The Sherlockian (44 page)

Sarah reached behind her and took the diary, placing it on Harold’s knees.

“We can use the light from my phone,” she offered, “if you want to read it.”

Harold swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

Sarah removed a cell phone from her pocket and opened it, using the face of the phone like a spotlight as she pointed it at the diary. Harold gently pried open the covers. The pages were fragile and yellow, but he could make out the words written in Arthur Conan Doyle’s broad hand.

Harold held the diary between them, and together they read.

C
HAPTER 45

The Missing Diary of Arthur Conan Doyle

“Come, come, sir,” said Holmes, laughing. “You are like

my friend, Dr. Watson, who has a bad habit

of telling his stories wrong end foremost.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”

December 8,1900

Arthur wrote it all down.

That’s what he did—he wrote things down. Writing was both his occupation and his calling. He was celebrated around the globe because was so very
good
at it. When he wrote, when he put events into words, into clear and tidy sentences, they were understood. Things made sense when Arthur wrote them down. And so, terrible as these events were, they demanded to be chronicled. They demanded to be wrought onto paper, to be sculpted from raw feeling into refined language. That’s what writers did, wasn’t it? They named that which needed naming, they enunciated that which had previously been unspoken.

The night of the deaths of Bobby and Melinda Stegler, Arthur stayed up till dawn, describing everything that had happened in as much detail as he could recall. When a particular moment escaped his memory, he embellished upon what he knew. He wrote the story as it existed for him. He did not glorify himself. He did not make it seem as if he were blameless, as if he bore no responsibility for the evening’s tragedy. He did, and he would not deny it. But nor would he gloss over the villainy of Bobby Stegler. That the boy had deserved to die was really beyond debate, and Arthur had to be sure to be clear on that point. It did not justify the tragedy of his sister. Nothing would. But then, in these weeks, in all this time since that bomb had exploded, no tragedy had ever been justified. None of the violence that had stained Arthur’s life had ever been explained. Death, murder—perhaps in the end they were never explainable. They simply were.

Arthur and Bram did not see each other again for a few days. Neither man, it seemed, wanted to talk about what had happened. They read the reports in the newspapers, and when no culprits were found— and no bobbies came knocking on either of their doors—they knew that it was over. They would never see Tobias Stegler again, and the burden of his children’s death would live with him and him alone. For that they were quite sorry. Arthur did wonder whether Janet Fry would call on him again—she knew the name Bobby Stegler. She must have been in his shop. If she saw the notice of his death in the papers, would she make the connection to the deaths of her friends? Or would she chalk it up to odd coincidence? She had been so convinced of the guilt of Millicent Fawcett, after all . . .

But as the days went by and Arthur heard nothing from her, he became satisfied that he wouldn’t. And so he was free. If Inspector Miller suspected anything, which he probably did—well, what would he do about it? Inspector Miller had, at least so he thought, helped Arthur cover up one murder already. He would do the same for another two. Was Inspector Miller at work, pulling strings to keep Arthur’s name in the clear? Or was Scotland Yard really incompetent enough not to be able to trace the murders back to Arthur’s doorstep? He would never know. He was free, whether through corruption, incompetence, or dumb luck.

On December 8, 1900 , Bram Stoker made his last visit to Undershaw, and to Arthur’s study. He came to talk. It was time for them to consult about what had occurred and to properly bid farewell to this period in their lives.

For two men of such intimacy, the meeting felt curiously formal. As Bram entered and Arthur put down his pen, he felt awkward for the first time in his friend’s company.

Silence followed.

“What are you writing?” asked Bram, after the strangest quiet in their friendship.

“It’s . . . Well, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” said Arthur, oddly embarrassed by the words on the page before him.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“It’s Holmes. I haven’t told a soul yet. You’re the first to hear. But it’s Holmes.”

Bram simply nodded, as if somehow he had expected as much.

“The other day,” Arthur continued, “I had an idea. Have you been to Dartmoor? Those frightful heaths? They’re quite terrifying. I thought it would be a great setting for the old fool. I had this notion of a plot, after my friend Robinson described to me this story about a gigantic hound terrifying the countryside. Ha. Sherlock Holmes on the trail of a terrific hound . . . Well, maybe it’s too far-fetched. But perhaps it would be a good yarn, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Bram. He appeared content. “It would be an excellent yarn. And the world is short, nowadays, of good yarns.”

Arthur described the plot to Bram, and both men went over the pages. Bram was more than approving; he was ecstatic. He described the tale as a return to form—Arthur was delighted.

The conversation took an odd turn when Arthur told Bram about what else he had written.

“You’ve kept a diary of all . . .of all that happened?” asked Bram, stunned.

“I needed to put it all down. Oh, don’t give me that look, man! I’m no fool. It’s not for anyone to read. I won’t share it with a soul. But I needed at least to share it with my diary.” Arthur smiled then, his face turning wistful. “Perhaps one day when I pass into the next world, if someone finds the book and reads what happened . . . well then, what do I care if people know the truth? And what do you? Perhaps the truth deserves to go free at last, one day.”

“You cannot be serious, Arthur,” said Bram angrily. “Your reputation . . . your worth to generations . . . It’s not just your name you’re tearing down, don’t you see? It’s Holmes’s. This is about more than just you.”

“Please, calm yourself. Sherlock Holmes will be fine with or without my help.”

“No,” replied Bram. “He’ll be nothing, Arthur, for heaven’s sake, if you don’t destroy that thing. Do you hear me? For your own good. For my good. And for Holmes’s good.”

“Lord, Bram,” Arthur began, before he was cut off by a noise from upstairs. It sounded like a crash. One of the children had done something improper with a table lamp, and the sound of yelling followed. “Excuse me one moment,” said Arthur as he wandered from his study to see what the matter had been.

By the time he came back, a few minutes later, Bram had the most curious look on his face.

“What is it?” Arthur asked.

“Nothing,” said Bram. “Nothing at all.” He was sweating, Arthur noticed. Bram so rarely perspired.

Neither man had any idea at that moment that in those few short minutes a mystery had been laid. And that after the diary had been hidden, it would take more than a hundred years for it to be found.

C
HAPTER 46

The Reichenbach Falls

“Wear flannel next to your skin, and never

believe in eternal punishment.”

—Mary Conan Doyle, to her son Arthur,

as recounted in his memoir
Memories and Adventures

January 17, 2010, cont.

When Harold closed the diary, he realized that he was crying. His tears were dripping onto the hard leather cover of the book, mingling with a hundred years of dirt, dust, and a few specks of blood.

He’d read slowly, making sure that Sarah could follow along with him. Now they both sat freezing on the rocks, and they both knew everything. Sarah placed a hand comfortingly on Harold’s knee, and he found himself crying harder. He pulled the diary to his chest and let his tears fall on the dirt. He didn’t have the energy to conceal them. Neither Harold nor Sarah said a word.

After a few minutes, Sarah stood. Without speaking, she gestured along the path through the mountains. She wanted to walk. Harold didn’t object. He brought himself to his feet, feeling aches forming in his thighs and knees. He followed her in the darkness, up the path, higher into the snowy Alps.

He had no idea how long they walked. It could have been twenty minutes or two hours. They walked under the cover of starlight, through the snow, higher and higher. The exertion warmed Harold a little, and after some time he thought he was close to regaining feeling in his fingertips. Sarah sensed his cold, and despite her own she removed her coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. He didn’t thank her but only walked farther, higher and higher through the thinning air.

He wasn’t sure where they were going, and he didn’t care. He began to appreciate the cold in his bones, the cold freezing the tears on his face. The chill quieted his racing thoughts. He could only feel so much in his head, in his frayed and slow-beating heart, when the rest of his body was frozen. The thought occurred to him that if he lived here, if he set up camp in the mountains and never came down, he might be able to avoid all future feeling altogether. The plan sounded as reasonable as any other.

Before they came upon the clearing, Harold heard the sound of rushing water. Because of the darkness, they didn’t see the waterfall until they were only a few feet away from it. Harold felt the mist from the racing falls spray his face at the same time that he saw the cascading torrent of water through the trees. He could hear the water crashing against the rocks below, slapping against the hard side of the mountain every hundred yards until, somewhere far in the dark distance, the water landed in a churning pool and fed into a lake deep in the valley.

The Reichenbach Falls. They both stopped walking and stared silently off into the distance at what little of the falls they could see.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said.

“Me, too.” Harold didn’t have an ounce of anger left inside him. He wasn’t sure how much of anything he had left inside him anymore.

“Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you glad you found the diary?”

Harold did not need to think in order to answer truthfully.

“No.”

Sarah reached across his body and took the diary from his hand. He loosened his fingers and gave it to her without argument or complaint. She stepped back from the ledge. She pulled the diary behind her, curling her arm like a pitcher, and overhand she threw the diary as far as she could into the darkness. They could almost hear the diary collide with the falls, as it was rocketed downward toward the cragged lake by the force of the water.

And then silence. Stillness. The hum of the waterfall and two sets of breaths, puffing in unison.

“Thank you,” Harold said.

Sarah reached for his hand and held it warmly in her own. There, staring into the night sky, they stayed, fingers intertwined. Harold squeezed as hard as he could, and Sarah squeezed back, each gripping the other’s hand until they felt their fragile bones were about to shatter.

C
HAPTER 47

Farewell

And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for

your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has

been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries

of life and stimulating change of thought which can only

be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

preface to
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes

August 11,1901

The workmen were tired. They had been at it all day, sweating through the August heat and dampening the armpits of their navy blue uniforms. Two days ago they had finished laying the twenty-foot-long main electrical cables from the Marylebone Station to Baker Street. The mains were thick and quite heavy, two copper tubes placed one inside the other and layered with brown wax. The whole thing was encased in heavy iron, and every time the men lifted a long section of cable between them, they’d grunt and feel the strain in their bulging necks. Yesterday a larger team had come to help raise the cables above the houses, laying them between the lampposts and over the two-story roofs. It had taken twelve men to spread their web of wires outward through Marylebone, slowly west to Paddington. Today only two workmen were left to remove the gas lamps atop each pole along Baker Street and replace them with electric bulbs. Late in the afternoon, as the sun melted into the taller buildings along Montague Square, the two sweaty, exhausted men took turns mounting their one ladder and unscrewing the tops of the gas lamps. One would stand on the ladder’s lowest rung, weighting it down, while the other would climb to the top. The poles had been connected to the nascent grid already, so all that remained was to connect the sockets to the positive and negative lines and then replace the bulbs. The wires kept slipping through their damp fingers, and when they would try to brush the sweat off on their work suits, they would leave finger-shaped stains of wax and dirt on the navy cloth. They were getting very tired.

Just after sunset, a few hours behind schedule, they came to the final lamppost, right before the corner of Igor Street and the park. The shorter of the two held the ladder from below, because it was his turn to do so, and the taller man ascended the eight vertical steps to the bulb. It took him only a few minutes to rewire the fixture, and by the time he came back down the ladder, every lamp along Baker Street had been wired for electricity.

After returning the ladder and tools to the back of their wide-bedded carriage, they walked to the Marylebone Station to complete the connection. Once they had connected the Baker Street line to the system, from the transformer room deep underneath the station, they made their way back to examine their work.

They turned the corner as ten thousand volts surged from the Deptford Power Station, nine miles away, through the Ferranti cables underneath the city and onto the shining expanse of Baker Street. It was a brilliant sight, and though they had worked for the London Electric Supply Company for a few years now, the first glance at a street illuminated solely by the searing electric bulbs still caused a brief shock. Every building, every alleyway, every dark and fetid cobblestone had been washed clean in the radiant light.