The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (29 page)

It had crossed my mind that Lady Frances might have stirred a latent taphophobia in Holmes. By 1900, the fear of premature interment had grown to epidemic proportions. Recently, an elderly female patient had presented me with a first edition of Tebb and Vollum's
Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented
. If she died while in my care, so great was her fear of waking in the grave that she strictly charged me to cut her throat before allowing her to be
buried. Glancing through the book's bibliography, I counted no less than 120 works in five languages on the subject, in addition to 135 articles, forty-one university theses, and seventeen pamphlets published by the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. By God, that gave
me
nightmares, before I ever heard of Lady Frances Carfax.

But Holmes had never shown any such weakness, nor did it seem likely with his cool, almost clinical approach to any case. In short, I was at a loss to know why the Carfax affair still haunted my friend, and I was worried. Hence my ill-fated attempt to divert him with a country drive.

“Turn here,” said Holmes suddenly.

I could see no crossroads, but to the right there was a dark break in the trees. At a tug of the reins, the pony swung down off the causeway, the trap lurching after him. We would end in the ditch after all, I thought, but then the wheels crunched on unseen gravel. We were following a hidden drive through a tree-lined tunnel of darkness. High grass swished around the pony's legs. Branches scraped the trap's sides. The first fat drops of rain began to tap imperiously against the overarching leaves.

“Holmes, I don't think that this is the road to Bagshot.”

“No. It is, however, the road to shelter, if you don't mind a ghost or two.”

I was about to demand what he meant when we emerged from the trees. Ahead, indistinct against the dark flank of Surrey Hill, sprawled an enormous building. Then a lightning flash revealed my mistake: The house itself was fairly small, a country manor in the Georgian fashion. Surrounding it, however, like a series of broken eggshells set one inside another, were the ruins of at least three far older structures. Then the darkness fell again like a thunderclap, and again the house seemed huge and misshapen, devoid of light or life, yet watching, waiting.

The wind swooped and rain came spattering down, mixed with a handful of stinging hail. As I secured the pony in the lee of
the house, Holmes disappeared inside. Following, I hesitated in an entryway as black as the bowels of the earth, stinking of wet wood and rot.

“Holmes? Holmes! Where are you?”

His voice came hollowly from within: “Welcome to Morthill Manor.”

As I groped toward him, the storm breathing loudly down the hall at my back, his words reached me in snatches:

“The name or some variation of it . . . said to date back to Neolithic times, designating the huge barrow mound which itself is the hill. Druids . . . circle of standing stones within the oak grove on its summit . . . 60
A.D.
, human sacrifice there to ensure Boadicea victory in her revolt against the Romans . . . Following her defeat, Roman soldiers slaughtered the priests, overthrew the stones, and cut down the sacred oaks to build a country villa . . . said to have sealed Celtic infants alive under the floor as foundation sacrifices . . . Watson, you spoke?”

“No,” I snapped. I had run my thigh hard against a table and sworn, as much at Holmes and his ill-timed games as at the pain to my old war injury, already aching with the change of weather.

My left hand lost contact with the wall. I stood in the doorway of a long dining room, its dimensions briefly defined by a flash of lightning outside tall, broken windows. Holmes was moving about at the room's far end, apparently in search of something, still lecturing like some infernal cicerone:

“Many structures have risen on this site since then, each built with the bones . . . I mean, the stones of its predecessor, each with its foundation sunk deep into the same thirsty darkness. In the Middle Ages, a convent rose on the villa ruins, but was abandoned because of ‘straunge noises under-ground.' Later, it was learned that the abbess had ordered thirteen young novices to be walled up alive for ‘consorting with the dead of the mound.' During Elizabeth's reign, the house was rebuilt, but again abandoned after tainted water from a new well shaft killed nine children. In 1645, Roundheads burned
it to the ground under the impression that the wife and children of a Royalist supporter were hiding inside. Unfortunately, they were. Ah.”

A candle flared. The light flickered across Holmes's sharp-boned face, and then across that of the young woman behind him. I could not suppress a cry, even as I realized what I was seeing. Holmes turned and looked at the portrait over the fireplace. I believe that its sudden, spectral appearance startled him, too, though the only sign was a quiver, instantly controlled, in the hand which held the candle.

“The current structure dates from 1725,” he said. “Its last owner, to my mind, was its worst. There, if you please, is the portrait of a true vampire.”

The light called her forth from the shadows, ghostly in her pallor, yet strangely, avidly alive. The pose and style were reminiscent of da Vinci's
Mona Lisa
. Her hair, the shade of anaemic strawberry, was pulled back from her white brow to tumble luxuriously down below her waist. Her eyes were a pale, almost luminous green. White teeth—the incisors, not the canines—showed between unexpectedly full, red lips. She was smiling. I thought, despite myself, that she looked hungry, and Walter Pater's description of that famous painting came unbidden to my mind:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave
.

No. This would
not
do.

“Really, Holmes. Next you'll claim to have known this lady.”

“Of course I did,” he snapped, turning. “Her name was Blanche Vernet. She was my cousin.”

Then a strange expression flickered across his face. He was staring at something above my head. Hastily, I crossed the threshold and turned to look up. Over the doorway, chained to the lintel,
hung a giant, skeletal branch of mistletoe. It moved slightly in the unaccustomed draft rushing in from the hall, its leafless fingers scraping on stone.

“ ‘The mistletoe hung in the castle hall.' ” Holmes quoted the old ballad in an odd tone, as if surprised to remember it. “ ‘The holly branch shone on the old oak wall . . .' ”

His voice faltered. For a moment, he looked . . . “haunted” is the only word—but that moment quickly passed.

“You have heard me mention my maternal great-grandfather, the French painter Carle Vernet,” he resumed briskly. “Besides his son Horace, also an artist, he had another son, Charles, who became a doctor.”

“Your great-uncle,” I said, working this out.

“Yes. For a doctor, he seems to have been singularly unfortunate: His first wife, a Frenchwoman, did not survive Blanche's birth. His second wife, the daughter of a minor Wallachian diplomat, died some twelve years later under similar circumstances, leaving behind twin infant girls, Alice and Alyse. That was in 1853, I believe, after the family had moved to London . . . Watson, am I boring you?”

“What?” I jerked my attention back to him, away from a second face that stared grimly from the end wall opposite Blanche out of the heavy gold of a mock Byzantine icon. “Holmes, who is
that?”

“Irisa,” he said curtly, noting the direction of my gaze. “The second wife's sister and the twins' aunt. She descended suddenly from some aerie in the Carpathians and stayed to tend house after her brother-in-law removed his family here in the summer of '62.”

Severe, black clothing, an ornate Greek cross on her breast, black brows drawn together over inimical black eyes . . . she was like the shadow cast by Blanche's hectic light, watching her niece down the length of the dining room with the unfathomable stare of a death's-head.

Sodden branches lashed the windows. Atop Surrey Hill, the Druids' desecrated grove seemed to pull lightning down from the sky.

Flash. CRACK.

I blinked in the after-glare, seeing not the room but its image burned into my mind, stark black and white. Instead of portraits, the family themselves stood silent and watchful against the walls: blackbrowed Irisa, pale Blanche, and two little girls in white, side by side in a corner, regarding us solemnly . . . but then my sight cleared and again they were only paint on canvas with dust-blurred eyes. Of the two girls, however, there was no sign.

I cleared my throat. “Dr. Vernet painted these?”

“He did,” said Holmes. “Art in the blood will out, one way or another. His last portrait was that which you see over the mantel, but his true masterpiece was its original: his eldest daughter, Blanche.”

“ ‘The baron beheld with a father's pride,/ His beautiful child, young Lovell's bride.' ” I quoted the ballad's next verses sarcastically, still half convinced that Holmes was pulling my leg, not wanting to prove myself as gullible as he thought or as I had just been given reason to fear.

“Oh, yes,” he said, ignoring my tone. “He doted on Blanche, for whom nothing was good enough. My own father, Siger, on business in London, wrote home that Blanche's coming-out ball was the hit of the season and she the nonpareil, upstaging even that other ‘Pocket Venus,' the notorious Florence Paget. Oh, my lovely cousin had many admirers, but, as women will, she fixed her wild heart on the least suitable and seduced him.”

This was blunt, even for Holmes, surprising bluntness from me in return. “Who?”

He ignored my question.

“In the midst of her triumph, she contracted a cough which proved to be consumption. At that time, Dr. Vernet sold his London practice, bought Morthill, and moved his family here in a desperate attempt to find a cure.”

In this, Dr. Vernet had my sympathy. The only “cure” for tuberculosis is fresh air and sunlight, but most victims die anyway,
usually from inanition, sometimes from drowning as bodily fluids flood into their destroyed lungs—a far cry from the romantic image of the disease in Dumas's
Lady of the Camellias
or
La Bohème
. In the mid-nineteenth century, the disease which we now call the White Plague killed millions, if not tens of millions, with no end in sight even today.

“I fear,” I said, “that Dr. Vernet's effort was gallant, but doomed.”

“Call it rather his obsession, matched only by his daughter's ferocious will to live. Tiny as Blanche was—hardly taller than a child—she proved remarkably tenacious of life. Summer passed, and then fall. In the last, bleak days of the year, a black-edged envelope finally arrived—sent by Blanche to announce her father's death.”

“Of consumption?”

“Yes. Remember, this was before Villemin proved tuberculosis to be contagious, although it had already been noted that while the disease dawdled with some victims like a fond lover, it galloped off pell-mell with others. This had been Dr. Vernet's fate. Moreover, Blanche informed us that she had inherited all her father's assets, including a large debt owed by my father, Siger Holmes, to hers. She asked—no, demanded—that Father immediately attend her here at Morthill to discuss terms. And so, perforce, he came, bringing me with him.”

Holmes looked up again at the leafless branch chained and creaking over the lintel.

“Forty years ago one Christmas Eve, when I was a boy of eight and that bough was fresh . . .”

V
iscum album
, the boy Sherlock thought, regarding the spiky greenery over the door. The traditional kissing bough. How seasonal.

He tried to keep his thoughts on this subject—
parasitical, sacred
to the Druids
. . . —but unease gnawed at him, as it had all that long, dark day on the increasingly silent drive to his cousin's house.

Looking back, it seemed that none of their household had been easy since Father's return from London the previous spring. That was when the letters started to arrive. At first, awkwardly joking about some “damned importunate suitor” in a civil case, Father had carried them away to read in private.

Finally, in a stony voice, Mother said, “Burn them.”

From then on, self-consciously, Father did—unopened, in full sight of the family—until they slowed and stopped at summer's end. Intrigued, Sherlock slipped back into the breakfast room to rescue the last one from the grate. All that remained was a piece of red paper, ripped on one side and charred on the other, overlaid with a filigree of light ash.

Then, that morning, another envelope addressed in that same impetuous hand, edged in black, lay beside Father's plate.

“Open it,” Mother said, and he did.

As he read, Siger Holmes's face blanched. “My God. So much money. This will ruin us.” He looked at Mother, turning paler still. “I must go.”

Mother was silent for a moment and then suddenly said, “Take Mycroft with you.”

Mycroft looked grim at this. At fifteen, seven years his brother's senior, he took their mother's side in whatever-it-was that had upset her since the previous spring. Father glanced at him and then quickly away.

“No. I will take Sherlock. A child may soften her.”

Now here they stood—Sherlock and his father—in their cousin's cold, disordered dining room beside a long table laden with dirty dishes. Their pony and rig were tied at the outer door; no one had come to take charge of them, the servants having all fled.

“A plague house declares itself,” that grim woman in black (Aunt Irisa?) said as she let them in. Then she saw Sherlock, and drew her breath in sharply. “You fool, to bring a child here! Do you know what happens to children in this house?”

The boy wondered about his two little cousins, Alice and Alyse. As he entered the dining room, Sherlock thought he saw the white hem of a child's dress flick out by the far door.
Girls are timid
, he reminded himself, clutching for the warmth of superiority. Cold as the room was, Mycroft would laugh at him if he shivered:
What are emotions to the superior mind? What is physical weakness?