Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.

where her sometimes highly irregular comings and goings, at all hours and in odd dress or actual disguise, would not perplex her mother’s staid servants or titled guests.

      The ground floor below, which had been occupied by stables, had become her workrooms, and it contained a study as well as a laboratory where all kinds of odd experiments and investigations were conducted.

      Adjoining Lady Sara’s headquarters were apartments for her employees, including my own residence. Beyond these were carriage houses, stables, and more living quarters for employees. Lady Sara owned a carriage as well as her own private cabs, both hansom and four wheeler, which meant she was always prepared for whatever kind of foray a crisis called for. In addition, there was a cart that could be adapted to various highly useful functions, from impersonating a greengrocer to costermongering.

      She also owned a splendid Spider Phaeton that she favoured for her own daytime excursions because it was a socially acceptable vehicle for a woman to drive. She could take the reins herself and occasion no more severe criticism from her mother’s friends than “There goes Lady Sara being eccentric again.” Once out of their sight, her driving became decidedly unladylike. I often occupied the phaeton’s rear seat garbed as her groom.

      She kept six horses and a donkey, which made it possible for her employees to use several vehicles simultaneously if an investigation, or several investigations, required it.

      Lady Sara had remarked that the case of the two giants might be one for the board. The “board” she referred to was the world’s largest cribbage board. It had been designed by Burke Varnley, her father, a cribbage fanatic from the moment he learned the game as a child until his death.

      The Earl had two passions in life—besides women, his Countess would have quickly added—cribbage and eating. He acquired the latter obsession in Spain at Madrid’s famous Restaurante Botin. That venerable establishment introduced the Earl to many delicacies he was fond of describing in lyrical terms, but its great specialty, and the Earl’s favorite, was cochinillo asado, roast suckling pig.

      When, much later, he learned that the invention of cribbage was ascribed to Sir John Suckling, a seventeenth century poet and cavalier with the army of Charles I, the notion that the inventor of his favourite pastime had the same name as his favorite food came to him as a revelation. He considered it a divine command to merge his two passions.

      He founded the Suckling Club, which offered its members an elaborate roast suckling dinner weekly and access to Sir John Suckling’s game at all hours. Unfortunately, true gourmets rarely proved to be cribbage players. They were more prone to nap after a meal than gather around a board for a challenging session of cribbage, and the club was not a success.

      The Earl invented a six-handed game of cribbage especially for the Suckling Club. It required the enormous cribbage board and three packs of cards. The board had rarely been used because of the difficulty the Earl experienced in assembling six players of the quality he insisted on. Now Lady Sara kept the board in the centre of a large oval conference table in her study, and she used it to peg her progress in her more important investigations. She could keep six cases going at once on it, but she rarely had more than one or two that were sufficiently interesting to merit a place there. The board was more than six feet long and used pegs almost as large as a man’s fingers, and the six tracks, of 121 holes each, looped and entwined to form fantastic patterns. I often wondered how the Earl’s inebriated friends—which, according to his Countess, they frequently were—had accurately pegged their points on that complicated board.

      Because the tracks were so convoluted, Lady Sara referred to them as byways—her Byways to Evil.

      If criminal investigation was an unusual pastime for a noblewoman, so was my presence in Lady Sara’s household. As her principal assistant, I considered myself the most fortunate of mortals. In inventing a profession for herself, she also devised one for me. But first she had to invent me!

      I remember very little of my early childhood. I have read that a baby is born in London every five minutes, and it is only to be expected that most of them arrive in undistinguished homes. It was not quite correct to say I was a street arab—a homeless, unwanted child—from birth. Someone wanted and loved me, and cared for me, and kept me in health until the age of three or so. Then both my parents died. Whether they met death separately or together, from sickness or from an accident, I have no recollection. I find it difficult to believe they simply abandoned the child they had loved and cared for until then. Since I have neither records nor recollections of them, I can only assume they had no relatives or close friends, and their suddenly orphaned child somehow got overlooked. The East End was a crowded place—much more crowded then than now—and there were far too many homeless, parentless children about anyway. One more or less made no difference.

      I must have wandered for a time, desperately seeking food and shelter, and I had the astonishing luck not only to survive but to escape the kind clutches of the various charitable organizations intended to succour children in my situation. Dr. Barnardo’s National Waifs Association would have cared for me and taught me a manual trade—and stultified my imagination. A number of similar organizations that look after homeless children, such as the Orphan Working School, Princess Mary’s Village Homes, the Church of England Association for Befriending Waifs and Strays, or the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage, would have taken me in, but I managed to avoid them. An even worse fate would have been to fall into the hands of charities like the Marine Society, which prepared homeless boys for careers as sailors, or Miss Annie Macpherson’s Home of Industry, which would have trained me and then sent me to Canada for a new start in life.

      Fate guided my steps. I escaped all of the well-intentioned societies and sought refuge in the cattle-shed of an Irish dairyman. He and his wife were childless, kindly people of middle age—poor, of course, but I had never known anyone who wasn’t. They adopted me, jokingly calling me Colin Kine—Colin meaning child or young animal, and kine being their word for cattle. Colin Kine I remained until, long afterward, Lady Sara’s coachman adopted me. The dairyman and his wife had a surname of their own, but it never occurred to me that I had any claim to it.

      I already had my start in life. I was learning the shabby parts of London as few people ever know them.

      When I was eight or nine, my adoptive parents died of a fever, perhaps typhoid. Sickness and death were and are an ever-present reality to the London poor. I was sick myself but survived. Perhaps my foster parents fed and cared for me better than for themselves. The relative who took over their dairy business didn’t like my looks, and I didn’t care for his, so I left. My luck at avoiding well-intentioned charities continued. Simply by surviving in the London streets, I continued to educate myself as though I were deliberately preparing for the career I eventually followed.

      I must have been almost twelve when I met Lady Sara. I had happened onto a crowd of boys tormenting a dog that had been run over by a carriage. When they wouldn’t stop, I attacked the whole group in a fury, even though several were larger than I. In the end, with both eyes blackened and a bloody mouth, I routed all of them.

      Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Bring that boy here.” Her coachman grabbed me and took me to her carriage. She had watched the entire fracas, not intervening until it was over because she wanted to know what the outcome would be. She asked my name.

      “Colin Kine, Ma’am.”

      “Where did you get a name like that?”

      “I useter to look after cows, Ma’am.”

      “It’s the wrong name for you. You deserve something heroic. It takes character to fight a mob over an injured mongrel.”

      She continued to question me. When she found I had no parents and no home, she opened the carriage door. “That won’t do. Come along—I’ll find a place for you.” She was given to such kind impulses, and she always made up her mind quickly.

      She seemed as beautiful as a fairy princess, and the carriage and coachman marked her as fabulously wealthy, but none of that meant anything to me. My mind was still on the dog. I said, “Please, Ma’am, I wants to look after the dog.”

      She