The Sherlockian (33 page)

“I’ve a family, too, Dr. Doyle. My good wife, Shelly, and my boy. Terrific lad. His name is Arthur, too. Funny that!”

“Yes. I appreciate your discretion,” said Arthur, well aware of where this discussion was headed. He had learned, over the years, that as soon as any man made even the briefest mention of his “terrific lad,” Arthur should begin to search around for a pen forthwith.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” said the governor. “He’s a great admirer of yours, my boy is. And . . . well, of course I am, too. If you wouldn’t mind, if it’s not too much of an imposition . . .”

“Oh, just give me the bloody book,” said Arthur. He signed a copy of
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
for the governor and then signed a copy of
The Sign of the Four
as well. Elated at his good fortune over having Arthur Conan Doyle as a day prisoner, the governor left Arthur alone with a firm handshake for a farewell. As the man strode through the galley of his prison, Arthur could hear him whistling.

The sun had just set when Arthur was released. Though the guards were surprised to loose a prisoner at this late hour, they quickly fell into line upon receipt of his release papers. One even bowed to him as the man opened the sturdy central gate and let him out onto the noisy streets.

Bram Stoker and Inspector Miller were waiting together on Newgate Street to greet him. Both embraced Arthur warmly, and Bram had even brought a flask of gin for the occasion.

“If the inspector here doesn’t mind, I thought you might be in need of a drink,” said Bram as he passed the silver flask into Arthur’s dirty hands.

“Most certainly,” said Inspector Miller. “Please. You’ve been through a great ordeal.” Arthur was not the sort who was prone to public drunkenness, nor had he been craving the taste of liquor. And yet, as he felt the cool flask in his hands, he became instantly grateful for Bram’s considerate forethought. Arthur drank deeply and felt warm as the chilled gin tinged his gullet.

“Assistant Commissioner Henry has been reprimanded for his hasty actions,” continued Inspector Miller when Arthur had finished. “This should set back his takeover of the CID at least a year, if I have anything to say about it. The commissioner himself asked that I pass on to you his deepest sympathies and his solemn promise that no record of this . . . incident shall be kept in the Yard’s records. We had to generate a bit of paperwork for Newgate, but I’ll see to it that it’s burned by the week’s end.”

“Inspector Miller here has been most helpful on the matter of your release,” said Bram. “He contacted me this morning, and has been working tirelessly for your benefit.”

“Thank you both,” said Arthur. He took another swig of gin.

“Where shall I take you?” offered Bram. “I’d suggest your home for a hot bath, or mine for a hot toddy. But knowing you, I suspect you’d like to get right back to your case. To sniff out the murderer of Emily Davison and all that.”

Arthur smiled. Bram was such a dear friend, and he knew Arthur’s mind as if it were his own. And yet, right then, Bram could not have been more incorrect as to Arthur’s wishes.

“Thank you, no,” said Arthur. “The late Miss Davison, and her dead friends, can rot away in their graves as they please. It’s no business of mine. But, Bram, I think this gin was the best idea either of us has had in months, and I will require some more of it before I retire. Come! To the nearest public house! We’ll drink ourselves to sin and stumble home when we start seeing double.”

Both Bram and the inspector made curious faces.

“Arthur, this is most unlike you,” said Bram. “I vaguely remember your giving me some long-winded speech a few weeks back: Justice something something, or truth something something, I don’t quite recall the details. But it was awfully earnest.”

Arthur laughed bitterly and dove snout-first into the flask.

“You know, they say that gin is the curse of the poor,” he said. The alcohol had somehow already made it to his stomach, and he seemed drunk. “But I think it may be the other way about—the poor are the curse of gin!” Arthur laughed, only to himself, and finished the rest of the flask in one gulp. He dropped it onto the street.

“Well then,” said Inspector Miller politely, “I’ll leave you two gents be. Good evening.”

Arthur bowed regally to the inspector, while Bram grasped him in a sturdy handshake. When the inspector had gone, Bram turned to his drunken friend.

“Arthur, this is embarrassing enough as it is.”

“Is it? Are you embarrassed?” Arthur lurched in the general direction of St. Paul’s. “I’ve been near blown up, I’ve been to the Sodom of Whitechapel and the Gomorrah of the docks, I’ve had a revolver pointed at my head, I’ve been arrested by the Yard and sent to waste away in the mire of Newgate Prison. And what have I to show for it all? Three dead girls. I looked into the bloody, beaten face of Emily Davison, and do you know what was there? Nothing. Not a damned thing. There is nothing at the bottom of the rabbit hole, do you understand? She wasn’t killed for a reason, Bram. None of them were. She wasn’t murdered for love, and she wasn’t murdered for coin—she was murdered for the sake of murder itself. What am I to do with that? How does one investigate that? And what would I hope to find? From dead girl to dead girl, I can trace the sins of London, but to what end?” Arthur’s eyes had swelled. He sat down in the dirt and let his head hang between his knees.

“Look up there,” said Arthur, pointing at the southern sky. “We’re fifty paces from St. Paul’s Cathedral. And we could have our veins overfilled and bursting with medical opiates in a quarter of an hour if we chose to. There was a civilization here, once. There were a thousand years of progress, building from the muddy soil to that spire. There were rules. There was order. There was Britain. I had actually believed that I was helping, can you imagine that? With those stupid stories. That we lived in an age of transcendent reason. That the pure and brilliant light of logic was on its way, to shine over the pallid city and sweep us into the white future of science.” Arthur spit forcefully into the dirt.
“Horseshit.
You were right from the beginning, you always are. This has been a great mistake. And now I am finished with it. All of it. No more playing detective, I promise you. The dead can keep their secrets. We the living wouldn’t know what to do with them anyhow.”

Bram Stoker said nothing, but merely placed a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, and squeezed as tightly as he could.

C
HAPTER 34

Only Those Things the Heart Believes Are True

“There had been a time when the world was full of blank spaces, and

in which a man of imagination might be able to give free scope to

his fancy. But . . . these spaces were rapidly being filled up; and the

question was where the romance writer was to turn.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

from an address given in honor of Robert Peary, May 1910

January 12, 2010

The 9:15 train from King’s Cross to Cambridge was a five-car express. In the first-class cabin, Harold and Sarah sat beside each other in warm silence. Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating their particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances? He and Sarah had experienced them all, and yet this one was different. It felt conclusive. If Harold were a sommelier of unspoken moods, then this would be his recommended
digestif.
This was an After-Dinner Silence, where both parties could digest the meal they’d had and contemplate the approaching end of their evening.

When she spoke, Harold was surprised but not startled. There was something gentle in her voice.

“You’re not reading,” she said.

“No,” Harold replied, “I don’t have anything left to read. All the books I brought with me are stuck in that first hotel room. But it’s nice, staring out the window.”

“What do you see?” she asked.

He felt like he was a child and she was playing a game to pass the time on a long drive. Harold looked out the window.

“Mmmm . . . Some wet, gray trees. Some wet, gray train tracks. A few wet, gray trains passing us on the opposite track. A few towns in the distance, and even though they’re just specks on the horizon, I’m pretty sure they’re wet and gray, too.”

Sarah smiled. “In other words, Britain.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I’m so much more familiar with Britain a hundred years ago than Britain today.”

“Yeah? I’d imagine that’s true of all Sherlockians.”

“There’s a poem by Vincent Starrett. He was one of the first Sherlockians. What is it? ‘Here dwell together two men of note / Who never lived and so can never die / How very near they seem, yet how remote / That age before the world went all awry. / But still the game’s afoot for those with ears / Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo; / England is England yet, for all our fears— / Only those things the heart believes are true . . .’ The ending is great, it always gets me. ‘And here, though the world explode, these two survive, / And it is always eighteen ninety-five.’ ”

Harold paused. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he added.

“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it’s odd, when I hear you say that . . . There’s something really conservative about you Sherlockians, isn’t there? I don’t mean in a political sense, but in an aesthetic one. Always wishing to return to this rose-tinted vision of the world as it existed a hundred years ago. ‘England is England yet . . .’ Well, this is England, too, right? Only now women can vote and racial discrimination is at least on the retreat. As a woman, I’ll tell you flat out, I wouldn’t want to live in 1895.”

“I understand,” said Harold. “There’s something . . . incomplete about our vision of Holmes’s time. I know it’s not real. I know that in the real 1895 there were two hundred thousand prostitutes in the city of London. Syphilis was rampant. Feces littered most major streets. Indian immigrants were locked up in Newgate on the barest suspicion that they had committed a crime. So-called homosexual acts were crimes, and they were punishable by years in prison. It was a racist culture, and a sexist one, too.”

Harold took a breath while he thought of how to proceed. “Look, I get it. I’m a white, heterosexual man. It’s really easy for me to say, ‘Oh, wow, wasn’t the nineteenth century terrific?’ But try this. Imagine the scene: It’s pouring rain against a thick window. Outside, on Baker Street, the light from the gas lamps is so weak that it barely reaches the pavement. A fog swirls in the air, and the gas gives it a pale yellow glow. Mystery brews in every darkened corner, in every darkened room. And a man steps out into that dim, foggy world, and he can tell you the story of your life by the cut of your shirtsleeves. He can shine a light into the dimness, with only his intellect and his tobacco smoke to help him. Now. Tell me that’s not awfully romantic?”

Sarah laughed. “Sure,” she said. “That definitely sounds romantic.” She looked out the window at the gray countryside sweeping by. “But maybe this is romantic, too.”

Harold looked at the passing trees, noticing how they were stooped over with water from a recent rain. He saw an expanse of grass, a damp heath pocked with yellow bursts of dandelion. He turned from the window to face Sarah, and as he did so, his elbow touched hers on the armrest between their seats.

“I see your point,” he said.

“Is that why you love the stories so much? For the romance?”

Harold considered this. He realized that he’d never before had to put into words his reasons for loving the Holmes stories. Did this sort of obsession even have reasons? If she had asked Harold why he loved his mother, there wouldn’t be any answer he could give. How could he then explain his love for Holmes?

“I think I love the idea that problems have solutions. I think that’s the appeal of mystery stories, whether they’re Holmes or someone else. In those stories we live in an understandable world. We live in a place where every problem has a solution, and if we were only smart enough, we could figure them out.”

“As opposed to . . . ?”

“As opposed to a world that’s random. Where violence and death are happenstance—unpreventable and unstoppable. Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that’s impossible to break is the solution at the end. Conan Doyle has writings in his journals about it. And plenty of novelists since have tried. Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it’s unsatisfying. It’s unpleasant for the reader. There needs to be something at the end, some sort of resolution. It’s not that the killer even needs to be caught or locked up. It’s that the reader needs to
know.
Not knowing is the worst outcome for any mystery story, because we need to believe that everything in the world is knowable. Justice is optional, but answers, at least, are mandatory. And that’s what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in so ordered and rational. It’s beautiful.”

“The romance of a rational world,” Sarah said. “Do you still think there are answers at the end of all of this?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Satisfying ones?”

Harold watched the rain. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.

C
HAPTER 35

A Plea for Help

“One should put one’s foot to the door to keep

out insanity all one can.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

unpublished journal entry, 1912

November 23, 1900

A week after Arthur had stumbled free from the gates of Newgate, life in Hindhead had returned to normal. Or as close to normal as anything in Hindhead ever achieved. From the early-morning clanking of the chambermaids with their pans to the evening
thunks
of the butler as he closed the chimney flues, the house was alive with noise at every hour of the day and night. The stable master was having some difficulty with a new mare that had just arrived from Spain. Somehow little Roger had managed to break his arm when he toppled out of a wheelbarrow being pushed around by his older brother, Kingsley. Roger got a cast for his forearm, and Kingsley got a stern talking-to about excess roughhousing with his brother. Touie rested comfortably in her bedchamber, and one morning Arthur went so far as to bring her the breakfast tray himself, wearing one of the servants’ uniforms as a little joke. Touie had giggled like a girl when she realized that it was Arthur holding her tray of oatmeal. Arthur hadn’t been out to see Jean yet, so concerned was he with the affairs of the house, but he would be into the city to see her soon enough. He was happy—happier, really, than he could remember being in some time. It takes a shock to the system, doesn’t it, to make a man realize what good things he has.