A Drug on the Market

KIM NEWMAN

Had my first London enterprise met with a lesser success, Leo Dare would not have invited me to join the consortium; and had it met with a greater, I should not have accepted his invitation.

However, response to the patent Galvanic Girdle, an electrical aid to weight reduction, merely shaded towards the positive end of indifference. After the craze for such sparking yet health-giving devices in my own native United States, this came as a disappointment. My British partners in the endeavour preferred to make known the virtues of the marvellous modern invention through public demonstration, with testimonials from newly slender ‘Yankee’ worthies, rather than incur the apparent expense of taking advertising space by the yard in the illustrated press. This was a sorry mistake: our initial penuriousness served to alienate the proprietors of those organs. The ‘papers took to running news items about the nasty shocks suffered by galvanised ladies of a certain age through overuse or misapplication of our battery-belt. In brief, the Fourth Estate was set against us rather than in our corner. The grand adventure of ‘slenderness - through electrocution!’ - the slogan was my own contribution to the enterprise - was frankly sluggish and slowing to a halt. I foresaw a lengthy struggle towards profitability, with the prospect of a smash always a shadow to the promise of rich dividends. I was not looking to get out - the example of New York proved that the trick could be done, and the odd singed spinster would be easy to set aside with a proper advertising campaign - but when the third post of a Tuesday brought a card from Leo Dare, requesting my presence at the birth of a consortium, my interest was pricked.

The public does not know his name, but Leo Dare is an Alexander of the market-place, a hero and an example among the enterprising. Unlike many of his apparent peers, he endows no museums or galleries, seeks no title or honour and erects no statues to himself. He is not caricatured in Punch, quoted in sermons or travestied in the works of lady novelists. He has simply made, risked, lost and regained fortunes beyond human understanding. In ‘82, Leo Dare cornered quap - an unpleasantly textured, slightly luminescent, West African mud which is the world’s major source of elements vital to the manufacture of filaments essential in the (then-uninvented) incandescent lamp. Great quantities of the radioactive stuff sat in warehouse bins for years, as rivals joked that the sharp fellow had been blunted at last. A succession of night-watchmen succumbed to mystery ailments, giving rise to legends of ‘the curse of the voo-doo’ and of witch-doctors conjuring doom for those who stole ‘the sacred dirt’. Then, thanks to Mr Thomas Alva Edison, control of quap became very desirable indeed and Leo Dare, clearly the reverse of cursed, cashed out in style. In ‘91, he introduced pneumatic bicycle tyres and obliterated overnight the market for solid rubber. Not only do pneumatic tyres offer a more pleasant, less guts-scrambling bicycling experience but they are prone to puncture and wearing-out, necessitating frequent purchase of replacements and creating an ancillary demand for repair equipment, patches and pumps - in all of which our Alexander naturally took an interest.

The particular genius of Leo Dare, that quality which those ‘in the know’ aptly call ‘Dare-ing’, is not in discovery or invention - for canny minds are at his beck and call to handle those tasks - but in the conversion through enterprise of intellect into affluence. The old saw has it that if ‘you build a better mouse-trap, the world will beat a path to your door’. In these distracting times, the world has other things on its mind than keeping apace with the latest rodent-apprehension patents, and any major advance in the field has to be brought forcibly to its attention. Even then, Better Mouse Trap must compete with inferior snares that have an established following, or lobby successfully for a Royal Seal of Approval, or are simply blessed with a more ‘catching’ name. Better Mouse Trap, Ltd. will find itself in the care of the receivers if its finely manufactured products are placed in stores beside a less worthy effort retailing at 2d cheaper under the name of Best Mouse Trap. Leo Dare could make a fine old go of Better Mouse Trap, but if he had the rights to Worse Mouse Trap, he would represent it as Best Mouse Trap of All, emblazon the box with a two-coloured illustration of an evil-looking mouse surprised by a guillotine, undercut Best Mouse Trap by ½d and put both his competitors out of business within the year. Snap! Snap! Snap! That is Leo Dare.

* * * *

‘This is Mr William Quinn,’ said Leo Dare, introducing me to the three gentlemen and one lady cosied in armchairs and on a sofa in a private room above a fashionable restaurant in Piccadilly. ‘As you can tell from the stripe of Billy’s suit, he’s one of our transatlantic cousins. A veritable wild Red Indian among us. He’ll be looking after our advertising.’

From the looks on the faces of those assembled, I did not impress them overmuch. As a member of a comparatively new-fangled profession, I was accustomed to glances of suspicion from those whose business forefathers had managed perfectly well in a slower, smaller world without stooping to plaster their names on the sides of London omnibuses. Come to that, they had managed quite well enough without omnibuses. Our host, who had no such delusions, spoke as if I was already aboard the consortium.

It is a peculiarity of Leo Dare that he has no premises of his own. Concerns in which he takes a controlling interest might lease or purchase offices, factories, yards, warehouses, firms of carters and distributors, even railroad trains and cars. He himself resides in hotel suites and has, as the courts would say, no fixed address. It is his practice to engage rooms temporarily for specific purposes. This well-appointed salon, with waiters and attendants firmly shut outside, was the destined birthplace of our fresh venture.

Leo Dare is one of those fellows you can’t help looking at, but would be hard-put to describe. In middle years, trim, of average stature, cleanshaven, sly-eyed, impeccably dressed but not ostentatious, he has that sense of command one finds in the best, if least-decorated, generals and statesmen. He alone was standing, back to a fireplace in which a genial blaze burned, one hand behind him, one holding a small glass of what I took to be port.

‘Quinn, meet the rest of the consortium,’ said Leo Dare. ‘This is Enid, Lady Knowe, the philanthropist. You’ll have heard of her many charitable activities, and of course be familiar with her family name. Her late father was Knowe’s Black Biscuits.’

‘ “An Ounce of Charcoal is a Pound of Comfort”,’ I quoted.

Lady Knowe, a thin-faced young woman dressed like an eighty-year-old widow, winced. I tumbled at once that she didn’t care to be reminded that the funds for her philanthropy came from a species of peaty-looking (and -tasting) edible brick. Knowe’s Blacks were dreaded by children entrusted to nannies who believed (or maliciously pretended to believe) their consumption was good for digestion.

‘Sir Marmaduke Collynge, the distinguished Parliamentarian . . .’

A beef-checked man in clothes too small for him, Sir Marmaduke seemed to be swelling all through our meeting, indeed all through our acquaintance, as if the room were far too hot for him and he had just enjoyed an enormous meal unaugmented by Knowe’s Black Biscuits. He grunted a cheery greeting.

‘Hugo Varrable, our research chemist. . .’

A young fellow of about my age, with long hair, a horse face and stained hands, Dr Varrable sat with a leather satchel on his lap. The chemist prized his satchel, which was stuffed to bulging with what I assumed were formulae and vials of experimental compounds.

‘And Richard Enfield, administrator of the estate of the late lawyer, Gabriel Utterson.’

A well-dressed gadabout, no longer young, Mr Enfield had the high colour of a man who has spent as little time in his rainy, foggy homeland as possible. He gave a noncommittal, very English wave.

‘Does the name “Utterson” mean anything to you, Quinn?’ Leo Dare asked.

I confessed that it did not. Leo Dare seemed pleased.

‘What about the name of Jekyll? Dr Henry Jekyll?’

‘Or Hyde?’ suggested Varrable, glumly.

Of course I knew the story. A few seasons back, even the New York ‘papers were full of little else.

‘Dr Jekyll was the scientifical fellow who brewed the potion that turned him into another man entirely,’ I said. ‘The dreadful murderer, Edward Hyde.’

‘Capital. You did follow the story.’

I shrugged.

‘But, Quinn, did you believe? Do you credit that a dried-out elderly stick might, by the consumption of a chemical elixir, be transmogrified into a thriving young buck? That he might undergo a radical metamorphosis of mind and body, shucking off the respectable front of Jekyll to indulge in the licentiousness of Hyde?’

I laughed, a little nervously. My humour was not shared by anyone in the room.

‘Well, Quinn. Speak up.’

‘Mr Dare, I read the published accounts of the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I even saw the Mansfield company’s stage dramatisation in New York, with startling theatre trickery. Knowing something of the workings of the newspaper business, I have assumed the matter blown up out of all proportion. Surely, this Jekyll simply took a drug that unseated his wits and used disguise to live a double life. He cheated the gallows by suicide, I believe.’

‘They were two men,’ said Mr Enfield. ‘I knew them both.’

‘I bow to personal experience,’ I said, still not fathoming the import of all this.

‘Do you not see the opportunity created by our control of the Jekyll estate and by the notoriety of his case?’

‘You know that I do not. But I have a strong suspicion that you do. You, after all, are Leo Dare and I am someone else. It’s your business to see overlooked opportunities.’

‘Spoken like a true ad man, Quinn. Just the right tone of flattery and familiarity. You’ll “fit” in all right, I can avow to that.’

I was still no wiser.

‘How would you react if I were to tell you that we had, working from the fragmentary papers left behind by the late Dr Jekyll, reconstructed the formula of his potion? That our clever Dr Varrable has reproduced the impurity of salts that was the key, one might also say secret, ingredient of Jekyll’s elixir of transformation and is at present applying his talents to a system whereby we might compound that miraculous brew in bulk? That our consortium has sole licence for the manufacture, distribution and sale of the “Jekyll Tonic”?’

Quiet hung in the room. I was aware of the crackling of the fire.

‘Surely,’ I ventured, ‘Britain has a surfeit of murderers as it is? The Police Gazette is full of ‘em.’

Leo Dare looked a little disappointed. ‘The murderousness of Hyde did not emerge for some months, remember. Initially, the experiment was a remarkable success. Jekyll became a new man, a younger, fitter, more vital man. Can you not see the possibilities?’

I began to smile. ‘In bottles,’ I said. ‘Lined up on a druggist’s shelf. What do you call them here? Chemist’s shops. Little blue bottles, with bright yellow labels.’

‘I see you understand well enough,’ said Leo Dare, approving.

‘The formula must be highly diluted,’ said Varrable. ‘Maybe one-tenth the strength of that Jekyll used, with water . . .’

‘Coloured water,’ I put in.

‘. . . added to minimise the unpleasant side-effects. I say, Quinn, why coloured?’

‘So it doesn’t look like water. Otherwise, suspicious folk think that’s all it is. I served a rough apprenticeship in a medicine show out West. The marks, ah, the customers, ignore the testimonials and the kootch dances. They open their wallets for the stuff that has the prettiest colour.’

‘Well, I never.’

‘Look to your own medicine cabinet at home. You’re an educated man, and I’ll wager you purchased your salves and cure-alls on the same basis.’

‘We’ve decided to call it a “tonic”,’ said Leo Dare.

I thought for a moment, then agreed with him. ‘The biggest hurdle will be the public perception of our product as the stuff of melodrama and murder. The name should not have associations with magic or alchemy, as would be the case with “miracle elixir” or “potion” A “tonic” is something we all might have at home without becoming bloodthirsty monsters.’

‘From henceforth, the word “monster” is barred among us,’ decreed Leo Dare.

Mr Enfield looked down into his empty glass. ‘I concur. Though, for a tiny fraction of our customership, the attraction will all be wrapped up in the business of Jekyll and Hyde. Some souls have a temptation to sample the dark depths. We should be aware of that and fashion strategies to pull in that segment without alienating the greater public, whose interest will be chiefly, ah, cosmetic. Everyone above a certain age wishes to look younger, to feel younger.’

‘Indeed. And we offer a tonic that will let them be younger.’

‘We should be cautious, Mr Dare,’ said Varrable. ‘The formula must be carefully tested. Its effects are, as yet, unpredictable.’

‘Indeed. Indeed. But it is also vital, Dr Varrable, that we consider the practicalities. I have asked Quinn to apply his wits to matters outside your laboratory. Many considerations must be made before Jekyll Tonic can be presented to the public.’

‘What of the legalities?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t there stringent rules and regulations? Government boards about medicines and poisons?’

‘There certainly are, and Sir Marmaduke sits on them all.’

Sir Marmaduke grunted again and made a speech.

‘It is not the place of this House to stand in the way of progress, sirrah. The law should not interpose itself between a thing that is desired and the people who desire it. That has always been my philosophy and it should be ever the philosophy of this government. If Jekyll Tonic, this wondrous boon to all humanity, were to be denied us because of the sorry fate of one researcher, where would frivolous, anti-medicinal legislation cease? Would sufferers from toothache be prevented from seeking the solace of such perfectly harmless, widely used balms as laudanum, cocaine and heroin? I pity anyone who persists in needless pain because the dusty senior fatheads of the medical profession, who earned their doctorates in the days of body-snatching and leeches, insist on tying every new discovery up in committees of enquiry, of over-regulating and hamstringing our valiant and clearsighted experimental pioneers.

‘The present manufacturers have taken to heart the lesson of Dr Jekyll, and have gone to great lengths to remove from his formula the impurities that robbed him of his mind even as it gave him strength of body and constitution. Jekyll Tonic is a different matter now that it has been improved and perfected. Its effects are purely beneficial, purely physical. I myself shall ensure that all the members of my household take one tablespoonful of Jekyll Tonic daily and am confident that there will be no ill-effects. This Parliament must declare for Jekyll Tonic, and decisively, lest the health of the nation be sapped, and our overseas competitors draw ahead.’

Mr Enfield clapped satirically. Sir Marmaduke bowed gravely to him.

‘Think of the enormous benefit it will be for the poor,’ said Lady Knowe. ‘Always think of the poor.’

‘Jekyll Tonic will retail at threepence, but we intend to put out an extremely diluted version in a smaller bottle at a halfpenny a bottle,’ said Leo Dare.

‘For paupers and children,’ explained Sir Marmaduke.

I began to do summations in my head. Leo Dare gave figures.

‘A farthing for the bottle, the cork and the gummed label; a quarter-farthing for the tonic itself. . .’

‘That little?’

‘In bulk, yes. I have cornered the uncommon elements. The rest is just water and sugar for the taste.’

‘More than twopence halfpenny sheer profit?’

‘We expect demand to be enormous, Quinn. Especially after you have worked your own brand of alchemy.’

This put galvanic girdles in the ashcan.

‘One thing,’ I said. ‘What does the tonic actually do?’

‘I suppose someone had to ask that question, Quinn. What does the Jekyll Tonic actually do? Let us try an experiment.’

He raised the glass of what I had taken for port, looked at the clear pink-orange fluid, touched the rim to his lower lip, then inclined his head backwards. He took in the glassful at a gulp and swallowed it at once.

Shadows crept across his face.

But it was only the firelight.

‘Most refreshing. I can assure you, as I’ll be willing to attest before lawyers, that I feel enormously invigorated and that my senses are sharper by several degrees of magnitude. The outward effect made famous by Dr Jekyll is only notable after a course of tonics, and then only in the cases of those who most desire a change of appearance. I myself am happy with the way I look.’

I understood perfectly. I had been in the snake-oil business before.

But never with the Jekyll name.

I foresaw rooms full of gold, profits pouring in like cataracts, fortunes made for all of us.

* * * *

Varrable’s ‘laboratory’ was a former stables in Shoreditch. Leo Dare had lately purchased Mercury Carriages, a hansom cab concern, not in order to run the operation (whose slogan was an uninspiring ‘Fleet and Economical’) but to close it down. A sudden surge in demand for quality horsemeat in Northern France made it more profitable to despatch Dobbin to the knackers than to retain the nag in harness.

Leo Dare had come to an arrangement with several long-established businesses with a combined interest in the hackney carriage trade (their more pleasing slogan, ‘Hansom is as Hansom Does!’), pledging to eliminate a rogue firm given to undercutting the fares of bigger rivals in return for a substantial honorarium and a percentage of increased profits over a period of five years. Had the cab combine turned him away, he would doubtless have reduced Mercury fares to a laughable minimum and brought about a complete catastrophe in the carriage business, taking his profit from subsidiary concerns. The Mercury premises were at his disposal, and now served as a convenient headquarters for the developmental work of the Jekyll Tonic consortium.

Our research was carried out in such secrecy that no sign outside the works marked our presence. On this first visit, I found the address only by the sheerest chance. I noticed a thin crowd of shifty-looking fellows in heavy coats and scarves loitering on a corner. From the long buggy-whips several of them were toting, I gathered that these were freshly unemployed cabbies, mindlessly haunting their former base of operations. Mercury Carriages had tended to draw their drivers from a pool of swarthy immigrants from the Mediterranean countries, and so I noted not a few fezzes among the traditional flat caps. A couple of big bruisers in billycock hats guarded the stable doors, with cudgels to hand, as a precaution against an invasion of these disgruntled cast-offs.

My own carriage, a sleek four-horse job retained permanently at my disposal by Leo Dare through another clause in his agreement with the cab trust, drew up outside the stables, exciting mutters of discontent from the corner louts. I got out, told the liveried coachman to await my convenience, and presented my credentials to the bruiser who looked most capable of coherent thought.

‘Yer on the list, Mr Quinn,’ I was told.

A regular-sized door cut into the large stable doors was hauled open and I stepped into a doubly-malodorous place. Doubly, for its former usage was memorialised by the trodden-in dung of equines (currently gracing the plates of provincial French gourmands, I trusted), while its current occupation was most pungently signalled by the stench of chemical processes. I wrapped a handkerchief around my nose and mouth, which gave me the look of a desperado robbing a stage-coach. My eyes still watered.

If you think of a laboratory, you doubtless form a mental picture of tables supporting contraptions of glass tubes, beakers and retorts, with flames at strategic places. Coloured liquids bubble and ferment, while strange heavy smoke pours from funnel-shaped tube-mouths. Perhaps one wall is given over to cages for the animals - rats, rabbits, monkeys - used in experimentation, and in a corner is an arrangement of galvanic batteries, bottles of acid, switches, levers and metallic spheres a-crackle with the blueish light of harnessed lightning.

This was a former stables. With open barrels of smelly gloop.

Hugo Varrable, in a much-stained apron and shirtsleeves, stirred a vat with a long stick. He wore a canvas bucket on his head. It looked like a giant dirty thumb stuck out of his collar, with an isinglass faceplate for a nail.

‘It’s all done, Billy,’ said Varrable, voice a mumble inside the bucket. He turned from the vat to pick up a stoppered flask of the now-familiar fluid. ‘Come on through.’

He led me out of the stables into a courtyard where the fleet of Mercury cabs, stripped of brass fittings and iron wheelrims, sat decaying slowly to firewood. Leo Dare would profit from that come winter.

‘Have our volunteers appeared?’ I asked.

Varrable took off his bucket and coughed. ‘Some of them.’

‘Only some?’

Varrable shrugged. ‘The Jekyll name may have given one or two second thoughts about participating in the experiment.’

‘Indeed.’

Awaiting us in what had once been the common-room of the cabbies were three lank-haired, languid individuals, students who fancied themselves ornaments to the aesthetic movement. One of the species was a young woman, though she wore the same cut of velvet breeches and jacket as her fellows. They had been exchanging bored, nasal witticisms. At our entrance, they perked up. Beneath their habitual posing, they were skittish. All considered, apprehension was understandable.

‘This won’t do, Doc,’ I said, alarming our volunteers. ‘The effect of the Tonic we want to push the most is rejuvenation. These exquisites are sickeningly youthful enough as it is.’

‘There are other effects, measurable upon all subjects.’

‘Yes, yes. But our “selling point” is the youth angle. Are you telling me you could find no elderly or infirm person willing to take part in the testing of our medical miracle?’

‘We put the word out at an art school. All the patent medicine concerns do the same.’

‘There’s your problem, Doc. However, it’s easily set right. If you’ll excuse me for a moment.’

I stepped out of the common-room and went round to the main gates. The bruisers let me pass and I crossed the road. The loitering ex-cabbies edged away from me with suspicion. Among the Turkish brigands and Greek cutthroats, I found several English individuals of advanced age, faces weathered from exposure to the elements, backs and limbs bent by years spent hunched at the top of a cab, breath wheezy from breathing in gallons of London pea-soup.

‘Who among you would care to earn a shilling?’ I asked.

* * * *

Varrable worked the results up into a learned paper no one actually read. Leo Dare arranged for its publication in an academic journal whose name eventually lent weight to our campaign. When The Lancet, alarmed by the spectres of Jekyll and Hyde, ran an editorial against us, thunderous voices among the medical profession - not to mention Sir Marmaduke Collynge - were raised against the brand of irresponsible trade journalism that inveighs against a perfectly legal product which has yet to be judged either way by the final arbiters of such matters. ‘The public shall make up its own mind,’ said Sir Marmaduke, at every opportunity, ‘for it always does, the average fellow being far more astute than your addle-brained quack, consumed with envy of the achievements of younger, more free-thinking men.’

As the brewing and refining continued in Shoreditch, Leo Dare took the elementary precaution of establishing, through Lady Knowe, a philanthropic trust to dispense grants supporting avenues of medical enquiry whose pursuit was blocked by the hidebound bodies responsible for the allocation of funds at the country’s major universities, medical schools and teaching hospitals. This enabled many a hobby-horse to be ridden and pet project to be nurtured, doubtless contributing (in the long run) to the health of the nation and the wealth of scientific knowledge. A correlation of this generosity was that researchers who benefited from the foundation’s beneficence were predisposed to uphold the reputation of the late Dr Henry Jekyll on the public podium and give testimony that his work, though unfortunately applied in the first instance, was perfectly sound. These worthies tended to have passionate beliefs in the benefits of naturism, monkey glands, cosmetic amputation, the consumption of one’s own water, phrenology, galvanic stimulation (our old friend), vegetarianism and other medical tangentia. However, their MDs were every jot as legit, as those of the head surgeon at Barts or the Queen’s own physician, and the public (perhaps regrettably) tends to think one doctor as good as another when reading a testimonial.

Having observed the experiment first-hand, I did not quite become a fanatic believer in Jekyll Tonic. However, I had to concede that it was a very superior species of snake oil.

For a start, its effects were immediate and visible.

Our would-be poets and unemployed cabbies did not transform into a pack of Neanderthal men and take to battering their fellows with makeshift clubs, but several evinced genuine transformations of feature and form. A very bald fellow instantly sprouted flowing locks that were the envy of the decadents in the room, suggesting we could market the Tonic as a hair restorer (always a popular line). Arthritic fists, all knuckles from a lifetime of gripping reins, opened into strong, young hands. A shy stammerer among the students was suddenly able to pour forth a flood of impromptu rhyming and would not shut up for two days, when the effect suddenly (and mercifully, for his circle) wore off. Another poet, an avowed anarchist and shamer of convention, rushed from the stables, eluding our guards, hacking at his hair with a penknife. He was later found to have taken a position as a junior clerk with a respectable firm of solicitors, which he quit suddenly as his old personality resurfaced.

Varrable remained concerned that the effects of the tonic were essentially unpredictable, as proved by further experimentation with a range of volunteers from wider strata of society. We thought we should have to pay substantial ‘hush money’ to a curate who sampled Jekyll Tonic and passed through a bizarre hermaphrodite stage to emerge (briefly) as a woman of exceedingly low character with an unhealthy interest in the gallants of Britannia’s Navy. Leo Dare overruled our request for cash, predicting (correctly) that the cleric in question would rather bribe us to keep from his Bishop any word of the Portsmouth adventures of his female alter ego.

None of our volunteers killed anyone, which was a great relief.

Only the anarchist and the curate vowed never to repeat the experience. I had a sense that the cleric came reluctantly to the decision and would eventually alter it, perhaps making surreptitious purchase of the Tonic once it was generally available and indulging in its use only after taking precautions in the name of discretion. The others returned, bringing with them sundry family-members and friends. They all clamoured for the Tonic in a manner that suggested Leo Dare had another ‘winner’ on his hands.

The Hon. Hilary Belligo, the stammering aesthete, splutteringly conveyed to us that he would be prepared to forgo the shilling remuneration we offered for participation in the experiment and would meet any price we suggested if an inexhaustible supply of the Tonic were made available to him.

Varrable and I independently liquidated all our other holdings and ploughed our money into the consortium stock issue. The next day, before any public announcement had been made, the value of our shares tripled.

I drew the line at sampling the formula myself. If called, I was only too happy to swallow a few ounces of coloured water - doubtless the same recipe Leo Dare had theatrically quaffed at our first meeting - and declare myself satisfyingly rejuvenated.

Varrable formed a theory that the effect of the Tonic was to reshape each individual into the person they secretly wanted to be. The ageing, stuffy Jekyll had become the young libertine Hyde; but, as the name suggests, the violent thug had always been ‘hiding’ inside the respectable man. Sometimes, as perhaps with Jekyll and certainly with our anarchist and our curate, the transformations proved a shock to the subjects because the Tonic was no respecter of hypocrisy. It acted on secret wishes, some concealed even from those who harboured them. Many were unaware of the fierceness that burned in their breasts, the need to be somebody else. My own reluctance to take the Tonic came from an unanswered question: I thought that I was perfectly happy to be myself, but what if I were wrong? What if some notion I couldn’t consciously recall was stuck there? As a lad, I wanted to be a pirate when I grew up. Would a course of Jekyll Tonic have made me grow an eye-patch and a pegleg? Might I not have come to myself, like that sore curate in a Portsmouth grog-house, to find I had taken the Queen’s shilling and was miles out to sea on a ship of the line?

* * * *

‘Our stock issue is closed,’ announced Leo Dare. ‘Those not aboard by now have missed the omnibus.’

The consortium was dining out, no longer in a private room.

Now part of the game was to be seen, to be envied and admired, to cut a dash before those who mattered. We had taken a table at Kettner’s and were very visible. Leo Dare had insisted Varrable and myself be taken to Sir Marmaduke’s tailor and outfitted in a manner befitting ‘men on the rise’. Suits of American cut would not do.

Envious glances were tossed at us. The maitre d’hôtel presented a succession of inscribed cards from plutocrats and captains of industry. Leo Dare glanced at any message before smiling noncommittally across the room and not extending invitations to our table. The cards from journalists and editors were handed to me, those from churchmen and society leaders to Lady Knowe, those from scientists (who would a month ago not have cared to recognise his name) to Varrable. Between us, we had enough cards for a deck - we could have played whist with them, to show our indifference to those outside the consortium.

‘I’m no longer at home to fools clamouring for an inside chance at a few shares,’ chuckled Sir Marmaduke, mouth full of well-chewed beefsteak. ‘Barely a month past, I offered the bunch of ‘em a chance to buy in. To a man, they said I was cracked, sirrah, cracked.’

We all laughed, heartily. Even Lady Knowe, whose mode of dress dropped a decade each time we convened. She still wore black, but her gown was less widow’s weed than dark blossom.

Leo Dare, whom no one had ever seen eat, oversaw our gustatory indulgences and, begging permission from Lady Knowe, lit up a black Cuhano cigar. He exhaled clouds that seemed to take sculptural shape before dissipating.

‘Our conquest of the market has been so complete,’ he said, ‘that the “smart money” has stayed away. Some call us a “bubble”, you know. They predict a “smash”! Soon, they’ll learn that the old certainties have gone. In the coming age, men - and women, Lady Enid - such as we shall set the pace, make the decisions, reap the profits. The Twentieth Century shall belong to us.’

When Nietzsche writes of an ‘Overman’, the philosopher means Leo Dare.

‘So we are smarter than “the smart money”,’ I said.

In my mind, I held the picture of Hilary Belligo, trying to get out the words, the light of inspiration dying in his eyes, to be rekindled as a physical and mental need far stronger than any poetic impulse would ever be.

‘There’ll be no limit to the demand for the Tonic,’ said Varrable. ‘We could ask five pounds a thimble, and some would pay it.’

I thought of the Hon. Hilary. Varrable was right.

‘Let us not be over-greedy,’ said Leo Dare, which made Mr Enfield giggle. As usual, the controller of the Utterson-Jekyll estate was slightly soused.

‘Think of the poor,’ said Lady Knowe, sipping champagne. ‘The poor poor.’

A card was delivered to her, not from a churchman, but from a golden-haired Guardsman. She giggled at the inscription and placed it separately from the others. I wondered if she’d been at the Jekyll. Samples were already in circulation among the consortium.

‘I have been reconsidering the matter of price,’ said Leo Dare. ‘I don’t think sixpence a bottle is unreasonable. Any objections?’

Heads shaken all around the table.

‘Passed,’ said the entrepreneur. ‘Now, let us drink to the memory of the late Dr Henry Jekyll, without whom, et cetera et cetera . . .’

‘Et cetera et cetera,’’ we chanted, raising glasses.

* * * *

Varrable and newly hired assistants continued the course of volunteer tests, making slight refinements to the formula, and the consortium stock continued to gain value by the proverbial leaps and bounds. Shoreditch’s first telephonic lines were strung, with matching sets of the apparatus installed in my sanctum, once the snug nest of the proprietor of Mercury Carriages, and Varrable’s command post above the factory floor. Varrable became addicted to the gadget, ‘ringing up’ on it several times a day to pass trivial messages, though a perfectly adequate speaking tube between our offices was left over from the Mercury days.

As my role in the enterprise became paramount, I closeted myself with secretaries to take dictation, commercial artists to work up sketches and a few trusted experts to bounce ideas against. For weeks, we ‘brain-stormed’.

A Marvel of the Modern Age!

Ladies - Make of Yourself What You Will!!!

Release the Young Man inside You!

A Kitten Can Be a Tiger!

Transformed and Improved!! Transmogrified and Reborn!!

It has always been a credo of mine that an advertisement cannot have too many exclamation points.

We bought space on public hoardings and in the press, and sent sandwich-men out onto the streets. We put up posters on the platforms of the London Underground Railway and inside the trains themselves, where passengers had no choice but to look at them. We were plastered on the sides of ‘buses, in the windows of chemists’ shops and on any walls that happened to be bare before our trusty regiment of boys with paste-pots passed by. Striking illustrations, engraved by the best men in the business, were augmented by ‘unsolicited’ testimony from our volunteers, much the best of it genuinely unsolicited. I decided to keep the Hon. Hilary in the background, for he was now almost permanently in his secondary personality and the quality of his rhyming, while undoubtedly visionary, was of a nature to prove alarming rather than reassuring. Varrable insisted we keep supplying our initial volunteers with the Tonic so he could study the effects of repeated use. He also asked for more bruisers at the laboratory, to guard against possible riots from the much-swelled cabbie crowd. It seemed our people couldn’t get enough of the Jekyll. Varrable tried to water the formula down, to make its effects less immediate and lasting.

Some use could be made of the statements of cabbies and longhairs, but willing participants were also found among the better classes. We prominently displayed sworn testimonials from gracious ladies, leading churchmen, military officers and, inevitably, Sir Marmaduke Collynge. I interviewed all manner of folk who had sampled the Tonic, helping them set down in appropriate words the benefits they genuinely felt had accrued to them. Major General Cogstaff-Blyth, ‘the Hector of Maiwand’, was quoted as saying ‘with this spiffing stuff in him, your British soldier shall never lose another battle!’ I had the Maj.-Gen. put on his best medals and troop down to Speakers’ Corner to harangue passers-by with the merits of Jekyll Tonic, and lobby for a bulk purchase of the wonder fluid by the War Office.

In any enterprise, only so much can be done by buying space to hawk your wares. True success can be achieved only if the press find themselves so harried by the interest of their readership that they are obliged - nay, forced - to augment paid advertising by running stories that pass as unbiased journalism but which essentially serve to boost your reputation. To reach this point, you have to worm your way into the public mind by fair means or foul. Firstly, I provided the lyrics for an entire song-book of ditties which were set to tunes by a couple of tame music students willing to work in lucrative anonymity. The theory was that one at least of our songs was bound to catch the nation’s fancy. Certainly, for a time, ‘Changing for the Better (through a Course of Jekyll Tonic)’ was heard on every street-corner - Leo Dare magnanimously promised me a fifty per cent cut of the song-sheet income -and hardly less success was met by ‘An Inspirational Transformational Super-Sensational Stuff and ‘You’ve Got to Be a Jekyll Tonic Girl (to Get the Boy You want)’.

The greatest success of this campaign was, I venture to say, the affair of the Jekyll Joke.

It took no little negotiation and expense to arrange for the ‘patter comic’, Harry ‘Brass’ Button to conclude his turn at the Tivoli Music Hall with an apparent ad. lib. remark of my own coinage. ‘With Jekyll Tonic I feel like a New Man,’ said Button, then adding with an indescribable leer, ‘... luckily, the wife does too!’ The results were as startling to the performer as anyone else. Not only was Button’s ‘punchline’ greeted nightly with gales of laughter but also applause that lasted for minutes, delaying the first-act curtain. The audience could only be quieted if he agreed to give the ‘Jekyll Joke’ over again, as much as seven times. Attendances were up and expectant patrons turned away in crowds. A sticker across the posters outside the hall announced ‘the “Jekyll Joke” will be told’. Eventually, new posters were put up claiming the Tivoli as ‘home of the hilarious “Jekyll Joke”‘.

Harry Button, whose check suit and mobile eyebrows had been rather falling from favour, was precipitously elevated to the top of the bill, displacing an entire family of acrobatical contortionists and an opera singer who had conducted a famous amour with a Ruthenian Prince. Button only sampled the Tonic once that I heard of. He wept for six hours, then swore off it for life. But he told and retold the Jekyll Joke. I don’t doubt that, though his top-of-the-bill days are now but a memory, he still tells it at the drop of a hat. Certainly, he truly believes his was the brain that conceived the marvellous line and he’ll try to thrash anyone who says different.

Some fellows entirely unconnected with the consortium whipped up a song that Button refused to include in his act on the grounds that it was an affront to the dignity of what had now become a much-loved, therefore respectable, music hall institution. However, every other comic in London sang ‘Have You Heard the Jekyll Joke?/It’ll make you laugh until you choke!/Have You Heard the Jekyll Joke?/Old Brass Button is the funniest bloke!’ In the Strand, whenever Harry Button was about, children chanted the chorus, especially the repeated refrain ‘now tell us another one, Brass!’

With the departure of Mr Richard Mansfield from the London stage, we commissioned our own dramatisation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, emphasising the positive aspects of the transformation and omitting any mention of the late Sir Danvers Carewe. After all, Edward Hyde never came to trial and so was not proved a murderer in any court of law. Our lawyers sent reminders of this fact to any who tried to publish or stage the hitherto-accepted version of the story. On behalf of the Jekyll Estate, Mr Enfield accepted a great many grudging retractions and apologies. Several times in the play, our Dr Jekyll took a swig of his formula and approvingly exclaimed, ‘It’s a tonic!’

All this, it should be remembered, was well before the Tonic was available in stores. By the time we were ready to begin manufacture and distribution, the consortium had gathered again and concluded that 6d was far too meagre a price to ask for such a highly demanded and beneficial commodity. Lady Knowe bleated a little about pricing the Tonic out of the reach of the poor, but we decided that -  though the Jekyll Tonic was of such incalculable good to the public that it must in effect be declared priceless - we would settle upon the trivial sum of is a bottle, in order to effect the greatest possible distribution of the wondrous blessing we were about to grant humankind in general.

‘A shilling is little enough to pay,’ said Leo Dare.

* * * *

I was mentally formulating an alliterative sentence employing the words ‘modern’, ‘marvel’ and ‘miracle’ in some fresh order when a discreet rap at the door disturbed my process of thought.

‘Go away,’ I shouted at the Porlockian person. ‘It can wait.’

The office door opened a crack and an unfamiliar individual peeked around, holding up something shiny.

‘Generally, that’s not the case, sir.’

The newcomer was a shabby little man with a London accent. I pegged his section of the market at once - clerk or undermanager, with a little education but no elocution, the son of someone who worked with his hands, the father of someone who’d ‘do better’. He would be most susceptible to advertisements that linked the product with easy living, good breeding and ‘class’. A life lived with unformed needs and aspirations, and thus an ideal customer. He’d be looking for something but not know what it was. Enter: the Jekyll Tonic.

‘Inspector Mist, sir,’ he announced, ‘from Scotland Yard.’

I gave him another look. He had a bloodhound’s big wet nose and a drooping moustache that covered his mouth entirely. His hat was a year or so past style and his topcoat was too heavy for him, as if the pockets were full of handcuffs for felons, packets of plaster of Paris for footprints and magnifying lenses for clues.

‘Come in, Inspector. You’re Sheriff of these parts?’

‘You would be the American, sir. Mister . . .’

‘Quinn.’

‘That’s the name.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘Rather delicate matter, sir. Are you acquainted with . . .’ he consulted a note-pad ... ‘a Mr Belligo?’

‘What has the Hon. Hilary been up to now? Subversive publications with obscene illustrations?’

‘Misappropriation of stock is mentioned, sir. In short, theft.’

‘I was under the impression that he was of independent means.’

‘Ran through ‘em, sir. Looked around. Found another source of readies. Only it wasn’t exactly his to tap.’

‘Lock the villain away, then. I imagine he’ll find an eager audience for his verses in one of your excellent prisons.’

‘Have to catch him first, sir.’

‘He’s not around here.’

‘Didn’t say he was. Only, it seems you have something the absconder needs. A tonic, I believe. Likely he’ll come nosing about.’

The policeman picked up a bottle from my desk.

‘Is this it? Jekyll Tonic?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a sample of the bottle. The bottle is important, you know. The comforting size, the colour, the quality of the wax around the stopper, the adhesive label.’

‘Looks like a bottle to me.’

‘Very perceptive, Inspector.’

‘That’s as well, then. If Mr Belligo pops up . . .’

‘I’ll send a lad to the Yard.’

‘We’d be grateful, Mr Quinn.’

‘There is a flaw to your trap, though. At the moment, Jekyll Tonic is a rara avis, obtainable only from our experimental laboratories, downstairs in this very building. As of,’ I consulted my new gold watch, ‘as of eight o’clock tomorrow morning, it will be on sale all across London, then the country. You might have to post a man at every chemist’s shop in the nation.’

The bloodhound face drooped.

* * * *

My first thought upon arriving fresh and early in Shoreditch to see a line of policemen outside the factory was that one of our devoted test-subjects had done himself or someone else injury while in the grips of Jekyll Tonic fever. The fellow who would now have to be known as the Dis. Hon. Hilary Belligo sprang naturally to mind. It turned out that Leo Dare had merely suggested it would be sensible to take precautions against rioters. I looked about for the dogged Inspector Mist. If present, he was in one of those impenetrable Scotland Yard disguises.

We understood that the chemists’ shops and apothecaries’ dispensaries which would be our main retail outlets would abide by no decree we might make that the Tonic should be withheld from sale until a certain standardised time. I knew enough about storekeepers to guess they would agree to all our terms and then sell the stuff as soon as they got it, probably knocking a penny off the shilling to undercut the fellow across the street.

So, it was to be a free-for-all.

At eight o’clock, the old stable gates opened and carts trundled out, laden with straw-packed crates of clinking bottles. Each cart was manned by a former Mercury cabbie (retained at a generous two-thirds of his previous wage) and a bare-knuckles boxer with a handy shillelagh. The purpose of the latter individuals was not so much to prevent any attempts at seizure of the Tonic supply as to suggest to the world at large that the product was so desirable that such attempts were highly likely.

Because it seemed expected of us, we put up a stall outside the laboratory, manned by several smart young women recruited from the chorus of the Tivoli, all neat in abbreviated sailor-suits and hats with pom-poms. Harry Button had asked an outrageous fee to act as shill at the stall, so we had declined his services. I noticed that the comic had turned up for the historic moment anyway, a little surprised that the eager public were clamouring not for his Joke but for the inspiration of same, the Tonic itself. The first Jekyll Tonic offered for sale direct from the factory was available at an introductory price of 9d. Our shutters went up simultaneous with the emergence of the carts.

We were all there. Leo Dare hung rather in the background, calmly puffing one of his cigars. In press photographs taken that morning, as so often in Kodaks of the entrepreneur and Overman, Leo Dare’s face is indistinct, masked by frozen shrouds of smoke. Sir Marmaduke and Lady Knowe made speeches, drowned out by the Babel of eager customers beseeching the attention of our becoming sales assistants. Varrable, emerged again from his bucket, still fussed about the vats, already concerned with brewing up tomorrow’s batch of Tonic.

I found myself in a corner of the stableyard with Mr Enfield.

He drew a draught from a hip-flask and offered it to me.

‘Is that. . .?’

‘Not on your nellie,’ he said.

I took a swallow. Strong whisky.

‘I saw Hyde trample the little girl,’ he said. ‘Worst thing I ever did see. The look on his face.’

‘Monstrous? Evil?’

‘No. It was like he was walking over more pavement. As if no one else mattered at all. He was scared all right, when the mob had his collar, scared for himself. A shirty little bastard he was, whining and indignant, with clothes too big for him. That was what was inside Jekyll.’

The first customers were swigging from their own bottles. On labels they hadn’t read, we had printed a warning advising that the daily dose should not exceed a spoonful taken in a mug of water. It was not our fault some patrons were too excited to read and regard these instructions.

‘The formula was lost,’ I said to Mr Enfield. ‘Even Jekyll couldn’t recreate it. You could have kept it that way. If you were really worried, you could have suppressed the Tonic, stopped this even before it started.’

Mr Enfield looked at me. He took another drink.

‘You really don’t know Leo Dare, do you?’

At that moment, I was distracted.

In the street, ten or fifteen new devotees of the Jekyll Tonic were changing. It was like a Court of Miracles from Notre Dame de Paris crossed with the news of the Relief of Mafeking. Crutches thrown away! Speaking in tongues! Vigorous embraces! Cries for more, more, more! Supply at the stall was exhausted, and the sales girls apologised. Banknotes were waved in fists. Coins were thrown. One girl nearly had her eye put out by a flung florin.

The police moved in, augmenting our bare-knuckle men.

I saw the most beautiful woman I ever beheld in my life, a slim blonde angel wrapped in the voluminous garments of a much, much larger lady. She threw away a veiled hat to unloose a stream of glamorous golden hair. She took my arm and looked at me with unutterably lovely eyes.

‘The children call me “pig-face”,’ she said, wondering.

I did not understand.

‘A mirror,’ she said. ‘Have you a mirror?’

I patted my pockets though I knew I did not have a glass about me. At my shrug of apology, she left me - a slave to her memory - to ask another bystander.

Beyond the crowd, I saw Varrable having heated words with Leo Dare. The chemist listened, arms folded, as Leo Dare stabbed the air with a cigar to emphasise points.

The transformed angel found a mirror and was stunned by her new face, a female Narcissus absolutely smitten with herself.

The mirror was passed around. Our customers beheld their fresh selves. I heard a scream from one, who covered his head with his jacket and plunged alarmingly through the crowd. He was soon forgotten. Others danced on the cobbles, leapt up and down with abandon, shouted ‘look at me!’, performed feats of strength such as lifting a grown man up in each hand, turning cartwheels. A ragged choir lit into ‘An Inspirational Transformational Super-Sensational Stuff’.

Word escaped that I was connected with the consortium and I was hugged and kissed. I trapped light-fingers reaching for my wallet and watch and kicked away a junior ruffian who scurried off with good humour to ply his trade elsewhere.

Leo Dare and Varrable caught the ear of Sir Marmaduke. He stood up on a platform by the stall.

‘Friends, friends,’ announced Sir Marmaduke, booming at the crowd with a voice proved in Parliamentary debate. ‘Owing to the unprecedented demand, a fresh batch of the wonder Tonic is being brewed up even as we speak. It will take some hours for the complex scientifical processes necessary in its manufacture to be brought to complete fruition, but on behalf of the Jekyll Tonic consortium, we pledge that the demand shall be met even if it means working our factory round the clock. The Jekyll will be on sale again by twelve noon, this we guarantee.’

‘Maybe they still got some at Filkins the Chemist, down the road,’ suggested someone.

Half the crowd dashed off.

They soon came back. It had been the same at Filkins the Chemist, and at shops all over London.

The Jekyll Tonic had not so much arrived as exploded.

* * * *

The ‘papers were full of it. Questions were asked in the House (and answered at length by a personage familiar to us all). More vats were bought and more fellows engaged to stir the compounds. Our credit was accepted by suppliers of equipment and chemicals. Carts continued to trundle out three times a day, laden with cases of the Jekyll Tonic. The former stables grew more crowded and we had to lease larger premises adjoining the original site. In addition to the vat-stirrers, we had (after unfortunate incidents) to engage more bruisers to watch that the workers didn’t siphon off or sample the raw Tonic. Then we had to take on ex-soldiers and former policemen to crack down on the bruisers.

It turned out that there had been a deal of pilferage, and ‘super-strength’ Jekyll Tonic was being made available to the criminal classes of Whitechapel, Limehouse and Wapping. Inspector Mist snuffled around again, with reports of running battles in the streets between Irish and Hebrew bully-boys with illicit Jekyll interests and the Chinese tongs who found patronage of their opium dens drastically reduced. Leo Dare was not overly concerned, assuring us all that this had been accounted for in his calculations. It would serve only to sharpen the appetite for our legitimate Tonic. All considered, that a street brawler of previously average reputation could see off a dozen Chinamen though one of the celestials had embedded a hatchet in his skull was as fine a testimony for us as any recommendation from a Bishop or Baronet. We did, however, bring swift and merciless court actions against competitors who ventured to sell coloured tincture of laudanum as ‘Jeckell Tonik’ or ‘Jickle Juice’. I made sure to add to all our posters the rubric ‘accept no imitations, swallow no substitute . . . there is only one original Jekyll Tonic!’

Borrowing against my stock, I removed myself from lodgings in Lewisham to a house in Kensington. Suddenly equipped with (or weighed down by) the trappings of a man of stature, I had to beseech from Sir Marmaduke and Lady Knowe information about how best to employ a household’s worth of bowers and scrapers. It took me a disastrous week to learn that the finest servants were not necessarily the most unctuously deferential butlers or the prettiest, cheekiest maids, hut rather the faintly drab individuals who actually took the bother to do the work they were paid for. I received so many invitations that I had to engage a secretary with a type-writer to respond to them all. I did not let it go to my head. It was all very well to be popular and sought-after, but it was what was on deposit at Coutt’s that counted.

Varrable, the last man I should have thought likely to gain a reputation as a rakehell, was seen about town with, in succession, a chorus girl with a dimple, a Drury Lane ornament whose beauty had prompted several duels in Paris, the wealthy young widow of a lately-deceased African millionaire and the youngest daughter of a Duke. Sir Marmaduke was offered a Cabinet position, but declined on the grounds that his business interests engaged too much of his time for him to be concerned with the minutiae of canals and waterways. Lady Knowe took tea with the Prince and Princess of Wales, dressed in white for the first time in her life in honour of the occasion. Her philanthropic concerns became extremely fashionable, and many distinguished names were added to her roster of charitable souls. Mr Enfield sold all his stock (mostly, through third parties, to me) and departed for the South Seas, still muttering doom under his breath. He was fleeing from a fortune, but would not be reasoned with and if profit was to be had from his squeamishness I saw no reason why I should not be the one to scoop it.

For me personally, Jekyll Tonic was Inspirational, Transformational and Super-Sensational. And I did not even taste the stuff.

At some point in any venture, my job changes from ‘starting up’ to ‘looking after’. Once the train is up to full steam, it needs a steady hand on the throttle and a good eye on the track ahead. There is no time to relax, to sit back and let the coffers fill. Each day brought a thousand questions from the press, from tradesmen, from the factory. My secretary wore out her type-writer and a new, improved model had to be purchased. I arranged tours of inspection, interviews with various members of the consortium (never Leo Dare, of course), supervised the design of new and improved labels for the bottles. I no longer had a fresh canvas: the name of Jekyll Tonic was known, and had to be protected rather than bruited about. That was the chief reason for seeing off the Jickle and Jeckell jokesters.

All at once, we were the only Tonic. Bovril was forgotten, even when advertised by an admirable image of a cow being strapped into an electric chair. Carter’s little liver pills piled up unsold in the stores. Dentists reported that even heroin, miracle drug of the decade, was sorely out of fashion. Sufferers from all maladies and pains demanded to go ‘on the Jekyll’ and would accept no substitutes.

* * * *

By now, a week into the reign of the Tonic, I was surprised by nothing. Approaching Varrable’s office early in the morning, I passed a lady who had just emerged from our chemist’s sanctum. Though her hair and costume were in disarray, I recognised Mrs Mary Biddlesham, a supporter of Lady Knowe’s latest endeavour, to ship supplies of the Jekyll overseas to missionaries in order to coax out the decent Christian lurking within every benighted heathen. Mrs Biddlesham repaired her clothing in a manner that led me to form a conclusion as to the activities with which she had been engaged overnight. She did not meet my eye or answer my good-day.

I found Varrable fussing with his cravat, admiring himself in the cheval glass, and in good spirits.

‘You are a wonder,’ I said.

Varrable smiled and paraphrased one of my slogans, ‘Inside every kitten, there’s a tiger!’

I shrugged.

‘With claws, Billy,’ he assured me. ‘I have the scratches to prove it.’

A divan had been installed in Varrable’s office, as an aid to abstract thought. Its cushions were on the floor and I gathered that little in the abstract had transpired on the previous evening.

The remains of a late supper stood on a side-table.

I picked up an empty glass, and sniffed the dregs.

Varrable raised a decanter.

‘It looks like port, remember,’ he said.

‘Doc, you’ve become a blackguard.’

‘Have I not? I don’t know about the average advertising man, but the average research chemist isn’t thought of as a “catch” by the ladies. It’s something to do with the penury and long hours, of course, but the reason most often given is the smell. At school, they call chemistry “stinks”. It stays with you for life. Not so stinky now, of course.’

He sniffed his newly manicured nails.

‘I don’t go near the vats any more,’ he said. ‘We have low people for that.’

‘So this is your secret?’

‘It’s all our secret, isn’t it? I confess I’ve been conducting my own course of private experiments. I should write it up, I suppose. “The Effects of Dr Henry Jekyll’s Transformational Formula upon the Fairer Sex, as Observed First-Hand by Dr Hugo Varrable, with Fifteen Water-Colour Plates and Extensive Footnotes”. At first, I propose a toast and we both “take a Jekyll”, only mine is coloured water. An observer has to be distanced. I admit that I do tend to intervene, possibly affecting the outcome of the experiments. A certain, ah, class of female is excited by the prospect, and will probably deliver the desired results with a placebo of coloured water. But my interests in that sort ran dry some time ago. Their inner selves are too close to the skin. No, to demonstrate the truly miraculous effects of the Tonic, I have to seek not Rosie O’Grady but the Colonel’s Lady. In this case, the Commodore’s Lady.’

‘What if they’re like us, Doc? What if they don’t want to find out what’s inside or know already? A lot of people are still afraid of the Jekyll.’

Varrable laughed.

‘Don’t I know it, Billy! Mrs Biddlesham, for one. In her case, I simply gave her an aperitif with the compliments of your Hibernian friend, Mr Michael Finn.’

‘The results?’

‘Most satisfactory. I’m not the only researcher in this field. A great many gentlemen have been purchasing the Tonic not for themselves, but for ladies of their glancing acquaintance. Sir Marmaduke insists his household take a tablespoon a day. He lines up his maidservants like sailors being given the rum ration. And he’s been rejuvenating himself with regular doses. I understand a few women of dubious character or attractions have ventured their own experiments along these lines. I couldn’t approve of that, of course.’

I was not, of course, shocked. But I did perceive a flutter of danger.

‘When your, ah, lady-friends, come to themselves, how do they feel?’

‘Delighted and rotten all at the same time, I should imagine. I’ve never really asked. Do you think I should make enquiries? Do a “follow-up” study?’

I thought a moment. There would be complaints. It was but a matter of time before some soiled dove took the matter to the police. No lady of good name would want this to come out in the courts, but eventually some tart with nothing to lose would try it on. And I would not have wanted to be in Varrable’s expensive new shoes if word of last night’s experiment were to reach Commodore Biddlesham, whose expertise with both cutlass and revolver could be attested to by not a few deceased Shanghai river pirates.

‘You still don’t use the Jekyll?’ I asked. ‘I mean, Doc, this is you?’

He looked surprised at the question, but insisted he’d never touched a drop.

Still, even without drinking it, the Tonic had brought out something inside him that would never go back in hiding.

‘Tonight, a fresh direction,’ he said, sliding on his smart new jacket. ‘I am entertaining the Flavering Sisters, Flora and Belinda. Their father, the Earl of Roscommon, sits on the board of the University of...well, you know who he is. A year ago, Billy, I was discharged from the faculty. Merely for pursuing a line of enquiry involving the effects of caustic solutions upon the mammalian eye. A petition was got up about vivisection and a to-do burst in the ‘papers. My name was “Mudd”, like your countryman, Dr Samuel Mudd. Now, it might as well be “Rose”, for it seems that with the Jekyll Tonic millions pouring in I smell a lot sweeter. This is the Strange Case of Dr Varrable ... and Mr Rose.’

‘Flora and Belinda,’ I mused. ‘With which delightful young lady do you intend to experiment?’

Varrable fixed a fresh-cut rose to his lapel and sniffed it.

‘You misjudge me. Why choose only one?’

* * * *

‘You’ve complicated our lives at the Yard, sir, and no mistake.’

Inspector Mist had become a frequent visitor to Shoreditch.

Given that, with the Jekyll craze, all I saw were smiling faces, hungry eyes, beautiful women, happy bankers, deferential servants and ecstatic consortium comrades, the presence of the Inspector, who trudged about under a perpetual black cloud, was almost a refreshing change. In a world of sunshine and champagne, he brought his own little patch of gloom and weak tea.

‘One swig and you change face, body, height, everything. Don’t match a description. Don’t look like your picture in the Police Gazette.’

‘You mean the Threadneedle Street bandits?’

‘Indeed. A touch of your “Wild Wicked West” in staid old foggy London. There were heart attacks, you know.’

‘So I read.’

A small band of habitual crooks, minor rogues who had never done anything worse than lift a purse or knock over a coster-monger, had staged a raid on the Bank of England after the manner of Jesse James. They careened up Threadneedle Street on horses and in a carriage, discharged revolvers at random over the heads of shocked crowds and dashed into that august financial establishment, demanding that cash and bullion be handed over. Before setting out on this exploit, each of the gang had drained a bottle of Jekyll to become another person entirely. It was popularly supposed that the transformed criminals were ape-faced, spider-fingered, devil-horned, cyclops-eyed sub-human fiends. The Pall Mall Gazette, perhaps inevitably, had referred to the miscreants as ‘a pack of Hydes’. I had already dashed off a telegram to the editor threatening withdrawal of advertising unless a balanced retraction appeared within the week.

‘Suppose it’s a mercy your average villain is so thick-headed,’ said the Inspector. ‘This mob had spent all their lives dreaming about robbing the Bank of England. It was the Land of Cockaigne to them, sir. They thought of a golden temple. Heaps of bank-notes and piles of silver sovereigns lying around for the taking. Then they crashed in and discovered it was a bank like any other, only snootier. Vaults and strong-boxes, inaccessible to the raiders. When we caught up with them, they had less loot to hand than you’d expect from a provincial post office job. All themselves again, they were, blinking and surprised. Hadn’t taken elementary precautions. Got ‘em by the mud on their boots. And the blood on their coats.’

Two bank employees had been ‘pistol-whipped’. One seemed likely to die.

‘Still, a question is answered. One left over from the Hyde business.’

‘What question, Inspector?’

‘It’s like this, sir. We knew what happened when Jekyll drank. He became Hyde. But, even without the potion, there are Hydes in the world. See ‘em every day. Not a few on the Force, in fact. Now we know what happens when Hyde drinks. It doesn’t make him cleverer, which is a terror and yet a mercy, a terror because all trace of scruple, even that which rises from fear of being caught, evaporates like dew in the morning. But a mercy because your Hyde is a stupid crook. And stupid crooks are easy to catch. But not all villains are idiots, Mr Quinn. Jekyll was a villain, after all. He was different from Hyde, not separate. What mightn’t happen if a clever villain drinks your Tonic? What then, sir?’

I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was being judged.

‘It’s just patent medicine, Inspector,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t really do anything, except in the imagination. Oh, it’s dramatic, all right. Makes people pull faces. But it wears off in a tick, and you’re back for another bottle. There’s nothing inherently Evil about the stuff. Have you tried it?’

‘Yes sir. Have you?’

Not loitering for an answer, Mist left.

* * * *

Jekyll Tonic had been on sale for two weeks. I was returning to Kensington just after dawn. The sun was up, but the thin fog had yet to dissipate. This was not the fabled pea-souper I’d heard about back in the States, just wispy yellowish stuff that hung in the air like the colour-swirls in a glass marble. I trailed my stylish new cane through some strands, setting them in motion like phantom streamers.

I was still a little ‘tight’ from last night’s celebration, hosted after the show at the Tivoli by Harry ‘Brass’ Button, in honour of the success of our venture. The entire company of the music hall had been in attendance, and most of the finest, most fashionable in the city. Not to mention the Flavering Sisters - quite the Jekyll Fiends these days, with happy results for Varrable that he was generous enough to share with his comrades in the consortium,. Even Lady Knowe’s besotted Guardsman-intended took notice. Of our principals, only Leo Dare - who never appeared at parties of any kind - was absent. I took this up with Sir Marmaduke, who mused that our colossus of finance must be at bottom ‘a sad, lonely sort of chap’, allowing that he was enviably single-minded in the pursuit of cold wealth, but that he lived the life of a monk, in his cell-like hotel suites, reading only ledgers, measuring his life’s worth only in bank deposits. ‘What’s the point of it all if you can’t drown yourself in it, sirrah?’ Sir Marmaduke then took his tablespoonful of Tonic and joined with the ladies of the chorus and several ladies of distinction, including Lady Knowe and Mrs Biddlesham, in an enthusiastic performance of the can-can, lately the sensation of Paris.

I rounded the corner and observed an orderly commotion.

A crowd was gathered outside my house. Not a mob, but men in black coats and bowler hats, celluloid collars shiny, paper clutched in their hands. My first thought was that they were newspaper reporters. Was the Threadneedle Street Gang at large again?

‘It’s ‘im,’ someone shouted, and they all turned.

They rushed at me, thrusting out wax-sealed envelopes, ribbon-tied scrolls and telegrams. I was briefly in fear for my person, but to a man they handed over documents, raised hats politely, bade me good-morning and departed. I was left alone outside my house, hands full of paper. I stuffed as much as I could into my pockets.

My front door opened and my butler emerged, silverware stuck out of his coat-pockets and a crystal punchbowl (full of pocket-watches, snuff-boxes and other portable items of value) in his embrace. He was followed by Cook and two maids, hefting between them a polished mahogany dining table with the linen still on, bumping alarmingly against the door-frame and scraping spiked railings as they came down my front steps.

The butler saw me and did his best to bow without dropping anything.

‘In lieu of wages, Mr Quinn. Please accept my regret that we are unable to continue in your employ.’

Lucy, the ‘tweeny’, sniffled a bit.

I was too astonished to say anything.

‘If you would stand aside, sir,’ said my former butler. ‘So we might pass.’

I did as he suggested and found myself holding the door open to effect the removal of my former dining table. Lucy, eyes downcast, muttered something about it being ‘a dreadful shame, sir’. I watched my entire staff struggle down the road, like a Whitechapel family doing a midnight flit.

I did not have time to examine all the papers in my pockets before the bailiffs showed up.

Within the hour, I realised that I did not have so much as a Knowe’s Black Biscuit to my name.

* * * *

The Shoreditch facilities were besieged, but not by customers. That would come later. Creditors barred the gates so that we could not even supply our own stall with the Tonic, let alone distribute as normal. I saw my secretary sprinting off into the fog, cased type-writer on her back like a snail’s shell.

Varrable was on the ‘phone, needlessly cranking the handle faster as his sentences sped up, hair awry. I gathered that he was talking with his stockbroker. A Flavering girl was perched on the divan, dead flowers in her hair like Ophelia, shivering as if in a rainstorm. Her colour was off, as if she were coming down with the influenza.

Windows smashed somewhere.

‘Sell some consortium, stock,’ Varrable shouted. ‘Use the funds to cover... what funds? Why, that stock is worth fifty times what we ploughed into it. A hundred.’

Varrable went white. He replaced the telephonic apparatus in its cradle.

‘Billy,’ he said, voice hollow. ‘I could do with a tonic.’

The Flavering girl obediently sorted through empty bottles.

‘Not that tonic,’ Varrable said, with utter disgust. ‘There’s brandy around somewhere.’

I found the decanter and poured a generous measure. Varrable snatched the glass from me and raised it to his mouth. Then he gasped in horror and set the glass down.

‘Billy, you nearly . . . No, the real brandy. It’s in the desk.’

I found a bottle and filled two more glasses.

Varrable and I both shocked ourselves with drink. The brandy hit the last of the Tivoli champagne, but did no good.

‘Just before close of trade yesterday,’ Varrable explained, ‘a vast amount of consortium stock went on sale. It went in small lots, to dozens, hundreds of buyers. There’s been clamour for the issue for months, but it’s simply not been available. When it was “up for grabs”, there was what my man called a “feeding frenzy”. A share worth fifty pounds yesterday isn’t worth five shillings this morning. And won’t be worth fivepence tomorrow.’

‘Dare-ing,’ I said.

Varrable nodded, swallowing more brandy. ‘He sold at fifty pounds, Billy. Without telling us. We’re all ruined, you know. Except him.’’

I could not quite conceive of it.

‘There’s still the business,’ I said, ‘the Tonic. Money is pouring in. Buck up, Doc. We can cover debts in a day, costs in a week, and be in profit again by the end of the month.’

Varrable shook his head.

‘Jekyll Tonic sells at a loss. Even at a shilling.’

This was news.

‘Oh, in the long run, costs would have come down,’ said Varrable, bitterly. ‘But there is not going to be a “long run”. There were unforeseen expenses in development, you see. The original estimates were optimistic. We were moving too swiftly to revise them.’

I understood. A harvest had been reaped, profit had been made. Leo Dare had taken his money out and moved on.

‘I borrowed against the stock,’ I admitted.

‘So did I,’ said Varrable.

My pockets were still stuffed with writs of foreclosure, bills suddenly come due, summonses to court, notices of lien, announcements of garnishee and other such waste paper.

A quiet knock came at the door. A doggy head poked around.

‘I realise this is an inconvenient time for you both,’ said Inspector Mist, ‘but I am afraid I must ask you to accompany me to the Yard.’

* * * *

The thing of it is that if Jekyll Tonic had not worked, Leo Dare would have stayed in it longer. If it were just the coloured water he himself was prepared to drink, the horse might have been ridden for years. Then there might have been gravy enough to keep us all fat. But, as Varrable had always said, the effects were dramatic but unpredictable, and that made the venture a long-term risk.

The Threadneedle Street raiders inspired similar crimes, no more successful but equally spectacular. Veiled ladies brought suit against the likes of Dr Hugo Varrable for artificial exploitation of affections, which had in more than one case led to Consequences. Every murderer and knock-down man in the land was purported to be under the influence of the Jekyll, though it is my belief that as many heroic rescues from burning buildings or sinking barges were carried out by persons temporarily not themselves as were homicidal rampages or outrages to the public decency. All manner of folk disclaimed responsibility for reprehensible actions by blaming the Tonic. Sermons were preached against Jekyll Tonic, and Editorials - in the very same ‘papers that had boosted us - were written in thunderous condemnation. Lawsuits beyond number were laid against the consortium, which no longer included Leo Dare. The simple duns for unpaid bills took precedence, driving us to bankruptcy. The criminal and frivolous matters dragged on, though many were dropped when it became apparent that the coffers were empty and that no financial settlement would be arrived at. A tearful Harry Button was booed off stage before he could give his infamous Joke, and shortly thereafter found himself bought out of his contract and booted into the street by the Management. Temperance organisations shifted the focus of their attention from the demon alcohol to the impious Jekyll Tonic.

Sir Marmaduke and Lady Knowe made numberless attempts to get in touch with Leo Dare, but I recalled those cards he had made a pack of and ignored in Kettner’s and did not waste my efforts. A man with no fixed address finds it easy not to be at home to the most persistent callers. At length, both worthies departed from the stage in no more dignified a manner than ‘Brass’ Button. Sir Marmaduke, sadly, retained a gold-thread curtain cord from the fixtures transported away by the bailiffs and hanged himself in his empty Belgravia town house. Lady Knowe, perhaps surprisingly, married her Guardsman. The couple decamped for a posting in Calcutta, where she devoted her energies to improving the moral health of Her Majesty’s troops by campaigning against boy-brothels.

The formula remained ours alone, our sole asset, but many competitors were working to reproduce its effects. A Royal Commission was established and, with uncharacteristic swiftness, made all such research illegal unless conducted under Government supervision. I suspected some in Pall Mall still maintained Major General Cogstaff-Blyth’s notions of a Regiment of Hydes trampling over the Kaiser’s borders, chewing through pickelhaubes with apelike fangs and rending Uhlans limb from limb. Regulations closed around the Jekyll. An amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Acts insisted that the Tonic now could not be sold unless a customer signed the Poisons Book and waited until the signature was verified. By that time, it was a moot point since there was no Jekyll to be had anywhere. Our Shoreditch factory ceased manufacture when the stock crashed, and supplies dried up within the morning.

Varrable and I spent some nights enjoying the hospitality of one of Her Majesty’s police stations, mostly through the good graces of Inspector Mist, who realised we had nowhere else to go and no funds to procure lodgings. A great many lines of enquiry were being pursued and we were told not to leave London. Questions would doubtless be asked of us on a great many matters, but no criminal charges were forthcoming as yet.

We trudged, cabless, to Shoreditch.

* * * *

The factory, thoroughly looted, was abandoned. Our bruisers, our pretty sales-girls, our secretaries, our vat-stirrers, were all flown. And the fittings and furnishings with them. Even the prized telephones.

‘What if he didn’t drink coloured water that time?’ said Varrable, with his now-habitual look of wide-eyed frenzy. ‘I’d brewed up the first test batch. It could have been the real Tonic. He could have changed?’

‘Leo Dare has no Hyde side,’ I said. ‘He was always himself.’

Varrable admitted it, smashing a beaker too cracked to steal.

We were in the stables, where vats stood overturned and empty, the flagstones stained with chemicals. The stinks still clung to the place. The gates had been torn down and taken away.

‘Look,’ said Varrable, ‘the cabbies are back.’

Opposite the factory was a knot of loitering fellows, despondent and jittery, as I remembered them.

‘I imagine not a few of our employees will be joining them,’ I said. ‘It was all over too swiftly for them to draw more than a week’s wages.’

‘It’s breathtaking, Billy. He sucked all the money out, like you’d suck the juice from an orange, then tossed away the pith and peel. No one else saw anything from the Jekyll bubble.’

The loiterers formed a deputation and crossed the road. They marched into the factory.

‘This might be it, Doc. Prepare to repel boarders.’

‘They don’t look angry.’

‘Looks can be deceiving.’

In the gloom, we were surrounded. I made out fallen faces, worn clothing, postures of desolation and resentment.

‘D-d-d-d-octor V-V-V-Varr . . .’ stammered one of the louts.

From his shabby clothes and battered face, it would have been impossible to recognise the exquisite aesthete, but the voice was unmistakable. The Hon. Hilary Belligo.

‘Is there anything left over?’ asked one of Hilary’s fellows.

I shook my head. ‘We are at a financial embarrassment,’ I said. ‘All in the same boat.’

‘N-n-n-not m-money!’

‘Tonic.’

I remembered a happier day and Varrable’s declaration that the likes of Hilary Belligo would be happy to pay five pounds a thimble for the Jekyll. I wished I had a crate of Tonic in a safe store somewhere, but it was all gone, shipped out and drunk. There wasn’t a bottle left on a shelf in London. When supplies stopped coming from the factory, devotees haunted the most out-of-the-way shops and tracked down every last drop. There had been fearful brawls before the counters to get hold of it, as devotees paid whatever canny chemists asked. Even Jickle Juice and Jeckell Tonik, supposedly withdrawn from sale, were snapped up and drunk down. Fools had forked over ten guineas for empty Tonic bottles refilled with Thameswater.

I shrugged, showing empty hands.

‘I might know where some Tonic remains,’ said Varrable, smoothing his hair with stained hands. ‘But we’ll need to see, ah, expenses up front.’

The desperate souls all had money about them. Not much, and not in good condition - torn bank-notes, filthy coins, bloody sovereigns. I cupped my hands and they were filled.

‘Be here tomorrow, at ten,’ said Varrable. ‘And keep it quiet.’

They scurried away, possessed with a strange excitement, a promise that took the edge off sufferings.

‘Have we a secret reserve, Doc?’

Varrable shook his head, disarranging his hair again. ‘No, but I still have the formula,’ tapping his temple. ‘Some of the ingredients must remain here. Few would want to loot chemicals. I can brew up Jekyll in the laboratory, rougher than the stuff we bottled, but stronger as well.’

‘The demand is still there.’

I knew Hilary Belligo’s crew would ignore Varrable’s order to keep quiet. By tomorrow, word would be out. In two short weeks, a great many people had become used to a spoonful of Jekyll every day. The business was gone, the consortium collapsed, but that didn’t mean the need had evaporated.

‘It’ll be illegal,’ I ventured. ‘Under the Dangerous Drugs Act.’

‘All the better,’ Varrable snorted. ‘We can ask for a higher price. That lot’ll slit their grannies’ throats for a drop of the Jekyll. And we’re sole suppliers, Billy. Do you understand?’

Varrable was as possessed as the Hon. Hilary. With another kind of need.

Leo Dare had passed from the story. He left us all with new needs, but also new opportunities.

‘I understand. You’re the chemist, I’m the salesman. We’ll need a place to work. Several, to keep on the move. Mist won’t just forget us, and he’s no fool. We can no longer afford fixed addresses. We’ll need folk for the distribution, lads to stand on street-corners, fellows to sit in taverns. Servants, perhaps, to get to the customers with the folding money. We’ll need places to hide the profits. Not under mattresses, in investments. Respectable, above-board. We’ll have to see off the opium tongs. Maybe those East End roughs are still interested in the Jekyll trade. We could pitch in with them. The law of the land will not be with us, just the law of the market. We’ll need new names.’

‘I have mine. Harold Rose.’

‘And I’m Billy Brass. Do you know, ah, Harold, I think that this way we shall wind up richer than before.’

I had the strangest impression that Leo Dare was smiling down upon me.

And so your friends Dr Rose and Mr Brass embarked upon a new venture.

* * * *

Kim Newman has won the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award. A film journalist and broadcaster, his novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the Anno Dracula sequence, comprising the title novel and its sequels The Bloody Red Baron, Judgment of Tears (aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha) and the forthcoming Johnny Alucard. Also upcoming are An English Ghost Story (currently being developed as a movie from a script by the author) and The Matter of Britain (again with Byrne). Newman’s short fiction has been collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories and Where the Bodies Are Buried, while his story ‘Week Woman’ was adapted for the Canadian TV series The Hunger. In 2001, Newman directed a too-second short film, Missing Girl, for cable TV channel The Studio. ‘This is my second stab at a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ admits the author. ‘The first was “Further Developments in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, published in Maxim Jakubowski’s Chronicles of Crime and also found in my collection Unforgivable Stories. That took a very different tack in imagining what might have happened after the events of Stevenson’s story than “A Drug on the Market”. Dr Jekyll appears briefly in my novel Anno Dracula, and there’s a return visit to his house in the forthcoming Johnny Alucard. Obviously, the original lingers in the memory, sparking ideas that need to be written up. I even liked the film of Valerie Martin’s brilliant novel Mary Reilly, though I think Eddie Murphy should be prohibited by law from making another Nutty Professor sequel. Of all the founding texts of the horror/monster/Gothic genre, Stevenson’s novella strikes me as being the best all-round piece of writing. While Frankenstein and Dracula are big, sprawling books full of flaws and hasty patches, careless of characterisation, choked by plot, Strange Case is put together, as Stephen King once noted, like a Swiss watch, without a wasted word, cliche character or dull paragraph. Mr Hyde is one of the genre’s most vividly imagined monsters: not the lusty caveman of most film versions but a shrunken, frightened, bullying, vicious little man who never picks on anyone his own size. In this piece, I was also influenced by H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay, which has a terrific section about a voyage to corner quap (a wonderful word Wells seems to have invented and which I hope comes back into circulation) and is an early fulmination against the advertising industry. Though it doesn’t play with the original text in the way Anno Dracula does, “A Drug on the Market” does take a similar line: extrapolating from a story about individual monstrousness to imagine its effects if spread to a wider society that is Victorian London but also our own world a century on.’