'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.