The next morning, London stirred slowly awake in a shroud of damp, grey mist.
The sun had not yet fully torn itself free of the horizon. Pale, ashen light filtered through the fog, tracing the city's silhouette in soft, indistinct lines.
The streets were still quiet. Only the occasional bright ring of a milkman's bicycle bell broke the silence.
That tranquillity did not last.
It was shattered, soon enough, by a chorus of sharp, feverish cries.
"Extra! Extra!"
"The Times — latest headlines! Phantom Thief Moriarty announces a performance preview!"
"The Guardian front page — five days from now, a grand spectacle is about to begin!"
"The Morning Post! The Daily Telegraph! Every paper in the city is running the same story! Come and read all about it!"
The paperboys swarmed out from every corner of Fleet Street like sparrows bursting from the nest. They brandished their papers — still warm with the smell of fresh ink — and screamed themselves hoarse, carrying that one name, the name capable of sending the whole city into a frenzy, down every last street and alleyway.
— Moriarty!
One stone had cast a thousand ripples.
The shopkeepers just throwing open their doors for the morning trade, the housewives setting out with their baskets for the market, the labourers hurrying off to the factories — every single one of them, the instant that name reached their ears, stopped dead in their tracks.
People poured out of their homes and pressed in around the paperboys, trading a penny, two pennies, for their copy of the script that would be on every tongue in the city before the day was out.
"Good Lord, it's real — look, the front page of The Times!"
"The Guardian too! My God, even the layout is identical!"
"Five days from now... a grand spectacle... what does he mean? What is he going to do?"
"Who knows — but it's bound to be quite a show!"
The crowd thickened, and the hushed whispers, the gasps, the barely-suppressed excitement — all of it merged like countless small streams rushing together, swelling rapidly into a torrent that swept through the entire city.
Panic and anticipation — two utterly contradictory emotions — wove themselves together in that moment with perfect, seamless tension, becoming an invisible net cast over the whole of London.
221B Baker Street.
Russell was woken by the commotion rising from the street below.
He hauled himself slowly upright, padded to the window, and drew back a corner of the curtain to survey the scene below — the mild chaos of it — with the unhurried ease of a man who had been expecting exactly this.
Good. The reaction was even more enthusiastic than he'd anticipated.
He gave a satisfied nod, then turned and headed to the bathroom to wash up.
By the time Russell wandered downstairs, yawning, Mrs. Hudson was already waiting with a cup of black tea, a newspaper set out on the table beside it.
"You're up earlier than usual today, Russell."
"Hard to sleep through all that noise." Russell smiled, then picked up the paper.
Mrs. Hudson was a Times reader, naturally, so it was The Times she had bought.
The paper had gone ahead and planted the announcement letter he'd written directly on the front page, bold and unsubtle, under a headline in the heaviest typeface they had.
"Gabriel's trumpet," he muttered to himself, with a slightly self-deprecating smile at the overwrought comparison.
"I only hope it doesn't cause any real trouble," Mrs. Hudson sighed.
Russell gave a noncommittal shrug, swallowed the last of his toast, and turned to pull on his overcoat.
"I'm popping out for a bit, Mrs. Hudson. Going to pick up a few more papers."
"Do be careful, dear."
"Don't worry."
Russell pushed open the door and stepped out into the clamour of the crowd.
He didn't rush to buy the papers straight away. Instead he strolled along the street with his hands in his pockets, unhurried, just another face in the morning throng.
He stopped in front of a paperboy, fished a few pennies from his pocket, and bought one copy of every major paper currently on sale.
Cradling the thick stack against his chest, he turned to head back to Baker Street.
And it was at that precise moment that the System's notification chime sounded in his mind.
Upon seeing the newspapers, a great many members of the nobility — Hansen Boule among them — had been seized, almost simultaneously, by a wave of panic.
Russell's stride faltered almost imperceptibly, and the corner of his mouth curved upward of its own accord.
The fun was about to begin.
When Russell returned to 221B with his armful of papers, Charlotte was already installed in the armchair in the sitting room.
She sat there quietly, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, Mrs. Hudson's copy of The Times pinched in the other.
"Morning," Russell said, dropping the stack of papers onto the coffee table with a satisfying thud.
Charlotte glanced up at the sound. Her gaze travelled across the pile of papers — every front page, in near-identical typeface and headlines, trumpeting the same event.
"A theatrical stunt," she said, crisply and without preamble. "Overwrought, populist, entirely without originality. A waste of money."
"It was only a few pennies," Russell said, pulling over a chair and sitting down, picking up one of the papers idly.
"And evidently the public is lapping it up."
"The masses are invariably susceptible to this sort of thing." Charlotte took a sip of her coffee.
"They let themselves be dazzled by the surface, forever chasing spectacle and theatrics, and never stop to consider what lies behind them."
"And have you considered it, great detective?" Russell asked, smiling. "Why has our Phantom Thief gone to all this trouble?"
"It's quite simple." Charlotte set down her coffee cup. "He wants to generate panic."
"Rather self-evident," Russell agreed with an obliging nod. "And the motive behind that?"
"Who can say. Perhaps it's simply a surplus of performative impulse with nowhere else to go." Charlotte's tone was dismissive.
"Speculating about that man's motivations is a pointless exercise — and a considerable waste of mental energy."
"I'd have to agree," Russell said, without particular conviction.
He finished the last of the breakfast he'd brought in, stood up, and made for the door.
"Mrs. Hudson — I'm off to school."
"Mind how you go, dear."
After leaving Baker Street, Russell took the tram to Imperial College.
The moment he walked through the gates, he could see students on all sides with papers in their hands, chattering away with great animation.
The name "Moriarty" surfaced every now and then from some passing student, drifting into Russell's ear.
Russell walked the path to his classroom and watched the expressions on their faces with quiet interest.
Excitement and curiosity were the dominant notes. Underneath those, a thread of unease at the unknown, and the faint shadow of worry.
He even spotted several familiar faces in the crowd — Anne Brown, Isabella White — gathered with a few friends, murmuring among themselves, the disdain they'd previously worn for Timmy Roy apparently supplanted, for now, by curiosity about Moriarty.
When he walked into the lecture hall, the room that ought to have been sitting in quiet anticipation of the professor was, instead, buzzing like a fashionable salon.
Nearly everyone had a paper in hand, huddled in twos and threes, swapping theories with animated enthusiasm.
Some speculated that Moriarty's next target was a powerful figure in Parliament; others guessed a ruthless commercial magnate. Still others marvelled at his audacity, or denounced his appropriation of public resources.
Listening to it all, Russell found he could roughly sort the room into two camps.
Those who inclined toward Moriarty tended to come from middling backgrounds — comfortably off, or modestly so.
Those who opposed him, or condemned him outright, tended toward the aristocratic and the politically connected.
The two groups ran parallel, like two rivers that would never meet — each flowing in its own course, neither crossing into the other.
Russell paid none of it any mind and walked straight to his usual spot.
The morning sunlight had already warmed the seat for him. He settled into it lazily, dropped the stack of papers on the desk, then folded his arms and put his head down, intending to squeeze in a few more minutes of sleep before class.
It was then that the familiar scent reached him — a blend of white tea and ink, arriving precisely on cue.
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