in Europe. It reminded him of the way women lost their senses in Duvall’s presence. In his lifetime, Duvall had been challenged to eight pistol duels by cuckolded husbands and won them all.
    But beyond the society gossip, the rumors were impossible to confirm, for Duvall was a man who made embellishment too tempting. Indeed, embellished stories of Duvall were the currency of social advancement amongst the European aristocracy. The stories of his international diplomacy were too widespread and inconceivable to be believed, but Doyle knew full well that Duvall was involved in the more crucial decisions of the last half of the nineteenth century, despite showing no allegiance to any one country or king.
    Many feared him. There was a dark side to the stories, not so kind or easily dismissed; tales of political treachery, of spy-craft and assassination. There were even whispers of sorcery and Devil worship.
    Supposedly, Pope Pius IX had placed a secret bounty on Duvall’s head, though some found that to be more an act of self-preservation than of holy writ.
    He